Eternal Reign

by Melody Johnson

  The putrid stench of feces.

  The Damned was behind me. Breathing on me. I hadn’t heard its reptilian, clicking growl over the noise of Harroway’s labored breaths, but now that I was listening, I could hear it like a death toll.

  “Run,” Harroway whispered one last time, and then he exhaled and didn’t inhale again.

  I didn’t have time to run. I didn’t even have time to scream or cry or rage at his loss. My back was a sudden, sharp, blaze of pain as the creature’s claw slammed into my side, and I was airborne.

  I soared across the room, over thirty feet of hardwood floor, shattered glass, Harroway’s spattered blood and our tracking equipment. The creature had broken all the windows on the far wall, so there was nothing between my body and the street below except fifty floors and air. There was nothing to grab, nothing to slow my momentum. I only had time to think, No! And then my body hurtled through the shattered window and out into the open air.

  I did the only thing I could do.

  I screamed.

  Air whirled around my body, tumbling me head over foot as I fell. Sky swapped with building and building swapped with the insanely shortening space between me and the ground. I stretched my arms wide, as if that would help, as if anything could help, and just seemed to fall faster.

  Of all the ways to die by vampire—bite to the carotid, bite to the brachial, throat slashing, exsanguination, heart consumption—and all the lengths I’d gone through to protect myself from those outcomes, I’d never imagined that falling fifty stories from a city building would be my demise.

  But something smashed into me before I smashed into asphalt. It bruised the side of my body, and I thought for a moment that I’d hit the side of the building.

  Maybe I’ll die before even hitting the ground, I thought, but then arms wrapped around my waist and stopped my body from somersaulting.

  Dominic.

  He slowed our fall and controlled our trajectory, but he’d lost the ability to carry me while flying two days ago. Hell, he probably couldn’t even fly solo anymore.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted at him.

  “What does it feel like?” he shouted back. “I’m saving you.”

  I looked down at the fast-approaching street and concrete sidewalk below. “I don’t feel saved.”

  The ground met us in a sudden rush, Dominic twisted, and I screwed my eyes shut. We hit the sidewalk, not nearly as hard as I would have hit without him, but just as hard as the last time we’d crash-landed from midair. This time, however, Dominic hooked my legs with his, preventing every part of me, even my extremities, from scraping the ground. Despite his effort, the impact jarred every bone in my body, punched the air from my lungs, snapped my head back against Dominic’s chest, and clanked tooth against tooth, but as I lay immobile, cradled on Dominic’s stomach, my back on fire, and struggling to breathe, I realized that I was alive.

  I’d plummeted fifty floors and lived.

  I was starved for air. Something was pooling in my mouth, something sticky and metallic, and I realized belatedly that I must have bitten my tongue. It ached dully, but as the adrenaline slowly faded and as my lungs inflated and I finally gasped sweet, essential air into my body, the pain became sharp and penetrating. Worse than my tongue, however, was my back.

  “Dom-nic,” I whispered, but with what was left of my tongue, my words were garbled.

  Dominic didn’t move behind me. He wasn’t breathing either, but that didn’t mean anything from a man without a circulatory system. I craned my neck to see his face.

  He was staring straight up at the night sky, unmoving, unseeing, and unaware.

  On the concrete sidewalk beneath us, a widening pool of blood was spreading beneath him. Some of it was mine—I could feel its sticky wetness gluing my back to his front—but not nearly all of it. He was injured, egregiously injured, but thanks to the extent of my own injuries, I couldn’t discern which pain stemmed from his wounds and which were mine.

  I heard its rattling growl before I saw its movement. Turning away from Dominic and his bleak stillness, I looked up. The creature was just a speck of a shadow from the distance of fifty stories, but as I stared, the speck became larger.

  I could discern its massively muscled arms and its hinged hind legs, and, as it drew rapidly closer, its snarling, rage-filled features. But it didn’t fall with the somersaults and crazy airborne acrobatics of my free fall. It fell with controlled focus, its eyes honed with laser-targeted precision.

