Authors: Jennifer Estep
Or I’d die trying.
The people pressed forward, forming a loose ring around us, hooting, hollering, and cheering at the tops of their lungs. Bria, Xavier, and Owen held their position by the sedan, alternating between keeping an eye on Benson’s guards and shooting worried looks at me. Through my earpiece, I could hear Owen murmuring. I didn’t focus on his words, but the sound of his voice was more than enough encouragement for me.
Meanwhile, Benson’s guards had formed a line on the sidewalk in front of his mansion, their guns out but down by their sides—for now. They still thought that their boss was going to kill me, so they weren’t going to interfere. They couldn’t, not if Benson was going to continue to be the king that he’d portrayed himself as for so long.
Benson might be a villain, but I was one too, and I was eager to show him that I could be more ruthless than he ever dreamed of being.
“You should give up now, Gin,” Benson called out as we circled each other. “Who knows? Instead of killing you, I might take you back down to my lab for a while. Test some of my new drugs on you. I’d love to see your reactions to them. I know that you’d grow to love it too. Quicker than you think. Everyone does.”
My hand tightened around my knife, so hard that I
could feel the spider rune in the hilt pressing into the larger, matching scar embedded in my palm. “I’d rather gut myself like a fish than be your damn science experiment again.”
Benson grinned, showing off his fangs, the tips of his teeth as sharp as the knife in my hand. “Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t have a problem with that scenario either. Only I’m afraid that I’ll be the one doing the gutting, not you.”
He let out a loud roar and charged at me. I let him come.
Benson swung at me, this time using his enhanced vampire strength to put even more force behind his blows. But I still had my Stone magic, so I used it to harden my skin, head, hair, and eyes into an impenetrable shell. Oh, Benson’s punches still hurt, each one as hard and brutal as me slamming Owen’s hammer into the vamp’s car, and the blows knocked me this way and that, like I was a bit of gravel flying across the road after a semi roared by. But the brutal assaults didn’t crack my ribs and break all the bones in my face the way he wanted them to.
While Benson concentrated on pummeling me, I lashed out with my knife at him.
Punch.
Slash-slash.
Punch.
Slash.
Punch-punch-punch.
We traded blow after blow after blow, his fists pounding into my chest and face over and over again. I got in a few glancing swipes with my knife, but every time the
blade would start to sink deep enough into Benson’s body to do some real damage, he would use his enhanced speed to dart back out of range of the edge of the blade. It was a small, subtle movement but extremely hard to do, and I found myself being impressed with his technique. We were playing a game of inches, and he was winning.
“You’re going to lose,” Benson taunted me when we broke apart after another furious exchange. “Face it, Gin. You’re going to run out of magic long before I run out of strength.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I snapped back at him. “Considering that you’ve already started sucking wind, I’m willing to put my belief in my magic—in myself.”
Benson frowned as he realized how true my words were. His breath was coming in sharp gasps, sweat was sliding down his forehead, and the rims of his glasses had fogged up from his exertions.
He growled, stepped forward, and shoved me in the chest with both hands. His strength sent me flying again, this time right into the side of his smashed-up Bentley. My back slammed into the driver’s-side door, adding another dent there, while my legs slid out from under me, and my ass hit the pavement. I raised my knife, expecting Benson to do another one of his soaring leaps on top of me, but instead, he snapped his fingers. One of the guards hurried over to his boss’s side and raised his gun, pointing it at my head. I tensed, wondering if Finn could take him out before he pulled the trigger.
But Benson had something else in mind.
Even as his man turned toward me, Benson came up behind him. Then he casually reached out with one
hand, jerked the other man back up against his body, and plunged his fangs into his own guard’s neck. Benson took several long pulls of blood out of the vamp, who screamed and thrashed against his boss’s body, even as his gun slipped from his fingers and clattered onto the pavement. But Benson wasn’t content to just take the man’s blood and his strength along with it.
Oh, no.
