Chapter 50
Finn’s words barely sink in. I’m in such pain, it’s all I can do not to vomit on the scuffed warehouse floor. I can smell the sizzling flesh on my back. There are gashes down both my arms where the Brood demons held me so tightly that I tore my own flesh against their claws.
And something else too. A lushly luminous power stalking beneath my skin.
Not sinister or virtuous. Not belonging to any realm or creed.
Just power. Crackling within my body. Curving around my spine like a serpent.
Slumbering inside me like a doe. Impossible for me to harness but living within me just the same.
Finn comes to stand before me. He bends down to get a better look, lifting my chin with his smooth finger as he does.
No more need for those claws. I am no threat to him in my current state.
A wicked chill spreads from the point of contact, down my neck, and up to my ears.
I’m too weak to even spit in his cruelly carved face.
“You’ve endured quite the ordeal.” He sounds almost awed. “Do you know how long we’ve been searching for you? How long my father has awaited this?” He’s flushed like he’s just seen something revelatory. I realize with revulsion that it was my blaring agony.
“Shall I fetch him?” Driscoll grunts. When I turn my head to get a good look at the dean, I notice blood dripping from both his ears. Darkest magic in the world is right. I hope it fucking kills him.
“Yes. Get the censer and let’s finish this.” Finn continues to examine me like I’m a successful specimen in a lab. “Aren’t you a pretty thing? I wish we could have played longer.”
My head throbs behind my eyes. “Fuck you.”
Finn laughs, his eyes red and wide. All I can do is grind my teeth as Finn caresses my throat.
I’m listening to my own heartbeat weakening in my chest when the demon to my left is suddenly wrenched from me and eviscerated. Claws rip through his gut, heart, and throat in one murderous slice. He collapses to the floor in a pulpy, gurgling mess.
My pulse picks up a notch.
I don’t see him or hear his voice, but I know.
I know.
The demon to my right releases his hold on me to protect himself from my unseen savior, and I barely manage to scuttle away.
My heart slams so hard in my chest that when I stand, I find I’m swaying with the force of it.
I’ve lost a lot of blood. And when my eyes find my gouged arms, I realize I still am. Shit.
“Viv,” Reid bellows, voice booming off the walls of the warehouse. “Run!”
I have to whirl to see him. Claws flying as he lunges for Finn.
A snarling, growling creature born from hell.
My heart clenches at the sight of his injuries.
There’s blood along his arms and down his cheek, and he’s limping.
I wonder how many dead Brood demons are littered around these docks.
The thought brings a sick grin to my face.
I move toward him—not so much a run as Reid instructed, but more of a weak, broken stumble.
My daggers are still strapped to my body, and I brandish them, even as my hands shake and my vision blurs.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Driscoll take in the mayhem and bolt from the warehouse just as a swarm of Broods rush in.
“Reid,” Finn says with the familiarity of an old boss. “About time you showed up.”
But Reid ignores him, sinking his claws masterfully into another henchman’s chest. The demon wheezes out a final breath before falling to the ground in a puff of ash.
Reid is left standing over him, the demon’s heart impaled on his claws.
He glares at Finn as he crushes the creature’s still-beating organ and lets it fall to the ground with a wet squelch. “Your father is not going to kill her.”
He’s strong. Stronger than any demon who doesn’t take souls has any right to be.
I almost wonder if something has changed—he shouldn’t be this strong without human souls powering him.
But I can’t think of that right now. Not when more and more Broods are prowling into the warehouse to protect the heir.
“Reid,” I rasp. He cannot fight them all.
“I told you to go,” he commands, his brutal eyes still pinned on Finn as he fights through a cloud of Brood henchmen.
They’re coming for me now too. I back away slowly, putting distance between myself and two snarling demons. “I’m not leaving you.”
Reid finally turns to look at me, and sorrow lays itself bare in his eyes as he takes me in. “Huntress…” he breathes, so low only I can hear it. “It’s okay. It’s time I pay for my sins.”
My heart lurches for him. I want to hold his clawed hands, to kiss the ravaged skin of his arms, to stitch the gash along his cheek.
Finn frowns at us both. More pitying than anything. “Even if she runs”—his eyes rove over me—“in that shape, she won’t get far.”
When Finn takes a tentative step closer, Reid’s menacing horns sprout from his head, curling back. “Viv!” he roars. “Get the fuck out of here!”
