Chapter 9 #2
I focused back on my paper.
Date venue.
Date venue.
What would be a nice, comfortable sort of place where—
“Of course!” I cried out loud, so excited I’d finally thought of something good.
Vantiqe.
That was the answer.
That would be the date venue.
A shadow fell over the table.
“What’s the deal?” a rumbling voice sounded.
I jerked my head up to see a familiar face.
Alpha wolf, Todd Wallace.
His purple spiky hair almost the exact same style as mine gave him that sexy edginess that had first drawn me to him a couple of years back. His big, ripped body was barely contained in a pair of white board shorts and a lavender muscle tee.
“What are you getting at, T?”
“First you cancel your fuck session with Payton, and she tells me you didn’t even reschedule, then I get a text from you this morning saying you’re canceling ours for tonight as well?”
Oh, right.
“I’m not up for it. Is that not satisfactory?”
“Well, it’s obviously not satisfactory. In fact, it’s the opposite of any kind of satisfaction, especially nowhere close to the kind of satisfaction we always bring each other when we get it on.
” He shifted his weight. “Is this about the dragon girl? Rumor has it that you added her to your fuck buddy list?”
“The hell I fucking did,” I snapped, before I could stop myself.
Evira wasn’t a fuck buddy of mine. She wasn’t… she wasn’t… that.
He frowned down at me. “Huh. Why didn’t you just say that in your text?”
“Say what?”
“That you’ve found a mate in her?”
“A mate? No, that’s—”
“Good for you. That’s real special. Enough said.”
“Wait. I didn’t—”
He smiled, then moved to walk away, but pulled up short to ask me, “You okay if I make a move on Payton if she’s up for it? Maybe even your other recurring fuck buddy, that sexy Light Fae guy, Lixant Lenore?”
“Yeah, whatever. Why not?”
“Great. See you around, man. And best of luck with your ice dragon.”
Before I could get another word out, he strode from the Cafeteria.
What the—
With him no longer blocking my view, Vaxan was visible again.
And something was wrong.
He was half hunched over his food container, clutching his stomach with one hand, while he wiped actual dripping sweat off his brow with the other, eyes narrowed at the food.
What was happening?
I shoved my paper and pen into the pocket of my studded leather jacket, intending to go over there to check—obviously because both Winter and Evira cared about him, so they’d want me to. Especially Win. That was clearly the reason.
But then Vaxan got up and staggered out of the Cafeteria, knocking against a table, and then one of the walls in the process.
A rush of adrenaline shot through me as I noticed the vampires, Andrew and Pierce, follow after him.
Right after him.
What the ever-loving fuck was happening?
Turned out, I’d had to double back to the fucking Cafeteria.
And it had cost me too much time.
Well, more like, it had cost Vaxan too much time.
Those fuckers had clearly snatched him up down the corridor before he’d made it very far—either to his room or the Infirmary was where I’d figured he’d been headed—and they’d vamp-sped him all the way across to the other side of campus.
Seeing as though I didn’t possess animal-like reflexes or scenting abilities, I’d headed back into the Cafeteria and performed a tracking spell on something connected to him. For my purposes, something he’d touched—his food container—had been enough for a small-scale, small-distance tracking spell.
And now I was striding through the early afternoon sun beating down on the fields of the Loxley campus grounds.
According to my spell, I was now just a hundred feet out from where Vaxan was.
It was leading me to the motorcycle path near the grassy mountain.
And the vampire sun-safe zone that ran along near it.
It was like that area at Sanctum Sands Beach that had a shielding dome that filtered sunlight into a harmless ambient glow.
Well, the zone here only ran along part of the path.
It was just enough that if vampires or those sensitive to the sun got caught outside when the sun rose—something that had been known to happen with a load of drunk academy students being a part of the whole academy experience thing—they had a protected path back to the main building and the dorms. But there were still danger zones if they weren’t careful.
And as I hurried closer, I saw it was being used to its fullest right now—the danger zone parts.
Fucking shit.
No.
My gut twisted, bile rising in my throat, as I took in the scene.
There Andrew and the other fuckface, Pierce, were standing in the sun-shielding area while Vaxan was lying out right under direct sunlight on the grass, two spikes driven through his forearms that were now a bloodied mess.
And the sun… it was shriveling his skin.
I could see him trying to maintain calling his scales to the surface to protect himself, but they were fading in and out all over.
