Kassandra ushered me inside with her customary lack of finesse, a gesture that would have sent a mortal sprawling. The routine was getting old.
They were a perfect match, these two. Beautiful and lethal. He’d have almost been pretty, except for the large, thin nose and those lifeless black eyes.
Haemon took my quick survey of the room’s contents for exactly what is was; a search for an escape route or a weapon to use against them, or both. Devoid of windows, the only exit from this chamber that I could see was through the same set of doors behind me.
“Even if escape were possible, which it isn’t,” he said with a note of irritation, “my men are everywhere. How far could you hope to get?”
I didn’t want to admit it, but he was probably right. Even with my ability to incinerate vampires with a single thought, there might be too many of them to fend off all at once.
Nevertheless, I reminded myself that priority number one was to locate Mark and Niko. To do that, all I needed was to kill two vampires. My day (or night) was starting to look up.
I responded by offering Haemon his same insincere smile, and then intentionally projecting an image of me leaping onto the bed and driving a silver blade through his psychotic heart. The thought of watching him writhe in agony before he died gave me a vicious thrill.
Then I’d settle the score with his immortal bitch.
“Riveting.” The vampire ran a slow, deliberate hand over the place where his heart was. “And yet, I prefer to have things done my way.”
His way involved torture, rape, and grisly murder, of which I was now an accomplice. How would Mark ever forgive me? I was as much to blame for Christie’s death as the killer staring back at me. Nothing could (or ever would) rid me of her chilling death stare, with the exception of my own death.
“Do you leave someone with a choice?” I responded, channeling all my guilt and frustration into anger. I liked being angry. It gave me a sense of clarity, a single focus.
Kassandra jostled me closer to the left side of the bed.
“Ah, but we always have choices.” Haemon leveled a shrewder gaze at me now. “For instance, do we sacrifice ourselves to save another?” He reached down the opposite side of the bed and dragged a body I’d failed to notice earlier from the floor onto the damask coverlet in one swift, violent motion. “Or do we surrender that individual to his fate, because our own survival instinct demands it?”
“Mark!” I rushed forward, only to have Kassandra jerk me back by the hair.
Rage detonated inside me, and with it came the familiar spark of heat behind my eyes. Oh yes, I could do this. I could end these two monsters right here and now!
Yet something compelled me not to act on that murderous impulse—not yet, anyway. Something outside myself which had nothing to do with vampire mind control or that ancient talisman. Whatever this something was it had physical weight to it. I could feel it filling every square inch of the room, guiding me and helping to cool my rage.
I’d also detected the faintest hint of rotting citrus in the air.
If the vampires picked up on this, they failed to acknowledge it. Instead, Kassandra left me standing there alone to join her lover over on the bed.
With the arrival of this unexpected presence, I was reminded of what could happen by failing to keep my emotions in check. They carried consequences. Serious ones.
Yet a large part of me didn’t care. The monster responsible for Christie Gold and Joy Ebersole’s deaths, and God only knew how many others, was here and ripe for the taking. The incubus in me wanted revenge. I wanted revenge. Because anything, even death, would be better than living with the constant inability to protect the only two people I had left in this world.
“Yesssss! What you are shall only bring you and those around you needless suffering,” Haemon said. “I can smell the stench of your shame and grief from here.”
My body tensed around the sudden rise of heat within it. I was either going keep my shit together long enough to give these two a final taste of my grief and shame and survive it, or die trying. That was definitely good for something.
“Don’t forget cowardice,” Kassandra added, snaking a hand around Haemon’s neck.
My eyes darted to my unconscious friend. His chest rising and falling only fortified my resolve. Once these bloodsuckers were dead, Mark and I would search for Niko and then find a way to kill the remaining vamps. That was the plan, anyway.
When the presence from before tried to bring me back from the edge, I pushed it away and focused on the amulet dangling between Kassandra’s breasts, which she removed now and hung around her lover’s neck. Its gemstone heart winked back at me in the firelight.