And I don’t want to leave him—I can’t leave him. If I do, he will die. I’m sure of it.
But Penny’s trapped in a shipping crate a few feet away.
And Driscoll has run off, which means he’s either gathering more backup or finishing off his blond loose end.
If I stay and these demons bring me to the High Thane, he’ll kill me and harness the power churning beneath my skin, and so many more will suffer.
So, for the first time in all the times he’s begged me to let him fight alone, I listen to Reid. I take off running before the guilt can hold me back.
But I do turn and get one final look at him: blood drying under his nose, bruises blooming on his strong, muscled body.
A body that held me so closely just this morning when I woke from that nightmare.
This…this is the real nightmare. Leaving him like this.
Watching him barely hold off the High Thane’s son and all these men for me.
For Penny. Their claws slashing through his skin.
Tearing at him. Piercing. And Reid—taking blow after blow.
Tears crest in my eyes at the sounds of his pain echoing through the warehouse.
They only fade as my feet slam outside on slats of sea-weathered wood.
I don’t allow myself to think of what they’ll do to him when he falls.
Not if but when. A demon who’s left the Brood to teach hunters?
Caught in the teeth of a sadist like Finn?
Death would be a mercy. My stomach rises into my throat.
That and the iron-rich taste of blood. I swallow and keep fucking running.
When I reach the shipping crate, the door’s already been wrenched open.
Shit, shit, shit—
Inside, I find Driscoll, knife raised, inching toward a sobbing Penny.
“Edgar!” I shout.
He whirls on me, face gray and bleeding. Casting that spell has drained him. “You’re as irritating as your whistleblowing father was, you know that?”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I bite out, launching myself at him.
The two of us go flying. Pain sings in my blistered back and along the side of my head.
Driscoll lands one punch in my stomach, and I roll to the side before I can absorb another. All I can hear are Penny’s muffled cries and Edgar’s grunts as he begins to mutter the words of a spell. The crate shakes with the force of his brewing magic—
But I’m faster.
My daggers fly out, and I land one square in his back before he can finish the words. He shouts in agony and collapses to the floor. I kneel over him with my other dagger raised, snarling and dizzy with pain of my own.
Before I can bring it down, he spits, “You need me, Viv. To get that out of you.”
He’s right, of course. I don’t need to strain to remember the rest of Peter’s lesson from that day in the courtyard.
I’ve thought of it plenty in the weeks since.
The syrabraxa can only be removed by the same witch who cast it in the first place.
If I have any hope of not being the most valuable pawn in a cataclysmic battle for the survival of the mortal plane, I need Driscoll to remove the syrabraxa that’s been welded to my spine.
And maybe with it, he’ll take my hunter’s gene too.
It’s shameful.
Rotten and darker than the killer inside me. How I want so desperately to be free of my bloodlust, and my anger, and my otherness. To be normal and pleasant and happy. The daughter my mom always envisioned. The friend Penny deserves. That photographer on a date with a planetarium expert.
And I won’t get this chance again…Here, gurgling blood beneath me, is the man who killed my father, the only person alive who can ever set me free.
I study Driscoll’s hefty, twitching frame and the tension coiled in his square jaw.
And maybe in the deepest, truest corners of my heart I debate it.
I almost let this man—who’s abused his sworn duty as a protector of students, who murdered my dad—live for my own selfish, cowardly gain.
So he can remove this spell from me and, with it, all my hunter abilities, instincts, and duties.
But then I hear Penny’s sniffling, muffled cries. I think of all the lives I’ve saved. My friends, strangers, that mom on the subway. I think of what Reid told me. How it’s a privilege and an honor to hunt. And that it’s about time I make peace with who I am.
We take care of people.
My heart cracks wide open. My eyes burn.
“This is for my dad,” I say before I plunge my dagger into Edgar Driscoll’s heart.
He gurgles and sputters, first in fury, then in fear. I move to climb off him when his meaty hand grasps my shirt, pulling me back.
“You’re a fool.” Blood coats his teeth and dribbles from the side of his mouth. “Reid—” He hacks a wet cough.
“Reid what?”
“He’s…He’s not—” And then his eyes fade from furious to nothing at all.
My breathing is tight as I scramble off him. There’s no time for deathbed mind games right now. He lived a liar and died as one too. I hurtle over to Penny without a second thought.