by Laken Cane
Aspen and Edgar walked to the edge of the roof of the neighboring cabin with Angus’s daughters. Both girls were silent, and neither one of them struggled. Edgar held Derry, and Aspen gripped the smaller Natalie. Aspen shoved Natalie dangerously close to the edge. “If you can take her, she’s yours,” she yelled.
Angus roared and rushed the cabin, no thought in his mind but saving his girls.
“Angus, no,” I screamed.
I reached him in mere seconds, but I didn’t get to him before Safin’s whip did. Darkness flicked his wrist and the whip streaked through the air, wrapped around the werebull’s neck, and began to behead him.
Safin was counting on shock and awe to give him the advantage, had planned for it, and in the end, he got exactly what he wanted.
Someone I would throw down my weapon for.
He got Angus.
Angus didn’t shift back to human form. As his animal, he had a much better chance at surviving the constricting whip. But for a second, his eyes met mine, and I saw his rage. He wasn’t giving up. He wasn’t going to die.
He was too pissed off for that.
All around us, men were fighting. All around us, men were shooting, dying, bleeding.
The supernats had arrived, sometime, somehow, and I hadn’t even been aware of it.
The vampires, too, but they couldn’t get into the battle.
Over the years, the healers had vampire-proofed their property. They’d laced the ground near their house with silver, had hung it in their trees, had even placed silver-plated sculptures at odd intervals. The vampires tried to get through it, but it repelled them, hurt them, and forced them to hang back. There was simply too much of it.
The healers were apparently very anti-vampire. Safin had discovered that and was planning to use it to his advantage.
His backup kept the supernats occupied while Safin attempted to get what he really wanted.
Angus’s dead body, and me.
I didn’t try to cut through the whip. It would have taken too much time, and we didn’t have time. I raced toward Safin. I jumped, leapt over the porch railing, and lifted Silverlight, preparing to thrust her into his vulnerable chest.
“Stop or they all die,” Mikhail said. “One at a time.”
Edgar might have a soft spot for children, but his boss did not.
He would kill both of Angus’s children, and he would make Angus watch. There was no flinching in his eyes, no softness, no doubt.
“I will kill them,” he said.
“I know,” I murmured.
Then I flung Silverlight at his heart—because that was my one fucking chance, and I figured he’d kill the children anyway.
But whatever he had surrounding him was too strong. Given time, the sword would have broken through.
Too bad we had no time.
Darkness smiled
“Trinity,” Derry screamed. “My dad!”
Everything seemed to slow down. The sounds, only a moment ago loud and discordant, dimmed and fell away. I honed in on Safin’s eyes, the sweat beading on his nose, the soft breath hissing from between his teeth. I concentrated on the muffled thump, thump of his heartbeat and the thundering rush of blood through his veins.
He held out his hand. “You for them. Edgar will be happy to save the little ones. You know that. And I swear to you, I give you my word, I will release the werebull.”
“Why?” I murmured. “Why do you want me?”
“Because you can get the dragon.” He peered at me, curious. “You can, can’t you?”
“I don’t know how.”
He shrugged. “I believe you can free the dragon. If I have your power, I can free the dragon. At the very least, if I take you and the sword, I will not leave this godforsaken place empty-handed.”
He snapped his fingers. “The sword, please. For the sword I will drop the werebull.”
I would give him my sword and my power, and perhaps he would kill them anyway.
The cabin shook when Safin flung Angus against the side of it. “I will slice his head off in thirty seconds. Make your choice.”
“Trinity,” Derry moaned. “My dad.”
I felt my men watching me from below, I felt their helplessness, their anger, their fear. Mostly, I felt their love.
I closed my eyes and blew out a soft breath. Then I thrust Silverlight into her sheath and held her out to Safin. “Trade.”
Safin dropped Angus, flung him to the ground, and I heard the thump of his body like a death knell.
He took Silverlight gently and slung the strap of her sheath over his shoulder. “Come here,” he told me. “I won’t hurt you.”
But before I gave myself to Mikhail Safin, I stepped to the edge of the porch and peered over.
“Angus,” I called.
“He’s alive,” Clayton said. “Trinity, you can’t…”
“I have no choice,” I told him.
“Let them go?” Edgar yelled. “Mikhail, let them go?”
“Not just yet,” Safin said.
Natalie began crying, and the sound droned on and on, endless and heartrending. It drilled into my brain, sank into my memory, and I knew it would not fade away for a very long time.
“Nat.” Angus tried to yell, but his voice came out croaky and rusty. “Let her go. Let her go.”
“Not just yet,” Safin repeated.
“If you do this,” Amias said, “we won’t let you leave the Deluge.”
The silver should have kept him out as it kept out the other vampires, but Amias bore his pain silently and stood with us despite his rapidly weakening strength. The silver was draining him, but he would not leave the ones he loved.
Safin threw back his head and guffawed, genuinely amused. “Master vampire, if you could stop me, you would have already.” He looked at me and dropped his smile. “Come here. No more delays.”
I glanced to where Edgar and Aspen waited with the girls.
“Aspen,” Mikhail said. “Kill the little one.”
