You are useless and replaceable, just like the rest
31
It’d been less than twenty-four hours since Ksava’s murder, and word had yet to get out. It was possible they weren’t going to release the information. Ksava would die quietly and the Fedoravs would peaceably go back to taking orders from their less-than-competent leader, Pavel.
Killing Ksava didn’t bother me—at first. After all, I killed all the time, and Ksava was the type I went for. What bothered me was the heat I’d get if anyone found out it was me. Dwelling on our interaction sparked anxiety. Hearing her call out my immortality rang loud in my head in the silence of every waking moment.
Ksava wasn’t a resident of Creswell, but instead ran her arms business from the smaller town of Pleasant Valley to the North. That didn’t mean she was na?ve to the ongoings of Creswell, and I was sure she was as familiar with vampires as the high ups were here. But the fact she’d put together that I was one of them, even though she was an outsider, was concerning. I’d been cautious, but not cautious enough. Johnny couldn’t find out.
With that heavy on my mind, I was wary of every little change in his tone, and uneasy when he called me into his bedroom.
“What’s wrong?” I asked with a slew of innocence and a demeanor ready for anything.
He seethed at the foot of the cavernous bed, face red and tone vicious. “Did you really think I wouldn’t put two and two together?”
“What do you mean?” I held my breath, meeting him head on and holding eye contact, prepared to thrall him once necessary. I’d unfortunately also have to thrall Harry—the guard who waited at the door, watching us—if I wanted to get away with it.
Johnny went on, his tone the same. “You know what. Did you really think I would assume with the way you’ve been that you had nothing to do with Ksava’s death yesterday?”
A breath left me in the most errant wave of relief.
Raising his hand above my face, he continued, “Tell me the truth. What do you have to do with her death?”
With Harry right at the door, I decided not to thrall Johnny. Instead, I admitted, “I killed her. Can you really say you’d have done anything different? She was threatening your entire livelihood. With her gone, the Fedoravs have no hope of regaining their position. She was the head of the snake, I just cut it—”
I’d almost finished my argument, but Johnny’s hand was quick. He struck across my face hard enough to send me to the floor. As fast as I was, I should have seen it coming, and maybe I had. Though he couldn’t do any real damage to my immortal body, my overactive nerves screamed at his assault. The sting faded quickly, but the rancid feeling that his actions left in my guts didn’t.
“Johnny, I—” My argument was again short-lived, split by Johnny’s interruption.
“Have I been so soft on you that you really cannot see your place?” He knelt, grabbing onto my shirt and hauling me within an inch of his face. “If I have, then I can fix that. I will teach you your place under my foot, right here and now.”
Johnny laced his fingers around my throat, squeezing until there was no hope for oxygen to pass through. The air thickened, viscous as I tried to suck it down through my narrowed windpipe. My ears rang and vision blurred with a frantic panic, not from unconsciousness, but from lack of. I wouldn’t die like that; my body would regenerate before the lack of oxygen could do any damage. Even knowing that, I tried not to fight back, letting the roar of blood pound against my ears as I gasped for what little breath I could gain in Johnny’s grasp. My heart hammered in my chest until it was like my entire body vibrated from it. When it felt like I might actually burst from the beating, the natural urge to abate the feeling took over, and I shoved Johnny away. I welcomed oxygen with forceful gulps and let myself reprieve despite the looming threat of a momentarily staggered Johnny.
Wide eyed, he grabbed a fistful of my hair and tugged, pulling until I was falling onto the bed. Despite my screaming follicles, I let him toss me around, still not sure at what point I would get away with fighting back.
I need to thrall both him and Harry.
He let go only long enough to reach into his pocket and close the distance on my form strewn out over the foot of his bed. I jumped to meet him halfway, leaving me awkwardly half sat on the mattress when he pressed the sharp metal of a blade against my neck.
Our eyes met, but not before the sting of his knife grazed my skin, sitting nimbly against the surface.
Shock pounding in my chest, I questioned him without the influence of a thrall, “What are you doing? You wouldn’t hurt me.”
He spit out his words. “And why not? You are useless and replaceable, just like the rest.”
I faltered, his words punching me in the guts. The metaphoric strike was closely followed by the searing incursion of his blade as he took it from my throat and sunk it into my midsection. The tear in my flesh sent me reeling. Pain blinded everything. The white noise of panic buzzed in my ears.