Even as the guard’s screams grew louder and his thrashes weaker, Benson clamped his hand onto the side of the man’s head, a blue glow pulsing out from between his fingers like the bright flare of a star. The bastard was sucking the fear, pain, and terror out of his own man just to make himself stronger—just so he could beat me.
It disgusted me, how casually Benson would disregard his own man’s loyalty, how he would betray it in this most ultimate, intimate way in front of everyone, but it didn’t surprise me.
Because that was exactly the kind of scum he was.
Well, not for much longer, not if I could help it.
I scrambled to my feet and started forward. But it was already too late for the guard. Benson ripped his fangs out of the other man’s neck, dropped his hand from his head, and let him go. The guard flopped to the ground, dead.
Benson let out a loud, satisfied sigh that had everyone in the crowd screaming, ducking down, and hurrying to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the vamp and still be able to see our death match.
Benson turned to face me. I’d never seen him look anything but cold, clinical, and detached, but right now, he was a fucking mess. His clothes were torn, ripped, and
dirty from our fight, his black hair stuck out from his head at odd, spiky angles, and patches of sweat darkened his baby-blue shirt. Even worse, his body had swelled up, his muscles filling out and bulging with all the life, blood, and emotions he’d just sucked out of his guard.
But it was his face that was truly gruesome.
The dead guard’s blood was smeared all over Benson’s mouth, the most garish sort of lipstick imaginable, while more blood had run down his chin and spattered all over his shirt. Crimson specks even dotted the lenses of his silver glasses like dead bugs splattered all over a car windshield.
But it was his eyes that worried me the most. They pulsed a bright blue from the terrified emotions he’d sucked out of his dying guard, burning hotter than the noon sun overhead. Benson was stronger now than ever before.
And I wasn’t.
I’d already used up a good chunk of my magic just keeping him from breaking every single bone in my body. I needed to finish this, I needed to kill him, before my own magic ran out entirely, just like he said. Or I’d be the one dying in the street today.
Benson grinned, showing off his fangs, stained red with blood. “What were you saying about my winding down? I can do this all day long, Gin. But you can’t.”
I tightened my grip on my knife. “I don’t have to do it all day long. It shouldn’t take me more than another minute, two tops, to finish off the likes of you.”
Benson growled and launched himself at me again. But I was expecting the move, so I was able to sidestep at the last possible second, and he slammed into his own car
instead of me, putting a bigger dent in the metal with the force of his own body than I had with Owen’s hammer.
But it didn’t slow him down for an instant. Benson let out a loud, guttural growl, reached down, hooked his hands on the bottom of his car, and flipped it over onto its side, causing the people gathered on the sidewalks to scream in surprise and terror. Benson grinned, whirled around, and took a menacing step forward, as though he were going to plunge into the crowd and do to them what he had done to his own guard. He would too, the second he felt like he needed another hit of power.
In his own way, Benson was just as much of an addict as all the people he’d gotten hooked on his drugs over the years.
He chuckled at the crowd’s fear, his eyes burning brighter than ever before. He might not be able to feed on their emotions without touching them, but he could sense their fear, and it was adding to his own twisted high. I had to distract Benson from the crowd before he attacked someone else and became too strong for me to kill, so I darted over, grabbed Owen’s hammer from where it had landed, and hurled it in his direction.
But Benson was truly hopped up on adrenaline, emotion, and blood now, and he whirled around almost too fast for me to follow. One second, he was doing his best bogeyman impression with the crowd. The next, he’d snatched Owen’s hammer out of midair. He let out an amused chuckle, then turned and hurled the weapon as hard as he could. It sailed away as free and easy as a kite, as if Benson had the strength of some Olympic god, and it didn’t stop until it clattered against the side of his mansion,
knocking a chunk of stone off the side before falling to the ground.
Benson grinned at me again, his fangs seeming even bloodier than before. “And now, Gin, I think it’s time for you to die.”
