Bloodshifted Page 20

  Jackson moved so that he could see both of us. The hallway was still clouded with dust from all the newborns Gemellus had slaughtered.

  “No tricks?” he demanded.

  “You know me. I’ve never been the liar.”

  Jackson nodded, then unshouldered his backpack, setting it on the ground at the same time he pitched the lighter forward in a low arc over my head. Gemellus caught it without taking his eyes off him.

  In an instant Gemellus was behind me. “No one was here to see your honor but me, and I will not tell your child of this,” Gemellus said, his breath hot on my neck. Jackson was backing, wide-eyed, down the hall.

  “No.”

  “But you have no idea what he did to me!”

  “He only did what he was told, which is what you’re going to do,” I said, turning on him, my voice flat. “Put on these pants.” I handed them over to him, ignoring the hatred burning in his eyes.

  “I still get to kill Raven,” he said.

  And as if to answer him, there came an explosion from up above.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “What was that?” Gemellus asked as I ducked down.

  “I think if you want the chance to kill Raven, you’re going to have to hurry.”

  “Artillery?” Gemellus guessed, sounding impressed. “I’m looking forward to meeting this guardian of yours.”

  The building rumbled again. When I looked back, Jackson was gone.

  “I’m sure she’ll be happy to meet you too.”

  He held out Jackson’s lighter. “This is a weapon?”

  I nodded.

  “Show me.”

  “Not here. We’ll light ourselves on fire.” We needed to get out of here—Jackson wasn’t the only person with a lighter in the building. Plus if there were more explosions and we were trapped below—

  “He’s above us. I can feel it!” Gemellus shouted. “Tell me the layout of this building.”

  “Destroy this utterly, and I’ll talk.” I handed the backpack to him, and with his hands he set to turning it and everything in it into atoms.

  I knew enough to make sure Gemellus had crumbled the hard drive before I’d let him stop, and I explained the different floors of the club and the one-way glass as we moved. Each time we turned a corner I expected to find another wave of newborns, but apparently Raven had bigger problems upstairs. Gemellus let me lead, but only barely, maybe worried I’d let my conscience get the better of me again.

  We reached Hell in record time—and Anna’s bomb had blown open the entrance to the Garden of Eden, leaving a wide hole in the back of the room. This explained why we’d felt the rumble below: It’d been right on top of us. The thick structural beams holding up the next two floors were in place, but everything else in the room had been blown ten feet to the right, including new vampires—the air here was heavy with dust, too. There was fighting on the deck—a wall of newborns, shrieking hunger and surprise. I thought I saw the swish of a scythe and I both hoped and couldn’t imagine that Dren was here, fighting for me. I saw Jorgen’s head pop up over the crowd—standing, he was taller than any of them. He spotted me and let out a baleful howl. I wanted to howl back at him.

  I expected us to go join that throng—I knew Anna was outside there, fighting her way in—but Gemellus grabbed my arm and shook his head. “He’s higher.” He strode out into the center of the room. “Is this the strange glass you told me about?” he asked, pointing up. I nodded as Gemellus looked up at the ceiling.

  “Corvus! I come for you!” he yelled with wild abandon. One of the newborns at the back of the garden turned and ran for him. He caught the man and flung him back into the group, bowling three other vampires down, attracting the attention of the outliers. Hungry faces turned toward us—but not as hungry as Gemellus. He looked back at me. “Take me up to him.”

  I nodded again. Up seemed safer than staying here.

  * * *

  We ran up the stairs to Purgatory. A fresh wave of newborns had been held in reserve, or just woken up. They surged mindlessly forward, and Gemellus picked up a nearby table and sent it spinning across the room at chest height. It cleaved through the three nearest and pinned a figure I couldn’t quite see to the back wall. Other newborns crowded in, all looking like they had at the beginning of their night out, dressed to impress—and now dressed to die.

  “May I?” he asked again, crouched to run at them.

  “Yes. Please!”

