“Shit.” Nibbling my lip, I gave her a nod and began to back toward the open door. “Thanks for the info. If I were you, I’d get out of here and go home. It’s not safe. Okay?”
Alarm flittered in her gold-specked eyes, but a moment later she broke out into a laugh. “Good one. Like these glorious angel dudes can’t take care of anything that comes our way. I think I’ll stay here with them, thanks. Anywhere else in the city is probably much more dangerous than this.”
Chapter 31
“So, what’s the deal?” Laura asked when I joined the cluster of mages on the sidewalk. They’d eased out from behind the bushes, but it didn’t matter. The sidewalks were full of tipsy students, and no one was paying attention to the weirdos whispering amongst themselves.
“Honestly, I don’t have a fucking clue.” With a deep breath, I repeated everything I’d learned while inside the bar. What the girl saw (angels instead of demons), what she’d said about the night of the attack, and how she’d reacted when I told her she’d be better off at home. Whatever these creatures were up to, it sent a shiver of unease down my spine. They were setting some kind of trap. I could feel it in my bones. But what that trap was? I hadn’t the foggiest clue.
“I mean, why are they making themselves appear as angels and why stand in a bar where there has just been an attack?” I asked. “Does it make any sense to you?”
“Not really,” Michelle said with a frown. “But you have to remember these creatures think a lot differently than we do, right? Their number one focus is to feed on as much life-force as possible. Those humans inside are their food. Maybe this is their new tactic for devouring as many as possible in a single sitting.”
“Yeah, I thought the same thing, but it wasn’t like they were feeding on anyone in there,” I said. “No one looked scared or in pain. Hell, they looked like they were having the time of their lives.”
“That’s because they are,” a voice said from behind us. The six of us whirled on our feet to find Professor Ivan Wagner standing in the middle of the road, surrounded by an army of pale-faced, red-eyed, hollow-boned vampires. A chill went through me as I flicked my gaze from one creature to the next. There was no doubt what these soldiers were. I’d faced them in Scotland, and now we were facing them here.
“You brought Nosferatu to this place?” Anastasia hissed, and I swore I could see the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. “How dare you.”
“Congratulations. You have proven yourselves to be far too tough for your own good. If you’d just given up a long time ago, then I wouldn’t have needed to bring these creatures here with me,” he said with a wicked smile. “You’ve forced me to take our fight to the next level. I know you’ve been hunting for me. So, here I am.” He spread his arms wide as his smile twisted even wider. “Here’s your chance to take me out. Good luck.”
He flicked his fingers, motioning to the Nosferatu behind him. In seconds, the dozen vampires had launched themselves across the street to join us in a fight. I bent my knees and curled my hands into fists, bracing myself for impact. A second later, I was on my back when a Nosferatu twice my size slammed into me. Grunting, I rolled onto my stomach and jumped back to my feet, feeling a surge of strength coming from my newly-fed heart.
As strong as I was, my hybrid cursed form couldn’t match the brutality of a Nosferatu, but I sure as hell could put up a fierce fight. Sniffing the air, I threw myself to the right just in time to miss the hurtling fist of the vampire. I smiled and shot out my own fist, aiming for his head. Nosferatu were notoriously hard to kill but damaging their skull would knock them senseless long enough for me to get a grip on my blade. And then I could sink the steel into his skull.
But I missed, my hand meeting air instead of flesh. I ducked down when he swung another blow my way. Crouching low, I kicked hard at his stomach, hitting him square in the chest. The vampire stumbled backward, his mouth and eyes widening into O’s. Bullseye, I thought as my lips twisted into a smirk. He’d fallen back. I ripped my dagger from my sheath and flicked it to my left hand while I curled my right hand into a fist. The Nosferatu caught his balance and eyed my new stance, sizing up my weapon with a frown.
“Worried, are we?” I asked with a smile. “Good. You better be.”
“Oh, I’m not worried,” he said in a low hiss, a sound that reminded me of a whisper of harsh wind on the top of a midnight mountain. “The warlock is right. You’re easily distracted. Makes you easy to control.”
