by Dima Zales
Ignoring the pain, Kit reaches out with four horrific limbs.
When they touch Dirk, he screams in a voice that isn’t recognizable as coming from a throat.
Twitching spasmodically, he collapses in a heap on the ground.
Injured Kit looms over her victim.
A horrific-looking tongue slowly snakes out of the drekavac’s maw, and wherever it licks Dirk’s skin, the skin melts away, leaving behind raw meat.
On the second lick, Dirk slumps, probably glad to be dead.
Kit turns into her usual form and clutches her grievous-looking wound.
She then takes one step. Then another. Then falls on the floor.
Chapter Thirty-One
No.
No one I care about is dying today.
“Someone give her blood!” I yell at the vampires in the room.
A tall, slender vampire closest to Kit rushes to do as I ask—only in that moment, Lug tosses a dazed-looking Chester into the air, and Chester flies right at Kit’s would-be-savior, accidently slashing his throat with the dagger in his hand.
They collapse together in a heap, seemingly passed out or worse.
“I guess I was luckier,” Lug says tauntingly.
“And I guess I’m luckier still,” Lilith says as she slices Lug into two equal pieces with the gate sword.
Then, instead of helping Kit, Chester, and the rest, Lilith zooms to where Tartarus and a few vampires are battling it out.
Gritting my teeth, I rip through Siegfried, and then Roy, fighting more fiercely than ever before.
When I reach Kit, I extend my fangs and slice my finger open.
As soon as my blood touches Kit’s lips, her wound begins to mend. I try to do the same thing for the vampire entangled with Chester, but nothing happens.
“You can’t heal a vampire with vampire blood,” Lilith shouts. “He has to recover on his own.”
Well, that sucks.
That means if I’m hurt, a vampire won’t be able to heal me either.
I untangle the vampire from Chester and prepare to give him some blood.
“Enough of this!” Lilith angrily shouts before I get the chance to do that. “You’re not here to play healer. You’re here to kill Tartarus. Now do so. As your sire, I command you.”
I halt mid-gesture as the word “command” slams into my mind.
In the heat of all the fighting, I completely forgot to dance on eggshells around Lilith—and now I’ve gone and acted like a decent person, which has clearly pissed her off enough to activate the stupid sire bond.
“I command you to attack Tartarus,” Lilith repeats, enunciating every word.
My free will becomes a prisoner somewhere deep inside me as my body begins to move with zombie-like determination.
Though not in control of my limbs, I still perceive what’s happening in the room.
Kit stands up on shaky feet, and turns herself into a giant orc.
Lilith kills another magician.
Heph punches Nero yet again, causing Nero to growl furiously as he shakes it off.
Then, Nero does something I’ve never seen him do. He inhales air, then breathes out fire at Heph—without turning into a dragon.
The problem is that stupid force field.
Even when hit with dragon breath, not a hair on Heph’s body is singed.
But still. Wow. Could Nero always do that? No, can’t be. He would’ve utilized this power before now. I bet this is something he discovered thanks to that TV appearance.
A Dunninger lookalike blocks my way to Tartarus.
“Kill him,” Lilith orders as she dispatches another attacker of her own.
I didn’t need her urging.
I sidestep the guy’s kick and break his jaw, then his nose, then smash a fist into his temple to put him down for good.
Orc-Kit rips apart another magician on her way to Tartarus.
Tartarus begins sucking energy from her.
Gritting her huge orc teeth, Kit closes the distance between them and strikes.
Catching her green fist, Tartarus twists her arm, then tosses her at the wall.
She hits her head, turns back into her regular Kit shape and slumps down, unmoving.
Damn it. Getting knocked out so easily must be a side effect of getting one’s energy sucked.
I better be careful not to get hit on the head.
Nero and Heph exchange more blows as I leap for Tartarus—who in that moment starts to drain energy from Lilith herself.
“Here,” Lilith grits out. “Kill him with this.”
She tosses me the gate sword. Catching it, I strike at Tartarus’s head.
He dodges, then punches me in the face.
I’m not sure if this is the sire bond’s benefit, or if I’m tougher in general, but I not only don’t pass out—I don’t even feel the pain of the strike.
I do, however, fly back six feet.
Instead of letting myself hit the wall with my back as gravity would demand, I use my newly acquired flying powers to hover in the air.
Then, with my sword extended, I whoosh back at Tartarus.
Only the guy is freaking fast.
He sidesteps my maneuver in the last possible moment, and I end up piercing the floor with the gate sword before I hit the ground with my face.
Grabbing my shoulder, Tartarus tosses me at the nearby Tetris game.
This one does hurt, but still not as badly as it should, considering the shards of glass and wood pieces doing their best to stake me.
“She’s too weak,” Lilith grunts under her breath as Tartarus resumes draining her energy. “Damned Rasputin made her too weak, and now we’re going to lose.”
Seeing my mother disarmed and under attack, a bunch of still-alive Tartarus spawn run at Lilith with renewed vigor.
My cuts and scrapes heal—even pushing some glass shards out of my skin in the process, Wolverine-style.
