A Dark Heart (27 page)

Neither would Ehrengard, who cursed when he saw what was happening and
stalked away from the cage towards the commotion.

“The boy loves shiny things,” Percy murmured. “They’ll have a devil of a
time tearing him away.”

“Not if they hurt him,” he muttered.

“They won’t,” Percy said, focusing on an argument taking place between
Ehrengard and the white-haired man. “The old man is telling Ehrengard they
still need the lad alive. Ehrengard doesn’t believe him, but he’s not letting
O’Connor touch the lad.”

Elijah gave Percy a surprised look, for as far as he could tell the men
were speaking the foreign gibberish the white-haired Elder seemed to prefer.
“You understand what they’re saying?”

Percy looked as surprised as Elijah. “I do. It’s … Italian, I think. How
the hell do I know Italian?” she cried, her silver-gray eyes wide, her knuckles
white with tension on the bars in front of her, and her whole body shivering
underneath her rags. She’d never seemed so vulnerable.

“Are you all right, Percy?”

“No, I’m not bloody all right. That bastard … he stood right in front of
us, and I froze. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even
move
. Nearly thirty
years I’ve waited for this, and I’m bloody useless! He didn’t even recognize me
either,” Percy continued, watching the white-haired Elder attempt to lure
Hector away from his shiny prize while Ehrengard looked on with barely-leashed
fury. “I doubt he even remembers what he did to me. To my brother …” Her voice
broke on this last word, and she reached under her shirt, clutching something
around her neck in her fist. She turned to Elijah, her battered face twisted
with determination. “Take my blood, Elijah,” she said, low and urgent.

He shuddered at the offer and shook his head.

“It will help you. Maybe it will be enough for you to get out of this
damned cage,” she said, pushing uselessly on the bars in front of her.

“It won’t be enough,” he said. “They shot me full of Elder blood, Percy.
It’s poison to vampires, even worse than opium. I’m not even sure if Ana’s
blood will heal me.”

She winced at Ana’s name. “You don’t know that.”

“Even if it did, what then? I couldn’t fight my way out of here even if I
was fully blooded.”

“I don’t want you to. I want you to kill Ehrengard. He’ll not expect your
attack,” she insisted, a worrisome, manic glint in her eyes, turning them
nearly entirely silver. Elijah’s blood ran cold – or would have run cold,
had the poison in his veins not been sizzling hot – at the madness he saw
behind that glint in her eyes.

Percy had lost her mind. It had no doubt fallen out during the beating
she’d taken. Or perhaps she’d lost it when she’d stood helplessly before
Ehrengard for the first time in thirty years, stymied from exacting her revenge
by metal bars and her own fear. He could hardly blame her. He understood all
too well her desperation, her determination to have her retribution whatever
the cost.

To once more be entirely at the mercy of the two men who’d stolen
everything from them, after decades of dreaming of their revenge, was as cruel
a twist of fate as Elijah could have ever imagined.

But Percy was willing to do anything to kill Ehrengard – even if it
meant destroying herself and Elijah in the process. As little as a week ago,
Elijah would have agreed with her, perhaps even considered acting on her
hare-brained plan. But he couldn’t, not any more, not after the promises he’d
made to Ana – not after the fundamental shift in his heart that went even
deeper than those promises.

He didn’t want to die, even if it meant walking away from his revenge.

Looking into Percy’s eyes, he saw what Ana and others must have seen in
him
at his worst, and it was horrifying. That gleam in her eyes held nothing but a
blank, soulless hate, and it was going to swallow her whole if she wasn’t
careful.

“It won’t work, Percy,” he said as gently as he could. “I’d die before I
got anywhere near him. And you’d be dead anyway. I’d suck you dry. You know I
would. What use would your revenge be then?”

“It would be enough, to know that you’d kill him,” she said stubbornly.

“No it wouldn’t.
Jesus
, Percy, I won’t do it.”

She groaned in frustration and kicked at the cage. “Then what are we
going to do? We can’t let them win.”

