Chapter 41
Chapter forty-one
Kai
Pain clogs my throat. Flays my skin with rusted blades.
The world fades in and out.
I’m floating, I just don’t know how.
Maybe I’ve always floated…
There’s a sound and, disoriented, I reach for it—grasping for anything familiar.
“You will be okay.” A voice comes from somewhere in the fog. Soft. Unwavering. Ramy? “Vidar promised me.”
“You’re a fucking badass, Kai, alright? And you’re coming home!” Golden, I realise, and he’s draping something over my shoulders.
They may say something else. I try to sieve through the stomach-churning confusion and nerve-searing pain, yet shapes melt and sound loses meaning, as I continue to float towards a dark sky.
There’s a slam. A roar. The smell of chemicals and metal. I don’t bother to decipher any of it, too focused on inhaling something cold and perfect.
I must black out. The next thing I’m aware of is bright colours flashing behind my eyes.
A painting?
My mouth stretches into a smile, and trembling, I reach for the twisted blues and swirling yellows, towards a sky that’s become The Starry Night. So pretty, I want to touch it.
My fingers meet something solid, clear, and I make a distressed sound.
Why can’t I touch the painting?
“It’s okay, little prince. I’ve got you.”
I blink. Once. Twice.
Vidar.
The painting fades, replaced by a road whizzing by, framed by yellow street lights. The rich smell of leather finds me, as well as the smooth black interior of a car. I jostle where I’m held on Vidar’s lap, the car going well over the speed limit.
Slowly, Summer’s blonde head and fluffy purple coat come into focus from the passenger seat. She’s shouting directions to Lucero, who follows them with lightning-fast precision. The tyres screech as we speed through the night.
A sudden burning races up my hands as if I dipped them in lava, and I shoot my fuzzy gaze down to find the source, only to recoil at the sight.
“What’s happening to me?” I croak out, pleading to anyone who’ll listen.
White scars, thick as rope, coil out from under my T-shirt sleeves and twist around my arms, wrists, and shaking hands.
My skin is inflamed, my fingers bulging around the nails like coins sinking into wet clay.
I can’t see the rest of my body, but a sickening fear constricts my stomach at the thought of where else the infection has spread.
Or how deep?
“Summer! The transformation is happening too fast!” Vidar shouts, his deep voice edged with hysteria.
Summer whips around, clinging to her headrest so she isn’t thrown into the door when Lucero makes a sharp turn. She hisses out a curse, unsnaps her seatbelt and crawls into the back seat.
Lucero takes another turn, sending Summer’s face colliding into my legs, and I let out a pained, weak groan.
“Watch it!” she snaps just as Vidar yells, ‘Careful!’, and hoists herself into a sitting position.
“I can either be fast or careful,” Lucero bites.
Summer shifts her focus to my horrifying hands, her shoulders trembling. “Fuck. Fuck. FUCK!”
“T-that bad?” I whimper.
“Fix him!” Vidar growls.
“Do I look like a damn healer?” my shadow mage friend spits. “We’ve gotta get his soul back in his body, it’s the only way.”
Vidar’s hold tightens around me. “How long does he have?”
Summer’s red-rimmed eyes lock onto mine.
Her throat bobs, as if she doesn’t say anything, then it won’t happen. But the deadly truth is written in the tears that begin to gather in her eyes. “This wasn’t supposed to happen so quickly…”
Vidar must see the same thing. In the next second, he’s drawing his elbow back, then slamming it into the door with such unimaginable force that the metal flings off like a spat-out piece of gum.
Lucero swears loudly, Summer shrieks as a blast of air whips her blonde locks around her face and throws her arms around a headrest, clinging for dear life.
Somewhere far behind us, the torn door screeches against the road.
Vidar lunges out of the car, me in his arms, and I don’t even have enough time to be terrified as we quickly approach the asphalt.
Instead of becoming paste, Vidar lands like a predator on two feet—then springs forward into a sprint.
I suck in a sharp breath the second before the world becomes a blur, Vidar reaching speeds only a vampire could achieve. He keeps my head tucked close to his chest, and I expect to hear his heart beating like a rabbit. Instead, it’s slow, even. Deadly calm.
