“Now, Xerxei,” he says carefully. “Try to remain calm.”
“Calm?” I yell again. “What did that bitch do to me?”
“She fixed you,” he says simply.
“Fixed me? Fixed me?” I am getting hysterical now and I stop and put my hands on my face and breathe in deeply. What was it she said again? Oh yeah, sacrifice my Vampire. “Sacrifice my Vampire?” I shriek at him suddenly, making him flinch.
I hold my hand up to my face and try to Vamp out. Nothing happens. No claws and when I poke my top teeth, no fangs either. I grab my long hair and see that no, in fact I am not Xerxei, but Liv, and I seem to have lost my Vampire. She’s gone. I don’t need any more confirmation other than the never-ending thirst for blood has completely disappeared.
“Xane!” I scream at him. “Why did she do this? How did she do this?”
He has his hands up as I advance on him, and so he should. He stood by and let her do this and now I am no longer a Vampire. I am a…fuck knows what I am? I have been a Vampire for over a thousand years, what the Hell am I supposed to do now? Oh, the old gods have mercy; CK is going to have an apoplexy. And what about my charges? They are going to suffer unimaginably now that their sire has been vanquished from their lives. All of my anger and fear and confusion crash together as I lift my hands up and blast Xane with such a force of Faerie power it catapults him into midair and he hangs there as I fry his circuits. The electricity is bouncing off the walls and mingles with my cries of rage. I get such a surge of raw power that I kill him. The overload fries his senses and his brain shuts down.
Only for a moment, of course.
He is the Demon Overlord, after all. Not even my incredible force of power is enough do him in. Well, I don’t think, anyway. A small part of me thinks that Xerxei stepped in and tampered it down before it finished him off for good.
I let him go and he slumps to the floor, completely extinguished, and I stand with my hands on my hips, waiting for him to revive himself.
He opens his eyes with a groan some moments later. Enough to make me start to panic that I have turned into a homicidal Faerie maniac, but not enough to make me any less mad at him.
“How could you do this?” I ask him, now with tears in my eyes. “You have destroyed me. I can never forgive you for this.”
That gets him on his feet, and he staggers towards me with his arms outstretched like a Demonic zombie.
“No, Xerxei, don’t you see? We can be together now. You and me, like it is supposed to be,” he says.
He grabs my arms and I am about to shake him off when I get sucker punched by an overwhelming sense of passion. I pull him to me and take his mouth to mine, probing his tongue until I am ready to jump his bones.
Err, wait.
Something doesn’t add up here.
I push him away from me, breaking his hold on me, and I wipe my mouth with my hand. My black hair falls into a curtain around my face and I growl. For some reason when he touched me, I turned into Xerxei and did what his Demon wife would do. I Shift back with as much force as I can and a stamp of my foot.
“Stay the fuck away from me,” I say to him. “You will not use Xerxei to manipulate me. This is far beyond a betrayal, Xane. I have no words for you.”
He shakes his head at me in sorrow. If this was his plan, to get rid of the Vampire and have me all to himself, it has backfired in a major way. All he has done is see to it that I never want to see him again. I Astral out, needing to get to my charges. They have suffered so much in this past year; this is going to devastate them. Cole is going to be….
I don’t get to finish my woeful thought on how gutted Cole is going to be, as I land in my library at home to CK leaning over a prone Devon, who is lying next to a prone Cade.
“What?” I squeak as I drop to my knees. I don’t need to be a Vampire to smell the blood and it is freaking me out. Devon is covered in it, as is Cade.
I rip Devon’s shirt open and there, like the last five hundred and eight years have never happened, is the pitchfork wound in his stomach, bleeding out all over my Aubusson rug.
“CK?” I shriek and rip open Cade’s shirt to find four bullet holes in his chest. “What the fuck?”
“You tell me,” he says with a shrug. “These things usually have something to do with you, my sweet.”
He leans forward to take my hand and then stops, standing as still as a statue. “What the fuck?” he growls at me now. “What have you done?”
Well, clearly, he knows I am no longer his charge. He obviously can’t sense me, and I have no Vampire connection to him whatsoever. Well, why would I? Xanthe made sure that I wouldn’t.
“Not me,” I say, shaking my head. “Long story. What is happening to my charges?” That’s the more important thing right now. “Why are they dying like this? Like I never turned them?”
I gulp. I have reverted to my non-Vampire self, but I still have enough other paranormal goings-on in me that I survived. My charges, or ex-charges as it is now, are dying from the same wounds that were inflicted on them before I turned them and saved them. They too have been reverse-turned somehow.
“Cole!” I suddenly shout and Astral upstairs to our bedroom, hoping to find him in there unharmed.