  “Wait, wait! You owe me!” said a familiar voice. As Gemellus mowed his way through the newborns I circled warily to see Estrella, pinned beneath the table. I hadn’t realized Gemellus had flung it with such force—it’d ground into her like a buzz saw, nearly lopping off her chest and arm, embedding itself into the wall behind her. One of her arms hung limp, and the other couldn’t get ahold of the table’s smooth surface to free herself with.

  She looked relived to see me. “Save me,” she commanded, and her voice rumbled with the tone of command. But I wasn’t hers, and Celine was nowhere in sight.

  Save her to what, heal and fight more?

  “You owe me,” she said. “You promised me a favor.”

  “Under duress.”

  I’d seen her tuck into test subject sixty-four’s neck. She’d lived long, and she was no stranger to blood.

  “A promise is a promise,” she hissed.

  I looked back over my shoulder, to where Gemellus was glorying in the violence of his kills, laughing as he went through the newborns like a rabid dog among hens.

  “I did.” I grabbed hold of the table’s edge, and her face lit up before I went on. “I’ll kill you. Instead of letting Gemellus do it.” I closed the table on her like I was slamming a door. Darkness swam in my vision, and a horrible part of me was pleased with myself.

  Dust spurted over the top edge of the table and spilled like hourglass sand down by my feet. I watched it flow with the angle of the floor, tilting now toward the far side of the room, sliding across the one-way glass.

  A snarl behind me warned me just in time, and I leapt away with strange instinct, barely missing a newborn’s attack.

  Gemellus was two-deep in newborns, which left this other one free to tangle with me. I held my chain-covered arm up as he led in for a second time with his teeth. Enamel grated on metal so hard a tooth popped off. He was stunned by this—I was too. I needed a weapon, fast—I reached back to rip one of the legs off the table I’d used to smash Estrella. The newborn was twice my size, more wary now, and a full vampire where I was not. I waved him back with the stake, chain-shielded arm out, and felt like a gladiator in a Roman arena given far too little cover. Not engaging wasn’t an option: He was between me and the door, and Gemellus still had his hands full at the other end of the club. I shouldn’t have let myself get separated from him.

  He took three steps and pressed me back against the wall. The leg-stake was still in front of me, but I’d just lost the room to use it. The newborn loomed, licking the space where his missing fang should be, and roared before leaning in.

  “Gemellus! Save me!” I shouted—just as a scythed blade appeared out of nowhere over the newborn’s shoulder, drawing from his shoulder to his hip, cutting him in two like a tear in reality.

  “I hope I’ll do,” Dren said, appearing out of the cloud of newborn dust. He was wearing his trench coat, his hat, and his crookedly evil grin.

  “Dren.” I sagged and coughed and grinned. “You almost cut my nose off.”

  He waved his scythe at me casually. “You should have stopped sticking your nose in other people’s business a long time ago.”

  “Are we winning?” I asked with hope.

  “Won’t know until we’re through.”

  I saw Gemellus’s attention turn, and he launched himself at Dren. “No!” I shouted at him, as if he were a bad dog, and he drew up short. He was still covered in the dust of others, with a disconcerting concentration of it on his mouth and at his throat.

  “I take it we’re on the sam
e side?” Dren asked of me.

  “For now,” Gemellus said, as if that might not last long.

  I looked through the glass below at the fighting inside Hell. I couldn’t tell who was winning; there was too much chaos.

  “He’s higher,” Gemellus prodded.

  I looked from Gemellus to Dren. “He’s Raven’s Sire,” I explained. Dren gave me a slightly alarmed look. “If we can get up there, we can make this whole thing stop—”

  “It’s not safe—” Dren started just as another wave of newborns came up the stairs, following a baying Jorgen.

  “This isn’t either.” Gemellus looked to me.

  With the older vampire, there was still a chance.

  Dren made a sound of either agreement or disgust, then wiped his scythe blade off on his thigh. “We’ll hold them off here. Do what you will, but hurry.”

  I nodded and raced for the stairs.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Gemellus mounted the steps two at a time, and together we emerged into Heaven. Raven was nowhere to be seen, but Wolf was waiting for us, and Gemellus growled.

