by Izzy Shows
"That's for the safety of everyone. Your people endangered everyone before we came to power, not just us."
I scoffed. "You can't possibly believe that."
"Oh no?" He arched an eyebrow. "Just look at you, look how dangerous you are. You think I don't know that you could kill me right now? How many people could you take out without leaving this room?"
I was shocked silent for a moment, that he would say something like that, and then I got riled.
"For one, I'm not a mindless killing machine. Every death I've ever served was well and truly earned. And for two, the other blood mages aren't like me at all. They don't fight, they only heal. In fact, it was a very big point of contention in allowing me to stay with them, because they didn't want to have a hunter with them. And finally, why exactly are the vampires more deserving of happiness than blood mages? Why do you get to live in safety and luxury while my people are in chains down below?"
He made a derisive sound, but he didn't acknowledge any of what I said.
"Next you're going to ask me to sit down with the wolves and give them a place in the world."
"And why not?" I snapped, crossing my arms over my chest. "Why can't our three species all live in harmony together? Why does there have to be pain in the world when there could be peace instead?"
"That's a beautiful dream, Nina, but it's unrealistic. You have to live in reality."
"Unrealistic or not, to me it's worth fighting for. I can't turn my back on my people," I said, standing up. I pulled my pants and shirt back on in a hurry. "I can't stay. I hope you can understand that."
I leaned down and kissed him, knowing that it was goodbye. He pulled me back down on him, holding me tight once more as he kissed me with a ferocity I hadn't expected.
At last, I pulled back. "I have to go."
There was a heaviness in my heart, knowing that we could never be. But he didn't look sad at all, just determined.
"This isn't the end, Nina. I said I would do whatever it takes, and I meant it. I won't let this be the end."
Eleven
I was lost in the city for what felt like ages, unable to pay attention to my surroundings enough to make my way back to the safe house in a direct line. My heart hurt so much from saying goodbye to Gray, although he'd said it wasn't goodbye at all. I didn't see how he could think that when we didn't agree on such fundamental things.
He said he would do whatever it took. Have a little faith.
But how could I when he hadn't been able to stand up to the Council before? And that was just for me. I was asking him to set my people free, something that would lead to anarchy in the vampire world. He would never be able to do that, which meant that I would never be able to be with him.
The knowledge was like a stone in my chest, but I did my best to push it aside.
Hadn't I already resolved to live a life without him? Hadn't I already learned to ignore the pain that came with being separated from him?
But it hadn't hurt this much before, surely. It hadn't felt so agonizing yesterday as it did today.
His mate. He called me his mate.
It shouldn't be possible. I was a blood mage, he was a vampire. We couldn't be mates. Blood mages didn't even mate, for Christ's sake. But I couldn't deny the pull that had been between us from the very first night I'd met him on the rooftop all those years ago. It felt like a century had passed now, even though it had just been a few years.
Whether or not it made logical sense, though, I felt in my heart that he was right when he'd called me his mate, when he'd said that we'd been made for one another. That was how it had felt.
It explained everything about why we were drawn to each other when we shouldn't be, why he'd felt more for me than he should for a thrall, why I hadn't been able to shy away from the vampire that I should have hated.
But it didn't matter, not now. Because we weren't going to be together, not in the way that mates were meant to be. I was going to have to accept that my life would be without passion now, just as I had accepted it before.
It's not just passion you're giving up. Be honest with yourself: you're giving up love.
Tears burned my eyes at the thought. It was true, I knew it. I'd said it, hadn't I? I'd told him I loved him, and I'd meant every word. I loved a vampire, wrong though it was, and I was walking away from that.
But I had to. Love or no love, I couldn't ignore the plight of my people. I couldn't live in luxury while they lived in chains. I might struggle with issues of morality, but that was a line I could easily draw in the sand.
It was late in the day when I finally made it back to the safe house. Even though I'd just told Gray how I'd found my people and they'd welcomed me, looking at the house didn't instill the sense of home that it had just yesterday.
