Authors: Melody Johnson
* * * *
It took a moment for his voice to register because I’d never heard it so cold and without its usual twang. My head instinctively swiveled up to see, but even seeing, I couldn’t believe. Walker was splattered head to toe in a thick, sticky, dark crimson—nearly purple—liquid, and against everything I believed he was capable of doing, he was holding me hostage.
“Walker? Are you kidding me?” I asked.
He dug the gun deeper into my side when I moved. “I was talkin’ to you, too, darlin’.”
I winced, but with a weapon that could essentially blast me in half at this range, I did as I was told. I remembered all too well what happened to hostages when Walker aimed his sawed-off at them. I didn’t dare move.
Rene raised his eyebrows. “I guess you really did have a falling out.”
“Ian,” Bex said, her voice soft and soothing and slow, very slow, like the way you shape your tone for someone balancing on the edge of a fifty-story building. “What have you done?”
Dominic’s expression was unfathomable. He didn’t so much as blink at Walker. It wasn’t until I heard the low rattle and insect-like clicks of his growl that I knew how he felt. He was enraged.
“You can growl all you want,” Walker snapped. “I’m pissed, too. Where are they, Bex?”
Bex blinked, her face transforming from worried to bland in an instant. “Where are who, Ian?”
“Don’t fuck with me. You know exactly who I’m talking about,” Walker backed up a step, dragging me with him. “I said, don’t fucking move!”
“Calm down, Ian Walker,” Dominic said, his voice low and on edge. He was minutely closer than he’d been standing a moment before. “You don’t want to hurt Cassidy. You fancy yourself in love with her.”
“You don’t want me to hurt Cassidy,” Walker snapped snidely. “You fancy yourself another vampire. But I’d rather see her dead than a member of your coven, and you know that’s damn true.”
Dominic sighed heavily. I knew that what he’d said was true, too, but hearing the words, “I’d rather see her dead,” from Walker hardened a part of me I hadn’t imagined could feel much of anything anymore.
“What do you want?” Dominic said, resigned.
“I want Bex to show me where she’s keeping them.”
“Where she’s keeping who?” Rene said, exasperated.
“My night bloods. You have Ronnie, Logan, Keagan, Jeremy, and Theresa, and I want them back. Now.”
Bex narrowed her eye. “
Your
night bloods?”
Rene glanced at Bex.
Dominic’s gaze bore fiercely and fixatedly at Walker. “Bex?”
“Lysander?” she answered, nonplussed.
“Answer the man’s question. We’re losing moonlight as we speak. Nathan won’t wait for us to get our shit straight. He’ll attack someone tonight, and we want that person to be Cassidy.”
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“You said so yourself that a Day Reaper transformed Veronica,” Bex said. “If I don’t know where she is, how should I know where the rest of them are?”
“
I
know that,” Dominic gritted, “So tell
him
.”
“Where’s Ronnie?” Walker insisted.
“Don’t you listen?” Bex asked Walker, her voice turning ugly. “I. Don’t. Know.”
The gun jerked painfully into my side. I gasped.
Dominic’s low growl reverberated through the cavern. “Careful, Walker.”
“Where is she?!”
“At home!” I shouted. The dam inside of me burst at the sound of Walker’s tears. I could hear their hollow keening as they squeezed from his tear ducts, thanks to my amplified senses, but that didn’t make his pain any less real. I knew the tearing, helpless, hopeless pain of not knowing whether a loved one was dead or alive. I knew the ache of questioning when to let them go. Nathan’s disappearance had consumed my mind every day since the moment I realized he was missing, but even had I tried to move on, the emptiness of his absence would have never left my heart.
I could only hope that Walker’s love for Ronnie would never leave his, even after he knew the truth.
“What?” Walker asked, his voice soft, like a razorblade against the throat is soft, but still lethal.
I swallowed. “The last time I saw Ronnie, she was at home. But she was already a vampire.”
The gun dug sharply into my rib. “You saw her? When?”
I breathed in sharply. “After our fight. After you left,” I said quickly. I wasn’t about to say otherwise while he jabbed me with the business end of his gun. “She came back to the house after she was transformed. She considers it her house, too, you know.”
Walker shook his head. “Ronnie is not a vampire.”
