Hands tore at me.
Damon clung to me, but the other hands gripped me with a force that was beyond strong, beyond savage—beyond this earth.
I screamed as two unyielding forces threatened to rip me in to.
“Let the blood go, cat!”
The voice of Lemera shrieked in my ear.
“Damon…do it.” I barely managed to get the words out in a level voice before pain tore through me again when she ripped at me again.
I had the odd feeling she wasn’t trying to hurt me. She didn’t care if she did, but it wasn’t her intent.
“Kit…” He spoke in a ragged growl, desperation in each word.
“Trust me.” I blinked, staring at him through wet eyes. “Trust me.”
He let go.
I went flying back against her and immediately, I wretched. The stink of grave rot filled my head, surrounding me.
Bile choked me and to my horror and shock, Lemera stroked the back of my head. “Your belly is weak, small sister. But that is nothing to me. This…thing…is he the one who dishonored you?”
“Wuh…what?”
But she didn’t repeat herself. Lemera waited, utterly patient.
I wasn’t, though. I had to get away before my stomach crawled up through my throat in effort to ease the pitching and roiling.
Wheeling my head around, I searched for whatever she’d been referring to.
Chang was slowly coming toward me, slinking through the tall grass. I shook my head, mouthed, It’s okay.
He continued on.
Damon approached from a ninety-degree angle, far less subtle.
But it wasn’t either of them.
She let me go and stroked my head once more. “Look at him, small sister. Look and see.”
“Look at…” I took a step forward.
My foot hit something—no. It went in to something.
Freezing, I looked down.
Jude lay there, his chest cracked open like a walnut, eyes glazed with pain. He was missing both hands and feet—but he had mine, I thought hysterically. It was buried in the desiccated mess that was his entrails. I’d known, logically, that a vampire’s intestines shrunk and withered, leaving only a fairly normally functioning kidney system to flush out toxins. Something that didn’t eat solid food didn’t need did the body system designed to flush it out, right?
But whether they were used or not, the intestines were a disgusting mess and my foot was buried ankle deep in his.
Did I ever threaten to have his guts for garters?
Another hysterical thought.
I yanked my foot up and scrambled away.
Thankfully, Lemera allowed me.
“That’s him,” I said, pasting a rictus of a smile on my face. “That’s the..um…he’s the one.”
“How shall we kill him then?” She cocked her head, smiling at me. The dank, thin strands of hair that had once been blonde drifted in the breeze and the stink of decay mingled with the cloying miasma that now clung to my boot.
“We?”
“His blood is yours—ours. He cannot dishonor you without dishonoring me. I am your vengeance. I am your rage.” Her eyes moved down and lingered on him. “I, perhaps, can kill him for you. You are young and small. Yes…”
Jude started to laugh.
Despite the hole in him, despite the pain he had to feel, he started to laugh.
“I’m killing him,” I whispered.
A familiar weapon came to mind, then my hand as Lemera turned, her eyes narrowing on my face. “I am vengeance, small sister. This is the task set before me.”
So she kept saying.
I went to lift my bow as he smiled.
“Perhaps you’ll still laugh in hell,” I said.
Laughter faded, Jude eyed me warily now.
“Remember this?” I smiled. Aimed. Released. He lurched, trying to evade, but the muscle needed to regenerate was gone and he could barely move.
Then, arrow still vibrating in his black, pulpy mess of a heart, I banished the bow and drew my blade. With a scream, I spun, bringing her up, then down in a shining arc.
His head separated from his body just as he managed to fling out an arm.
Damon lunged for me.
Lemera lunged for him.
I screamed again, but this time, for a totally different reason.
“No!”
Chapter Thirty-Four
“You smell of lust, of the small sister, of pain, need…”
She caught him with a strength that denied her slim frame and when Chang prepared to pounce, she whipped her head around almost ninety degrees, shoving one hand up to Damon’s throat.
Her fingers were like sharpened blades, the bones protruding from the skin, jagged and sharp. “I kill if you move. And I feed…”
Chang tensed.
“So much better.” Leaning in, she pressed the empty socket where her nose should have been to Damon’s cheek. He had gone still, staring at me with fathomless eyes. “You stink of…love. Do you love a child of the blood?”
“I love her,” Damon said flatly. “Her bloodline doesn’t matter.”
“Hmmm. Does yours?””
“Not to her.”
She sucked in a breath, a grotesque sound as she had bits and pieces of flesh missing from the area around her ribs. “Might that change if you all knew…all there is to know. Beware…I am vengeance. I am fury. But…this intrigues me.”
She turned then, moving with speed that set her hair to flying around her shoulders. “Do not summon me, small sister. When I am summoned, I come with…death.”
Then she lifted her face and faded away.
In her place, where she had stood, lay an old bronze blade. It was the one I'd found in Jude's house.
I grabbed it and promptly threw up.
Epilogue
“And…she just disappeared?”
A full tribunal sat in front of me. Not just three Regents—or two, perhaps, with Malcolm busy being dead.