Elijah wanted to reassure her that they’d find a way out of this
disaster, but he hadn’t the heart or the energy to lie to her. As far as he
could tell, they were royally fucked in the arse. It took all of his strength
just to stay upright at the moment. He hadn’t a chance in hell of escaping.
Their only hope lay in the hands of others. He just prayed that if Rowan came
to the rescue, he’d leave Ana at home.

A sudden shift in the atmosphere broke through Elijah’s frantic thoughts.
The whirring of the black box suddenly amplified in intensity, sending
vibrations across the chamber floor so strong Elijah could feel it in his
teeth. A low-pitched sonic boom followed on the heels of the black box’s
increased activity, which gave way to a flash of white light so bright
everything in Elijah’s field of vision was lost. The light seemed to suck all
the sound from the chamber as well, so for a moment Elijah felt as if he were
floating within the blank pages of an unwritten book, without sight or sound or
shape.

Then the world came rushing back, and he was once again in his metal cage
with Percy. Voices were screaming over the din of the black box, and a wall of
wind at his back blew so powerfully he pitched forward hard against the bars,
his hair whipping at his cheeks.

Percy cursed next to him, her attention riveted on the center of the room
as she struggled to brace herself against the wind. He followed her line of vision
and sucked in his breath. The giant brass wheels of the device were spinning
and slowly gaining speed, and the small ball that hung from the base had begun
to glow and pulse with life. He realized that the strange wind came from the
rotating wheels, but instead of pushing air outwards, as any normal fan would
do, it seemed to be sucking the air and anything else it could into itself,
like a hungry mouth. And as the wheels went faster and the ball glowed hotter,
a strange, shimmery
something
began to form in the blank void between
the wheels and the base of the device.

He noticed Hector had escaped and was running along the perimeter of the
room, while O’Connor chased after him, screaming at his disoriented men to
catch the lad. It would have almost been comical had he not been so frightened
for Hector – or for all of London, for that matter. The device was not
supposed to work.

“What the bloody hell!” he cried, as the wheels began to move so fast he
couldn’t see them anymore. The iridescent shimmer in the center of the device
became a giant, pulsing ball of white light, humming with energy and sucking up
everything it could with its strange, impossible wind. Papers and pencils from
Hector’s table flew towards the white light and disappeared inside of it. Even
a few heavy tools from the white-haired man’s arsenal began to slowly scrape
across the stone floor, drawn towards the light as if it were a giant magnet.

“Hector did something,” Percy said, following whatever it was the
white-haired man was shrieking at Ehrengard as the two men worked frantically
over the black box. “He tampered with that golden ball somehow, and it
triggered … this. Good God, Elijah!” she breathed, gesturing towards the light.
Elijah watched as one of O’Connor’s leeches skirted too close to the device in
his effort to get to Hector. The power of the device forced the leech into the
air and began to draw him towards its growing, blinding center. The leech
opened his mouth to scream, his limbs flailing uselessly, as he hurtled backwards
into the white light. But before he could make a sound, he was gone, swallowed
up in the light.

Incinerated.

And the ball of light just kept getting bigger. Stronger. The old man’s
tools flew through the air now, hurtling into that bright void, along with any
object or speck of dust not anchored to the floor. Elijah even felt their metal
cage shift a little bit, its hinges groaning, straining towards the light.

Elijah turned his attention back to Ehrengard and the white-haired man as
they scrambled to contain the giant ball of light, though he had no clue what
difference flipping a few levers and pushing a few buttons on the black box
would make. Even Ehrengard did not wear his usual self-assured expression. He
looked rather worried, and so did the white-haired man.

That
certainly did not bode well.

Brightlingsea had warned the device had the potential to destroy London,
and Elijah was inclined to believe him. He just hoped Brightlingsea wasn’t
about to be proved right. He did
not
fancy being incinerated by a couple
of diamond-studded wheels, a dangling gold ball, and a hungry orb of light. It seemed
too ludicrous to be real, and was certainly not the way he’d ever envisioned
his death.