And he was also coughing up frothing white foam onto the grass, which was getting all over his tank with him trapped in place.
He was trying to move his legs to somersault to dislodge the metal stakes driven through his arms and deep into the ground, which I figured he could normally pull off well with his Basilisk agility.
But not now.
Not hurt like this—in several ways.
The image of him rubbing his crown with a concerned look earlier made a whole lot of sense now. There was an enchantment imbued in it that protected him from the sun. So, he’d had that worried expression because he’d felt it needing charging.
And him clutching his stomach and staggering out… all that became clear as their voices reached me.
“It worked excellently,” I heard Andrew saying, then high-fiving his buddy as they stood over a pained Vaxan.
Pierce told him, “Even your senses couldn’t pick up on that glamor. You thought you were eating your steak and mashed potatoes, but it was a whole lot of grain and fruits—poisonous to your kind, yeah?”
“Causes that nasty venom of yours to crystallize, doesn’t it?” Andrew said. “In your veins. That sounds like some nasty shit.”
“Much… like desiccation… for vampires,” Vaxan rasped. “Something you’ll… both know the… agony of… soon.”
Andrew used his vampire speed to slam his foot into Vaxan’s ribs and pull it back without being scorched by the sun.
I grimaced as I heard a noticeable crack, even from a distance, and Vaxan spluttered.
“Know when you’re beaten, bitch,” Pierce said, laughing.
Andrew told him, “Now, unless you want more of that, hand over the crown. Then you’ll live to enjoy special treatment from the supernatural world for another day, like the rest of your fucking reptile brethren.”
“Special… treatment? Do you not… know your history?”
“What we know is you’re able to walk in the sun, but we can’t. And our clan means to rectify that by studying this crown of yours.”
“Fools,” Vaxan uttered, a moment before Andrew dealt him another brutal kick that wrenched him to his side for a second and had one of the stakes tearing through the flesh of his right arm as it forced him to twist in response.
I hurried faster, calling my fuchsia magical flame to both my palms.
It wasn’t fast enough as I saw Pierce pull a vial of translucent liquid from his blazer pocket. “You know what this is?” he demanded of Vaxan.
Vaxan hissed at him.
“Don’t get that shit on me,” Andrew told him, easing back a little.
Pierce popped the cork. “Holy water. I heard it burns when it touches a Basilisk’s skin, just like it does a vampire’s. I wonder just how excruciating it’s gonna be if you continue to refuse handing over that crown and you push me to pouring this into those nasty arm wounds.”
Fucking hell.
Just as he went to move Vaxan closer so he could obviously do that, I was there.
I fired a bolt of my magic at Pierce.
Well, specifically at the vial of holy water.
It shattered the vial that was still out of range of Vaxan, and it sprayed all over Pierce instead.
He screamed like a little bitch-ass as it splattered his face, his neck, even getting in his hair and over his hand that had been holding it, smoke erupting all over those sites as it burned through his skin.
Poetic justice? Seemed about right.
I used Andrew’s shock against him before he could employ his vampiric speed against me, and swept my other hand in an arc, generating a lasso around his throat that seared the skin.
I used my magic to soup up my strength, then yanked him toward me.
“You’ve made a fatal fucking mistake,” I snarled in his face.
He tried to vamp-out, but he couldn’t in his agonized state.
And then I used my magical hold on him to shove him beyond the safety of the shielding area and out into the sun.
“Big fucking mistake,” I ground out. “You’re in for a world of horrific pain, fucker.
You see, there’s no limit for me when I happen upon this sort of sickening shit, victimizing people, using their inborn weaknesses against them that they can’t fucking change and already fear living with in case assholes like you pull this despicable bullshit. ”
Andrew was rapidly recovering, having now taken off his blazer and using it to wipe off the remnants of the holy water. His skin was still marred with third-degree burns, though. It would take longer to heal properly from that kind of damage.
I wasn’t taking any chances, so I used my free hand to pull out the stakes from Vaxan’s arms, then levitate them up, before sweeping my hand and making them drive into Andrew’s throat and gut.
He lurched and collapsed to his knees, fighting to pull out the stake in his throat that was making him splutter up a whole lot of blood, unable to utter a word.
With that dealt with as Pierce struggled against my magical hold, I shoved him back out into the sun, his shrieking rolling through me.
It was a demonstration.
It was punishment.
It was fucking justice.