Day Reaper

by Melody Johnson

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “I brought it with me when you said there was no Wi-Fi. I figured there might be a need,” Walker said.

  “Does Bex have one?”

  Walker gave me a look. “As if I had time to take a stroll into the Underneath.”

  “You had nearly nine hours to—”

  “You’re lucky I had time to give one to Greta.”

  “Then what good does—”

  “It puts your voice on a different frequency, remember? She’ll hear you.”

  “And so will Jillian,” I snapped, frustrated with our failed plan almost as much as I was frustrated with all of Walker’s interruptions.

  “We’re not going for stealth and surprise anymore,” Walker insisted, his words a mirror of Dominic’s words not twenty minutes earlier. “We need backup, and we need it now. Tell Bex to make her move.”

  I wanted to continue arguing—really, I could stretch an argument with Walker all day without even trying—but when both Walker and Dominic were in agreement over something, it was time to listen. I squeezed the walkie-talkie and shouted into it, hoping Bex would hear me over the shrieks and roaring growls around us. “Reaper to Reaper, I hope you copy. Release the other Reapers if you have them. I repeat, release the Day Reapers. Over.”

  “If she has them?” he asked.

  I tossed the walkie-talkie back at Walker to free both my hands against the Damned. “She had a little trouble finding the Day Reapers in the Underneath. They weren’t where we had left them.”

  “So entrance the Damned, and we’ll deal with the Day Reapers later,” Walker said.

  “About that—” I began.

  Walker aimed his watch and shot three Damned in a row with deadly accuracy, piercing their eyes with his little watch spears. Their roars shook the honeycombs, and when I roundhouse-kicked their chests, eviscerating three others with my talons with one power swipe, all six tumbled backwards off the rafters.

  “We had a little trouble entrancing the Damned too,” I admitted.

  “What didn’t you have trouble with?” Walker snapped.

  I slashed two more Damned and tossed them from the rafters. “We found the Damned, no problem.”

  He snorted. “Not funny.”

  “You used to like my humor,” I said.

  “I used to like you,” he countered.

  I blocked a Damned from eviscerating Walker with a smart kick to its elbow and used the momentum to impale my claws in another’s chest. I glanced at Walker over my shoulder. “You’re welcome.”

  He grimaced. “We can’t defend against this assault forever.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I growled, kicking the wounded aside to deal with the next in line. “Besides, we don’t have to fight forever—only until Bex comes with reinforcements.”

  “And then what?” Walker said, reloading his watch and taking out three more eyeballs. “Unless you can entrance the Damned, so we can drain and transform them, the Day Reapers won’t have any choice but to kill them.”

  I didn’t justify Walker’s comments with a reply. He was right. He knew he was right and admitting as much wouldn’t help solve our problem. Neither would hiding behind a Pollyanna facade and denial, but I let his comment fester in the air between us and took out my frustration on another round of Damned.

  The last round of Damned.

  I stared at the empty air in front of me, at a loss. We hadn’t fought them all. There were too many of them for us to have possibly fought and beat them all. I leaped to the edge of the rafter and peered down at the scene ten stories below. The Damned had another battle to wage against a new adversary: the Day Reapers.

  “Stay here,” I said.

  “Where are you—”

  I jumped from the rafters.

  I’d known Walker would be right, but knowing it and living it were two different things entirely. The Day Reapers weren’t just defending themselves against the Damned. They were slaughtering them.

  Lord High Chancellor Henry Lynell Horrace DeWhitt looked fantastic, considering he’d just been resurrected from the Underneath. Feeding from our willing human donors had obviously helped; the Chancellor’s skin was plump and blushed with the bloom of health. His dark, chestnut-and-white–striped hair was thick and wild around his blood-spattered, chiseled jaw, and his eyes—those piercing, unyielding, unforgiving humanlike eyes—were trained on me, even as he decapitated three Damned with one powerful swipe of his silver talons.

