“The blood will run. The earth will burn. The three shall fall.”
Isla
I wasn’t dead.
I was still undead, in fact.
Firstly, because even Hades himself couldn’t have designed a punishment as cruel as having the sweet ambrosia like nothing I’d ever tasted in almost five centuries ripped from my tongue.
Yet it was. The heavenly substance that wasn’t simply blood but life itself stopped coating my tongue as my mouth was ripped from the taut skin of a muscled neck.
And it was me who did so.
Detached myself from Thorne’s neck.
I didn’t know how I did it. Or what part of me recognized the slowing of his heart and the twang to the blood that made it sweeter than anything.
Death.
Had anything ever tasted sweeter on my tongue than death? My own was mixed with Thorne’s, and it was as delicious as it was repulsive.
But it was Thorne’s death. And that echoing heartbeat that had become my soundtrack to everything was slowing, taunting me with the longer silence between beats.
So I wrenched myself from his neck.
And that’s how I knew I wasn’t dead.
Because it sucked, the loss of his blood on me. Inside me.
And not in the right way.
It took a few snatches of time, in whatever vortex I’d been lost in, to understand what was going on. Namely that I wasn’t dead—a feat in itself, considering I had not one but two certainties on that score.
The first a curse put on me by some ancient witch to drain my immortality before killing me as a mortal.
Then there was the poison that was the blood of the slayer, who just happened to be the man I loved. The man I had pleaded to let be my end because dying with him as my executioner was the only way for me to go.
Wasn’t the best executioner the man who held your heart?
Wasn’t the person who held your heart—even if it was broken, mangled, blackened, and charred—the only person who held the keys to your demise?
Although I did glimpse the silhouette of Hades and hear the screams of all the souls he held within him—not a sound I would ever forget—the slowing of Thorne’s heartbeat, the taunting silence of what would be the world without that in it? It was even worse than Paris Hilton without auto-tune.
Haunting.
It was stark color, the removal of the crimson from my vision decidedly uncomfortable considering I was willing to live, and die, in the bloodlust. Yet the body that had been welcoming death for all these months was no longer its friend. Or acquaintance. We weren’t on speaking terms, death and me.
My body felt recharged in a way draining an entire football team couldn’t.
And I’d done that. Once. Or twice.
Before I got my conscience, obviously.
Okay, the second time was technically after, but they deserved it.
But the glaring reality brought with it the disturbing sound of a faltering heartbeat. Thorne’s eyes gaped at me in surprise, then joy, and then they went weirdly vacant.
In a way that chilled my bones which had moments before been flaming from the inferno of his lifeblood.
“Thorne,” I demanded. “This is not a Romeo and Juliet situation. You do not die in my place. No one dies here. Not me, it seems. So you’re not allowed,” I ordered. My voice shook, not from the proximity of my own death but from his.
I’d been close enough many a time to chirp happily in its face. Never had I let fear seep into my voice. Or even my soul.
I got it now. The Romeo and Juliet thing. The prospect of death was endearing, enticing, and preferable to the reality of a world in which Thorne didn’t exist.
The silence, save for the faltering heartbeat, was something much scarier than the impending doom I’d just been faced with. Than the vision of Hades and the underworld full of tortured and depraved souls.
The reality of another death much more terrifying than mine.
Thorne’s.
The clock swayed and I was still, glued to the spot despite my panic; I worried if I moved, it would tear the fragile fabric of the moment in which we were stuck.
The moment between life and death.
The moment tore itself anyway. As such moments did.
With the improved, louder and not so much ringing in the sound of both of our deaths.
Because in the moment between moments, it was a cool sort of certainty that told me life, or even undeath, without him would not be preferable. And it would be short.
He had been as still as I had, but not out of fear. His stillness was out of severe and life-threatening blood loss.
Because he wasn’t a mere mortal, he healed. Fast. Not completely, but completely enough to move quickly, clutching me by the neck even as his own was stained with blood and the two puncture marks from my fangs.
“Isla,” he demanded roughly, his voice dry.
I blinked at him.
His lips crashed down on mine before any other words could be said. As our tongues clashed together, so did the marriage between life and death, both of which we’d tasted and somehow merged together. It was all of it, life and death and blood and love, embroiled into one furious kiss.
Then it wasn’t, his mouth hovering over mine as his eyes burned into me.
“You’re still here,” he rasped.
“Yeah,” I whispered back. “Lucifer will have to wait a little longer to get his most coveted soul.”
His eyes blazed. “No, that soul doesn’t belong to the Devil. It belongs to me.”
I stared at him. “You want that twisted, tarnished, depraved, and ugly thing?”
“I don’t want it,” he said. “I need that twisted, tarnished, depraved and exquisitely beautiful thing in order to keep my heart beating. I know that because it almost slipped out of my hands.”
“Yeah, and then your heart nearly stopped beating because I almost drained you dry,” I said, laughing nervously.
He stared at me as if etching every inch of me into his memory. Then he blinked, his face clearing with cold realization. “You survived it. My blood.”
I nodded.