Stumbling to my feet, I rush at Tartarus one more time—but miss him with the sword yet again.
In response, he slams his massive fist into my face with such force I finally see stars.
Nero was right when he wanted to get away to Atlantis to train me. I could’ve used fencing lessons right about now—and also lessons in how to more gracefully take a punch.
“Touch her again, and you’re dead,” Nero growls from where he’s duking it out with Heph.
Tartarus smiles nastily and punches me so hard I fly back ten feet and slam into the wall before I can activate my flying abilities.
Recovering quickly, I jackknife to my feet and rush at Tartarus again.
Before I reach my target, though, Nero grabs Heph by the torso and tosses him at Tartarus.
For good measure, he also throws a stream of dragon fire at Heph.
Pushed either by the flame or the kinetic energy of Nero’s toss, Heph rams into his father like a rocket.
Upon impact, they fly into different directions—Heph toward me and Tartarus toward Nero.
“Slice!” Lilith shouts, and my arm obeys without me even registering it.
The gate sword penetrates Heph’s force shield like a soap bubble, then effortlessly continues its course to disembowel the bear-like man.
“No!” Tartarus yells as he watches his most resilient spawn die. His face twists with fury. “You’ll pay for that a thousand times over.”
His hand angrily lashes out toward Nero, and purple energy arcs from Nero’s body into the bastard.
Nero tries to blur forward but the pain—or the energy suck itself—causes him to move much slower than usual.
“Attack!” Lilith shouts at me.
I leap toward Tartarus, happy to follow Lilith’s command.
Tartarus dodges my sword strike and kicks me—and I fly at Nero, knocking him off his feet and falling on top, my sword rolling to the side.
“You need to power up,” Lilith says to me as she rips the heart out of the chest of yet another magician. “Drink Nero’s blood, and you�
�ll be stronger. Then, when I say, you’ll attack Tartarus again.”
Wait, what did she just say?
Drink Nero’s blood?
Hell no.
Except my body isn’t listening to my free will right now, so my arms reach out and grab Nero’s shoulders.
Either not liking Lilith’s plan or taking advantage of an opportunity, two of Tartarus’s minions join him in draining Nero’s energy.
With his energy sucked three ways, Nero grunts and slackens in my grip.
“Hurry before there’s nothing left to drink,” Lilith says. “I command it.”
Feeling sick to my stomach, I lean in, my fangs already extended.
Nero locks eyes with me. “She’s right.” His voice is a raspy whisper. “This may be the only way.”
I want to argue with them both, but I’m still not in control of any of my faculties.
Channeling Dracula, my fangs enter Nero’s neck, and I begin to suck.
“Yes,” Lilith says from somewhere. “Drink it all. I command it.”
All?
No, she can’t mean that. But of course she does. She said it herself. When she gets the chance to drink from a powerful Cognizant, she always drains them to the last drop to maximize the benefits.
Now she’s applying the same logic to me, her weapon.
Just like in the vision where I killed my friends, I want to command my mouth to scream, but nothing passes my lips.
I will my body to halt, or to slow, but nothing works.
Making matters worse is the fact that each gulp of Nero’s blood brings with it an unwelcome orgasmic pleasure.
As I drink, Lilith kills the two spawn who were helping Tartarus drain Nero’s life force.
Great. Nero will live longer before I kill him.
Realizing that I’m becoming a bigger threat, Tartarus starts to suck energy from me.
I almost welcome that pain.
The torment is a more suitable sensation for what I’m currently doing.
The weird thing is, instead of weakening from Tartarus’s energy suck, I actually feel the beginning of an incredible power growing in me.
Of course.
Nero’s blood is potent stuff.
Felled trees and craters kind of potent.
If I could speak, I’d beg Lilith to let me stop. I would tell her I can probably already take on Tartarus, but I can’t speak and Lilith doesn’t let me stop of my own initiative.
Quite the opposite.
If she so much as suspects any slowness in my drinking, she reissues the command to force me to keep going, and going.
Soon, I have no doubts at all.
Lilith will make me kill the man I love.
Chapter Thirty-Two
And I do. I love Nero. I don’t know why it took this horror for me to realize how I feel. And now it’s too late. There’s no way to break the sire bond.
Unless… isn’t love supposed to conquer all?
It doesn’t hurt to give that a try. Picturing myself in a romantic movie, I visualize a montage of all the reasons I’ve fallen for my boss and Mentor. The end result is more reminiscent of porn, though. Apparently, our best moments were X-rated and above.
The montage idea isn’t working—aside from convincing me about my feelings for my soon-to-die lover.
No matter how I feel, the cursed sire bond keeps making me drink Nero’s blood.
Inside the dark hidey-hole in my mind, I’m screaming like a banshee.
If it were possible to strain the brain by wishing something, I’d need a splint for mine because that’s how hard I want to pull my stupid face away from his neck.
But it doesn’t work.
Clearly, my warm and fuzzy feelings for Nero aren’t the way to break the sire bond.
Then I get a desperate idea—one that should’ve occurred to me earlier.
Lilith controls my body, but not my mind; otherwise, I wouldn’t be having all these thoughts.
