Bound by the Vampire Queen (49 page)

Chapter 18

LYSSA crouched on the sand, getting her breath back. Despite her chest being slick with sweat and blood, the rose still pulsed against it, telling her she was getting closer. If anyone was following her, she’d left an interesting trail of bread crumbs. She’d turned the first three Fae into cacti, and the next group into a small handful of scorpions. They’d chased her until she outran them. After that, she went for inanimate earth forms. Rocks, dried sticks. The flow of earth magic here was stingy at best, most of it wrapped up into holding the protections and forms of the prison.

As her energy and that shifting supply of magic dwindled, like a well spring drying up, the ways she could fight the inhabitants became more and more macabre.

She stared at the last set of cacti, which were not fully cacti at all. They were half Fae, half plant, and the Fae were still hideously, torturously alive, their screams of agony now down to rasping pants, and moans. She was sorry for that. Under normal circumstances, she would have tried to end their pain with a quick throat slitting.

However, the cold and ruthless truth was that the terrifying image of those mangled, half alive bodies, cactus spikes protruding from their bloody torn skin, was keeping the next wave of pursuers at a wary distance. Even so, the newest group had swelled from five to ten members, the largest contingent yet.

She’d wondered how any of them had survived to become these desperate packs, if they were so quick to attack newcomers. When she’d fought in close quarters with them, their damaged bodies and dead eyes told her why. Newcomers weren’t killed, not outright. Everything of value was taken from the weak… repeatedly. From their crawling, avaricious gazes, she also knew why she’d not seen any women. A woman wouldn’t survive here long because her primary value was quickly used up by males starved for sexual contact. They were wild, savage beasts with no reason or logic, all of that long ago burned away by the sun.

She was having a hard time believing Rhoswen had ever come here and tried the quest she was attempting now. The fact this place existed was a blight of shame on both monarchs. While the most brutal crime might deserve this kind of judgment, it would taint the judges’ souls to give it. A quick execution would be better.

She thought of what Tabor had intimated, that the Fae had experienced a dark period when there was little trust among them, as well as between themselves and humans. Conflict, war between factions. It sounded much like the vampires’ Territory Wars and the brutality that had happened then. For all that she was being constantly pursued, there was not a large populace. How long had it been since anyone was sentenced to this? Did those in the Fae world realize any of the condemned still survived?

Though survival was a loose term. Any immortal who figured out how to exist here sentenced themselves to unimaginable hell.

She wished she could tell how far she was from her goal. While the rose’s pulse was getting stronger, she had no measure for what that meant.

She’d gone through most of Jacob’s blood in the pouch Keldwyn had provided, but her body was quivering with exhaustion, because her opponents had gotten in their strikes as well. During one harrowing moment when they’d pinned her, she’d cracked open the earth, a minor quake that threw all of them, including her, fifty feet into the air. When she landed, she’d been fortunate to be the only one not momentarily disoriented, expecting the effect. That had been her first set of mutant cacti, her body too depleted to do the full job, the supply of magical energy too thin.

Those ten were starting to move forward. They’d noticed the trembling, her blood forming a larger stain under her feet. She started moving again.

Perhaps they’d trail her for a while before finding the courage to attack her once more. Every step was a possibility she might reach her father’s soul before her own departed the world.

Then she realized the shuddering beneath her was not coming from her own body. Whirling, braced for a charge, she saw the ten retreating at a full , stumbling run, dispersing like rats scrabbling on a flat table surface. Realizing the shudder was from the ground beneath her, she started to follow them, to get beyond the point where the desert was violently shifting, the sand rolling away and ground heaving much like it had done when she called up the percussion force. Only this time, an actual
something
was coming up from beneath the earth.

It blasted forth with a loud noise somewhere between a hawk’s cry, an enraged lion’s roar and a dragon’s screech. The explosion knocked her on her ass, but she stopped moving, letting the sand shower over her as a long serpentine neck reared up above. The head that topped it was skeletal looking, with six red eyes and three rows of teeth. This was not a prisoner. This being was indigenous to this place, one of the things put here to ensure nothing survived long. Perhaps the judges’ ironic form of mercy.

