On Your Knees, Prospect (Kings of Hell MC 3)

It was pure instinct, and yet more than that. Instinct would have made him run from the threat of death. This was much more. Jake was his future, life itself, and without him, nothing mattered.

So when the realization dawned on Vars that Damon was in fact still here, even if neither of them could see him, he still stood in the way of the force cutting through the smoke. In the split second after Vars pushed Jake out of the line of the hit, he saw Damon again.

He was death itself, coming for Vars if he couldn’t get Jake. Knife in hand, eyes of a reptile, fuming with hate, Damon stabbed a blade into Vars’s throat.

It didn’t hurt at first. A pleasant numbness kicked in right away, but a split second later Vars registered what had truly happened, and he spun around, grabbing at the wall that offered him nothing in terms of support. His brain screamed for air, and he opened his mouth wide when he looked back at Jake. Red sprayed the handsome face, got into his hair. The blue of his eyes stood out even more now. He was so beautiful. So pure even with blood all over him.

Instead of air, Vars’s lungs filled with thick, hot liquid, the same that cascaded down his chest when his knees gave up and sent him tumbling to the floor. His chest was a ball of pain. He could taste the coppery tang of blood on his lips when he realized just how much there was of it—enough to soak through the thick sweater he was wearing. It gushed out of Vars in firm spurts. With a major artery sliced open, Vars’s rapidly beating heart was bringing him closer to death each time it contracted.

His thoughts were difficult to wade through, little islands in the endless tub of hot water. But this time he was cold, frozen stiff and no longer had the strength to attempt blocking the bleeding wound on his neck with his palms.

He couldn’t move. His eyes were dry. And he was in pain, as if every single cell in his body screamed in terror at once. Darkness was about to suck him in again, and this time Magpie wasn’t here to grab Vars’s hand before he drowned too deep in the cold nothingness somewhere under the surface of the world.

He couldn’t bear the icy feeling in his extremities. Soon, they would disintegrate, still attached to the shell that was his body.

A roar erupted above him, and yet so distant. A wave of heat followed, and even though Vars couldn’t gasp for air, his unmoving eyes saw Jake breathe fire at the empty corridor.

Damon screamed as the flames climbed up his body.

The stone Magpie had placed in Vars’s heart began pulsing like a car that wouldn’t start no matter how hard he tried, but the warmth surrounding Vars felt as if it was there to melt the invisible snow covering his body.

The stone within him throbbed faster and faster, sending vibrations to all the capillaries in his body, up through his chest, and into his throat that was no longer ripped open. Instead of expelling a fresh burst of blood, the wound was rapidly sealing up.

It hurt. Each pulse of heat filling recently vacated blood vessels was like a nail hammered through an opening far too small, but Vars could neither move nor scream, locked inside his body as if it were a coffin in which he’d been buried alive.

Above him, Damon was a fireball. Thrashing between the two walls of the hallway, his invisible form dragged behind it a tail of flame and smoke, which ended up tumbling to the floor just before Jake’s lovely, red-stained face loomed over Vars.

Tears streaked down his cheeks. Pale, with his face aged by grief, Jake called out to Vars from beyond a blurry ring of light that surrounded everything Vars saw.

“Come back to me, hold on,” Jake whispered, holding Vars’s hand, while his other frantically clutched Vars’s throat. His touch was like stepping into a warm shower after getting soaked in the snow. The smell of smoke and meat awoke a sudden hunger in Vars’s gut—ravenous as if he had missing space in his body, but the pulsing pain in his veins was gone, with only a latent headache remaining.

The darkness Vars had expected wasn’t coming, and Jake’s hand, curled up around Vars’s icy fingers, kept him warm enough for Vars’s consciousness to remain afloat.

A voracious impulse burst inside Vars’s chest, and then his heart thumped. Once. Twice. Thrice, and then continuously. And once the light was gone from the edges of Vars’s vision, he opened his mouth and took a lungful of air, suddenly sitting up as if only now released from under the water.

Jake yelped and jerked away so fast he fell back on his ass. “Vars?” his voice was high-pitched, as if his wishes coming to life were freaking him out, but seconds later he was reaching for Vars with trembling fingers. “How…?”