  “Corvus!” he shouted.

  Wolf leapt for Gemellus, and Gemellus for him.

  They ran at each other at full strength and quickly went down to the ground. The sound of bones breaking and reknitting filled the air, along with the grunts of impact, the sound of flesh hitting flesh. They fought like titans, trading blows that would have broken lesser men—or lesser vampires.

  I didn’t know what kind of fight Gemellus was anticipating, but I doubted this was it.

  “Corvus! Appear! I command it!” Gemellus said after throwing Wolf back fifteen feet. It felt like the room thundered, even though the words weren’t meant for me. Raven was nowhere to be seen—and Wolf didn’t have to listen. I started to get worried Gemellus would die, and then who would stop Raven? Maybe Dren was right, and I would’ve been safer downstairs with him.

  “Call off your dog!” Gemellus shouted when Wolf next let him catch his breath.

  Raven finally emerged from the back of Heaven, walking as slowly as he could—Gemellus hadn’t told him to move quickly, and so he hadn’t.

  “Wolf, stop,” he said quietly, obeying his old Master to the letter of the law. But Wolf didn’t relent—he had Gemellus on the ground now and was clawing at his throat.

  This contradicted the way I thought vampires had to act—I thought the entire system was built on blind obedience. Then Wolf and Gemellus traded places quickly in the way fighting dogs sometimes will, and I caught a glimpse of dull metal at the sides of Wolf’s head, as if the younger vampire had gray headphones on.

  “Silver?” I whispered as I realized just what Raven had done. Wolf still had his ears, but Raven had poured silver into them. He couldn’t hear Raven anymore to obey—if his ears scarred the way my arm had, he wouldn’t be able to hear anything ever again. He’d be following his last order forever, presumably to kill Gemellus.

  They twisted and fell against the floor again; I heard it groan with their weight as they landed. Wolf had his hands latched in a death grip around Gemellus’s throat. Raven looked over their tangling bodies to me.

  “So you decided to become a vampire after all?” he said, his voice still low. His face looked strange, pained, eyes red, with smears of scarlet on both of his cheeks.

  “Have you been crying?” I asked, scared of him and for him both at once.

  He didn’t just sit down on the dais at the far side of Heaven, he collapsed, as if something had hit him. “Natasha’s gone. I felt her go.”

  “No—”

  “He ate her. The monster of my Master that you freed ate her—” Raven reached into his coat, pulling out his silver knife.

  “No! I saw her! She’s fine!”

  “Don’t lie to me, Edie,” he commanded. I felt it wash over me and through me and couldn’t have disobeyed him if I’d tried.

  “She was worried you would need help. She dosed herself with stem cells, like the others.”

  Raven’s face fell anew. “Then my own monster gnaws her now.”

  “But she’s alive—sort of.” I looked from him to Gemellus and Wolf’s evenly matched wrestling.

  “Not with the life I wanted for her.”

  “If you wanted to play Romeo and Juliet you should have gotten her the hell out of here!”

  “Where to? Tell me where it would have been safe for us from your Beast?”

  “She’s not like that!” I fell to my knees pleading with him as his face went dark.

  “All Masters are eventually. I should know.” He watched Gemellus and Wolf’s fight with bleak satisfaction. “Come here, Edie. I’ll show you what she’s like.”

  I got up off my knees and crossed the room to him, just as Dren raced up the stairs. Seeing him, I shouted, “Dren, help Gemellus!”

  Dren started forward, then stopped. “When our kind fights like that, only cowards want other people to get involved. Is your new friend a coward?”

  “Wise words from the Beast’s lapdog,” Raven said. I was walking as slowly as I could, and I could still speak—

  “Dren, kill him then. Please.” I didn’t know what Raven was going to do to me—to us, baby—but the implacable look on his white face smeared with red was frightening.

  I could see Dren calculate his chances of reaching me before Raven did.

  “Wolf and I are well fed on others of our kind. You would have a hard time defeating us.” Raven stood and almost instantly crossed the room to where I was. He placed himself behind me, silver blade drawn and at my neck. “Summon the Beast.”