Without any warning, we come to a complete stop, my stomach lurching into my raw throat.
“Rurik! Sen!” Vidar calls.
Rurik rushes over from a sagging two-storey house. “Holy shit, he looks bad.”
“GET. THE. DOOR. OPEN!”
“On it.” Sen slams his foot into the door. It shakes but holds.
From the boarded-up windows and tiles missing from the pointed roof, the place looks abandoned. A glance to my left and right, and the whole neighbourhood appears banged up and forgotten.
A whoosh of movement disturbs the air next to us, and I turn to see Lucero placing a wobbling Summer on her feet.
“It’s going to be okay,” Vidar says more to himself than me. Hard, unrelenting gaze glaring down the house like he would an enemy.
I swallow back the pain to speak, only to have to swallow again when the words won’t form. “V-Vidar…”
He looks down, and our gazes lock. His beautiful grey eyes highlighting his fear and possession, and a love so deep I could drown in it.
“Vidar, if something happens to me, you have to promise you’ll not do anything stupid—”
“You will live,” he growls between clenched fangs. His jaw at a hard, stubborn angle. “There is no other choice.”
I go to say more, but he gently sits me on the ground.
“I won’t hear anymore of it.” And then he’s storming towards the door that Sen is still kicking, the picture of a warrior ready to tear down anything in his way.
I want to live, desperately. But as I watch Vidar throw his hulking body against the door, the only thing I’m scared about is what he’ll do if I don’t.
“Summer!” Vidar barks. “Get this door open!”
Summer rushes over, her purple coat flying in the wind as if she’s transformed into an exotic bird. More tears spill down my face from the pain, but even through it, a rush of affection sweeps over me as I watch the people I care about—even Sen, who I’ve only just met—try to save me.
“Emma’s magically sealed this place down,” Summer snaps, kicking the door for good measure.
“I’ve seen you teleport before,” Lucero replies.
Summer’s already shaking her head. “I need to be able to see or know where I’m going.”
“This is fucking pointless!” Vidar roars, slamming himself again and again at the single piece of wood keeping him out. Bellowing threats at Emma to come out.
The sound hits me when I try to move—leather. In the car, I thought it was the seats. But it was me, and through the fog of my memories, I hear Golden’s voice as clear as a bell. He was the one who put my leather jacket on me, after all.
“Heaving myself up, I shuffle my protesting body forward. These disgusting white scars burning me from within.
Nah, screw that.
I’m fire, not this bullshit. Not Emma, the blood mages, or anything else.
‘You’re a fucking badass, Kai.’
“Hell yeah, I am.”
“Kai?” Vidar sounds terrified as the group turns to look at me, and I raise my hands.
The people I love are trying hard to save me, and I gotta do my bit, too.
Magic courses through me from my jacket. Not a trickle, the whole goddamn river. “Back up.”
They scramble away, Vidar coming around me as I suck in air until my lungs scream. The stream of magic is a current rushing to my horribly twisted hands—and I swear my jacket glows—as a surge of blazing purple flames bursts free, slamming against the wall like a rushing tide.
The front of the house catches fire.
Red brick becomes a blinding white, and wood crumbles into ash, my pain along with it. In this moment, I’m pure fucking power.
All too soon, my magic tapers off, the flames dying into nothing. But…there’s no normal fire. Not even a red ember, only wispy smoke.
“You’re amazing, Kai,” Vidar says as he catches me before I can fall. The pain seeping back in. “Let’s go.”
Vidar hauls me up to carry me bridal style. Sen and Rurik are the first to step into the wreckage. Lucero next, then Vidar and me, with Summer coming at our rear.
The inside is a disaster, but from the eaten-away wallpaper and brown, matted carpet, it’s been this way long before we arrived. Within the smoggy darkness that seems to hover like fog, there is a stench that invades my nose and has bile climbing up my throat.
“What the hell is that?” I gag.
“I’ve smelt some bad shit in my life,” Sen comments, moving like a panther down the hallway. “But this isn’t normal blood magic.”
It’s like we’ve waded into a chunky, rotted meat soup. The damp, cloying air thick enough to assault my taste buds.
“Keep focus,” Vidar orders, voice low. “Emma could’ve set traps.”
