by Anne Malcom
“You aren’t aware of what plan we’re referring to,” Rick cut in smoothly.
The kingly brother, ever the diplomat.
I drained Duncan’s whisky. “I don’t need to be aware. I’m bored. It includes recklessness, a small possibility of success, large possibility of death. Add some Prada and a full-bodied pinot and it’s my kind of party. Plus I want to test just how far this ‘deathless’ thing will take me.”
“Of course you fuckin’ do,” Thorne seethed. “You’re not doin’ it.”
Then there was the not-so-kingly brother, who was a slave to his baser urges. With the technicality of humanity and all that.
And the one I was fated to be with, apparently.
Pity that fate was a fickle bitch. Though I was fickler and bitchier.
I totally planned to outmaneuver that bitch. A woman scorned and all that.
I tilted my head at him. “I’m sorry, I think you have yourself confused with someone with any fucking right to make that call. You know, someone who isn’t a spineless liar who deserves to be chained to the bottom of an ocean with a scuba mask and endless oxygen and just the pressure of the water and the small hope a shark might come along to tear him to shreds rather than live in that empty silence for the end of eternity,” I hissed.
“Well detailed. Like it,” Duncan put in with approval.
I grinned at him. “Thanks, though it’s only option one. I have twelve more.”
“Thirteen,” he observed, obviously understanding the lovely irony of doing things in odd numbers, with thirteen being the most beautiful of them all.
“Exactly. And of course, they’ll be carried out on Friday.”
Duncan barked out a stiff laugh.
No one else was laughing. But then again, the sense of humor we had was only reserved for a special—read: awesome—breed.
Thorne burst out of his seat, darting across the distance to clutch my arm in a grip that caused my bones to crack slightly and dragged me out of the room.
I let him, only because I was not hot on ruining another set of furniture in my living room, and also because—and I’d never admit it out loud—he was strong enough to pull off such an act.
I was sucking down on his blood; he should have been anemic and weak, not all flushed with anger and stronger than he’d been before. Or maybe he’d always been that strong, and he had just been playing his part as a weak human to me in order to continue the farce.
Whatever it was, he managed to yank me into my room, shoving me so I tottered slightly into the area at the end of my bed which boasted great views of Park Avenue. Too bad he wouldn’t see them from the ground. Which was where I planned on him landing.
“Can you fly?” I asked calmly once he’d slammed the door shut and rounded on me.
His eyes were black and darkened, his fists clenched tightly at his sides and jaw held tight. Ticking off all the little boxes for Thorne fury. Unfortunately, his jaw was also sprinkled with a liberal dusting of black stubble and his hair was artfully wild, brushing against the nape of his neck and framing his face in its inky curtain, making him look like the Devil himself.
Or at least his hot brother.
Oh no, wait, he was the hot brother of the king of all vampires. Who was nothing to sneeze at either.
But back to Thorne.
The muscles I swore had gotten bigger threatened to pulse out of the fitted black shirt which was trying to do the job of keeping them contained. As was the faded pair of jeans that encased his powerful thighs.
“What?” he clipped through gritted teeth.
I snapped my head back up to the swirling eyes.
“Your little slayer human vampire thing you’ve got going on,” I said, waving my hand at the package that contained the man who was destined to kill me, yet also destined to be my ‘mate,’ whose heart beat in my own chest and who had lied and betrayed me. “Does flying come with the laundry list of qualities?”
His eye twitched and he shook his head in a curt no.
I grinned. “Excellent.”
“You’re not going to throw me out the window, Isla,” he said blandly, crossing his arms.
I frowned at my response to the simple gesture, hating how much it turned me on. “Are you a mind reader too?” I snapped.
He regarded me. “No, I just know you.”
“Well, that makes one of us. Since I have no fucking clue who you are,” I hissed.
“You’re clinging to this excuse. You’ve been doin’ it for too fuckin’ long, and I’m not doing it any longer,” he growled.
I glared at him. “Do what, Thorne? Play the alpha male who broods more than he breathes? Good, I was worried about your lung capacity.” I paused. “No, wait, I wasn’t. As soon as Sophie finds a way to break this spell shit so I don’t need you to survive, you can brood as much as you like. And breathe as little as you like. If at all. That’s my preference.”
His grip tightened and he yanked me closer so our bodies pressed together, showing me what I’d forgotten. That ice and fire could mix and create something colder than the arctic and hotter than Hades. And made you want to burn and freeze at the same time.
“No. See, that’s what you’re doing. Clinging to this denial that it’s the blood, my blood, that you need to survive. That without that need you can do it without me. But I know your secret, Isla. This excuse came at a pivotal time for you. When you could cling to it to escape and distance yourself from me. From this. Because you pride yourself on being so fucking strong that you can’t handle the thought of something making you weak. Of us making you more than what you are at the same time as making you less than what you were. Because what we have, babe, even without prophecies or blood or fucking immortality, it’s immortal in itself. It’s otherworldly, and it’s got the power to burn through our fuckin’ souls if we let it.” His grip tightened. “I’m not gonna fuckin’ let it. Not gonna let your soul burn. I’ll gladly sacrifice mine to the inferno before that shit happens.”