Rana and Samantha had spent the past two days scattering body parts. The last two pieces, his head and his heart, were being burned, the ashes scattered in two different oceans.
I’d thought about burning Jude to ash, too.
But I didn’t want to give him even another moment of my time.
He was dead.
That was all that mattered.
Dead with no chance of ever coming back, either, because Damon had made sure of that—he’d destroyed whatever might have been left of his heart, then, for good measure, he’d eaten it.
“Bad meat,” he’d told me. There had been a half-crazed light in his eyes as he’d spat the taste from his mouth and I hadn’t let him kiss me even once that day. It was more than the idea of bad meat that kept me from it, although I understood the predator that lived inside Damon.
I had no idea what happened with the rest of Jude’s body. Chang had returned to his human skin, once more nude, and requested my phone.
I’d been tucked up against Damon’s chest, hardly able to move when it happened, so Damon had fished the phone out and turned it over.
By the time I was able to think straight, he had me tucked inside the car and we were back on the way to the Lair.
I’d done nothing but sleep for twelve hours straight.
Then I’d spent a good hour soaking in a bath tub and staring at the bronze blade that had been left by Lemera.
It was the geas…or whatever one might call it. Whatever it was, it had held some sort of control over her. But it was more than that. It was still hers in some strange way. I felt that connection.
Somebody had been controlling her through their connection to that blade—that was what she’d meant, I suspected.
Don’t call me.
I had no intention of doing so.
Now, as I faced the Tribunal, including Findlay and Ellen, I kept my expression locked down, emotions under tight control. I might stink of fear—who wouldn’t facing vampires, shifters and other crea
tures whose total years stacked up to be nigh uncountable? Just sitting in the same room with all of them was enough to give me a power buzz strong enough to make my teeth ache.
But I didn’t have to let the fear control me.
I was past that.
Long past.
“There were reports that some of Jude’s seconds had seen him toying with a small bronze blade, and there were whispers between him and an unknown female the last day or so before he died.”
“You mean those fleeting moments between when he was set free and when he came after me to kill me?” I said, meeting the gaze of the vampire who’d commented about the blade.
It made my lip curl. I didn’t know if he was fishing or if he knew something.
Findlay cleared his throat. “Ms. Colbana. Do you have that blade? Is it in your possession?”
“No.” I smiled serenely. I didn’t have it. It wasn’t in my possession. I’d told Damon I was giving it to him to keep safe for me—for just this purpose. I’d told him I wanted it tucked inside the locked room with the rest of the weapons I owned that were too dangerous to be left out, including a sword that whispered of death, but I didn’t want to know where he put it.
Findlay’s eyes narrowed. “Could you find this…creature? This assassin?”
“Even if I could, I wouldn’t do it,” I said bluntly. “She brings death—those were her words. I’d rather not dance this particular dance again…ever.”
One of the shifters at the far end of the table muttered his agreement, then raised his voice. “I see nothing more to be gained by pursuing this angle, members of the Tribunal.”
Another seconded that.
I didn’t dare let out a breath.
Next to me, Chang lifted a hand and put it on my shoulder, offering a comforting squeeze. He’d aligned himself at my side and when we’d entered, he’d addressed the Tribunal first.
“All who are called are allowed council. I’ve offered my services to Kit Colbana.”
That had caused more than a few of the shifters to exchange glances amongst themselves—and the vampires had all gone deathly still. None of that, though, had quite matched the reaction we got when the doors opened again and one by one, every witch registered with Green Road filed into the room. It was well over two hundred.
When the seats ran out, they simply moved to the front of those seated and sat on the floor.
The line was closed up by Justin, Colleen, Brahm and Padraig.
None of them spoke.
The head of the Tribunal had leaned in to murmur to the woman at his side—one of the witches. She’d had a faint smile on her mouth from the moment the door opened and she responded to whatever he’d asked with a faint shake of her head and a widening of the smile.
Now, as the long line of old, powerful non-humans sat at the table and leaned back, quietly murmuring amongst themselves, the witches all rose, standing silently at my back.
I shot a look up at Chang.
He had the look of a smug, satisfied cat on his face as the head of the Tribunal finally looked at us.
“These events shouldn’t go unpunished,” he said, frustration in his voice. “One vampire house is completely gone. Others weakened. And yet the only one who might have the information about where we can locate the ones responsible tells us that to bring the assassin forth is to call for more death.”
He spread his hands wide. “You bear no guilt and it was actions you took that helped bring this to an end. So…what are we to do?”
He seemed to genuinely want an answer from me.
Glancing up at Chang, I studied him. But he simply shrugged, never taking his eyes from the men and women in front of us.
I opened my mouth.
But any answer I might have offered was cut off.
There was a knock at the great doors of the hall, huge and thundering. A chill spread through me, an ominous warning that I didn’t understand.
Slowly, I rose and turned.
I made the complete circuit as the doors swung open.
Nobody on this side had opened them.
The golden livery was what caught my eye first.
Panic, a chittering, nasty little parasite, settled between my ears and began to scream.