Vidar’s offspring fan out, clearing each of the rooms downstairs. Yet even with my normal senses, I can tell that the stairs—where the smell has coalesced into a reeking miasma—is where we’ll find our blood mage.
“What type of magic do you suspect we’re walking into, Summer?” Lucero glares into the darkness leading to the second floor.
“I…” Summer shoots me a worried glance, then looks back to the vampires. “I have no idea. Lotta magic, that’s for sure. But we don’t have time to be careful.”
Sen, Lucero and Rurik are the first up the creaking, rickety stairs. Vidar and me next, Summer at our backs.
Like before, the vampires clear the two bedrooms and the single bathroom.
Then every pair of eyes fix on the narrow hallway, leading to a white door—oddly pristine given the condition of the house. Except for a single bloody handprint.
Sen levels a look at Lucero and Rurik, an unspoken order and from the hard set of his jaw, one expected to be followed. To my surprise, they move aside to allow Sen to slink ahead on silent feet.
Lucero once said that in a vampire family, age determines hierarchy, so with me in Vidar’s arms, his eldest offspring is currently in charge.
The hallway squeezes us as we step closer, shoulders bumping, and the only sound is my ragged breathing. No bugs scuttle by, no webs clog the corners. Yet the walls are…
Moist.
I shudder.
It feels as if we’ve been swallowed and forced down the diseased throat of some great beast, heading toward its belly.
Once we’re close, Vidar sits me on the dusty carpet, my back to the sogging wall. “Stay here, and if anything happens, use your fire.”
He scans my face, as if committing my features to memory, before standing to shoulder past his offspring to the front.
My vampire. My warrior. My soulmate.
Summer stops at my side, her hand steady on my shoulder, protective as a guard dog.
“I’m sorry this is happening to you,” she whispers, so softly that even in the silence, I almost miss it.
“But you’re going to make it out, Kai. If it’s the last thing I do, you’re gonna make it.
” Her words are forged from steel, her promise something even stronger, and despite my worry and pain, I believe her.
Without another word, Vidar wraps his long fingers around an old brass doorknob— and waits. Head tilted, listening for any signs of life.
My body taut as a wire, I wait for an attack. Emma might be weak, but she’s got two powerful spellbooks now.
Summer’s grip tightens.
Rurik’s fingers twitch.
The door swings open, hitting the wall with a bang, shattering the silence, and the vampires race in with fangs out. Moving like deadly shadows.
I expect screaming, the noise of a fight. Blood.
What I don’t expect is for Rurik to stumble back, his shoulder hitting the doorframe. “What the fuck…” he rasps.
Sen swears in Japanese.
“What is this?” Vidar snarls.
Confused, I struggle to stand with Summer’s help and within a faded pink bedroom, sits Emma.
Or what used to be her, that is.
She’s slouched in a filthy bed, covered in blood, vomit and other splattered bodily fluids. Her once full body is skeletal, cheeks gaunt, and eyes sunken. Like she’s been starved for years, not days.
Almost every inch of her is covered in black boils, leaking a viscous yellow goo.
The two spellbooks—one being the First Tome—are discarded on the floor as if she threw them away in anger.
“P-please…” Emma reaches out a bony arm, her wet voice pleading. Desperate. “Help me…”
“Vidar?” Lucero’s head snaps to his Maker. “What the fuck happened to her?”
“It doesn't matter,” Vidar growls, steeling himself. “Emma, give Kai his soul back!”
“T-take it,” she creaks, throat swelling like a bloated toad. “Please, ta-take it from me…t…the thing h-has poisoned me.”
Emma waves listlessly to herself, and I notice there’s a small centre of her chest that has no boils, glowing a faint purple.
“It's because Kai is half-demon,” Summer says, voice edged with impatience. Emma’s emaciated jaw drops as realisation crystallises in her dark eyes. “And demon blood—or soul, in this case—is poisonous to mages.”
A cool sting slides across my neck. My gaze travels down. Confused, I see an obsidian blade gripped in Summer’s ringed hand.
Vidar’s head snaps to us, eyes growing in fear.
“Summer?” I whisper.
She sighs, sounding resigned. The blade not moving an inch.
“I really wish you had given me the spellbook, Kai,” my friend says.