Vamped Up

by Kristin Miller

  “Sweet Jesus,” she breathed as the energy in the amulet began to gather into a ball of shimmering light above her chest. “How . . . ?” She let the rest of the words fall from her tongue.

  He’d brought these elders here to be massacred and she was what? Some kind of sacrifice? As the amulet’s buzz became stronger than ever before, Eve realized that Savage didn’t bring these elders here—wherever here was—to be slaughtered.

  No. She’d called them here. Just as Lilith warned her, they were drawn to the energy building within the amulet on her neck. Their blood was on her bound and helpless hands.

  Savage licked his lips, slow and sadistic. “I didn’t realize you were the beacon until tonight, you see. Until I overheard Lilith talking to you in your apartment. I was blind not to see it before.” He stalked slowly round and round the tablet like a hungry predator, then scraped his hands across his jaw and said, “But there was still the problem of harnessing an elder’s maware for longer than twenty-four hours. Their mawares waned no matter what precautions I took. When Lilith came out of hiding and made herself known to you, I realized I must’ve missed something. Spilling your blood must do more than call them together. It binds them to their master forever, and that, my ignorant vessel, is me. I am their master. Or at least I will be when this is through. That has to be the reason Lilith wanted to die back at your apartment to protect you from me.”

  Ludicrous. He was certifiably insane. “You’re wrong. I’m no more special than any other mundane. You have the wrong woman.” No matter what Lilith or Savage believed, Eve had the stomach-clenching feeling that she was no different than any other woman walking the earth. No more pure than the elders hanging onto life in the corridor beyond the chamber.

  “I beg to differ,” Savage said. “Lilith hasn’t come out of hiding for a hundred years. Since just after the Crimson Bay Massacre. Every move she makes is calculated and precise. Including teaching you how to use the energy in that amulet. I heard her telling you that with the energy within you, you’re able to bind the shades. Well, plans have changed a bit. You’re going to summon as many elders as you can, and then you’re going to bind their shades . . . to me. By the time your blood has filled my pores, I will have the strength of every elder in this place.”

  He’d mistaken what he heard. Lilith told Eve that she bound the shades together, releasing them to the Ever After. How could Savage have misunderstood that to mean that by killing her, the death shades would bind to him, giving him free reign over their mawares?

  Hope sank to the pit of Eve’s stomach. What if they were both right? What if her pure spirit could bind the shades together . . . but the person responsible for her death earned the culmination of those mawares she’d just released?

  “I’m not going to help you,” Eve croaked, her lungs strained. “I won’t.”

  “You don’t have much of a choice. It’s already begun.” He scraped his fangs over his bottom lip. “I wonder if you’ve known about your role all along? Did you know that in you lay the enchantment to mystify them all?”

  “What are you talking about? Mystify? Who?”

  “So you don’t know?” Savage smiled out of the side of his mouth, then unsheathed a dagger from his belt and stalked to the first elder outside the door: a vamp dressed to the hilt in a raven-black silk suit with broad shoulders, flaming-red hair and coal eyes, who didn’t look more than twenty years old.

  Eve’s chest constricted as she realized what was about to happen.

  “Just as vampires earn mawares when they transition to elder status, you, a lowly mundane, have earned your own type of maware for being the chosen one—the one who’ll bind the shades. You had to have some sort of idea . . . you had to feel deep down you were different. I wonder if Ruan felt it too.”

  Savage’s shadowed silhouette leaned over the crouched elder and whispered something in his ear. His fangs dropped, the stark white tips shining through the dark like two brilliant warning beacons. With the speed and surprise of a lightning strike, Savage buried his mouth into the elders’ neck; thrashed against him as he drank from his heartiest vein. Then he pulled back. And stabbed him with the entire length of the blade, right through the heart.

  Silence lingered in the hall as Savage stood slowly, swiping blood off his chin with the side of his sleeve. “Elders are mystified in your presence.” Not a single elder in the corridor made so much as a whimper. “They’re not able to use a single maware against you or against anyone in your immediate vicinity.”

