Blood Sacrifice
Page 26
When Terence opens his mouth to speak, the night air shatters with a long, piercing wail.
The moment between them is broken. Alarms go off and each is poised to run. They watch as Elise emerges from behind a wall, tendrils of dark hair escaping, tumbling out of her hood, to flow behind her as she begins once more to run.
Terence and Edward exchange one more glance, momentary. The glance is panicked, with the same question. Has she wounded Maria? Their Maria? It can’t be.
The figure scrambles north again, at a much faster pace.
“What should we do?” Edward is torn by emotions, desperate to run after Elise and—at the same time—wanting to see her get away. But most of all, he wonders why Maria has not emerged from behind the wall, and is sick to realize perhaps she let herself be wounded by this human.
“What can we do?” Terence spits out a bitter laugh. “We have to get her!”
And Edward watches, helpless, as Terence begins to run after Elise. His speed is superhuman and silent; his feet almost never touch the ground. When he gets within a few feet of Elise’s scrambling figure, he leaps high into the sky, almost as if taking flight, and comes down with a thud on her back. Both fall hard into the earth below them.
Edward takes a few cautious steps forward, then freezes when he sees how rage has transformed Terence. They always change when they feed, but this is worse, this is pure animal. Terence’s mouth is a grinning rictus of razor-sharp fangs. His fingers have elongated, topped with thick, hoof-like nails as long as daggers. His very body has become longer, a more efficient killer of his prey.
Edward stuffs a fist in his mouth as he watches, in mute horror, what comes next.
Terence sets upon her, rearing back and lifting his clawed hands to come down on her squirming figure. He doesn’t allow her even one second to scream as his talons rip through her clothes, then the flesh of her back, yanking out her spine and flinging it, like a snake, behind him. He lowers his growling jowls and begins to tear flesh from bone.
Edward imagines Terence’s rage: white-hot, immune to reason, blinding.
Terence bites, claws, and shreds with a terrifying fury.
She has never made a sound. She has never moved.
At last, Terence looks up at the silver light from the moon hidden behind clouds and sends a howl of triumph into the air. The bitch is at last done, dispatched with deadly efficiency.
He wants a trophy. He plunges both hands into the shell of her, tearing and cutting through muscle and bone until he wraps his hands around her heart.
He rips it out, offering it up to the moon.
But the heart is cold, the wounds bloodless, dry.
Something inside Terence closes, like a fist, tight and protective. He drops the cold heart to the ground.
Edward sobs behind him.
Terence turns and sees Edward incapacitated by grief. He knows what’s wrong even as he turns back to the still figure beneath him. Her head has turned as he ripped her apart like a lion attacking a gazelle.
He will never forget her face. That face that remains intact, so still and so beautiful.
Maria. Dead at last.
This time, when he sends a strangled cry into the night sky, it is not one of triumph, but of anguish.
*
Elise ignores the stitch, ignores the fact there is no more air left in her lungs. She runs on adrenaline alone. Gray light spills over the housing project looming over her, illuminating the broken and boarded-up windows, the gang graffiti, and the rusting guardrails of balconies no one dares to use, except for suicide.
Yet never has a place looked more welcoming. Elise continues to sprint toward it, heart pounding. The first fingers of dawn, magenta-tinted, are creeping over the lake behind her, as the city comes to life.
Elise looks behind her. She will always be looking behind her.
The End