Eternal Reign

by Melody Johnson

  The moment he was out of sight, I scooted down the rest of the hallway and eased open Meredith’s apartment door without knocking. Despite Nathan’s warning, I wasn’t prepared for the total destruction of her place. Part of me was still in denial. The stupid, optimistic part that should have died along with my parents still hoped against all odds that maybe someone else needed medical attention. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t Meredith who was dead.

  If I hadn’t already been sitting on my scooter, I might have fallen to my ass on the floor.

  Blood was everywhere. Soaked into the carpet. Sprayed across the walls. Smeared over the couch and chairs and tables. Puddles where she’d stumbled and streaks where she fell marked the hardwood. Handprints where she’d tried to crawl and pull herself up stained the cabinets. Proof that she’d fought her attacker and struggled to stay alive painted the entire apartment red. Proof that she’d failed.

  I bit my lip.

  “Clear.”

  A long, high buzz filled the room, and I swallowed down bile. I didn’t know which was worse: the sight of so much of Meredith’s blood or the sound of her still, lifeless heart.

  Did she still even have a heart?

  It couldn’t have been the Damned, I thought, trying and failing to assure myself. She’d left the hospital early this morning and would have arrived home just before sunrise. The Damned would have had to wait at the hospital, follow her home, attack, and return to wherever they hide during the day in the mere minutes between early morning and dawn. That was a tight window, assuming the Damned had the cognizance to stalk their prey—which, according to my experience with Nathan, they didn’t.

  I covered my mouth with my hand to hold back a sob. Assuring myself that a human had killed her didn’t change the fact that she was dead.

  “One more time.”

  “But it’s been—”

  “Again.”

  A low, double pound shook the room. I bit my lip, wanting to die myself, but then the long, high buzz suddenly stopped and was replaced with a steady beat.

  “We got her back. Let’s move.”

  The paramedic moved out of my line of sight, revealing Meredith. She was lying on her back in the middle of a puddle of her own blood on her living room floor, her shirt split from hem to neck and the pads of the portable, external defibrillator stuck to the middle of her chest and left ribs. Her body had been slashed by deep cuts in rows of four across her wrists, neck, stomach, and thighs, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have said that the slashes resembled the same raking of claw marks on all our other victims. But her chest was smooth and unmarked. Whoever had attacked her hadn’t taken or eaten her heart.

  Her hair was plastered to her head with blood. Her face was tipped limply to the side, her eyes half open and unseeing.

  Looking at her like this made me want to curl into myself, shrivel, and die.

  “There’s not enough time, damn it.” One of the paramedics cursed. He was young and lanky and had been performing chest compressions before they’d found a rhythm. “With so many nicked arteries, there’s no way she makes it to the hospital without going back into v-fib. She doesn’t have enough blood to keep her heart pumping.”

  “We have fluids in the ambulance,” his partner answered. She was calm and experienced, but I recognized the hard look in her eyes. The younger paramedic was right. Meredith wasn’t going to make it.

  “You think that’ll be enough?”

  “We’ll make it work. Let’s go,” the female paramedic looked up and met my gaze. She scowled. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I, um.” I had to clear my throat before I could speak. I wiped my cheeks, realizing that tears had tracked down my face while I’d been watching them work on Meredith. So much for being here on assignment. When my throat was clear, or at least as clear as it was going to get, I spoke through the rasp in my throat. “I’m her best friend. We had a date. When she didn’t show, I came to get her.”

  “I’m so sorry, miss, but you need to move outside. We’re leaving now, and we need to move fast to save your friend’s life. Do you know if she has any allergies? Any adverse side effects to medications?”

  “No, she doesn’t have allergies.” I backed up my scooter as they picked up her stretcher between them.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Meredith. Meredith Drake.”

  “Okay, we need to take Meredith down to the ambulance, so we can take care of her. Meet us at the hospital, and you can see her there.”

  “Can you—”

  The steady beat of the portable defibrillator cut into a high buzz.

