Chapter 14 #2
She was woken up by a crash and the sound of breaking glass.
Instantly, she was on her feet, adrenaline rampaging through her system as she held a pistol aloft. She’d found it in a drawer in Raziel’s nightstand and put it in reach before lying down to sleep.
Searching for the source of the noise, she quickly found it. Her heart dropped.
It was Raziel.
He was half-collapsed onto the nightstand. The crash had been the lamp hitting the ground, the glass shade shattering on the old, lacquered wood floor.
Still shirtless, his skin was ashen and gray. She could count his ribs from the back. It was like he had… decayed, in the time she had been asleep on the sofa. She’d never seen a vampire starved for blood.
Now she wished she hadn’t.
“Raziel?” She crept closer to him, keeping the gun tight in her hand, but pointed downward.
He stood, slowly, as if it pained him. Head lowered, his dark hair, usually so smooth and perfect, was still stringy from the dried blood, serving as a veil to hide his face. Wavering on his feet, he swayed from side to side as if he were simply sleepwalking.
“Raziel…?” She kept her distance, some ten feet away, figuring that was probably how far he could jump at her if he attacked. She had dealt with deadly snakes in the Wild, and she had a pretty good instinct for how far a cornered animal could lash out when pressed.
Circling around slowly, she tried to see his face. His shoulders were curled. His hands limp at his sides, fingers occasionally twitching.
“Raziel, look at me.”
She shouldn’t have asked for that. She really, really shouldn’t have.
Because he listened. He lifted his head. And those crimson eyes were not the ones she knew. They were the eyes of a feral, mad animal. His lips were pulled back from his teeth, making his fangs look longer and more vicious than before.
The snarl that left him wasn’t human. It was the same noise he’d made before, when she’d touched the bullet in his chest. Only now, it was louder. It was desperate.
And it was hungry.
She fired off two bullets into his chest and jumped backward, trying to put as much distance between them as possible. He staggered, but ignored the wounds in his chest like they weren’t even there.
These bullets weren’t silver.
And nothing oozed from the holes they made.
He fell against the wall, smashing into a bookcase, sending much of its contents crashing to the floor. Weakly, as if every movement was agony, he started pulling himself back up to his feet.
And those red eyes never left her.
He was going to consume her. Every drop.
The gun wasn’t going to stop him. Not unless she put a bullet in his skull. And that would kill him.
Fuck. Fuck—fuck—fuck! “Ivan!”
No one answered. He wasn’t back yet. “Ivan!” she screamed again, desperately hoping the bodyguard was within earshot. But she was on her own. On her own with a feral, blood-starved vampire.
Raziel threw himself at her again, but more weakly this time than the first. His knees gave out and he fell to the ground with a painful thud.
A ragged wheeze left him, his nails digging into the wood floor as he clawed at the ground in a pathetic attempt to crawl closer to her.
And that was when it hit her.
Raziel… was dying.
He’d been bled dry. And she’d just put two new holes in him.
Raziel was dying in front of her eyes.
This was what she wanted all her life.
To watch her most hated enemy, the man she had vowed revenge upon all those years ago, suffering in agony and slowly, painfully, coming to an end. And she would be the last thing he saw.
It was supposed to be the happiest moment of her life. When the ghosts of her family could be at peace.
So, why was she shaking?
Why did it feel… wrong?
Maybe it was because it wasn’t by her hand that he was dying. It wasn’t because of her that he was suffering. She hadn’t been the one to get revenge, it’d been his mother.
Maybe it was because he was probably lost in the haze of whatever blood-starved madness had consumed him. He couldn’t understand or appreciate what was happening to him.
Both of those things could be true.
But if they were? Neither of them would explain why she was crying.
“Ivan!” One last hope. One last chance.
Silence.
Nothing except the ragged gasps of a dying vampire, and the scrape of his nails against the wood floor. Raziel was going to die…
… if she didn’t feed him.
But if she let him feed from her? He would kill her. He wouldn’t be able to stop. He was a wild animal. He’d rip her to pieces, tear her open, and drink her dry.
One of them would die in the next fifteen minutes.
Shutting her eyes, she let the tears run down her cheeks, unchecked. It’d be a mercy to him to put a bullet in his head and end his suffering. How many people had he killed in the same way? How many people had she killed in her life? He deserved to die.