Yes, that was a pesky little detail that had gotten lost with the fear that I was watching the man I loved more than Jimmy Choo die before my eyes.
For the second time.
I technically shouldn’t have been undead to watch the death of the second man I’d ever loved in my immortality—well, the first in my immortality, considering the very first was when I wasn’t a vampire, merely a stupid girl who fell for a human.
Apparently that stupid girl may not have died the day my sarcastic woman with fangs emerged. The day of Jonathan’s death. Maybe I’d only thought she’d died.
Because that same girl fell in love with the one mortal on the planet who could kill her.
Slayer blood was, after all, one of the main things nature had done to create some form of even footing.
Fatal.
To all vampires.
Except me.
Thorne’s blood wasn’t fatal to me.
I wondered if his love would be.
“It saved you,” he rasped, his voice rough with not just the aftermath of death but the close brush with the definite destruction that lurked behind his tortured eyes. The ones drenched with a love so deep I was certain it would kill me.
No one could survive that.
Not even an immortal.
“Let’s not go wild,” I corrected. “Nobody can save me. That’s a job for me, if I so wish, which I don’t. I’m rather enjoying being damned. Plus, it’s the twenty-first century. Women can save themselves from ancient witch curses and slayer blood that was meant to be fatal but somehow wasn’t,” I snapped.
He grinned, but it was the darkly comic grin of someone who did so only to stave off the worst of the demons—or perhaps welcome them in for tea. Or a steaming hot cup of O Neg.
“You’re still Isla. Still my Isla,” he murmured, almost to himself. H
is eyes were looking at me, really looking at me, but at the same time they weren’t actually seeing me. They were entertaining—or possible fighting—those same demons he’d obviously invited in for tea.
His arms tightened around me to the point of pain, despite the fact that he wasn’t even back to full strength.
I reminded myself that I needed to get the skinny, or perhaps the fat on that little nugget. How such an apparently human man healed almost as fast as a vampire, and alluded to the fact that he was able to live for about as long as one.
But now wasn’t the time. You know, since I’d almost died in front of him, then almost killed him after deciding to commit suicide via slayer—whom I loved—and then in turn almost killed that slayer.
That slayer who had shaken off the worst of the demons or was at least ignoring them for now in order to focus sharp eyes on me. “You aren’t allowed to do that again,” he growled.
“What?” I asked, trying to snap myself from my own demons. It was easier to do, since mine were BFFs and we had sleepovers and braided each other’s horns.
“Almost fuckin’ die in my arms,” he clarified in a voice so rough it actually hurt more than the brutal grip of his hands. “No curse worse than that invented on the planet.”
I held up my hand. “Belladonna’s sisters might take that as a challenge. Let’s deal with the current one we seem to have beaten and find ourselves a witch-type person to bippity boppity boo and tell me what I want to hear,” I said, thinking about the fact that I was, until mere moments before, supposed to be dead. I wasn’t complaining; in fact, I was pretty glad about it. But half a millennium on this earth meant I knew this wasn’t a gift.
Life was never a gift freely given. Death, more often than not, was the cost.
I reluctantly moved from my spot in Thorne’s arms—or rather tried to.
His biceps flexed with exertion as he held me in place. Though they didn’t need to. His demon filled gaze did that all on its own.
“Isla. You almost died. In front of me. You think I’m gonna let you go now? Or ever? I need to keep holdin’ you to make sure this shit isn’t something my broken mind didn’t make up in order to escape the world without you in it.”
Again those demons surfaced, acknowledging my own that came with the pain in his voice, in his very soul. Only because my own soul, if I had such a thing, felt that agony too, at the prospect of a world without the thundering heartbeat that was more like a roar in my ears.
Never had I welcomed that roar more. Never had I wished that I would never be haunted by that terrible silence again.
I blinked at him. “Well, I need to think of something that your mind wouldn’t conjure me up doing that will make you sure of that fact,” I said. “I could tell you about the Great Fire of London. Yeah, it didn’t start on Pudding Lane.” I paused. “Well, it did, just not by a baker. It was by a demon. Well, if you want to get technical, it was me goading the demon by telling him that he couldn’t even light a pipe on fire, let alone a city. It got away on me, but boy were the flames pretty to look at.” My eyes flared with the memory of the inferno, although it had been nothing but a flickering candle compared to the heat from Thorne’s arms around me, from his blood pouring through my veins.
His eyes cleared like the sudden loss of storm on troubled seas, the illusion of calm settling them—for a time, at least. He choked out a harsh chuckle. “That’s my Isla,” he muttered, kissing my head. “And you’re not goin’ anywhere. I need to know the why of this too, but not now. I need to sink into you. I need to fucking drown in you to remind myself that I wasn’t just staring at the dry wasteland of a world without you,” he growled. “Surest way I can be is if I come home to the place where I belong.” His eyes turned to an inky abyss. “Inside you.”
I flinched at the same time my lady bits did. They were doing a good flinch but my body wasn’t; it was reacting to what my ears were only now picking up.
And when I concentrated, I noticed the unnatural scent to the air. The musty smell to it and the way it thickened unnaturally in a way that was both too familiar and an omen in one.