  “We’re losing her!”

  The paramedics turned away from me to work on Meredith. They were taking too long. By the time they eventually carried her out of her apartment, drove to the hospital, and got her on the operating table, she’d be dead.

  I gunned my scooter into full throttle down the hallway to the elevator and hit the down button.

  “Come on,” I urged. “Open.”

  Miracle of all miracles, the elevator doors opened before the paramedics could notice my retreat, but when I reached the ground floor and drove outside, the paramedic I’d lied to was waiting for me. I bit my lip. Greta had obviously not vouched for me and my investigative privileges.

  I turned away from him and drove in the opposite direction.

  The paramedic was faster than my scooter. He cut in front of me, and when I tried to run over his feet, he grabbed my handles and squeezed my scooter to a stop.

  “Excuse me,” I snapped.

  “I don’t think so. Detective Wahl’s on her way, and she told me to keep you on scene. It’s a federal offense to impersonate a police officer.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I did no such thing.”

  “Sure you did. You said—”

  “I said that Greta would vouch for me. I never said that I was a police officer.”

  The paramedic narrowed his eyes. “You never denied it.”

  “Rule número uno, kid. Never assume someone belongs on scene just because they act like they belong. People can act really well.”

  His face turned hot red. “Listen, you—”

  “Hey, what’s going on over here?” Nathan asked. His eyes narrowed on the paramedic and his hands over mine on my handlebars.

  “This man is harassing me,” I accused.

  “I certainly am not! She broke into a crime scene! She impersonated a police officer! She—”

  “She’s obviously handicapped, and you’re scaring her,” Nathan reasoned. All eyes turned toward me.

  It wasn’t hard to feign terror when the scene in Meredith’s room had certainly terrified me.

  Nathan turned back to the paramedic. “I’ll take it from here.”

  The young paramedic looked unsure and confused again, obviously not accustomed to being accused of anything, let alone terrorizing handicapped young women. He looked between Nathan and me and eventually nodded. He released my handlebars.

  “If you’ve got this, I’ll just head back upstairs to see if they need more hands.”

  “You do that,” Nathan said, but the paramedic had already disappeared into the apartment complex.

  With the paramedic out of earshot, Nathan and I turned to each other and spoke at the same time.

  “What the hell are you thinking?” he asked.

  “When the paramedics come down with Meredith, I need you to drive the ambulance to the coven,” I said.

  Nathan blinked for a second, dumbstruck, but when he finally recovered, he exploded. “Dominic’s coven? The vampire coven?”

  I nodded. “One and the same.”

  “Are you insane?” Nathan shouted.

  “Shut up before they hear you,” I snapped. “Meredith isn’t going to make it.”

  “I told you that,” Nathan muttered.

  “Her only chance is with Dominic,” I reasoned. “Vampire saliva heals wounds. If the paramedics give her fluids on the way, and one of Dominic’s
vampires heals her when we get there, she might survive.”

  Nathan wiped his hand over his jaw as he thought about it. “It’s a long shot.”

  “A long shot is better than no shot.”

  Nathan shook his head. “What about the paramedics? They’re going to open the ambulance doors and realize we’re not at the hospital. And then they’ll freak when they see Dominic and the others in their true vampire form. Then what?”

  “Altering memories is the vampires’ specialty. The paramedics can freak all they want. They won’t remember what happened or who they saw. They won’t remember any of us.”

  Nathan shook his head, unconvinced. “You’re putting all of us at risk, especially the paramedics.”

  “This is Meredith we’re talking about, Nathan. She’s dying. You don’t think it’s worth the risk?”

  Nathan’s expression fell. “Fuck,” he spat, rubbing his hand over his jaw. “Take a cab. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Thank you!” I squealed, tears flooding like twin waterfalls down my face in relief.

  Nathan rubbed his own eyes. “Yeah, well, like you said, it’s not like I have much of a choice. It’s Meredith, after all, and she’s worth the risk. Any risk.”

