Silence.
No explosive gun fire the way I’d expected—there was just a boat load of nothingness.
Pulling my own Glock free, I aimed it at the nearest rotted person and pulled the trigger. The bullet jammed, the trigger making one pathetic click as I squeezed it over and over before finally admitting defeat.
What was left of the dark-haired woman grabbed me, her flesh sliding away from the bones in her fingers, her nails snapping off as she struggled to get a grip on me. In her eyes, I could see fear, and it rolled my stomach.
Christ, she was aware—she knew what was happening to her, the same way the others had, but at least in their eyes, I’d just seen the blank stare of whatever spirit had possessed them.
“Fuck, the guns aren’t working!” Nic roared, using the butt of his gun to fend off the nearest person clawing at him.
The dark-haired woman clawed at my face, her face twisting as she mouthed, “Help me,” into my face.
There was nothing I could do for her; her body was way too far gone and I knew what would happen to her the second I crushed the invading spirit within her. I did the only thing I could do, grabbing her neck and head with both hands and simultaneously shoving my power into her rotted remains.
The spirit twisted in the grip of my power, fighting back as I crushed it. I jerked my arms, wrenching her neck to the side as bile crept up my throat. The human horror disappeared from her gaze the second I did it and the spirit screamed in frustration. At least she wouldn’t feel the next part.
My power wound its way around the spirit inside and crushed it completely, the body going limp in my grip. I let it drop to the ground, trying not to focus on the fact that it was already beginning to swell.
Glancing in Nic’s direction, I watched him hack through two shambling corpses that attacked him, his machete blade slicing through their swollen bodies easily.
“We need to get inside, we need to find Zeck,” I said, shouting to Nic over the sound of shuffling feet.
He nodded, his expression grim as he moved towards me. I didn’t wait for him and, spotting the break in the horde, I raced forward, crashing through the front door of the casino as another body careened into mine from behind. His weight rode me to the floor and air rushed out of my lungs as he crushed me against the scorched carpeting.
Rolling to the side, I knocked him from my back and hopped to my feet before he had the chance to come at me for a second time.
“Dex,” I said. The second I saw him, his eyes were grey and unfocussed, the skin on his face slack and sagging, but from what I could see, there didn’t seem to be any visible signs of rot.
He didn’t react to his own name, instead lunging towards me, his movements clumsy and uncoordinated. Whatever Zeck had summoned didn’t have the best command of the human body and part of me couldn’t help but wonder why.
“Dex, no!” I said, sidestepping his wild grab for me. How the hell was I supposed to get him to hold still long enough for me to give him the antidote?
Pulling the bottle free of my jacket, I lunged at him. If I couldn’t reason with him, then I had no choice but to use force against him. Crashing into his chest, it was my turn to ride him to the carpet. He wrapped his arms around my chest and squeezed, making each breath harder and harder to take.
Tugging the cork from the bottle, I leaned forward and jammed the top of it into his mouth, the blue liquid splashing against his lips. He drank greedily and his grip on my chest disappeared as he attempted to grab the bottle from my fingers.
I whipped it away, sliding the cork back into place as Dex growled at me. Rolling away out of his reach, I climbed to my feet and watched him. He flipped over and crawled towards me, his spine bowing upwards as the blue liquid began to work.
“Amber, look out!” Nic shouted, his words drowned out by the sound of Dex’s scream of agony.
I moved, but I was far too slow, my attention caught up in Dex’s movements as he bucked and heaved on the floor. Pain burned through my side and I screamed, the sound ripping from my throat. Agony roared in my body, every nerve ending on fire as the blade bit deeper in through my back.
It was a pain I recognised from when I’d walked the scene back at the River Gardens; agony like this wasn’t something you could wipe from your memory so easily. I took a shuddering step forward, but a firm hand on my shoulder halted me from moving off the blade.
“Don’t stop looking now, dear; you’ll miss the show…” Zeck whispered against my ear, and a wave of nausea rolled through me.
Dex coughed and choked, his body heaving as he started to retch, his fingers digging into the burned carpet. The grey smoke that I’d watched pour down his throat spluttered out through his mouth and into the air. He choked and retched, forcing it out until it pooled around him.
Zeck whistled low and the grey smoke whipped up towards us. I closed my eyes, sealing my lips shut, but Zeck twisted the blade in my side and I screamed again. The sound was instantly silenced and I felt the spirit force its way down my throat. Struggling to suck in a breath, I jerked and spluttered until the sound of static filled my ears.
The pain I’d felt seemed very far away, like the constant, dull ache of a tooth on the verge of catastrophe. Nic stormed towards me, but it wasn’t me he wrapped his arms around; my body wasn’t my own.
The spirit inside me probed at the power coiled in my core, but there was no response; my power was my own and there was nothing on this earth that could control it but me.
Heat spread across my chest and my body twitched. I was only vaguely aware of the movement. Being so detached made it all the more difficult to have any real thoughts, everything seemed to just run on instinct.
