If I head to the village and slaughter people, those who hunt us will find me. They’ll kill me. It’s what Dragomir said. Insisted. Promised. My heart would be pierced with a post and my head sliced off and then I would not rise again.
I can dredge up the energy for this, I think. I can linger near the Fidatov home until they find my carnage. I can build a throne with the skulls of my victims, the unholy queen of vengeance, and await my death. And I feel so very, very small in that moment, I think it the best option available.
I have nothing. Am nothing. Deserve not this long life I could now live. Ana might’ve deserved it but she would never reside here again.
Ana is gone and I don’t know who I am. What I am, beyond a monster.
But something lingers under my skin, pushing, pushing. Something urges my eyes open, forces my head to lift. I look at the canopy of trees, at the stripe of black that is the night sky. My heart is torn, chest ripped in two, hurting so badly that it surprises me the times I glance down and see it still looking whole. A sob wracks me, anguished cry tearing up to my lips, and my hands clutch my smooth belly, where a babe once grew before being snuffed out.
I could die. It would make no difference to anyone. But still, something is there, a thread so deep I can scarce comprehend it that simply says: No.
No, you will not die here.
It is no god. No devil. No spirit. Perhaps it is my own insanity, but still, it whispers to me.
No.
And then the rain comes.
It patters down, beating leaves and striking my face, rolling down my forehead and into my closed eyes, tickling my parted lips. I let it wash over me, soak me, weigh down my bloody clothes like I’m drowning in it.
I am lost. I am tiny and broken and I can’t imagine a world in which I don’t hurt so deeply, so constantly. I am a weak girl, not yet eighteen, who let herself be betrayed, who could not fight off a vampire when he descended upon her, who relied on her husband and believed the only life she would ever have was as his wife.
But the whispering continues, faint in the darkness. I can no longer be Ana. I can no longer be this demon. I can no longer be a damaged little girl nursing her wounds and contemplating death.
I have to be more than that. And while I do not yet know my name, I know who I need to become.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Unraveling
I blinked at the phone like Mish was about to climb out of it à la some Japanese horror movie and kill everyone on the spot.
Nate did the same for a beat longer and then stood, brushing my legs aside and pacing past the couch. He tapped the screen and then held it to his ear. I bit back a comment about how she just wanted that kind of reaction from him and waited; eventually he gave up and threw my phone onto the couch. The air grew thick, that familiar crackle of magic around him as he continued pacing, raking his hands back through his hair.
“So that’s my sister?” Peri broke up the silence at last, and met my gaze. “She sounds like a total cunt.”
“It runs in the family,” I said. Nic gave me a glare but Peri chuckled.
“So you have a son?” Nicolette said softly, sympathetic gaze moving to Nate.
“No, he has a lying cunt of a soon-to-be-ex-wife,” I said. “Pay attention.”
Nate halted, turned, locked on my eyes. “What if it’s the truth?”
I blinked, just in case I missed some look of irony but nope, he was serious. “I’m sorry, I think I’m having trouble hearing since she screamed TRAP so loud in my ear. She’s not just a lying cunt, she’s the Supreme Lying Leader of the Lying Cunts in Cuntania.”
Ellie fought a grin. “Okay, that was good.”
I cocked my head to the side. “It wasn’t too much? I waffled between Cuntania and Cunt—”
“Zara!”
I snapped my mouth shut at Nate’s sudden bellow and craned my neck to look back at him. His lips trembled, tremors working through his arms, eyes were getting dark—he tottered there again, about to snap, like none of those intervening months had ever happened, and he gave me a look that plainly said he needed me, needed support. Like he forgot I lacked empathy or any human kindness.
Like he forgot who I was.
The others around us shifted, moving in my peripheral vision and muttering something about taking a walk—a walk, apparently, to the loft for Peri and Nic, and then Ellie tugged Ryann toward the bedroom hallway, like she didn’t know to go on her own, leaving me and Nate to duke this out.
