Gilded Destiny

by Nola Sarina

  Slip Away

  Calli

  Nightfall brought Nycholas stroking my arms, tracing the golden ropes between my tattoos as my eyelids fluttered open. I couldn’t see because it was dark, but I could smell and feel and that was all I needed.

  I rolled to face him and dragged him on top of me, and it hurt so damn good, the soreness of last night and the new pain of his body entering me… I was lost within moments, and lost for hours.

  “I remember you now,” I whispered as I sat astride him when he was spent once more, still buried within my core, pulsing, cold, and tender. “Tell me how it happened… when it ended.”

  Nycholas slid his hands up from my hips to my breasts and then stroked back down my belly. He settled his palms atop my thighs, still secured within me, and sighed. “You don’t need to know this story.”

  His eternal stubbornness rocked my heart again. He couldn’t really be planning to let his life end, could he?

  “I do need to know. You don’t know what it’s been like for me these last years. Empty. Cold.”

  “You’re not empty right now, though,” Nycholas said, pressing his hips up against me.

  I managed to give him a half a smile. “This matters to me, Nycholas. If I’m going to...” I cleared my throat to suppress a cry, “...lose you again, I need to know.”

  He searched my eyes for a long moment, conflicted. Then, he ran his hands up my body and took my face in his palms. He pulled me down, kissed me, his eyebrows knit together. My heartache doubled as he kissed me. I wanted this forever. Not for three nights. Three nights wasn’t enough time. I tried not to let him feel my agony through our kiss, but he pulled me down, held me tight, and whispered new apologies.

  How could he do this to me? To us?

  “I met you,” he crooned, his voice low and vibrating through his chest, “when I was preparing for a kill. You watched me lift the owner of the tattoo shop high into the air by his throat. I was going to eat him.”

  It was the same tattoo shop. The one I later bought in some desperate attempt to find him... the brightness in my life I didn’t know was missing. All those years I couldn’t put my finger on why it was so important to surround myself with the hints of my past, of Nycholas.

  “I didn’t do it in front of you. No, Calli, I wanted to spare you that visual. So I released him, but I’d already choked him unconscious. I don’t like them aware while I’m eating, you see.”

  “Except for Freddy.”

  Nycholas hummed. “He deserved something special for daring to try and force you that way.”

  “What happened when I walked in?” These questions felt so strange to ask. As if I should already know the answers.

  He sighed, stroking my back. “You looked at the man on the floor and then at me. You spoke to me. I’ll never forget your words.”

  I pulled up a little to get a look at his expression.

  “You said, ‘Well, fuck. Guess I can’t get my birthday present.’”

  I remembered saying those words, but not why. It was the last moment I could remember prior to the onset of my amnesia. “I wanted a tattoo.”

  “Which you never got, because you asked me what my name was.”

  The memories trickled through my mind like steam wiped from the wall of a shower, giving me glimpses of clarity before the fog moved in to take over again. I remembered more of the feelings than the actual moments. “You told me your name. And I was so captivated by you. You were... impossible.”

  “I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “You didn’t. Well, a little, maybe. You know me, though. The fear turns me on.”

  He broke into a grin and shook with that sexy, breathy laugh of his. Then, his eyes tightened and his smile melted to a frown of regret.

  “Levitiqas discovered us. He knew about us for months as we ran all over the continent to escape his wrath. I didn’t hear him creeping up behind us, and I saw him grabbing your face so I attacked him, though I knew I shouldn’t, I knew it was wrong to do. I dared to strike my master, and thus I was sentenced to death.

  “My brothers chased us. But they chased us half-heartedly. Only Festus and Manaen – you’ll remember Manaen, he is dark of tone…”

  I did remember him. As hugely thick as Nycholas, black as night, with eyes that melted into his face even darker than his flesh – I saw him behind me as I ran as fast as I could away from a train station. He terrified me.