Her explosion had likely drawn its attention, which meant that movement attracted it. Since its multiple gazes were on the fleeing men, she stayed still, not breathing, not moving. She was close to it, such that it would have to tuck in its chin and look directly down to see her.

Letting out another shrill scream, it took several running steps and launched itself on wings that seemed merely a frame of bones connected by a thin membrane run through by blood vessels. The wings were too thin for this sun, but that might be why it could burrow and travel underground. It might even be immune to the sun.

Unfortunately, those three running steps took him directly over her. She couldn’t risk moving, but there was also no time to move away. It pushed into flight off her thigh. The give of the sand beneath her saved the bone from breaking, but the barbed talon tore open her thigh, a long gash that went to the bone.

Biting down on a scream, she rolled face-first, pressing her thigh and the resulting geyser of blood into the sand. Hopefully by the time the creature reached and mangled the other victims, it would assume the blood on the talon belonged to them. But she was sure it would be back.

Tearing another strip off the hem of her tunic, she tied it around her thigh to staunch the blood flow. Her neck and ears, any part of her not under the hat or her clothes, was already blistered. She tasted small rivulets of blood from her cracked lips. She’d taken her hair down despite the heat, because it provided some covering for her neck and face.

As she staggered to her feet, moved forward once again, she thought of Mason. When she’d visited him in the desert years ago, he’d worn the elegant tunic and robe of a Bedouin, a romantic figure. It said something that what her memory lingered on was not how devastatingly handsome the male vampire was in such garments, but the garments themselves. If Mason was here, he’d strip them off without hesitation to give them to her, no matter that he’d turn to ash before he even got to her. Her life was full of foolish, noble and chivalrous males.

The sand serpent unfortunately hadn’t left a tunnel in its wake. The sand was too soft. When it emerged, the sand had closed in behind it, so following the path it had taken underground was not possible. It was too risky anyhow, not knowing where the next surface break would appear.

She’d held on to one of the Fae she’d turned into a stick and now used it to hobble forward, ignoring the fact she was dizzy and her breath was labored.

She’d fought through much worse pain than this to achieve her goals. This would be no different. Of course, when she’d had more vampire strength than Fae, she’d been more certain of what could or couldn’t kill her. The wound in her leg, combined with the sun’s heat and however many other battles she faced, might end her.

She made it another hundred yards before she heard the serpent’s shrieking cry again. It had reversed course. She made a dive for the gully its tail had created and burrowed deep, though she suspected it had already seen her.

As it swooped, she knew that was the case. Even if not, at this range, there was no way it couldn’t smell the blood, coating her leg with slick grit. Giving a snarl of pure frustration and exhaustion, she shoved herself out of the gully and took a defensive position.

As she did, she reached deep into the ground beneath her. Nothing, no magic left there. The well was dry.

But there was the creature itself, a being of life and earth, no matter how rare or aberrant. As her mind raced over the thought, weighing possibilities, she braced herself, watching it arrow down toward her.

The triple gaping maw of teeth was open, the talons extended. Dropping to a squat, she bit back a moan at the fire that shot up her wounded leg. She had no speed, and even at her best, she didn’t have enough strength. It didn’t matter. She’d depend on her mind. It had always been her best weapon, coupled with her unstoppable determination to win.

Since Rex’s murder, Thomas’s death, the Delilah virus and the Council’s betrayal, she’d been fighting that damn lassitude. What Jacob had feared was the onset of the Ennui. But suddenly, out here in a barren desert, closer to death than she’d ever been—which, given her precarious life, was saying something— that determination unfolded inside her, like a treasure that had merely been waiting for her to unwrap and remember she possessed it.

She wasn’t leaving her boys alone, come hell or high water. Or deserts, Fae queens and sand serpents. Kane and Jacob needed her, and she needed them. She wasn’t going to lose this fight; she didn’t care what Fate or the law of averages told her about her chances. In the cruel irony that fate often offered, it was truly facing her own inevitable death that gave her a renewed resolve to live.

