Bold Mercy

by Cane, Laken

  “She took my blade,” I whispered, and of everyone there, only Remy really understood what that meant. “She has my Dolly.”

  He slowly and carefully slid his lucky stake back into its loop and held his hand over it, as though one of the vampires might sneak up behind him and snatch it from him. Yeah, he understood. “It’s not going to fly back into your hand while you’re standing there whining about it.” He gave me a cocky grin, somewhat maniacal looking with his bloody, swollen face. “Let’s go get your blade and stake a bitch. Come on. Where’s that crazy killer we all know and love?”

  My breath whooshed out of me as Remy’s words triggered a memory. In the tunnels, I’d called my blade to me, and it had flown into my hand. I’d done that once, and I could do it again. I had to get in the right frame of mind and probably a little closer to it, but I could fucking do that. I was going to get my demon blade back, and I was going to stake a bitch. Excitement and hope exploded through me and I shoved myself away from the wall, energy renewed.

  “There it is,” Remy said. “There it is.”

  I turned to Joe. “Take my car and drive to Shadowfield.” When he opened his mouth, I held up a hand to stop him. “See Dr. Hayes and get some rest. There will be other nights, and other fights.” I was honestly shocked that he was still standing. And maybe he was, too, because he shut his mouth and nodded.

  “Bastien,” I said, “get your vampires away from the humans. I’m calling the paramedics and the cops, and your people should be gone before they arrive. If you or your vampires find Avis before I do, get my fucking blade.” Maybe it wasn’t smart to let everyone know how much my knife meant to me, but I was beyond caring. They all knew I’d kill anyone I had to kill to get it back and I doubted any one of them believed a blade was worth that risk.

  Five minutes later, Remy and I were jogging through the dark city alleys and side streets. I stopped for a few seconds when I smelled a particularly strong splat of blood on the street, but that was for Remy’s benefit. I followed her by scent, not by sight, but I wasn’t ready to let him know that.

  Soon, when Avis was dead, the city was calmer, and I had my demon blade, I’d tell him what I was. And if I thought he was going to sneak up behind me and kill me for it someday, we’d fight then and there, and I’d end him. I didn’t like things hanging over my head.

  She was so fast, even for a vampire—especially fast for someone who wasn’t really a vampire at all. I would stay on her trail if it took me all night, because that trail, if not allowed to grow cold, would lead me straight to her sleeping place. She could feed and kill and cause havoc all night but I doubted that even Avis Vine could stay in the sun for long, if at all. If I had to follow her into the ground and kill her while she slept, I would.

  Strangely enough, I had the scent of my blade as well—and I hadn’t even realized, at least not consciously, that it had a scent. It smelled of fire, ash, and something close to burnt sugar. It smelled as good as the alpha.

  When we came upon a group of four vampires fighting over a human man, I was tempted to leave them to Remy and continue on lest I lose Avis Vine’s scent. In the end, though, I went at them with a vicious hatred, a frantic impatience, and two stakes. I killed the four of them and was growling at the human male to “get the fuck home, asshole,” when I glanced up and saw Remy’s face.

  His face had lost its color and his eyes were wide, slightly wild, and full of crazy. “Fuck you,” he murmured. “You’re not fucking human.”

  “Protect the humans,” I told him. “We’ll talk about me later.”

  “Yeah we will,” he said, and I don’t know if he meant to or not, but he pointed Dolly at me. “What are you?”

  “Later,” I repeated, but I saw what was in his eyes. Maybe he’d accept me, maybe we’d fight. Maybe months from now he’d catch me unaware and slip a blade into my heart or a bullet into my brain. But right now was not the time to care. I couldn’t trust him at my back, though, so I left him there. I followed the scent of my blade and Avis, leaving Remy to track her the old-fashioned way.

  He would understand.

  After that, I became laser focused. I ignored the world around me—the looting, the fighting, the sirens, the screams. The only way to regain control of the city was to rip out the root of it. Kill the infected and most of all, kill the spreader. Avis fucking Vine.

