Dimitri’s shoulders tensed, the emerald fire reflected in his eyes eerily reminiscent of the stone that made up the heart of Haemon’s amulet, a near duplicate of which hung around Shayla’s neck. “After what your people did to mine, you mean!”
They had to be referring to the Great War between vampires and incubi over a millennium ago. Even as an incubus, I’d found it difficult not to side with Dimitri, especially after what he’d shared with me aboard the yacht. By all accounts, the Incubi had cast the first war stone by trying to enslave the vampire world through dream invasion and mind control.
Then again, Dimitri Ravello had been less-than-honest with me on several occasions. I also didn’t need to be a twenty-four-hundred-year-old immortal to know that the story inevitably ran far deeper than he’d been willing to share.
More to the immediate point, I’d watched Shayla die in my last vision. The sinister being from that other realm, the Dark Woman, had killed her.
Unless, of course, I was now being played by all sides.
Regardless, here stood Shayla in the living flesh. If she’d indeed come to me in dream form, not only to reveal herself as my birth mother but also to help me escape whatever Haemon and Kassandra had in store for me, the Dark Woman had to have manipulated me into believing that I’d witnessed her death. But to what end?
“It will not come to that,” Dimitri said through clenched teeth. “I will not let Austin die.”
“Yes vampire, I can see that you’re doing everything in your power to keep that from happening.”
They took their quarrel closer to me just as an all-too familiar prickling crisscrossed the surface of my skin. It wasn’t the Void trying to capture me again. Something else was here, a new presence had come amongst us. It hid within the sanctuary’s rocky crevices where the artificial light couldn’t reach it. The sensation was reminiscent of my encounter with Kassandra and her mind probes; a black widow spider testing the filaments of its web for her next meal.
Dimitri and Shayla appeared oblivious to this presence, their argument growing more heated by the minute. I tried to go to them, but my legs refused to obey.
Above me, the air began to coalesce, shaping itself into a near-perceptible silhouette that lengthened its mass and to draw nearer.
“Yield to me.” The hissing resonance echoed through my mind, a pressure coiling around my brain. “Give me sight and hearing.”
I struggled to force the sibilant voice away, but the pressure inside my skull was beginning to darken the edges of my vision. It quickly spread to my eardrums, until they pulsed like a thunderous heartbeat, my lips lengthening into a lopsided grin. The intruder was taking me over.
The demon part of me refused to be defeated and fought back.
The intruder recoiled, enough so that the fog impairing my ability to reason thinned and the masquerade slipped, exposing the thing crawling around inside my head. “Haemon!”
The hypnotic quality to his words had been replaced by the cruel, hollow sound of a voice I’d learned to despise. “Clever little incubus.”
How had he orchestrated this? Better yet, how had Haemon managed to survive the explosion in his bedchamber?
“Give me sight and hearing, or the stallion is next.”
He meant Mark. My best friend was still alive! Or was this just another trick to get me to do what he wanted and drop my guard?
I looked to Dimitri and Shayla for help they couldn’t provide. I was alone in this. Alone perhaps, but not dead. My turn to offer up an ugly grin. And this time, it was all me.
My biggest obstacle, greater than Haemon could ever be, was fear. It consistently hindered the one arsenal I had at my disposal, but to which I so often failed to turn, and that was my incubus nature.
Haemon must have sensed this realization in me, because he resummoned the Void.
He was too late. I knew now that I wasn’t in hell, nor had God turned His back on me.
“If you like hell so much” I told him, my body trembling with rage, “why don’t you go there instead!”
The echo of his scream was followed by his ghostly likeness shimmering for an instant, then fading into empty space once more.
Whether or not he’d been cast into his own twisted machination, I couldn’t say. One thing was certain, though: the degree of my hatred for Haemon was rivaled only by the fury mirrored in Dimitri’s eyes for the woman standing before him.
But that hatred suddenly took a backseat to the modest tremor shaking the rough-hewn ceiling above our heads.
