Death's Redemption (The Eternal Lovers Series) (3 page)

Frenzy had always been more of a lover than a fighter. Tipping her face up to his, her breathing ragged from the pain and a sexual wave of intense longing for his touch, she melted into his lips.

But touching him while ridden by death was like kissing a volt of lightning. His mouth tingled as his power transferred to her. Death’s kiss sank its tentacles deep inside her, rushing through her veins, her pores.

She gasped, pulling away as her body began to freeze from the inside out. Already pale ivory skin turned an alarming shade of arctic blue, and then cracks slid in large grooves down her face, her neck, her arms.

“Good-bye, vampire. It’s been swell.” He gently flicked the tip of her nose, and she shattered like a pile of broken marble at his feet.

Sighing, he stood, refusing to acknowledge that the knife wounds in his sides and back actually hurt like a mother. He licked his teeth, kicked the still-catatonic Lucian in the gut, just because he felt like it, and followed the sounds of wet gurgling inside the house.

The smells were the first things to hit him. A blast of spring, the scent of newly turned soil and seedling sprouts. Humans smelled of this. The good ones anyway. The ones who went to the light.

Not that he considered any of them good; as far as he was concerned they all deserved to be thrown into the fiery pit that reeked of sulfur. But whatever, not his decision.

The squeaking chirp of mice and rats rang like a melody all around him, almost in sync with the wet rattle coming from a few feet in front of him.

“Bloody freaking vampires,” he growled, fully expecting to find a partially dismembered human with barely a torso attached and full of fang marks. Vamps could be a lot like sharks when in a frenzy, ripping off and sucking clean. The myth that they killed with a love nibble was rarely the case.

He now knew why their eyes glowed. Vampires could only pass as human when they fed properly. Only by being the parasites that they were could they attain the rich shade of healthy, pinkened skin and the natural eye color of what they once knew when alive and mortal.

But when a vampire didn’t feed, they began to resemble the monster of legend. The pale-faced, glowing-eyed freaks whose looks gave them away as something other than human.

The vampires he’d fought tonight had been half-starved. Maybe they didn’t care to appear human because San Francisco was the one city in the world that allowed any monster, be it vampire or zombie, to roam free and unmolested. A vampire did not need to hide his truths if he did not wish to. There were even clubs where humans and vamps went to hook up for those few but rare mortals who enjoyed being a vampire’s snack for the night.

Times were so different from when he’d first roamed Earth, and a part of him missed the day when mortals had sense enough to fear
others
, when they worshipped the beauty of nature and the fae. But those days would never return again. Humans had adapted, just as the monsters had.

The black inside the ramshackle house of crumbling wood did not hinder his ability to see. The walls were covered in scratch marks, profanity-laced phrases written upon them with red and black spray paint. Decaying leaves and used needles littered the floorboards.

More than likely the vamps had stumbled upon a user too doped up to realize the type of danger she’d been in to flee in time.

Moon filtered in through cracks in the paned kitchen window. The female was bathed in shadow and weakly clutching onto her white robe, now stained a deep shade of crimson.

Standing in the doorway, Frenzy took his time studying the pathetic creature. The vampire, likely Lucian, had done a number on her. Her legs were splayed apart in an unnatural position. The feet were pointing in the wrong direction, but not only the feet: the hips were no longer even aligned.

Her chest cavity had been cracked open. Not unlike what he’d done to Vanity, but unlike the walking dead, the woman before him was a mortal and her very essence pooled around her in a large band of red. Pale fingers clutched almost spasmodically against the edge of her robe.

What must have once been a stunning face was now ribboned open at both cheekbones, the eyelids having been sliced off. There wasn’t much in death that offended him; death was simply a fact of life. He’d killed many in his long life—vampire, shifter, witch, and human. But the savagery of this attack made the muscle in his jaw tick. A strange sensation filled his limbs, one he was not used to feeling often.

The emotion was pity. Much as he despised the mortals, the act of violence against this woman was an atrocity. Kindness was not an emotion inherent in him. So as much as he felt…something, it didn’t change what he’d come here to do.

