Chapter 35 Brynn
brYNN
The van’s red taillights bleed into the darkness of a particularly thick stretch of forest. My heart hammers against my ribs.
“The trees,” I say, my voice a harsh whisper. “The canopy is too thick to fly.”
Chad’s gaze is already sweeping the perimeter of the camp, analytical. He’s not looking at the guards, he’s looking past them, at the things they’re ignoring. One drab, olive-green utility vehicle is parked near a supply tent, key left in the door by an overconfident soldier.
Chad's hand closes around my arm. “We're not flying,” he says, and suddenly he's crouching in front of me. “Get on.”
My pulse skips as I realize what he means. I hesitate, my brain short-circuiting for approximately 1.5 seconds while I calculate the exact surface area where our bodies will make contact. Ridiculous. Focus, Brynn.
“We don't have time,” he growls, not looking back at me.
I climb onto his back, my arms circling his neck, my chest pressed against the hard planes of him. His scent—dark and masculine—fills my lungs. He stands in one fluid motion, my weight nothing to him, and moves with a silence that's weirdly predatory considering he’s still in his human form.
I sense more than see the vampires detach from the darkness above at Chad's barely perceptible signal: a flick of his fingers, a bare inclination of his head. Follow.
We reach the vehicle, a rugged, open-topped thing that looks like it’s survived at least three wars already.
The air here is thick from the smell of pine with a hint of exhaust fumes.
Chad slides over the driver’s seat and I scramble off him into the passenger side, my hands gripping the cold metal of the dashboard.
He doesn’t bother with subtlety; a twist of the key and the engine coughs to life with a gravelly roar that sounds deafening in the quiet night. The vampires slide into the back seats.
Then Chad floors it. We lurch out of a tree line, tires spitting dirt and gravel. Shouts erupt from the camp behind us, but we’re already on the dirt track, fishtailing as Chad corrects the steering, his eyes locked on the distant red lights of the van.
The ride is a bone-jarring, tooth-rattling nightmare. The road is little more than a suggestion, like a winding scar through the forest. Branches whip at my face, and I have to duck to avoid being decapitated.
“Great,” I gasp. “Love a scenic tour.”
Chad doesn’t blink. “Complain later. Not dying, now.”
He drives with a focused, terrifying intensity, his knuckles white on the wheel as he throws the truck around a curve so violently my soul nearly vacates my body.
“Tell me,” I shout over the engine, “is this how they teach driving at demon school, or did you just fail every human test available?”
His lips twitch—barely. “Cute.”
“Blink twice if you’ve ever had a license!”
He doesn’t blink. But we’re closing the distance. The van is just a few hundred yards ahead—when a second set of headlights floods our vehicle, appearing in the side mirror like angry, accusing eyes.
“Company,” Horace snaps, and I twist to see another utility vehicle—identical to ours—gaining fast.
“Great. I didn’t RSVP.”
“Hold on,” is all Chad says.
Yeah, let me just grip the part of the seat that hasn’t been shaking loose.
A bolt of blue energy screams past my head, close enough for me to feel the heat, and explodes against a tree trunk ahead of us, showering the road in splinters. Great. They aren’t trying to stop us, obviously; they’re trying to kill us. My favorite kind of outing.
I fumble in my satchel, my fingers closing around a smooth, obsidian disc.
A shield ward. It’s small, meant for personal defense, but it’s better than nothing.
I hold it up just as another sizzling bolt hits, this one striking the back of our vehicle.
The ward flares, absorbing some of the impact, but the force still shoves us forward, sending us skidding sideways.
Chad wrestles with the wheel, his jaw set, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.
The clearblood vehicle chases alongside us.
I can see their faces now, grim and determined in the wash of headlights.
One of them, a woman with a vicious scar across her lip, raises a gray handgun, its barrel crackling with blue energy.
Manipulated dragon magic, of course. The kind specifically engineered to fry darkblood auras into non-existence. Perfect.
A deep, guttural sound rips from Chad’s throat, a noise that isn’t human.
I whip my head around to look at him, and my blood runs colder.
The green in his eyes is gone, swallowed by a solid, burning crimson.
The lines of his face sharpen, becoming something more angular and cruel.
Veins on his neck and temples pulse with a dark, almost black energy.
The demon is out.
“Get her out of here.” The words tear from his throat like they've been ripped with claws.
