She closed her eyes and urged her cells to open, to pull the flow of energy inward instead of readying to release.
Nothing.
Antonio’s breathing shallowed, and his blood ran freely onto the floor.
“Oh, hell.” Maybe she’d be able to pull the bad energy back out before he woke up.
Good fucking luck with that.
Once transplanted, dark energy always seemed to stick better to its new home and was ten times harder to pull out.
Doesn’t matter; there is no other choice.
She compressed the wound with the veil. Ixtab gasped and felt her entire body surge with a powerful light that circulated between them. In and out. In and out. It was as if…
Our lights are dancing together.
What the…?
She looked over at Kinich. “Dammit, sunshine. Get your ass on the phone and call that vampy doctor.”
“What doctor,” he grumbled, still immobile on the floor.
“There’s a magnet on your fridge. Didn’t you see it?” Helena had mentioned in their last phone call that she’d put them in all the apartments for the newly undead. “Move!”
She looked back down at Antonio, feeling mesmerized by the intertwining of their souls and by his exquisite male beauty. She brushed back his dark brown hair. “Don’t die on me, Klaus Van Mad Scientist. Don’t you dare die on me.” Gods be damned she didn’t know what was happening, but she’d never touched a mortal like this. She wasn’t draining his darkness or killing him. They were simply… touching.
She sighed and soaked him in. His eyelashes—so thick and dark—the masculine dip in his chin, the strong stubble-covered jaw. “You need to help us save the world,” she whispered in his ear.
Perhaps you will save me, too…
Again she glanced over her shoulder. Kinich wasn’t in the kitchen. He was standing in the open window, readying to jump.
No! Dammit!
She’d dosed him with darkness. He was trying to kill himself.
She bolted across the room just as Kinich launched.
“Nooo!” She leaped forward and caught him by one thick ankle. Her entire body jerked violently outside with Kinich’s weight. She caught the ledge with her shellacked pink fingernails and dug in hard, her body dangling precariously from the frosty ledge. Damn, her brother was heavy.
Ixtab grunted as a few onlookers from the street below screamed. Thank the gods it was nighttime and the building had few exterior lights or the entire city would be able to see him.
“Let me go.” He fought and squirmed.
Oh, hell.
This was not happening. She clenched her eyes shut.
Reverse for fuck sake. Reverse!
She needed Kinich to want to live. Antonio was bleeding to death, and if forced to choose between him or her brother, it would be Antonio. Didn’t matter that her brother meant everything to her, that besides Francisco, Kinich was the only being on the planet who’d treated her like someone important or that Kinich had never turned his back on her. Not even after she nearly lost her mind from killing the man she’d loved so deeply that it had left her soul twisted and mangled.
But that water had flowed past the dreary-goddess bridge thousands of moons ago. This water had yet to pass and was coming fast and furious and its name was Antonio Acero, the keystone to opening the portal. And her bond with the Universe would always dictate she put humanity first.
Goddammit.
The tears squeezed from her body like a lemon in a press as her muscles strained under his weight. She’d been given many gifts, but the gift of strength? Not a chance.
I hate you, Universe! Don’t do this to me! Don’t you dare make me choose!
she mentally scorned with every flicker of her immortal soul.
Please, please, reverse.
“Aaah!!
Teen uk’al k’iinam. Teen uk’al yah. Teen uk’al k’iinam. Teen uk’al yah. Teen uk’al k’iinam. Teen uk’al yah…
”
Kinich’s body went limp. Had it worked?
Ixtab gritted her teeth and pulled up, but two hundred and fifty–plus pounds of pure ex–Sun God was more than her frame could support.
His heel slipped a centimeter. She flexed her nails and penetrated his skin, but she was losing her grip. How long could she hold on? And every second lost was another ounce of blood loss closer to death for Antonio.
Her eyes flipped down. Would a vampire survive the fall? She had seen them survive far worse over thousands of years. She’d also seen a few die from lesser injuries.
“Kinich, can you hear me? Goddammit, you have to grab on to something.” There was a small ledge below that led to a window in the downstairs apartment.
Kinich didn’t respond.