Magic.
Ancient magic.
And not the good stuff that would get me out of the situation I was currently in.
No, the bad stuff that might just swallow the situation and then the rest of the fucking wretched world.
“Oh fuck,” I hissed, detaching myself from Thorne and darting out the door in a swift movement that even he, as some sort of updated version of a slayer, couldn’t catch up with. Nor properly see with his more than human eyes.
I was very regretfully out of Thorne’s arms and then staring into the eyes of my best friend.
And then the eyes of the other creature that had been lurking inside her, waiting for death to come to the party before it turned up fashionably late.
Chapter 2
Sophie banished it. The power that had been stirring within her, the kind I had recognized and not in a good way, like you recognized Chris Hemsworth on the street checking you out. Yes, that happened. The man wasn’t blind. Of course he checked me out. And asked me out.
And a girl doesn’t kiss and tell.
Okay, she does, but it was Chris fucking Hemsworth—Thor, for God’s sake. I hadn’t had better, since… well, Thor himself. Oh, and afterwards, Thorne.
Even a god had nothing on my slayer.
But no, it wasn’t that good kind of recognition.
No, it was like when you recognized the one-night stand that was a result of draining too many drunken frat boys and imbibing enchanted drinks. Sophie only banished it for a while, though; the remainder of the magic still lurked around her, as did the creature inside her. Whatever those irises had been, they weren’t Sophie’s.
The pulse in the air around her, even now, wasn’t comfortable. Or normal.
Or it was more abnormal than it usually was. Much more.
The thought worried me.
A lot.
But then so had the seemingly dead Scott—who Sophie had to resurrect. Luckily he hadn’t probably been dead; even she didn’t have that power.
Well Sophie didn’t. This new power that lurked behind her eyes most likely did.
And a power that could snatch souls back from Hades himself was a good kind of power to have on our side. Especially when we were in the middle of fighting a supernatural war.
Problem was, a power like that, one older than perhaps time itself—ancient in a way that scared even me, and I got bangs in the eighties—it didn’t have anyone’s side. It only had one purpose.
Destruction.
And it was that very power that got us—read: me—into the situation we were in, cursed by thousand-year-old witches and fighting humans turned into gross versions of vampires.
So the death magic was likely something we needed to treat like orange-tinted lipstick—steer clear of it at all costs.
After the resurrection of Scott and his subsequent freak-out, clutching me and jumping all over me so hard I had to shake him back to the ground to which he had been slumped, I was distracted.
And then there was the issue of a stony-faced and weirdly not-homicidal King Rick, whom Sophie had given back his immortality.
Hades would have been angry about the loss of not only my soul but that of a royal vampire. Angry enough to do everything to make sure those who cheated him would not stay on this earth for long.
Rick had stayed frozen, even after Sophie said she released both him and Silver. I’d known Silver had been released since he’d darted over to Sophie the second he’d found purchase over his limbs, clutching her shoulders and shaking her, asking, “What the fuck possessed you to pull that fucking shit?”
What the fuck indeed.
Instead of pondering that, I had to deal with Thorne’s heartbeat rapidly approaching, coupled with Rick’s frozen stare centered right on my face. Thorne’s burned into my back. I didn’t need to look back to know that; some sort of invisible string connected
his consciousness to mine. I couldn’t read his thoughts exactly, but his emotions were clearer and starker than they had ever been. Almost like they were my own.
I idly wiped the stray blood from the corner of my lip, sucking it on my finger and having to suppress the moan that came with the smallest taste of Thorne’s blood.
Despite the fact that I’d gotten my fill, I craved more. His approaching heartbeat enraptured me with the circulation of that sweetness in his body. And then I remembered the quiet between those heartbeats.
It lessened my cravings slightly.
Through all of it, Rick continued to stare.
I shifted uncomfortably on the dead ground.
“I know I don’t exactly look crash hot, but you don’t have to stare at me like a circus freak. A girl is entitled to look a little ragged after, you know, being cursed by a witch and then almost dying. Technically a process sped up by you,” I told him. “I’m not pointing fingers, but if I was….” I lifted my bloodred pointer finger to the level of his chest. Then I frowned at the chip in the varnish.
“Can someone not design a nail polish that doesn’t chip, even in death?” I muttered to myself. “I’ve even got the perfect name for it: Deathless.”
Somehow the word hung longer in the air than I’d meant it to, but I didn’t inspect the meaning of this, or the mutterings of Silver and Sophie, who were still exchanging curse words.
Unfortunately, due to the sheer amount of weird fucking shit happening in this day, I had to prioritize.
I glanced to Scott, who was sitting against a tree trunk, dazed but okay. I guessed I was partly to blame with him looking dazed, considering I was the one who had pushed him when he was recovering from almost dying. He should have known better, trying to hug me of all things. I’d only almost died.
There were only so many intense emotions I could take from men over my lack of being dead.
I was pretty glad too, but I kept my shit together.
And the fact that I was the one with her shit together at that moment should have worried someone.
“Go find yourself a hiker, perk up,” I suggested to Scott.
He frowned at me.