“What the fuck are you doing?” Atlas asked, his breath hot against my face as he shook me furiously by my shoulders. “You don’t get into the middle of any fight, let alone one between two vampires. Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
Declan crawled over, her eyes wide as a doe as she reached for me and pulled me back out of the fallout zone.
“And definitely not between these two vampires,” she added, grunting as she used all of her strength to drag us both with her at the same time. Eventually, with a deep groan of frustration, she abandoned Atlas, leaving him to his own devices, and devoted all of her energy and focus on pulling me. I could feel the carpet creating a dull burning sensation along my back with each thrust. “There’s something off about them,” she exhaled with exertion, “they’re too strong. Like vampires on fucking steroids.”
A loud crash sounded and I craned my neck to see Claude sitting in a pile of broken glass and wood where a side table and ornate lamp had been standing a moment before.
His face contorted with rage as his teeth descended past his lip. “You fucking prick. That lamp was a hundred years old. You just signed your own death warrant.”
“What are you going to do about it? Bite me?” Darius taunted, his eyebrow arched and eyes glistening, whether with bloodlust or amusement, I couldn’t be sure.
Claude shook off a few stray shards of ceramic and glass, his palms already healing from the superficial cuts, before he stood up, dove forward, and rammed into Darius’s chest.
They went down with such ferocity that the ground shook, the two of them nothing but a pile of indiscernible limbs, each trying desperately to claw at or hit the other. They looked so similar to each other that it became almost impossible to decipher which arm belonged to which vampire when they were all tangled up like that.
They lashed out with a fury of fists and kicks that would have killed humans and protectors alike. Watching them, I wasn’t sure how even a whole team of protectors could stand a chance, let alone one of us. We were a doomed species if this was the sort of thing we were up against after graduation.
Declan went back for Atlas and I just—watched. Mesmerized.
Their movements brought them closer and closer to us until I could reach my hand out and touch them if I wanted to.
I needed to move. But for some reason, I was frozen. My breath locked up somewhere in my throat and all I could see was the image of the vampire snapping Wade’s neck before he fell to the ground in a heap. Lifeless.
My hands tingled and my skin felt itchy as I tried desperately to breathe in and out, my vision blurring between the scene that night and the one in front of me. It was a ridiculous thing for my brain to do in this moment, and a hollow shame filled my belly.
When I located Darius’s eyes in the fight, I realized that for the first time, he actually looked concerned. This was no longer a game to him, not anymore anyway. Would his brother really kill him? Would he kill his brother?
How deep did their hatred towards each other go? And if one of them died, what would happen to the rest of us? I knew with a deep, aching certainty that if Claude was the surviving twin, the rest of us would quickly follow Darius’s fate. If his allegiance to his brother was gone, we didn’t stand a chance at making it out of here alive.
And Wade would remain a prisoner forever, locked up and alone until the cloaked creature decided to do whatever it was he was going to do with him.
And Ro and and Cyrus and Izzy—I’d never see any of them again.
Picking up where Declan left off, Eli slid his hands under my armpits and lifted me up like a rag doll, my limbs lolling loosely like they were boneless. I saw rather than felt him drag me a few feet away until my feet danced above the carpet like I was nothing more than a puppet. After a brief moment of hovering, he let my feet touch the ground, though I couldn’t feel them properly. Everything felt unstable and unreal—my body most of all.
When I turned back, I saw that Atlas’s eyes were pure gold as Declan held onto his arms, trying to hold him back, to calm him down.
But she didn’t stand a chance, not really. The wolf was no longer willing to stay in the small recesses of Atlas’s mind that he was allowed to prowl. As if realizing this at the exact moment that I did, she let go and took a few steps back from him. His body contorted in pain. I watched in horror as his muscles snapped and his bones broke. He was starting the transition right in front of us. His smooth, muscular arms lined with the now-familiar dark brown fur. There was pain clear as day on his face as the transition rolled through him and my chest ached at the sight.
