by Juliet Lyons
I squeeze harder, until my fingers knit together at the nape of her neck, my thumbs pressing down on her windpipe, but she only laughs—a bloodcurdling rumble that reminds me killing her is impossible. Her eyes pierce right through me, as if she can see into the depths of my soul, and when I loosen my grip a fraction, she reverses our positions, rolling over on top of me until I’m pinned to the ground like a butterfly in a case.
I struggle beneath her, clawing at her like a wild animal, but the super-strength has deserted me and it’s suddenly as it was that night many years ago, when I was lying powerless in my bed, the sickness in my veins smothered by her poison.
She tilts her head to one side, her scraggly black hair falling into my face. I feel as if I might suffocate in the foul stench of lilies and death. Finally, she says, “Here we are again, eh?”
My eyes bulge as I brace myself for the inevitable. I say a prayer for Silver, that she will live a long and happy life.
With one hand clamped around my neck, Anastasia uses her fangs to tear into the ivory flesh of her wrist. Droplets of black blood fall onto my face, but it’s only when she reaches down and tears my T-shirt open that I realize what she’s about to do. Taking a sharp, red fingernail, she slits open my chest. I gasp, red-hot pain searing through my body, as she holds her wrist to the wound, my blood mingling with hers.
She grins, a glittering, evil smile. “I have a penchant for taking things full circle, Logan,” she hisses, “and now you’ll die mine, just as you were born again mine.”
I writhe in agony as a greenish mist rises from the wound, her blood overpowering Ronin’s. Somehow this is worse than any ending I could have imagined—that in death I should become hers once more.
Her bony fingers tighten around my throat. “Any last words?”
I lie very still, looking past her into the sky. There are a few stars out, twinkling behind silvery wisps of cloud. The sirens I heard earlier are growing louder, and there is a blue light beginning to pulse beyond the darkness of the trees.
Anastasia frowns. “Oh dear. Looks like your friend with the machete arranged for some reinforcements.” She sighs. “Killing police officers is always rather difficult to cover up.”
The sound of car doors being flung open echoes off the houses, followed by the soft click of guns being cocked. She leaps to her feet, hauling me up by my neck and dangling me in front of her like a puppet. I struggle in vain to break free, my arms and legs thrashing beneath me. My teeth are gritted so tightly my fangs have cut my bottom lip, warm blood trickling down my chin. From this angle, I notice shadowy figures crouched by the wrought-iron fencing, surrounding the whole garden. If only guns could kill her.
A voice cuts through the night, spoken through some kind of megaphone. I scan the bushes and see a middle-aged gentleman in a long, beige trench coat crouching on our side of the fence. Brave man.
“Maria Bryant,” he says with a clipped British accent. “You are under arrest for crimes against humanity. Please release the hostage and put your hands in the air.”
If I wasn’t about to die, it might be funny.
Anastasia snorts in disgust, backing away from the police officers, dragging me toward the other side of the garden. To my amazement, the man in the beige overcoat rises and strides fearlessly toward us. In one hand is a giant megaphone, in the other, his Metropolitan Police badge.
When we reach the trees, we stop. Anastasia grunts and from the corner of my eye I catch a spark of light glinting on metal. She is holding Vincent’s machete. The one I flung earlier.
“I would rip your head off with my bare hands,” she whispers in my ear, “but I had a shellac manicure today, and it would be such a waste.”
“Do it,” I spit. “What the hell are you waiting for?”
“As you wish.”
She thrusts me forward and I fall to my knees in the mud. Gunshots whistle past my ears, but I can tell from Anastasia’s delighted cackle they missed. The brave police officer shouts something I don’t catch.
“Enjoy hell,” she hisses.
I see a flash of light as she lifts the weapon, hear its whisper as she swings it home. I close my eyes as it hits—cold metal slamming into the flesh at the nape of my neck—but as quickly as it strikes, it stops, going no farther. I fall forward into the damp earth.