  “It’s still not too late.”

  “Tell that to Lars,” he said, setting the blade down on my skin, and I gasped in pain.

  “I can make her listen, Master. I swear it.”

  “Only because you don’t know how we are. Meant to kill from the moment we are born. We cannot think of others before ourselves, and it is a joke to pretend there’s ever been another way. My Natasha wanted to cure humans, and instead the darkness made her able to kill for me. My blood perverted even her sweet heart. Your Beast cannot back down from this challenge any more than I can rescind it now.”

  “I am not a monster,” I whispered, hoping it was true.

  “Yes, you are. Just like me, just like I was made.” His hand caught under my jaw and he tilted my head forward, I thought for a horrible second to kiss me. Then his mouth opened and his teeth caught into my hair and tore raggedly against my scalp and I screamed as I felt his fangs grate against my skull. Blood poured out from the wound, covering my eyes as the wound took its time to heal.

  “Summon your Beast,” he told Dren with bloody lips, “or next I will suck out her eyes.”

  Dren had been trapped at the far side of the room, scythe up, unsure what to do next. He incrementally lowered the scythe. “Anna!” he bellowed. “Get up here!”

  There was a sound at the stair and Jorgen emerged with a swollen belly, like a mockery of the child I carried inside, and Anna came up after him.

  “Good boy,” she said, petting his massive disfigured furry head. Then she looked over to all of us.

  She was a sight. A horrific yet beautiful sight. Her blond hair was tinted gray from all the newborn vampire dust. Her clothing was torn. But she was intact, and there was a sad smile on her face.

  “In the tales of the Beast that I’ve heard, the Beast does not have friends. So imagine my surprise when you requested that we save her,” Raven said from behind me.

  “Your storytellers are wrong then. I have many friends—and also many enemies. Which are you? Choose carefully.”

  “Like you would give me a choice.” What had Gemellus done to turn him into this? There was a wheezing gasp from the wrestling vampires as Wolf gained on Gemellus. I could see where Wolf’s fingers were straining into the meat of Gemellus’s windpipe; if Gemellus gave him even one more half inch of leverage, he would twist it free.

  “Just because you were raised without
honor does not mean there is none.”

  “And all of this?” He twisted us both to look through the glass at the carnage below. “Ignored? Erased?”

  “We have ways of making you forget.”

  I could feel him weighing his options as he held me. Trust someone he’d never met, who’d just destroyed his livelihood, love, and house, or play his final awful card? The blade hovered, burning me as he considered, and I knew the moment he’d made up his mind. Poor Natasha; Raven never was going to be able to outrun his past.

  This is it, baby. I’m sorry. I loved you and your father.

  Then he released me. I fell to the ground in limp surprise. The knife clattered beside me, dropped.

  Had he—were we?—I twisted to look up at him, but nothing had changed. “Edie, pick it up.”

  My hand reached for the knife like it was told.

  “Kill her, or kill yourself. You choose.”

  The silver blade was a living thing in my hand, twisting in the air like a snake. Either I pointed it at me, or it had to be pointed at Anna.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I looked hopelessly at Anna, and at Dren, and at Gemellus, fighting myself. I didn’t want to die. But I didn’t want to kill her. The blade wavered as I tried to make up my mind, picking between two horrible options.

  “Help me. Please,” I begged anyone who could listen. I took a staggering step toward Anna, as if pulled by the knife.

  If I did try to kill her, would she kill me? What if she somehow changed me now? That would be a way out, but it wouldn’t save the baby. I needed to live—but could I live with myself knowing that I had killed a friend?

  “My people have your land surrounded and we’ve already killed everything in this building,” Anna said. “End this, and I swear I’ll let you live until dawn.”

  “You heard her. Go to her, Edie.”

  I took another stumbling step forward. “I don’t want this. Make it stop. Gemellus—”

  “Don’t talk to him,” Raven commanded. Dren stepped forward to intercept me, but Anna put her hand out, denying him.