“No.” I’d already handed over Silverlight, the only thing that could kill him. I walked to him.
“Good,” he said. He coiled his whip around my body. The end of it, a throbbing, rubbery tentacle, caressed my throat. I could feel Angus’s blood on that tentacle.
“Safin,” Crawford yelled. “Your life is over. You have to know that. Let her go.”
He shouldn’t have come to the scene of a supernatural fight. He was human, as much as he seemed determined to prove otherwise, and one of these nights he was going to come into Bay Town and get himself killed trying to help us.
Trying to help me.
And I wasn’t sure that wouldn’t just break my cold rifter heart—which was turning out not to be that cold after all, unfortunately.
Safin didn’t bother replying to Crawford. “I need power,” he told me, his voice soft. “But this is not a power trip. I don’t want to rule the world. I simply must have power to live. To kill. You understand that.”
The whip moved from my throat to my lips, rubbing back and forth, and I could barely resist the urge to open my mouth and bite a chunk off it.
“You understand,” Safin continued, “the urge to kill, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” I replied, shuddering when my tongue touched the tip of the whip. “I understand completely.”
He hesitated. “I wish you could join me,” he said, finally. “If I didn’t need to absorb you, I would partner with you. Imagine what we could do, together. What we could chase. What we could possess.”
“I’m flattered.”
He nodded, untouched by my sarcasm. “And afraid?”
It was my turn to hesitate. “I’m afraid to fail.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “But you have failed, Trinity. So you don’t need to be afraid of that anymore.”
“It’s not over yet, Darkness.”
“For you,” he said, “it is over.”
But then Rhys, leaning on Jamie Stone’s arm, walked into the clearing.
“No,” he said, “it is not.”
I smiled. “I’m glad you made it, Dragon.”
Safin’s eyes widened and he wrapped the whip tight around my throat, strode to the edge of the porch and peered over. “You lie.”
I snorted. “You hoped he’d come to save me, didn’t you? That’s the only reason you didn’t stop talking long enough to suck me dry. You knew.”
He glanced at me and the whip tightened a little too much. “I hoped, yes. But I am not gullible enough to believe you’ve brought him to me.”
“He brought himself,” I said. “Rhys?”
“I’m all right, love,” he replied, “but I fear I now have the urge to kill Himself and the elders.”
“Understandable,” I said.
“Shut up,” Mikhail yelled, and the abrupt change from calm to emotional was startling. “You haven’t brought the dragon in that sad, ragged man. You have brought more delays, and I will not have it.”
He was raging, and he believed we were trying to dupe him. He believed we were laughing at him. But he also had the tiniest sliver of hope that maybe we really had brought the dragon.
“Mikhail,” Aspen yelled. “This kid’s fucking crying is driving me crazy. Let her go or let me kill her.”
“Bitch,” I whispered.
“Kill her,” Safin said. “Kill them all.”
And then everything happened at once.
Safin yanked the whip from around my throat and drilled it into the base of my neck. It went in with a shocking ease, and began to wrap around my spinal cord. I felt it like an icy heat, spreading from my neck to my lower back, and just that quickly, I could not move.
I was paralyzed.
I’d planned to fight him at the last minute—to open my hand and call Silverlight to me, to plunge her into his heart, over and over, until that black, cold thing was shredded, bloody meat and he was dead at my feet.
Sometimes plans go awry.
I could not move, but I could feel.
Oh, I could feel.
Safin was pulling out my insides. He was taking everything I was and would leave only a shell behind.
I had no words for that feeling. Safin’s possession was unfathomable.
There was chaos below as my people fought his people—and I could only hope that the girls had been saved and the healers, if they lived, had been rescued.
Because the dragon was there, and he had come to burn the place down.
Chapter Forty
TRAPPED
Safin wasn’t taking only me.
He was absorbing everyone and everything there.
I didn’t believe he knew he was or that he could, but I absorbed what he absorbed. I felt it. We were connected through his living whip.
It was unpleasant.
And that was the understatement of my life.
Silverlight fought his thievery. Her struggles were my struggles. The only difference was, she was succeeding in her fight.
I was not.
Then I felt the heat from the dragon, and Safin’s shock. He tried to pull out of me, because he realized his mistake.
He hadn’t trapped me.
I had trapped him.
I couldn’t have done it without Leo’s blood inside me. Without his power, I could not have held Darkness.
And despite the black horror of the situation, despite my paralysis, the feeling that my insides were rotting into a reeking, slimy mess and being siphoned out by a fucking snake whip in my spinal column, I smiled.
“Oh,” Safin whispered. “I made a mistake.”
Indeed.
Would Silverlight and I survive the night? I wasn’t sure. But Mikhail Safin, executioner, supernat tormentor, power thief, would not.
It was not only for us, for Bay Town, or for the world of supernaturals that it was important to emerge victorious from this night. It was important for the humans.
I heard someone—Crawford, I thought—scream a horrified “No!” and that scream echoed inside my mind as I lay in Safin’s arms and kept him trapped inside me.
And then I felt the dragon’s fire.
It was the fire of magic.
He washed me in it, and Darkness with me.
It only burned for a little while.