Frowning, I held my stance. Either this was an attempt to trick me into turning away so that he could launch himself at my back, or there was something else happening behind me. I relaxed my body, letting it still so that I could tune into my enhanced senses. In the distance, I heard the clash of steel on steel, the crunch of breaking bones, and I could smell blood filling the air. At the corners of my eyes, my vision began to turn red. Even though I’d recently fed, my new body was hungry for more. Pain radiated through my chest, but I swallowed it down as best I could. Dorian had warned me this would hurt, but my only choice was to power on, welcoming in the pain as fuel to my furious fire.
“They’re fighting,” I said. “Not really surprising.”
“They’re not the only ones fighting,” He licked his lips and grinned. His teeth were stained red. “Can’t you smell the difference, Unbound? Or does your curse prevent you from sniffing out the different levels of iron in human blood and mage blood?”
“Human blood?” My heart thumped, both from desire and from fear at what he’d said. Surely the humans would have stayed inside the bar with their guardian angels when they saw the fight that had broken out on the streets. Surely they hadn’t wanted to venture out into the middle of this?
I turned toward the sounds of fighting behind me, and my entire body turned to ice. Humans had spilled out onto the sidewalks from the bars, their faces ashen as they clustered together. On every side, the demons rose up high around them. From the fear in their eyes, it appeared that the angel illusion the demons had been wearing before had been cast away to reveal the true forms of these creatures. But the most chilling thing about the situation was the lack of screams. The humans were so full of terror that they could barely even move their legs, let alone yell.
“What are they doing?” I asked, whirling back toward the Nosferatu. He was gone. I shifted to my left and then to my right, scanning the street for any sign of the silver-haired vampire. It wasn’t until I turned back toward the demons that I spotted him. He’d joined the circle around the humans, and his eyes had turned a red so bright that he could have been spotted from the moon.
My heart thumped hard in my chest as a new kind of fury ripped through me. This was some kind of corral. The demons and the vampires had led the humans to a slaughter, and if I didn’t do something—and fast—they’d all end up dead.
“Wagner!” I called out, glancing from face to face with a newfound focus. I had to find the warlock who was behind it all. Laura and Anastasia were tag-teaming three Nosferatu, and Dorian was taken on two vamps at once. The two bone mages who had called for backup were fighting vampires here and there, and nowhere among the fight could I find the warlock. Narrowing my eyes, I strode into the middle of the fight, listening for any sign of the warlock’s presence. He had to be somewhere. He wouldn’t have left. He had set up this battle and this weird corral of the humans for some reason that I didn’t understand. Not yet. And I didn’t have time to puzzle it out.
All I knew is that I had to find and stop him before whatever he’d planned actually came to fruition.
“Zoe, watch out!” Laura cried out as something dark blurred by me. I whirled toward the shadows, but they were gone before I could lock my eyes on them. It was Wagner. I knew with every beat of my new vampire heart. He was using his shadow powers to lurk in the night, doing only the goddess knew what.
Something cracked loud and sharp from the direction of Laura’s shout. I shifted toward the noise, seeing Laura’s prone form on the ground. B
lood leaked out of a deep wound on her neck. Beside her, Anastasia had collapsed to the ground, and she stared vacantly at the dark sky above. Heart charging into my throat, I rushed away from Wagner’s shadows to fall to the ground by Laura’s side, my knees digging into the cold, hard ground.
“Laura,” I said, shaking her arm. She murmured in pain, wincing as she grabbed my hand to hold tight. I swallowed hard as I stared down at her wound, and the hunger within me rose up like a lion who had spotted his prey. My mouth salivated with the need to taste her blood, and pain clawed the insides of my stomach. My power answered my hunger, intensifying it to the point where my skull pounded against my eyes. The world tilted underneath my knees, and I had to place my hands on the ground to hold myself steady, taking deep breaths in through my open mouth.
“Help,” my best friend whispered. “Please.”