The heat turned to a fiery rage that flooded my veins and Nic’s grip on me faltered. I wanted to cry out to him, to ask him what was going on, but my mouth refused to cooperate. The demon mark flared to life and I wasn’t just instinct anymore. I was pain and fury and everything in between. The spirit twisted and fought against the mark, but the demon-infused gift had been with me longer; it had become a part of me and it wasn’t willing to let me go.
The world went black, my vision fading as my lungs ceased to expand and my heart slowed to a crawl.
At least if I died, it would be knowing the feel of my own body.
Chapter 31
Air rushed in my lungs, pain and the overwhelming urge to eat the biggest burger I could get my hands on.
“Breathe, goddamn it!” Nic’s voice filtered down to me and my heart sank. Was I still possessed? Was that why it sounded as though I was buried at the bottom of a well?
Fighting my way to the surface, I surged upwards. Every inch of my body felt as though it had been well and truly abused and beaten. And maybe, in a way, it had. Pressing my hand to my side, my fingers came away warm and sticky. That bit hadn’t been a part of my imagination.
“Where is he?” I said, struggling to sit up against Nic’s arms.
“He ran when you went demonic…,” There was no hint of laughter or sarcasm in Nic’s voice, and I waited for him to smile, but it never came.
“What do you mean when I went demonic?”
“I mean full on black eyes, deep voice, the full exorcist…. For a second, I thought maybe I was going to have to….” Nic trailed off and dipped his gaze toward the floor.
“You’d have done what needed to be done,” I finished for him as I crawled onto my hands and knees and then pushed up from the floor.
“We need to get him. There’s no way he can be allowed to get away with what he’s done. And anyway, there’s still all of that to deal with,” I said, gesturing to the horde that was now wandering around outside the locked door.
Sirens split the air and I spotted the telltale black Elite vans as they pulled up outside the casino. Trust Jon to trace my call.
Stumbling forward, I paused next to Dex, who was sprawled across the floor unmoving.
“He’s still alive, just utterly out for the count,” N
ic offered, as though he knew what I was thinking.
“We still need to find Victoria.” I didn’t wait for any answer; instead, I moved forward, the wound in my side burning like a son of a bitch with each step I took.
Pushing through the double doors that led into the main casino floor, I paused. Victoria lay on the stage near the front of the room and Zeck stood over her. From my position, I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not; all I knew for sure was that she wasn’t moving.
“Freeze!” I said as Zeck lifted his blade into the air. The tip of it glistened red in the fluorescent lights overhead.
He didn’t look at me, bring the knife down towards Victoria, his arm moving in a blurred arc. Without thinking, I raised my own arm, power flooding the room like warm water. It crackled along the edges of my skin and I could just make it out as it danced along the tips of my fingers. Calling my power had never been this easy before; something had clearly changed, but I had no idea what it was, and considering it was now my power holding Zeck’s arm suspended above his head and preventing it from plunging the blade into Victoria’s chest, I wasn’t going to question the change too closely.
“You should be dead,” Zeck called over his shoulder.
“Yeah, well, I don’t die that easy,” I answered, using the time I’d bought to close the distance between me and the stage.
Zeck strained against my magic, pushing and pressing as though testing my limitations. I could feel him brush it against it, much the same way a cat could wind its way around my legs, all soft fur and warm purrs. It was a front. Whatever power Zeck possessed wasn’t soft and gentle, I was certain of that; I’d felt it when he’d plunged the blade into me….
Maybe it wasn’t Zeck at all. Was it possible that the power all came from the blade? I wouldn’t know until I got closer, but there had to be a reason Lily wanted it.
Reaching the edge of the stage, I tried to split my concentration between Zeck and Victoria. She lay on her back, her eyes shut, with thick, black thread criss-crossing her lips and eyes.
Hopping up onto the stage, my gaze darted up to Zeck and he smiled at me, a cruel twisted grin that told me just how much he was truly enjoying the situation.
“What have you done?” I said, reaching down and placing my hand on Victoria’s neck. Her pulse beat a tattoo against her delicate skin—or, at least, I hoped it was her heartbeat and not something incubating inside her.
“She’s the perfect gateway, immortal and strong….” Zeck’s words made no sense and I took a small thread of my power and pushed it into Victoria.
There was nothing but a black, sucking void, and I planted my hands on the stage, as though physically anchoring myself to the spot could stop me from falling headlong into whatever dwelled inside her.
The sound of ripping fabric filled the air and I gathered my power back around myself as Zeck’s arm dropped to his side, the blade dropping from his grip. That was the problem with being human and losing circulation.
Victoria’s eyes opened the stitches tearing away, but what looked up at me wasn’t human, the eyes were black and glassy. She blinked up at me and I expected to see nothing but the blank stare of one of the possessed staring back at me. Instead, I was met with recognition.
“No, no, no, you can’t do this, it’s not how it works!” Zeck said, backing up across the stage as Victoria pushed up onto her feet.
She moved with a grace I hadn’t noticed before, her joints rolling as though held together with pure magic. She shivered, a complete rolling of her skin and her black hair shimmered down her back in a long wave. I watched her skin turn blue before it ran with purple lines that reminded me of a tattoo of vines. She glanced over her shoulder and her eyes were still completely black, not a hint of white, just a bleak darkness that seemed to extend all the way down into my very soul.