Now when I thought of home, Gray's image came to mind. He was home to me. No matter where that was, he had to be there.
I pushed the thought away, growing irritated with myself. I couldn't keep thinking like this, or I was never going to get anything done.
Move along.
I walked into the house, full of people bustling about.
"Nina! You're back at last," Harriet, one of the blood mages, said, beaming at me. "Where were you? I thought you were just doing a night shift, but it's almost evening already. We expected you back hours ago, and we were really getting worried."
"Sorry, I didn't mean to worry anyone," I said, trying to force myself to sound normal when all I wanted to do was go upstairs and curl up in my bed and let myself have the pity party I so dearly wanted.
"Well, where were you?" Jonathan, another blood mage, came forward.
"Just in the city," I said, evasive. I didn't want to lie to them, but I couldn't exactly tell them I'd gone to see the vampire king and climbed into his bed to boot.
At least things didn't go too far. We stopped before…
I swallowed at the thought, unable to finish it. Yes, it was a good thing we'd stopped before things had gone too far. Somehow, I knew that if we had, I wouldn't have been able to walk away.
"Just in the city?" He frowned. "But you were gone all night and most of the day."
"Yeah, well, I was busy."
"Busy doing what?" Harriet asked.
"Yeah, what were you doing?"
My throat tightened as I tried to think of what to say to their questions. I panicked a little—I wasn't good at lying. Never had been. Never had a reason for it before, and I couldn't think of a lie to give them now.
I couldn't tell them the truth—they'd throw me out on my ass—but I didn't have anything else to give them.
Before they could put any pressure on me, though, everything went to hell in a handbasket.
The door burst open behind me on the back of a bestial roar, and the next thing I knew, I was spinning around and coming face-to-face with a hybrid.
"What in hell?" I shouted, throwing up my hands and chanting swiftly.
"Oh my god, it's here!" Harriet shrieked, and the other blood mages all began screaming, making targets of themselves.
"Shut up and get upstairs!" I shouted at them, doing my best to keep myself between them and the three hybrids that had appeared. They were eyeing me warily, not making a move yet, and I knew that it was a situation that wasn't going to last.
I didn't know why they hadn't attacked already, but honestly, I didn't want to know. All I knew was that I had to kill them, or everyone here was going to die.
My fault, all my fault. I didn't do a good job hunting last night, and I was busy with Gray during the day. I should have been keeping them safe from these creatures. This is all my fault.
I tried to focus around the stream of guilty thoughts in my head. It would do me no good to kick myself right now, not when I had these creatures to contend with.
I heard the scuffle of feet moving across the wooden floor, an indication that the mages were doing as I said, and then the tension snapped. The hybrids lunged, and I started chanting as fast as I could
, reaching out with my magic to try and catch onto the biorhythms of the creatures. I could hold onto more than one biorhythm at once—I'd done it before—but it was so damned difficult to latch onto a hybrid's rhythm. They were just too different for me to get it easily.
One of them almost made it past me, but thankfully that put it in reaching distance. My fingers glanced off its forearm, and I latched onto its biorhythm. At once, I was able to use my incapacitation spell. The migraine took hold in its mind immediately, and it was driven to the ground, howling loudly and threatening to burst my eardrums with its racket.
The other two hybrids eyed their fallen comrade with suspicion, glancing at me and then back down at it. They didn't want to end up like it, I was sure of that, but they also weren't willing to back down from the fight.
They didn't know what I was.
I gritted my teeth, holding steady on the one hybrid as I reached with my magic for another of them. If I could just get two of them down at once, this would be easier to handle…
I could handle one hybrid in a fight, but three at once was difficult. I just needed to even the playing field a little bit.
The hesitation in the hybrids was enough time for me to latch onto a second biorhythm, and then I had that one down on the floor as well, suffering from the same aneurysm-induced migraine as the first.