“I saw her, Walker. She drank my blood. She—”
“Shut up,” Walker snapped. “I don’t need to listen to your lies! Bex is pissed at me because of her eye, so she took Ronnie.”
Bex laughed. Looking at him dead in the face, at his anguish and fanatic hope, she burst out laughing. “I’m not pissed at you about my eye. You were defending Cassidy, and you have impeccable aim. I wouldn’t have you any other way.”
The gun disappeared from my side. One moment there, its pressure bruising my ribs, and the next moment, simply gone.
I blinked, and amid rips of Velcro and snapping noises, a clatter rained over the stone floor around us. Walker’s weapons—several knifes, multiple guns and their extra clips, various pens, pepper spray containers, a watch, and four aluminum tuna cans I’d assume no longer contained tuna—scattered across the stone floor around us.
Walker’s arm bent back from the elbow, releasing me.
I felt the crack of his bone like ice on my wisdom teeth before I heard the high shriek of his scream. Something knocked me forward. Dominic caught me before I hit the floor. He tucked me behind him, and I couldn’t see around his back. I squirmed to the side to peek over his shoulder and stared, shocked.
I don’t know why I was surprised. Who else could have attacked us if Dominic, Rene, and Jillian were standing here, watching?
Walker had hit the floor, and by the looks of his twisted arm, busted knee, and a swelling bruise on his forehead, he’d hit hard. He was still struggling to move, fighting to sit up and defend himself, but Bex had a finger on the center of his chest. I could see the strain in the bulging veins at his neck and forearms, but all the effort Bex needed to put forth to keep him down was one little finger.
“What I
am
is furious,” she growled, and her fangs seemed to grow longer as she spoke. Her nose flattened slightly, and the very tips of her ears poked through the sides of her bronze hair. “You would have let me die and been relieved to have me gone.”
“You’re a monster,” Walker spat. “You deserve to die.”
“I may be a monster of the flesh, but you, my dear, lovely Ian Walker, are a monster of the heart.”
Bex sharpened her gaze on him, and her otherworldly, reflective, yellow-green eye bore into Walker in a blaze of inner light. He screamed.
“Finally,” Rene muttered under his breath. “She’s going to kill him.”
“She is not,” I snapped, but honestly, I wasn’t sure. “Right, Dominic?”
“She’s going to do what she should have done years ago, when he first tried to kill her,” Rene muttered. The emphatic joy in his voice grated on my nerves. “She’s going to kill him.”
“Dominic?”
“Hush, both of you.” Dominic hissed. “This is why I don’t have newborn vampires.”
“I thought it was because I refused you,” I whispered.
Dominic looked down at me, his expression stern, but I could see the hint of amusement tip the corner of his lips.
“Do something,” I said softly.
He shook his head slowly. “He just held you hostage and threatened to kill you, yet you want me to do something.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but Dominic leaned in close, nose to nose. His fangs bared and his ears suddenly pointed. My argument choked in the back of my throat.
“He’s lucky I’m letting Bex have him. If it was up to me, I’d tear out his throat,” Dominic growled. “If he touches you again, he’s dead.”
I swallowed. There was no arguing with that.
I stared directly into Dominic’s unnerving, otherworldly icy blue eyes, and I could feel the fuel of his rage. I could see it in the tightening of his muscles. I could feel it vibrating from his chest like the steady, constant heartbeat he didn’t have. He didn’t try to entrance my mind, to cloud my senses from seeing and feeling and knowing his mind like I’d never known before, and I wondered if he even knew it himself: more than my usefulness as a night blood and more than my potential as a vampire, Dominic Lysander cared about me, just for me.
Walker’s scream cut short.
I tore my gaze from Dominic. Bex was standing over Walker, a strange, bitter, pain-filled resentment clouding her petite features. Walker was lying on the ground, struggling to move. I worried the pain was too much, that he’d seize, but slowly and shakily, he struggled to his knees. Eventually, he stood.
“Get out of my home,” Bex growled. “And stay out.”
“Damn,” Rene said, obviously disappointed.
I blew out a shaky, uncertain breath.
“You can’t keep me out, not until I find Ronnie.” Walker panted, defiantly. “You have her somewhere, you have them all, and I won’t stop searching until I get them back, even if that means killing every last one of you.”
