Rose’s hands seemed to move of their own accord, both hands cradling Kara’s face, her palms gliding along the soft, curve of Kara’s jawline, Kara’s silky blue-and-black hair sliding over her fingers. They leaned closer together, their heads tilting involuntarily, as if a magnetic pull were drawing them together, their lips desperate to meet again. “Why not?” she panted, breathless from the intensity of the emotions brimming between them, breathless with desire.
Kara growled in frustration and dug her fingers into Rose’s thick, red hair. She stepped forward, the front of her body pressing against Rose’s body, and she tilted her head until her lips brushed Rose’s lips, desperate for another kiss. Just as their lips pressed together, Rose moved her hands to Kara’s arms and pushed back, extracting herself from Kara’s hold before they could kiss.
“I can’t,” Rose gasped. She glanced back toward the mausoleum, relieved to find that Kallias had already gone inside. She returned her gaze to Kara, pain flashing in her bright azure eyes. “I’m sorry. I can’t keep doing this.”
Kara nodded, and then, she stepped forward again, completely shocking Rose by slipping her arms around Rose’s back. She buried her face in the curve of Rose’s neck, breathing in Rose’s sweet, powerful scent, and she held Rose close, embracing her tightly, as if this would be the last time they’d ever touch.
For a moment, Rose just stood there, frozen, stunned by the sudden embrace, but then, she slipped her arms around Kara’s neck and pressed her face into Kara’s hair, breathing in the flowery scent that clung to each sleek strand of blue and black hair. Their bodies pressed together just as erotically as before—breasts against breasts, stomach against stomach, thighs against thighs—and yet, there was nothing erotic about this embrace. Warmth—soft, affectionate warmth—unfurled through Rose’s body, beginning in her chest and spreading throughout her entire body, tingling in her extremities. Rose’s soft lips curved into a smile against Kara’s shoulder. “Didn’t you say that you didn’t like hugs?”
Kara moved her lips to Rose’s ear. “Didn’t I tell you that I was a liar?”
Rose shivered at the sensation of Kara’s warm breath against her ear, and just like that, the non-erotic warmth unfurling through her body suddenly became erotic. She grimaced at her rebellious body and reluctantly stepped out of Kara’s arms. “Don’t worry about me,” she said, forcing a smile. “I’ll be fine.”
Kara’s piercing, blue eyes flashed with anxiety. “I hope you’re right.”
“Seriously, though, be careful,” Rose sighed. “I worry about you, too.”
Kara smiled. “I’ll see you after the battle, sexy.”
Rose laughed softly. The normalcy of the flirty comment felt almost like a breath of relief after the intensity of their earlier emotions. The relief was short-lived, however, because at that moment, Rose noticed the sound of hundreds of footsteps, moving rapidly, faster than humanly possible, through the grass.
“Kara!” Aaron yelled. “I need you over here! Now! They’re coming!”
“Get inside,” Kara breathed, picking up the blood-coated battle-axe at her feet. She stepped backward, toward Aaron. “Kallias and Erik need you.”
Rose nodded. “Be careful,” she repeated worriedly.
“Ah, don’t worry about me,” Kara said, that flirty smirk returning to her face, replacing the seriousness and fear. “I’m a warrior. I love a good battle.”
—
“What’s up with your emotions?” Erik asked with a raised eyebrow, as Rose stepped inside the mausoleum. He leaned against the wall, waiting for her.
Heat rushed to her face. “I don’t know what you mean,” she mumbled.
Kallias wasn’t with Erik near the entrance. Instead, he stood down near the scary tomb-elevator that Rose hated so much. Their footsteps echoed through the empty halls as Erik and Rose walked through the mausoleum.
“Ah, come on,” Erik pleaded excitedly. “Tell me what happened.”
Rose glared at him. “Nothing happened. It’s none of your business.”
“Which is it?” Erik asked. “Was it nothing or none of my business?”
Rose stopped short as she noticed the way Kallias watched her with his brows furrowed and his lips pursed. She sighed, “I need to tell you something.”
“Do you really think that this is the time for that talk?” Kallias asked.
