The battle behind us sounds to be thinning enough for Demetria to handle the rest on her own.
Guess that means we’re all set, and now it’s just a matter of someone throwing the first punch.
“Because I just watched Violet play Idun like a broken harmonica,” Vance says with…a terribly outdated metaphor.
I want to cringe.
Clyde grins. “She is quite surprisingly strong. Idun, however, will never be defeated. She’s stronger than ever, thanks to all the fearful whispers that have gathered this past millennium among monsters. You had to bury all of us to put her down, and that was at full strength.”
“That was full strength back then,” Vance says with a smirk.
Taylor, Idun’s first cousin, steps to the front, grinning darkly, as he holds his phone up.
Vance’s smug expression falls, and I lean closer to get a better view of the screen.
There’s a coldness that washes over me when I see Violet being slammed into the ground. A dark, visible fog slams my almost-bride into the ground so deeply that she cries out in surprise and a small bit of pain, as Idun flexes some of her true power.
Idun comes into view, bloodied mouth twisted in a fiercely excited grin. The wind swirls all around her, as the earth begins to wilt in her wake. Hyde is suddenly screaming, and the screen cuts out.
“You’re no match for us. You never were. Now—”
Clyde’s words are cut off, because his head goes rolling off his shoulders. As Vance’s sword finishes the deadly arc, I quickly close the short distance between myself and the headless body, rip out Clyde’s heart, and toss it aside, all before the body drops to the ground.
He’s down until someone puts his heart back in.
Vance’s glare is icy when he stares down the Neoprys, and my blood begins to boil. Taylor takes an uneasy step back, the smirk falling from his face.
“Fucking Neoprys,” Vance grinds out.
We don’t give them much of a chance to react. In the next instant, we become the attackers. My monster surges forth, and the sounds fade to near nothing. My vision dims to mere shadows. My senses dull into subtle numbness.
The monster takes over.
The delicate taste of Neopry blood hits my lips, and a grin curves inside my hungry soul. Fire burns against my flesh, but my cold overpowers it, chilling the painful heat almost immediately.
My vision swims with fresh, rushing images, the monster feeding my curiosity, as I trust it to keep me alive long enough to claim our bride.
At last. At last I have a bride to claim.
My vision shifts to a still scene before me, and I’m plunged back into reality, as the reins land in my control once more. My gaze collides with Taylor’s—arguably one of the strongest skin-walkers—and I look down to see my hand shoved inside his chest cavity.
I grin when I look up, and his eyes widen, just as I yank his heart out. Idly, I notice his severed arms lying at his sides.
“I do love losing control. I don’t get to do it nearly enough,” I taunt, smiling as I skip toward the rest of the stragglers.
I spent too long watered down, and these fucking fools think they’re stronger? A thousand years does make a beautiful difference after all.
As two run away from me, deciding to take their chances with one of the others, I remove a head.
It’s been a thousand bloody years. I don’t even remember which Neopry that one is. Bet it sucks to be fighting against people who buried you and forgot your name.
Oh, I need to tell Violet I remembered every single Simpleton, but I forgot some of the skin-walkers. I bet that gets me rewarded.
Violet…
I need to find Violet.
Focusing is hard, because the blood is driving me crazy. There’s so much of it, and Neopry blood is damn tempting. Always has been.
My monster lurks near the surface, but stays caged, as I turn to see Vance and Zuela working like a well-oiled team against the remaining three Neoprys.
Marta is running away from a fight, which can only mean she’s on her way to Violet. Makes it easier when I have a trail to chase.
“Coming, little monster,” I whisper into the wind as my body begins moving.
Chapter 45
DAMIEN
“But then you killed Theon before the sacrifice could happen. He didn’t have the appropriate sacrifice to appease the blood magic,” Talbot goes on, almost as though he’s reciting this information. “Jack was born to Dr. Harvey Jackal. Shortly after, the tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde started circulating. Hyde isn’t truly dangerous until it learns its name, because that’s when the memories slowly start returning. It drives the host mad, especially when Hyde starts showing the conscious mind all the ways it has tried to make the host’s ‘dreams’ come true. Most of these humans were far too pure to make peace with the darkest wishes they have becoming a reality at their hand. Nor can they make peace with a monster living inside them.”
“Theon’s altar didn’t work. It couldn’t have. It cracked. If it cracks, it means the spell didn’t take,” I argue, remembering that much from our own past.
All that other shit sounds like an entirely new world of problems that I’m most certainly not in the mood to face.
“It worked well enough. Hyde’s like the bloody errant, malfunctioning Jack-in-the-Box that people unknowingly wind up every time they go seeking immortality. It pops out like the devious, deranged spirit it is, and it leeches onto the first host it likes. When Vance killed ‘Jack,’ Hyde skipped into the ghost plane and stalked its next opportunity with an unnerving amount of calculated patience. It hates the box. It’s a terribly tenacious, impatient, and competitive monster,” Talbot continues. “Violet was both perfect and all wrong for it—a constant, cosmic coin toss. But I’d tried everything else, so I figured, why the hell not? Then I got drunk for a while. End of story.”