I stood and crossed my arms at my midsection. “You cannot fall for this. She’s lying.”
“Why would she lie?”
And then I threw my hands up in frustration. “Cuntania? I just explained it two seconds ago and it was really funny.”
“This isn’t a joke!”
“Actually, I’d say it’s fucking hilarious that she has the balls to pull this shit, but that you’re even considering that she’s telling the truth, yeah, maybe it’s not so funny. Jesus, Nate...” I stalked around the couch, trying to shove down my rage and irritation, calm myself long enough to get his head on straight. When I reached for him, he took two steps back with a glare of warning.
“If she’s telling the truth—”
“Which we established she’s not, and she’s just going to kill you—”
“—then I have a child.”
“Yeah. I caught that part. But this is the woman who paid me money to kill you. Who never loved you, who set you up as a sacrifice. She lied to you for weeks. Months. Betrayed you. Remember?”
“Yeah, there seems to be a lot of that going around—”
“What the fuck is that supposed to—”
“If she’s telling the truth, then this is the only one I will ever have, thanks to you.”
The air left my lungs like he’d punched me, hammered a fist right through my chest. And a punch would’ve been kinder because it was the truth. The vampire parasite left the nerves in our nether regions alone because happy vampires are vampires who can orgasm, but much of the reproduction parts and their functions? Gone. Turned to pulp. That’s how I lost my baby, turned when I was pregnant.
He might have a five-year-old. He might not. But even if he didn’t, he’d always hate me now because he couldn’t. Not ever. I’d been with child once—I knew what it was like before feeling it, before knowing it was really real. Finding out she was lying, he’d still feel the loss. He’d never forget that loss.
Oh sure. He wasn’t mad at me—right. Talk about a fucking liar. Everything he said the other night about not being bothered by what I did was apparently a big, fat, classic repression.
Great.
My face flushed, so red I could almost see it. He held my gaze a beat longer, turned, and stomped down the hall to our room, slamming the door so the pictures on the walls rattled dangerously.
What the fuck just happened?
Ten minutes ago he’d pulled my shirt out of my hands when I was dressing to just neck for a while, whispered that he loved me. And now he had a kid and he was believing his bitch of a former wife and stomping away and what?
Shit.
I slipped around the couch and dragged my tired feet up the stairs to the loft. The girls’ bedroom was quiet and serene, white walls with lamps behind shoji screens on the far wall, mimicking daylight. A shelf set against another wall, tucked in a corner, had photos of people I didn’t know, offerings of water and rice. Nic sat cross-legged in a black arm chair in the corner while Peri stood leaning against the dresser, and neither said anything as I approached.
I sank down on the end of their bed. “I think I fucked up.”
****
Nate brooded downstairs for a couple of hours.
No one checked on him, not even Ellie, so maybe they hadn’t bonded that much yet. And I didn’t have the ovaries to go down and talk to him, so he remained in our guest room and I remained up in Nic and Peri’s room. The former tried to reassure me. The latter made pithy comments until I th
reatened to break her bony ass. And then the former jumped in again to calm us down because her best friend and girlfriend were not getting into a fight in her house or she’d be really sad and no one wanted that. And she was probably right—we didn’t. I bit my tongue and didn’t bring up that her girlfriend hid the phone number of a Veil representative for months because although that might bring her to my side, it would make Nic sad, and the world wept when that happened.
“She’ll kill him if he goes,” I insisted for the millionth time.
“I’m pretty sure he can take care of—”
But I cut Nic off. “You saw him. He believes her. She says, ‘Ooooh,’” I affected my Skanky Lying Cunt Voice, “‘your magical son is right here, my lovely. Stand on the edge of this cliff and I’ll point him out to you.’ Then bam! She pushes him into a pit of spikes seventeen stories down and he dies horribly and he curses me for not being there and I can’t even chant that I told him so because he went alone so wouldn’t hear me.”
Nicolette’s mouth opened. Closed. Like she hadn’t heard me go off on irrational rants before.