  The myriad of emotions—recognition, shock, awe, respect, anger, and eventually cold resignation—in that man’s gaze would have been laughable if not for the fact that it was also everything Dominic had predicted and feared. He broke our gaze, faced Dominic, and with one swipe of those silver talons, ripped out Dominic’s throat.

  The stabbing heat of his claws across my throat was staggering, a physical pain from my metaphysical bond with Dominic. Flashbacks of Jillian raking her claws across my throat distracted me for a moment, but I shook off the vulnerable, horrible feelings that memory evoked in favor of the present horror. The wound was devastating; Dominic wouldn’t have been able to heal it, might not even have survived it, without our metaphysical bonds—without me—and that made me furious. I took the injury into myself, healed it, and refocused all that fury toward the nightmare confrontation come to life before my eyes. Someone had to, because the Chancellor—high on his all-knowing, all-powerful, all-ruling pedestal—either couldn’t see or didn’t care that while he was engaging in an unnecessary, personal battle with Dominic, his Day Reapers were losing against the Damned. Again.

  The other Day Reapers weren’t as recovered from the injuries they’d sustained within the Underneath. Their movements weren’t as quick or as effective. They were weak and malnourished, and without the Chancellor giving them focus and strength, I could see why they’d lost against the Damned at 432 Park Avenue. Besides the fact that they would have been distracted by entrancing Greta’s SWAT team, they didn’t fight like a team; they fought like they could single-handedly take on the Damned on their own. Which they couldn’t.

  When one Day Reaper took a hit to his forearm to block the Damned’s claws from raking his chest, the Day Reaper next to him didn’t cover his back while he healed. She ignored his injury, decapitated the Damned she was fighting, and moved on to the next, letting her partner struggle to both recover and block another strike. He nearly didn’t, but while the Damned’s claws embedded in his other forearm, he couldn’t help the Day Reaper on his other side, who hadn’t healed her injuries in time to block the next strike to her chest. The Damned impaled her sternum with its talons and tore out her heart.

  She hit the ground, not quite dead yet, but that was only just a matter of time. The Day Reapers stepped into the gap her absence left in their defense, closing the circle and protecting the Chancellor. But they weren’t protecting each other.

  By the time I dropped into the center of their circle, four more Day Reapers had fallen, and no one even spared me a second glance. I wasn’t a Damned, and honestly, I don’t think any of them—having remembered me as the night blood who could barely walk—really anticipated facing a version of me that was not only strong, fast, and powerful, but stronger, faster, and more powerful than them.

  The Chancellor raised his bloody claw for a second strike against Dominic. Dominic’s chest was soaked in a waterfall of blood, and although his wound was already healed, a second wound so soon after the first might just be a killing blow despite our metaphysical bonds. I leaped between them, shielding Dominic’s body with my own, my hand raised to catch the Chancellor’s wrist. His sharp, silver talons halted inches from my face.

  I’d thought long and hard about how to react upon seeing him, knowing he would be duty bound to kill Dominic for transforming me. I could grovel, beseeching his empathy; I could rationalize Dominic’s
actions, appealing to his logical mind; I could feign innocence and ignorance of his crimes. But all of those options implied that we were somehow wrong in our actions and needed the Chancellor’s forgiveness. A very good friend of mine once told me to never apologize for surviving, and although lying was worth my pride if it saved Dominic, it wasn’t worth our lives; the Chancellor was the one creature who would undoubtedly be capable of detecting a lie, and he would punish it with death.

  Instead, I’d wield the only weapon I had against the most powerful vampire on earth: the truth.

  “Hi, Henry,” I said, smiling bright and wide, showcasing every one of my many pointy fangs. “Aren’t you happy to see me?” I asked.