These two ancient beings might have strength and effective mind games on their side, but that talisman was the key to helping me defeat them. I just didn’t know how, exactly.
Kassandra threw her head back and laughed. “Struck a nerve, did I?”
Incubus fire honed in and locked on its targets.
I fixed on the two vampires and dropped my shields, opening my thoughts to them. If Haemon sensed my intentions, he concealed it behind a look of utter indifference, all the while caressing Mark’s matted curls. He never for an instant considered that he might be in jeopardy.
The build-up of energy inside me was reaching its peak. I was going to do to them what I’d done to their men in Athens, or die trying.
I closed my eyes and visualized Haemon and Kassandra engulfed by fire. I imagined blazing-hot light erupting from their eye sockets and mouths, the way supernovas fanned out in all directions. I reveled in their shrieks of horror and pain echoing through the vast room, as my incubus energy sought out and ravaged their ancient bodies.
“This one,” Haemon said, ignoring my fantasy death scenario for them, his black eyes glittering, as he stroked Mark’s hair, “has real passion and hunger in him. He’s proven a difficult stallion to break.” He bent forward, keeping his obsidian gaze trained on me. But to Mark he whispered, “And we’re nowhere near finished, are we, my friend?”
Mark groaned and tilted his head back to stare at me entreatingly. “Austin, please…”
My body jerked violently from the sheer force of energy detonating inside it, which shot through my extremities and burst from my fingertips, mouth, and eyes.
Kassandra was struck first by the terrible light and fell backwards onto the mattress, screaming and thrashing, as if that would be enough to put out the flames engulfing her.
The doors to the bedchamber flew open and slammed back against the walls with a thunderous boom. Half a dozen vampires stormed the opening and rushed me, their protests drowned out by the frightening blast of power shooting out of me.
I raised a palm in their direction and, one-by-one, they collapsed to their knees, incubus energy finding each and every one of them.
“Stop him!” Haemon commanded above the deafening roar inside my head.
I turned back to the bed in time to see the flesh of his face melting away to expose the gleaming teeth and bone beneath. It was too late for him. Too late for any of us.
I was standing at the nucleus of that supernova now, an unimaginable discharge of energy radiating outward from my body in all directions. The energy inside me refused to burn out, blinding me in a shower of glowing copper and gold sparks. And from this devastating blast of heat and color I was plunged into absolute darkness.
CHAPTER 36
A howling void swallowed me whole.
I screamed in agony from the breaking of bones and tearing of muscles and ligaments, as my body was stretched to its limits, but fathomless space swallowed the sound. Then I collided with something solid and decelerated in a sickening rubber-band effect that compressed my entire mass back in on itself, funneling it through a rift the size of a keyhole.
I shot out the other side, a sudden brilliance surrounding me and forcing me to squeeze my eyes shut against it. When I opened them, it was to warm sunshine, my body intact and pain-f
ree. Female laughter—Laura’s laughter—and encouragement greeted me with a rush of excitement over my triumph. I was a little boy again, peddling a wobbly, red two-wheeler past the front gate of our big Craftsman in Monrovia, my hands trembling on the handlebars. I knew in that instant that the training wheels were never going back on.
Her proud image was blocked by Mark Gold stepping between us with raised fists.
Bleachers rose up behind him now as he stared down the leader of a group of high school jocks who’d cornered us against a chain link fence. One of them was carrying a baseball bat.
He shouted at Mark: “This’ll teach you to mess with my girl.”
Mark offered an ugly grin, and then charged the guy, tackling him and one of his buddies to the ground. The third jock with the bat rushed me and swung hard.
I threw arms up to block the blur of gleaming wood, but the bat passed right through them, its whoosh transforming into a clicking, whirring drone.
I spun around to see a small machine pumping a flow of yellowish nutrients through a clear tube into the sleeping woman next to it. She looked frail under the harsh florescent lights and was dwarfed by the ugly motorized hospital bed and steel railings. A heart monitor blipped steadily, the scent from numerous bouquets around the room mingling with the sharp odors of medicine and rubbing alcohol. Laura was dying.