“Maybe Peter can talk some sense into him,” I offered, starting to rise, but Nic put her hand out, fingers splayed, and darted for the stairs.
“I’ll get Ellie. Just...don’t go downstairs right now, s’il vous plait.”
She meant business when she pulled out le French. I sank back down and jabbed my thighs with my elbows, hands propping my head up while Nic left me with Peri. “You agree with me, right?”
“Yep.”
Of course she did. “Because you’re a lying cunt too.”
“Yep.”
Yep.
“If she’s telling the truth, something’s in it for her. She’s already using the kid to get his attention. She’ll use him to get whatever it is she’s looking for.”
Hell Bitch was right. I’d probably have to hunt down Mishka and murder her before the next dawn.
“Which means if she’s telling the truth, he needs to go and get his kid.”
I glared at her. “I was just starting to hate you less.”
Peri shrugged. “It’s what I’d do, if I were him. Child in the custody of someone who would use him like that? Hell, I’d go and help him if being in the same room with my sister wasn’t probably guaranteed to end this world I’m starting to be okay with.”
Great. So score one more for the fictional child even though it meant Nate’s imminent death and/or enslavement.
Nic came up the stairs with Ellie in tow, and our psychic was polishing off the last of a grilled cheese sandwich. I was so out of it moping, I hadn’t heard anyone in the kitchen.
“Peter—” I started.
He mumbled around his last bite of grilled cheese. “Yeah. Yeah.” He swallowed, nodded. “Okay. Peter was not, in fact, here for that exchange, and is concerned about why you look so worried.”
Oh, where to begin.
“Mishka’s alive and claims Nate has a son and Zara wants you to talk him out of meeting her because she’s a lying cunt.” Peri glanced at me. “That’s it, right?”
So succinct. “Yeah, Pete, that’s it. Also, while we’ve got you on the line—on a scale of one to a season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, how likely is the apocalypse looking now that both sisters are alive and well in Macamigon, which I’m told is a gateway to hell, and what do you suggest we do about it? I mean, until I’m able to put a bullet in Mishka’s forehead. But talking Nate out of total stupidity is top priority.” Putting boys over apocalypse aversion—that’s me. Really growing as a person.
“He just sighed dramatically and says that you know Nate. You know he gets something in his head and he doesn’t let go. They couldn’t talk him out of looking for you when they thought you were dead—no offense, of course, but they genuinely didn’t believe he could find you—and if he believes Mishka, well...”
Well, fuck. Shit, I think I preferred the crazy one. At least his wildly firing neurons were an excuse for any stupid moves. “Okay, what if we tied him up and gagged—”
A door downstairs slammed and we all perked up, glanced to the top of the stairs as steps hammered up them. Ryann appeared at the top. “He just went to the garage.”
Shit. I pushed past Ellie, past Ryann, flew down the stairs, leaping the last several steps, and bolted to the garage door that still thrummed from him slamming it. An engine was roaring in the garage, exhaust tingeing the air, and I threw open the door—
And saw nothing. Silence greeted me, the dark night beyond yawning from the open garage door, no sign of the truck. I’d heard it half a second ago, but—
He can remove himself—and whatever he’s touching—from this dimension’s time stream, dumbass.
I hated that trick.
I stomped back in the house, gazing around the couch—he took my fucking phone. So he had her number. And I couldn’t call her back. And he’d text her and go there and-and-and—
“Motherfucker!” I gave the wall a kick, my foot sinking through plaster. I rubbed at my tired eyes and stomped around the living room where the others were gathering. “He took my fucking phone. He’s going there. And now half my contacts are apparently freaking out because I lied about killing someone—no one’s going to talk to me about where she might be staying. The time it’ll take Toby to find them—”
“GPS,” Nic reminded me, her cell phone to her ear, and she turned her attention to whoever she had on the line.
I blinked. Right. GPS. He took my phone—so they could track it. Jesus—the boy was making me stupid or something. I looked at Peri. “Do you still have my pet out back?”