Johnny’s smug, vindicated snarl focused on my face, but I was staring at the pool of blood that seeped from my bleeding stomach in agonizing waves. His marble handled switchblade sat in the wound, holding it open to bleed out my suffering. It wouldn’t subside until I got the weapon out of me, and that was all I could think about. Wrapping my fingers around the stone handle slicked with blood only made the feeling fester, pulsating in blinding, painful swells that nearly took my consciousness.
All at once, I ripped the obstruction from my body, relief instantly washed over me, and I took a deep breath of fresh, unhindered air.
Looking down on me, Johhny’s face fell, disappointment heavy in his cheeks as he watched my misery absolve. His response filled my heart with a burning hatred—an enflamed, rabid indignation that could only be cured by retribution. With zero thoughts in my head except vengeance, I took the knife that’d previously been buried in my guts and jammed it into Johnny’s.
“I knew it.” The revelation struck Johnny too late. “You are one of them.”
The smell of his blood filled my olfactory senses with delight as it poured over my hand. He coughed some up, bringing it closer to my nose. The culmination of revenge—the smell of his blood, and the fury that’d plagued my mind to near blindness—filled me with a palpable bliss near numb nirvana.
I twisted the knife and Johnny fell to his knees with a weak cry that sounded like music to my ears.
Licking his blood from my hand, I enjoyed the quiet peace it gave my senses in the chaos.
On sky high, my mind blurred all reasonable consequences, and I easily overlooked the elephant in the room. I wasn’t privy—or just completely indifferent—to the cocking of Harry’s gun in the doorway. It wasn’t until his bullet actually penetrated my rib cage, following the ring of his shot, that I cared to look at him.
Pain like fire blossomed from the spot where the bullet penetrated my flesh, but the worst part was that it didn’t stop there. The blast was followed by one, two, then three more shots.
The room spun, the sight of Harry going blurry as he stood on the ceiling. My body begged for the end of this horrible feeling. I faded to the door, my hands taking ahold of Harry and ripping his head from his body—all before I’d told my muscles to react. His blood splattered over my face, coating my lips and darkening my vision. The smell of him was everywhere, and I loved it. I licked my lips, bit into his headless body, and smiled. His taste made my heart dance, gravity no longer affecting the way I flew around the room. Everything was red—a blurry, bloody, but glorious color of unfettered death.
I didn’t care when more bullets hit me. It meant fresh blood, and I killed the culprits of those attacks, too. The hallway rang with gunshots mingled with screams. Each bullet added to my rage, but every kill blinded me from the consequences. In a feat of bloody self-preservation, I killed as many men as came to attack me, taking a bite of each of them as I tore their limbs from their bodies.
From head to toe, I tingled with pleasant delight that shrouded all of my intellectual properties. Without them, I was a slave to my instincts, letting the vicious nature of my immortality take over—whether I wanted it to or not. Sitting back in the theater of my mind, I had no choice but to watch as the scene played through the blurry window of my optic nerves.
Coating the hallway in viscera, I bulldozed through the Roufe mansion like a bull in a China closet. Around every corner, a new enemy came and a new enemy fell. Somewhere in the middle, the memory of it became hazy, too much happening at once to really understand it all, or to see it through my blood-soaked eyes.
Too many people fell by my hand. When I thought the slaughter was over, I found another victim. At some point, they were running from me, and I killed the harmless in my frenzy. The guilty, the innocent—I murdered them all the same.
Time had become a construct, only slowing back to normal as the blood euphoria waned and I found myself staring up at the domed coffer ceiling in the foyer. My mind was reassigning where it dictated control, the feeling in my limbs returning first as I slicked my fingers through the pools of fluid at my sides. The smell of blood still plagued my senses, but I was so full I didn’t crave it.
Once my intellect snapped back into place, I shot up, looking around the room with unclouded vision. Disfigured bodies littered the foyer, scattered blood stains followed the carnage up the stairs and down the hallway. Silence filled every gap in that giant house, nothing shifting except the birds outside.
The reality of that silence weighed heavy. It was evidence that I’d killed the Roufes. Not only Johnny and a few others, I’d murdered all of them—with my bare hands. Bile singed my throat, the room narrowing as everything fell into place. The only Roufes who got away from this massacre with their lives were the ones who weren’t present, which would be very few mid-day on a Wednesday.
