Fractured (The Deep in Your Veins Series Book 5) (22 page)

“You’re tiring!”

Paige’s accusing words made me snap my gaze to hers. Yes, I was tiring. Hell, even my psychic hand was tiring. Like Butch had predicted, I still wasn’t yet accustomed to not having my old level of strength and speed. I’d overexerted myself, forgetting my new limits. And her protective instincts no doubt told her to get me out of the way.

Suspecting she might try to follow those instincts, I lifted my chin. “I’ll be—” A blast of cold rushed our way and a dragon literally rocketed out of the thick smoke. Butch blurred to my side and slammed up his shield, blocking the blast and making the creature do a sharp turn to avoid the shield.

“Sam agrees that I need to be with you right now!” Butch told me, which meant they’d also noticed I was tiring.

Paige scrubbed at her eyes. “The smoke needs to go!”

But it couldn’t. It was trapped inside Sam’s shield, just like everything and everyone else. Thankfully, the smoke did our internal organs no harm, though it was uncomfortable to inhale. My eyes, on the other hand, didn’t do so well against it; they stung and itched like crazy.

“I just spoke to Jared!” shouted Butch. “He said—”

A large wing snapped out and sent Butch, Paige, and I zooming backwards, soaring what felt like miles through the air. The breath whooshed out of me as I crashed into something hard—most likely a tree. Groaning and coughing, I got to my feet, utterly pissed. These winged bastards needed to die. I blinked rapidly as I glanced around, searching for Butch and Paige. I couldn’t see them through the smoke.

But I could smell Butch.

More specifically, I could smell his blood. A
lot
of it. The scent wafted over me, reached something
inside
me. I didn’t let myself think of how good it would taste; didn’t give in to the pull of the scent. Instead, I blocked it, just as I’d practiced with him in training.

“Butch! Paige!” I shouted as I followed the scent of his blood. But there was little chance that they’d hear me over all the roaring, snarling, screeching, and screaming.

Not allowing myself to panic, I called out their names over and over. Just as Butch’s scent became stronger, something long and spiked shot out of the smoke and swung at me—a fucking barbed tail! Cursing, I ducked. But one of the spikes grazed my scalp and it hurt like a bitch
.
Quick as I could, I rolled toward Butch’s scent, pushed to my feet and—

Motherfucker!
The spiked tail darted out of the smoke and struck my chest, stabbing me hard just as it sent me flying several feet away. My head hit the ground with a crack that reverberated around my skull, and I almost blacked out.

Ears ringing, I blinked to clear the stars from my vision. I was gonna kill that bastard when I could see it. God, my chest
hurt
. I grit my teeth against the streaks of burning pain as, for the third freaking time, I awkwardly got to my feet. I needed to get to Butch, needed to ignore the pain and just hope I didn’t heal too slowly or—

A strong arm looped around me and began dragging me backwards. I would have struggled like crazy, except the unexpected scent made me freeze in surprise. “Marco, what the fuck are you doing here?” He kept dragging me away. I twisted in his grip. “Let me go!”

“No, we need to get you out of here!” he growled into my ear.

“Let go of me, you bastard! I need to—”

Everyone brace yourfuckingselves!

Before I could wonder at the panic in Jared’s warning, I felt the buzz of Sam’s energy leave the air. Her shield winked out.
Oh, shit
.

As the smoke began to clear, I watched as three dragons shot high into the air. Or, at least, they tried. One screeched as it was hit by a telekinetic blast that sent it crashing somewhere. The second shook as sparks of high-voltage electricity assailed every inch of its huge body. The third halted as a silvery-blue energy whip lashed out of the smoke and wrapped tight around its throat, yanking it back down.

They weren’t the only ones that tried to flee. They might have succeeded, but the problem for them was that since Sam no longer had to concentrate on keeping her shield in place, she could use her gift in other ways—ways that were causing the dragons to hit the ground.