And she wanted to kill him.
But not like this.
So… she would let him starve to death in front of her? That was better? To let an animal with a leg caught in a hunter’s trap bleat, and cry, and scream until it died, rather than just snap its neck and end its suffering?
No. No, he had to die.
This wasn’t revenge, this was a kindness.
She lifted the gun and pointed it at Raziel’s head with a trembling hand.
The expression on his face shifted. Just slightly. Just a flicker of something that might have been recognition in those rabid, crimson, glassy eyes.
He lowered his head. And the clawing stopped. The animal was accepting its death at her hand…
Then, she heard it. The noise. Through the gasping, dying rattle of air in his chest… he was crying. But vampire cried blood, didn’t they? And he had no blood to weep.
She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Flicking the safety back on the gun, she placed it down on a nearby table.
She couldn’t kill him.
She hadn’t been able to kill him back at Braen’s estate.
And she couldn’t let him die now.
Staring down at her palms through the hazy blur of her tears, she wondered what had become of her. What he’d done to her. She should have listened to Luciento—she should have escaped into the Wild with her uncle the moment she had the chance.
But she’d chosen the path of revenge. She’d chosen to stay in the metropolis and hunt the Nostroms. She’d chosen not to disappear into the Wild and find a new life.
She’d chosen death.
And she had let him in. She had let him get into her soul and twist something around his fingers. She had let him poison her in a way she didn’t know was possible.
Yet… here she was.
Unable to scratch the name that had been at the top of her list for over eighty years. The name. The whole reason she was still alive. The whole reason she was still in the metropolis. The reason she had left a trail of corpses in her wake as an assassin.
Who was she, if she wasn’t Nadi, the fae who wanted the Serpent dead?
What did she have to live for, if she didn’t have that to drive her forward?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Pulling in a breath, it hitched halfway and she choked out a sob. No. No, this was all right. She could only hope that the gods would be kind and simply commit her soul to the endless oblivion. That they didn’t leave her to wander as a ghost.
She supposed she was about to find out.
Taking another deep breath, she readied herself, and muttered a quiet prayer to the moons and the lords of the deep. To her family, she prayed for forgiveness.
And to Luciento, most of all.
Slowly walking up to Raziel, she knelt down beside him. “Raz…”
The noise he made was a strangled, unintelligible thing at first. The hand closest to her twisted into a claw and jerked toward her before he pounded it into the floor.
He was trying to fight it.
“Run…” He pulled in a hollow, rasping breath. His voice sounded like the wind escaping from a tomb. Cold. Empty. Death itself. “Run… from… me…” He sank his nails into the floor, leaving white scratches in the dark wood.
“It’s okay. This is how it was meant to end between us.” She gently urged him to roll onto his side facing her.
His eyes were sunken, his cheeks hollow. He was fading away as she watched. Like a corpse decaying. “Run…”
“You told me to run, once, long ago.” She ran her hand down his cheek. He hissed, his mouth open, seeking the pulse of her wrist. “I’m not going to listen to you this time.”
“Na… di…” Her name, as best as he could manage it.
“Ssh…” Gently, she picked him up, grunting under his weight at first. But as she slung an arm underneath him to pull him close, his own arm, which felt so weak at first, snapped around her like an iron girder.
“Run…” He was still telling her to run. Sharp nails scraped her scalp as fingers tangled in her hair and fisted it, yanking her head to the side.
Suddenly, she was in his lap—a burst of strength from the last desperate attempts of an animal to survive. And she knew there was no escaping now.
Taking a deep breath, she settled into his grasp, tilting her head away from his already opening mouth. “I’m going nowhere. I vowed to follow you straight into the void, Serpent. One way or another. So I need you alive.”
It was then that the strange purr began in his chest. Rasping and broken, but there all the same. Shutting her eyes, she let the sound of it take her away. Let it soothe her, let it wipe away all the fear of what was about to come.
She felt the bite more as a jolt of her body as he sank his teeth into her. Then felt that pull. That glorious, wonderful bliss as he began to consume her.
He moaned, clutching at her, deepening the bite. She stroked his hair, holding onto him as she let herself simply disappear into the pleasure of him. Of his kiss.
The world began to fade away, and she could pretend she was simply falling asleep in the arms of her lover.
At least this was a good way to die.