Invincible (A Centennial City Novel) (31 page)

“We have a…problem.”

I felt the almost unstoppable urge to laugh like a maniac. “I cannot imagine something possibly going right.”

“Fate does seem to have a way of making sure to frown upon you, doesn’t she?’

This time, I did laugh. I couldn’t have stopped it for the world. “I can only wait and see what she has planned.”

The brackets between his thin lips deepened. “You will not like this piece of news, I fear,” he said and sighed. “On second thought, there can be only one person who could rejoice at this news and that would be the one who took him.”

The one that took him.

Something tightened in my chest. “Who took who?”

He shook his head. “Jason. No one can say. Well, no one who can speak, that is.”

“What happened?”

His fingers tapped wildly on his thighs. Was it a sign of his disquiet? It was clear this was extremely worrying to him, although how it could worry him more than myself, I could not understand. “There was an attack at my estate after I went to intercept you. From what I can gather, someone or something simply walked into my home and demolished it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Demolished it,” he said again and to my most abject horror, found myself sitting only three inches away from a vampire lord with fully extended fangs. “They came to
my
bastion and left
no one
alive. They slaughtered all of those under my protection and left my home in
shambles
.”

I wanted very much to leap out of the car. When it came to taking my chances with an angry vampire lord or asphalt going seventy miles per hour, I’d take the asphalt. It would be less painful. “Then who called you?”

“Ryder,” he said. “He was supposed to help you acclimate to the new…atmosphere.”

And even though fifteen years of conditioning made me want to lunge for my sword, it would only prove cumbersome in the car’s interior.

That and I didn’t think Noir would give me the time to pull it out of its bag, much less the sheath itself. “You’ve been rather accommodating to someone who hunts things like you.”

His smile was crumbling visibly at the edges. “It would seem you’ve got more pull with him than most other Ailwards. Seen but not heard, I believe, is the purpose of them, no? Clearly, you must not have received the memo.”

His fangs had retracted just a bit but it was enough that I released my death grip on the door handle. I might die that night, but chances were high it would not be in that moment, in this car.

“What happens now?”

The car took a right turn a little too abruptly and I careened into Noir’s side.

Slamming into a brick wall woiuld’ve been less painful and the breath left me in a sudden whoosh that left me gasping for air, my stomach cramping.

Someone screamed, long and high.

I didn’t realize it was the driver until the car screeched to an earsplitting halt and I bounced off the front barrier, cutting my chin on a metal coat hook.

“That…that wasn’t planned, was it?” I asked, like a stupid idiot. I tasted blood in my mouth and felt it dribble down my chin; I’d bitten my tongue, and pretty badly at that.

Noir stared at me, his eyes wide, and I stared into those empty, pitch black depths. “What?”

He shook his head and turned away, as though he could not bear to look at me. “Wipe your chin. Hurry up and wipe it before I do something I regret!”

Shit. I swiped at my face with trembling fingers. I almost put an eye out. “Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t think.”

“Never mind,” he said forcefully and opened the door. “Are you ready?”

I didn’t think he was, when someone, some
thing
jerked him out of the car and into the darkness that seemed to beckon like some horrible shadow that knows all your secrets.

Suddenly, I couldn’t get away from that side of the car fast enough.

Sword clenched in my right hand, I felt for the door handle digging deep into the small of my back, and I frantically depressed the handle, all the while aware of the terrifying howling, snarling I heard from the other side of the car.

The car door gave suddenly behind me and I fell heavily on my back, my right arm twisted in an awkward position underneath my hip.

“Well, ain’t this a surprise!”

Marcus leered down at me and before I could move, reached out, squeezing my shoulder hard enough to bring a cry to my lips.

Pulling me onto my feet, he dragged me around the side of the car where I saw Noir flanked by a pair of vampires, their eyes dark, fangs fully extended.

Meanwhile, the vampire lord’s right eye looked like it would explode in its socket if someone so much as coughed in his direction and blood drenched the flannel coat, dripping on the asphalt that seemed to absorb the blood before it even had a chance to pool.

I didn’t recognize the vampires standing on either sides of the bested vampire lord, although I did recognize the feminine figure that sat on the car trunk, her black stiletto heels kicking in the air.

“Hello, Ailward.”

Marcus shoved me forward and I fell on my knees, bruising both kneecaps.

“Vincent’ll have your heads,” I managed to say with some modicum of dignity.

Annabel exposed the long, pale length of her throat, running a fingernail down it as she pretended to observe the full moon. “Yeah, well, what he won’t know won’t hurt him, now would it?”

Noir tried to pull free of her guards, but one of them kicked him in the back of his knees, forcing him back down. “So, this is how you planned on eliminating the Sanguinate? Take out his allies and then take him out as well? Tell me, my little vicious, betraying darling. Is he already dead?”

For some inexplicable reason, she turned his dark gaze to me and for one terrifying moment, I thought she nodded.

But she only smiled.

What did that mean?

“Not yet,” she said. “But who knows what will happen in half an hour? I’ve left him with someone who very much wanted to meet him.”

My throat was dry, painfully dry. “Who?”

She tapped her forehead with a long, elegant red fingernail. “Well, he’s always professed an interest in Sanguinates…especially since we killed the last one. Said something about how he never got the chance to study his own creation.”

Noir tried once again to pull free but only succeeded in receiving a resounding cuff to the side of his head that would have felled a cow. “You stupid, silly bitch. You’re playing right into Matthias’s hands! Don’t you think this is what he wanted?”

