Incubus Moon (36 page)

An idea came to me.

Since I clearly had an effect on his physical world, didn’t it stand to reason that I should also be able to influence it in other ways? Time to find out.

I sprinted into the adjacent sitting room and yanked down the first tall, gossamer drapery panel I reached. The sound of metal rings raining down onto the stone floor was reminiscent of that day in Dimitri’s mansion when I’d done a similar thing in order to escape from him. Now I desperately needed his help.

Dimitri wheeled around to witness the ghostly cloth sailing across the room to land at his bare feet. Folding the sheer, white fabric back on itself several times to give it greater density, I next ran to the marble pedestal opposite the fresco. It was topped by a long-stemmed flower arrangement, which I ripped from its vase and cast aside.

Just as I’d hoped. The water was tinted dark green from their stalks.

I then slowly poured the water onto the material to spell out my name, glancing up after completing the “T” to gauge Dimitri’s reaction.

His eyes went wide. “Is it truly you?”

I dropped the metal urn and doubled over from the sharp, squeezing sensation gripping my intestines. The Void. It was letting me know that it was still watching. Still in control.

I breathed deeply and waited for the spasm to pass. Then a terrifying thought occurred to me:
Am I in Hell?
The Void might not be the proverbial biblical inferno, but it’s cold, endless darkness was certainly filled with suffering and hellish creatures.

Dimitri’s voice re-anchored me and pushed back the chilling tide. He fixed on the space that ghost me occupied not three feet away and narrowed his eyes. “I—I can
smell
you!”

When he reached out for me, I rushed forward towards the reassurance of his arms, only to be doubled-over again and drawn back into darkness. Only this time, the constriction around my innards had developed jagged barbs.

I bit down on the pain and struggled against the intense pull. If this was it, if God had turned His back on me, forsaken me to an eternity of horror and pain, then I would become the worst monster of them all, the very thing the darkness feared.

Was it my imagination, or did the Dark Universe just tremble?

Like a ripple effect, its sway over me diminished. Enough so that I passed through its cold, deafening noise and back into the quiet shelter of Dimitri’s sanctuary once more.

I materialized in the sitting room this time, its modern furnishings and lit fireplace no minor haven to me. Everything was exactly as I’d left it. Except for Dimitri Ravello.

He was nowhere to be found.

I needed to go in search of him, find a way to communicate what was happening to me. Who knew how much longer I had here. But the Void had left such a cold hollow inside me, a place that felt as though it might never be warm again. So I moved closer to those blue flames dancing across the dunes of sugary white sand within the enormous, log-free fireplace.

Then I heard it. Dimitri’s voice coming from somewhere nearby. He was furious.

“Get out! Better yet, I should end you where you stand!”

He stormed into the room now, a tall blonde in hot pursuit.

The woman gave a bitter laugh. “The long centuries have taught you nothing. Still arrogant and short-sighted. Can you not sense his marauders at your very doorstep?”

If a ghost could have a jaw-dropping moment, I was having one multiplied by ten.

Shayla was standing not three meters away, dressed in the same bronze gown I’d seen her torn to shreds in by that evil, black twister. Except this time, instead of a crimson fist protruding from her chest and pure terror reflected in her expression, fury animated the lavender gaze she leveled at Dimitri. “He has found you. The time to strike is now, before—”

“Haemon kills him.” Dimitri said this with a bowed head. “I know.”

Shayla threw up her hands in disgust. “After what you did to my people, vampire, you would allow such a thing to happen to my son?”

Dimitri’s shoulders tensed, the emerald fire reflected in his eyes eerily reminiscent of the stone that made up the heart of Haemon’s amulet, a near duplicate of which hung around Shayla’s neck. “After what
your people
did to mine, you mean!”

They had to be referring to the
Great War
between vampires and incubi over a millennium ago. Even as an incubus, I’d found it difficult not to side with Dimitri, especially after what he’d shared with me aboard the yacht. By all accounts, the Incubi had cast the first war stone by trying to enslave the vampire world through dream invasion and mind control.