He throws his hands up like he’s exhausted and tired of all my questions.
This is the worst beta I’ve ever had.
“And you don’t know if Violet can kill Idun without destroying half the town in the process? Also, let’s be outrageously open-minded and say you’re right and Hyde is a match for Idun’s monster…will Violet be able to push Hyde back after a fight of this magnitude?” I ask him.
I don’t like the way he shuts down all his expressions. It makes it too obvious that he doesn’t want to give anything away. He’s too suspicious as it bloody is.
“I’m afraid I have no personal attachment to these people or this place. There is no box anymore. That mark latched onto me in the dead of night, during one of the rare occasions I managed to sleep.”
His hand makes a seemingly unconscious move to rub the spot over his chest.
“What I’m telling you is that I’m here to handle Hyde.”
That doesn’t really answer my question.
I scrub a hand through my hair, glaring over at him, while ignoring my vibrating phone.
“My monster stayed in control of me for the first half of a century after that first battle,” I tell him, giving him a dead stare.
I try not to revisit the early days of immortality, because I was barely a passenger in my mind during those days.
“A weak-blooded Portocale fell in love with an old-blood Neopry Simpleton descendent, giving life to a girl who struggles to stay angry, in a world that never stops being angry, and she became the most powerful monster of them all,” he says very coldly. “A misfit monster found a misfit girl, who could make the monster immortal at last.”
He really does like pausing. I’m starting to notice his annoying tendency to constantly fuel the drama of a situation that is far too tense already.
“I feel like Violet was handpicked by the universe to right a wrong, and with a century of training, she may have been able to pull it off. But not this soon. Not this young. Not this new.”
“Stop leading me to the answer and just shoot it to me straight,” I demand with fraying patience.
/>
“Long after a botched immortality ceremony, a cosmic storm rained across a full nation on the night of a full moon. A Portocale was struck dead. An immortal Portocale gypsy hopped to this dead body, after said immortal gypsy cheated her usual lengthy departure. And somewhere mixed in with all that, the babe survived even after the womb around her died.”
I say nothing, and simply stare at him, waiting for him to hurry this along.
“The Simpleton’s tainted their hope for the first time since eternity started for them,” he tells me. “Yet another cosmic storm, caused by an unnatural child’s birth. The girl was always going to be a monster. Her natural monster would have been useless, and as the first of its kind, would have been ripped apart by the devious, powerful betas. The monster inside her now is about to rule the world with uncontested power.”
He’s done all he can to freak me the fuck out and confuse the shit out of me at the same time, since it all sounds like make-believe. However, he’s yet to answer my question.
“None of this makes sense. Not for the first time, I bloody sympathize with how hard this must have been for Violet when she first landed into a world she knew nothing about,” I decide aloud.
“If I ever find that rabbit hole, my parents will just have to be happy for me and miss me while I’m gone. It’s possible I may never find my way back, if it turns out to be where I belong. But the place the book explains is too similar to the home in my head. Or maybe it’s a heaven I’ll never see, since heaven is only for the dead,” Talbot says, reading from a journal of some sort.
“Could you do something productive?!”
“This is from Violet’s fourteen-year-old journal,” he says, as though he believes he’s explaining something. “It’s what she wrote after reading Alice in Wonderland, and apparently she was the dark, brooding, rhyming type of teenager, who suspected she’d never die, even as she protested the possibility of immortality.”
The sirens that have been wailing in the distance finally come to an end. The fresh and abrupt silence seems to interrupt his thorough analysis of Violet, which is honestly making me want to rip his head off just for knowing so much more about her.
Straining my hearing, I spot a familiar whisper in the wind several miles away.
“The vampire is moving fast,” I say, even as I remain distracted, trying to figure out where it is he’s heading. “He may know where she is.”
I turn and leave Talbot behind, feeling my phone vibrate with a reminder of a text.
Lifting my phone, while darting a look up here and there to dodge inanimate objects, I quickly skim the contents of a text from Vance.
VANCE: Stay on Violet. She’s somewhere in the direction of the old field.
I really should check my messages more promptly. Fucking hell.
Talbot surprisingly catches up, which actually pisses me off. I’ll blame it on the fact I’m famished.
“Violet has a weakness to my pheromones that she doesn’t experience with any other I’ve noticed so far,” I cut in, my feet moving like feathers, barely touching the ground, as I follow the whispered whistle of the vampire’s wake.
“That’s because I forgot you,” Talbot confesses. “When I created Hyde’s defenses, I remembered every Morpheous, including the infamous Dorian Gray. But I forgot you.”
I grin, almost as though I feel complimented.
“That doesn’t give you any sort of edge. Hyde will still rip you to shreds if you challenge Violet.”
In the next breath, he’s gasping for air, because I have him slammed against a tree in the forest near Morrigan property. His eyes widen, as my own eyes cloud over with the monster’s influence.
“I’ll torture you for all eternity if Violet isn’t as strong as you claim, after all this hope you’ve forced upon me. If she ends up being tortured by Idun for the rest of her immortal life, you’ll suffer by my hand for the rest of yours. You’re going to help us put Idun underground, and this time, we’d like to fucking keep her there without having to bury the entire Neopry House. Then you’ll help us subdue Violet, so that she doesn’t get stuck in monster mode.”
