Eight
I scream in rage as Aleric phases away, leaving me to plummet towards the earth. I can’t open my eyes. The wind is ripping across my body. I won’t survive a fall from this height. I am helpless to stop it.
As I tumble out of control, I cup a hand over my chest and protect that little smear. It’s all that remains of my little girl. If I’m to die, I will die with her in my arms.
I wish I could hold Micha one last time.
Wish I could save her from whatever hel she’s in.
Wish I’d never panicked at the thought of losing Khalid or her to my enemy. I should have trusted her. Despite all the evidence, I should’ve believed in her like she did me.
Regret fills me as I rage against an entity I can’t defeat. The night sky swallows my screams of vengeance without a care. Gravity pulls me down.
Down.
Down.
Blinded by the wind, I can’t see when death is coming, so I’m anticipating it every second. But beneath my anger, I’m holding on to a silver lining: maybe I can find Bambi in the Underworld. Maybe I can be the father to her I never got to be.
I hit the ground feet first.
My bones break all the way up from my toes to my hips. Shattered fragments sever veins and arteries. The knives I always keep on me stab and slice into my flesh. Broken ribs pierce my lungs. My spine gets crushed in multiple places. My aorta snaps free, and a reaper of death comes for me.
But then she stops.
Backtracks.
Hesitates on the edge of my vision, her smoky wings spread out, her glowing green scythe in her hand. Various souls cling to it in shapeless blobs. One end of them is tethered to her blade by a fading wisp; the other end’s a face screaming in rage – or perhaps agony. She is a keres, and her kind comes for those who’ve died a brutal death, those with unfinished business. No one she takes ever wishes to go.
Her long green hair, matted with blood, hangs over her face, and she stares at me with cruel black eyes between the strands. More blood stains her clothes, and she smiles at me, each tooth long, thin, and sharp. Two rows of poisonous needles.
“Not yet it seems,”
she coos, her words both a roar and a whisper. As her power hits me, she vanishes.
Pain explodes through me.
My eyes snap open.
Aleric is shoving a woman I don’t know into my face. Her throat has been slit, and her head’s been pulled back. Blood gushes from her wound, filling my mouth, and the Craving hits me full force.
I try to resist, only wanting to feed from my wife, but I’m not just starving now. I’m dying, and the bloodlust inside of me has already had a taste. It will not be denied.
And still I fight it.
The vampire above me rolls his eyes as he pulls the dying girl off me. “Stop being a child,”
he says as he drops her to the ground.
He grabs my jaw and snaps it hard to the right. It breaks with a loud crack!
“Aleric!”
a woman shouts.
“He’s fine.”
Grinning, he grabs my chin. “Fight me now, asshole.” Forcing my mouth up and down, he puts on a stupid accent. “I am Varius, and I have a small penis. I got it from my father.”
“I swear if you don’t –”
Ignoring her, he looks down at his crotch in surprise. He gasps, then shouts, “Who the fuck cut off my dick?”
“I’m fucking about to,”
a man mutters.
“I’ll hold him down.”
“Just say the word.”
“Aleric.”
Short. Clipped. A fucking warning growl.
Laughing, Aleric shakes his head. “I’m fucking hilarious, and no one gets it,”
he says before leaning down to grab the girl again.
“Or did you get the joke?”
he asks as he shoves her to my lips. “When I said you have a small penis that you got from your father,” he explains cheerfully, “it sounded like you inherited it, right?”
I imagine ripping his voice box out even through the onset of the Craving.
“But the joke was you cut it off me. You got my dick. Get it now?”
He laughs as my body shakes.
I try to resist for a moment longer, but the blood is in my mouth. I can’t resist with my broken jaw, and with a cry of defeat, I start swallowing the woman’s blood down in great big gulps. I clasp my hand over my chest, protecting Bambi from her filth as it runs down my chin and neck. I growl in both disgust and anger, but I don’t stop drinking.
Can’t.
My rage claws beneath my skin almost as fiercely as the Craving does at my throat. I scream at my body to move, to shove her away, but I’m trapped in this broken shell.
Though even when it starts to heal, the blood pushing magic through my veins, the bloodlust doesn’t let me stop.
After I drain her dry, I still want more.
Need more.
Feeling watched by other predators, I glance around as I bare my teeth. Mother, Khalid, Maddox, Ezriel, and Leno are all spread out around me in a large circle. A pack of hyenas waiting for their turn to eat. I growl, a lion standing over a kill.
“If he dies –”
Mother starts.
“I know, I know,”
Aleric says as he pulls my meal away. I want to grab her and hold her to my lips, but the only hand that’s working is the one protecting Bambi. My fingers dig into my chest, shielding her, choosing her above all else.