Good, good, this is good, we can handle this, I thought to myself, encouraging myself to keep going. I was eager now that I had two of them under my thumb, and the third one was looking at me with…god, I'd almost say apprehension? It was almost as if it knew it was in a bad spot, but it couldn't stop itself from staying to fight.
Pushing the thought from my head so that I could focus on the task at hand, I changed the chant that was flowing from my lips, switching to the words that would bring the blood in their bodies to a boil. I did it without flourish or wasting any time to enjoy it, which I was damned grateful for when the third one took note of what I was doing.
Was there something in the way the two on the ground began grunting and sniveling? Surely those had to be animalistic sounds of pain, not a language unto their own species warning the third one of what was happening.
But if I hadn’t known any better, I would say I was looking at anger and a thirst for revenge in the third one's eyes.
I had to drop the killing spell at the last second—I wasn't worried about that, enough damage had been done that they would die within seconds, they wouldn't be able to heal from it—to throw a hand forward in an attempt to block the blow the third one dealt me.
In case it isn't obvious that one human with a squishy body, in comparison to the hyper-tough hides of the supernatural, isn't up to blocking a head-on attack from a fucking hybrid creature that never should have existed, let's spell it out. The thing rammed into me, its head slamming into my chest, and sent me flying into the dining room table behind me.
The impact was deafening. The table splintered beneath me, and I was pretty sure I'd broken a rib, at least. My right arm hung limp at my side, and I was so dizzy I couldn't think through the cloud of pain, much less see anything. My vision had gone completely dark. But all of that was nothing compared to the piercing agony that consumed me seconds after I hit the table, as if my brain had been too shocked by the attack to fully process what had happened.
But it sure as hell made up for it once it got its gears spinning. My entire body felt like it was on fire, I couldn't drag air into my lungs, and I wondered if I could suffocate just from the shock of being in so much pain. Or maybe my broken rib had punctured a lung? Weren't you supposed to feel that in a specific sort of pain in the general location of the lung? Not that I would be able to localize any pain right now; it was fucking consuming my entire body.
Get up! Nina, get up! It's still alive, and it's coming for you. You have to get up, now!
The voice in my head, which sometimes sounded like my abuelita and certainly sounded like a terrified version of her right now, urged me onward. I knew it was right, but my body protested the idea of me making any kind of move right now. Logic and instinct told me that moving could mean death, that I needed to lie very still so that my body could recuperate until someone found me and healed me or until I could gather enough strength to heal myself.
The claws tearing through my shirt and ripping into the flesh of my abdomen told the logic to go fuck itself. Lying still and protecting my injuries meant death. Moving meant death. Better to take the death of someone who went out trying to protect herself and her people.
If you don't do something, all the other mages are going to die! It isn't just you in danger!
Right! That galvanized me, giving me the strength I needed to draw in another breath, and then I was forcing my eyes to see the creature bent over me.
If you've never seen a hybrid before, count yourself lucky. They're monstrous creatures, constantly caught in the half-shift state between werewolf and man, with either hair or fur—I never really spent the time looking to find out—all over its body, eyes a sickly yellow when they should have been the strong amber that all werewolves had, and a face contorted somewhere between man and wolf. You might think when you're staring one down that they're just some sort of cursed werewolf if you don't have the skill of a blood mage to sense the truth inside of them, but if you know anything about wolves, you know that they're never in this state of shift for more than a minute at most. They can't stay in the in-between state; it's either human or wolf for them. And they don't have claws like the hybrid does—long, yellowed, and sharp claws that could probably cut through metal if given half the chance. And if that knowledge didn't help you, the large set of fangs in their mouths heralded the vampire side of them.
Yes, wolves have fangs, but they don't look anything like a vampire's fangs. They're smaller, more canine in nature, than the four long fangs of a vampire, two on each side.
So that's the glorious sight that I came back to when I finally managed to open my eyes. That creature bending over me, its head cocked to the side even as it had one set of claws clenched in my abdomen.