  The Chancellor cringed. “I am Lord High Chancellor Henry Lynell Horrace DeWhitt, Master vampire of London and—”

  “And Lord of all vampires,” I finished. “I know. We met in this very room little more than a week ago. Guess I didn’t make a big impression. I’m Cassidy Di—”

  “Cassidy DiRocco, Dominic Lysander’s former night blood. Yes, I quite remember,” the Chancellor finished. “But as I am your Lord, you may refer to me as such.”

  “Listen, Henry, I know you follow this infallible adherence to propriety and titles, but considering you just attacked my master, I’m beyond adhering to anything remotely resembling propriety right now.” My voice was calm and reasonable-sounding in tone if not in words. “You can call me DiRocco. Everybody does.”

  The Chancellor’s other hand darted for my throat, and I blocked that strike, too.

  His eyes widened.

  I imagined that it wasn’t every day, if ever, that someone stood up to him. He was too fast to allow me to counterstrike, but I was strong enough to defend myself and protect Dominic, and really, that’s all we both needed to know.

  “According to Council law, I know that you’re the only vampire permitted to transform a night blood into a Day Reaper, and I know that, by saving me, Dominic broke that law,” I said, my voice still steady. Still calm. “I also know that breaking Council law is punishable by death. But you should know that I’m prepared to break every law if it means keeping Dominic alive.”

  The Chancellor didn’t react. He didn’t so much as blink.

  “I could have left you to rot in the Underneath,” I said, driving home my point, “but I saved you, hoping we could be allies against a greater evil.”

  The Chancellor lifted his left eyebrow—a very Dominic expression of doubt—and I wondered if that’s who Dominic had adopted the expression from. “Hoping I could save you from a greater evil, you mean,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I could take on the Damned myself, but I thought that having you and the other Day Reapers on our side would give us a better chance at winning. You failed against them last time because you were working against Greta and the other humans, like you’re working against me now,” I said. “Look around you,” I added, spreading my hand out to the steadily shrinking circle of Day Reapers around us. “You’re losing again. You might be willing to make that same mistake again, but I’m not. Either we work as a team, or this plan doesn’t work at all.”

  Rage blazed like fire in the Chancellor’s eyes. “The humans are here? You revealed the existence of vampires and the location of their coven?” he thundered.

  I snorted. Probably not the most intelligent response to his rage, but I couldn’t help it. “The Damned ravaged New York City, and with you, Bex, and the other Day Reapers imprisoned within the Underneath, Dominic caring for me, and me undergoing a week-long transformation, who was there to entrance the humans?” I asked, deliberately including Dominic and myself in the same breath as the Day Reapers. Subliminal messaging at its finest. “The humans have been fully aware of the existence of vampires for over a week. Jillian’s been running the show, and she certainly didn’t restore order to the city.” I shot a look at Bex. “Why is he not up to speed?”

  Bex rolled her eye. “Considering his impeccable sense of hearing, he is a surprisingly poor listener.”

  The Chancellor pinned his fiery gaze on Bex.

  She inclined her head. “My Lord.”

  That seemed to appease him slightly, or at least mollify him enough not to physically strike Bex. I could only protect so many people at once, and unfortunately, I had my priorities.

  He took a step back, slowly and deliberately, and I released my hold on his wrists, hoping for the best but tensed for the worst.

  “Assuming all of what you say is true,” the Chancellor said, his voice heavily laced with skepticism, “why has no one yet killed our betrayers?”

  Jillian shrank back, petrified.

  Kaden’s body vibrated with a gurgling growl.

  “They will receive their due comeuppance,” Dominic said, his voice grave through his shredded vocal cords.

  “But right now, we still need them to complete our plan,” I finished.

  The Chancellor’s right eyebrow rose to match the height of the left. “And what might that plan be?”

  “To save the several dozen night bloods who fell victim to Jillian and her evil, unlawful rise to power,” I said, hoping to mask the fact that I was referring to the Damned.