My stomach lurches as cold hands seize my arms. Suddenly I'm airborne, the car falling away beneath me.
Wind whistles past my ears as Horace's wings beat the air, carrying me into the tree canopy.
Ignatius rockets up beside us. Below, blue energy sizzles through the space where I sat a heartbeat ago.
Chad hunches over the wheel, knuckles hard as steel.
The engine screams as he floors it, but he doesn't flee.
He jerks the wheel hard to the left, ramming our vehicle directly into the side of the clearbloods’. Metal screams. I hear the scarred woman scream too as their vehicle careens off the road, flipping end over end before crashing into a thicket of pines with a sickening crunch.
But Chad isn’t done. His eyes are locked on the van ahead. He pushes our battered vehicle, the engine whining in protest, until he’s right on the van’s bumper. Then, he rams it.
The van lurches, tires skidding across loose gravel as the driver wrenches the wheel.
Chad slams into it again with a sickening crunch of metal.
The impact sends the vehicle careening off the dirt track.
It plunges through ferns and brambles, momentum carrying it in a wild trajectory until the passenger side crumples against an ancient oak, the sound of the collision echoing through the forest like a gunshot.
Before his vehicle has even come to a complete stop, Chad is out, a blur of motion.
I see one of the clearbloods from the van stumble out, raising a weapon, but Chad is on him in an instant.
There’s no finesse, no soldier’s training.
It’s pure, savage brutality. A sickening crunch, a wet tear, and the man goes down.
Demon-Chad stands there, chest heaving, his shirt torn open across his sculpted torso, revealing a constellation of scars that only seem to enhance the raw power beneath his skin.
Trickles of moonlight catch on the sharp angles of his jaw, turning sweat to silver as it slides down the column of his throat, pooling in the hollow where his pulse hammers like a war drum.
Now’s… not the time to be staring at that.
Two other clearbloods from the van stagger out, guns still clasped in their hands. Ignatius descends, silent as death. His fangs flash; the first guard doesn’t even have time to turn before Ignatius is on him, tearing into his throat. Blood spatters the leaves in a bright, sick arc.
The second clearblood fires wildly—a blue bolt sizzling past Ignatius's ear—before Chad lunges forward. His claws punch through flesh, ribs giving way with a dull crack. The guard’s scream dies in an awful choke as Chad crushes his windpipe.
By the time his body hits the ground, Ignatius is already topping off the kill, fangs buried into his neck with almost clinical precision. Where the vampire is controlled, exact, Chad is nothing but unleashed violence. Different styles, same result: two bodies cooling on the forest floor.
Horace descends with me on the slaughterhouse scene. Blood soaks the forest floor, dark and glistening in the sparse light.
Then, from the wreckage of the first vehicle, a figure stumbles out, clutching a bleeding arm. It’s the woman with the scarred lip, still alive. She takes one look at Chad—at the vampires feeding on her comrades—and her face twists into a mask of rage.
“Chancellor Rothmere is going to love this!” she snarls.
Then I realize she’s wearing some kind of blue-glowing ring, and her fingers twist in a complex pattern I’ve never seen before, not in person or in any book.
Blue energy crackles between her fingers before the air splits open behind her—a jagged tear in reality that reveals nothing but swirling darkness—and she steps backward into it.
Her portal snaps shut soundlessly, leaving us staring at the spot she disappeared.
My brain stalls on the portal. On the ring pulsing with blue energy.
That’s not how clearblood magic works. Not even close.
Their spells are rigid, built on geometric precision and often verbal components.
A stable portal for them requires an anchor, like a ley line convergence, or at the bare minimum, a five-minute chanted ritual.
That woman tore a hole in space with a gesture, as if ripping fabric.
It was raw, instinctual… draconic. The thought is chilling: clearbloods aren't just using dragon magic in their weapons, they're integrating it into their very spellcraft. Fusing it.
Not good.
A low groan from the back of the van snaps me out of my horrified analysis. The dragon.
Chad turns, his red eyes finding me in the gloom.
For a moment, the demonic rage is still there, raw and terrifying.
Then it recedes, like a tide pulling back, leaving the familiar green, though it’s clouded with exhaustion and something that looks like self-loathing.
He runs a hand through his mussed hair, his breathing harsh and ragged.
“The van,” I murmur.