"That was…kind of…a mistake," I said, in between pants for air.
Its jaw stretched open and shut a few times, and rough sounds emitted from its throat—was it trying to speak? I frowned, confused for a moment, before I reminded myself that this was no time to play the curious scientist. I was the hunter, and my job was to kill the threat, not spend time trying to figure it out.
Luckily, with the way the hybrid was partially inside my body, oh my god, I didn't have any difficulty locking onto its biorhythm. In fact, I latched on a lot more deeply than I ever had with another creature before, probably because of the deeper contact I had with this one than I'd ever had with another—I didn't exactly make a practice of letting vampires or hybrids get their claws inside my gut.
My lips practically blurred together, I chanted so quickly, not even bothering with an incapacitation spell. I went straight for the kill.
Still, the hybrid wrenched away from me, howling in agony, leaving my gut a bloody mess and me stuttering through the spell as I gasped for air and fought to maintain my consciousness.
Fuck, fuck. Fuck. I'm going to die. Have to…have to hang in there…long enough to kill it.
The thought was hazy, and my vision was growing blurry—blood loss, probably, but I knew that I didn't have time to enjoy the numbness that came with it. Not that it was something to enjoy; it might stop the pain, but going numb was a pretty clear indicator that my situation was getting a lot worse.
The hybrid fell to the ground, contorting and writhing in place from the pain I was putting it through. It wasn't a gentle death, having the blood inside your veins, inside your very heart, boiled from the inside out. But there was no room in my heart for mercy, not considering everything it had just done to me.
"Mercy…"
The thought echoed in my mind, but…it was more than a thought? It was almost a voice. It certainly didn't sound like any of my own thoug
hts, didn't even sound like the snarky voice that was my subconscious mocking me or the sound of my subconscious again when it took on the role of my long-gone abuelita.
It sounded like a dying man's voice.
My eyes widened as I considered the ramifications of the potential the thought alluded to. Could it have been the voice of the hybrid inside my mind? But the hybrids were dumb creatures, incapable of intelligent thought, let alone capable of speaking!
I could almost feel its presence in my mind even still—a bad sign if that was truly what was going on, because my shields would normally have been strong enough to keep anyone out, but weakened though I was, it was no surprise that they would have fallen—but just as I started to think about the impact of what might be going on, the presence cut out abruptly.
And the hybrid stopped jerking on the floor. Dead.
Before I could so much as try to think about what had just happened, the darkness blissfully claimed me, and I knew no more.
Twelve
Three days. I was unconscious for three days, and everyone thought I was as good as dead anyway. Hell, I don't blame them. I thought I was going to die even while I was trying to kill the hybrid that had broken in. The upside to having been basically comatose for three days was that I hadn't had to deal with the cleanup of the three hybrid bodies, not that I usually cleaned them up. When I killed them out in the city, I just left their bodies there as a warning both to the hybrids that would come upon them and to the humans as well.
Killing vampires and disposing of their bodies was one thing; I'd done it often enough when I was a hunter, unless Conall wanted to send a message like he had with the general I'd killed in the brothel—god, that was a long time ago now. Felt like a lifetime. But the hybrids, that was my call to make as to whether their bodies disappeared, never to be seen by the humans, and I decided that they stayed. I wanted the humans to know exactly what was stalking the streets with them.
They knew the vampires were there, and they also knew that the vampires had not only sworn to them but also made it law that no vampire could feed on the citizens of the city, with the only exception being the thralls who volunteered. It wasn't even about whether a passing human was willing to be fed on by a vampire if they were to meet one and strike up a relationship—which, let's be honest, that never happened—it was still illegal. The human would have to come to the castle and present themselves as a potential thrall, and that didn't even guarantee anything. I had gone through the process of presenting myself as a potential thrall, so I knew it better than most. You had to endure “the Choosing,” which was only moderately humiliating, especially when the vampire king showed up and hauled me out of there, which was apparently not how the Choosing was supposed to go.