“You can try, and as always, I’m sure you will,” Bex said, “And as always, you will fail. Goodbye, Ian. Let me show you the door.”
The dining room hall door exploded outward in a mess of splinters, and they were gone.
I blinked a few times. “Where?” I stammered, unable to form complete sentences, “But how…”
“She’ll be back,” Rene said, his smile radiant. “Like she said, she’s just showing him the door.”
“I thought you said she liked that door,” I muttered.
“She did, but she likes the flair for drama more. We needed a new door, anyway. That squeak was unforgivable.”
I shook my head, in awe. “Bex
is
faster and stronger than you,” I said to Dominic.
Dominic was still staring at the remains of the door when he said, “That’s why she’s our ally and not our enemy.”
I shook my head. “She never displayed her power like this before.”
“She’s not one for bragging, but just because she doesn’t show it off doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it.”
I bit my lower lip. “Walker has considered her an enemy for years, but until now, Bex considered him her night blood.”
Dominic lost his grin slightly. “Until now. I risked quite a lot to ensure that Bex remained my ally. Ian Walker risked everything to solidify Bex as his enemy. He has a long road ahead of him, one that I don’t envy, but he paved the way himself.”
I pursed my lips. He may have paved the way himself, but I still felt partially responsible. If I hadn’t flaunted my relationship with Dominic, albeit a faked relationship, Bex wouldn’t have realized what she was missing. She wouldn’t have demanded that he lick her blood at dinner—he wouldn’t have even been at dinner—and maybe his life wouldn’t have spun so quickly out of control.
Dominic tipped my chin up, forcing me to meet his gaze. “I can feel your regret, and I’m sorry.”
“You knew this would happen,” I said softly. “Weeks ago when you first proposed that I come here to smooth your relationship Bex, you knew that Bex would be jealous of my loyalty to you, the loyalty she couldn’t inspire in Walker. You knew that would drive a wedge between them.”
“I knew that would forge a stronger alliance between Bex and me. What Ian Walker has done is between him and Bex is his own doing, not mine, and certainly not yours.”
I rubbed my sore side where Walker’s gun had bruised my rib. “Right,” I said, unconvinced.
“Y’all coming?” Bex said, appearing in the doorway. “Nathan’s feeding, and we don’t have all night to clean up his mess.”
Nathan was feeding. That was one way to phrase what he was doing.
A body was crushed under the weight of his back leg, keeping his victim in place as he punctured the chest cavity, severed the heart with near surgical precision, and ate it. The person was already dead. Both its arms and one leg were torn off from what looked like a ragdoll beating, and the remaining leg was only attached by thin tendons. The bone was severed and poked through the wound like a gruesome flagpole, skin hanging loose and flapping from its tip.
We were outside Walker’s house where Dominic had healed my wrist. My blood was now mixed with someone else’s, but there was no denying that Nathan was still tracking me. He’d followed my blood here, so hopefully he’d follow my blood where we wanted him to go next.
I didn’t have the chance to ask Bex if Walker was all right, and after he had threatened to kill me, I debated with myself whether or not I should even care. She didn’t have bloodstains on her clothes or face when she’d returned, so I assumed that she’d left him unharmed, or at least not
further
harmed. Knowing her rage, however, that might be assuming a lot.
I squinted into the darkness from habit, not really needing to squint considering my temporarily enhanced vision. I didn’t see Walker inside the house. None of the lights were on. I was perched thirty meters away, high in the treetops with Rene as my parachute, but from one glance through the trees, through the blackness of the night, and through Walker’s dirty kitchen window, I could see that the basement door to the safe room was wide open, and his kitchen was still a bloody mess. My bloody mess.
If Bex hadn’t harmed him, Walker would likely seek shelter to recover, but his home looked deserted.
I turned my attention back to the victim that Nathan, having finished with the heart, was now tearing to shreds.
Rene’s lips touched my ear. “That’s not Walker.”
I jerked instinctively and then nodded. “That’s nice of you to say, but you don’t know that for certain.”
“Sure I do. It’s Buck McFerson.”
It took a moment for the name to click, but I’d always been snappy with names. I closed my eyes as I realized what I was seeing.
Jeremy’s uncle
, I thought. I was watching Jeremy’s uncle being murdered.
I shook my head at the nightmare in front of me. It was either that or scream. Or throw up and then scream.