  He bent down, and I wrapped my arms around Nathan in a brief, fierce hug. Now she’d have a chance, however minuscule. The odds weren’t in her favor, but hell, I’d managed to save Nathan against worse odds. I’d saved Dominic after he’d been staked through the heart and spontaneously combusted head to toe in flames. I’d saved Bex after she’d had her heart ripped from her chest. I’d survived after being bled nearly dry. Twice. If there was one thing I could fall back on it was my stubborn refusal to give up in the face of overwhelmingly bad odds. And if it was the last thing I ever did, I’d make sure Meredith survived, too.

  Chapter 18

  “Dominic!” I shrieked at the top of my lungs, hoarse now from screaming his name in a litany, like a prayer.

  A prayer that had gone unanswered.

  The cab had weaved and cut through the traffic in New York City style, beating the ambulance downtown. I’d waited until the cabbie had driven off—smiling, with an exorbitant tip in hand for helping me and my scooter in and out of his cab—before beginning my search. Typically, I’d go out of my way to avoid this seedy, secluded section of the city, but this was a likely neighborhood to find a manhole with a missing cover. With metal prices on the rise, people would steal the covers and resell them for scrap, but their greed was my godsend. A few minutes into my search, I found exactly what I needed: access to the sewer and Dominic’s coven.

  After messaging Nathan a pin to my location, I dropped painfully to my knees beside the open manhole. I’d been screaming Dominic’s name through said sewer system for a full minute, but my efforts, though herculean, had been ignored.

  Something was wrong.

  Dominic could sense when my hip ached over the phone from three hundred miles away. Certainly he could hear me screaming for him when we were in the same city, less than three miles apart.

  I gripped the edge of the manhole, inhaling and about to let loose another bellow, when a sharp, stabbing pain encircled my wrists and ankles. The pain was electric. I gasped and looked down at my hands, but in the time it took for me to react, the pain was already gone.

  The injury wasn’t my own. Considering my metaphysical bonds with Dominic and what that implied, something was definitely very wrong.

  “Cassidy?”

  That timid, nervous voice was not Dominic. I squinted into the darkness, but I couldn’t see anything but shadows within shadows.

  “Cassidy DiRocco?”

  Something shifted, I heard the suction of a boot lifting from slimy sewer muck, and the glint of deep, plum-colored eyes blinked in the darkness.

  Of all the vampires to respond to my call, I thought, anyone but Neil.

  “Yes, it’s me. Where’s Dominic?”

  “This had better be important, Cassidy,” a deep, confident voice replied. Neil wasn’t alone, but neither was Dominic with him.

  “It’s more than important, Sevris. It’s urgent,” I said. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

  “Good. Those are the only matters I care about,” Sevris said. “Come down.”

  I blinked, staring down into the sewer pipe. “I can’t. You come up.”

  “I can’t. It’s still daylight. I’d burst into flames. In this, even if I wanted to, I can’t compromise. You must come to me.”

  I blew out a long breath. There was a time when willingly crossing the threshold into darkness was unthinkable. They’d dragged me—sometimes kicking and screaming and oftentimes bleeding, broken, and unconscious—but I’d never gone willingly. I squinted into the sewer, their silence as damning as the approaching siren. Now, remaining in sunlight was the unthinkable option.

  I crawled around the manhole on my hands and knees, and using the utility ladder, I tried to lower myself into the sewer.

  The shards of my left hip ground into frayed nerves, my right leg burned in agony, and between the two, my legs gave out. I gripped the ladder rung with both hands and struggled to pull myself back up, but the rungs were slick from condensation and mildew. I’d never been particularly athletic. Even now, when I needed it most, my body failed me. My hands slipped, and I fell.

  For a split second, I thought, He’ll catch me. Dominic would never let me fall.

  But Dominic wasn’t here.

  I hit cement. Hard.

  The fall knocked the air from my lungs. I struggled to breathe, to move, to live with the pain splitting my body.

