Fire flared at their center. The moon was up; Jimmy was gone.
I had to make him believe that I was too preoccupied with doing him to realize I was supposed to be helping him fight the fight. He’d drink from me; I’d drink from him and then—
I didn’t want to think about that. For now, I’d just enjoy the press of his mouth, the brush of his hands. Jimmy’d always been a sexual savant. When he touched me. I melted. Couldn’t help myself.
Sure. Sawyer was the best sex I’d ever had, but Sawyer was sex. Jimmy was love, childhood—all that was good and right before everything went badly wrong.
Even in the Strega’s lair, when Jimmy had said and done terrible things, if he shut the hell up, turned off the lights, and touched me, it was as if we were seventeen again.
Talk about breaking someone. In Manhattan, he’d been very, very close to breaking me.
Now he was rough, hungry, that was fine. The faster he took me, the faster he’d lose control and do what I wanted him to.
I opened my mouth, welcomed his tongue, suckling it. He growled and yanked me closer, crushing my breasts to his chest, then shimmying back and forth, creating pressure and friction.
My body was twisted at an odd angle, so I swung my leg over his lap, straddling him. He was hard, no surprise, and I rode that hardness against my belly just enough to make him crazy.
He tore his lips from mine, kissing his way across my jaw, down my neck, then teasing the tips of my breasts with his tongue.
“Harder,” I muttered. “More.” And he grazed me with his teeth.
I yanked on his hair, and he bucked beneath me, the pressure against my now slick and swollen center both exquisite and excruciating.
The moon spilled across us; the chill silver light seemed to scald my naked skin. My fingers skated over him, my nails raking his back, his chest.
His eyes were completely red now; his fangs had lengthened. I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do, seduced him into forgetting the fight.
He flexed his hips, pressing against me, sliding just a little within. I lifted myself and let him plunge. My head fell back, and I clutched at his shoulders as I tightened around him.
“Your blood is like wine,” he whispered against my breasts. “I can smell the power pulsing under your skin. What could I do with you beside me? What could we. together, become?”
What was it with the evil throng? Give them an inch, they take the world, or at least covet it.
He arched, pressing into me even as he pulled my hips down. I couldn’t think anymore, could only feel, the pressure, the pain, the possibilities.
What could we do, together?
I shook my head hard enough to hurt. Focus! Jimmy needed to drink from me, I needed to drink from him. and then …
Shazaam, I’d be a vampire. Or close enough.
I had to move this along, and I knew just how.
“Maybe this isn’t the best idea,” I murmured. “I should probably—”
I flew to the side as he tossed me onto the bed, following me there, slipping inside again even as he captured my hands and drew them above my head.
“Too late now,” he said, eyes burning into mine as he began to move. In and out, slick, hard heat.
“But—”
“Quiet, Elizabeth.”
Jimmy never called me that. But the demon did.
He held me captive with his hands, his legs, the weight of his body. I struggled a little to make it look good, and he laughed the laugh of his father. I’d always hated that laugh.
“I’ve taken blood from you in so many ways. What was my favorite? Here?” He licked my neck. “There?” He grazed my shoulder. “Perhaps this?” He shifted, and his thumbnail coursed along the inside of my thigh.
I jerked, the movement making my breasts jiggle, and he smiled, lowering his head, nuzzling me.
“So pretty. So round and soft.” He lazily licked a nipple, then blew on the moisture left behind, becoming fascinated when the bud peaked.
In perfect syncopation with his thrusts, he suckled. I matched each of his movements with my own, forget-ing what I was about, only caring what was to come.
Suddenly, he tensed and spurted, full and hot. I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him closer, reaching for my own release but unable to find it.
Until his fangs pierced my breast. The pain made my body bow, pressing me into him and making me come with such ferocity I would have shrieked if I could have breathed.