“Then, you already know,” Rose said worriedly, “what happened.”
“Of course I know,” Kallias said dismissively. “I’m bound to you.”
Rose nodded sadly. “I didn’t mean to… It just…” she stammered.
“I said that I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Kallias grumbled.
Rose studied him with a nervous frown. “Right. Yeah. Sorry.”
“Did you kiss her?” Erik asked conspiratorially in her ear.
Rose glared over her shoulder at him. “Erik, shut up.”
“Let’s go,” Kallias growled, pushing away from the wall and stepping toward the tomb that secretly functioned as an elevator. “We have a war to stop.”
—
The halls of the Tomb of Blood were eerily silent. Corpses and puddles of blood scattered the black, marble floors. Doors hung open, presumably after the vampires raced out of their rooms to find out what was happening. Muted sounds of fighting drifted down the halls, seemingly echoing from the bar.
“Just how many traitors were there, exactly?” Erik said, his eyes wide.
Kallias stepped over the bodies of two decapitated vampires, lying side-by-side. “I’m starting to think that Alana’s army is much larger than ours.”
The sight of so many lives lost left Rose feeling sad and hollow. She felt as if they’d lost the battle before it even began. It also brought a certain statement to mind, a statement that Aaron had made a few days ago. He had said that he couldn’t trust anyone who followed him out of fear. It was the reason he trusted Kara and the reason he believed he could trust Rose. The number of corpses that scattered the floor could only mean that many vampires had betrayed Aaron.
As they neared the doors that opened into the bar, the noise grew louder and louder. It became clear that the battle was currently taking place in the bar.
When Kallias opened the door to the bar, for a moment, all they could see was red—and not just because of the crimson-red walls either. Many of the vampires in the bar already lay on the floor—decapitated, ripped open, or staked. The ones left alive were fighting each other, engaged in a battle to the death.
Kallias glanced over at Rose. “Stay close to me,” he said worriedly.
Rose frowned as she saw the bartender that Kara had introduced her to just a few nights ago—Tom, she realized. Kara had called him Tom. His white shirt—bright against his dark skin—turned a blackish red as she watched, blood drenching the fabric, pouring profusely from two stab wounds—one in his shoulder and another in his stomach. A group of vampires surrounded him, and he slumped weakly in the arms of one of them, cringing as another pressed a wooden stake against his chest. Rose raced toward them in hopes of stopping it.
Kallias scowled. “That’s literally the opposite of what I asked her to do.”
Erik snorted, “I’d be more surprised if she hadn’t defied you.”
—
“Why are you using a stake?” Tom asked weakly. After losing so much blood, he could barely even hold his head up, much less fight off five vampires.
Frank—the vampire who restrained him—answered him, his voice gruff in Tom’s ear. “Alana wants it to look like humans did this,” he explained.
The vampire holding the stake—a tall man with short, brownish-blonde hair that Rose vaguely recognized—hesitated. “Last chance,” he warned, raising an eyebrow at Tom. “I don’t want to kill you. I’d rather have you on our side.”
“I never took you for a traitor, Vincent,” Tom said hoarsely.
“A traitor?” Vincent repeated. “Aaron is the traitor! He betrays his own kind by in
sisting that we live out our immortality in the shadows. We are better than humans in every way. We are the more advanced species, the more evolved species. Why should we hide in the shadows while humans have free reign of the world? They don’t even know what they’re doing with it. They destroy it for power and profit. We could do better. Alana offers so much more than Aaron.”
“Are you suggesting genocide of the entire human race?” Tom asked.
Vincent frowned. “No, I don’t think it’ll come to that. Subjugation, perhaps, but not genocide. Humans will surrender before it reaches that point.”
Tom narrowed his eyes at him. “Subjugation? You mean slavery.”
“Perhaps,” Vincent said, shrugging. “They’re really just food anyway.”
“Count me out. I was on the other side of slavery once,” Tom said with a slight Southern drawl. “Forgive me if I’m not a big fan of the practice.”