Her black hair flowed around her as though it had a life of its own and she stalked toward Zeck, each step deliberate; the movements of a predator.
“Wait,” I said, calling out to her, whatever “she” was, because I was completely lost.
“Wait?” She rolled the word around her tongue as though it was a foreign concept.
“We need to bring him in alive, we need to know what he was up to, how many others there are.”
Victoria seemed to weigh my words and then shook her head. I caught myself staring at the mass of hair that shimmered across her shoulders and back. Dragging myself back from the edge, I blinked hard; the sound of Zeck choking made it easier for me to snap free of the glamour she’d used to distract me.
Whipping out with my power, I let it slap into her, but she barely even registered the hit, the full extent of her intention focussed on Zeck as she lifted him into the air as though he was nothing more than an inconvenience.
“You can’t kill him,” I repeated.
“I can and I will; if I don’t, he will expose us both, and that is something neither of us can tolerate, Amber.” Her voice was strange, deeper, huskier, and it raised goose bumps across my arms.
“We can’t do it for selfish reasons….”
She glanced at me from over her shoulder. Staring into her eyes, I saw a combination of pure innocence and utter evil. Neither good nor truly bad, she had the kind of eyes you could fall into and go completely insane within. It was her eyes that reminded me of the grey-coloured spirits, neither good nor evil; a perfect balance of the two.
The sound of Zeck’s neck as it snapped brought the world rushing back in a punishing wave. Victoria let his body drop to the stage before turning to face me once more. She shuddered, her skin shifting back in a wave, the black bottomless eyes the last thing to disappear.
“What have you done?” I said, racing across the stage to where Zeck lay dead.
“I killed him. He needed to die, Amber.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make, that’s not what we do!”
“It is when the choice is between your certain death or survival. Look at all the lives he ended; can you honestly say the world won’t be a better place without him?”
She was right, the world was far better off without him, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
“What are you? What were those things?”
“Changeling. He was using the spirits of the Fae who had crossed over, trapping them in limbo and twisting them so they became the destructive, possessing force.”
“But why?”
The sound of shouting in the hall cut me short.
“Amber, I’ll keep your secret if you keep mine. No one can know what I am.”
I stared down at Zeck’s broken body. He was the reason Graham was on life support…, “Fine, but you owe me an explanation.”
Victoria nodded as the main door into the casino burst open and Anthony strode in, the wide grin on his face telling me that the threat outside was no more.
“Cavalry’s here, ladies, no need to panic….”
Victoria shot him a withering look and hurried down from the stage, leaving me to explain everything that had happened. Crouching down next to Zeck, I scooped up the blade and hid it in my weapons belt along with my athame. What the Elite didn’t know couldn’t hurt them, and I needed time to contemplate Lily’s offer.
“What happened to this guy? Did you and the newbie combine your awesome girl power to kick his ass?” Anthony asked as he climbed up onto the stage.
“Trust me when I say you really don’t want to know…” I said, exhaustion washing through me, my shoulders drooping as I picked my way over to the edge of the stage.
“Hey, don’t go too far, going to need statements from everyone present…,”
I didn’t answer him. I already knew the drill; it would be hours before I could escape, go home, and lick my wounds in the quiet of my own apartment. Stalking away from the stage, I tried to control my thoughts and everything I’d learned. The time to digest would come later—for now, I would have to console myself with the knowledge that my secret was still mine to keep.
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For now, at least.
Chapter 32
Sitting on the side of the road, I watched the Elite mill around. The forensic team had already arrived and I’d spotted Callum heading into the casino. Part of me wanted to see his reaction when he realised it was Zeck, but I was too tired to bother moving.
My cell phone buzzed and I tugged it free. Graham’s number flashed across the screen. Scrambling with the phone, I nearly hung up before I could get it to work properly.
“Graham?”
“Amber, what have you done?” He was hoarse, but it was him; the censure in his voice wasn’t something Lily could master.
“Nothing, yet…” I said.
“She was here babbling about some blade; she wants it…. It’s the only reason I’m awake. The doctors are all hailing it a miracle.”
I laughed, the sound bubbling up from the back of my throat, causing my shoulders to relax. He was alive; she’d kept her word.
Of course, that meant I’d have to keep mine, and the voice in the back of my head told me that would be one giant mistake.
“Graham, you have no idea how close you came; it’s a miracle….” My voice cracked and the sound of Graham sighing filtered down the line.
“We can discuss it another time. I just wanted you to be the first to know I was awake….”
“And you don’t know how glad I am.”
“So, this is where you’re hiding out.” Nic’s voice cut through my conversation and I stared up at him as he towered over me.
“I’ve got to go, Graham, but as soon as I’ve washed the crime scene off me, I’ll come in to see you.”
“Right, you take care, Morgan, and don’t do anything until we’ve discussed it.” The line went dead. Utterly typical of Graham; having a near death experience hadn’t changed his inability to end a call with “goodbye”.
Blood Craft: The Shadow Sorceress Book Two Page 17