  “…Only they chased us with certainty and intent. The others, not so much, for they felt pity for me. I carried you through water… a lot of water, a long way. I don’t know if it was a lake or an ocean… all I could think was to get space between us, to get you away from them and help your wound heal.”

  I shivered. I couldn’t recall the ice-cold water, only the security of Nycholas clutching me to his chest as I bled from a deep gash in my face.

  “And then, I stopped with you outside of a hospital. People saw me. I didn’t care. I pinched my fang, and you screamed at me, Calli, you demanded I not give it to you, but I knew if I didn’t, we’d be caught eventually and you’d die. So I drugged you against your will, told you that you had a car accident, and kissed you goodbye with my tongue in your mouth, assuring that you’d remember nothing of me at all.”

  My heart clenched at the tale, for the potency of his tongue, directly mingled with mine, was too thick an amnesia for my feeble brain to break.

  “The Psycho – a little one, Sychar is his real name - was the Vesper who caught up with me in that hospital parking lot as I left you on the ground, bleeding. He’s so fast you probably never saw him, because he moves at an unmatchable, invisible speed. But he is small, and young, and compassionate. When he saw me kiss you on the pavement, he backed away. I assume he told my master you were dead, because I never heard mention of you again, all the times I’ve run into my brothers by mistake.

  “And then I left you, and it tore my heart in half to do so, and I began to hide. I grew tired of counting moons without you and decided to end it, to turn myself in, so I came back to have you one last time… Oh, Calli, I intended to wipe the memory of me from you once more, but I can see the absence of me has only broken you further.”

  I listened patiently, unwilling to interrupt, knowing my recall was damaged beyond repair. I could remember his pleasure and I could remember his drug, and if the nightmare of our escape from his master refused to return to my memory, I had to assume that ghastly amnesia was for the best.

  Nycholas was frightening no matter how much I loved him. Flashes of Levitiqas and Manaen and their snarling jaws, snapping at me… it was enough memory to quiet my curiosity, and I refused to dig any further into the trauma, afraid of finding another reason to be angry with him.

  We had so little time left to be together before he would walk into a deathtrap and never come out. My stomach dropped and I groaned with sorrow as I fell against him, and he held me tight and moved within me once more.

  We lay atop a hill – hours and a beautiful shower of the most exquisite intensity later - gazing at the stars, as we’d done so often for our affair of a year. Nycholas brought a knife out of his pocket and showed me how it refused to cut his skin, and explained that Levitiqas would kill him by tearing off his head. I pulled away from him and retched into the grass at that, and he rubbed my back without words. What words could he say? Nothing could make this better, and all for what? Because he broke some stupid rules from his tyrannical master who had something to do with protecting the human race?

  “I’d rather the human race perish than lose you again,” I despaired.

  Nycholas only kissed my hair and whispered to comfort me. “Too many innocents. I am not an innocent, therefore only my life should pay my debts.”

  His world was so complex yet simple, just as he was so cryptic yet straightforward. I loved the pleasure and pain of his body and the ecstasy and agony of his love in my soul, and I knew it would be over way before I was ready.

  He pushed my hair
away from my face as I shivered, an unnatural sweat of panic broken out across my forehead. “I should take you home now.”

  I glared at him. “No, you should stay with me, sleep with me through the day, and let me have every moment with you that I can.” I didn’t say the words that threatened to slip out. I didn’t say before you abandon me again.

  Nycholas frowned. “If we stay together, I risk returning you home while they’re already on their way, watching me. I can return you home now and they’ll never know we were together once more, they’ll never know you’re still alive.”

  I set my jaw and refused to back down, and the vehemence of my voice reflected my pain. “Let them know! Let them kill me, Nycholas. I’d rather die with you than waste any moment of time I could have spent with you before it all ends.”

  Nycholas laughed, that sexy sound that stabbed me in my pelvis with electric force. “Calli, such things are not as romantic as they seem in ancient poetry.”

  I shoved him and rose to my feet to stomp away. I didn’t know where I was going. I just walked in the darkness, Nycholas right behind me the whole time. Eventually, I found the path we’d taken through the woods and we headed back the way we’d come.