His rhythmic sucking seemed to pull first at my belly and then ever lower. My head went dizzy with blood loss. Despite his orgasm, he stayed hard inside of me, kept pumping against me. Then he lifted his head; a quick flick of his tongue traced away the last drop of blood from his lips, and I wasn’t disgusted. I was intrigued.
Blood was both life and death. What did mine taste like? What did his?
Jimmy leaned closer, pressing me deeper into the mattress as he whispered my own enticement back to me. “Do it. You know that you want to.”
At first, I thought he meant come again; boy, did I want to. And when he seemed to grow even larger, swelling inside of me, stretching the already sensitive flesh, I did come. And then I did it. I bit him. Because he was right.
I wanted to.
He tasted like wine, just as he’d said, deep and rich. I became drunk with it; I couldn’t stop. Didn’t have to. Because Jimmy wouldn’t die any more than I would.
The heady combination of sex and blood flowed through me, strengthened me. Together we finished what we’d started—shuddering through a shared orgasm and completing my transformation into the darkness.
As I think back on things now, it scares me. I blundered ahead, doing what needed to be done. What choice did I have? But if I’d thought more about it I would have wondered: Once I was possessed by evil, why in hell would I want to fight the Naye’i and stop the coming Apocalypse?
Except I did. The instant I became a vampire, I was consumed by the need to kill her. As I’d thought just moments before, why did every evil thing want to rule the world? And as soon as I was an evil thing, I knew.
Because I could.
I was better than all the others. I’d chosen this. The choosing gave me strength and ambition.
The whole world seemed different. With dhampir powers I could see farther, run faster, hear more. But as a vampire everything became magnified. Colors flared, agonizingly bright and surreal. Sounds reached me long before they should, altering my sense of time and place.
I unwound myself from Jimmy’s embrace, the slide of our skin so intense I could literally hear the hair on his legs swish; the blood coursing through his veins hummed like a song.
When he spoke, I flinched at the volume. “Do you like it?”
“Mmm,” I purred.
He took my hand and led me to the mirror above his dresser. That bit about vampires having no reflection? Total BS. I could see both of us—along with our flaming eyes and sparkly fangs. It was a good look for me.
I fingered Sawyer’s turquoise. I was now as strong as the woman of smoke, and while I wore this, she couldn’t touch me.
The bitch was toast.
I laughed, the sound deep, throaty, and utterly demonic. I liked it so much, I laughed again.
A heated breeze blew in through the window. The breath of evil, it smelled like brimstone, and I drew it in like ambrosia.
The wind called me closer; I peered through the bars and up to the top of the mountain. The full moon shone across a gathering mist. Rain tumbled from the sky, but only on the peak, and the dormant volcano rumbled.
The rain is a woman, Whitelaw had said.
Old Navajo legends that hinted of the truth.
“The woman of smoke,” I murmured.
She was here, and she was waiting for me.
CHAPTER 33
“How are we going to get out?” Jimmy asked.
I turned reluctantly away from the mountain, which had begun to rumble my name.
&nb
sp; Phoenix, it said. Come to me.
Jimmy stood by the golden door, dressed in black jeans and a tee that read Hannah Montana. In my old life that would have been hysterical. In this one, all I could think of was how sweet the blood of a child.
I didn’t even consider clothes for myself. Such trivialities meant nothing to me anymore.
“They aren’t going to open it,” I said as I joined Jimmy. “Sawyer can’t.”
“And Summer won’t.”
This close to the exit, the heat of the metal made every inch of my skin throb like a bad sunburn. The thought of touching it made my fingers sting.
“How did you plan to get out?” he asked.
I hadn’t planned, I’d just moved forward. I really needed to stop doing that.
My skin is my robe.
Sawyer’s voice came to me out of the past. I turned away from the pulsing heat of the golden door and strolled back to the window—the only way out. Beyond it lay the mountain, where she awaited me. If I were a bird—
I tilted my head, suddenly understanding what Sawyer had meant.
I faced Jimmy. “Do you have a knife?”
Jimmy pulled his switchblade out of his pocket.