  Eve couldn’t breathe, let alone respond to his crazy accusations. She didn’t have a maware. She wasn’t even a vampire for heaven’s sake! She tugged at the ropes binding her wrists and ankles, again to no avail.

  “You’re like the host for a deadly virus,” Savage whispered, cloaked by shadows. “Sure, you’re the mundane who will harness the fragments of mawares in that amulet . . . but you’re immune to them all. The host of all mawares. That’s why you’re the only one able to bind the shades together. And as such, you’ve given me the out I needed to round them all up in one place.”

  But Lilith had used her maware against Eve in the apartment, she remembered suddenly. Eve had stayed on her cramped wood floor, bending and warping energy, learning its pulses and waves, listening to Lilith’s instructive wisdom long after she would’ve. If she was immune to mawares, why, then, was Lilith able to effectively control her?

  Eve peered down the long corridor to the lineup of elders dangling helplessly, waiting for Savage’s demented show. She hoped others like Lilith awaited their shot at vengeance. Others who would be able to use their full maware force against Savage when the time was right. “More are on the way,” she said, hearing the pounding of her heart in her ears. “Even without their mawares, they can overpower you. You’ll be outnumbered.”

  “Ah, but you’re assuming they all arrive here at once.” He unsheathed a glowing silver dagger from his boot, revealing fresh bloodstains on the shaft. “It only took the first elder’s maware to convince the others to comply. That, along with the threat of your spilled blood and an eternity on this earth serving me. How’s that for perfect planning?”

  “You won’t succeed. You can’t.”

  “Oh, I can . . . and I will.” Savage crouched over the elder in the corner. “Now guard this fort,” he growled. “Not a soul shall enter.”

  At first Eve thought he was talking to her. Her gaze whipped around, searching for his soulless eyes boring into hers, commanding her to do something she’d never willingly do. Guard the fort? Yeah, right. She’d die first. But then he spoke again.

  “Guard Eve Monroe.” He moved into the glow of a dim, red bulb anchored on the ceiling. He smiled—a crooked, knowing smile. Like he’d gained some valuable information about what was going to happen tonight. Maybe that was the maware he’d recovered from his first elder kill . . . the gift of foresight. She wondered what maware the twenty-something elder had passed along . . .

  Like something from Eve’s most haunting dream, the shadow in the corner seemed to melt against the wall, sliding from ceiling to floor. It pooled on the stone in a sea of impenetrable black. Eve cringed against the binds, pulling harder until she was sure her wrists and ankles were raw. The shadow writhed over the floor, skating toward her like a living, breathing thing. As it rose up to the top of the tablet, hovering over her trembling body, Eve shrank away, turning her head, though unable to peel her eyes off this demonic shadow.

  Breathing shallow, Eve blinked away the moisture gathering in the corners of her eyes.

  Hissing from the inside out, the shadow slithered onto the tablet, over her body, and covered her in its mass of black from toes to neck. It bubbled and grew until it was heavy—the thickest blanket she’d ever seen. It finally settled on her skin, warming to her body temperature instantly.

  Eve’s blood froze. Pinpricks of fear jolted up and down her body. The pounding
of her heart drowned out all sound.

  Savage stalked into the chamber and stood over her, a wicked gleam in his eye. “Don’t move, darling,” he said, “and it won’t have any reason to suck out your soul. Got me?”

  Eve blinked quickly, holding her breath, hyper-aware of the way the shadow was clinging to the dips and valleys of her body like a second skin.

  He reached beneath the death shade smothering her body, pulled out the buzzing amulet, and laid it flat over the black shadow. “I hate to tell you this, but your blood would’ve spilled either on this tablet or by Lilith’s own hand. For her to come out of hiding, she had to have the same plan in mind. After you released the shades to the Ever After at her bidding, leaving her seductive ass the only one standing high and mighty on earth, she was probably going to kill you herself. She would’ve become unstoppable. More powerful than any elder in vampire history. A goddess of sorts.”