  The sun began to glow beyond the horizon as I neared the house that had made our home for only a night. I stopped in the backyard and turned to Nycholas, my arms folded across my chest, tears pricking behind my eyes.

  “If you’re going to do this, Nycholas… how can I trust that you’re really gone, when you let me forget you, before? How can I move forward and live a life… half a life without you… wondering if you’re out there after all? Maybe hiding, maybe enslaved again...”

  Nycholas narrowed his eyes and slipped his hands around my waist with the most gentleness he’d used with me in our entire, fucked up relationship. “You’ll have to trust me. Tonight, when the sun goes away again, I will die, Calli.”

  I chomped on my lip. “I can’t trust you. You ruined that when you wiped the best fucking year of my life from my permanent memory.”

  He swallowed and shifted, indecision evident in his posture. “I had no choice but to protect you. I will never choose to endanger your life when there is another option. Never.”

  “You could have run away with me.”

  “We ran for a long time, Calli. We tried to go anywhere, everywhere, and they were always only one little step behind us, stalking us, and you would have died.”

  I fought against a memory, knowing that he spoke the truth. I bit my lip again, harder, opening the wound where he’d broken it silencing me in the little boat. Blood leaked across my tongue and Nycholas inhaled through his nose, stepped forward and cupped my chin to get a look at the refreshed injury.

  I pulled my chin away. “I’m going to bleed from the inside out for the rest of my life, Nycholas, wondering if you’re somewhere in the shadows… reprogrammed by Levitiqas, still here but unable to find me again, unable to touch me again…”

  He groaned with remorse and wrapped his enormous arms around my shoulders, and I was helpless to get away. I didn’t want to get away, really. I just couldn’t let him twine deeper with my soul knowing how much I was going to lose when he left.

  My reluctance was a reluctance of fear, and even though I knew it would hurt more than anything ever hurt anyone on the planet before, I knew a clean break was the only way for me to ever move on after this.

  But not the kind of clean break he wanted.

  “Let me watch,” I whispered.

  “Watch what?” Nycholas asked. “I can’t enjoy the sunrise with you. I’ll burn.”

  That grin that forced its way across my lips every time he said something adorable tugged at the corners of my mouth, but I suppressed it, stubborn. I shook my head. “Let me watch it end, for you. Let me know you’re gone… see it for myself.”

  Nycholas froze, and then his hair danced over me as he shook his head from where he embraced me so tightly. “No. Never. Not hurting you like that.”

  I pulled back and glared at him, furious. “You’ll make me wander in question forever, then! You broke my trust, Nycholas. I can’t know you’re really gone unless I see you go!”

  He glared back, disappointed, baffled, and conflicted. “You’ll be ruined, if you watch such a thing. Our kind of violence is not a gentle one.”

  “I’m already fucking ruined!” I knew the words would sting him, but I was beyond caring and it was only the truth. I’d never love a man after Nycholas, and I’d never be satisfied wandering, searching for my immortal lover who left me in solitude once more. “You ruined me by being so… so… fucking perfect! And wonderful…” My fury melted into tears again and I fisted the cords of his hair between my fingers, wishing that somehow, this didn’t have to happen.

  Nycholas watched me cry but had nothing to say to comfort me.

  I didn’t blame him for not trying.

  “I need to see. To be with you at the end. It might fuck me up, but I need to see.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I love you.” My voice dwindled to a whisper. “Because I don’t want you to be alone. Because I want to be with you for every moment of your life, however many moments are left…” I knew I was rambling, but it didn’t matter. How could I explain it in a way that made sense?

  I took a deep breath and blew it out. “Let me be with you.” It was all I could think to say.

  Nycholas studied me for a long moment, as the sun glowed on the horizon brighter, the indigo lifting to pink, and then he scooped me into his arms and carried me inside the little house.