Then again, Dimitri Ravello had been less-than-honest with me on several occasions. I also didn’t need to be a twenty-four-hundred-year-old immortal to know that the story inevitably ran far deeper than he’d been willing to share.

More to the immediate point, I’d watched Shayla die in my last vision. The sinister being from that other realm, the
Dark Woman
, had killed her.

Unless, of course, I was now being played by all sides.

Regardless, here stood Shayla in the living flesh. If she’d indeed come to me in dream form, not only to reveal herself as my birth mother but also to help me escape whatever Haemon and Kassandra had in store for me, the
Dark Woman
had to have manipulated me into believing that I’d witnessed her death. But to what end?

“It will not come to that,” Dimitri said through clenched teeth. “I will not let Austin die.”

“Yes vampire, I can see that you’re doing everything in your power to keep that from happening.”

They took their quarrel closer to me just as an all-too familiar prickling crisscrossed the surface of my skin. It wasn’t the Void trying to capture me again. Something else was here, a new presence had come amongst us. It hid within the sanctuary’s rocky crevices where the artificial light couldn’t reach it. The sensation was reminiscent of my encounter with Kassandra and her mind probes; a black widow spider testing the filaments of its web for her next meal.

Dimitri and Shayla appeared oblivious to this presence, their argument growing more heated by the minute. I tried to go to them, but my legs refused to obey.

Above me, the air began to coalesce, shaping itself into a near-perceptible silhouette that lengthened its mass and to draw nearer.

“Yield to me.” The hissing resonance echoed through my mind, a pressure coiling around my brain. “Give me sight and hearing.”

I struggled to force the sibilant voice away, but the pressure inside my skull was beginning to darken the edges of my vision. It quickly spread to my eardrums, until they pulsed like a thunderous heartbeat, my lips lengthening into a lopsided grin. The intruder was taking me over.

The demon part of me refused to be defeated and fought back.

The intruder recoiled, enough so that the fog impairing my ability to reason thinned and the masquerade slipped, exposing the
thing
crawling around inside my head. “Haemon!”

The hypnotic quality to his words had been replaced by the cruel, hollow sound of a voice I’d learned to despise. “Clever little incubus.”

How had he orchestrated this? Better yet, how had Haemon managed to survive the explosion in his bedchamber?

“Give me sight and hearing, or the stallion is next.”

He meant Mark. My best friend was still alive! Or was this just another trick to get me to do what he wanted and drop my guard?

I looked to Dimitri and Shayla for help they couldn’t provide. I was alone in this. Alone perhaps, but not dead. My turn to offer up an ugly grin. And this time, it was all me.

My biggest obstacle, greater than Haemon could ever be, was fear. It consistently hindered the one arsenal I had at my disposal, but to which I so often failed to turn, and that was my incubus nature.

Haemon must have sensed this realization in me, because he resummoned the Void.

He was too late. I knew now that I wasn’t in hell, nor had God turned His back on me.

“If you like hell so much” I told him, my body trembling with rage, “why don’t you go there instead!”

The echo of his scream was followed by his ghostly likeness shimmering for an instant, then fading into empty space once more.

Whether or not he’d been cast into his own twisted machination, I couldn’t say. One thing was certain, though: the degree of my hatred for Haemon was rivaled only by the fury mirrored in Dimitri’s eyes for the woman standing before him.

But that hatred suddenly took a backseat to the modest tremor shaking the rough-hewn ceiling above our heads.

“The Haemon Beast moves quickly,” Shayla said. “Yet you leave
this
for him to find.” She held up the old, leather-bound book I’d read on my first visit to the sanctuary. “It is all he needs to complete what he has already set into motion.”

My mind was reeling. Too much was happening at once.

“Incubus!” Haemon’s energy collided with my own again. “I command you to let me see and hear!”

I fought to resist him, calling on the stone at the center of the amulet in my mind and throwing up an emerald wall so thick around me that it kept Haemon from listening in on and observing Shayla and Dimitri. More importantly, it kept him from controlling my mind.

He slammed into the mystical barrier I’d raised and it rumbled and cracked—or was that the ceiling overhead from another quake? Whatever it was, the attack brought me to my knees.