Before I could move, before I could react, before I could even think about ducking, Benson was on me. I lashed out with my knife, but he let out a mocking laugh and slapped the weapon out of my hand. I palmed another knife, but Benson slapped that one away too, sending it flying through the air. It came to a stop right beside my first knife. I started to reach for the third knife against the small of my back, but Benson stepped forward, grabbed my shoulders, and slammed his head into mine.
With all of that fresh blood and emotion pumping through his veins, this blow was harder and sharper than all the others he’d landed so far. I felt like my skull had gotten run over by a Mack truck, and I lost my grip on my Stone magic.
Benson used the opening to head-butt me again.
I managed to bring enough of my magic back to bear to keep the blow from killing me outright, but my brain rattled around in my skull like a coin tumbling through a slot machine. White, gray, and black stars winked on and off in my vision, and I was flat on my back on the pavement before I realized what was happening.
I lay there, trying to
blink-blink-blink
the dangerous spots away and come up with some sort of plan that would let me kill Benson without getting dead myself. In my earpiece, I could hear Bria, Xavier, Owen, Finn, and Phillip all screaming at me to
getup-getup-getup!
, but
scrambled brains aren’t great for comprehension or action.
I blinked again, and Benson was kneeling on the pavement beside me, his hand wrapped around my throat. He easily hoisted me off the ground and lifted me up into the air, so that my feet were kicking in the breeze and my gaze was level with his.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bria, Owen, and Xavier start forward, only to draw up short as Benson’s men moved in front of them, cutting them off from me.
“I don’t have the angle,” Finn yelled in my ear. “I don’t have a shot!”
“Neither do I!” Phillip yelled back.
Things had not gone my way, and my friends were still trying to save me. But they were going to be too late.
So I’d just have to save myself.
I pushed all the noise away. Finn and Phillip still screaming in my ear. Bria, Xavier, and Owen shouting from behind the guards. The excited whispers of the crowd. I ignored it all and focused on Benson. The sweaty warmth of his hand wrapped around my throat. The strength in his arm as he held me up. The hot blue glow of magic in his eyes. The bloody flecks painting his glasses. The lemony scent wafting up from his body.
It was that last one, his smell, that made me flash back to my time in his lab. Different day, same situation. Because right now, I was just as helpless as I’d been in his chair, when Benson shoved that Burn pill down my throat and then made me swallow it—
Malevolent understanding burned through me like
acid, making me grin. Because I wasn’t helpless. Not here, not now, not
ever
.
And I knew how I could beat Benson: the exact same way he’d beaten me.
All around us, the crowd gasped, pressing forward in anticipation of the end. They knew that this was the moment when the vamp could snap my neck with a thought, if he so chose.
Benson knew it too, because he started laughing. He turned this way and that, lifting me up higher and higher into the air for the crowd’s and his own inspection and amusement, as if I were some sort of trophy he’d won and was hoisting skyward.
But what the bastard didn’t realize was that he hadn’t won—not yet—and that I wasn’t about to let him be the end of me.
Finally, Benson quit waving my body through the air and brought me back down so that my eyes were level with his again. He stared at me, his happy face creasing into a thoughtful frown. Once again, he did that weird, tilting thing with his head, staring at me like a bird about to gobble up a worm, as if he were surprised by something I’d said, even though he had such a tight grip on my throat that I could have barely done more than croak out a few words, even if I’d wanted to crow about how I was going to kill him.
“Fascinating,” he said. “Truly fascinating.”
Benson loosened his hold on my neck and waved his free hand in front of my face. The rough, sandpaper feel of his Air magic sloughed against my body, trying to pinpoint the emotions under the surface of my skin and tear
them out of me. But I didn’t let them. Instead, I reached for my Ice magic and let the cold power center me the way it had done so many times in the past.
Benson gave me a little shake, as if trying to rattle the emotions out of me, like pennies stuck to the bottom of a glass jar. I gritted my teeth as my brain sloshed around inside my skull again, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of hissing in pain. Instead, I focused on my magic, letting it make me as cold as ice—literally—from the inside out.
But my lack of response, my lack of emotion, my lack of fear, made him go from curious to enraged in a heartbeat.