  In the bed, we laced ourselves together again. Nycholas’ touch swept me into his deadly, sexy trance. He touched every place I was sore, soothing it with the chill of his skin. He kissed from my tear-soaked eyelashes down both my cheeks, over my neck, his fingers buried inside me. I moved along his hand and body without thought, and he moved in me harder and faster than ever before, his mouth hovering over my jugular. The exquisite pain took away the agony in my heart, but only until we finished. Once he withdrew from within me, the fear set in like ice.

  He fell into the heavy Vesper slumber of daytime when we finished, and I refused to sleep, watching the slow rise and fall of his breaths, counting them. He counted moons in the sky for me, I could keep vigil with him and count breaths on the last sleep before his eternal night.

  My eyes were weary, but I couldn’t tear my gaze away from him, knowing it was only hours until I’d never set eyes on him again. Dread mingled with sorrow, disbelief, and love in my heart, and the battle of those was far worse than the warring of lust and fear I’d felt before.

  This battle pulled at my insides, ripped them from my bones, and a horrible combination of nausea and terror brewed my blood into a furious boil. More than a few times that sleepless day, I thought I’d vomit or explode, so raw were my nerves as he slept. The silence in that house was maddening, and I kept waiting, wishing, and praying that an earthquake or act of God would heave all the train tracks in the world from the ground and I’d have him for just a few more nights, or years, or lifetimes, or even merely breaths.

  But nothing happened despite my wishing, and my terror bubbled into a total, choking sorrow as the day wore on to evening, and when Nycholas finally woke, I was sobbing against him, completely dry of tears and shaking violently on his chest. He enveloped me in his muscles and the velvet of his skin, and crooned his apologies, his confidence in my strength, and his certainty that I wouldn’t miss him for long.

  He was so fucking wrong I couldn’t even express it, so I just let him talk to me as the sun disappeared and the red glow of nightfall faded to black.

  And then we rose from the bed, and the time had come. He didn’t even argue with me as I glued my hand to his, and he led me through the water in the little paddle boat, back out into the forest. He helped me climb up a rocky, muddy hill in the trees with me – the hill where I’d seen the Vespers from a distance before - and tucked me into his brown
leather trench coat. I shivered and silently begged myself to stay conscious as he pressed his lips to my forehead, his breath freezing cold and his lips as soft as feathers.

  He straightened to standing and smiled at me. “I love you.”

  I shook harder and stared past him at the train tracks through the trees, and then I met his eyes and thought I was going to just slump over and die from fright. “I love you, too.”

  “I still have time to wipe me from your mind and send you away,” he said.

  I just shook my head and huddled down smaller inside the coat where I sat.

  Nycholas sighed. “Stay hidden until they leave. Stay quiet. You are far enough away to hide your scent, but if you make a sound…” He shook his head.

  I nodded. Nycholas’ eyebrows furrowed with sorrow, and then he traced my lip with a fingertip, and turned to walk with courage and strength down into the trees.

  The second his back was to me, I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, launch myself to my feet and tackle him, touch him, forbid him from leaving my side. I wanted him to come back. I needed him. He couldn’t leave me. I loved him.

  But to see my fear, now, would weaken his resolve to leave my memory untainted, so I kept achingly quiet as Nycholas slipped out of my reach.

  I couldn’t reach him. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  A train horn sounded in the distance, and tears leaked from my eyes again. I knew better than to make any sound.

  The light materialized in the night from the distance and illuminated Nycholas’ silhouette where he stood on the tracks, shirtless and beautiful, and totally fucking doomed.

  The train slid to a smooth halt on the tracks just before Nycholas, and my lover looked so glorious and bold that even the train seemed small and harmless by comparison.

  A hatch on the top of the train opened and out crawled the Vespers… I counted nine in total, some larger than Nycholas and some smaller, but none as tall as Levi or thick as my lover. And then, when they all surrounded him in a threatening circle, a tenth emerged, this one clothed in fine, Victorian attire rather than solid leather. Levitiqas. The master, the terrifying immortal leader who gouged my face so long ago. Silver of some kind swung around his neck, and his hair was long like all the others though streaks of shiny gray lined the black. He strode forth and stood between two Vespers – Levi, the tall one and Festus, the asshole who refused Nycholas’ handshake only a few nights ago.