Another assault or two like that and he’d break through to me.

That was when Shayla whipped her head around to the exact spot where I’d fallen.

“He is here!” She rushed to within inches of me, the sudden wonder in her eyes quickly fading to hostility. “An incubus facing death returns in ethereal form only to those he loves.” She gave Dimitri a sour look. “It is his way of saying farewell.”

“Austin was here,” Dimitri confessed. “I sensed him earlier, but—”

“Is still here!” Shayla insisted. “This is how the Haemon Beast has found you.”

The pain in my head mushroomed, but I managed to hold off his second strike on the mystical barrier protecting me. New cracks had formed, but it still held—for now.

A second realization came to me then. Haemon had effectively used magic to conjure up a hell dimension for me. This meant that my corporeal form had to be alive somewhere to work magic on. If I had a physical body to return to, then it stood to reason that it was still at Haemon’s castle in Prague.

A massive explosion shook the living room. Fragments of rock and thin columns of dust rained down on us from the ceiling.

“His marauders make swifter progress than I anticipated. We must hurry.” When Shayla reached for Dimitri, he actually growled at her. “There is no other way.”

I couldn’t focus on their quarrel any longer. Haemon was almost through to me and the entire roof of the sanctuary was about to collapse in on us. I had to get back to his castle.

The
how
came through sheer intuition. That, and siphoning power from the gemstone at the center of the amulet. I envisioned it in my mind, connected with it. As I opened to the emerald, a rush of power inhabited me, adding yet another shield to impede Haemon.

Time to push this supernatural hitchhiker’s ass out of my ride.

What resembled my physical body—blond hair singed and matted to my face and neck, my naked body not faring much better, its skin charred—began to materialize through a murky haze. It was slumped against the stones of the same cell beneath Haemon’s castle. More reassuring was that I could see my chest rising and falling.

“Take my hand, vampire,” Shayla shouted to Dimitri above the rumblings. “Do it now or let this place serve as your tomb. The choice is yours.”

She didn’t wait for him to act and seized Dimitri by the arm.

In that same instant, the colossal mantel and fireplace façade behind me broke apart. Massive chunks rained down on me, but caused me no physical injury. They simply passed through my ethereal form.

The lights flickered throughout the sitting room and then went dark. Before panic could take hold of me, a generator kicked in and emergency lights flashed on.

My relief was short-lived, because the ceiling above and to the right gave a great, groaning shudder, before splitting apart with the roar of countless jet engines and dropping an enormous section of the Greek fortress above down into the space.

Three things happened next.

First, a tremendous displacement of air from the explosion knocked Dimitri and Shayla off their feet, sending them sprawling across the sanctuary floor. I saw the book fly from Shayla’s hand and
their bodies begin to ripple like a mirage in the desert, as they slid toward the far wall.

With Shayla’s fingers firmly locked around Dimitri’s forearm, they simply vanished.

Second, movement drew my eye to the lopsided section of stairs still attached to a portion of the ancient temple that had crashed through the ceiling. From amid dense clouds of sand and earth, a dozen or so men materialized to fan out in all directions.

Not men. Vampires.

Haemon’s vampires.

I recognized Mr. Curious and his brother among them.

Lastly, I glimpsed the emergence of a thin cord, a glowing, silver tether between my ethereal body and the unconscious, damaged one I’d left behind.

Again, intuition guided me to focus on that single, gleaming filament, to let it connect with me, instead of the approaching bloodsuckers. As I did so, a powerful tug jerked me once, then twice, the sensation reminiscent of the Void’s terrible influence.

For a moment, I panicked at the thought of being dragged back into it. Then I saw my physical body jerk, just as dense clouds of dust and debris from the cave-in reached my ethereal form beside the toppled fireplace.

It wasn’t that cold abyss reaching out for me, after all. The wrenching sensation belonged to a gentler universe, a wholly different power that urged me to return to my physical form.

The instant my ghostly shell folded in on itself, Haemon shattered the mystical barricade. But I was already descending through a misty veil, his fury mitigated by the cord guiding me through a hushed world, until I could no longer see, feel, or hear anything.