“Look at me, mortal.”

A horrible snuffling sound, like she was trying to draw breath through a ruptured nose, issued from between her cracked lips.

Her head began a slow roll in his direction.

“What in the hell did those vampires want with you, little one?”

Flexing his bony hand, he placed it over her broken form, ready to harvest the soul from her body, when a pair of eyes stole the very words from his tongue.

Eyes the color of sun-warmed honey, a golden brown so rare he’d only ever seen the likes of it once before. Jerking his hand away from her chest as if burned, he sat back on his heels.

“Who are you?” he growled, as a strange sort of numbness infiltrated his limbs and brain.

Adrianna was the name running like a mantra through his head. His Adrianna. The only woman in the world he’d ever loved, ever needed, wanted, desired, adored…

A horrible grinding sound emanated from her as her lips flopped open, as if she was trying to speak. Disbelief kept his feet rooted to the spot. He needed to finish this, to get away from her and the memories surfacing like a bitter friend.

But he couldn’t look away; the vision of his Adrianna kept merging with the battered face of this nameless woman. She was gazing at him with pain and fear, with hope. But not the hope that he would save her; she wanted death. He read it clearly. Her eyes were shrouded, angry, and screaming at him to hurry. To end it now.

“Who are you?!” he roared, even in his fury careful not to touch her with the bones of his hand.

Her eyes kept boring into him, accusing him, but there was something else in her eyes: pain. She was shrouded in it and barely hanging on to any last vestige of sanity.

“Kill…me,” she croaked.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

He moved his hand, circling her head.

“Cannot…become…that.”

Her broken voice scraped his nerves, set his teeth on edge, made a blanket of fury creep like a shadow across his mind. Fury at her for reminding him of a long-dead ghost, fury at the vampires for destroying her the way they had.

“It’s too late, mortal. You already are that. Me taking the soul will not negate it. They’ve envenomed you.” And they’d gone to great lengths to do it. She was covered head to toe in bite wounds.

Her head shook painfully slowly. “Then finish,” she gasped, body shuddering as she tried to speak around the pain, “what…they…started.”

Her eyes rolled back, and he could think again, because she didn’t look so much like his Adrianna anymore. She was just a woman, a nameless, faceless woman. A human who’d destroyed and hated and lied and cheated and stolen…She was the worst of all creation.

Flexing his fingers, he flung them over her chest, ready to harvest the pulsing blue orb that was her soul, when there was a blinding flash of light followed by the unmistakable sharp and biting scent of frost.

Shielding his eyes against the brilliance, he turned to the side, but knew instinctively who’d intruded.

“Lise?” He jumped to his feet when the light finally turned down.

Lise was always a surprise. None knew of her true form or who she really was, always referred to as the Ancient One. All he did know for a fact was that even The Morrigan had to do what the old battle-ax said, which in his book meant that she wasn’t one to mess with.

Dressed in a gown of sparkling sheer white, she reminded him of the frost he still felt shivering through the air. Strange, luminescent eyes hooked his, making him wonder all over again what she was.

After what Lise had done with Cian, all of faedom wondered what she was and why she’d taken such an interest in death. He narrowed his eyes.

“To what do I owe this honor?”

Quirking a snowy brow, she simply shrugged. “Must I have to have a reason to visit?” A vein of ice skated across the floor with each step she took.

“Do not tell me you’ve taken an interest in me now, Ancient One,” he said with a thread of sarcasm.

A prim and small smile curved the edges of her petal-pink lips. “And if I have?”

“Good goddess”—he cast his gaze heavenward for a brief moment—“I’m not in the market, so if you’re trying to get me to play patty-cake with a human the way you did with Cian, I’m not interested.”

She was no longer looking at him. Lise was studying the woman, whose breathing was now a faint wisp of air.

“She hasn’t got long in this world.”

“Obviously.” He knelt again. “Which is why I’m here.” Extending his hand, he made to snatch up the glowing blue orb that was her soul, but a surprisingly warm hand latched on to the bone of his finger.