Blue, sizzling flames, tall and fat with red tips, danced merrily as they engulfed us, and the dragon did what Darkness had meant to do. He stole our fucking power.
All of it.
Safin’s, Silverlight’s, and mine.
Enraged, I fought, even as I neared death, because I was not quite sane in that scorching, magical mess. I was not quite sane.
Rhys’s whisper flared inside my mind.
Shhhh, love. I must. I must.
I lost everything I was.
Rhys took it when he took Safin.
With my sword’s light and his dragon fire, he killed the darkness.
Then something hit my palm, hot and hard, and I wrapped my hand around Silverlight and burst from the flames, naked, shiny, and clean, like a newly minted penny.
And I was mad as hell.
I went after the dragon with my sword, determined to take back my power. My speed, my strength, my fucking immortality. He’d taken it all.
I was just a woman with a sword.
Once again.
“Trin,” Angus roared, and oh, the pain in his voice. The disbelief. The joy.
I was on the ground, and they were trying to reach me, but fire was everywhere. The mud bubbled, the water boiled, and the ground was ash and hot coals. The trees had become columns of gray smoke, and the moss strings of streaming lava.
I was fire. And the dragon filled the sky.
He lowered his head and even as I shook Silverlight at him, laughably ineffectual and raging, he sent a stream of blue fire to once again engulf me. But that was not a fire of taking. It was a fire of giving.
Like a sponge, I absorbed what he returned to me, what was rightly mine, and I slurped up the little something extra he added.
And when he withdrew, I was whole.
I was me. The good, the bad, and the truly fucking hideous.
Angus was the first to reach me. His throat bore deep, mottled marks from the whip, and his bare body was burnt in places, raw in others, but he was alive. All my men were alive.
Even Mikhail lived. But he lived inside the dragon. He and his power belonged to Rhys now.
I guess Darkness sort of got what he wanted, in the end.
I guess we all did.
Chapter Forty-One
TWO WEEKS LATER
I fell asleep at dawn in my own bed, wrapped up in Amias and Shane’s arms.
When I awakened at dusk, Rhys and Clayton had piled on the bed with us, and Leo sat in the chair beside the bed, his arms crossed across his mighty chest, dozing.
The master and Shane woke when I did, but lay quietly with me, getting the feel of the room and the world outside the room. It was not unusual to wake up and know immediately that the world had gone nuts or that someone we loved was hurting.
But there was only peace inside that room.
I turned my head slightly, darted out my tongue, and tasted the master’s skin.
His eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled, and my heart lurched at his beauty.
“Hi,” he murmured, heat and hunger in his eyes.
“All is well,” I said, as I did every night since Darkness had been destroyed. “Isn’t it?”
“All is well, my love.”
“Still no sign of Aspen,” Clayton told me, before I could ask.
Aspen had escaped the Deluge. Perhaps she would stay gone forever, or maybe someday she’d reappear and try to attach herself to someone else of power now that Mikhail was gone. I didn’t really care.
If she returned, we would handle her.
“Where’s our werebull?” I asked. He’d been spending more time at his house. His children wanted him near.
“With his kids,” Rhys told me, his voice soft. He gave me a slow
smile when I looked at him, and once again, my heart lurched.
“You all are too, too pretty,” I said.
Leo stretched. “Some of us are prettier than others.”
I laughed, then lost my breath when Shane slid his hand across my bare abdomen. “We should take advantage of the peace and quiet,” he suggested.
“Oh, absolutely.” I gasped when Clayton dipped his fingers between my thighs and began rubbing languidly, as though he had all the time in the world.
And he did. There was nothing pressing outside that room, no terrible enemies to defeat, no one calling for our help.
At that moment, there was only peace.
Well, not only. There was sex, as well. And hunger. And love.
Rhys crawled under the sheets and I felt his lips on my inner thigh, then his teeth, gentle but with enough of a bite to make me shudder.
Amias pulled the sheets off my body and let them slide to the floor, and I stared down my nude body, fascinated by the darkness of Rhys against the paleness of my skin.
Rhys had changed since his dragon had taken on Mikhail Safin. I wondered if it was because that dark power lived inside him. He’d become gradually and subtly withdrawn. When I asked him about it, he told me “nothing is wrong, love.” But there was distant look in his eyes when he said it.
He looked up at me. “Tonight, you’ll feed from me.” He switched his gaze to Amias. “You, as well.”
Why did I feel like it was an order?
And why did I feel like it would be the last time?
Amias sighed, then nodded. “It is an honor to partake of dragon blood,” he said, almost formally. “We thank you for the gift.”
I frowned. “What is—”
But Rhys wrapped his lips around my clit, and I forgot to care about his intentions. He lifted his head once more, as I arched my back and cried out. “Just me this time,” he told the others. “But you are welcome to watch.” He flashed a grin and the old Rhys was there, but…changed. He’d made a decision of some sort, and I was terrified about what that might mean.
I reached down and buried my fingers in his hair. “Rhys, don’t leave me.”
“Never, Trinity. I’ll always be here.”
Funny how that didn’t really reassure me. I didn’t believe his idea of “being here” was quite the same as mine.