The only consolation that kept me from spewing my emotions right out onto the floor of bloody bodies was knowing the boys hadn’t been home. They’d been saved from my onslaught by the simple fact that they were still in school.
Scrambling to my feet, I slipped in blood, catching myself on a decapitated body that wore a maid’s uniform and held no weapons. “Oh god…” I groaned, but God’s judgment was not what I feared. Immortals didn’t answer to God, they took these kinds of transgressions up with the Council. And in my case, offenses with the Council certainly meant the end for me. Their lead bitch, Rosaline, was already looking for a reason to off me.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I scooped my sopping hair away from my face and assessed my options for getting away with this. No one runs or hides from the Council, not with the all-seeing Rosaline there, and I knew flight wasn’t an option. Fight, however, would almost certainly mean an even quicker death.
Solving this on my own wasn’t possible, but my contacts list was still small, and the list of immortals I knew with enough pull to help me out of a situation like this was even smaller. In fact, it was compiled of exactly two: Riftan and Jameson.
They’d both know how foolish I had to be to get myself into this situation, and I didn’t want to have to admit to either of them what I’d done. Regardless of how stupid it was, they’d both be willing and ready to help.
Pulling my phone from my pocket, I skipped to one of the many missed calls I had from Jameson. Taking a breath, I steadied a shaky finger on the screen and hit call. The phone rang. And it rang. I went over my excuses in my head—both for not calling him all this time and for the blood bath I was standing in. When his voice carried through the line, it was only his voicemail. My pulse skyrocketed. The tonal beep queuing me to leave a message nearly toppled my wobbly knees.
“Hey… Jameson, I’ve really messed up. I’m so sorry for not calling you all this time. I just—it doesn’t matter. I need help. Like, immediately. I know I don’t deserve it after giving you the cold shoulder the last few months, but this is kind of life or death. Please, just call me back as soon as you get this.”
I hung up, instantly wishing I’d given him a better goodbye—especially if it was going to end up being my last goodbye.
Tears stung in my eyes, the thought of never getting to apologize correctly stabbing me in my delicate heart. I waited in the silence for multiple heavy moments with my phone in hand like it was going to miraculously ring. It didn’t, and I shouldn’t have expected anything different. Jameson was a busy guy, even for an immortal. He likely wouldn’t see my message for a few hours, minimum. Thus, I was forced to go with option B.
Opening my phone again, I ignored my pounding heart but couldn’t avoid the weakness in my legs, so I crouched in the pool of bodies. Riftan was one call away, and he had nothing better to do during his down decade than answer my call. He’d be disappointed in me for getting carried away by blind rage like this, but I would be more disappointed in myself for having to grovel at his feet for help. But this wasn’t the hill I wished to die on, and I’d rather grovel to Riftan than accept Rosaline’s victory when she took my head.
Scrolling to his contact through my blood-smeared screen brought an awful spark of excitement to my skin. It tingled like it still craved his touch, crawled like he had already gotten under it—and I hadn’t even called him yet.
A creak sounded in the silence, light joining the room through the growing crack between the double front doors. My soul left my body, only to find the wind blowing through the open door. Forgoing my lamentation, I hit call on Riftan’s number, deciding to act before somebody actually did walk through that front door to see this massacre.
The wait while it rang was agonizing. My heart went through every stage of grief all over again, in a matter of seconds. All the healing it’d done in the past nine months was instantly null—completely broken again and excited for the beating it would get by hearing Riftan’s voice over the line. It was a glutton for the kind of punishment only he could give to it.
“Leanne?” Riftan’s voice was as tormenting as I’d expected it to be, tantalizing every cell in my body, shaking my very being on a molecular level.
Frazzled, my mind and my emotions fought for dominion in the chaos, and I blurted out, “I killed him. I killed all of them,” completely forgoing a proper introduction.
Riftan was calm, but his concerned tone seeped through the phone, pummeling my heart. “You killed who, Leanne? Are you alright?”
“The Roufes—as in all of the Roufes. I don’t know what happened. One minute I was in control and the next they were all dead.” I tried to remember the extent of my carnage. Too many faces came to mind. “Oh god, I think I killed Nonna.”
“Where are you?” He was immediately airing toward stringency.
“At the Roufe’s main house, past Hall Street.”
“Okay, don’t move. I’m minutes away.”