“You’ll chain me to your bed and spank me like a bad, bad boy,”
Aleric says as he tosses the body aside. Then he winks at me and whispers, “Ya know, not gonna lie, I kinda wanna let you die now.”
“Aleric,”
Mother growls.
He grins as he gestures to one of the women sitting in a line at his feet. They’re bloodbanks, nothing but property, and they know better than to run. The first woman stands, her blue eyes glazed with whatever drug she’s shot up with, and stumbles over to us. She doesn’t react at all when he stabs her throat with his knife and then shoves her in my face. Perhaps, for her, this is a mercy.
I drink with less resistance now, but I don’t sink my fangs into her throat.
She isn’t Micha.
Any intimacy isn’t right.
When she’s nothing but an empty husk, he grabs another for me to drink. Then another and another.
My body slowly heals.
The Craving slowly dies.
But the agony doesn’t wane.
It fucking amplifies.
With a broken scream, I jump to my feet. The fog in my brain has lifted, and I can finally feel my wife through our blood bond. She’s north. Somewhere far away. A part of me knows I should head for the cars, but I can’t bear to detour long enough to find the keys and get an engine running. She needs me now.
I can feel her dying.
She’s dying, and it’s all my fault.
“Var–”
Ezriel yelps, snapping my attention back to my surroundings.
Shit.
I’m a split second away from barreling into him.
I don’t have time to stop. I don’t even have time to pivot around him. All I can do is duck my shoulder and slam into his. A loud crack resonates from his body as he goes flying. A hit like that normally wouldn’t hurt him, but I’m running at hybrid speed, desperate to reach my wife.
I can feel her terror of pain, her fear that she’ll never be saved, that she will die in Antonio’s compound. I can’t lose her.
I won’t.
“Varius!”
Khalid says, his voice just loud enough for me to hear him.
Danger flares across my neck, and I twist my head to the right. Mother is tending to Ezriel, bathing his chest in a white light as he struggles to breathe. Beside them Khalid raises the reaper mask to his face – a black skull with four golden horns at the top and a death rune on its forehead. His mien is one of emotionless indifference. In his right hand, his only hand, is a double-edged scythe, a cursed tool. One cut from it, no matter how small, will cause me to bleed out.
If I want to escape, I’m going to have to kill him.
Pain squeezes in my chest, but the irony of this isn’t lost on me: how I’m forced to hurt him now in order to save my wife. I love him, and he’s the only person I trust, the only one I confide in. But if it’s between him or Micha...
Pivoting towards him, I grab a knife.
Only –
Some fucker removed them all while I was out.
Shit.
I’m just going to have to rely on my speed. My increased strength. If I can take the scythe from him, I might actually stand a chance.
I take a step towards him, and a thousand blades of grass shoot up from the ground. They grow rapidly, crawling up my waist, wrapping around me, and slicing me apart with their sharp edges. A thousand cuts. A thousand more. I tear the strands off me, but they’re instantly replaced by fresh shoots. Still, I keep fighting, knowing Leno can’t keep this up for long. The ground is already half-dead from whatever Antonio did to it, so he’s pulling on nature from a hundred yards away. That’s a massive drain on his body, and I’m recently fed. But the danger isn’t coming from the grass.
The fucking reaper is stalking towards me, and he’ll get here long before I can break free.
Leno whistles three sharp notes of different pitches, and Krypto comes tearing across the yard towards me. I look at him dryly. It’s such a fucking ridiculous thing to do – to get his dog to attack me too, that I can’t help myself. Useless overkill is just so Leno.
But he does something that makes me still completely.
Krypto stops in front of me, his hackles raised, his teeth bared, and growling low. Only, he’s isn’t facing me.
He’s facing Khalid.
My brother will kill without mercy; when he dons that mask, there is no pleading with him. No begging. Nothing will save you. But there are two things that will cause him to hesitate.
His kira.
And an animal standing in the way.
In over a decade of being a reaper, Khalid has only killed one creature. It was an accident, but it still haunts him.
My head jerks to Leno, but he doesn’t see me, his eyes on Khalid. My chest burns with shock and disbelief. He put his own dog on the line – his best friend.
Why would he do that...?
More movement snags my attention, and I turn to see Maddox joining the mutt in front of me. “Come on, Khalid. Don’t do this.”
“Move, Maddox,”
he says softly. “He’s lost to the Craving. We can’t save him.”
Ezriel joins the two in front of me. He breathes out low, like he would rather be anywhere else, like he thinks it’s the worst idea ever to stand against the reaper.
But he’s there.
And my throat closes a little bit more.
“He’s our brother, you dick cheese,”
Maddox snaps.