She yanked one more time, but it was useless, too heavy. “Kinich, I don’t know if you can hear me, brother, but I love you. You’re the only family I’ve ever had, and for this I will never forget you. But if I don’t save Antonio, the portal will not open, Guy and Niccolo will remain trapped, and the Maaskab will exterminate us all—your precious Penelope and baby included. I have to choose. I have to. And my heart chooses you, but my duty chooses…”
Sobbing, she clenched her eyes shut and released his ankle.
“Nooo!”
At that exact moment, Ixtab looked up only to see Penelope’s face witness Kinich’s fall to earth.
Oh, Gods. No. No…
There simply weren’t enough souls, evil or good, to cleanse the pain and darkness she witnessed in Penelope’s eyes.
“Please, Viktor.” Ixtab paced across Kinich’s living room. “Don’t tell me this is a cluster. I know it—”
“Well, it is,” he replied. “The biggest cluster I’ve ever seen.” Seven feet of pure angry Nordic vampire crossed his leather-clad arms over his chest. He wore a deep blue turtleneck sweater and black leather pants that matched his black leather duster. His long blond hair was elaborately braided down his back with strips of brown leather woven in.
“Honey, don’t dwell on the things we cannot change,” said the petite blonde woman with wide hazel eyes at his side, better known as Julie, Penelope’s mother and—well, fallen angel recently turned vampire. Confusing? Oh yeah. Someone might have even written a book about it.
Viktor beamed down at Julie with his cobalt-blue eyes and then patted her cheek. “Yes, my angel. As usual, you are right.”
Pacing frantically across Kinich’s living room, Penelope glanced at them both with a directness that emphasized this was the end of her rope. “Please, Mom. Viktor. Do something fast. Please? For me?”
“What a cluster.” Viktor turned toward the heap of twisted muscles and broken bones on the couch. “Fine. I will give Kinich my blood to keep him alive, but he will require massive amounts of human blood to heal—if he’s going to heal. Unfortunately, he’s unable to feed so I suggest we start an IV.” He looked at Penelope. “Please retrieve the blood bags from the refrigerator and bring me the emergency kit from Helena’s kitchen upstairs.”
“Thank you, Viktor. Thank you,” Penelope said and scrambled out the door.
“And keep him out of the sun! It will weaken him!” Viktor yelled toward the door.
“What about the physicist?” Ixtab asked.
Viktor gave her a stern look. “Turning a mortal into a vampire isn’t something we do simply because the person is dying.”
Ixtab was about to go kamikaze on this crowd. “This isn’t a normal mortal. If he dies, we all die. Just do it and get it over with.”
Viktor’s eyes flipped her the middle finger.
Like she cared. She’d been “blessed” with the “gift” of suicide, which pretty much meant she’d been given the middle finger by life itself.
“And are you going to take personal accountability? Are you?” Viktor asked Ixtab. “Will you teach him about the Pact and how not to kill innocent mortals, Ixtab? We just got rid of evil vampires. I don’t want to be responsible for making new ones. I like my neighborhood Obscuro-free.”
Ixtab rolled her eyes. “Why do all vampires have to be on vacay, and I get stuck with Mr. Vampy Rogers who wants a beautiful neighborhood?”
“Yes or no, Ixtab?” he prodded.
Ixtab nodded. “Yes! Yes! You idiot! Save him!”
Viktor’s attention moved to Antonio who lay on the floor with a bandage wrapped around his neck. The bleeding had slowed, but the wound was severe, and to Ixtab’s estimation, he wouldn’t last much longer. “He needs to drink my blood before his heart stops.”
“No. I do not want to be like him. I don’t want to be a monster,” a low voice mumbled.
All eyes moved to Antonio.
* * *
Trapped in a nightmare of pain, Antonio’s mind flickered on and off again like a waning lightbulb dangling from the ceiling of a third world interrogation room. Each time his awareness illuminated, the ugliness of his reality—the pain of having his throat ripped open—was more terrifying than death.
Vampires were real? This was what the voices said.
No. A dream. A crazy dream.
“Antonio,” a soft voice cut through the darkness, “you can’t give up; we need you.” A soft and soothing warm hand stroked his wrist, and the feeling of pure levity embraced him. The scent of vanilla and daisies filled the air. “That’s right. Let go of those thoughts of death. Give them to me.”