What that means is I should still be able to utilize my mind-driven powers—like probability manipulation and predicting the future.
Assuming I’ve regained them, that is.
Which I should have. Or at least I should soon, given that Nostradamus thought we could win because of my triple powers.
Bursting with hope, I try to focus in order to get into Headspace.
The pleasure from Nero’s blood and the pain from Tartarus’s energy sucking almost cancel each other out, but the panic I can’t suppress makes focusing nearly impossible.
What’s worse, because I’m not in control of my body, I can’t make myself take a deep breath and let it out slowly, as Lucretia had taught me.
Well, I have to do this somehow.
Maybe I can do a mental equivalent of the slow breath.
As impossible as it is, I do my best to forget where I am and what I’m doing, and picture myself sitting on a cloud that’s similar to the one from my dream therapy with Bailey.
Nope.
Then I picture myself floating in warm water and petting Fluffster. Then Lucifur when she was a kitten.
Closer.
I picture Nero kissing me and stroking my back as he growls sweet nothings into my ear.
Yes, here we go. Focus reached, I plummet into Headspace.
Finally!
I never thought I’d be this happy to be floating among the shapes—especially ones that sound this disturbing.
It’s easy to guess what they will show me—Nero’s slow exsanguination.
Still. I’m here. I’ll summon better visions—ones where I thwart that horrific future.
Somehow.
But first, I need to acknowledge how different this Headspace session is from all my prior ones.
More accurately, it’s not Headspace that’s different. It’s me.
I understand the shapes better. I can see details in them that I didn’t notice before—textures, for lack of a better word.
It’s like someone gave me binoculars specifically designed for Headspace.
This must be how the TV-boosted seer powers manifest themselves. It’s not merely that my daily seer juice allotment is higher now. Everything to do with Headspace is improved.
If the situation weren’t so dire, I’d enthusiastically explore my new state of being, but as is, I must focus on what to do.
Which doesn’t take long as there’s only one thing I can do.
I have to find a way to use my probability manipulation to save Nero’s life.
As soon as I concentrate on that thought, the shapes around me disappear, and a slightly different cloud takes their place.
The tune coming off these guys is still disturbing, but with my new awareness, I can tell there might be something useful there anyway.
Reaching out to all the visions at once is effortless to me now—so I sprout my ethereal wisps and dive in.
I’m killing Nero by drinking his blood.
Lilith is fighting for her life, and Tartarus is sucking energy from all of us.
So, how do I use my probability manipulation to break the sire bond?
Well, if there’s even a small chance that someone could rip me away from Nero, I could bring that about.
But who? And again, how?
Until now, I’ve only tried influencing the probabilities of a deck of cards.
So that’s what I start with. I decide to treat the outcome of “rip me away from Nero” as the totally sorted deck, and the people around the room as cards, or shuffles.
Holding everyone in mind, I picture someone running at me, grabbing me by my hair, and pulling me away from Nero with a good jerk.
Something clicks, and the colorful lines—the strands of fate—appear in front of me faster than before.
Thank you, TV performance.
I examine the strands carefully, paying close attention to their thickness.
What I see doesn’t bode well for me. Even the thinnest strand is many, many times thicker than the thickest one I was ab
le to control when dealing with a deck of cards.
As before, the thicker strands feel more right, but they require more power expenditure, as they represent lower-frequency events.
I reach for a strand that’s as thick as a redwood tree trunk—figuring the rarer the event, the better. Perhaps this represents a possibility that Tartarus himself will change his murderous ways and pull me away from Nero?
I mentally try to grab the tree trunk strand, but it’s like a slippery ghost—completely unreachable even with my TV-boosted powers.
Fine.
I look at one of the thinner ones and choose one at random. It feels more elastic and more yielding than the tree trunk one, but less “right.”
So be it.
I metaphysically put pressure on the strand in question, and it snaps.
In the distance, Nostradamus slowly rises to his feet.
I guess there was a possibility he’d come to in that moment.
Unlikely as it was, it was possible and I made it so.
The problem is that he looks barely alive.
Gritting his teeth, Nostradamus stumbles toward me.
One step.
Two.
I begin to get hopeful.
Maybe he can pull me away from Nero?
But then what if Lilith makes me use my vampire strength to squash him like a bug?
Well then, perhaps he can pick up the gate sword and kill me, ending this nightmare.
But no. It’s all moot anyway.
Tartarus spots Nostradamus, raises his triangular eyebrow, and stops draining me for a moment to point his hand at Nostradamus instead.
With the pain gone, the pleasure of Nero’s blood makes it hard for me to think—but on some level, I’m aware of Nostradamus turning into a raisin.
The sire bond forces me to keep drinking. And drinking and drinking—until, a few hellish minutes later, Nero finally dies from the blood loss.
I’m trying to use my probability manipulation to stop drinking Nero’s blood. Specifically, I’m focusing on a chance that someone who’s currently unconscious becomes conscious—or anything else useful like that.
After some mental effort, the strands appear in front of me.
I fail to activate a tree-trunk-sized one, but one of the thinner ones yields to my boosted power.