  He was lying through his fangs. “No.” It was all she could muster beneath the weight of the shade lying over her body and the truth seeping into her mind. “Lilith wouldn’t have—”

  “If it’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t trust Lilith. She only acts if she gains some sort of benefit from it.” He leaned over her, palms down on the tablet.

  Lilith and Savage certainly seemed to know each other when they met unexpectedly in the apartment foyer, though she’d called him Kane. This was too much. Eve suddenly didn’t know who to trust, who to believe.

  Eve’s heart ached, never having felt so alone in all her life. She wanted to bury herself in Ruan’s arms. She wanted to take back the words she’d said to him so they wouldn’t be the last things he heard her say. Now she would die in this evil place by Savage’s greedy hands and Ruan would live on, thinking she didn’t love him anymore. That thought bothered her most of all.

  “You know, I think this, right here, is the most beautiful thing I’ve laid eyes on in ages.” Savage ghosted his hands along the death shade. It rippled at his touch like a kitten arching for a good scratch.

  Although the death shade was silent, no longer hissing and spitting with each move, Eve could feel evil churning inside it. It was ready to smother her body and soul, given the slightest opportunity.

  The amulet burned through its evil depth, against Eve’s chest, warming her from the inside out, despite the cold coating her skin. The warmth felt heavenly, filling the frigid void in the room and her heart. She needed more of that. More heat. Less evil chill. Despite Savage’s lingering gaze, Eve pinched her eyes tight and focused on the pure white energy swirling within the amulet, just like Lilith had taught her. Her breath caught. Her heart slowed.

  Instantly, the chamber grew a bit brighter, the blanket less stifling.

  “Thatta girl,” Savage hissed, slowly backing out of the room. “That’s the way . . . we’re going to do this one elder at a time, and we’ve got about five hours of moonlight left. Keep calling them to you and this will all be over soon.”

  That’s exactly what had Eve shutting down the energy in the amulet and shivering with the cold fragments of her heart the instant the chamber door closed behind him.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

  NIV Bible: 2 Peter 1:19

  “THE LAST CUSTOMER is gone.” Dylan strode through ReVamp’s lab with a heated kick to her step and a worried tone etched in her voice. At least she was feeling better. She’d been sick for the better part of a week and everyone was beginning to worry. Her color was still . . . off, but she wasn’t vomiting into office trash cans anymore, which made ReVamp smell a whole hell of a lot fresher. “Slade is closing up, then heading over to the haven. He’s called an emergency Crimson Council meeting to inform the Primuses what’s going on. As soon as you decipher more, I’m supposed to report back.”

  “Right.” Ruan spread two pages of scroll over the smooth white top of the lab table, his eyes skimming for the encrypted portion he’d written a hundred years before.

  Dylan brushed her tiny hand up and down his arm. He was wound so tight he could barely feel her gentle, reassuring touch. “We’ll find her, Ruan.”

  He nodded, lost in thought.

  Her expression turned to a scowl as she turned to Lilith, who was quiet and contemplative after having just spouted off information about the scrolls and Eve’s role. “So is there anything else we need to know?”

  Lilith had done her best to fill in Dylan and Slade once they got back to ReVamp, but the concept was so damn hard to believe. Eve was some sort of gatekeeper for elders’ shades? The purest spirit? The oldest? Ruan wouldn’t have believed that she’d resurfaced every hundred years unless he saw it with his own eyes . . . or at least experienced the memory of her.

  He certainly couldn’t expect Dylan and Slade to believe it, but they’d jumped on board, taking Lilith’s words and Ruan’s concern more seriously than he ever thought they would’ve. Still, Dylan didn’t trust Lilith wholeheartedly. She must’ve picked up on the same vibes Ruan had.

  Lilith sat board-straight in a desk chair at the back of ReVamp’s lab, her scarlet corset holding her tight. Against the whitewashed walls and sterile surroundings, she looked out of place—like a blotch of blood on a doctor’s starched straight lapel. “As much as you’d like to blame me for all of this, I didn’t foresee Savage taking Eve. I don’t have any idea where he’s taken her. All I know is what he plans to do with her and that he must be stopped.”