Atlas was immoveable; a creature of pure strength and determination. Seeing him struggle through this was like a heavy dousing of cold water on my face.
I could see it in his eyes as they locked onto mine. For once, I could read every emotion there—pain, anger, and most prominent of all, fear. It was like he was using every morsel of energy in his body to keep the wolf back. But as strong as Atlas was, he wasn’t strong enough to win this match.
I watched in awe as he lost the battle to his other half, his shadow self; until, eventually, he bared his teeth in a vicious growl—a giant, livid wolf standing where Atlas had been just one moment earlier.
“Calm down Atlas,” Declan said, her hands lifted in front of her, palms out as she made eye contact and took a few steps away from him. Slowly, very, very slowly. She didn’t quite seem scared of him, but there was enough unease to suggest that she was just on the verge of fear. I wondered how often she’d been around him in this form before. “Remember who you are.”
Would he hurt her? Would he attack the rest of us? She told me that generally Atlas had decent control of his wolf, but no werewolf had control near a full moon. Guessing by the anger radiating from the beast in front of us, we were smack dab in the full part of the cycle.
I turned around, desperate to find Ralph in the chaos. He’d kept Atlas’s wolf in its place once before, maybe he could do it again, without hurting him. I craned my neck around the room that now looked like it’d seen the depths of a great war, but the giant dog was nowhere in sight.
When had I last seen him?
He’d brought me to the room, walked me through the house, but now he was gone without a trace. He had a habit of disappearing without warning. Better that way, perhaps. Better that he not get wrapped up in this reckless shit show. I’d pulled him into enough dangerous situations already.
My nose itched from the unsettled dust in the room, like the particles were clinging to my skin and trying to fight their way into my body to suffocate me. My palms dug deep into Eli’s thighs as we pressed ourselves against the wall, desperate to get out of the way as the brothers thrashed through the room, breaking everything in sight. It felt like a battlefield as the room filled with clouds of dust and the ground rumbled beneath my feet with every toss and fall. How the fuck did this situation devolve so quickly? I didn’t understand what went wrong, not even a little bit.
“Stop this, I don’t want to hurt you,” Darius said, his words tumbling out in breathy puffs as Claude punched him in the gut with so much force that I was shocked his fist didn’t go straight through Darius’s stomach and out of his back.
Atlas’s wolf turned from Declan and studied the brothers, muscles tense like he was waiting until the right moment to pounce. I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse about that. It was great that he didn’t seem to want to attack his friends, but something told me that if he went after the brothers, he’d end up dead. And almost instantly.
And as much as Atlas ground my gears, I knew with absolute certainty that the last thing I wanted was him hurt. Or worse.
“You selfish, mindless creature,” Claude said, his words punctuated with punches until Darius’s lip split in a burst of deep red. “You show no loyalty in your whole life, none. Never to me, never to your family. You’ve saddled me with an impossible debt. And then you go and do this on top of it? You waste your freedom? You’re a fucking j
ackass. I don’t know why I bothered helping you in the first place. I should’ve left you and your friends to rot like the worthless pieces of shit you are.”
Darius wasn’t even fighting back now, his face nothing more than a punching bag as Claude rocked hit after hit at him.
I wasn’t sure what this was about, not really, but I could tell from the darkness in Claude’s eyes as he lashed at his brother that it was about way more than recent events. This was the result of a lifetime of anger, built up over time, and now we were all around to watch it spew.
Eli inhaled deeply behind me before letting out a loud, anguished yell. “What the hell?”
I spun around and saw that his lip was broken open, thick blood spilling down his jaw and neck. His left eye was slammed shut and covered with blood like he’d been punched by a hammer. His white shirt was now dyed with splotches of red.
“Eli?” The breath left my lungs. I stared as another line of red carved itself across his cheek out of nowhere. When the hell had he been hit? He’d been standing right next to me the entire time. I reached out to touch his face but hovered an inch away out of fear of hurting him. “What the hell is going on?”