I gave him an even gaze. His words hit their mark but my self-defense mechanism—sarcasm and snark, in other words—helped me. “Sorry, babe. Too late on the soul front, considering mine’s already burning in the pit. Has been since… well, since the beginning of my undeath. It’s kind of part and package with immortality. The bloodsucking thing and then the sacrifice of the soul.”
He stared at me. “No, Isla. Your soul hasn’t been sacrificed to the Devil. Your soul is mine, whether you like it or not. No refunds, no returns and sure as fuck no running. And you tell me to breathe as little as I like? That’s on you, babe. You’re the thing that keeps my lungs sustained, not fuckin’ oxygen. And I know it’s not my blood keeping you sustained. Known it since I saw you in that station. My whole life has been a battle. Told you you were my greatest and bloodiest yet. And I’ll go to war with a smile on my face, if it’s fighting the war that gets me to where I need to be—by your side. Not winnin’ you like a trophy or a prize because you’re not to be won, or owned, or saved. You’re to be weathered, fought, and fuckin’ loved more than a simple human being could ever do. And I’m not simple. This sure as fuck isn’t simple, but that fact is. The fact that you’re never gonna push me away.”
“It’s not pushing someone away when they’ve betrayed you, Thorne,” I hissed. “That’s called logic.”
He lifted a brow. “Since when have you and logic even been on the same planet?”
I glared at him. “Since my destruction came in the form of a slayer who brought me to the edge and then hurled me off with lies and secrets,” I snapped. “Because you told me to trust you, and then you kept things from me.”
“And you’re not keepin’ shit from me?”
I pursed my lips. “A girl doesn’t tell a man the secrets she holds. That’s just common sense. And my secrets aren’t the pivotal truth to my identity and haven’t ripped through everything we’ve fucking had or ever would have.” I paused. “Plus, my secrets? My truth? It’s darkness,” I admitted.
He didn’t even blink. “If it’s in the darkness that this is going to take you, then that’s where I’ll go.”
I stared at him. “You don’t even know the demons that lurk in this darkness, the depravity.”
He stared back, unwavering. “I don’t need to. Only thing I need to know is that’s where you’re going to be.”
He was saying all the right things. All the ones that settled into whatever parts of me were left to accommodate him while my brain—either the logical part or the crazy part, I couldn’t decide—urged me to forget. Maybe not forgive just yet, but at least forget long enough to lose myself in him once more.
But the other part, the logical or crazy part that remained, steered me towards the storm.
So I pushed myself from his grasp, trying to find some distance.
“You don’t know what you feel for me. You know what you think you feel, tangled up in danger and forbidden love and war and strife and fucking prophecy. Take all that away and what do you have, Thorne?”
He didn’t seem to like the distance I’d just created. He surged forward, not just so his hands cupped my chin and my body pressed into his, but so his soul met mine through the connection we shared, through the blood he made spill as he pressed his thumb into my mouth and pierced his skin with my fang.
“What’s left when we strip all that away, when we take away everything on the outside that you think makes this somehow more. Or somehow less. But it’s wrong. Because without everything on the outside, we’re the truth. We’re everything.”
His hand left my mouth and moved to circle mine in his large palm, giving the illusion that my small and pale fingers were delicate and precious and hadn’t known death. Hadn’t dealt death and evil.
He took them and didn’t take all that away, accepting it all without words instead.
Then he laid that death-filled hand on his life-filled chest, where his heart vibrated.
His eyes met mine. “It’s through my life that I almost lost you. From the origin of it all. I’ll regret that, that lie for as long as I live. But I won’t regret what I am. Or what you are. Because my heart is thousands of years old, and my thousand-year-old heart knows things. Just like yours does. And the outside stuff is white fucking noise compared to that shit. What we know, what we are.”
His words were said with such conviction, such love, that I was helpless against them. Me. A vampire. Arguably one of the strongest and most brilliant of our kind, laid to waste by mere words.
It was the mistake of idiots, dreamers, and lovers who thought love itself was a cure to reality, sent from God to temper the burn of mortality. The Devil’s greatest trick wasn’t convincing the world he didn’t exist. No, it was to make humans think that God sent love from the heavens to save them when he sent it from the underworld to damn them.
And there I was, damned.
Not because I was a vampire or a murderer.
Because I sinned as an angel did and loved as a demon might.
Chapter 20
I eyed the house, perched on top of the hill like some kind of nefarious idol. Despite my familiarity with it and my lack of fear towards it, I did, for a second, get a snapshot of what the locals of the town below saw every day. Cowered and bowed to every moment of their existence.
The menacing presence of the house itself, seemingly alive with the sheer coldness, even when nestled in the Russian summer with snow surrounding it. The darkness from the blackest midnight couldn’t reproduce the aura of the house.
Evil, if such a concept existed, would live there.
“Home, sweet home,” I said, holding my arm out to the stone fortress that was too harsh and ugly to be called a castle.
Though my mother would like to think of it as so, and the humans in the town below her servants.
Though they were, to an extent. The town had been around for centuries, for as long as I’d been undead. And for that time, the locals had always known. From whispered legends passed over campfires, and now with the background noise of television sets, were the stories of the Upyr and the ones who resided in and lorded over their town.