  Two Vespers I didn’t recognize close to Nycholas’ size came around his back and grabbed him by the wrists, pulling my lover’s deadly arms out to his sides. He struggled for a moment, but they overpowered him. One of them twisted Nycholas’ arm at the elbow and he grunted and stopped fighting.

  Don’t touch him! I wanted to scream. What good would it do? If I blew my cover and Nycholas watched me die before he did… oh, it would crush him. I didn’t want to watch this… but I needed to.

  “Kneel,” Levitiqas’ aged, baritone rasp of a voice ripped from his mouth.

  Nycholas raised his chin high and defied Levitiqas’ command, so one of the Vespers at his side kicked him in the back of the legs and his knees hit the iron of the train tracks with a clang.

  I gathered the leather of Nycholas’ coat in my hands and pressed it to my mouth, trying to find some comfort, some calm. All I could feel was the pounding of my heart reaching the tip of every nerve in my body, and I was frozen and on fire, all at once. A whimper of fear lingered in my throat, so I took a few deep breaths and strained again to keep quiet, that brutal urge to run straight for him and beg him to stay with me surging up through my body.

  Levitiqas stepped forward to Nycholas and pointed with a wiry finger at his mouth. “Open,” Levitiqas commanded.

  To my shock and horror, Nycholas obeyed.

  I remembered him trying to cut his skin with a knife, to no avail. How could the master tear off his head?

  By going for a weak spot.

  “Wider,” Levitiqas said, and Nycholas unhinged his jaw and let his mouth fall open further.

  I couldn’t stop the whispered “No!” that slipped from my lips, and the tall one, Levi twitched his head in my direction. I chomped on the leather of Nycholas’ coat and tried to stop shaking. Every little shift of pebbles beneath my ass and every creak of the leather I wore suddenly resounded in my brain like an accusatory echo across a canyon.

  But Levi didn’t turn to look at me. Did he know I was there, watching?

  Levitiqas slipped his entire hand into Nycholas’ gaping mouth.

  My heart hammered in my ears, and I knew unconsciousness was only moments away for me, and I didn’t dare to blink, tears spilling from my wide eyes as I clenched my teeth into the leather so hard it hurt my jaw.

  “Was it worth it?” Levitiqas sneered, his hand down Nycholas’ throat. Even his wrist disappeared into my lover’s seductive mouth.

  Nycholas shrugged and nodded with his eyebrows raised as though the question itself was stupid – a classic reply for him. Pride washed over me at his defiant answer to his master, but it was followed by a wave of certainty, remorse, and terror… the moment had come.

  I held my breath, and Levitiqas’ mouth curled up with the effort as he grabbed hold of something in Nycholas’ throat. Nycholas lurched once on his knees, and then Levitiqas twisted his arm sharply and yanked, and Nycholas’ throat split open across the front, black blood spewing out onto his chest and the dirt. My lover’s eyes squeezed closed. Levitiqas grabbed Nycholas’ lifeless head by the temples, wrenched it to the side and dropped it to the tracks, where my precious Vesper’s entire body wasted away to pieces of useless rust.

  Vomit launched itself up my throat and I puked onto the ground at my side, straining to muffle the sound of my heave. I sucked in a gasp, desperate for air, and sat bolt upright to see if I’d been noticed.

  All the fear and all the awfulness… it was over just like that. Levitiqas’ minions were stomping Nycholas’ rusted pieces into powder on the tracks. They finished up and followed their master back into the train, and the great metal beast pulled away as the last few were still climbing aboard.

  Levi was last to board the slowly moving train. He perched atop the steel monster with his arms folded across his chest, watching the train roll over the rust. And then he snapped his head around to stare straight at me. Fuck! I held my breath, and he tilted his head, the pitch black of his eyes piercing across the space between us, his long, black hair playing out beside his shoulders in the wind of the train’s motion.

