by Laken Cane
“They hurt a supernatural child,” I replied, my voice even. “This is supernatural business. And we’ll take care of it.”
“He hurt a child,” he repeated, firmly. “And that shit is not happening in my town.”
“Frank, Bay Town is not yours. And we don’t need him arrested. We need him dead.”
I strode through the city streets, keeping my eyes peeled for a gathering of executioner SUVs. Frank didn’t have to tell me where they were. I’d find them. But it’d make things a hell of a lot easier if he’d just give up the location.
Electricity danced across my skin, making me jumpy, and it took me a minute to realize it was the castoff terror and worry. Better dancing across my skin than living inside me.
“They’d better hope I find them before Leo does,” I told Crawford. “At least I’ll make it quick. Leo will slice them up an inch at a time.”
I had no doubt that Leo was stomping through the city, searching for the monsters who’d messed with Derry.
“Do you understand what will happen if you attack the executioners, Trinity?”
“Captain,” I replied, “ask me if I give a fuck.”
He said nothing for a few heartbeats. Then, “Hyde Hill. They’ve taken over the old Hyde Motel.”
I wasn’t surprised. On Hyde Hill they could see who was coming up after them. There were also a lot of humans living on the hill. Safin would believe we wouldn’t attack with humans surrounding him.
He was wrong.
I started to slide my phone back into my pocket, but called Leo instead. And when he didn’t answer, I called Al.
“Alejandro,” I said, when he answered. “It’s Trinity.”
“I heard about Angus’s girl. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s…” I blew out a breath and shook my head. There were really no words.
“I was waiting for your call. You’re on your way to talk to Darkness?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Talk.”
“I’ll meet you up there.”
He hadn’t needed to ask for their location. I figured there wasn’t much that got past Alejandro.
I hadn’t slipped into the city alone. Of course I hadn’t. The vampires lurked, and though I didn’t see them, I felt them. And as I slid my phone back into my pocket, I beckoned one of them toward me.
“Where is the master?” I asked.
But he didn’t know.
I needed to know where Amias was, because if I let myself, I would crumble without him. I would live in misery and desolation, because he was the master.
My master.
And I really did not want to exist in a world without him.
Jade Noel called before I reached the hill.
“Angus wanted me to call. He said to tell you to stay the fuck home until he can come back.” She hesitated, and her normally angry, aggressive voice softened. “Derry won’t let him leave her bedside.”
“How is she?”
“Not good, but the healer seems to think she’ll recover. She’s telling her dad she’s too afraid for him to leave her alone, but the truth is, she’s too afraid he’ll face off against Safin and die.”
“I’m going after Safin now,” I said.
“Where is he hiding out?”
“Hyde Hill.”
I could feel her surprise. “That’s not exactly hiding out,” she said.
“Safin is a little too arrogant. He doesn’t believe he needs to hide.”
“Oh,” she said, “it won’t matter if he hides. As soon as he’s secure in Derry’s recovery, Angus is going after him. And he will kill him.”
I curled my lip, rage making my body tight. “Not if I kill him first.”
“He’s Angus’s kill,” she said, her voice tight and judgmental. “You’d take that from him?”
“Yeah, I would. If I kill Safin, I’ll likely save Angus’s life. He can’t hurt Darkness.”
“It’s good that you have such confidence in him.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “I don’t care about his pride or his need for revenge. I care about keeping him alive.”
And I went to find—and kill—Mikhail Safin.
Perhaps I was a little too arrogant as well.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
POWER
I raced up Hyde Hill, the sounds of the city providing the music that urged me on—sirens, roars of engines, blaring music and horns and laughter and screams—I heard it all. I felt it all.
The executioners were waiting for me.
They surrounded the old motel. And in a breath of tangled silence, Aspen’s laugh, clear and almost sweet, rose above the cacophony of the city.
Shane was abruptly there.
Shane, angry and eager as ever to take himself out of his own head by fighting.
He patted his shotgun. “I wouldn’t let you face Darkness alone, baby hunter.”
He’d give me that, because there was a chance we’d die there that night.
And who could hold a grudge when death was blowing you kisses?
Then another figure strode toward us, his long legs eating up the distance, his towering figure at once familiar and foreign.
Leo the half-giant.
And he carried with him the memory of a battered supernatural girl.
“Come on,” one of Safin’s men yelled, and a streak of blue power hit the sky. “We’re ready, motherfuckers!”
Yeah, they were. Still, they were going to have to fight hard, even with their stolen magic, to defeat us.
“Sinclair,” Safin called. “How nice of you to visit.”
“We’re here because you attacked a child,” I told him. “We’re here to free the dragon. And we are here to kill you.”
The street and parking lot separated us. Still, I could see his frown.
“Free the dragon? You believe I have the dragon?” He sounded genuinely confused. “I can assure you that if I had the dragon, I would be long gone.”
“The dragon will be free when you’re gone,” I told him. “And one way or another, we’re going to make that happen.”