Squeezing my eyes tight, I gave a nod and forced my mind to focus on her weakened pulse rather than the smell of her intoxicating blood. I pressed my fingers tight against her wrist. The heartbeat that answered was so faint that it almost wasn’t there, and her breathing was so shallow that I struggled to hear it even when I lowered my ear to her chest.
“Shit. Laura, on a scale of one to ten, how badly does it hurt?”
But my best friend didn’t answer my question. Her eyelids had slid shut as she drifted to sleep. Or worse.
I lifted my wrist to my mouth and cut open my skin with the sharp knives my canines had transformed into when I’d changed. My blood spilled from my veins, and I quickly pressed my arm to her parted lips. The blood slid onto her tongue, filling her up with a healing power that would bring her back from the brink. The wound on her neck was deep, but as I continued to feed her my blood, it slowly began to close, the skin coming together. Finally, the wound completely closed, and her eyelids flickered back open, though only momentarily.
“Laura, are you okay?” I squeezed her hand.
Groaning, she pushed up onto her elbows and glanced around us. Her face was ashen, and her eyes were streaked with red. Even though I’d healed her, it might take her days to fully recover from this attack. And, after glancing at Anastasia, I could tell she was in pretty bad shape as well. We’d taken some massive hits, and we hadn’t even faced off against Wagner and his demons yet.
“Zoe,” Laura gasped, her eyes going wide. “Oh my goddess. How did this happen?”
“The Nosferatu are strong,” I said. “And we’re outnumbered. We’re lucky I was able to get to you before the damage was worse.”
“I’m not talking about me,” she said, her voice cracking. “Have you not seen what the demons have done?”
“What”? Dread pooled in my stomach like oily water, full of a dark and twisting stench that thickened in a sickly way.
With a deep breath, I turned toward the scene that I’d left behind in order to heal Laura’s wound. The street was littered with bodies. All around us, the humans who had moments before been enjoying a night out with friends were now only vacant puppets on broken strings.
Horror clenched my gut, and I pressed a shaking hand to cover my nose. There was no blood, but that didn’t stop the stench of death from filling my head. There were so many bodies, so many that my vision began to blur. Not only had we failed to take out Wagner, but we’d failed to save all these innocent lives, all these people who thought they were being protected by beautiful, powerful angels.
And they should have been protected. By us.
Instead, they’d never see daylight again.
Chapter 32
The Nosferatu disappeared into the darkness when the rest of our backup appeared on the scene, but it was far too late to make any difference at all. While we’d all survived ourselves, so many humans were dead that I couldn’t bear to count them all. There were dozens though. Maybe even a hundred. Now I understood what the Nosferatu had meant. They’d plan to distract me from their attack by giving Laura a serious enough wound that I’d need to tend to her instead of the demons.
It had worked like a charm. Wagner had done what he loved best—playing me like a fiddle.
“Oh my god,” one of the backup mages said, gasping when she stared at the pile of bodies. “How did this happen?”
“Wagner had it all planned out. He got the humans to see the demons as something else entirely—their saviors. And then he used the fight with us to lure them outside. The demons surrounded them, and then—”
I choked, unable to finish the sentence.
Her face blanched, and the mages who gathered behind her looked as ashen as a steel and cloud-filled sky. I could read their fear and their pain. Their expressions reflected the horror that had happened here tonight. My rallying speech from earlier had been forgotten, replaced by the reality of what we faced. We were outnumbered, and Wagner had outsmarted us time after time. And the next fight would be even worse. I knew that in the deepest part of my soul. Tonight, we’d lost dozens. Tomorrow, we’d lose hundreds.
And weeks from now? Thousands and thousands would fall.
“Go home,” I said, raising my voice so that all the mages who had gathered could hear me. “The fight is over, and we’ve lost. It’s time to go home.”
After the mages had dispersed, I slipped into the shadows and stole away to the cemetery, hoping that Dorian and the others wouldn’t try to follow. There was only one soul who I could talk to right now, and it was the fae who had started me down this path in the first place. All this time, I’d suspected his motivations and his intentions. And secretly, I’d trusted that he knew far more than I did. If he’d led me to getting my mark when I did, and if he’d led me to meeting the rebels, surely he had reasons beyond my comprehension, as if he could somehow see into the future, to know how the cards might fall.