“The Haemon Beast moves quickly,” Shayla said. “Yet you leave this for him to find.” She held up the old, leather-bound book I’d read on my first visit to the sanctuary. “It is all he needs to complete what he has already set into motion.”
My mind was reeling. Too much was happening at once.
“Incubus!” Haemon’s energy collided with my own again. “I command you to let me see and hear!”
I fought to resist him, calling on the stone at the center of the amulet in my mind and throwing up an emerald wall so thick around me that it kept Haemon from listening in on and observing Shayla and Dimitri. More importantly, it kept him from controlling my mind.
He slammed into the mystical barrier I’d raised and it rumbled and cracked—or was that the ceiling overhead from another quake? Whatever it was, the attack brought me to my knees.
Another assault or two like that and he’d break through to me.
That was when Shayla whipped her head around to the exact spot where I’d fallen.
“He is here!” She rushed to within inches of me, the sudden wonder in her eyes quickly fading to hostility. “An incubus facing death returns in ethereal form only to those he loves.” She gave Dimitri a sour look. “It is his way of saying farewell.”
“Austin was here,” Dimitri confessed. “I sensed him earlier, but—”
“Is still here!” Shayla insisted. “This is how the Haemon Beast has found you.”
The pain in my head mushroomed, but I managed to hold off his second strike on the mystical barrier protecting me. New cracks had formed, but it still held—for now.
A second realization came to me then. Haemon had effectively used magic to conjure up a hell dimension for me. This meant that my corporeal form had to be alive somewhere to work magic on. If I had a physical body to return to, then it stood to reason that it was still at Haemon’s castle in Prague.
A massive explosion shook the living room. Fragments of rock and thin columns of dust rained down on us from the ceiling.
“His marauders make swifter progress than I anticipated. We must hurry.” When Shayla reached for Dimitri, he actually growled at her. “There is no other way.”
I couldn’t focus on their quarrel any longer. Haemon was almost through to me and the entire roof of the sanctuary was about to collapse in on us. I had to get back to his castle.
The how came through sheer intuition. That, and siphoning power from the gemstone at the center of the amulet. I envisioned it in my mind, connected with it. As I opened to the emerald, a rush of power inhabited me, adding yet another shield to impede Haemon.
Time to push this supernatural hitchhiker’s ass out of my ride.
What resembled my physical body—blond hair singed and matted to my face and neck, my naked body not faring much better, its skin charred—began to materialize through a murky haze. It was slumped against the stones of the same cell beneath Haemon’s castle. More reassuring was that I could see my chest rising and falling.
“Take my hand, vampire,” Shayla shouted to Dimitri above the rumblings. “Do it now or let this place serve as your tomb. The choice is yours.”
She didn’t wait for him to act and seized Dimitri by the arm.
In that same instant, the colossal mantel and fireplace façade behind me broke apart. Massive chunks rained down on me, but caused me no physical injury. They simply passed through my ethereal form.
The lights flickered throughout the sitti
ng room and then went dark. Before panic could take hold of me, a generator kicked in and emergency lights flashed on.
My relief was short-lived, because the ceiling above and to the right gave a great, groaning shudder, before splitting apart with the roar of countless jet engines and dropping an enormous section of the Greek fortress above down into the space.
Three things happened next.
First, a tremendous displacement of air from the explosion knocked Dimitri and Shayla off their feet, sending them sprawling across the sanctuary floor. I saw the book fly from Shayla’s hand and their bodies begin to ripple like a mirage in the desert, as they slid toward the far wall.
With Shayla’s fingers firmly locked around Dimitri’s forearm, they simply vanished.
Second, movement drew my eye to the lopsided section of stairs still attached to a portion of the ancient temple that had crashed through the ceiling. From amid dense clouds of sand and earth, a dozen or so men materialized to fan out in all directions.
Not men. Vampires.
Haemon’s vampires.
I recognized Mr. Curious and his brother among them.