“Personally, I would’ve said he isn’t lost to the Craving. He’s just acting like a little bitch, like your dad did when Sau went missing,”
Aleric pipes in cheerfully.
Everyone stills at his words.
Then slowly, they turn to face him.
“But what do I know?”
he continues. “As your MILF so often points out, I should shut up more.”
“I’m going to cut out your tongue,”
Mother vows.
He turns to her and purrs, “If you want my tongue, love, all you have to do is sit on my face.”
She takes a step towards him, a promise of hel in her eyes, but then she pivots towards me.
“Don’t release him, Leno,” she says.
I lunge forward, snapping free of the grass, but more just sprouts up out of the fucking ground.
“Let me go,”
I snarl. “I need to get to Micha.”
“You need to rest. You go after her now, and you’ll get you and your brothers killed.”
“I’ll go alone.”
“You can’t stop them,”
she says at the same time as they say:
“The hel you will.”
“Are you fucking stupid?”
“I didn’t just risk my life for you to kill yourself.”
Khalid simply removes his mask and deposits his scythe back into his shadows. If he isn’t killing me, then he’s going to help me. He always does.
I clench my teeth. It’s on the edge of my tongue to tell her they are acceptable losses, but I bite it back. They’re words I don’t mean, born from the overwhelming anger and fear inside of me.
My chest burning, I rasp, “I can feel her. He’s killing her.”
My body trembles.
I can’t breathe.
I need to go to her.
I start to tear off more strands of grass, but then Mother places a hand over my chest, over Bambi, and I stop.
Shudder.
“We’ll save her, Varius,”
she says as she looks me in the eye. “But right now, you need to think rationally. Antonio doesn’t know you’ve bonded to her, so you have one chance to take him by surprise. If you go in half-cocked, he will kill you. He’s planned this for years.”
“Fuck off,”
I snap. “If she dies, you won’t even care.”
Her eyes don’t waver. “You know why I picked her?”
she asks. “Because she saves kids. Because there is nothing she would not risk or suffer through for those she loves. You get yourself killed, and you’ll make her feel like she’s survived for nothing. You’d be telling her that you think she is too weak to hold on long enough for you to make a plan. That her weakness is what got you killed.”
She lifts her hand from my chest, but her eyes don’t leave mine, and I can’t escape the truth within them. “I chose her, Varius, because she isn’t some damsel in distress. She’s a fighter. Your equal. Now fucking treat her as one.”
My lips tremble as I clench my fists. I want to swing at her.
To curse her out.
To release this utter need for violence.
But none of that will change the fact that she’s right.
I’m only going to have one chance to save Micha.
One.
If I fuck it up, I will lose her forever.
Antonio will find out we’re bonded, and he’ll kill her as a loose end. Can’t have me knowing exactly where he is.
Unless... I make it look like I found her through good old police work.
Pushing as much hope and love as I can down my bond to Micha, I give a small nod. I won’t let my emotions get my wife killed. Mother looks at Krypto, and the grass falls off me.
Maddox tries to hug-tackle me, but I shove him back. I glance away from him as my breath catches in a hard lump at my throat. My heart pounds so hard, it’s all I can hear. I tremble as I build up the courage to look down at the little girl he would’ve squished in his hug.
“He killed her,”
I say, swallowing hard to push out the words. I want them to know that when I go for Antonio, it won’t just be to save my wife. It’ll be to kill the fucker with the same amount of mercy as he showed our daughter.
“Who?”
Ez asks, but Maddox elbows him in the stomach, and his face instantly pales as it registers. “Shit… Varius…”
I ignore him as I take off my shirt. Slowly. Carefully.
Trying my best not to desecrate her body even further.
My eyes burn as I stare at the dark-red splodge lying on the cotton. She’s surrounded by the blood of all those I have fed on, but none of it touches her.
In that way at least, I protected her.
A poor fucking solace.
Rage pulses through my veins, helping me to focus past the pain.
“This is all he left me of her,”
I say as I lift my gaze to my four brothers and Mother. Aleric stands stiffly beside them. He knows he’s my father, knows this is his granddaughter he never got to meet.
She was our little girl.
Our firstborn.
Murdered at eighteen weeks.
We never even settled on a name for her. Micha wanted to call her Bambi. I offered up Rafiki as a joke.
A joke…
I made a fucking joke because I thought we would have time to come up with something that fit her perfectly.
My eyes land on Maddox – cold and dangerous.
He stiffens, knowing what I’m going to say.
But I don’t give a shit about his silent protest.
He hasn’t claimed her.
He hasn’t blood bonded with her.
Her life is mine.
“Get me Zita Garcia.”