Chapter 40
ISAAC
It happened quickly, Tony as Fake Me leaping over the garden wall of Blood House, crushing and kicking over the plastic flamingos.
I prayed those vampires were using some of their emergency escape routes to get away from here. If they’d been woken up by the noise on the street, of course.
Please be awake!
The solar shadows joined their master in the garden, gathering around him.
“Incubate!” Tony said, clapping out the magic.
The figures joined me in the dark, losing their shape. Nothing but flickering fireflies of solar light hovering around me.
Ugh. Now what?
“Time to burn,” Tony said, his voice bouncing in the darkness around me.
The fireflies glimmered in response.
He cast a spell to break the door down, calling, “Open!”
The door flew off its hinges, crashing down the hallway beyond.
Dim lights shone in sconces on blood-red walls, the shadows around the edges of the glow looking alive.
Goosebumps prickled up my arms, but Tony stomped across the mahogany floor without a care in the world.
A vampire leaped from an open door on the right, crashing into him. He slammed into the wall, knocking a painting off its hook, the vampire moving so quickly she had her fangs buried in his neck within seconds.
Make that my neck. And I felt nothing, sealed away from all physical sensation.
Others arrived, moving around us, muttering, too many to count.
“Your turn!” he cried. “Your turn!”
Who was he shouting at? Me? He could get fucked.
“I’ll just watch, thanks,” I retorted.
The vampires closed in, and for a moment I thought they’d drain him dry enough to give me my body back. Then I’d take the lead and make this right.
Only, he shouted, “Your turn!” again, and clapped out the white magic in his hands.
Oh. Shit.
A surge of buzzing power shot through me, the darkness of my prison bathed in daylight. The fireflies swirled around me, picking up speed until they conjured a violent wind.
“Tony!” I roared, unable to do anything but stand here in the spinning gale, this prison crumbling around me.
“Make me proud, babe!” he bellowed.
I returned to my body completely, my hands ablaze with golden fire. Pain scratched at my neck, and I felt blood running from the vampire bite.
“Kill him!” a voice hissed.
The vampires were still there, keeping their distance, none of them attacking on account of the pool of sunlight around me.
My turn, I thought. This is my turn.
Shit. That wasn’t me. Not really. Whatever Tony had done to me still held the reins and the whip.
Our turn, many voices spoke, my ears aching as if enduring too much noise. Release us. Release us and let us burn as we should.
“I won’t let you,” I rebutted, sweat pouring down my face.
Every inch of me was tight and throbbing with resistance.
A real strain on everything, a battle I was losing as the figures inside me fidgeted, desperate for release, longing to be out there to burn, burn, burn.
They would kill every vampire in this house, making Tony’s wishes come true.
He was right. It wasn’t easy to kill a vampire. Sunlight did it, as did cutting off their head with a silver blade, or by setting them on fire. Oh, and you could make them sick with garlic, which always seemed weird to me.
But they were cunning, clever enough to live their lives safely. And why kill them? They never bothered anyone and didn’t drink blood they weren’t allowed to drink. Probably the safest race in the world, barring a few incidents back in ancient times. But things were wilder in general back then.
Much wilder, although this current timeline was giving them a run for their money.
“Get out…get out of here…” I warned the vampires. “It’s not…it’s not safe.”
Shania appeared then, arriving in her famous red pantsuit, her hair raven-black, striking against the luminous white glow of her skin.
“Leave this house,” she demanded, her vampires filing out around her.
“Be careful, mistress,” a man warned. “He is The Sun.”
“I know who he is.” She spoke in her famous lascivious tone which sounded like she was about to indulge in some dirty talk.
“I don’t…I don’t want to hurt you…” I managed, the solar fuckers swelling, pressing against the confines of my internal barriers.
I couldn’t hold on for much longer.
Hurt her, the shadows whispered. Burn the things of the night away. You are the day. We are the day.
Fuck this. If I could get outside and away from this house, maybe—
The shadows crashed harder into my barriers this time, almost breaking through.
Time was running out.
“Run!” I bellowed. “Run before…before it’s too late.”
Shania’s dark eyes widened, and she let out a mighty roar. “This is my house! I will not be chased out by anyone!”
“Please…” I tried, throat a pit of agony.
But she was having none of it, the pride rife in this vamp. “For three-hundred years I have ruled this house. And I will do so for another three-hundred.”
That long, eh? But there’d be no ruling anything in this life if she didn’t swallow her pride and haul ass.
Let her stay and let us out!
Shania moved toward me. “I’ll kill you before you hurt anyone here.”
Why wouldn’t she just listen to me? Clearly, seeing three centuries pass by did not a modest vampire make.
All I could do was move backward and try to get outside.
Let us out! the voices roared.
I clutched my head against the rise in sound, the heat in my hands intensifying, as if they were being held too close to a fire.
Our turn! Our turn! Our turn! We are pure now! We are able now!
To kill them all!
I staggered back, doing my best to cast them out, to do anything but be Tony’s puppet.
But resistance really was futile in this fucked-up situation.
These things got the better of me, kicking every wall down, seeping out into the real world.
The pool of light expanded, the flames in my hands spreading up my arms.
What a plan Tony had concocted. Filter these things through me to become pure solar power, unleash them upon a vampire house, and make me the face of murder.
How amazing.
Not.
“Die, witch!” Shania roared.
The solar shadows tore out of me, killing her first. In a flash of light, her body collapsed into a pile of ash as quickly as a tissue paper meeting a log fire.