The watchful eye of the Rominskitoff clan meant the townspeople were probably the least likely in all of Russia to get killed by a vampire. Drank from? Maybe. Tortured? Also a big maybe when my brothers were in town. But killed? No.
My father had made some kind of blood vow with the original settlers of the town. A homicidal, sadistic, sociopathic vampire he may be, but he always kept his word.
He’d even given me a pony I’d asked for as a child. Of course, Viktor slit its throat in front of me a day later.
Father knew or expected such a thing would happen. Yet he got the pony. Because he was a man of his word. And a homicidal, sadistic, sociopathic vampire.
“I don’t like it,” Thorne muttered against the crisp bite of the Russian summer.
He was bundled up in his leather jacket, thin yet warm wool underneath. Not burdened with too many layers, since it was hard to fight in a cozy wool sweater.
I tried to imagine it. “You don’t own any wool sweaters, do you?”
He glared at me, which was becoming the norm considering he spent the entire flight muttering curses and setting his iron stare on me—and, on occasion, Duncan, when he decided to poke the bear. Because doing that in a pressurized metal box flying thirty thousand feet in the air was a good idea.
Then he’d decided talking to me was somehow a better idea. “You could get hurt,” he rumbled.
In an uncharacteristic gesture, I moved my hand to cover his thigh and squeeze it. “I could, and I most likely will,” I agreed.
His jaw ticked, but I continued.
“But I’m fucking awesome and tough and pretty well versed in surviving torture. I learned how to withstand it before I was even turned, and then multiple times after, so I’ll still be able to kick ass and take names even with a limb hanging off.” I paused. “Well, apart from my head hanging off, for obvious reasons, and I don’t think that’s classified as a limb. I wonder what they actually call—”
“Isla,” Thorne growled, obviously deciding to cut me off before I went too far.
I always went too far. That place beyond whatever line decency stopped at? Yeah, that’s where I hung out. And all the other cool kids too.
His hand covered mine. “What are you fuckin’ talking about you withstood torture before you were turned?” he demanded.
I blinked, distracted for a moment at the way his thumb rubbed at the top of my hand absently, then following the movement to the pulse point in his wrist. The gentle vibration gave me pause for a second before I snapped my head up to him.
“Yeah. Of course. It’s like the vampire version of the SATs,” I explained.
There was a pause. A long one.
“As a teenager, one as breakable as a human, you were made to withstand torture in order to graduate from high school?” he seethed.
I gave him a look. “Dude, it was four hundred years ago. Pipe the alpha rage down. You can’t change the past. And I wouldn’t want to. I aced that fucking class. Because, as mentioned earlier, I’m awesome.”
My eyes went to Duncan’s form, gazing out the window in a troubling melancholy that disturbed me just the slightest with its intensity.
Duncan was never intense. Well, he was, but not in any kind of serious way.
This was serious in a way that even the death of his entire family three hundred years before hadn’t been.
Not for me to worry about at this juncture.
We had enough to worry about. Sophie and her wolf were on another plane, or perhaps a train by now. They’d be meeting Thorne and Duncan at the back entrance to my old home while I came in the front.
I was the main distraction, followed by Duncan and Thorne. Hopefully, in all the chaos, Sophie and the wolf—whom I’d not been happy to hear was part of the plan—would snatch Malena with some nifty little spell and drag her back to the continental US where Rick could p
ut her in his little gallery and perhaps gain an advantage in the war.
That was with all things going well.
If all things didn’t go well, we all died.
Cheerful, really.
At least Thorne and I had reconciled, thoroughly, before our impending deaths.
“I even beat a certain Scotsman’s record,” I taunted Duncan, putting my attention on him and not me welcoming the grave for what felt like the hundredth time that week.
His melancholy snapped away like a rubber band, the mask of easiness that I thought was his natural state fitting quickly onto his features.
“Fuckin’ cheated,” he muttered.
“I won fair and square. Just because the little human Duncan couldn’t handle a little dismemberment. Boohoo, someone get you a fucking tampon,” I shot.
He flashed his fangs at me in response.
I rolled my eyes, then grinned at Thorne, who was glowering.
“Dismemberment?” he repeated.
I waved my hand. “Oh, only a little. There was a witch on scene to fix it good as new.” I turned the hand in question around in the light. “See, flawless as ever.”
He frowned at the hand. “Jesus, Isla.”
I quirked my brow. “Pretty sure he wasn’t a classmate. At least not in my year.”
He yanked me so I straddled him, his eyes swimming as emotions rolled off him in waves so palpable I had the completely irrational thought that they might bowl me over if he wasn’t pressing me to his body.
Which was ridiculous, of course.
“This isn’t a joke, Isla,” he growled. “Life. Death. You being in any proximity to it or in pain.”
“That’s precisely what it all is,” I replied. “Life. Death. A big fucking cosmic joke that we have to find the humor in, however dark it is. Otherwise, it’ll eat us alive. And now that I’m all deathless and shit, I’m not a fan of it eating me alive. I eat people alive, not the other way around. And you can’t take it seriously either,” I ordered.