“Load up and I’ll unlock the shed.”
We parted, her moving for the sealed back door, me trudging for the bedroom. He’d touched nothing while he’d brooded in there, left no note—not taken a weapon either, that I could see, though maybe he’d have the brains to grab one from my truck. He had the power of a warlock and strength of a vampire, so it wasn’t like he needed a gun to kill her. But it wouldn’t even get that far, the stupid trusting fool.
I found holsters hanging in the closet, and I slipped one over my red tank top. Guns in both, heavy Desert Eagles loaded with .50 AE because I planned to blow some fucking holes in shit once I got there. A belt with magazines tucked into pockets. Two knives, sheathes slipped into the belt. Finally I dug a red vinyl motorcycle jacket out, light but tough, that zipped up to my neck.
One thing left: I reached under the bed and hauled out the Rossi 12 gauge, all in black. Beautiful piece, already loaded, stock band around the butt with extra rounds. I swung the strap over me so the gun crossed my back and stalked back through the house.
“Yeah, so Peter says this is a bad, bad idea,” Ellie called.
Peter could bitch all he wanted—after I got Nate back. I slipped out into the humid summer night, trudging across the grass where Peri waited by the open shed, keys dangling between her thumb and forefinger. I accepted them and gazed down at the sleek, black and red Kawasaki Ninja. It sucked leaving my cars behind, but this crotch rocket was plan b and she’d do fine. A black helmet hung on the inside of the shed and I lifted it from its peg.
Nic’s steps padded toward me and she handed me an earpiece, which I slipped on. “He’s still moving. I’ll give you directions—you have some time because he’s probably going to get a new phone.”
Good enough. I’d knock him out, tie him up in the back of the truck, get Mish’s directions, and take care of her.
“Kick her ass,” Peri offered with little conviction, like she wasn’t quite sure how to cheer me on given that she hated me.
I swung my leg over the bike and fished a pair of red gloves from my pocket. “With the firepower I’m carrying, she won’t have an ass left.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Not So Ass-less After All
I missed him at the stop to get a phone—Nic reported that he’d already hit a place on the highway and was on the move again. Wind whipped my hair
as I rode and the Rossi was a comfortable weight on my back. The night was clouded, thick and dark with air that could suffocate, damp with summer heat.
I scanned the road beyond my visor, searching for any sign of the big truck of mine he’d stolen—it was heavy duty and white, purchased and kept in a garage below my building that led two blocks away because I might need to leave in a hurry and had to have something with a back that would protect me from the sun. It would be hard to miss out here, but he’d had a head start, able to travel farther after freezing time. Instead of ten minutes ahead of me, it could’ve been an hour.
“He’s heading back north,” Nic said in my ear. “Rural area. You want to get off the highway—take Concession 48.”
It didn’t get too rural around here—even out in the suburbs, it was urban sprawl. But fifteen kilometers later, when I saw the sign for Concession 48, I made a left and followed it. Around me trees were black and thick, fading into the night; the farther I got from the highway, the darker it got. Just the light cutting in front of my bike lit a path as I rode through farmland with SOLD signs on the corners.
“He stopped a while ago, hasn’t moved. It’s fifty kilometers from the highway, maybe?” She mumbled, possibly counting. “Forty-eight. Northwest side of the road.”
Farmhouse, then, because that’s all I was seeing around here. No cliff with a pit of stakes below, but she was a witch and anything was possible—I hadn’t ruled it out.
I slowed my bike and peered to the left every time I picked up the rough outline of a building. Yeah, she’d give him an address my ass—these places didn’t have addresses. They had pig farmers who fed victims to their livestock.
I saw the truck.
I braked, wheeled to the shoulder of the road, and killed the engine. He’d parked the truck on the shoulder too, like he’d been thinking as I had—sneak up on the house and see what the fuck without announcing his presence. I climbed off the bike, slipped off the helmet and set it on the seat. At last I could talk over the wind. “I’m here. Talk to you in a bit.”
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