Brows gathering into sharp slashes, he shook off Lise’s hand, surprised to note her skin still gleamed, almost glowed, like moonlight was trapped and filtering through her pores from within.

“You should have fallen to your knees in agony from touching that.” His tone was accusatory. What bothered him most wasn’t that Lise was unaffected by his touch, but that none were immune to death. Especially not an
other
, as indestructible as they sometimes seemed. Everything died. It was the continued mystery of who Lise was, why she interfered in the lives of the reapers, and what she could possibly want with him that really irritated him most.

“Do not try to make sense of me, boy. You never will.” There was no malice in her words, merely amusement.

It made his teeth gnash.

“You must not allow Mila to become a vampire or to be taken by one of them.”

Now that the real purpose of her visit was revealed, he still found himself just as confused.

“O-kay. She is covered in bite wounds. The venom has spread through her system. Are you suggesting I drive a stake through her heart?” He pointed at her still body; the bump of her heart was barely discernible now. She had literally milliseconds before human death occurred, at which point she
would
become the walking dead.

Crossing her arms she pinned him with a glacier glare. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

His lips twitched despite himself.

Then everything stopped. Literally halted. The squeak of mice, the hollow scraping of a door creaking open and shut in a gentle breeze. The world was quiet and still, except for him and Lise.

The human was no longer breathing, but she wasn’t dead either. She was in stasis along with the rest of the world.

Lise wore a smug grin. “Now then, as I was saying, she must not become one of them.”

“And how do you plan to stop the inevitable, Ancient One? Keep her catatonic for the rest of her life?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Of course not. I already thought of that, but it really doesn’t work for my endgame.”

Nodding, he leaned against a fridge that’d been partially moved away from the wall. “What is it with immortals and their endgames?”

“Like you’re one to talk, reaper. And what were you planning to do? Hmm?” The whites of her eyes glowed as she tapped her finger against her chin. “Tell the queen you were through being master of death? Is that not an endgame? Though a minor one, still an endgame.”

He remained silent, refusing to rise to the obvious baiting.

“We are all the same; we all have a goal in mind. My goal involves you and this woman.”

“No.” A swift shake of his head didn’t stop her from nodding as if he’d agreed.

“Oh yes.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Frenzy licked his front teeth, counting slowly to three before speaking. “I do not think you heard me correctly. I’m not in the market for an Eve, especially not a human one. Cian at least got a witch. This…” His nose curled as he pointed to the broken shell lying before them.

Rolling her eyes, she looked at him as if he were merely a bug under a microscope and not the creature in whose hands rested life or death. She had no fear of him whatsoever. It was rather novel, and slightly off-putting.

“Well, as you succinctly stated just moments ago, she’s no longer really human, now is she?”

“What?” He winced, trying to make sense of her nonsense. “You just said she couldn’t be allowed to become a vampire—”

“Yes. And?”

“Aaaannnd…” He dragged the word out as he rolled his wrist, looking to her for a cue, some sign that she might have realized she’d spoken in riddles, but she was giving him a wide-eyed, totally innocent stare. “You confuse me.”

She laughed. “I confuse them all, do not worry. Now, you and I will get along just fine if you listen to everything I tell you to do.”

“Even if I agreed to this, whatever it is, it doesn’t mean that The Morrigan would. She nearly killed Cian last time and—”

“Yes, yes, I handled that one. The kitten has been declawed; you work for me now. An arrangement the queen and I have made, if you will.”

“What?” He jerked off the fridge, glaring at her now. “When did this happen? I work for the—”

“Not really. No.” Her smile was laced in sugar. “You work for me. Memos may not have been handed down yet, but ownership has been overturned. Now listen up because we haven’t much time.”

And just like that all humor vanished from her face; she was intensely serious. The air between them shivered with the rawness of her power, like getting caught outside during an electrical storm. Waves of heat and ice and suffocating magic gripped him so tight he could do nothing but take a stuttering breath around the sudden pounding of his heart.

“From the moment that I release time she will have half a second before death. She cannot become a vampire, which is why you will not take her soul.”