Raw emotion stung my eyes and throat, but movement at the periphery of my vision caused me to look away. Crouched and shivering in a dark corner of the room sat a pale Niko, raw cuts and bruises decorating his forehead and cheeks. What memory was this?
I rushed over and scooped him into my arms, alternating between kissing and stroking his hair. Whatever misery he’d been experiencing before my arrival now escalated into pure terror. His eyes darted from side to side, showing too much white, as he began to thrash against me, kicking out and trying to repel the thing gripping him.
As usual, my presence in his life served only to bring him unnecessary suffering. But I needed this, needed to touch him, to have this human connection, even if it frightened him.
Then Niko suddenly went very still in my arms, his brown eyes softening. “Austin?”
Relief washed through me, and I pulled him tighter against me. “I’m here, Niko!”
He still couldn’t see or hear me. But he could feel me and that was enough.
“Am I dreaming?” he said through dry, cracked lips. Then his gaze drifted to the heavy wooden door of the small, unfurnished cell that had once been Laura’s hospital room and his expression grew panicky again. “Mark is gone. He—”
My body jerked violently upwards, my arms ripped from Niko’s warmth.
I was catapulted back into that terrible abyss. Only this time, there were things in the dark with me. Things with teeth.
Cold, dry lips pressed against my ears, wheezing out fetid demands that I open myself to them, that I let them anchor themselves to me. My silence was met with sharp claws and jagged teeth that tore at my ethereal body; a shell which might as well have been actual flesh and blood for the degree of pain their attacks caused me. When I could stand it no longer, certain there’d soon be nothing left of me, the same rubber-band effect sent me sprawling and gasping for air.
In my scramble to escape the terrible creatures, I connected with a solid surface, my bare feet kicking out against a polished red onyx floor.
Soon, rising panic gave way to a surge of familiar power and warmth spreading throughout my body. This reassuring energy continued to expand in me, as yet another familiar force began to emerge: Rage. Incubus me had had enough.
When the void next came to reclaim me, for I had no reason to believe that it wouldn’t, I’d be ready for it. And maybe, just maybe, this time I’d make it bleed.
But first, I had to figure out where I’d crash landed.
From my position on the floor, I looked up to discover the reclining figure of a young Saint Paul dressed as a Roman legionnaire. He lay on the ground, legs splayed, his hands and muscular arms outstretched in a gesture of rapt surrender to the shaft of celestial light bathing him. A single spotlight punctuated the shadowy room surrounding the fresco, suffusing it with greater depth and vibrancy and lending an almost three-dimensional quality to the saint’s likeness.
I now knew exactly where I was.
The priceless Caravaggio was one of only two in the world. The first graced the Cerasi Chapel in the Basilica Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. The second, unbeknownst to most, belonged to the man standing before it; a man even more precious than the art piece itself.
At least to me he was.
My pulse quickened at the sight of him standing there barefoot and shirtless, his feet a shoulder’s width apart, his hands clasped behind him; a soldier’s stance. His dark, wavy hair and pale olive skin all but shimmered under the rich lighting. But this version of the man bore a long, dark purple furrow that ran from his right shoulder blade at a diagonal down to meet his waist, marring the otherwise smooth skin of his back. He’d had no such scar aboard the Francesca Adorata. This injury was recent and I knew where he’d received it and why it hadn’t healed. This was the handiwork of Kassandra’s silver sword blade.
Dimitri hadn’t let Niko and I be captured in Athens, after all. He’d fought to save us and failed. I was just glad to know that he’d survived the fight!
He offered no reaction to the sound of my voice calling out to him.
My touch, however, as I clambered to my feet and rushed over to wrap arms around his waist and press against his solid frame proved an entirely different matter.