The screaming started, the solar figures shooting through the house, choking the air with vampire ash and death, chasing the darkness away.
“No…” I managed. “Please…please stop.”
It didn’t stop until the light vanished and a slimy presence slid out of me, hitting the floor with a thud. A fizzing lump of golden jelly burning a hole through the floorboards, disappearing into the basement shortly after.
Gold.
Gold like his tooth.
I collapsed into the wall, nothing but silence around me. No signs of life, only the silence of a freshly made tomb. That’s what this house was now, one big red graveyard created by me.
They’re all dead.
I slid down the wall, my chest clogged with dust and distress.
This vampire clan had survived so much, only to be undone by me. My power. Even if I wasn’t in control, my magic ended them. And that came with the worst kind of skewering guilt I’d ever experienced. As if a rusty pole had been dipped in acid, then driven through my body.
I killed them…
I killed them…
A cloud of crimson dust appeared, bobbing in the air, glittering like a million tiny rubies.
I rubbed my eyes. Was it Shania’s essence? That was the first thing I thought, seeing as Tony wanted it.
Two beams of white light whizzed past me, piercing the cloud, locking it in place. It stopped moving as if paused by a remote.
I got to my feet, ducking under the beams to press myself against the wall. My ears were ringing, and my eyes sore from the dust in the air. But I powered through, determined to get into the fresh air and find Tony.
Cut off his head, cut off this bullshit.
Carefully, I slid toward the front door, body wracked with the pangs of guilt and fury. Adrenaline guided me across the wall, determination to kill my ex a real fire under my arse.
I killed them…
Crimson light flooded the white beams, flowing through them like blood, heading outside. The chanting started then.
I ducked under the beams again when I reached the door, moving into the garden of destroyed flamingos. I glanced at Tony, who watched me with a smirk on his face.
The real him now, no more other version.
This hurt my head and fucked me off! The sooner he was dead, the better.
His coven formed a line outside the house, the beams coming from the two crystals Tony held in the air. The others pressed theirs to their heads, chanting a word repeatedly.
There must have been at least twenty of them.
“Become, become, become.”
The redness in the beams inched closer to him. Shania’s essence almost inside him.
New magic. He’d really created a new form of magic by abusing, and eating, the Hecate Crystals. I didn’t want to believe it, but here was the reality staring me in the face.
By Hecate. What a horrible abomination.
“This is it,” Tony said, offering me a massive grin.
His gold tooth was gone. It’d clearly been a magical tool to infect me with his new brand of power, it’s remains now fizzing in the basement of Blood House.
What else are you capable of?
I went to throw out my Defensive Sunshine, but Ollie arrived, firing his gun twice in quick succession, destroying the crystals in Tony’s hands.
They exploded in a burst of white mist. The beams began flickering, totally unstable.
That’s what I liked to see.
Tony wailed, spinning with a face full of rage.
“Freeze!” Ollie yelled, clapping out his witchcop spell.
But the spell bounced off Tony, who summoned magic to his hands in retaliation.
“You’ll pay for—”
The beams snapped like a thousand branches, the sound hurting my ears. Shania’s essence reformed into a cloud, then shot forward, making a beeline straight for Ollie.
Oh, shit!
Before he could dodge it, the crimson cloud slammed into him, sending him onto his back and sliding across the road.
“Ollie!” I cried, leaping over the garden wall.
The witches didn’t grab for me, only watched me run to him. Panic pulsated within me, one major fear taking me over, donging like a warning bell.
Vampire.
Ollie will become a vampire.
And it was still daylight.
“No!” I screamed, smoke rising from his body. “No!”
He’ll burn.
Ollie will burn because of me.
“Isaac!” Tony roared.
I ignored him, throwing myself over Ollie to shield him from The Sun.
You are The Sun and you’ve killed him.
My heart threatened to stop, my world collapsing around me.
Ollie couldn’t die like this.
We couldn’t end at the beginning. That wasn’t fair.
But his skin began to blister, embers forming around the edges of his lovely face.
“Ollie, please…”
“Get away,” he whispered, pain woven into his voice. “Get away…”
“I can’t… I can’t…”
He wasn’t going up as quickly as Shania and her clan. This was good. I could work with this and make things right and stop him from leaving my life.
Okay. So what now?
“Isaac!”
My head snapped round to find Tony standing a few feet away.
“Fuck you!” I screamed, tears breaking free, running hot down my cheeks.
“Not until I take what’s mine,” the prick countered. “If you’d just let me perform the ritual, we wouldn’t have this problem, would we? Essences are tricky, but I’ll fix it.” A witch tossed him a crystal, a beam shooting from its tip and landing on Ollie’s forehead.
I swatted at the thing, getting nowhere. The embers spread across Ollie’s face, his eyes losing their luster, so much smoke billowing from his body.
“Don’t go,” I pleaded, ready to heal him, but unsure if my touch would accelerate the burning.
Why did I have to be The Sun? Why not The Moon or something made from the night and coolness? Anything to make this stop, to protect him from the march of death.
The beam of light flooded red again, the essence of the vampire leeched from Ollie, passing into Tony. I watched. I held back and I watched as Tony’s eyes flooded crimson, as fangs appeared in his mouth.
“Yes!” he cried. “Watch me become!”
Using my aura lenses, I saw the purple glow of vampiric aura form around the other colors.
Four down, a fae and a goblin to go.
“I am becoming!” Tony bellowed.
“Behold him!” the coven thundered. “Behold him!”
Every Hecate Crystal exploded, unleashing an army of shades into the street.