Vanquished (24 page)

“I’m happy that you were able to make a life with the man you loved, but I don’t understand what this has to do with me,” he said.

“Before Jenn came here, she never had a real boyfriend, so she never knew what it was like to have her heart broken.”

He bowed his head again, shame filling him.

“Now, a grandmother doesn’t want to see some guy rip her granddaughter’s heart out of her chest and stomp it into little pieces. Problem with you is that’s a figurative danger
and
a literal one.”

“I know,” he whispered.

“In case you haven’t noticed, Jenn’s father isn’t exactly around to object to you. So the burden falls on me.”

“To object to me,” he said. Of course she did; she must. He objected to himself. Why, then, did it hurt?

“Yes. Deeply.”

They stared at each other for a moment. He heard the beating of her heart, sure and steady.

“But I’m going to give you a chance,” she said.

He blinked, surprise mingling with something else—elation? Fear? He wasn’t sure.

She reached out and flicked her wrist. There was the sound of metal grating on metal, and then suddenly she swung the cage door open. Reflexively, he sucked in a breath.

“Now be a man. Prove to me that you deserve her.”

Esther moved back, and Antonio took a hesitant step forward. Her words had cut him deep, stinging, burning, shaming. Could it really be as easy as she made it seem? Was it just a matter of faith and love and will? He squeezed his eyes shut and felt blood tears seeping from them. There was an ache in his heart that was lifting, twisting.

Had he imposed this prison, this hell upon himself? Upon both of them? He wanted to tell Esther that he would try to be the man she was asking him to be. But he knew that trying wasn’t enough. He couldn’t
try
any longer.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. “I will,” he vowed.

She nodded, and then turned and walked toward the door of the cold, dark room. He hesitated for a moment.

“Are you coming, then?” she asked without looking back.

“Yes,” he said, marveling at the strength, the resolve in his own voice.
God help me to be the man I need to be and not the vampire I fear that I am,
he prayed.

They climbed the stairs and eventually came out into the passageway near the chapel.

Antonio heard Esther swear soft and low.

“What is it?” he asked, for her ears alone.

“Looks like I was wrong about one thing.”

Fear gripped him tight. “What?” he asked, moving to see around her.

“Jenn’s father
is
here.”

Running and hiding, running and hiding. It had become like a sick little game Skye and Jamie were playing. Hide-and-go-seek and Estefan was the seeker.
Come out, come out, wherever you are,
she could hear him in her mind, though there were times she thought she might just be imagining it.

That would be a relief, to only have imaginary voices in her head instead of real ones.

She shook her head, tired of running, tired of the games. But what else was there? She glanced uneasily at Jamie as she set up wards around the room. They were in the tiny attic of an ancient inn. It was dangerous to rest where other people were, but neither of them could spend another night half-asleep on the freezing ground.

As soon as they got upstairs, Jamie fell headlong on the bed and passed out. No one could fake those snores.

She wrinkled her nose, tempted for a moment to do a spell to mute the sound, but she surrendered the idea with a sigh. It was dangerous to cast unnecessary magick. Anytime she conjured anything other than a protective ward, she suspected it served as a beacon drawing Estefan right to her. She wasn’t sure how he was managing to see it, but then there was a lot about his magick and what he had become that she didn’t comprehend.

She shuddered at the thought of it.

How had Estefan become so evil? Or had he always been that way, and she, being so young and so love-struck, had never seen it?

She finished her wards and winced at the burning sensation in her left shoulder as she lowered her arm. During the fray in the cave, one of Estefan’s lightning bolts had singed her, and she hadn’t dared to use magick to speed the healing.

She hated Estefan for that and for so much, much more. She shoved Jamie over slightly, and he flipped onto his side but didn’t wake up. She eased herself down onto the mattress beside him, being careful of her injured shoulder. Jamie’s bag of weapons was on the other side of him. It made her nervous knowing that there was a gun within such easy reach.