  I was frozen. I stared, dumbfounded, lost. Levi ducked into the train for a moment and then sprang from the roof, his booted feet planting firmly into the soil where he broke into a stroll directly toward me.

  Shit! Not what I expected. I scrambled to my feet and shook my head to free the tears from my lashes. I made my way down the hill and then hopped into a run back toward Portland, though I had no idea how far it might be. The night seemed lighter and somehow less full of frights, now that the one thing I feared most – hostile Vespers – were undoubtedly chasing me from behind. I knew what lurked in the shadows.

  I ran. I didn’t fall. A vague fantasy prickled in the back of my mind, that Nycholas’ soul might have been guiding my feet, helping me stay hidden in darkness, keeping me alive from beyond his rusted grave as the Vesper chased me.

  As I neared the edge of the treeline, the border of the suburbs twinkling beyond the branches around me, I slowed. He’d have caught me by now, if he was chasing me still.

  I jogged, but I didn’t stop until I rounded the corner of a familiar street. Blair’s street! Relief smoothed some of my anguish and fear, but as the terror slid aside, it made space for pain, for grief, for loss.

  I reached Blair’s doorstep – the two-story house was a light blue and square with no unexpected corners or shadows. I sank to the step, took one deep breath to calm my slamming heart, and then I shattered and completely hit bottom.

  Everything I’d had, I l
ost before. Every piece of it I gained back, Levitiqas ripped away from me with his hand stuffed down Nycholas’ throat. I wrapped my arms around my waist and doubled over, and the motion was reminiscent of the way Nycholas lurched forward on his knees as Levitiqas grabbed his insides. I pressed my forehead to my knees and begged the memory to go away, my sorrow spinning my heart around in senseless circles of tears.

  And then I shook my head at myself, disappointed. How dare I wish for the memory to leave me, after the four years of hell I spent with amnesia? Watching Nycholas die was gruesome and the image was burned into my brain forever, but at least he knew I was with him even in his most wretched hour. I’d run with him for a year from certain capture, torture, and death, and I’d never have left his side if he hadn’t forced me to forget.

  I forgot him. I shouldn’t have forgotten him…

  I wanted to hate him for taking away four years I deserved with him, four years he deserved with me. But as the hollow of the truth crept through my core – that Nycholas was dead - I couldn’t feel anything but the void of loss within me, filled with liquid, aching love. Nycholas.

  He wasn’t willing to die without seeing me again, yet he knew that seeing me before his death would put me in harm’s way. It was the ultimate price, which he paid happily: that he refused to die before tasting me again, regardless of the danger our reunion posed to us both. I couldn’t be angry, even as my ankles burned with pain from running through the woods on uneven, slippery ground.

  The darkness of midnight sent a chill through my blood, so I snugged Nycholas’ trench coat tighter around my waist and stood. I dried my eyes and took a few breaths, and slipped in through Blair’s back door, grateful it was unlocked.

  I hung Nycholas’ coat on the rack, but not before burying my face in the collar to try and catch a hint of his scent. The warmth of leather lingered in my nostrils, but the steel was gone, and the material felt hard… not like silk, not like Nycholas.

  I crept up the stairs and peeked in on Dizzy. She rolled over when the floor creaked beneath my feet and her lips parted in a wide, toothless smile. I wondered when she’d finally start to get teeth, and staring into her green eyes beneath the tightly-curled locks of fire red dangling along her temples, my sorrow was dimmed by a cold sort of certainty. Nycholas was gone, so this… madness… the insanity of loving an immortal was over.

  Back to mortality. Gazing at my beautiful niece and her little knuckles clenched around the bars of her crib, mortality didn’t seem so hollow after all. My heart ached with guilt as I so easily put Nycholas aside in the company of sweet Dizzy. I pressed my finger to my lips and shushed her, and then paced down the hall.