My neck is burning, and when I open my eyes, a white-hot light is glowing around my neck.
My necklace—the one my mother left me, the one I’ve worn since the night my family deserted me—is glowing brightly. The chain erupts into shards of white light, the medallion as orange as the brightest sunset. What is happening?
I roll onto my back to face Anastasia, stunned to see that she’s burning with the same orange fire of my pendant. Shards of light rip out of her body, incinerating her from the inside out. As her glowing red eyes meet mine, she lifts a ragged hand to point to the pendant at my throat.
“Witches,” she says. Her voice is brittle and coarse. “Gypsy curse.”
As her words drift across to me, I hear voices on the wind, a familiar chanting I haven’t heard since I was young. The voice of my grandmother whispering a spell, and overlapping it, louder and desperately sad, my mother weeping, promising that although she must leave, she will always protect me, that I will always be her green-eyed boy.
I slide backward across the grass, tears pricking my eyes until I hit against something hard. I look up into the shocked face of the officer, and together we turn to stare at the burning inferno that is Anastasia.
Her face is now black and charred, an eerie banshee-like wail pouring from her throat. Then she explodes, her body obliterated as if someone lit a bomb beneath her. For one fleeting second, an image of my grandmother and mother appears in the flames, their kind faces gazing down at me with love. Then the blaze turns to smoke, and when that too fades, all that is left of the demon is a small, black crater in the ground.
The burning at my neck cools. I look down in time to see my necklace and its medallion crumble into black dust, a sudden gust of wind carrying it off on the salty air. Did my mother know this moment would come? All these years, I kept the pendant as a reminder, a good luck charm. Was it always intended to save my life?
Before I can procrastinate further, I’m struck by a spasm of pain.
The policeman bends over me. “Are you all right?”
I stare into his lined face as tiny bolts of electricity spark through me, my chest constricting, a burn flooding my body. I haven’t felt real human pain for so many years, it feels foreign, as if an alien has invaded me and is hacking my internal organs with knives.
“I think I’m having a heart attack,” I say, clutching my chest where my heart is pulsing hammer-like beneath my rib cage. Beating. I grab the collar of the man leaning over me. “I’m dying,” I whisper. “There’s something inside me.”
Then it hits me. I’m not dying at all. I’m living. I clap a hand to my chest, feeling the thud of my heart, loud and pounding under my shirt for the first time in nearly two centuries.
“I think I’m alive,” I say to the man who, from the baffled expression on his weathered face, clearly thinks I’m a lunatic. “But it’s impossible.” Ronin’s words to Silver replay in my mind: Ancients are next to impossible to destroy. I’ve never known one to die.
Is this what happens?
I begin to shiver violently. From across the garden, a medical team is rushing toward me. “I might have cholera,” I say to the tall, weary-looking man. “That’s what I almost died of. Tell them to treat me for that.”
My last thought before I drift into feverish unconsciousness is one of hope. Hope and Silver—a future together, hazy but as bright as a star in a pitch-black sky.
Chapter 24
Silver
I wake up disoriented in a white hospital bed, a strong smell of washed cotton, disinfectant, and sick
ness permeating my nostrils. Someone has removed my jacket and blouse, and I’m wearing a hospital gown with tiny blue diamonds. My arm is swathed in a bandage. I look down to see a ginger head of hair on the bed beside me, face buried in the starchy sheet.
“Ollie.”
He sits bolt upright. From the crystal-sharp look in his eyes, I can tell he wasn’t sleeping at all.
“Silver, don’t try to move again. Just stay still.” He rises from the seat, hands outstretched as if I’m some wild animal about to bolt for the door.
My mind is foggy. I know I’m supposed to be somewhere else—Dad’s house with Logan?
Logan.
“Where’s Logan?” Memories flood in—Anastasia, the garden, a blond vampire bending over me on the grass, and a hazier memory: Logan kissing me on the lips, telling me he loves me.