She tilted her head to one side. “I don’t care what he wants. Once I get rid of you and Vincent, I’ll be the one and only power to Centennial City. I am sick and tired of playing second fiddle to you buffoons. Do you think this constant pandering to the humans is good for our species?”

“It’s the only way we can survive!”

“Wrong!” she screamed and smacked a hand on the car roof. All of the windows blew out with a crash and a shard dug deep into my left cheek. “You think the humans are afraid of us? They think we’re some kind of joke, Noir! Well, no more. I’m not some kind of tourist attraction, you got that? I’m taking the fucking night back, do you understand me? The fucking sheep will learn to bow at our feet once again. Just like you and that human next to you.”

Noir studiously avoided looking at me. Blood was beginning to trickle down my face again. Damn it. “So, what happens now?”

She slithered off the hood, the moonlight casting a faint aura over her pale white skin. “Well, you die. Then she dies.”

“And Vincent?”

She waved a hand in the air. “Oh, I’m sure the Fellow-thingie will take care of him well enough.”

I choked on my own spit and sputtered, eyes watering. “You called the Fellowship on them?”

Her eyes narrowed with malicious pride. “Oh, they loved it. Ate it up. Ate it up even more when I told them you were betraying them all along.”

You were betraying them all along.

In that instant, I didn’t want to kill anyone more.

I would have given anything to feel her blood drip from my fingers.

She clapped her hands. “Yes, yes! Look at me like that. Glare at me like you think you can do anything about me. God, I love it. I wish I could feed off hate. Fuck blood, give me hatred any damn day.”

Marcus’s hand tightened on the back of my neck and I stopped breathing. One faint twinge of his fingers and I would breath no more.

A frightening, sobering thought.

Shit. I hated lose-lose situations like this.

“Anyways, I’ve gotta go.” She waved a hand and proceeded over to a dark blue sports car parked a few meters away at the curb of the oddly quiet industrial parking lot. “Got a few vampire lords to overthrow. Have fun, hm?”

Marcus’s body thrummed with nervous energy behind me. “What do you want to do with these two?”

“I told you, kill them,” she said without a backwards glance and when she screeched out of the parking lot, I tasted dust, thick and heavy, in the back of my throat.

Marcus sighed. “Jesus.”

I shifted under his grip, to keep my knees from turning into hamburger meat on the rough gravel, but a single tightening of his forefinger and thumb stopped me from making any more zealous movements.

“I, uh, wouldn’t move, if I were you,” he said. “I’m not exactly the most steady at the moment.”

“Your eyes. They look better,” I said, my voice sounding even quieter in the silent night in which even the crickets declined to sing. “I was worried.”

His laughter was husky. “Were you now?”

“You are not my enemy. I have never considered you the enemy.”

“Lady, you don’t even know me.”

“And you don’t know me,” I said. “What kind of hold does Annabelle have over you? Didn’t you say that Vincent owned you?”

He was silent for a moment. “You don’t know her. Vincent might own me, but he’ll at least leave a dead man’s body alone. She might be an idiot, but she’s a vindictive one. She’ll go after everyone I know. There are people I have to protect. If I tell her no, she’ll find a way to make me pay.” His breath seemed to hitch. “I’ve got a son. In second grade and I swear, he looks just like his mother. She threatened his safety. Knew the name of his teacher and his best friend. You have to understand, I would do anything to keep him alive.”

Noir cleared his throat. “Including inciting a coup?”

I wished I could see the expression on the werewolf’s face. “You don’t know her.”

“Wrong,” replied Noir. Was that a pitying look on his face? “There is no one who knows her better than myself. She’s an idiot. A twit who doesn’t even know she’s being manipulated. And you’re playing right into her hands. Just as she’s playing into his.”

His hand twitched and a sharp, sudden pain ran down my back.

For one second, one breathlessly terrifying moment, I thought he’d broken my spine.

I screamed. Long. Loud. My voice cracked in the night.

“Jesus Christ!” Marcus let go of my neck in surprise and I fell on my hands, moisture pooling at the corners of my eyes.

No. I was okay.

I had used my arms.

I was
alive
.

Alive.

I turned on my knees, the
bi-su'
s abrasive handle cutting deeply into my palms.

But not as deeply as it slashed across his Achilles tendon and brought him down to eye level.

He had healed, but not well, the scars puckered underneath his eyes like something was trying to burst out from underneath his skin.

Behind me, I heard thuds, the sound of a blade leaving its sheath, but all of that faded into little consequence when Marcus reared back, mouth open in a silent cry.

A flailing arm caught me on the left side of my face and pain burst across my vision, bringing forth fireworks of black and white.

“You have to die!” he howled, face raised to the moon. “My son is the only thing worth living for.”

I didn’t want to.

I did not want to kill.

With his Achilles tendon severed and blood pooling over his shoes and into the gravel, he was hobbled, crippled. It seemed more than a possibility he would never be able to walk on his own power again.

He howled again, the sound long and low, arms held up as though he thought he could reach out and embrace the moon.

I realized what he was doing too late.

Fur shone on his body and I watched in sick fascination as he fell on his hands and knees, the bones breaking and knitting underneath a skin stretched far too thin for it to stand the stress.

Noir shouted. “Kill him! Kill him now before he turns!”

I had no time to go for the sword; I turned the
bi-su
in my hand and stabbed downward, the point over the base of his neck.

I worried the blade would simply connect with a bone and deflect into his neck.