  And that target was me.

  Chapter 26

  The creature was closing in, close enough that I could see the anticipation and hunger in its rage-filled expression. I could barely find the strength to breathe, let alone move. Dominic wasn’t in any condition to duck and run either, but if we didn’t do something in the next three seconds, the creature would skewer first me and then Dominic through the chest with the foot-long talons on its horror-movie, back-hinged, bat legs.

  I closed my eyes and braced for its impact.

  Someone wrapped a punishing grip around my wrist and yanked me sideways. Dominic moved with me, and the agony of his wounds scraping over the sidewalk scored my back.

  The creature landed. Its talons missed my body by inches and embedded into the concrete from the force of its impact. Blood oozed from its toes where its talons jammed into its own skin. It howled.

  I gritted my teeth against the pain of moving and glanced up at the hand still gripping my wrist, the hand that had just saved me. Petite, with red, chapped skin, its dainty fingers tapered to pale pink nails bitten down to the quick. I blinked, shocked. I wouldn’t have thought that such tiny hands could pull my weight, let alone the combined weight of me and Dominic, but I recognized those hands. She wasn’t as strong as other vampires, but she was stronger now than most humans. She was certainly stronger than me.

  I looked past her hands to the arm and then higher to her face.

  “Ronnie?” I slurred. I tried to say more but my tongue stung, and I couldn’t form the words fast enough.

  “Get up,” Ronnie said. Her words were for me, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the creature next to me.

  I knew the creature was still there—I could hear the blare of its howls and smell the foul stench of its breath—so I didn’t need to look. I probably shouldn’t have looked, because anytime I glanced at the horrors of the Damned, I gained a new nightmare to keep me awake at night. Nathan eating hearts. Rowens losing an arm. Scattered body parts and spurting blood. But my natural reaction after seeing Ronnie’s expression was to look.

  I turned from Ronnie and looked at the creature. I wouldn’t be sleeping tonight.

  The creature had hit full speed into ground, anticipating the double cushion of Dominic’s and my bodies to break its fall rather than sidewalk. Its back-hinged legs, horrific and grotesque all on their own, had suffered multiple compound fractures. The femurs, fibulas, and talons in both legs had pierced through the skin. The exposed bone was a shock of white through the dark, nearly black blood oozing like honey from the wounds. Its blood was thicker than even Dominic’s blood and moved like creeping lava as it spread over the cement.

  Even as I watched the creature bleed and scream in rage and pain—between the three of us, we were creating a veritable sea of blood—I saw the impossible. Its skin was regenerating and healing over the wounds before my very eyes. One of the breaks that hadn‘t broken the skin straightened back into place with a sickening crack. The creature howled, but although the injuries were debilitating, they weren’t from its maker. They would heal.

  Wound by excruciating wound, in another minute or two, the creature would be hale and hearty, while Dominic would still be unconscious and I would still be immobile.

  Ronnie pulled hard on my arm, yanking back my attention and pulling my arm nearly out of its socket. “Get up!”

  I looked down at Dominic. He was still staring blankly at the night sky, unmoving.

  “I can
’t just—” I gagged as the puddle of blood in my mouth clogged my throat. I turned my head, spat, and tried again. “I’m not leaving him.”

  “He’s dead. You don’t have to be.” Ronnie grabbed both my wrists and let loose a long cry as she pulled me from Dominic’s embrace. She wasn’t strong enough to carry me, but that didn’t matter as much as the fact that she was stronger than me.

  “He only looks dead,” I ground out on a gasp. My words slurred, and I spat more blood before speaking. “You can’t drag me out of here faster than the creature will heal. We need a plan.”

  “Running is the best plan I’ve got,” Ronnie said, and despite my misgivings about her strength and fortitude, she bent down, picked me up over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and true to her word, ran.