Lastly, I glimpsed the emergence of a thin cord, a glowing, silver tether between my ethereal body and the unconscious, damaged one I’d left behind.
Again, intuition guided me to focus on that single, gleaming filament, to let it connect with me, instead of the approaching bloodsuckers. As I did so, a powerful tug jerked me once, then twice, the sensation reminiscent of the Void’s terrible influence.
For a moment, I panicked at the thought of being dragged back into it. Then I saw my physical body jerk, just as dense clouds of dust and debris from the cave-in reached my ethereal form beside the toppled fireplace.
It wasn’t that cold abyss reaching out for me, after all. The wrenching sensation belonged to a gentler universe, a wholly different power that urged me to return to my physical form.
The instant my ghostly shell folded in on itself, Haemon shattered the mystical barricade. But I was already descending through a misty veil, his fury mitigated by the cord guiding me through a hushed world, until I could no longer see, feel, or hear anything.
CHAPTER 37
I descended through a shroud of cool mist.
On some conscious level I knew this was illusion. Magic. Soon I’d return to harsh reality awaiting me, like having left Niko and Mark behind with real-life monsters and Christie being gone from my life forever. It also meant a chance to finish what I’d started. Only this time, I’d make sure that the Vampire Haemon and his Immortal Bitch stayed good and dead.
“Austin?” The voice came from all around me.
I startled at the sight of a pale hand emerging from the shimmering fog. It reached out slowly to wrap icy fingers around my forearm.
I tried to pull away from it, but it tightened its grip. “Austin!”
As the swirling, silver mist thinned, I was left standing in Mark and Christie’s design studio in Los Angeles. The hand was gone and it was dark beyond the tall windows. Mark was in his office arguing with someone. It was Andrea, the pretty brunette from his housewarming party. She was in the same red party dress. The one she’d been wearing the night Dimitri Ravello murdered her. Except that this never happened. Or rather, I wasn’t experiencing an event from my own memory.
She shouted something back at him I couldn’t quite make out and he slapped her across the face. So hard that she stumbled and nearly fell. I’d never known Mark to hit a woman.
I sprinted toward them to keep him from striking her again. The moment I rushed through the open doorway and into his office, however, I was back in my carriage house in the Hollywood Hills. A trail of clothing drew me from the living room and towards sounds of intimacy coming from my darkened bedroom.
When I peered inside, there were Mark and Andrea in my bed. He was rough-riding her, using her body for his own pleasure and uncaring that he was hurting her.
“Austin, you have to wake up!”
I turned away from the disturbing scene to find that I was once again in the dungeon beneath Haemon’s castle. Incapable of speech and metaphysically bound to the stone floor, I had to relive Haemon seizing Mark in a chokehold in the opposite cell. Christie was sobbing in the arms of a terrified Niko.
Christie…
“It is power you seek,” I heard Haemon silently convey to him. “The pretty woman is your obstacle to that power.”
Another false memory. A perverse manipulation leading up to Christie Gold’s very real and gruesome death. I sure as hell did not want to relive this again. I couldn’t.
So I channeled all of my focus on Mark, on getting inside his head to help calm him, to make him stop struggling against a creature he had no hope of defeating. But his mind was a chaotic vacuum of emotion that refused me access. Fight as I might against the maddening spell of paralysis binding me to the cell floor, I failed to break free of it. There was nothing I could do for him. Nothing I could do for any of them.
Something snapped inside him in that instant and his mind was suddenly open to me. At first, his frenzied thoughts and emotions made it impossible to zero in on the source of the fracture. Then I spotted it. A dark rift in his psyche. Like a cancer it spread outward to infect and destroy everything in its path. Real darkness was consuming the man I had known and loved since middle school. It was consuming Mark’s soul!
“Do it!” he silently shouted to the vampire. “Take her!”
Air refused to flow into my lungs and I began to choke on the horror of what I’d just heard.
Someone grabbed hold of me then and began shaking me. “Wake the hell up!”
