Chapter 30 Saskia
Iscream Lucan’s name as the Seventh Guardian grabs him by one of his monstrous forearms, tearing at his flesh, and lunges at his neck with her fangs.
But Lucan’s already moving. Twisting. Thrashing. Throwing himself to the ground and rolling on top of her. I can tell that he’s taken our earlier training to heart, because as soon as he pops back up to his feet, the Seventh Guardian has lost her hold on him.
“Monster,” she spits. “How did you get in?”
Lucan can’t respond, of course, not in his werewolf form, but something protective and possessive overtakes me at the way her eyes gleam hungrily in his direction, so enraptured by his presence that she hasn’t even noticed the rest of us still hiding in the shadows over here.
No, thank you. This male is mine to hunt and bite and taste. Nobody else’s.
So I answer in Lucan’s stead.
“That’s for you to die never knowing, Guardian.”
The Seventh Guardian twirls around at my voice, practically spitting with fury when she lays those crimson eyes on me as I step out of the shadows, into the light.
If I were still a human, I might drop to my knees in surrender right here and now, but I’m not something she can suck dry anymore. And she knows it.
“You. You treacherous, Chosen bitch,” she hisses at me.
“Arad told us you’d turned into a vampire, but we all laughed at him.
Told him it was impossible.” She begins to prowl in a circle around me, and I spin in place to keep her in my sight.
“Now I’ll have to apologize to him… after I torture you like I tortured your friend. ”
Fear punches me in the gut at her words, nearly halting my spin. “What friend?”
“Oh, what’s his name? I lose track when there’s thousands of you. Oh, right!” The Seventh Guardian snaps her fingers with a mock laugh before narrowing her eyes in a glare. “Diggory.”
I can hardly remember to breathe as that name rings through me. “Diggory’s alive?”
She can’t keep the twisted smile off her face long enough to keep me guessing.
“Where?” I manage to whisper through my shock, but she only revels silently in it, smirking at my obvious distress.
“I have to admit, he’s a stubborn one. Wouldn’t give up your name even though we already knew you had spoken to him. Tell me…”
She cocks her head, still prowling in circles around me, and I just barely manage to make eye contact with Lucan behind her. He’s holding back, trying to give me time to collect information while she’s in a talkative mood, but I can sense the vibration of his restraint in our shared blood.
The Seventh Guardian, however, remains oblivious.
“Where’s the rest of the necklace he gave you?
” she asks, crimson eyes flicking down to my chest, where the gold chain hangs.
“I don’t know how you managed to hide it for so long, but Arad put all the pieces together after you jumped.
Every step you’ve made since you were Chosen, we have on camera. ”
I scoff. “The Third Guardian didn’t put any pieces together.
He didn’t want to believe a Chosen One could keep any secrets, have any opinions, become anything powerful, until it was staring him right in the face.
And even then, he underestimated me. Just like you are.
So I’m going to give you a choice right now, even though you didn’t give your citizens one: leave this city and never look back… or die.”
The vampire throws back her head and laughs at the catacombs’ ceiling.
“You think you can kill me, Saskia? You don’t even know how. And I’m not underestimating you. You are just as spineless as the Thirteenth Guardian was. Soft for humans. Afraid to take what you can.” She crouches, as if preparing to pounce. “And you will be just as easy to turn into a corpssssssse.”
Her last word catches on the blood that spurts out of her mouth, splattering my front.
With a thud, she drops to her knees at my feet. Behind her, Lucan—back in his human form—pulls his ax out of her back with a disgusted wrinkle of his nose.
“How dumb can you get?” he mutters as the rest of her falls forward, her forehead cracking against the stone floor. “Turns her back on me for a solid five minutes while insulting and threatening the love of my life? Did she forget I was here?”
“I don’t know, but that was the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”
It’s Soren, hurrying forward in his human form with Merrick and Vivian, while the rest of the pack members stick to their werewolf shapes. All of them circle the Seventh Guardian’s body, though, sniffing at the sweet, dark liquid that spreads in a blossoming circle around her.
“I don’t think that’s her own blood,” Vivian says, plugging her nose.
“No.” I shake my head with a grimace. “That’s definitely a mix of human blood she must have drunk recently.” My stomach twists, hoping like hell it’s nobody I know.
But even if it isn’t, the fact is she chose to drink human blood. Even if the sight of a dead body feels wrong to look at on so many levels, I know this is the only way we can save Xantera—by killing them all.