“Then, you leave us no choice,” Vincent said as he tried to shove the stake into Tom’s chest. He frowned when the stake didn’t move. It felt frozen in place, as if some unseen force held it still. “I can’t move it. It won’t move.”
“What do you mean you can’t move it?” Frank asked, frowning at him.
“Uh, guys?” one of the other vampires said. “I think we have company.”
All six vampires, including Tom, shifted their gazes toward the other side of the bar-counter. Vincent spun around to look, too, and when he did, the stake still didn’t move. It remained frozen, where he’d held it, hovering in midair.
Rose stood on the other side of the bar-counter, watching them.
Frank frowned at her. “Who are you, and why are you standing there?”
“I thought this would be a good time to take up drinking,” Rose said.
His frown deepened. “Is that some kind of a joke? There’s a battle going on, and we’re winning it. What kind of person makes a joke at a time like that?”
“A weird one, I’d assume,” Rose said, “and I happen to be pretty weird.”
“Frank, she’s the one,” Vincent said. “The one with the red eyes.”
Frank raised an eyebrow. “Her eyes look pretty blue to me.”
“Alana says she’s dangerous,” Vincent said. “As a matter of fact, Osiris said that she attacked him on her first night here. I think we should kill her.”
A woman with curly, brown hair stepped forward. Rose recognized her as well. Kara had called her Isabelle. “Alana also said that we’re not allowed to kill Rose Foster,” Isabelle reminded him. “Alana wants Rose brought to her alive.”
Vincent rolled his eyes. “Ugh. There are too many people that we’re not allowed to kill,” he complained. “I can’t keep track of them all. Kara, Erik, this red-eyed—whatever-her-name-is.” He waved his hand vaguely in Rose’s direction.
Rose stared blankly at him. “Your friend literally just said my name.”
“Oh, I’m not Vincent’s friend,” Isabelle corrected. “I’m his ex-wife.”
“She cheated on him with his brother,” Frank explained.
Another vampire raised his hand. “I’m his brother.”
Rose blinked in shock. “Well, this is a lot of drama I didn’t sign up for.”
Vincent rolled his eyes. “Just attack her already.”
Frank and Vincent remained with Tom while the other three vampires attacked Rose. They never even reached her. Rose used her telekinetic abilities to throw them all back. She pulled the silver dagger out of its sheath and held it up. Then, she used her telekinetic abilities to lift the dagger into the air, and when the vampires returned to their feet and came after her again, she sent the dagger flying into each one of their necks, beheading them, one-by-one, without ever actually touching them. Vincent and Frank watched with shocked expressions, and then, left with no other choice, they dropped Tom and attacked her as well.
As Frank tried to race past Tom, toward Rose, Tom grabbed him and bashed his head against the bar-counter. Blood poured over Frank’s face as he collapsed into the floor, unconscious, and Tom caught himself against the stool.
Vincent moved faster than the others, and he managed to get his hands on Rose before she could stop him. He twisted both of her hands behind her back and then pressed a knife against her throat. “You must surrender now.”
“You really shouldn’t tell me what I must do,” Rose said as a spark of red light flashed in her eyes. “It’s a sure-fire way to get me to do the opposite.”
Vincent frowned, but before he could figure out what she intended to do, a red haze began to glow in Rose’s eyes, and then, a strangled cry escaped from his lips as Rose used her telekinetic abilities to rip his heart out of his chest.
Rose stepped out of the way as his body fell forward, hitting the ground with a thud. She looked up worriedly, searching for Frank, but she found lying on the floor, his heart ripped out of his chest as well, Tom standing over him.
Rose ran to Tom’s side as she watched him nearly collapse into the floor. She threw his large, muscular arm over her shoulder and then helped him stagger over to the stool on his side of the bar-counter. He dwarfed her easily, and he felt heavy against her. But with her supernatural strength, she hardly noticed it.
“I remember you,” he said, watching her with an amused smile. He held his hand over his bleeding stomach as they walked. “You’re Kara’s girlfriend.”
“Not exactly,” she muttered as she helped him climb onto the stool.
“Aw, come on,” he said gruffly. “I saw the way you looked at her.”