Especially since it fired silver bullets.

She took a deep, steadying breath. After leaving the Circuit, they had doubled back to the cave and retrieved Jamie’s weapons. They hadn’t found the scrying stone, but regrettably, they had found the gun with the silver bullets. She had watched with intense interest, though, when Jamie had worked on the gun that would fire wooden bullets and explained how it worked.

It was almost perfected.

And she hoped and prayed that vampires couldn’t outrun bullets like they did everything else. She and Jamie needed an edge, and as much as she disliked the gun meant
for werewolves, she couldn’t help but be very, very excited about
this
gun.

Jamie was still snoring as she struggled to clear her mind so she could go to sleep. Somewhere, out there in the night, Estefan was still coming after them. It was ironic—she was running from the guy who had spent years chasing her, with the guy whom she had spent years chasing.

And she didn’t want either of them anymore.

She wasn’t sure when or how it had happened, but her heart had set itself on Holgar. Funny Holgar, loyal Holgar, good Holgar. She’d always been drawn to the bad boys, but it was the best and noblest man she’d ever met that she had fallen truly in love with. It had happened so gradually she hadn’t even realized it—until that moment when Estefan had been torturing her and she’d been trying to take back her mind with thoughts of Holgar.

She was in love with a werewolf. If her family had still been speaking to her, she was sure they’d be shocked. There was probably something in their code that forbade such a love.

It didn’t matter. She’d turned her back on them and now on the Circuit as well. She knew she should feel guilty about it, but she just couldn’t bring herself to.

She squeezed her eyes shut and saw Holgar in her mind. What would he say when they saw each other again? What would she say? Would she have the courage to tell him how she felt?

She hoped so, but she worried she’d never get the chance to make that decision.

She drifted off to sleep and dreamed of Holgar, of staring into his eyes as she told him she loved him. And then the scene changed and she felt as if she were watching from afar as Holgar charged across a silvery landscape, leading a pack of werewolves. Or was he running from them?

She couldn’t tell, but in front of Holgar there was a line of monsters, hybrids like from Russia, and vampires. Oh, Goddess, there were so many!

Holgar crashed into them, bowling several over. Then Skye lost him, couldn’t see him for the thrashing bodies. And then, finally, he appeared again. But her relief turned to horror as she watched a tall vampire who seemed to blaze like the sun rip out Holgar’s throat.

“No!” she screamed, waking and sitting up. Her heart was pounding, and she felt dizzy and somewhat disembodied. Her cheeks were flushed, and she felt as if her entire body were on fire.

Cursing, Jamie leaped out of bed and landed in the middle of the floor, eyes wild, a gun in one hand and a stake in the other. “What?”

And in that moment Skye knew two things for certain. What she had just seen in her dream was a glimpse of the future—Holgar dying at Lucifer’s hands.

And Estefan had arrived at the inn.

They had run out of time.

Predator, prey, the oldest game
Somehow it always ends the same
Prey a tangled mass of legs and head
The predator’s fangs shining red
You’d do well to know your place
You can not change name or face
For real hunters always thrive
And the hunted ne’er survive

The room around Skye and Jamie erupted in flames. Beneath her feet Skye could hear the startled screams of the other patrons of the inn as fire engulfed the entire building in one blinding moment.

“Where are they?” Jamie roared, his voice barely audible over the crack and whoosh of the flames.

They were trapped with no way out. Once more Estefan was calling the shots, herding them in the direction he wanted to go.

And this time he was killing innocent people. People Skye realized she couldn’t save.

She grabbed hold of Jamie’s arm and yanked him toward the window. Before they reached it, she lifted her other hand and exploded the glass outward. She shoved Jamie halfway through it.

“We can’t jump. It’s four stories down!” he shouted.

An explosion rocked the ground, and she could feel the floorboards starting to give way beneath them. Heat and smoke rushed up toward them both.