  I cringed. As much as my leg and hip pained me, my entire body was one sensitive bruise. “Wait. You can’t just—”

  “I promised Nathan that if I came here instead of him, I wouldn’t let you die,” she said fiercely, but despite her determination, she really didn’t have the strength she needed. She’d only run a few yards, and she was already gasping for air she technically shouldn’t even need. “I keep my promises.”

  I blinked. So many things were wrong with that explanation that I didn’t know where to start. “When did you talk to Nathan? Why would he come here? How did either of you know where I—”

  “He was at your apartment when I arrived for my lesson,” she said, as if she had been learning to play the flute or piano. “But you weren’t there. He told me where to find you.”

  “Why would he—” I began and took a deep breath. Snapping at Ronnie wouldn’t help. Even though she was a vampire, yelling at her was like kicking a puppy. She peed on the carpet because no one had trained her otherwise. “You shouldn’t have come. It’s dangerous. I—”

  “That’s exactly why I’m here, because it’s dangerous. You shouldn’t have come.”

  I bit back a curse and changed the subject. “Where are Keagan and Jeremy? You didn’t bring everyone, did you?”

  “Keagan wanted to come, but Logan wouldn’t risking losing another son. And when you didn’t show, Jeremy half-convinced everyone that you don’t care about us anymore now that we’re vampires. They think you feel the same way that Ian feels about us,” she said, and when she mentioned Walker, her voice broke, “but I know better. I was there when Ian came to the house. You hid me from him. You protected and fed me, and helped me in every way you could. We were friends as night bloods, and being vampires hasn’t changed that now, right?”

  I’d only known Ronnie for less than forty-eight hours before she’d been attacked and transformed into a vampire, but the guilt over her attack still weighed heavily on my conscious. I hadn’t protected her the way I should have, the way Walker had asked of me, so whether or not we were friends before, she was undeniably my responsibility now.

  And if that meant giving her blood, teaching her to entrance, and being her friend, that’s exactly what I planned to do.

  “Right?” she asked, sounding frantic.

  “Yes, we’re friends. Nothing, certainly not you being a vampire, will change that,” I said. I craned my neck to see how much time we still had to escape before the creature fully healed . . . and cursed.

  Time was up.

  The creature didn’t seem remotely interested in Dominic—maybe his unconsciousness coupled with his unbeating heart was unappetizing. It wasn’t howling in pain or disoriented by the fall anymore. The large compound fracture in its right femur healed over as I watched, the last break to snap into place. I winced as the jagged, unnatural bend in the middle of its thigh straightened, but the creature didn’t so much as flinch. It didn’t have eyes for anything or anyone else except for me.

  It charged.

  I didn’t even have time to give Ronnie warning. One moment our eyes were locked from twenty yards out, and the next moment, the creature and I were eye-to-eye, scant inches from each other. I opened my mouth, but before I could scream, its claw swatted Ronnie aside, and we were airborne.

  Ronnie fell flat on her back, losing her grip and spilling me in a log roll into the middle of the street. On a regular day, we’d have been road kill, but the police must have been successful in some semblance of damage control and diverted traffic.

  I struggled to sit up—the double weight of pain and dread nearly paralyzing—to see how badly Ronnie was injured. She wasn’t as strong as other vampires. Strength or not, it might already be too late if the creature had gone for her heart.

  Before I could move or find Ronnie—I’d barely even caught my breath—the creature was on me. Its claw wrapped around my throat and held me immobile against the asphalt. I tried to think past the rushing panic of choking, but I didn’t have anything with which to defend myself against this creature: my vision was becoming too spotted and double to accurately aim the silver spear inside my wristwatch, the wooden pen stake was useless against the Damned, and I couldn’t reach my cast for the silver nitrate spray. I couldn’t compete with it physically, and I didn’t have night blood to try to control it mentally.

  The creature tightened its grip. Blood from my bitten tongue pooled and spilled from my mouth as I choked.

  Harroway was dead. Dominic was dying. I’d lost Ronnie. Greta and Rowens were MIA. And I couldn’t scream for help. Even if I physically could, calling Sevris and Rafe into this bloodbath was a suicide mission, and I’d lost enough friends to these monsters. I’d lost nearly everything but my life, and now, I was about to lose that, too.