Stupid question.
I took the weapon and carved a bat into my forearm. The image resembled the icon for Batman—a stick bat at best, Id never been much of an artist—but I was pretty certain it would do the trick.
It began to heal almost immediately. I never thought I’d wish my preternatural healing abilities away, but right then I did.
“What the hell?” Jimmy growled as the blood dripped from my arm and onto the floor. He inched closer, tongue flicking across his lips, still-glowing eyes fastened on the rolling river of red.
“It’s the only way.” Reaching up, I removed the turquoise from around my neck and set it on the windowsill.
“How am I going to get out?” he asked.
“You aren’t.” I pressed my palm to the steadily healing bat carved into my arm.
Seconds later I took the chain into my mouth, flapping my black wings harder to offset the downward pull of the turquoise as I headed upward toward the full silver moon that hung above Mount Taylor.
Jimmy shouted something, but I wasn’t listening. I wanted no one at my side when I met the woman of smoke. I’d always known it would come down to her or me.
Instead, the sonar that accompanied my shift—the ability of bats to “see” by sound—took over. The term blind as a bat had come about because bats use their incredible sense of hearing rather than sight to fly in the dark.
Now that I was a bat, I realized that it wasn’t exactly sound but feeling. A buzzing awareness all around me that there flew a mosquito, ahead loomed a tree, and soon, very soon, I’d reach the mountain and my destiny.
The moon’s glow made the whirling mist atop Mount Taylor luminescent. The rain had stopped, and I circled, unable to see the ground beneath, but somewhere in that fog I felt her.
I dropped through the shroud, making use of my bat supersenses to avoid trees, rocks, and one evil Navajo witch. A few feet from the earth, I reached for, then became, myself, landing in a crouch that allowed me to scoop up the turquoise and flip the chain around my neck. Just in time, too.
Naked as I, the woman of smoke stepped from the fog. “A bat,” she murmured. “How … cliché.”
“An evil spirit bitch,” I returned. “Right back atcha.”
“This will be a fight to the death,” she said.
“Que será, será.”
The Naye’i appeared confused. I guess she didn’t listen to much Doris Day.
From the first moment I’d seen her—as a spirit of smoke in the desert and as flesh in Murphy’s bar—I’d known she was dangerous. The more I learned about her, the more I hated her. But I’d hated as a human. A paltry, pathetic hatred, unworthy of the word.
As a spirit of darkness, I understood hate; I welcomed the desire to wreak havoc, to maim and kill just for the joy of it, and I saw why I’d needed to become like her to win.
The Naye’i had no humanity, no compassion, no restraint. And now neither did I.
We circled each other like all-star wrestlers waiting for an opening. I wasn’t worried. I could still taste Jimmy’s blood; the strength we’d shared pulsed through me; supernatural power lay at my fingertips; and the turquoise would prevent her from laying a hand on me.
The word cakewalk strolled through my head, and the Naye’i smiled. That smile made me pause. It was the smile of someone with a secret.
The woman of smoke’s hand snaked out and closed around my throat. I blinked, shocked. “Wha—” I managed before she lifted me from my feet, squeezing off all the air.
Wherever her fingers touched, pain erupted, but not the icy burn that had occurred the last time her skin had met mine. Something had changed.
My legs flailed, my arms, too. I reached for the turquoise, but she was there before me.
“You thought this would protect you.” She broke the chain with a single jerk and tossed the stone away. “Not anymore.”
I couldn’t breathe, which made thinking damn difficult. Even when she dropped me to the ground, I lay gasping like a fish on the shore.
“The turquoise marked you as his, but you chose another,” she whispered, her brimstone breath washing over my face, making my skin flame. “And when you chose him, the stone became just a stone.”
Shit. This was going to be a lot more difficult than I thought. But I guess if she were easy to kill, everyone would do it.
I sat up, and the Naye’i backhanded me so hard I skidded across the ground, stray rocks gouging my bare ass. One of my fangs pierced my lip and blood flowed.