He says nothing else, and I release him, barely catching Arion’s trail again.
“I don’t know if I can subdue Hyde. I warned her she wasn’t ready, but she didn’t yet trust me enough to help guide her. I didn’t want to push too fast, but I had no idea things would escalate so abruptly. She’s wildly and unpredictably reckless,” he adds quietly.
“If we can’t get her back, I’m going to sever your cock from your body and feed it to a bathtub full of piranhas,” I inform him very seriously.
“I didn’t have to tell you anything. I chose to, because you’re my alpha,” he fires back, lips thinning. “I chose to because I was trying to earn her trust and pay my dues, since a thousand years of solid, substantiated, rogue beta work wasn’t good enough. Marta pretended to not even know me, because she didn’t want me telling Violet anything at all. I was going to tell her everything and start coaching her, since she’s outlasted all the other hosts combined. But there wasn’t enough time to earn her very wary trust, so I counteracted my mother’s curse, and I risked it all by telling you the truth. I didn’t have to do that.”
Fortunately for me, a shriek from ghosts has me tripping over my own feet, and Talbot damn near does the same thing. It interrupts the semi-decent explanation he was making.
I hate my beta.
My gaze lifts to find Violet’s ever-expanding parade of ‘ghosts,’ as they drop a few speakers here and there.
Because that makes perfect sense…
Talbot mentioned a gypsy name I haven’t heard in ages.
Jackals.
Telekinesis.
The Jackals were an old gypsy line with some harmless telekinesis skills, not too dissimilar to Shera’s line.
“Violet really can’t see ghosts?” I ask, allowing myself a moment for the pain to subside, before I push myself to my feet, staring over at the assortment of personalities.
“She really can’t,” he answers.
“And these are all…Violet?” I ask, as one ghost does the worm in the middle of the field they’ve nearly surrounded with speakers.
“In a manner of speaking. They’re all one suppressed section of Violet’s subconscious,” he answers.
“And you’ve been reading my Flame’s teenage journals,” I also comment, wondering why I didn’t think of that first.
“If you think reading her adolescent journal is an invasion of privacy, then you aren’t fully understanding the gravity of what this means,” Talbot adds, misunderstanding my tone, apparently.
I roll with it and simply stare at him, waiting for him to elaborate.
“Hyde takes the suppressed pieces of one’s subconscious and turns it into a personality. Or in this case, fifty or more personalities. That number took an alarming swing into higher numbers fairly recently.”
He swallows a little thicker, proving he’s been hiding a lot of his fear until now.
“I should have realized Violet was on the verge of losing control,” he continues, sounding damn near apologetic.
“You know this thing better than we do. What the hell is it up to with all the speakers?” I ask, mostly because I’m damn near numb.
I don’t know how to process this information. Especially since I’m more concerned with finding Violet than getting an explanation of what Violet’s monster is capable of.
Centuries of seeing Idun’s sharp, versatile, and damn near invincible power, versus over a year of watching Violet bobble her way through one crisis after another.
It doesn’t sound even near the realm of possible, even though it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve considered it a possibility.
“Ever feel like two worlds are colliding, and you don’t know which one is about to crack under the pressure?” I ask him, still unmoving, as I watch the ghosts toil and play.
It doesn’t make any sense.
At all.
Again, he gestures toward the ghosts, who are…playing telekinetic soccer with…Taylor Neopry’s head…
How’d they get his head?
“Is this the new world?” I ask Talbot very quietly.
Given the fact that Taylor’s eyes are wide and frozen open, that means someone has put his heart back inside his chest…wherever that may be.
This is power to the next level. Taylor is a powerful alpha, and the ‘ghosts’ are using his head as a toy.
“I can’t imagine Violet condoning this. While I certainly find it alarming that she’s this powerful, what scares me the most is the fact this isn’t Violet at all,” I tell Talbot.
“Hyde doesn’t grant the host’s truest wishes, Alpha. Hyde is the darkest recesses of the mind. Don’t be scared yet. This is just the beginning, if we don’t manage to find a way to suppress it again. Marta can’t make a spirit bind strong enough to hold it back anymore. But there’s another way. If—”
“I’ll bring Violet back by myself,” I snap, slamming him into a tree, and holding him by the collar of his shirt.
His eyes widen marginally, as my own eyes narrow to slits.
“I may not know what’s going on, and I have no idea what to believe right now. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m ready to find out. What I do know is that Violet will not be lost to her monster, and you’ll not be using anymore blood magic. I haven’t trusted blood magic in too many centuries to count, because of my own multi-cursed soul.”
I feel the monster attempting to rise to the surface, but I’m fortunately too weak. Otherwise, this could end up in bloodshed and a newfound, powerful enemy. Neither of which is something I want or need in my life.
“Even if it kills me, I’ll break into her mind and guide her. If I’m her weakness, then I’ll use it to my advantage, and drag her the fuck back into the driver’s seat,” I assure him.
Gypsy Truths (All The Pretty Monsters Book 6) Page 39