His lips quivered as he looked at his hands, the knuckles now all torn and bloody as he buckled over and held his ribs and stomach. “I-I don’t understand.”
His words came out in heavy, labored breaths, like he couldn’t suck in a full lungful and was trying to disguise the full depth of his pain. When he spoke, I saw that his teeth were blood stained from the gash on his lips, the red coating each crevice along his gums. His tongue pooled with blood, punctured on one side as if he’d impaled it on his tooth somehow just by standing there.
“Declan,” I screamed, now no longer paying any attention to Claude and Darius, though I could still hear them meeting in a clamor of bangs and rage-filled yells. “Something’s not right. Like, really, really not right.”
“Holy shit,” she said, her jaw dropping as she stared from Eli to the two vampires. In the next moment, she left Atlas’s side and tore across the room towards us, her expression revealing her panic. “You guys need to duck!”
Eli and I both hit the ground in time as a vase flew into the wall where we’d both been standing a nanosecond before and shattered into dust after denting the wall. A few stray shards cut into my forearm as I used it to shield my face and eyes. I hovered slightly over Eli, desperate to stop him from incurring any more wounds.
“Leave. Her. The. Fuck. Alone,” Darius said. His voice was quiet, stilted, and almost calm. It was terrifying. And something about that sent chills down my spine, like a part of him I’d never seen before was slowly emerging.
I spun and saw him pummeling his brother in the ribs over and over, until I was certain that Claude didn’t have a single unbroken bone left in his chest cavity. I had no idea how long it took vamps to repair shattered bones.
Atlas paced back and forth between us and them, like he wanted to pounce into the fight but had no idea which brother to go for. He settled instead for guarding us as he sent out loud, warning growls, his body vibrating with frustrated tension.
Where the fuck had the evening gone wrong? An hour ago I was filled with light and excitement. Eli was alive, awake. And now—I glanced at Eli, doubled over in pain. Atlas, barely able to control his wolf. The vampires, slowly beating each other to death. What the hell had happened?
Claude turned his warped face in our direction. Despite the violence of their fight, it was only mildly bruised and filled with cuts that were already slowly healing. His mismatched eyes glanced down at Eli, now soaked in blood.
“See brother, see what you’ve done?” He laughed, the sound low and haunting. “Turn around and take a good hard look at the masterpiece you’ve created. It’s only fair you get to see and appreciate your work. You’ve saved the boy, only for it to result in both of your deaths. A fucking waste. But I can almost admire the poetry of it all.”
It took a moment for the words to pull Darius out of his blood-crazed battle rage, and when he finally did turn towards us, I recoiled. Gone were the familiar series of expressions I’d grown accustomed to while visiting the vampire in the research lab.
There was no humor, no amusement, no teasing in his eyes now.
He was nothing but pure, unbridled anger. His eyes seemed to glisten, like he was enjoying the violence as much as he hated it. And I had a feeling that if he couldn’t filter that rage against his brother, he would turn it on us. There was no mask of control there anymore. The monster within him was more than a simple vampire. He wrestled demons none of us understood. How many years had he spent in the lab at Guild Headquarters? How much torment and torture could a mind go through before it broke?
I looked closer, noticing that he had a cut above his eye, that his cheek was split, that his lip, now partially healed, was caked in a line of blood.
“Oh my god,” I said as Declan glanced between Eli and Darius. Her soft gasp suggested that she was drawing the same conclusion that was slowly solidifying in my mind. “You’re connected now. The blood—your blood—did this?”
“Yes, my little brother’s gone and tied his life to a fucking protector. The lowliest creature on the planet,” Claude said, his tone filled with mirthless laughter and disgust as he leveled a kick into Darius’s ribs. “Fucking worthless piece of shit.”