Her laughter echoed in the mountain’s rumble. “You thought it would be simple. Become the darkness and swallow me whole. But / am the darkness.” She lifted her hands to the silver-tinged night, and lightning rained down. “And you will be the one to die.”
If I didn’t move, I would die. I scrambled to my feet; her smirk said she’d let me. The fury came back, both icy and hot. I would bathe in her blood; I would use her bones for chopsticks. When she was dead I would dance a jig on her corpse.
There, that was more like the new me.
I tried to sweep her legs from beneath her. But she jumped my sweep, then hovered above me.
I leaped upward, very Matrix-like, and tried a roundhouse kick. She leaned back and my foot missed. My momentum swung me downward so fast I nearly ate dirt before I managed to get my hands in front of me.
“How to kill a vampire,” she mused.
My back exposed, I flipped over just as she snapped her fingers. A wooden stake appeared in her hand, and as she threw the thing, I rolled. The stake stuck in the ground where my heart had just been.
Fire billowed all around me. Beyond the flames, the Naye’i seemed to dance.
“I’ll kill you every way there is to kill a vampire. Little by little you’ll die; then I’ll do it again. And when you’re nothing more than a pile of blood and empty skin—no Sawyer, no robe, no way to shift and heal— then the gates of hell will fly open, and I will rule every demon on this earth.”
“Killing me will open Tartarus?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”
“Do you know how?”
I leaped through the fire; the places it burned healed almost instantly.
The Naye’i looked as if she’d sucked on a lemon.
“You think I’d tell you?”
“Can’t hurt.”
“This might,” she said, and opening her arms, fingers spread wide, she swept her hands toward me.
Rocks flew, hundreds of them in all shapes and sizes, raining down on me, crushing me into the earth, piling up until I was buried.
When things stopped pinging against the cairn, I shoved upward and they all fell away. “What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Cover a vampire’s grave with stones and she will never rise.”
&n
bsp; “I’m not dead” I said.
“Good point.” She flicked her wrist and something small and sharp and shiny flew, sticking in my temple before I could catch it.
“Ouch!” I yanked out a three-inch nail, and the Naye’i shrieked her fury to the stars.
“Why don’t you die?”
“Why don’t you?” I countered.
She was trying to kill me nature by nature—a common cure. I’d tried it myself with Jimmy, hadn’t managed it yet. But killing a vampire/dhampir/skinwalker was going to be a very neat trick. Not that she couldn’t do it if I kept letting her try. Sooner or later the woman of smoke was going to hit on something that did kill a vampire, and then she’d ease on down the road to the next nature. I had to take away her magic, and thanks to Whitelaw I knew how.
“I hate to keep calling you psycho hell bitch,” I said. “Though it does fit.”
She flicked her wrist and a gun appeared. Before she could point it in my direction, I smacked the weapon out of her hand, and it slid across the dirt with a metallic ping-ping-ping. When she predictably went for my throat, I snatched those hands in mine and murmured, “What is your name?”
It was an old trick but a good one. She didn’t have time to block me, to think of something else, to even figure out what I was doing. I touched her just as she thought, Lilith.
“Lilith?” I let her momentum carry her past me, and when I released her she sprawled in the dirt. “Not the Lilith?”
The woman of smoke flipped onto her back.
“You can’t be that Lilith.”
Her eyes widened as she realized what I meant to do. Her arm began to rise, no doubt to throw some other deadly magic my way, but I finished the spell with a final, “Lilith.”
She screamed, but instead of sound a cloud of black sparkly dust rose from her mouth, swirling away on the wind and disappearing into the night.
“Aw. I think that was your magic. Bummer,” I said, and decked her.
I had vampire strength; she flew about ten feet, scrambled to get up, and I hit her again.
She’d had the advantage as an evil witch, but without the witch, she was just evil.
Doomsday Can Wait Page 27