  No more weapons. No more allies. Under the pressure of the Damned’s crushing grip around my esophagus, this was the end. The creature raised its other claw and struck down in a hard, swift jab at my chest, aimed directly over my heart.

  I’d have screamed if I could, but I couldn’t even breathe.

  A second Damned appeared from thin air, which was obviously impossible, but in the way that Bex seemed to materialize from the shadows, the Damned was suddenly, incomprehensibly beside me, its own massive claw around the first creature’s wrist, blocking its strike.

  The first creature stared at the second, and although seeing past its fangs and scales to decipher facial expressions was difficult, I would swear that it stared at the second creature with shock. And that the second creature, with its saber-toothed fangs, grinned back.

  Taking advantage of its hesitation, the second creature used its other claw to rip four long gouges into its opponent’s chest.

  The injured creature howled. It released my neck to counterattack, and the moment the Damned released me, my protector drove it back with a frantic, selfless rage I’d only seen from mothers protecting their children. Disregarding its own safety, the second creature lunged between me and my attacker. It pinned the Damned on the asphalt with its powerful jaws and, with one mighty shake of its head, tore out its throat.

  Blood poured from the wound like a geyser, drenching the creature and showering me with its spray. I winced back, trying to protect my face from the spatter, but I could barely move. My throat was still convulsing as I relearned to breathe and swallow through the bruises.

  Ronnie’s face swam into view over me, and with the knowledge that she was on her feet and mobile, a tiny, clenched part of my heart relaxed. She looked panicked and rumpled, but otherwise untouched.

  She scanned my body, first with her eyes and then patting me down with her hands, and I realized she was looking for injuries on me, too.

  I waved her hands away. “Help me up,” I whispered. It sounded more like a croak than actual words, but Ronnie must have understood because she placed one hand under my back, the other holding my hands, and helped me sit up.

  The city somersaulted around me. Roads pirouetting with buildings. The sky twirled and twisted, and the ground rocked sideways. Ronnie’s hands tightened on my shoulders, keeping me upright. I closed my eyes for a moment, took a few deep breaths, and tried again. The world still hadn’t steadied, but i
t settled enough that I could focus on the scene in front of me without vomiting.

  The second creature, my protector, shook my attacker by its throat, nearly decapitating it. Small bits of flesh were flung out from the violence, and I swallowed, my stomach roiling again. Maybe vomiting wasn’t out of the question.

  “What the hell?” I whispered. Maybe the Damned weren’t as mindless as we all thought. First, Meredith was singled out in a targeted attack, and now this? A Damned vampire had attacked one of its own to protect me? None of this made any sense. The Damned were vicious, blood-thirsty, insatiable creatures incapable of thought or reason. Their attacks weren’t premeditated, and they weren’t capable of the depth of emotion necessary to risk their own safety in protection of another.

  Ronnie shook her head. “I promised to protect you. He obviously didn’t believe me.” She bit her lip. “Not that I was doing a great job.”

  The second creature turned its head toward us, and I froze. It had finished its assault on the Damned vampire and was coming for us next.

  Before I could give warning to Ronnie, before I could even brace myself, it snorted and turned back to its meal.

  I gaped.

  The second creature wasn’t interested in us at all. In fact, if I hadn’t known any better, I’d have said it had snorted at Ronnie. But worse than the creature being uninterested and having the capacity to understand language and the personality to snort derisively, almost worse than being choked to death and nearly having my heart ripped from my chest was what I saw pierced through the creature’s flat, pointy-tipped nose: a diamond-stud nose ring.

  Despite the creature’s protection, seeing that nose ring punched a hole through my chest and ripped out my bleeding heart.

  The creature was Nathan.

  “How—I don’t—” I stuttered, shaking my head as a wide canyon of hopelessness yawned inside me. “No,” I said, refusing to accept the horror in front of my eyes. “No!”