  I lost track of the time, but it felt like hours before I finally stood outside a huge furniture store, every window of its three stories dark and watchful. There was a notice on the front doors stating that the store would be closed until further notice.

  She was in there waiting for me, oozing blood and stink and infection, probably feeding from the humans she’d ordered her vampires to bring her. I reached for my blade, my stomach tightening when I touched an empty sheath.

  It was almost…peaceful there. My breath left white plumes in the cold, still air, and I shivered despite the fact that I wasn’t really cold. I longed for soft lights, bright laughter, warmth, and food. I craved people. Friends. My pack.

  I was sick of death and cold darkness, and I did not want to fight alone. Not anymore. But I had my wolf, now, thanks to Jared, and I could shift. There was no one here to hide my wolf from.

  I burst into my shift, all my emotions exploding with my wolf, and for a few trembling moments I had to fight to control her as she wanted nothing more in the world than to throw off all the responsibility and just run into the night.

  Finally, with a growl, I gathered my legs beneath me and shot through the air, crashing through one of the windows. I didn’t try to be quiet or sneak up on them. They knew I was there, and I was sure they were waiting with breathless—haha—anticipation for my arrival.

  I entered Avis Vine’s den, intent upon two things—killing everyone inside and getting my beloved demon blade back.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Bloodlust was strong in my wolf, but no stronger than it was in the rogue vampires. I’d known what I would be getting into when I went through that window, and I knew I was up to the task. I remembered what I’d done in Scarlett’s, how my inner psycho had risen up and how I’d needed a whole lot of desperation to get to that point.

  Apparently I had to believe I was dying before the power inside me, either planted or activated by the council, would roar to life—and I was pretty sure that fighting alone in a roomful of vampires would give me that belief.

  They converged upon me immediately. They attacked from all sides but my wolf, huge and vicious, wasn’t taken by surprise. She whirled and rammed and bit and clawed, stomping the ones who fell beneath her feet, but the super adrenaline or whatever it was that I was hoping for didn’t come—because I was kicking vampire ass.

  But then one of them raked a claw from my temple to my chin, and I felt hot blood spew forth, along with a deep, burning pain which turned quickly agonizing. Right then might have been enough to explode the building power except for one thing.

  That one vampire possessed the same awful magic that Avis had forced into me—the magic that the demon power in my blade had protected me from. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have my blade.

  Worse, Avis wasn’t in the room. I could not call a blade that wasn’t there. Without the blade to combat the magic, I weakened stunningly fast. Now I believed I might die…but my power didn’t come.

  I dropped to the floor as agony ripped through me, burning me from the inside out, and I understood suddenly that the pain was probably how a vampire felt when he was burning in the sun. And it was bad.

  Then Avis was there, standing over me, but I was too weak and too sick to do more than moan and writhe and try not to return to my human form. As my wolf, I would have a better chance of surviving the magic coursing through me.

  She knelt beside me and scratched my head like I was her pet. “It hurts, doesn’t it? I’ve been keeping Simona isolated, lest her power be diluted. I’ve saved her for you.” She stood abruptly and stepped back. “Let’s see what you can
do, little wolf. Let’s see how powerful you really are. I don’t want you to die.” She hesitated, and even through my agony, I could feel her pain. “I just want you to feel a tiny bit of what I am forced to endure every second of every day. I’m not insane, really, or any more twisted than you are. I’m just very hurt and exceedingly angry.”

  Her words were slurry and somewhat hard to understand with her oversized fangs in the way. Apparently she didn’t have the ability to retract them. She’d said she wasn’t insane or any more screwed up than I was. She lied. Maybe she didn’t realize it, but she lied.

  And then, I lost my shift. I curled up at her feet, drowning in the rush of magical agony, and I had no fear. I hurt too badly to be afraid. It was the kind of pain that made a person hope for death just to get some relief. I was lost for a while in that pain, and when it finally began to dissipate, I floated in the blackness of…nothing, really, and it was such a relief I could happily have stayed there. But my vampire captors were impatient, and they prodded me out of those sweet, dark arms.