And then what seemed like twenty cop cars came roaring up the hill, sirens shrieking. They slid to a halt on the street between us and the executioners, and cops jumped out and took cover behind open doors, guns drawn and aimed squarely at the executioners lined up in front of the motel.
I was thankful the earsplitting sirens had been cut. My ears continued to ring with the awful sound of them, and that made it a little hard to think straight. Damn vampire hearing.
Crawford, wearing a vest and holding a gun, stepped out of the lead vehicle and faced off against the executioners.
“Well,” Safin said. “It’s good to know which side you’re on, Mayor.”
“This is my city,” Crawford told him. “I don’t care who sent you—you don’t come into my city and attack one of our children.”
“Your children,” Safin said, shaking his head, tsk-tsking. “You disappoint me, Frank.” He held his coiled whip in his right hand, but made no move to send it streaking through the air. “If you really care, you’ll convince the supernats to hand over the dragon before more tiny nonhumans are hurt.” He paused. “And they will be hurt.”
“One of the children was attacked?” Edgar said. “What do you mean, attacked?”
“Battered,” Leo answered. “Beaten. Broken. Hurt. Attacked.” His knuckles cracked as he curled his hands into fists. “And you will die for it.”
Edgar looked at his leader. “You had to hurt a kid? Already?”
“Edgar,” Mikhail said, “you may be too soft for this gig. Remind me to revisit this conversation if you survive the night.”
“I’m not too soft for anything,” Edgar growled. “I just don’t see the sense in hurting children.”
“Shut the fuck up, Edgar,” Aspen told him. “You are too soft.”
“It’s a weak man who’ll use babies to beat his grown-ass enemies,” one of the cops said. She kept her gun aime
d steadily at the executioners.
Vampires poured from the shadows and stood at our backs, and even Safin’s men quieted at the sight.
“Where have they all come from?” Safin asked, stepping from one of the motel room doorways. He did not sound worried, merely curious.
“From the ground,” I told him.
Edgar and Aspen slipped up beside him.
“And you are here because you want us to bury them again?” Aspen said.
The executioners laughed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Safin said. “Allow me to demonstrate.” His whip cracked through the air, curled around a vampire’s leg, then dragged her across the street and into the parking lot.
She was screaming before she hit the ground.
“Silver is like the sun,” Safin said, calmly. “And I always come prepared.”
Safin had laced the lot surrounding the motel with silver. The vampires couldn’t help us. They couldn’t fight.
Shane couldn’t fight.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
And I knew he’d try anyway.
Safin flung the vampire back to us and then withdrew his whip. And slowly, carefully, the vampires pulled back. Just a tiny bit, but enough so I felt their withdrawal. They didn’t want to leave me to the executioners—the master would not be understanding—but really, unless someone tossed them an enemy to kill, they were pretty much useless.
And then Darkness turned his attention to me.
He unfurled his whip with a flick of his wrist, and sent it with deadly aim between two of the cop cars—and right at me.
The whip was as fast as a vampire. I barely had time to flinch before the thing curled around my throat and began to tighten with a gleeful and unbreakable grip.
I heard shouting—Crawford, I thought, and roaring—definitely Leo—and then I let my breath whisper through my lips and lightly brush the long line of whip that snaked from my neck to Safin’s hand.
“What are you? Not just a vampire in there.”
No.
Not just a vampire.
I followed that breath all the way down that unending whip, all the way to Safin himself. One second Shane was reaching out to try and rip the deadly lash from my neck, and the next I was standing in front of Darkness.
And it didn’t matter that the whip was cutting through my throat. I drew back my lips and prepared to eat Mikhail Safin.
“No,” he said, and flung me through the air, his whip sending me whirling as it dug in a little deeper.
There was pain, and a lot of it, but it didn’t disable me—it made me mad.
I grabbed the whip with both hands as it slung me against the motel. If I couldn’t bite Safin, I would bite his whip.
In some distant part of my mind I heard the others fighting—and I understood it was not going to be good for the city. If we couldn’t run off a few humans, why would they believe we could protect them against invading supernaturals?
They wouldn’t.
As soon as my fangs sank into the whip, I registered two things.
The whip wasn’t a whip. The whip was a snake. A living, breathing, thinking snake.
And Safin was mentally connected to it.
When I bit into the whip, I was connected to it, as well. And to Safin, in a dim, confusing sort of way.
And I registered that Darkness wasn’t simply doing a job for a shady government agency. He wanted the dragon more than he wanted, at that moment, anything else in the world. And he would do anything he could to get him.
There was a supernatural inside his room. A bound wolf with a spike through his penis and a missing eye. Darkness was cruel and hard and meant to get what he’d come for.
I felt him.
He felt me, as well.
He uncurled the whip from my throat at the exact moment I ripped my teeth from it, and I whirled through the air and slammed to the hood of one of the cruisers violently enough to dent the hood.
I was not okay—for about sixty seconds.
I rolled off the car, fell to the ground, knelt there long enough to shake off the fog, then climbed to my feet.