  As they continued to bicker back and forth, Ruan flipped over to the scroll with his encrypted writing. His eyes came to rest on the passage:

  gtw drh sos aiv xkqgal—jzvv gyvumww sycoxhb kcmv hki wpxc bwijqg chdwex . . . lnm gqi lc evv toj jx bzpp gvpqnifaxp lby wdtoaxg sqwppgcujvw qxl hts fezu etu.

  “Ruan?” Dylan asked, following his line of sight to the jumble of letters. “Why do I feel like there’s something you’re leaving out of all this?”

  Although Lilith revealed everything about Eve’s role and the elders and the mawares trapped in the amulet, she respectfully left out the part about Ruan’s role in her past. Slade and Dylan were told about Eve dying prematurely every hundred years before she could bind the shades and set the elders free, but Lilith conveniently left out that it was Ruan’s fault. That Eve had died because of the hideous sin bubbling in his veins.

  It was his, and only his, burden to bear. He appreciated Lilith’s gesture.

  “I just want to bring Eve back and it’s driving me mad that I’m stuck here flipping through scrolls instead of out finding her. I need to figure out what I wrote back then . . . and the clock’s ticking fast.”

  Ruan snatched a pad of paper and pen from Dylan’s desk drawer and laid it out over the smooth white table top beside the scroll. Along the top he wrote: If I die tomorrow it will be because I loved you too deeply. Beneath each letter of that line, he corresponded the matching gibberish phrase, letter for letter. As Ruan plugged away at the cipher—entering each letter of the key phrase in turn, skating his hand along the row, finding the ciphered letter, then skimming up the column to discover the unlocked letter—Dylan leaned over the table.

  She swept her fingers over the key phrase. “What does that mean?”

  He didn’t stop. He kept working, skimming over shifted rows of alphabet, writing each new letter down, trying to make sense of what was revealed.

  Gtw drh Sos orr xkqhal—jzvv gyvumww became You and Eve are joined—your futures . . .

  His heart sparked to life. It was working. “It’s something Eve said to me two-hundred years ago. Something she remembered in 1912 when I repeated it to her. And she spoke the same words to me in ReVamp’s office only this week.”

  Dylan’s eyes met his as she wh
ispered, “You remember your past.”

  He paused, his gaze landing on a UV-blocking window leading to the back alley, then nodded. He remembered everything . . . well, nearly everything. The good with the bad. Her innocence and his sin. There’d be a million questions later as more snippets of his past resurfaced, Ruan was sure. But now was not the time. Thankfully, Dylan understood that.

  “Here, let me help. It might go faster this way.” She tilted the scrolls toward her, then spouted off letter after letter, waiting for Ruan to decipher each in turn before saying the next. She was right. It did speed things along. Within minutes the gibberish had turned into readable phrases.

  More words cleared.

  Sycoxhb kcmv hki wpxc bwijqg lhdwex changed to knotted with the same tragic string . . .

  He continued letter after letter, his speed increasing the closer he got to the end of the encrypted passage.

  He read the next part aloud as its encryption cleared. “You must live for Eve to access the mawares in her amulet. Without those powers, she is no more special than any other mundane.” He remembered those exact words as they were spoken from Lilith’s lips in that dusty chamber in Fort Point.

  The last lines hit him like a freight train.

  Before he read the words aloud, he checked Lilith’s position. She was bent over the scrolls at the back of the room, sipping a mocha vampuccino from ReVamp’s special branded espresso machine. From the crinkle in her finely arched brow and the sweat beading at her temples, Ruan assumed she was having a harder time translating Valcish than he’d predicted. Seemed the dead language really was dead—not even the oldest of their species could translate it easily.

  Seeing her deep in concentration, Ruan whispered the final lines, breathing hard as if each word sucker-punched him in the gut. “If your memory returns, and my attempt has been in vain, you must die. Die so Eve can be free from Lilith and Savage’s enslavement.”