Ollie pushes a button by the bed. “I don’t know anything. I arrived at your house to say sorry for being a judgmental jerk and the street was swarming with cars. An officer asked if I knew you, and I told them I was your brother—they never tell non-family members anything, do they?—then a short guy in a beige overcoat let me go with him to the hospital. Inspector Davies, he said his name was. He was all right for a copper. He asked for the score in the West Ham match.”
“Ollie. Logan?”
A nurse comes in, smiling as if I’m her favorite patient. I resist the urge to drag her onto the bed by her fluorescent-pink pocket watch.
“You’re a lot calmer,” she says, smoothing down a corner of my bedcovers. “We had to give you a sedative when you first arrived. Screaming your head off, you were. Gave Darren our porter a cut lip.”
I reach for her wrist but narrowly miss. “I need to see a police officer. A tall, blond man who looks like a movie star, a vampire. You must have seen him? He was there in the garden.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who looks like that. But I’ll see if I can find out.” She tucks the blanket in tight before leaving the room, and I waste no time in kicking it back off.
Ollie moves swiftly to the opposite side of the bed to block the doorway. “Silver, you need to calm down.”
“You calm down, Ollie,” I hiss, tears pricking the backs of my eyes. I wrench the sheets off, about to jump out of bed, when I notice the gown barely covers my butt. “Where the hell are my clothes?”
Ollie opens his mouth to answer when a shadow falls across the doorway. Sergeant Davies ducks into the room, and I pull the covers over my bare legs again. I stare at him, half expecting to find answers scrawled across his face.
“What’s going on? What happened to Logan?” I demand. “If you don’t give me answers, I’ll rip this hospital apart.”
He and Ollie exchange one of those maddening looks men give each other when a woman is screaming and they think she’s crazy.
Davies slips into a chair beside the bed. “The bloke in the garden is alive. He’s being treated now.”
I sit bolt upright. “Treated for what? Vampires don’t get sick. They’re either alive or they’re dead. Which is it?”
Davies sucks in a breath before saying, “He’s very much alive, I assure you.”
I slump back against the pillows, a hot wave of relief rolling through my veins so intensely that white dots appear in my vision. He’s alive. Logan is alive. “What happened? Who was the other vampire? He said he was an inspector.”
Davies stares pointedly at Ollie, who is about to sit down in a chair at the bottom of the bed.
“Oh,” Ollie says, standing up and shoving hands into his pockets. “I’ll wait outside.”
After Ollie leaves, Davies turns to face me. “That was Inspector Vincent Ferrer. It’s a long story, but he’s recently joined our special division. We first suspected you were in danger after finding out what happened last night on your date. You see, after you gave us the name of Dolores Gericke, we were able to match a criminal ring from the Victorian era to Maria Bryant, or Anastasia as she appears to be known. Exactly the sort of information we’ve been looking for since we set up the operation.” He smiles, leaning back in the chair and steepling his fingers as if he’s some sort of mastermind genius. All that’s missing is a white Persian cat sitting on his knee. When he clocks my less-than-impressed expression, he quickly continues. “Gerhard Johnson belonged to that gang for a time. When we discovered how the date ended, we realized there was a chance Maria Bryant could come after you.”
I raise a hand. “Wait. Are you saying you knew all along he was a murderous villain?”
The detective fidgets in his seat. “Not until after we found out what had happened at the restaurant. If we’d known beforehand, we would have made sure you were safe.”
“How thoughtful,” I hiss sarcastically. “Or maybe you would have let me go anyway. You were never going to reopen my mother’s case at all, were you?”
He looks away, eyes darting around the room. “It’s always difficult to predict how these types of investigations will go,” he mutters.
“How did you know what happened to the sleazebag anyway?”
He sinks back into his seat. “Inspector Ferrer has connections. When you dropped the phone earlier, we sent out a unit straightaway. Vincent got there faster than the rest of us.”