  I knelt by Blair’s side of her bed that she shared with Joseph and whispered.

  “Hey.”

  Blair jolted awake and I cringed, remorseful for startling her, for scaring her with my disappearance.

  “Shit, Calli! Shit! Where the hell have you been? The cops are looking for you and… you’re filthy.” She sat up and picked a stick out of my hair, which gathered around my neck in knots.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  Her voice morphed into something like a hiss. “You promised me, never again, after last time!”

  I nodded. “I know. I have a hard time remembering things.”

  Blair threw the blankets off and rose to her feet, angry. Joseph rolled over and frowned at me, surprised and a bit annoyed, I figured.

  “Can I shower, first?” I asked. “Can I… just get clean, and then explain it all to you?”

  Blair folded her arms across her chest and sighed. “Shower quickly. You have a hell of a lot to explain.”

  I knew she probably figured I ran off with Freddy… No, Blair, Nycholas – my immortal boyfriend who faked my car accident to protect me from his violent master – ate him in one gulp. Like Popcorn-Freddys. A giggle almost escaped me in my stupor of turmoil, and Blair glared at me as the grin played along my lips.

  The heat of the shower was another absence: the absence of cold, the absence of velvet and absolutely no pain. I washed thoroughly with soap, admiring the bruises around my wrists, wondering how much of the purple on my hips was from Nycholas and how much from my treks through the woods. I pinched my nipple too hard – just like he would have done – but it wasn’t the same, and I sank to a crouch and let the steam have me for a while.

  I emerged from the shower and wrapped myself in Blair’s bathrobe. The chill of the air outside the bathroom was a better familiarity than the heat, and I soothed my thoughts with a fantasy that I was surrounded by the chill of Vesper breath.

  Blair wasn’t in her bed, so I stepped slowly down the stairs, wondering if she and Joseph had gone to sleep on the couch, for the lights were off. I rounded the corner at the bottom of the flight and flicked the light on, and I couldn’t even suck in a breath to scream.

  In the middle of the couch sat a Vesper.

  The tall one with the long, black hair.

  Levi.

  Beside him, spread over the couch, was Nycholas’ coat, and I was so fucking busted, screwed, and dead that fear refused to crash around me, and I didn’t feel like fainting. My shoulders pressed back and I lifted my chin, defiant and totally ready to die.

  “Where are they?” I demanded.

  Levi regarded me with an impassive expression, and spread his palms before rising to stand above me. Fuck! His height dwarfed me with menace and authority.

  I refused to be weak. “You fucking ate them.”

  Levi tilted his head and dropped his chin once: a nod. A confirmation.

  My sister and her husband and Dizzy were dead.

  “Let me explain where you stand right now, mortal,” Levi said, his voice ringing with that lyrical quality I remembered from the train tracks. “I am to find whatever creature watched us finish our brother from a hill beside the tracks. I am to bring it home.”

  “To the Pit,” I spat. Nycholas had never described the place to me, so I had no idea what it meant for my suffering of the future, but it was called the Pit. That was enough to make fear brew within my stomach.

  “Yes. I am to bring you to Levitiqas.”

  I swallowed hard and took a deep breath, suppressing the gag that rose in my throat as I detected the humidity of the room, the acrid odor of a digested human being.

  My goddamn sister, you fuck! I wanted to scream it at him, but I kept silent.

  “However, I feel it prudent to explain to you where I stand, right now.”

  I clenched my fists. What would he demand from me? Some kind of fucked up arrangement to satisfy his violent lusts? Worse things had happened to me, that night.

  “When I return home, I will no longer be permitted to remember my brother, Nycholas. That’s what Levitiqas does to us, you see… he forces us to forget things that remind us we were human, once. Aiding in the death of a brother pains me on a moral level, so it is something I will not be permitted to remember for long.”

  Was he seriously talking to me about guilt in the room fogged by the steam of my sister’s goddamn corpse? My heart had no energy left to ache for the pain of her loss.