“Hurry before he comes for her!” Marco shouted to a vampire on his right. That was when I saw a large, swirling portal. I’d be damned if I let Marco take me anywhere.

I kicked and punched at him, but all the struggling in the world didn’t make him release me. “Put me down, you fucking bastard!” I thrust my psychic hand into his mind, but it was tired and half-numb; flicking his blood-bond to his Sire did nothing more than make him wince.

“Imani, enough! We’re leaving
now
!”

“I’m not going anywhere!” I was about to telepathically call out to Jared when Marco sharply turned me in his arms, making my head spin. I’d sustained too many head injuries tonight.

“I’m not here to hurt you. I told him to keep you safe, and he didn’t!”

I realised he was talking about Butch. “He’s hurt, I need to—”

“What we need is to get you to safety!” Ignoring my struggles, Marco carried me toward the portal—a portal that abruptly closed as the vampire controlling it hit the ground with a thud.

“Let. Her. Go.”

Stilling in surprise at the familiar male voice, I looked over Marco’s shoulder. It wasn’t so hard to see now that the rain was putting out the fire and Sam had taken down her shield, allowing a lot of the smoke to clear. And there was Lazarus with a small group gathered behind him. I blinked. “What are you doing here?”

“We teleported to you so we could partake in the battle,” he replied. “My vampires are joining it as we speak. Marco, release her.”

Marco’s arms slowly slipped from around me and he turned to face Lazarus. No, he positioned himself
between
me and Lazarus. Like a protective barrier. Marco’s vampires flanked me, glaring at those that stood with Lazarus.

The Master Vampire held out his hand, a sense of urgency in his manner. “Now come along, Imani. You should not be part of this. Not when you are half-human.”

I would have pointed out that I actually wasn’t half-human, but this whole scenario felt distinctly wrong. “Marco, what’s going on?”

He didn’t take his eyes from Lazarus as he responded. “I told you, Imani. Good people do bad things sometimes.”

Realisation quickly dawned. And it hurt almost as bad as the burning pain in my chest. “Lazarus is one of the people you suspect injected me with the serum?”

“No, sweetheart, it wasn’t Lazarus. But he ordered it done.”

No way. “I don’t have time for games, Marco.” Butch was lying somewhere, wounded.
Jared, find Butch and Paige. I think he’s hurt bad but I can’t get to him—I’m watching Marco and Lazarus have some kind of standoff.

“I knew it had to be one of two people,” Marco went on. “Him or Eleanor.”

I frowned. “Eleanor?” And then I saw her, standing slightly behind Lazarus. There was a seriousness in her expression that took me by surprise. She was usually always so animated and jolly.

“They both want the same thing so badly that they’ll do absolutely anything to get it. It was Eleanor’s mate who told me the truth…though he took some
persuading
.”

Eleanor gasped, eyes widening in horror.

I might have told Marco to just shut the fuck up because I wasn’t in the mood for games, but something occurred to me as I looked at Lazarus, whose expression was carefully blank. “You should be denying this. He’s accusing you of trying to kill me.” Yet, Lazarus hadn’t said a word.

“Lazarus didn’t want to kill you,” Marco said. “Oh, he’d known you could die, which is exactly why he’s going to suffer for what he did to you. But he didn’t want you dead.”

Confused, I shook my head. I didn’t get what was happening. I didn’t get why the air pulsed with some kind of strange energy, or why I thought I could hear bullets being fired. I
thought
I could but wasn’t sure, because distant sounds seemed weirdly muted, distorted, and crackly.

Marco cocked his head at Lazarus. “You theorised that a vampire was more likely to get through the transition if they could feed on powerful vampires during that time, didn’t you? You knew that if Imani was injected, she’d be taken straight to The Hollow where the Grand High Pair and other powerful vampires would give her blood.”

Lazarus hissed. “You’re suggesting I was using Imani as a guinea pig?” The outrage in his voice sounded very genuine…but the emotion was absent from his eyes.