I shiver, wanting answers but at the same time afraid of what they might be. “What happened to the woman? The ancient. Did she get away?”
Davies frowns. “She’s gone,” he says as though he can hardly believe it.
“Escaped?”
He scratches his balding head. “No, gone. Destroyed. Left a black hole in the ground. She burned to a cinder. We don’t understand it ourselves yet.”
“Is Logan burned too?”
His eyes flick away. I can tell there’s something he’s not telling me. “No, not burned. But he’s receiving treatment. I can’t say any more than that.”
“Is he in intensive care?”
“I’m not sure, but I can check with Burke. He was there too when Bryant went up in smoke.”
I nod. “Anastasia killed my mother—Maria Bryant as you know her.”
His eyes widen. “We will, of course, need to formally question you about the events leading up to tonight.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “Of course you will. Make sure you squeeze every last drop of information out of me.”
Davies stands. “I’ll ask Burke about the young man. I am sorry to hear about your mother.”
A sob rises in my throat like bile, and I turn away from him to the dark square of window on the opposite wall, the faint outline of high-rises and skyscrapers making a shadow against the cool-blue horizon. “Just find out about Logan, please,” I mutter.
By the time I turn back, he’s gone.
* * *
Shortly after Sergeant Davies leaves, Ollie appears back in the room, Dad and Sheila trailing behind him.
“I called them,” he explains sheepishly, staring at his shoes as I glare at him.
Typical Ollie—always trying to do the right thing.
“Dad, I’m fine,” I say, bracing myself for a barrage of questions as he perches on the bed, hugging me tightly. When he pulls away, I notice he’s still wearing his tartan slippers. Sheila, on the other hand, is fully dressed and carrying a bright-blue cooler bag. I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Whatever the situation, Sheila always finds time to make sandwiches.
She pats her hair as she gives the room a critical once-over. “I’ve heard the meals are terrible in these places, so I brought food from home.”
Her gaze drifts to my bandaged arm and I lift it up to show them. “Just fractured apparently,” I say as Dad pales.
“Ah,” he says, looking relieved. “No acrobatics for a while then.”
I smile for the first time in what feels like forever. “Actually,” I say, eyes fixed on my father’s soft-gray eyes,
“I wouldn’t mind talking to Dad alone.”
Sheila sighs, looking across at Ollie. “Do you still like cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, Oliver? Or are you one of those gluten-free types now?”
Ollie gives her his best boy-next-door smile. “Nah, not me. I’d love a cheese-and-pickle sandwich, Sheila.”
Sheila smiles, flushing pink, as they both retreat into the corridor, Ollie shutting the door behind them. I turn to Dad, who sinks onto a chair beside the bed, twisting his thin hands nervously.
“I know what happened to Mum,” I start, the words sticking to the back of my throat.
His face goes slack, the light disappearing from his eyes. “What?” he asks in a voice little more than a squeak.
I pull myself up straight against the pillows, reaching to take one of his hands in mine, and tell him everything. From the V-Date setups and the police right down to what I learned from Ronin earlier today—how Stephen Clegg reappeared when I was nine years old and Mum ran away. How a powerful overlord finally killed him and ended up paying the ultimate price. I leave Logan out of it for now. There are some things he doesn’t need to know yet. My being in love with a vampire is one of them.
“Don’t cry, Dad,” I whisper, as his face crumples, tears trickling into his wrinkles. I lean forward to wrap an arm around his shoulders. Suddenly, he feels frail and birdlike, as if he’s no longer my parent but a child.
Eventually, Sheila trails back into the room and Dad tells her snatches of the things I said. Watching Sheila comfort him, arms wrapped around his shoulders, I wonder for the first time in my life if maybe I’ve judged her too harshly.
A tall doctor with a mop of brown hair strolls in, looking surprised to have stumbled onto such an emotional scene. He pushes black-framed glasses up the bridge of his long nose. “I’m just going to check Miss Harris’s arm, and then she can be discharged.”