Dimitri drew in a sharp breath. “Whatever you are, sprite or spirit,” he said in a low, threatening voice, “you risk much in taunting me.”
Scanning the space behind me with all the skill and concentration of a seasoned hunter, no glimmer of recognition flashed in his predatory gaze. Worse still, the nightmare dimension began to exert its influence over me again. I could feel it tugging at me and fought to push it away.
To my relief, it relented. No telling how long it would stay that way, though, which meant that I had to make Dimitri understand it was me here with him, that I needed his help. But how to accomplish this?
An idea came to me.
Since I clearly had an effect on his physical world, didn’t it stand to reason that I should also be able to influence it in other ways? Time to find out.
I sprinted into the adjacent sitting room and yanked down the first tall, gossamer drapery panel I reached. The sound of metal rings raining down onto the stone floor was reminiscent of that day in Dimitri’s mansion when I’d done a similar thing in order to escape from him. Now I desperately needed his help.
Dimitri wheeled around to witness the ghostly cloth sailing across the room to land at his bare feet. Folding the sheer, white fabric back on itself several times to give it greater density, I next ran to the marble pedestal opposite the fresco. It was topped by a long-stemmed flower arrangement, which I ripped from its vase and cast aside.
Just as I’d hoped. The water was tinted dark green from their stalks.
I then slowly poured the water onto the material to spell out my name, glancing up after completing the “T” to gauge Dimitri’s reaction.
His eyes went wide. “Is it truly you?”
I dropped the metal urn and doubled over from the sharp, squeezing sensation gripping my intestines. The Void. It was letting me know that it was still watching. Still in control.
I breathed deeply and waited for the spasm to pass. Then a terrifying thought occurred to me: Am I in Hell? The Void might not be the proverbial biblical inferno, but it’s cold, endless darkness was certainly filled with suffering and hellish creatures.
Dimitri’s voice re-anchored me and pushed back the chilling tide. He fixed on the space that ghost me occupied not three feet away and narrowed his eyes. “I—I can smell you!”
When he reached out for me, I rushed forward towards the reassurance of his arms, only to be doubled-over again
and drawn back into darkness. Only this time, the constriction around my innards had developed jagged barbs.
I bit down on the pain and struggled against the intense pull. If this was it, if God had turned His back on me, forsaken me to an eternity of horror and pain, then I would become the worst monster of them all, the very thing the darkness feared.
Was it my imagination, or did the Dark Universe just tremble?
Like a ripple effect, its sway over me diminished. Enough so that I passed through its cold, deafening noise and back into the quiet shelter of Dimitri’s sanctuary once more.
I materialized in the sitting room this time, its modern furnishings and lit fireplace no minor haven to me. Everything was exactly as I’d left it. Except for Dimitri Ravello.
He was nowhere to be found.
I needed to go in search of him, find a way to communicate what was happening to me. Who knew how much longer I had here. But the Void had left such a cold hollow inside me, a place that felt as though it might never be warm again. So I moved closer to those blue flames dancing across the dunes of sugary white sand within the enormous, log-free fireplace.
Then I heard it. Dimitri’s voice coming from somewhere nearby. He was furious.
“Get out! Better yet, I should end you where you stand!”
He stormed into the room now, a tall blonde in hot pursuit.
The woman gave a bitter laugh. “The long centuries have taught you nothing. Still arrogant and short-sighted. Can you not sense his marauders at your very doorstep?”
If a ghost could have a jaw-dropping moment, I was having one multiplied by ten.
Shayla was standing not three meters away, dressed in the same bronze gown I’d seen her torn to shreds in by that evil, black twister. Except this time, instead of a crimson fist protruding from her chest and pure terror reflected in her expression, fury animated the lavender gaze she leveled at Dimitri. “He has found you. The time to strike is now, before—”
“Haemon kills him.” Dimitri said this with a bowed head. “I know.”
Shayla threw up her hands in disgust. “After what you did to my people, vampire, you would allow such a thing to happen to my son?”
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