The woman then spoke to someone else in the room—a man with a deep voice and a European accent. “Turn him now, he’s slipping away,” she begged.
“He does not want to be a vampire. You heard him. He called me a monster,” the accented man replied.
“My father… I…”
I don’t want to be a monster like my father
, Antonio thought, but could not manage to say the words.
“See! He’s trying to say he doesn’t want to die. He wants to see his father.”
“That’s not what he said,” the man argued.
“Oh. Crapola!” she hissed. “Can we just get this over with? It’s for the greater good.”
God, he loved this woman’s voice. It was like sweet, warm nectar dribbled in his ears.
“Spoken like a deity,” the man said. “You’re a bunch of sick bastards, you know that don’t you? The man does not want immortality, so find another way to open the portal.”
“Please,” the woman whispered in Antonio’s ear, stroking his cheek. “Do it for me.”
“No compelling!” The strange man scowled.
“I’m not!” she barked and then returned to touching Antonio’s cheek—it felt so heavenly, soothing.
“Antonio, this is important,” she said. “You must say yes.”
Antonio suddenly wanted to. And just like that first time he’d heard her voice in the hospital, he didn’t want to separate from her. She was like a drug.
His mind whirled and sputtered, dancing in and out of conscious thought. Dream and reality mingled into an inseparable murky soup. “I wish I could see you. Just once,” he mumbled. “Are you as beautiful as you sound?”
She snickered. “Entire armies have fallen to their deaths for a peek.”
“And you will not leave me? Ever?” he whispered.
Emptiness filled a long stretch of time, and then, “I will not leave you.”
The word
yes
bubbled from his lips.
“Ha! You heard him! Do it!” the woman cheered.
The strange man groaned. “All right, I hope you know what you’re in for.” Hot, salty liquid poured into Antonio’s mouth and slid down his throat. It spread like a raging wildfire through his veins. Antonio peered through the lavalike pain scalding his throat into the haze. A pair of luminescent eyes gazed back.
“Relax, mad scientist. Let go. I’ll be waiting for you on the other side,” she whispered.
Antonio felt the life slip from his body and hurtle toward the stars. It was as if gravity had relinquished the claim on his soul and sent it to unite with the cosmos. He let out one final breath and slid into oblivion.
After two days of sitting beside Antonio’s dead body, Ixtab had reached her threshold of despair and went out to cleanse the negative energy flowing in her veins. Not every vampire transformation ended successfully, and the thought of Antonio dying brought her right back to the night of Francisco’s deathbed when she’d helplessly watched his body succumb to the poison he’d ingested. It had been too much to bear then, and it was too much watching a near replica die once more. Ixtab’s cells burst at the seams with sadness, and unfortunately, she couldn’t find sufficient country-club members at that hour, so she had to go after a few less-charismatic creatures. Park services were going to have about one hundred trees to replant in the spring.
Exhausted and needing to lie down, Ixtab made her way to the penthouse. Voices poured into the hallway, bantering back and forth as she stepped off the elevator.
Zac. It was Zac.
What the hell is he doing here?
she wondered, listening through the door.
“Penelope,” he said, “you are being ridiculous. Kinich does not care for you like I do. I would never toss you aside like that.”
“I love Kinich, and that’s not going to change.”
“Did he tell you his bond broke?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“When he was in Sedona, that night he became a vampire, I spent hours with him. He told me his bond with the Universe had broken. He has been free for some time now, no longer a slave to humanity’s well-being.”
“So, what are you saying?” Penelope asked.
“I’m saying that again and again, even before he became a vampire, he had the choice to stay with you, to put you first, but he didn’t. He tossed you aside.”
“Yes. It’s true; he put humankind first before his own wants and needs, but that makes him a hero,” she argued.
“No. It makes him selfish. He can’t stand the thought of letting someone else save the day because he wants the glory all for himself.”
Silence.
“I would have found a way,” Zac said, “not to hurt you and to do my job. My brother is a blind fool for letting you go. And regardless of if he wakes up, he will always hurt you again because he will never put you first.”
Ouch. He’s going for Penelope’s jugular
, Ixtab thought, unable to believe Zac’s cruelty.
“I can’t help how I feel, Zac. I just can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Look at me,” Zac commanded.
Uh-oh…