  The Chancellor blinked, and his eyebrows climbed higher, nearly merging with his hairline. “Your plan is to the save the Damned?” he asked, blatantly incredulous. “To save them?” He gestured at the ravenous, snarling, mindless riot of creatures raging around us, being held in check—barely—by his dwindling circle of Day Reapers.

  “She saved me,” Nathan said. The focused calm of his steady gaze was unnerving coming from him—as was the voice of a man coming from the lips of a monster—and I couldn’t have paid to have a more convincing advocate for my argument.

  The Chancellor was silent for a long moment before he finally spoke. “What do you need from me?”

  Relief rushed through my body, making me nearly weak-kneed. “We need to drain the Damned enough to incapacitate them, but not kill them, and then feed them human blood.”

  “Ah.” The Chancellor grinned unpleasantly. “The only beings capable of piercing the Damned’s flesh is their maker”—he eyed Jillian cowering and defeated on the floor—“a former Damned, and Day Reapers. Without us, it’s only you and your brother against hundreds.”

  “And me,” Bex said, raising her hand.

  “Against several dozen,” I said, eyeing the horde. “Eighty at most,” I corrected wearily.

  “That’s being overly generous, but for the sake of argument, three against eighty may as well be two against hundreds.”

  “Yes, I need your help,” I hissed. “We don’t have time for petty arguments. Are you in or are you out?”

  His eyebrows finally disappeared behind his hair. “And where are we obtaining that many humans on such short notice?”

  “We have them waiting on my signal to join us here and donate their blood,” I said.

  “And why would they do that?” he snapped. “Why would humans, nothing more than our food, bleed to save hundreds of Damned? The same Damned who—how did you put it? Ravaged New York City?”

  “Because those Damned vampires are their brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, and dear friends that they’ve loved for a lifetime, and just like I was determined to save Nathan, they are willing to risk their lives for a chance to save that love,” I said fiercely.

  The Chancellor stared at me. Slowly, his brows settled to a normal position above his eyes. “It’s certainly easier to kill them than subdue and drain them in battle.”

  “It doesn’t have to be in battle,” Bex said. “Cassidy can entrance them.”

  “No one can entrance them,” the Chancellor scoffed.

  “She can. I was there,” Bex insisted.

  “No, I can’t,” I said, and the confession was as physically painful as if I’d jammed my talons
into my chest and ripped out my own heart.

  “I was there,” she insisted. “I saw you. You can—”

  “I know I’ve done it before!” I screamed. Bex’s tone wasn’t condemning in the least, but after hearing that same statement from Dominic, Nathan, and Walker—and knowing damn well that I’d entranced them before—hearing those words yet again made me snap. “That was then and this is now, and for whatever godforsaken reason, I can’t now!”

  A Damned broke through the wall of Day Reapers around us, and on instinct, reflex, and blind hot anger, I swiped at it savagely. The blow severed its throat straight through to the spine; its head tipped back, the wound gaping like a spitting mouth, and fell off its twitching body.

  I glanced sheepishly at Nathan. He was shaking his head in aggravation.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  A second Damned broke through, and Bex blocked that one, humming thoughtfully as she fought. “What did you do then that you’re not doing now? We were surrounded, Dominic was injured, the situation was hopeless—”

  “So the situation was actually identical to now,” Nathan interjected.

  “We were in the Underneath, not the great hall. The sun had just risen. She was newly transformed and had not yet drunk fresh human blood,” Dominic rasped.

  “Those differences are inconsequential,” the Chancellor said, dismissing Dominic with his best High Lord sneer. “A skill of that magnitude accomplished once should easily manifest itself in a different location, and having fully transformed and consumed human blood would only strengthen that skill.”

  “Besides those inconsequential differences, Nathan is correct. Our situations are identical,” Dominic said grimly.

  “I was fully transformed when I entranced the Damned,” I argued. “The sun had just hit me and…” My voice faded along with my thought as the realization of what I’d just said slammed home. “The sun! That’s the difference! I was bathed in sunlight the last time I entranced the Damned!”