  “And as all Nycholas wanted was to escape this hell… something all of us crave, but none are so bold as to seek freedom, as Nycholas was… I identify with his reasons, and I am sorry he’s gone.”

  “You told Levitiqas where to find him.” He spoke of my lover like a lost set of keys… just “gone” rather than betrayed, beheaded, or murdered.

  Levi grinned, a ghastly sight of spotless, beautiful, neon teeth in a pallid face. His eyes seemed darker than Nycholas’, his face framed by his black hair and the pulsing veins of an immortal killer. “You have never, ever known torture like I’ve known, female. A man – human or Vesper – can only take so much before he breaks.”

  That stalled my anger and fury. Levi spoke of torture, of pain. Nycholas spoke of those things, too… but not with the look of simultaneous defeat and armor that Levi carried
in his eyes. How could a man look so haunted and strong, so terrifying and hopeless, all at once?

  Wrath and compassion warred in my chest. I swallowed my hateful words and stared him down, refusing to speak.

  “So I have a proposal for you.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” I sneered, fully prepared to provoke him to kill me rather than give my body to his desires.

  Levi chuckled and shook his head, and then stepped forward and closed the distance between us, looming over and around me and blocking out all of my sight except the black of his trench coat, the black of his hair.

  “I have another moral qualm, and that’s with killing innocents. Yet the child upstairs… she saw me.”

  “So you killed her.”

  “No. So I left you alive, because the steam of the shower masked my certainty of your scent. I took the adults first, and was left with the two of you.”

  What? He didn’t kill Dizzy? I snapped my head around to stare up the stairs as I heard a sound – shifting against blankets, the rustling of a babe in her crib.

  I stepped back from Levi and gazed at him with shock. Dizzy was alive! My baby niece was alive! My soul rang with joy in my ears and I felt the rush of a faint in my brain, so I clenched my fists tighter to keep blood moving in my body.

  She was alive. Something in my life was still alive.

  “Yes,” Levi hissed, excitement in his eyes. “I’ll be punished, have no fear. But it’s a qualm my master knows I have, a flaw he expects from me. Therefore, it is not terribly unbelievable that you slipped out of my pursuit because you put a child between your body and my jaws. If you hid behind her, I’d have a hard time capturing you without harming her, especially if you fled into the sunrise.”

  My heartbeat picked up in my chest. Seriously? Was he giving me an out?

  I moved toward the stairs, but he stopped me.

  “This time,” Levi said, “you’d better run hard. When I get home, I’ll take my punishment and hand my master my memories, and we will hunt you down.”

  I nodded and stepped around him. Upstairs, I slipped into two layers of Blair’s clothes, stuffed Dizzy’s diaper bag with supplies and gathered her precious little body up in my arms. She whimpered and her lip quivered, but I kissed her rosy cheeks and shushed her with a smile. I bundled her in layers, too, to save on space in the diaper bag… and prayed Levi would be gone when I got back downstairs.

  He was still there, so I huddled Dizzy against my chest and refused to let her look.

  Don’t look, Nycholas had said to me. Dizzy would follow the instruction where I failed, if I had anything to say about it.

  I snagged Nycholas’ coat with my half-full unbroken hand and moved to the door.

  “One more thing,” Levi’s musical voice, laced with pride and humor, echoed in my ears.

  I faced him, knowing the fear in my heart was as plain on my face as the boundless obsidian sky as I did.

  “When we meet again,” Levi said, “he will want to make it painful for you. When that day comes… I want it to be quick. I’ll bite you myself to get the job done without agony.”

  I nodded fiercely – grateful and certain that the day would come, indeed. “Will you remember that promise?”

  “Whether I remember it or not doesn’t matter. I don’t break promises.”

  Levi cocked his head to the side and regarded the bundle in my arms. I hugged my niece closer.

  “Such a peculiar child with such colorful eyes,” he whispered, though I couldn’t be certain he said it… and then he spun on his heel and glided to the window where he disappeared into the night.

  I swept out the door and ran.