“No choice!” she screamed. She hit him low, hard enough to throw him off balance and to send him toppling through the window with a shout of terror.

She sent a spell chasing after him, which slowed him and cushioned his fall right as he hit the ground. His weapons bag clattered down beside him. She hoisted herself up into the window frame just as tongues of fire began to lick at her hair. With a scream she hurled herself out.

She didn’t have enough time to properly cast the spell before she hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud. She tried to pull herself to her feet and realized that some of her ribs were broken.

And there was the taste of blood in her mouth. She prayed it was from a bitten cheek and not a punctured lung.

Jamie scooped down and picked her up and then ran with her into the darkness. She tried to cast spells to protect those they left behind, but she couldn’t focus. Her magicks were being blocked.

Then, in her mind, she could hear Estefan laughing. But even over that horrendous sound there was a worse one, the screams of the dying as they burned to death in the old inn. She screamed, too, sharing their pain, their desperation, because she was powerless to help them.

And still Jamie ran, his arm wrapped around her broken ribs, making the pain unbearable. A root shot up from the ground and tripped Jamie. Skye went airborne and slammed into a tree with a thud before sliding down the trunk to the ground.

Fresh blood blurred her vision, and she whimpered in pain and fear.

Come out, come out, wherever you are,
Estefan’s voice taunted.

“Skye!”

She turned at the strangled cry from Jamie. He was sprawled on the ground, hands wrapped around his leg. Bones were jutting out through holes in his pants. The same root that had tripped him now snaked up and over him.

Magick.

The root encircled one of the broken bones extending
from Jamie’s shattered leg and yanked it suddenly downward.

She wouldn’t have believed that the shriek of pain that followed could have come from a human if she hadn’t been watching Jamie.

She lifted her hand and whispered a spell, wheezing as she did so. She could taste blood in the back of her throat. Punctured lung.

Panic flooded her, but she forced herself to finish the spell. The root released its hold on Jamie’s leg bone and dropped to the ground, once more a harmless object.

One, two . . .
She heard Estefan’s voice in her head.

Why was Estefan counting? She dragged herself across the ground toward Jamie. She needed to heal his leg.

Three. Four.

If she could just help him, then he could escape. At least one of them would.

She sobbed in agony as she touched his leg and felt her own bones shattering as she took the injury and made it hers while mending his.

Five. Six.

Her chest contracted even more with the extra pain and trauma of Jamie’s injury. She was amazed that he had lived through the attack; Estefan had nearly crushed him. How had he endured?

Her bones began to knit, but so very, very slowly. She wanted to scream, but now she was having problems just
drawing breath. The cries from the inn had stopped, which probably meant that all there were dead. Despair poured through her, and she gasped at the very real psychic pain overlaying the agony of Jamie’s wounds.

Seven.

The bone fragments fused, but she didn’t have time to repair the muscle or nerve damage. She wouldn’t be able to move.

To escape.

“Go!” she shouted to Jamie.

Jamie pushed himself to his feet, his leg nearly collapsing when he tried to put weight on it. He remained upright, though, swaying slightly as he tried to catch his balance.

“C’mon, then, Skye,” he slurred, staggering forward as he tried to bend down and extend a hand toward her. He sucked in his breath through his teeth, still in pain. “Bugger. Skye, up.”

Eight.

“Go!” she repeated. “I can’t hold him. Get out of range.”

“I bloody well won’t leave you,” he ground out.

“Get free,” she ordered him. “Then I’ll come.”

Nine.

“No, I won’t—”

She was out of time.

Furious with him for not listening, wild to save him, Skye summoned magickal forces and flung them at Jamie. He stumbled backward, blinked, and opened his mouth,
probably to argue some more. She managed another push, her body shrieking at her to get back to the healing.

“Go!” she screamed at him.

“Bloody hell,” Jamie swore.

He stared down at her, picked up his bag, and hobbled toward the darkest part of the woods. She gave him one last push.