by L. D. Rose
Covered in sheet metal, the door had once been painted white, but it now looked a sick yellow. At the bottom, a decayed sticker read ‘EXIT’ in faded green, with a little stick figure running into an open box. Valerie pointed the flashlight at the ceiling and found the broken red-orange exit sign.
This was it.
She stuck the handle of the Maglite between her teeth, tasting aluminum as she reloaded her Beretta, popping a fresh clip into it. She palmed the Maglite and turned the door’s stainless steel handle, peering inside. The cramped vestibule spread out before her, the aged steel mesh of the freight elevator glinting back at her. Thankfully, the elevator sat at ground level, sparing her the need to call it.
Closing the door behind her, Valerie crouched and lifted the mesh, sending out a cacophony of metal grinds and screeches. She cringed at the horrendous amount of noise, but she kept moving, stepping onto the diamond grate floor as she yanked the mesh down behind her. Listening intently, she waited for a response to the racket she’d made, but heard nothing beyond the blood hammering in her ears. Finally, she eased over to the operating panel and flipped the switch.
The elevator shuddered, machinery groaning. Valerie backed up until she hit the opposite mesh wall, stabilizing herself as the platform ascended. She tried not to think of the pulleys snapping, plummeting her to her death within a decrepit skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. Instead, she focused on the whirring vestibules of the upper floors, the huge painted numbers on the walls flashing at her like a rising timer.
Her ears popped, ascending through the thirties, the forties, the fifties. The elevator groaned louder and louder as it propelled skyward, causing a fine sheen of sweat to break out over her body. She prayed she would make it—only three more floors—fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one . . .
Sixty-one.
Valerie hit the switch on the panel prematurely, and the elevator stopped about two feet short of the landing, but she didn’t give a damn. She quickly pulled up the mesh door, the cab rocking precariously as she climbed onto the landing and got to her feet. She glanced back at the elevator as it continued to protest, but it stayed put.
She took a deep breath, once, twice, until the tremble in her body disappeared. Swallowing against her pulse as she clicked off the Maglite and lifted her Beretta, Valerie opened the door to the Chrysler building’s renowned gargoyle floor.
Either her eyes had adjusted or there was light pollution coming from somewhere, because the darkness wasn’t as complete up here. The obscenely loud roar of the helicopter’s engine and its whipping rotors made it seem as if the bird sat directly on the balcony. A fresh dose of panic spiked Valerie’s blood, urging her to run, but that would be stupid and foolish. If she got herself killed, all of this would be for naught.
The shattered glass panels of two offices stretched out before her. She carefully stepped onto the carpeted floor, leaving the elevator door open to keep from making any more noise. Maybe the helicopter had drowned out the racket she’d made coming up here. Sure, it was wishful thinking, but she had to keep optimistic or she wasn’t going to survive this.
Valerie sidled through another narrow corridor of aged white walls, recalling the floor’s layout to be one giant square with a solid center. On the lookout for anything that moved as the helicopter’s roar amplified, she followed the sound like a moth to a flame, knowing wherever she ended up, she might very well burn herself alive.
The next two offices had solid walls with plain doorways. She checked the closest one cautiously, the process tedious but necessary. Empty. It wasn’t until she neared the second office when the scent hit her with the force of a wrecking ball.
Blood. Blood, frankincense, and myrrh.
Blaze.
Her tremors returned in full force, but Valerie kept a firm grip on her weapon as she pressed her back against the wall near the jamb. The smell grew thicker, burning her nose, scorching her lungs, and searing her gut. If she could smell it this strongly, there must be a lot of it. She braced herself for the worst as she finally turned and looked into the room.
Blaze was propped up in a metal chair, facing her, hogtied and bound in chains. White light filtered in from the shattered wall of balcony windows, coming from the helicopter overhead. It illuminated his hunched outline; his head bowed and chin resting against his chest.
Covered in blood, his throat gleamed black from a horrific wound. He didn’t move, didn’t stir, his body totally lifeless. God, he didn’t even breathe. Despair and dread twisted her gut into knots. Horror sank into her soul like a leech’s fangs, sucking the life from her as two words repeated over and over again in her mind.
He’s dead.
A whimper escaped her throat. The helicopter’s roar withered to white static, the world falling away to leave only Blaze . . .
His pained expression as she slammed the door in his face. What he’d whispered through that door, words he thought she didn’t hear, but goddamn it, she did.
I love you.
And now he was gone, the evidence right there before her eyes.
A sob swelled in her chest as she stumbled into the room, her Beretta weighing a thousand pounds. She reached for him, desperate to touch him, needing to make sure the nightmare was real, that this was it, it was over, he’s gone and you’re never getting him back—
Then a freight train crashed into her.
Her Beretta went flying as she hit the wall, her spine cracking against wood before her head followed suit like a high striker at a carnival. Red and white stars burst before her eyes, but she didn’t have time to recover before she was airborne again, slapping into the opposite wall hard and collapsing to the floor. Her brain finally circuited the pain from the rest of her body, and it was terrific. Her hip and shoulder felt as if they’d exploded. Shattered, dislocated. Maybe both.