Mark Gold was squatting down next to me, his large, cold hands cradling the sides of my face. Dark half-moons discolored the sunken skin beneath his haunted gaze, his face ashen and covered in a light sweat. He looked strung out. Worse still, we were locked in the same cell together, his words, “Take her!” a nightmare echo ringing in my ears.
He tried to pull me into a hug, but I resisted. “What’s wrong, Buddy? You hurt?”
This was no manipulated vision, no matter how much I wished it were. This was horribly and heart wrenchingly real.
I twisted out of his grip and scooted away from him until my back connected with the dank wall at the rear of the cell. I sat bare-assed on that cold, filthy stone floor and stared back at a man I didn’t know anymore. “How could you?”
At first Mark didn’t say or do anything but stare back at me with what passed for genuine confusion. Then his expression brightened. “Oh, that. Jesus, if it hadn’t been for your freakin’ nuclear-reactor-in-meltdown-show upstairs, I don’t think I could have. How the fuck did you pull that off, anyway?”
Every inch of my naked body was coated in a sticky, soot-like layer from having gone nuclear, as he put it. I rubbed at my forearm to find healthy skin beneath it. That was about as far as my relief went. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What then?” Mark stood up and folded arms across his chest. “’Cause it’s a little distracting trying to talk to your best bud when he’s got his naked on.”
He tossed something over to me that he’d retrieved from his rear jeans’ pocket. The small, seemingly innocuous, bundle landed at my feet.
I studied it before reaching forward to retrieve it, and then shook it out in front of me, ignoring the flurry of dust particles and the stale scent of the fabric. It was an old dress shirt.
It wasn’t the suspiciously convenient gesture that set off the alarm bells in my head, but the unsettling gaze Mark leveled at me. The tension ratcheted up between us, and those same alarm bells were now telling me not to take my eyes off of him for a second.
I pushed up to my feet as well, the muscles in my legs and back protesting the movement. I was stiff and sore all over, but I slipped on the musty shirt anyway. The arms, however, were too short and the shirttails not long enough to cover all of my nakedness. Taking it off, I used the sleeves to tie the shirt sideways ar
ound my waist, all the while keeping Mark in my line of sight.
He appeared to be taking in my predicament with perverse interest.
“You could at least try to show some fucking remorse,” I ultimately answered, unable to keep the heat out of my voice.
Mark shrugged “Ain’t gotta clue what you’re talkin’ about, Buddy.”
I should’ve sensed it right away. The weird, strung out vibe he’d been throwing off, the fact that all of his cuts and bruises were healed. Only vampire blood, and lots of it, could have restored a person this fast.
Mark offered up a chilling smile. “Oh, you meant that other thing.”
In the time it took me to blink, he was on me.
We tumbled to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs, while he gnashed razor-sharp fangs at me, trying to sink them into whatever flesh he could get his mouth around.
I drove an elbow up into the underside of his jaw. His head snapped back and against the wall of mortar and stones, but this was hardly a deterrent.
In one fluid movement, he shot to his feet again.
“Just like high school, eh, Buddy?” His mouth was smeared with blood from the wound he’d inflicted on my arm. “And you’re still as big a pussy as ever.”
“Not such a pussy that he didn’t see right through you.” Haemon stepped from the shadows, his contempt manifest.
Kassandra approached as well, but she wasn’t alone. Niko struggled against her, one eye so badly swollen that it had sealed shut. His neck was also bleeding from a vicious bite wound. He stared back at me with his good eye through a mixture of horror and relief.
Mark gave a hollow laugh. “Tell me, Buddy. Did the whole cock suckin’ thing happen when you turned into this…whatever it is you are, or did you always like it?”
“I dunno, Mark. Have you always been a wife murderer?”
Hard-boiled rage erupted behind his icy gaze and he made to lunge for me, but Haemon’s arm shot through the iron bars of the cell and jerked him backwards by the hair. The metal gave a deep groan of protest. “Enough!” he commanded.
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