Suddenly Percy was saying something even more ludicrous next to him about
this being their only chance at Ehrengard, and before he could process her
meaning, she shoved him backwards. He crashed against the rear of the cage and
fell to his back, too weak to fight her off as she straddled his chest and
pinned his hands against the metal floor.

For one disturbing second he thought she was going to kiss him, their
faces hovering dangerously close together. But she did something even more
horrifying than that. She sliced her wrist open with a knife she’d somehow
managed to retain, and smashed the bleeding wound against his mouth.

Warm blood trickled down his throat despite his best efforts, and for a
moment he feared he would be unable to stop himself from sucking her dry, just
as she clearly intended. But her blood was all wrong. If she thought to help
him, she was doing just the opposite. Her blood had always smelled different to
him than other humans, but he’d never understood why.

He still didn’t, for what he was tasting should have been impossible. He’d
only had blood like Percy’s once before, and that had been when he’d nearly
torn the throat out of Charles Netherfield last year.

Bonded blood.

And it tasted like shite. Worse than shite. Poison. Brightlingsea had
once explained to him that once a leech was turned, the only Bonded blood it
could tolerate was its maker’s. The rest was almost as poisonous to a leech as
Elder blood. It was certainly just as unpalatable. A wave of nausea washed over
him as a few drops hit his stomach, and he bucked and thrashed beneath her
until he finally managed to push her off him. He rose up on his hands and knees
and heaved up his insides until nothing was left, using up the last of his
strength. He slumped to the side, glaring up at Percy, who watched him as if
he’d gone insane, clutching her bleeding wrist.

But
she
was the lunatic here. And a bloody…

What
was
she?

“What are you?” he cried out hoarsely.

Her eyes got even wider. “What do you mean, what am I? What was
that
about?” she demanded, indicating the mess he’d made on the floor of the cage.
He shuddered and spat out the lingering residue of her blood still coating the
roof of his mouth.

“Your blood is wrong, Percy,” he said. “You’re a Bonded!”

“What are you talking about?” she nearly shouted, incredulous. “I am no such
thing.”

He managed to jerk her hand away from the jagged cut on her wrist. The
wound was still trickling blood, but it was definitely healing too quickly for
a normal human. Even the swelling on her battered face had begun to go down,
now that he could study her properly in the white light from the device. What
the hell was she?

“You should have bled out from a cut like that,” he hissed.

She tugged her sleeve over her wrist, anger and a little bit of fear replacing
her shock. “You’re ridiculous. I’ve always been a quick healer,” she muttered.
“I’m not a
Bonded
. I didn’t even know what that was until yesterday, no
thanks to you.”

He was completely baffled. Percy was a professional liar and a
bloodthirsty cheat, but he didn’t think she was being dishonest about this. But
how could she forget a traumatic thing like being Bonded by an Elder? It just
made no sense.

The fear in her expression grew bigger the longer he stared at her in
stunned silence. “Damn it, Elijah. What are you saying? I’ve
always
been
like this, I swear on my brother’s grave.”

He had no answers for her. And even if he did, he had no time to give
them, for things were getting even more interesting beyond their cage. The two
vampires who had guarded them suddenly decided to leave their posts, and it
took him a few seconds to realize it was because Rowan, Sasha Romanov, and Hex
Bartholomew were tearing through O’Connor’s men on the other side of the
chamber near the entrance. Thank God.

His relief was short-lived, however, when he saw the hem of a familiar
green skirt swish into view behind Rowan, and the flash of golden hair and
green eyes. Terror filled his heart, taking away his ability to breath, as he
watched Ana scan the chamber as if searching for something. She was seemingly
oblivious to the hundreds of millions of dangers surrounding her, including the
vampires her brother was busy cutting down beside her –
and
the
giant ball of light that threatened to consume her and half of London at any
second. The damn fool! What did she think she was doing?

And what was Rowan about, bringing her along to this bloodbath?

He staggered to his feet and gripped the bars, for the first time in his
life actually wishing for his vampiric powers to return, just so he could reach
her side and protect her. If anything happened to her, he’d never recover.