Valerie gasped for air, each breath sending a fresh wave of pain through her; the familiar agony of broken ribs. She tried to move, her limbs flailing in the dark, the room spinning. Bile burned the back of her throat from the intense nausea churning in her stomach, the threat of unconsciousness hovering at her periphery like a shark circling its prey.
“You think you can save him?” a rumbling voice bellowed. Her scrambled brain distorted its pitch and tone into something nasty.
Must be what the devil sounds like.
Cyrus. Who else could it be?
A powerful hand cuffed her ankle and dragged her across the carpet, sending another terrific jolt of pain through her and yanking a shriek from her throat. A big boot stomped on her knee, twisted it, setting her entire leg on fire. She would never forget the sound of her bones cracking, of the shards tearing through her flesh.
Tears burst from her eyes as she feebly tried to reach for something, anything. Struggling to focus her bleary vision on her attacker, all she saw was a shadowed behemoth looming over her.
Potent fear surged through her when he pulled her knife from her boot. The blade winked as he cut the strap of her M4. Kicking the gun away, he chuckled wickedly, the sound straight out of a horror movie. She tried to blow out his knee with her good leg, but he grabbed it and buried the blade in her thigh.
Valerie screamed as a new kind of pain tore into her and she blindly reached for the hilt. He yanked the knife out, spraying her blood into the black air, and brought the blade to his mouth. Her vision cleared enough to reveal the monster licking bloodied silver, his tongue a pale pink serpent in a midnight face. With eyes like volcanic glass in his dark skull, maybe he was the devil after all.
“Mmm.” Cyrus let out a sick groan as he brought the knife to her leg and sliced open the fabric of her pants, edging the blade toward her pelvis. “So sweet, so addictive, like candy. I can see why he couldn’t resist.”
Terror flooded her, so profound it shoved the pain into the background as she struggled to
evade him. He laughed maliciously, his lukewarm hand clamping her inner thigh, brushing against the mark. She fought harder—bleeding, broken and all—pushing past the pain no matter how loudly her body railed at her to stop.
Pure, unadulterated rage suddenly erupted inside her, as if the center of her body was a tank of gasoline that had burst into flames. When something shifted in her periphery, she knew the anger wasn’t her own.
Blaze.
He lifted his head, his glazed eyes smoldering, his beautiful face caked with blood. He’s alive. Relief crashed over her in a tidal wave, momentarily washing all other emotion away.
“Blaze—” Valerie uttered, but her words were choked off as Cyrus clapped a hand around her throat and squeezed.
“No!” Blaze roared, his voice harsh, raw, a sound that shook her bones. She was airborne again as Cyrus lifted her high, strangling the life out of her. She gasped for air, clawing at the leech’s thick forearm with her only good limb, struggling desperately to breathe. The edges of her vision went black, color splintering across her eyes like a cracked windshield.
Cyrus bared his teeth, showing her the longest fangs she’d ever seen. “Say goodbye, hybrid.”
Blaze screamed over and over, fighting furiously against his binds. Valerie hardly heard him as Cyrus’s grip grew hotter, as if he’d wrapped an iron around her throat and plugged it in.
This is how Elena felt.
As she stared into the obsidian eyes of the devil, the beautiful voice of a child whispered against her skull, the voice of her long dead sister.
Vally, use the aspen.
The foul smell of burning flesh invaded her nostrils, a smell that had infiltrated Elena’s apartment, had polluted the sky from a burning dumpster, and had once emanated from a smoldering vampire in her backyard. Valerie didn’t feel anything as she lifted her bad arm and clutched her vest pocket. Slowly, the pain amplified, accelerating faster and faster, giving her the strength to tear the pocket open as the syringes fell into her clawed hand. She could no longer tell the difference between Blaze’s screams or her own, but if she didn’t do this, he would never survive.
As for her, well, she was already dead.
Blaze tipped over in his chair sideways and hit the floor, still struggling to break free. Cyrus turned to look at him, giving Valerie the precious few seconds of distraction she needed. Moving faster than she ever thought possible, she lifted the syringes to her mouth and bit off the caps. Her throat yielded to the heat as skin melted into muscle, muscle melted into cartilage, cartilage melted into bone. Cyrus brought his attention back on her, his demonic eyes widening, but it was already too late. With one final life-ending surge of adrenaline, Valerie buried both syringes in his jugular and pushed the plungers home.
Go to hell, you motherfucker.
Then she was falling—falling, falling, falling—like she had when she and Elise used to leap into the huge piles of leaves in the backyard, or when they’d jump on their beds like trampolines. The way she’d fallen when Blaze touched her for the first time with love in his opalescent eyes.
Strong arms caught her and the scent of sage tickled her nose, one of the only senses still connected to her brain. Something filled her, something magnificent and indescribable, something that doused the fire in her throat like ice-cold water, taking away her pain and leaving her numb, soothed, and relieved.
“I’ve got you,” a familiar voice murmured, coming from everywhere, all at once. The voice of an angel. “You’re going to be all right.”
Then oblivion wrapped its warm blanket around her.