“Well,” Soren says with a happy sigh. “At least that was easier than expected, right? Not even a hair out of place, alpha.” He claps Lucan on the back. “Only eleven to go.”
As soon as the last word leaves his lips, however, the Seventh Guardian jerks.
“You were saying?” Vivian asks with raised eyebrows.
A gurgled hiss leaves the Seventh Guardian’s mouth. Her head snaps upward. She shoots to her feet before any of us can grab her, but the werewolves work quickly to surround her in an impenetrable wall of muscle and fur. She spins, the wound in her back already healing—
And then Kyra rips off her head.
I wince as the decapitated head hits one of the walls with a squelching thud. The Seventh Guardian’s body crumples to the ground a second time, and Soren whistles.
“Scratch what I said earlier. That’s the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever—oh, come on. Really?”
The headless corpse jerks again, the fingernails scratching at the floor in an effort to drag itself toward the head across the cavern. Gabriel steps forward and pins it down with a single, giant paw, but one of the arms whips around to scratch him, and he yelps.
“Enough with this shit,” Vivian grumbles. She marches forward to snatch one of the lit torches from its sconce on the wall. Before the Seventh Guardian’s body can crawl its way to the head, she brings the flame down upon it.
For a moment, nothing happens. Then another moment passes, and still nothing happens. The flame licks the Seventh Guardian’s body, and although her clothes catch on fire, her marble skin remains unaffected.
Worse, one of the arms swings up to snatch at the torch, and Vivian has to wrestle it out of her grip with a grunt.
“No wonder she turned her back on you,” Merrick mutters to Lucan. “She knew she wouldn’t die.”
Panic seems to settle over us like snow. If we can’t even kill one vampire when all of us are circling her, how are we going to kill the rest of them? Are they—we—completely immortal? No, that’s not possible. The Thirteenth Guardian died, I just have no idea how.
And what if Arad or any of the others comes down to the catacombs to investigate the noise we’ve already made while we’re trying to figure it out?
“Saskia.” Lucan closes the distance between us in two strides and cups my face in his hands. “Can you think of anything that will help us? Anything Arad might have told you in the past?”
I close my eyes, straining to scrape anything useful from my memories, but… nothing. I spent so much time trying to escape Arad’s presence that I never paused long enough to glean any useful information from him, dammit.
My heart beats in my chest, slow and steady as ever, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling everything. Fear. Terror. Horror, as the werewolves behind Lucan try to keep the Seventh Guardian’s body from rejoining her head to no avail.
My useless heart.
My useless human heart.
With a gasp, I open my eyes.
“That’s it! In the garden, right before I jumped, Arad told me our hearts can’t turn to stone.
” More accurately, he said, I am going to drain you dry until you are just as much of a stone as your helpless mother.
Well, except for your heart. The only thing that can’t turn to stone is your useless human heart.
“And since we all started off as humans—”
“Even a vampire’s heart would still be vulnerable.” Lucan snaps his fingers and kisses my forehead, but before he turns around, he casts one last look at my chest. As if even more scared now that he knows how I might die as well.
But I push at his shoulder. “Go!”
He spins on a heel, dripping with murderous power. Just as the Seventh Guardian’s body reaches her head, fitting it back onto her shoulders so that sinews begin to reconnect, Lucan’s claws shoot out of his fingers, and he punches through her chest.
When he rips out her heart, the Guardian falls to the ground for a final time.
“Burn it,” Lucan says with obvious disdain. The thing clutched in his fist isn’t a pulsing, bloody organ like I’d imagine, but a sad little lump of charcoal gray, the color of the ash we left behind at the door of the Wall. Obviously something that hadn’t been used in a long, long time.
Without looking over his shoulder, he tosses the heart toward Vivian, who shrieks and bats it at Soren. “Ew, I don’t want to touch that thing!” he hollers, but catches it anyway before it can land in the puddle at his feet, grimacing as he holds it out. “Fuck, get it over with.”
Merrick pinches the bridge of his nose, grabs the flickering torch from Vivian, and holds the flame out to the heart. With bated breath, we wait…
And then it bursts into flames.
I swear, I can hear the Seventh Guardian’s final shriek fade into silence as her once-human heart crumbles away into gritty embers, her ashes mixing with the bloody water on the floor. The rest of her remains in a heap, utterly still and lifeless, as if she truly became nothing more than stone.