I’d seen other things when I’d bitten the whip. A chaotic flurry of images and thoughts and emotions, but there was no time to sort through them. Later. Later I would thumb through the images that remained after the whip had let me go.
I yanked Silverlight from her sheath, and I went once more for Darkness.
Safin and I clashed—whip versus sword, man versus woman, dark versus…dark.
He’d learned a lesson and didn’t leave the whip with me. He sent it in painful flicks, and that bastard licked the flesh right from my bones.
And with Silverlight, I gave as good as I got.
She sliced him up. Her light drowned him in molten liquid silver.
In the end we were two bloody, hurting fighters, neither willing to give up, and I knew no mere human could have stood toe to toe with me and my sword and very fucking nearly bested both of us.
No way.
Darkness was no more human than I was.
He’d been made a long time ago.
He hated it.
And he knew I knew.
That knowledge fueled the fire of his savagery, and he wanted nothing more than to kill me because he couldn’t stand the fact that someone knew his awful, shameful secret.
His crew wasn’t full of undead and supernatural—they were strong, fearless, and they held magical weapons.
But they weren’t supernatural.
I hated the executioners, but I was amazed by them. I didn’t like my admiration, but it was strong. As were they, the bastards.
The cops had fled with the fight, trying to find somewhere safe to watch—it was all they could do.
And finally, the half-giant sent the executioners and their stunning weapons running for cover, and Safin and I went to our separate corners to recover.
I was very nearly to the point of collapse.
Luckily, so was he.
The vampires melted into the shadows as Crawford and his men came slowly forward, wide-eyed and pale, though they’d seen supernaturals fight before.
I was pretty sure they hadn’t seen a fight like that one.
There were seven dead executioners. They lay sprawled across the parking lot, their special, stolen weapons scattered across the cold, broken pavement, their magical protections long since severed.
Three of the victims had been sliced into neat sections by Leo. One downside to his power was the fact that in a crowd of fighters, his power didn’t differentiate between friend and foe. It simply sliced up anyone it touched.
That had to frustrate the hell out of him. With Safin’s whip flinging me all over the place, Leo would have been worried about accidentally hitting me.
And Darkness…
“Sneaky bastard,” I muttered.
Darkness was a supernatural.
A supernatural who killed other supernaturals while working with, fighting for, and protecting a deadly group of humans. He hadn’t been born that way. Someone had made him.
And that was when—and why—his hatred of supernaturals had begun.
I wondered if any of the executioners suspected that the protection surrounding them had come not from some fabricated captured witch, but from Darkness himself.
But now I wasn’t worried that Safin would bring the wrath of his government organization down on us.
No. He wouldn’t do that.
Bright spots.
“Trinity?” Leo asked.
He stood with Shane, both of them watching me, their faces gory masks of blood.
I frowned. “Shane? How did you fight with the silver protecting the lot?” Then I understood. “Silverlight touched you before. She made you immune.”
“Could she do that for them all?” Leo asked, gesturing at the vampires who’d wanted to help.
“No.” Shane said. “Only if they…”
“Only if they belong to me,” I finished. “An
d I’m getting tired of having to convince you of that every five minutes, Shane.”
He curled his lip. “I’m already convinced. But I don’t have to kiss your ass and pretend to like it.”
Crawford joined us. He took my arm, gingerly, and peered with concern into my face. “Are you okay?”
My clothes were in bloody strips, embedded in my flayed skin, and my body shook and trembled sporadically as it attempted to heal from that crazy powerful whip.
“The bastard nearly skinned her alive,” Leo said, grim, angry, and guilty.
“You can’t protect me from every little bump, Leo, though I appreciate you trying.” I looked around, a little fuzzy. Okay, a lot fuzzy. “I saw Alejandro fighting. Where’d he go?”
“He was here a few minutes ago,” Leo said. “I don’t know where he went.”
“There.” Crawford pointed, and we all turned to look.
Al was rushing from the motel, his arm around the supernatural he was half carrying, half dragging from one of the rooms.
“He went in after their capture,” Leo said.
Shane ran to help Alejandro with the shifter. He simply picked the big wolf up and slung him over his shoulder—and despite my half-dead status, I turned to mush at the sight of him. His strength, his willingness to help, his aloofness.
Everything he did made me want him.
Two executioners came to one of the doors and glared out, but they made no move to retrieve their tortured, half-conscious prisoner.
I continued to shiver.
I needed blood. Blood would help me heal a hell of a lot faster.
Leo caught my eye with his big, muscly body and his mystery and his delicious, special blood.
I needed to feed from Leo.
“Why doesn’t he shift?” Crawford asked, and I turned my attention to him.
I would have loved to taste Crawford, as well. Loved to. And if I wasn’t careful, I would lose control and bite him, and that would be the end of the Captain.
I tore my hungry thoughts away from him. “They’ve shoved a silver spike into his dick,” I said.
Every man there shuddered.
Despite the silver, the supernat had been naturally and uncontrollably trying to shift, but he could get no further than some dull patches of fur and a slightly changed face.