Valerie slipped into a heavy, glorious sleep that finally gave her peace.
TWENTY-TWO
When Blaze opened his eyes, he found himself staring at the marble ceiling of his bedroom. Awareness slowly surfaced, his mind still submerged in the dark ocean of a drug-induced sleep. Neurons began to fire, making the connection of home.
I’m home.
The soft whir of central air was the only sound he heard, giving him a vague sense of déjà vu. Sunlight filtered through the half-drawn curtains of the picture window. The ethereal glow of those warm rays magnified the floating dust motes, making them look like tiny dark stars in his vision.
Jasmine drifted to his nose, the scent faint and sweet, along with the sterile smells of medical paraphernalia. Underlying it all was the faded stench of coagulated blood.
Home. Sunlight. Jasmine.
Blood.
Then it all came rushing back to him in a tidal wave of emotion and memory, yanking his awareness straight out of that serene ocean and leaving him gasping for air.
He sat bolt upright, eyes wide and chest heaving as he looked down at himself. He was on his bed, bare-chested and covered in a thin sheet. The tungsten carbide chains were gone and pain no longer ruled his body. His hands had been washed, along with most of his exposed skin, but he smelled the tang of his own blood. He lifted his forearm to his throat, where he still had some semblance of sensation. He found no mark, no wound, nothing but the scars that had always been there.
Suddenly aware of the body stretched out beside him, Blaze jerked his head around and met Kasen’s incandescent eyes, staring back at him from the opposite side of the bed.
Hovering over Valerie’s body.
Blaze ceased breathing when he looked upon her quiescent form, arranged on her back with her head tilted away from him. She too had been stripped to her underwear, her bra exposed with the sheet resting at her waist. Tubes ran in and out of her left arm, the one she’d once broken on a mission with JJ. The same one she’d used to deliver Cyrus his deathblow.
That arm saved my life.
Her chest rose and fell in deep slumber, and he could almost hear her heart beating steadily against her ribcage. His lungs burned for air, and when he finally forced himself to look at her throat, he let out a sound he barely recognized, a cross between a gasp and a cry of utter relief.
Healed. The vulnerable line of her throat, the shape of her thin neck muscles, her carotid pulse, all there, all normal, with no traces of death left behind. Blaze reached for her, an instinct that was still second nature to him, even though he couldn’t feel anything in his hands.
“—Blaze. Look at me.”
Kasen spoke to him. His eyes slid to his brother as blood roared in his ears, his own heart battering in his chest. Images of the past twenty-four hours warred in his mind, fighting for center stage, and he tried to push them all away to no avail.
“How’re you feeling?” Kasen offered a smile, albeit wary.
The vision of Cyrus collapsing to the floor burst before Blaze’s eyes. He’d watched the leech die as he lay broken on that rotted carpet, gurgling sickly and foaming at the mouth with two empty syringes sticking out of his neck. Chimola’s demonic eyes had rolled into the back of his head, his big body seizing and convulsing as the aspen sucked the life out of him . . . Blaze had taken it all in.
Then the vampire’s color drained from him as his black soul seeped through the floor and returned to the hell it’d come from.
Blaze had witnessed the end of Cyrus Chimola, and it didn’t matter because Valerie’s terror, struggling in Chimola’s grip, trumped all. The smell of her burning skin as that monster used Blaze’s own element against her. His heart shattering into pieces as his world came crashing down around him in a tempest of pure agony. His soul, tearing right down the middle because half of it was hers.
She plugged the holes, stitched the wounds, mended him, revived him, made him feel something close to human again. Without her, he was only half a man, a hollow shadow, a fucking monster doomed to walk the earth alone for all eternity.
And now here she was, beside him, alive, her sweet scent in his nose, her warmth radiating against him, her breath like music to his ears.
“Blaze�
��” Kasen prodded.
“Fine,” he uttered, his voice stuffed with gravel, his throat raw. He must’ve been screaming for a very long time. “I’m fine. Just fine.”
Just fine.
“I’m going to say three words and I want you to repeat them in a few minutes,” his brother said, sounding as if he were miles away. “Apple, table, penny. Say them now.”
“Apple, table, penny,” Blaze repeated, feeling surreal. Fear slithered in his gut that he would wake up any moment now in the bowels of Miami, his body served up and flayed open, his mind shelled out and emptied, his soul having leapt over that balcony and into the night in search of his dead woman.
My woman. She’d saved his life by nearly sacrificing her own.
“Follow my finger with your eyes,” Kasen continued as he slowly drew an ‘H’ in the air. Blaze did as he was told and Kasen nodded in satisfaction. “Do you know where you are?”
Blaze gazed at Valerie, covering her hand with his. He couldn’t feel it, but it was there, all that mattered. “My room.”
“What month is it?”
“August.”
“Any headaches? Pain?”
He shook his head, still focused on Valerie, unwilling to tear his eyes off her.
“Say those three words I told you.”
“Apple, table, penny.” Blaze brushed a strand of hair away from her face, silently praying she wouldn’t vanish like a ghost before his eyes. “Is she going to be all right?”