“It worked, didn’t it? She got through it because she had access to very potent blood. Congratulations. You were right. But I won’t let you take her.”

Take me?

Lazarus looked at me, a fanatical gleam in his eyes that made my stomach churn. “Imani, you have the power to save all those who suffered the same fate as you.”

“What?” Was he high? Maybe
I
was high, because this was all fucking weird.

“Within you lies the answer to the cure for vampirism. Your blood has the answer.”

“I’m not cured,” I clipped, anger building inside me as it began to penetrate that, hey, he’d totally betrayed me. And I wanted to smash his face in. “There is no cure.”

“Wrong, Imani. You are partly transformed. With your blood, we can find a true cure. Then all of us who had this life forced upon us can once again be human.”

He said it with so much yearning and desperation that I almost felt bad for him. I had been in his position. I’d had everything ripped away from me, and for a long time I’d thought of nothing but getting back what I’d lost. I knew what it was to despise what you were, knew what it was like to long for all the things you once had and took for granted in—

I gaped as the truth slapped me hard across the face. “
You’re
Beau Irons.” I wanted him to deny it. He didn’t. He smiled.

“Well done, sweetheart,” said Marco. “It took me a while to figure that out. By the time I knew, he was already planning to take you while everyone was distracted in battle.”

And if Lazarus was Beau Irons… “All these vampires you’ve brought with you…They’re part of The Order, aren’t they?” Which meant they were fighting
against
The Hollow’s vampires, not alongside them.
Shit.

Lazarus’ smile turned a little creepy. “Yes. And you will join us, Imani. You will leave with us.”

Marco slowly shook his head. “I can’t have that.”

“This is not about what
you
want,” Lazarus told him.

Staring at the vampire who’d once taken care of me, who I’d trusted with my life, I swallowed. “I can’t believe you’d do this to me. To
anyone
.”

“It’s really nothing personal,” Marco told me, his eyes still locked on the Master vampire. “He’s so intent on being human again, so focused on the end goal, that he can’t see anything or anyone else.”

Lazarus again held out his hand. “Come with me, Imani. You were brought into a life you did not want. You deserve to have back what was so callously taken from you. I can give you that.”

“There is no cure, Lazarus.” Marco shook his head. “You’ll never find one, because vampirism isn’t an illness. It’s just another state of being.”

Lazarus went on as if Marco hadn’t spoken. “You once told me that you would give anything to be cured. Now we can work together to make that happen.”

Maybe I’d felt that way in the early nights, when I’d been filled with hopelessness and confusion and found it very difficult to adjust. But now? Now that would mean giving up the one thing I wanted more than anything. In which case… “Fuck. You.” I distantly noted that a whirl of energy had built behind me, and I knew the portal had re-opened.

His jaw hardened. “You want this as much as I do.”

He was wrong. “What I want is very simple. I want to be with Butch.”

“If you are thinking that he or anyone else from the legion will save you, prepare to be disappointed. Their gifts will not get them passed my force-field, and my vampires will prevent them from trying.”

Well that explained the weird energy I could feel in the air.

“Imani, come with us.” Eleanor’s voice was soft, desperate. “Please?”

I snarled at who I’d considered a friend. I supposed I should have expected her betrayal—people with perfect teeth couldn’t be trusted. “Fuck. You. Too.” She made the slightest move toward me, so I reached into her mind and flicked her blood-bond to her Sire—the warning wouldn’t have hurt her because my psychic hand was weak as all shit, but it made her halt with a hiss. “You weren’t Turned against your will. You wanted this life.”

“Because I was stupid,” said Eleanor, bitterness in every syllable. “Ignorant. Blind. Too scared to grow old, too frightened of death. I made a mistake, and I’m tired of paying for it. I want to be human again. Your blood can give me back my life.”

“You see, Imani, this is about more than just you,” said Lazarus. “It’s about more than just me. Your blood can help so many people.”