Run, you have to run, run, run, run…
A mocking voice seemed to echo in the back of my mind. There were no words though. Only laughter. Just laughter. Familiar.
Skin alternating between cold and hot, I flexed my wrist, cracked it.
“Kit.” Chang moved to block me. “Stay behind me.”
I wanted to. I so wanted to. But I reached up, rested a hand on his shoulder. “No, Chang.”
Damon’s head came my way. At some point, he’d gotten to his feet and was pacing the narrow space between the aisles, his gaze seemingly locked on whatever was unfolding near the doors. But at the sound of my voice, he looked my way.
Part of me half-expected him to order Scott and Chang to…do something.
Chang hadn’t moved again, but his entire body carried a subtle tension that told me he was ready to react.
Damon said nothing, his eyes moving to my face for a lingering moment before returning back to the quiet chaos taking place.
“What is the meaning of this?” Findlay demanded from his position at the center of the dais. “You’re interrupting a formal meeting of the Assembly.”
“I know,” a cool, calm voice announced.
A shiver broke out, raced down my spine. That voice…
The long, powerfully built finally stepped into view. Her face was strong and proud, set off by the silver coronet she wore. In the middle of the coronet was a jade green stone that matched her eyes. Those eyes were the only soft thing about her. Her hair, cut short, was starting to go silver at the temple. Her clothes were cut in a fashion as severe and serviceable as her hair, but they were finely made, from the short traveling cloak to the soles of the knee-high leather boots. The cloak was held closed at the neck with a brooch that echoed the silver and jade design of the coronet.
I knew the design, the sight.
And the speaker.
Reshi stood there, head inclined. Her eyes landed on me, her lips curving in a faint smile. “Niece,” she said in an expressionless voice. “I’ve come to take you home.”
The blade came to me in a shining arc of light in front of the entire crowd gathered. Setting into a guard stance without any conscious thought, I focused on my aunt. “Like hell.”
Damon had been seated at the table behind me, what I’d been told was the appropriate place for the leader of the Clan who had become, by default, my people.
It wasn’t the woman I’d expected, but in some ways, this was worse.
“Reshi.”
She smiled at me and hate spat from her eyes, eyes as blue as Rathi’s as been the day he pulled me from that pit. She smiled, and it was his smile as he threw me to the ground.
“Niece,” she said congenially.
“I no longer call you family,” I replied and I was surprised my voice didn’t shake.
As if I hadn’t spoken, she continued. “I’ve come to collect you, child. You’ve run wild long enough.”
I cracked my neck left, then right, fully aware that Damon’s people were on their feet, as well as every last witch, every last wolf.
And Damon was circling around, moving ever closer to me. He was growling, low sounds deep in his throat that carried to me over the few feet left between us.
Sliding my eyes from him to the guards before finally looking at my aunt, I asked, “Are the guards the only men and women you brought? If so…it’s not enough. You’ll need an army to drag me back there.”
And Reshi smiled.
Bio
J.C. Daniels is the pen name of author Shiloh Walker.
Shiloh Walker has been writing since she was a kid. She fell in love with vampires with the book Bunnicula and has worked her way up to the more…ah…serious works of fiction. She loves reading and writin
g anything paranormal, anything fantasy, and nearly every kind of romance. Once upon a time she worked as a nurse, but now she writes full time and lives with her family in the Midwest. She writes romantic suspense and contemporary romance, and urban fantasy as J.C. Daniels. You can find her at Twitter or Facebook and read more about her work at her website. Sign up for her newsletter and have a chance to win a monthly giveaway.
More JC Daniels’ Titles
Blade Song #1
Night Blade #2
Broken Blade #3
Edged Blade #4
Shadowed Blade #5
A Stroke of Dumb Luck (Tor)
Bladed Magic (A Kit Colbana Novella)
Misery’s Way (A Kit Colbana Novella)
Final Protocol
Blade Song Anniversary Edition
Damon
Look for other titles by J.C.’s other half, Shiloh Walker
The Grimm
Urban Fantasy Romance
Candy Houses • No Prince Charming • Crazed Hearts
The Ash Trilogy
If You Hear Her • If You See Her • If You Know Her
The Secrets & Shadows Series
Burn For Me • Break For Me • Long For Me
Deeper Than Need • Sweeter Than Sin • Darker Than Desire
The FBI Psychics
The Missing • The Departed • The Reunited
The Protected • The Unwanted • The Innocent
The Hunters
Paranormal Romance
Hunting the Hunter • Hunters: Heart and Soul • Hunter’s Salvation
Hunter’s Need • Hunter’s Fall • Hunter’s Rise
And more
Misery’s Way
“Have you scouted out the next spot?”
Saleel lifted one shoulder. “Yes. Montana. I tire of the heat.”
“Montana?” I grimaced and mentally shuddered. Summer was rapidly drawing to a close. That would mean cold. Snow. Worse … ice. “I hate the cold.”
Haunted Blade (Colbana Files Book 6) Page 30