  “You know I can’t heal you, Cassidy. Lysander’s orders,” Sevris said, his voice strained. “This is your punishment for disobeying him. My punishment for disobedience would be much worse.”

  I coughed and gasped, my own inhalation strained as I dragged air into my reluctant lungs. Taking slow, even breaths to manage the pain throbbing through my body, I looked up. Sevris and Neil were still shrouded in darkness. The only indication of their presence was their voices and the glow of three pairs of reflective, nocturnal eyes. Three pairs, not two.

  “Who else is with you?” I rasped.

  “Who else?” Rafe’s mocking voice echoed from the shadows, nearly giddy. “You think I’d miss all the fun?”

  The siren cut short. I glanced up and watched as Nathan parked the ambulance next to the manhole. “Yeah, fun,” I whispered.

  Sevris inhaled deeply. A menacing growl echoed from the darkness. “A human? You want me to heal a human?”

  “She’s my best friend.”

  “Do you realize what you’ve done by bringing her here? Do you realize the danger to which you’ve exposed our entire coven for one human woman?” he spat.

  “You said if I needed help,” I reminded him, “that you were just a call away.”

  “Yes, if you needed help,” he said roughly. “This is asking too much.”

  “You entrance dozens of people to cover up mass murder in the name of protecting the secrecy of your existence,” I snapped. “Healing one woman to save her life is nothing in comparison.”

  “A life that doesn’t matter,” Sevris growled harshly. “She is nothing but a fleck of dust on the wind compared to the longevity and permanence of our existence.”

  “She matters to me,” I said softly.

  “What’s it worth to you?” Rafe interjected.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What’s Meredith’s life worth?” he asked again.

  I narrowed my eyes in Rafe’s general direction in the darkness. I’d do just about anything to save Meredith’s life, but that wasn’t something I’d admit to these creatures. Then again, I’d just thrown myself ass-first down a sewer drain into the darkness with vampires. They probably already knew. Hell, they could probably smell the desperation wafting from my pores.

  “This sounds vaguely like extortion, and I don’t like it,” I said.

  “What are you doing?” Sevris h
issed. I had to strain to hear his question, and I realized he was no longer talking to me.

  “I’m helping,” Rafe answered. “You’re not happy about the rock and the hard place she’s crammed us into. I don’t like it either, but I’d not like it a little less if I got something out of it.”

  “Just shut up.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “When you speak, the words that come out of your mouth make me want to kill you.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to think while they argued. This was how my partnership with Dominic had begun. Bartering. I’d allowed Dominic to use me as bait to find Kaden in exchange for his promise to keep our city safe. I’d traveled to Erin, New York, to speak to Bex on Dominic’s behalf in exchange for his help to find and save my brother.

  Now I wanted them to save Meredith. What was I willing to give them—and capable of giving them—in exchange now?

  “What do you want?” I asked, interrupting their bickering.

  “You’re the only female night blood we’ve met in decades,” Rafe said, obviously bitter over that fact. “Do you know how rough life is when no one you meet is allowed to remember you? If I heal Meredith, you introduce me to one of your friends.”

  “Seriously?” Sevris asked. “Of all the things—”

  “Let me get this straight. You’ll save my best friend’s life in exchange for a date?” I asked dryly.

  “I just want an introduction, that’s all,” Rafe said, confidently. “I’ll take it from there.”

  “Cassidy?” Nathan called, his voice sharp.

  “Where the fuck are we?”

  The paramedics. Fuck indeed.

  “It’s now or never, Cassidy,” Rafe said, and I could hear the grin in his tone. “Will you hook me up?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Rafe clicked his tongue, a precursor to the rattle of his growl. “You’ve got to do a little better than that.”

  “Cassidy?!” Nathan called.

  “Fine,” I snapped. “I agree. I’ll introduce you to one of my friends. Happy?”

  “Ecstatic. Get everyone down here, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Nathan!” I called. “Down here!”