Looking up into the face of the creature as it swooped down upon her, she got a full face of its fetid breath as it screamed. She screamed back. As she did, she saw the masticated body part of one of her pursuers stuck in the back row of teeth.

Then she ducked and flung herself at its right claw.

As the creature closed the talons around her, caging her, she put both hands on the creature’s ankle, thick as a young tree trunk. The talons stabbed her like five knives, but she focused, focused,
focused
.

Feeling her magic, the serpentlike beast launched itself again rather than immediately tearing her apart, a vital advantage. High above the earth, dizzying, turning. She pul ed the energy from inside that creature, pul ed hard. Earth, creation, all of it there, all magic she could use. She could turn it to her will , it didn’t matter that her strength was flagging, that there were hazy bands of color shooting across her vision like flashing stars broken free from a rainbow.

Two of the talons had hit major organs, because she could feel her body stuttering, losing her grip, her focus.

No.
She snarled again, fought it, fought the inevitable. She was not going to be torn apart. She was not going to die like that. Bringing the magic together with the creature’s energy, she didn’t attempt to control or direct it. She let it go like a suicide bomber tossing an incendiary up over her head and watching it drop with wild, mindless insanity.

The sand serpent, already capable of a symphony of disturbing cries, let out a shriek that pierced her bones, made them ache. The beast shuddered in the air, faltered. Hazarding a look down, she realized they were several hundred feet in the air. She managed a grim half chuckle. The least of her problems, truly. Hanging on to a corner of the magic, she clutched the serpent’s ankle as its talons released, her blood painting every claw. Adrenaline pumped through her, making everything numb.

“Damn it,
work
,” she growled. She yelled it, gripped that ankle for all she was worth. And beneath her grip, it began to change.

At first it looked like it was turning to stone, a gray tint running up the creature’s leg, all the way to the skeletal features and the wings, freezing them in place. As they began to tumble out of the sky, that horrible screech came from its throat again. A terrible shudder and the beast exploded in midair, the inside coming outside, yanked there by her will .

Unfortunately, it left nothing to hold. She plummeted to earth among sharp shards of bone, gouts of blood and muscle, and a hailstorm of tiny sand stone, perhaps something it used for its digestion.

A piece of the wing slapped her face, cutting it open. She seized it. She was too close to the ground for it to slow her fall much, but it did help. That, coupled with the last scrap of magic she could command to summon air currents to fill it and slow her descent. As a result, she hit with a dull, bone jarring thud, instead of snapping her spine and paralyzing herself.

She lay there for long moments, wondering if she was about to die. She couldn’t seem to move, though that could be her body’s way of asking for a few moments to collect itself from the huge power drain of the energy summoning, the blood loss from her leg, or the multiple stab wounds in her upper body. Or the fact she had one enormous, pounding headache. Probably from sunburn.

She hoped that would heal. If she had to emerge from this experience with permanently blistered, unattractive skin, she might choose to die here, with sincere apologies to Jacob and Kane. Family was one thing, a woman’s vanity was entirely another. It almost made her smile, remembering how she’d teased Jacob about that not too long ago, at another equally grim moment, when she’d had the Delilah virus.

How many times could she almost die before the Grim Reaper got tired of showing up at the door, only to find she wasn’t ready? She hoped at least one more. But she was tired, and she had a plummeting feeling she had no more strength.

Perhaps if she just lay here a moment or two more, she could continue. Putting her hand to her chest, she felt a vague sense of alarm. The rose wasn’t there. She twisted her head, gasping at the pain.

She was surrounded by the debris of an exploding sand monster. It could be anywhere. She looked in the other direction, managed to roll to her side.

There… was that a flash of red?

Her lips pul ed back in a twisted half smile. As she did, she tasted her own blood and that of the creature she’d killed. She’d laugh if it wouldn’t hurt so badly. There was her pack, the rose laying neatly upon the top of it as if it had been placed there by a fussy maître d’ at a restaurant.