Darius was breathing in and out heavily, and I could tell that it was taking every ounce of his self-control not to give into the rage coursing through his bloodstream, not to turn around and finish the battle he’d started with his brother. There was a distance in his eyes now, like he was turning the rage in on himself instead. Much like Atlas had done only a few moments ago, he was waging war with his inner demons. All we could do was hope that where Atlas failed at containing his shadow self, Darius would succeed.
“What does this mean?” Declan asked as she ripped the one semi-clean area of Eli’s shirt left and used the grimy, white cotton to apply pressure to the cuts, to stem some of the bleeding.
In the process of her pulling up his shirt, I realized that Eli had several claw marks traversing his chest and abdomen. The gouges were deep and angry. It would take him days to heal from all of this, especially since his energy stores were already so low. But my stomach sank as he fell against the wall and slid down. There was no way that he didn’t have internal bleeding to match the external. I’d witnessed the fervor in every single one of Claude’s punches.
“This means,” Claude said, standing now and smirking down at his brother’s glazed expression as he rocked back and forth on the ground, hands sunk into his hair, “that they’re blood-bonded now. That if my brother dies, so does your friend.” He pounced, lightning fast, and stood less than a few inches away from Eli. “It means that all I have to do is end this measly protector’s life and I will take care of my little brother in one fell swoop.” He turned back towards Darius and curled his lip in disgust. “By the looks of him, it’d be a mercy. Your kind has already taken his mind, why not his life?”
Judging from Claude’s dexterity and speed, Darius had gotten the worst in their fight. I turned back and saw him still locked in his own private battle, his eyes bright and breaths ragged. While both brothers looked like shit, Darius was without a doubt in worse shape. His eyes were locked on Claude, tracking every single muscle he moved with absolute focus and precision as his rocking stilled.
And when I turned back to Claude, I realized that he’d been toying with Darius. Despite the mess in the room and the cuts rapidly disappearing from his skin, Claude looked like he’d done little more than go for a rather strenuous jog. I looked worse after some of my more active sparring sessions.
My blood turned to ice as Declan’s words came back to me.
He was no normal vampire.
I was almost certain that even if Declan, Atlas, and I all tried to take him down at once, we would fail. He was powerful in a way that none of us could understand, in a way we hadn’t been
prepared for.
“What the hell are you?” I asked, forcing myself to look the creature in the eyes as he stalked closer and closer to where we were guarding Eli. We were nothing more than prey to him, and I was convinced with absolute certainty that he would enjoy hunting us down one-by-one. With fervor.
Atlas was in the process of shifting back and I turned my head when I saw that his chest, coated in sweat and pulsing with each heavy breath, was completely bare. I forced my eyes not to sink any lower, knowing that he’d be naked from the waist down as well.
It was a ridiculous thing—that even in the middle of something as dire as the current situation, I could feel my cheeks heating up at the sight of his muscular chest. My stomach clenched as anger at myself gripped me like an iron ring.
Quickly, I turned back to Claude, while Atlas swept the ground for his pants.
“You can’t expect me to answer that question,” Claude said as he shoved Declan aside into a wall, her head crashing hard with a sickening crack against a shelf, and closed the distance between us, “if you can’t even answer the same question for yourself.” He leaned towards me, whispering in my ear, “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.”
I stood, stunned, body trembling uselessly as his breath hit my neck.
With a small, humorless chuckle he crouched down next to Eli and dragged a single, porcelain finger up his shirt until he pressed it into one of the claw marks—a perfect match to his own finger.
Eli writhed in agony, his eyes wild and confused as the truth of the situation washed over him. I could tell through his ragged breathing that he was fighting to stay conscious. He was already in such a weakened state, he’d only been awake for an hour or two at most now.
Without thinking, I shook the fear from my mind and latched onto Claude, trying with every ounce of strength I had to pull him away from Eli. My fingers dug grooves into his shoulders and my feet sunk into the ground as I tugged.
Hell and Back: The Protector Guild Book 4 Page 12