But now I was starting to wonder if he’d been just as blind as I was all this time.
“Belzus,” I called out as I strode toward the crypt, the place where he’d led me that night he’d asked me to banish a demon from his graveyard. “I need to talk to you!”
I stomped down the pathway, feeling the fury rising up within me. My shadows and my newfound vampirism intensified my anger, filling me up with anguish and grief. The events of the past few months began to crash down around me, hitting my shoulders and making me feel as though my feet were sinking into the ground. It was too much. We’d lost so many, and I couldn’t see how it was anything but impossible for us to ever get ahead.
The war had only begun, but we’d already lost.
“You rang, Unbound Shadow,” a lyrical voice called out as Belzus stepped out from the depths of the crypt. His dark hood covered his glowing skin, his pointed ears, and it plunged his expression into deep shadows.
“So, you heard the news,” I said, clipping each word. “I’m not only your fucking shadow creation, but I’m also a vampire who craves her own friend’s blood.”
“It was inevitable,” he said, far too calmly and quietly for my tastes. I needed him to show emotion. I needed him to get as angry and scared as I was. It was his fault this had happened. And he needed to realize exactly how much he’d ruined my life.
I scoffed. “Right. Me turning into an Unbound was fate. That might just be the most infuriating thing you’ve ever said, and that’s saying something. Because you’ve been annoying as hell from day one.”
“I know why you’re here, Zoe,” he said, ignoring my comments. “As much as this part wasn’t planned, I’ve been expecting it. I’ve learned quite a lot about who you are deep down inside, and there was never a question that you’d eventually demand some answers from me. I’d hoped it wouldn’t happen too soon—there would be only so much I could share early in the process. It’s time now. Anything you need to know, I’ll do my best to explain.”
I blinked at the fae, taken aback by his words. “What the hell are you talking about? You mean to tell me that this entire thing has been some kind of process? Is it some kind of game to you? Messing with humanity and the veil between the demo
n realm and this one?”
“Not a game, and I certainly wouldn’t use the phrase ‘messing with’ to describe what I’ve been attempting to do.” With a sigh, he gave a nod. “But it has been a process of sorts. A plan. A blueprint to save this realm from being ravaged by demons.”
“Explain,” I said as I crossed my arms over my chest. “No more treating me like some kind of puppet. Tell me what’s going on. I need to know why you did this to me.”
“I didn’t do this to you, Zoe. You would have always become a shadow mage. I merely encouraged you to come into your powers sooner rather than later.”
“But why?” I asked. “You had a reason. I need to know what it is. I need to know if you have some bigger insight into the future, that we truly haven’t lost this fight, that there’s a reason to go on.”
“Unfortunately, Zoe. I cannot give you that. Only you can convince yourself to keep moving forward.” He gave me a tight smile. “I have inklings of what will happen, but I’m not what humans would call a psychic. I have no way of knowing whether your war with the demons will end in a loss or a win. I can only tell you that I felt this fight coming, and I knew, somehow, that the mortal realm would be destroyed unless a shadow mage joined the right side of good.”
My lungs deflated and tears threatened to spill down my face. All this planning, all this messing with my life, and Belzus didn’t really know much more than I did. He had no greater insight. Instead, he’d merely been operating on some kind of misplaced hunch. Because even though a shadow mage had gotten involved in the fight, we’d lost.
“How could you do all of this without knowing what the outcome would be?” I asked, throwing my hands in the air. “I mean, did you ever consider that all your meddling has only made the entire thing worse? I mean, look at how this has ended! So many humans are dead, Wagner’s demons are bigger and more dangerous than ever, and now he can wield the power of all four covens. The world is ending, Belzus. And I’m pretty sure things might have gone better if you hadn’t gotten me involved.”
The Bone Coven Chronicles: The Complete Series Page 73