  When I came fully to myself, I was restrained with thick, heavy chains. They twisted around my ankles and my wrists and my throat, tight and cold, digging into my flesh, bruising my bones. Someone had shoved me against the wall and I was sitting up, listing slightly to the side. I also couldn’t feel my shift—likely the fault of the awful vampire magic that had been forced into me. I could only hope it was temporary. Neither I nor my wolf could survive another hobbling.

  Avis leaned against a display desk, watching me somberly, but she didn’t have my blade. She wore only a thin dress, stained and dirty, and ankle boots. I would have seen my knife—hell, I would have felt it—if she’d kept it. I couldn’t ask her what she’d done with it. She would only have lied, and I absolutely didn’t want her knowing what that demon blade meant to me.

  I shoved away my despair and tried to get my bearings. Wisps and tendrils of pain still floated through me, but they were insignificant and easily disregarded.

  The huge room was a mess. Furniture was broken and upended, stained with blood and other…things, and there was a smell that was nearly too much for my wolf’s nose. It was a mixture of things, none of them good, and I didn’t want to think too hard about what might have caused such a stench. But then from the recesses of the building, I heard a human scream. Everything that had gone into making that fetid smell was from a human body. Several of them.

  “I want to show you something,” Avis said abruptly. “And I need you good and awake. I admit to being upset that you have absorbed the worst of the magic already. You should be screaming, not looking around planning all manner of bad things.” She gave one of the vampires a nod. “Her throat,” she told him.

  A vampire hurried toward me, eager to please Avis, and I began to struggle in my chains, sure he was going to sink his fangs into my neck. He didn’t, though. He simply scraped a sharp fingernail along the side of my throat and when the skin separated and began to bleed, he eased the edge of the silver chain into the cut.

  Then he stood back and all the vampires stared at me with focused anticipation, all of them sadistic sons of bitches who apparently thrived on other people’s pain.

  I lifted an eyebrow.

  “Why?” Avis asked, when my skin didn’t begin to smoke from the silver.

  I shrugged. “Silver doesn’t affect me.” I didn’t tell her that I’d been warped, my wolf hobbled before I could shift. Likely that had made me, in some ways, more human than shifter. Wolves weren’t hurt by touching silver but were weakened and severely injured—usually—if they were cut or shot by it.

  Vampires were more affected by silver than we were, but someone had wrapped me in these chains, and the vampire who’d cut me had handled them like they were nothing more than paper. It made no sense.

  She said nothing for a moment, then, “Of course it doesn’t.” She curled her lip and clenched her fists, and hatred lit her eyes. “Of course it doesn’t.” Then she visibly relaxed and stretched her lips over her protruding teeth. “I am creative, though. I will figure out something else to make you cry, Wolf.”

  I yawned.

  She stared at me for a few seconds, frustration in her eyes. Then she snapped her fingers. “I know! What hurts you the most isn’t physical pain, is it? It’s the physical pain of others.”

  Shit. I could feel the blood draining from my face, and I couldn’t hide my reaction from her. She paced in front of me, pleased, watching me closely. Still, I said nothing. Threats wouldn’t do a thing except give her satisfaction.

  She crouched down before me. “I have your mother. Susan, isn’t it?”

  The pain from her magic hadn’t totally left me, but it wasn’t enough for her. She knew what would get to me the most. I leaned forward slightly, gratified when she flinched. If I could have gotten free at that moment, I would have ended her life.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “I don’t care what you believe. She’s here, in this building—but that doesn’t matter right now. It’s enough that you know. Now, about what I wanted to show you. Dawn. Fetch it.”

  And though I quivered in dread, terrified I would see my mother, the vampire lackey shoved a different human into the room. From the looks of him, he’d been there a while. He was naked, though his lack of clothing wasn’t from shifting, the way mine was. He was injured. Bloody. Terrified.

  All to be expected when you were a human captured by creatures you hadn’t known existed only a few days earlier.