Rose studied his stomach wounds with a frown. “I have a boyfriend.”
“So you keep saying,” he said with a pained-yet-amused smile.
“This looks bad,” Rose commented, gesturing toward his injury.
He nodded weakly. “I tried to stop them when I realized what they were going to do, but there were just too many of them. I’m actually a good fighter.”
She knelt behind the counter and began to search the shelves. “Oh?”
“Well, I was hung for beating a man to death,” Tom laughed.
Rose spun around, her eyes widening. “You were hung? For murder?”
Tom shrugged one shoulder. “The man raped my daughter.”
“Oh,” Rose said, staring at him. “Well, that…changes things…a little.”
He chuckled at her nervous response. “A little, yeah.”
She turned back toward the shelves. “Where are your blood bags?”
He pointed at a row of cabinets with his blood-soaked hand. “The third cabinet is actually a mini-fridge. You’ll see the blood bags when you open it.”
Rose shifted toward the cabinets and pulled open the third one. “How many do you need?” she asked as she gathered a few blood bags into her arms.
Tom glanced down at the gruesome injury. “Three should be fine.”
She nodded and brought him the bags. She stepped back, watching as he ripped the first bag open with his fangs. “If you don’t mind me asking,” she began hesitantly as he emptied the first bag, “how old was your daughter?”
He tossed the empty bag into a trash can and licked the blood from his lips. “You don’t want to know,” he said as he ripped open another blood bag.
Rose cringed. “That young, huh?” she said in a pained voice. She looked away, her fingers tapping a nervous rhythm against her thighs. “I’m not saying that there is a good reason for murder,” she sighed, “but if there is…that’s it.”
Tom glanced at her. “You don’t regret saving me, then?”
She smiled. “Not yet.”
He chuckled and returned to drinking the blood. “Why did you save me anyway?” he asked curiously as he tossed another empty bag in the trash can.
“I didn’t really think about it, honestly. I just saw someone in trouble, and I came to help,” Rose said. She shrugged. “It’s a character flaw of mine.”
Tom raised an eyebrow at her. “Saving people is a character flaw?”
Rose laughed, “Depends on who you ask, I guess.”
“Well, whatever the reason…thanks for saving me,” Tom said as he finished emptying the last blood bag and tossed it in the trash. “I owe you.”
“Nah, you really don’t,” Rose said dismissively. She watched the fighting with a nervous frown. It was hard to discern who was fighting whom when they all moved at such rapid, inhuman speeds, but she managed to locate Kallias after a few moments. Her frown deepened as she realized that most of the vampires that were fighting for Alana’s side seemed to be surrounding Kallias, specifically. She stepped forward as she noticed Erik approaching her. “Well, I’ll leave you to…uh…heal,” she said, waving awkwardly at Tom. “See you after the battle.”
“If we survive it,” Tom added under his breath.
Rose met Erik on the other side of the bar-counter. “What’s going on?”
Erik glanced around at all of the vampires that were fighting—none of which were paying any attention to him. “No one is attacking me,” he muttered.
“Alana probably ordered them to leave you alone,” Rose reminded him.
Erik sighed, “Well, she certainly didn’t tell them to leave Kallias alone.”
“Is he okay?” Rose asked worriedly.
Erik shrugged. “He’s surrounded, but he’s Kallias. He can fight his way out of almost anything. I doubt he’s leaving the room anytime soon, though.”
Rose nodded. “Then, I should go. Now.”
Erik frowned at her for a moment, as if he were trying to decipher what she meant, and then, his eyes widened. “Rose…don’t go after Alana by yourself.”
She offered him an apologetic smile. “You know that it’s the only way.”
“And you know that Kallias will kill you if you do this,” he argued.
“Not if Alana kills me first,” Rose quipped.
Erik scowled at her. “That’s not encouraging. At all.”
“The best way to end a war with the fewest lives lost is to take out the commander,” she said, “especially if that commander is controlling part of her army with telepathic abilities. Once we kill Alana, the battle is nearly over. Everyone who isn’t fighting willingly will stop, and then, we can handle the rest.”
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