  He gave a hoarse yell and shrank away when Avis approached him. “Now, now,” she said. “Let’s not get all dramatic. Remember what I promised you earlier? That as soon as I got this animal here, I was going to take all your fear away?” She gestured at me. “I have the animal, and I will keep my promise.”

  Almost before she was finished speaking, she took the human’s head between her palms and forced him to his knees. Then she leaned forward, opened her mouth, and bit him.

  She was not gentle. I heard the stretch and snap of flesh even over the man’s moans. She drank, and drank, and drank.

  “I will kill you,” I said finally, unable to keep silent. “You mutant bitch.”

  “Shhh,” one of her vampires said, putting a finger to his mouth. And when his black stare dropped from my face to my throat, I swallowed hard and went quiet, wishing my hands were free so I could drag my long hair over my shoulders and hide behind it.

  Avis continued to drink from the human, who had long since slumped into her arms. He was dead. She yanked her mouth away from his flesh finally and stood, then dragged the body to me.

  He was waxy and still, but his eyes were half-open. There was no spark there, though, just flat, dull…death.

  “You won’t believe this,” she told me. “Watch what I can do. Watch what I am going to do everywhere.”

  One of her vampires dropped to his knees at the humans head, then pried open the man’s jaws. He forced his mouth open wide, and then, before I was quite ready for it, Avis leaned over and began vomiting the blood back into the dead human’s mouth.

  The blood gushed, and along with it, I got a whiff of the same putrid scent I’d caught earlier. My mind was overwhelmed, and my stomach rebelled. I turned my face away and took shallow breaths, trying my best not to throw up and add to the awfulness.

  Dawn, the vampire who had dragged the human into the room, leaped to me and grabbed my face, forcing me to watch.

  And then, the unthinkable happened.

  The impossible happened.

  Avis staggered drunkenly to her feet, giggling, and the human she’d killed began to twitch. In seconds, he sat up, his eyes snapped open, and he parted his lips. Fangs, long and sharp, shot from his gums, and he screamed, confused, horrified, and most of all, starving.

  Avis patted him on the head. “Come with mommy, darling. There’s a lovely shifter waiting for you. You may feast until you are quite satisfied, and then I will teach you how to be a vampire.”


  She led him from the room, and I really couldn’t decide which horrified me the most—the fact that she was about to take him to my mother, or the fact that she’d just made a vampire.

  In mere minutes.

  Chapter Twenty

  When Avis had gone crazy and dragged the vampires into the public eye, I’d believed everything was about as bad as it could get. I’d been wrong. Now it was as bad as it could get. Surely.

  Turning humans was a complicated process that didn’t often work—which is why there were so many more humans than vampires. If the bloodsuckers figured out how to turn humans as easily as just…biting them, the world was doomed. Vampires needed humans to survive, so they would die, as well.

  Avis didn’t care.

  “Avis,” I screamed, struggling in the chains that held me. “No! God, no!” I fought the heavy, cold metal, and the more I struggled, the tighter they became. They bit into my flesh, twisting and pinching, and I realized something that hadn’t even occurred to me before. The chains were not metal. They were magic.

  No wonder they hadn’t bothered the vampire when he’d touched them. The same magic that hurt me seemed to protect him.

  Avis was not powerful enough to do any of this. She’d been Frederick’s whore, his servant, and his rat in a cage to torture and experiment on. Every thought she had in her head had been planted there by him. Everything she did now was because of him. Spreading diseased magic, killing the world…that wasn’t her. It was him. While she lived, he lived.

  I fought the chains, and despite trying to push the thoughts of my mother away, they rose suddenly to overwhelm me. Logically, I knew that if Avis really had my mother, she’d have paraded her in front of me. She would have made me watch as her newly created “child” savaged her. Logically, I knew that.

  But what if? What if she really did have her? And that tiny what if grew and grew until finally, I was overwhelmed by it. In the end, I was sure of it. Avis had my mother, and they were killing her. Maybe they were even turning her, like the troll in the tunnels.