Wolf leapt for Gemellus, and Gemellus for him.
They ran at each other at full strength and quickly went down to the ground. The sound of bones breaking and reknitting filled the air, along with the grunts of impact, the sound of flesh hitting flesh. They fought like titans, trading blows that would have broken lesser men—or lesser vampires.
I didn’t know what kind of fight Gemellus was anticipating, but I doubted this was it.
“Corvus! Appear! I command it!” Gemellus said after throwing Wolf back fifteen feet. It felt like the room thundered, even though the words weren’t meant for me. Raven was nowhere to be seen—and Wolf didn’t have to listen. I started to get worried Gemellus would die, and then who would stop Raven? Maybe Dren was right, and I would’ve been safer downstairs with him.
“Call off your dog!” Gemellus shouted when Wolf next let him catch his breath.
Raven finally emerged from the back of Heaven, walking as slowly as he could—Gemellus hadn’t told him to move quickly, and so he hadn’t.
“Wolf, stop,” he said quietly, obeying his old Master to the letter of the law. But Wolf didn’t relent—he had Gemellus on the ground now and was clawing at his throat.
This contradicted the way I thought vampires had to act—I thought the entire system was built on blind obedience. Then Wolf and Gemellus traded places quickly in the way fighting dogs sometimes will, and I caught a glimpse of dull metal at the sides of Wolf’s head, as if the younger vampire had gray headphones on.
“Silver?” I whispered as I realized just what Raven had done. Wolf still had his ears, but Raven had poured silver into them. He couldn’t hear Raven anymore to obey—if his ears scarred the way my arm had, he wouldn’t be able to hear anything ever again. He’d be following his last order forever, presumably to kill Gemellus.
They twisted and fell against the floor again; I heard it groan with their weight as they landed. Wolf had his hands latched in a death grip around Gemellus’s throat. Raven looked over their tangling bodies to me.
“So you decided to become a vampire after all?” he said, his voice still low. His face looked strange, pained, eyes red, with smears of scarlet on both of his cheeks.
“Have you been crying?” I asked, scared of him and for him both at once.
He didn’t just sit down on the dais at the far side of Heaven, he collapsed, as if something had hit him. “Natasha’s gone. I felt her go.”
“No—”
“He ate her. The monster of my Master that you freed ate her—” Raven reached into his coat, pulling out his silver knife.
“No! I saw her! She’s fine!”
“Don’t lie to me, Edie,” he commanded. I felt it wash over me and through me and couldn’t have disobeyed him if I’d tried.
“She was worried you would need help. She dosed herself with stem cells, like the others.”
Raven’s face fell anew. “Then my own monster gnaws her now.”
“But she’s alive—sort of.” I looked from him to Gemellus and Wolf’s evenly matched wrestling.
“Not with the life I wanted for her.”
“If you wanted to play Romeo and Juliet you should have gotten her the hell out of here!”
“Where to? Tell me where it would have been safe for us from your Beast?”
“She’s not like that!” I fell to my knees pleading with him as his face went dark.
“All Masters are eventually. I should know.” He watched Gemellus and Wolf’s fight with bleak satisfaction. “Come here, Edie. I’ll show you what she’s like.”
I got up off my knees and crossed the room to him, just as Dren raced up the stairs. Seeing him, I shouted, “Dren, help Gemellus!”
Dren started forward, then stopped. “When our kind fights like that, only cowards want other people to get involved. Is your new friend a coward?”
“Wise words from the Beast’s lapdog,” Raven said. I was walking as slowly as I could, and I could still speak—
“Dren, kill him then. Please.” I didn’t know what Raven was going to do to me—to us, baby—but the implacable look on his white face smeared with red was frightening.
I could see Dren calculate his chances of reaching me before Raven did.
“Wolf and I are well fed on others of our kind. You would have a hard time defeating us.” Raven stood and almost instantly crossed the room to where I was. He placed himself behind me, silver blade drawn and at my neck. “Summon the Beast.”
“It’s still not too late.”
“Tell that to Lars,” he said, setting the blade down on my skin, and I gasped in pain.
“I can make her listen, Master. I swear it.”
“Only because you don’t know how we are. Meant to kill from the moment we are born. We cannot think of others before ourselves, and it is a joke to pretend there’s ever been another way. My Natasha wanted to cure humans, and instead the darkness made her able to kill for me. My blood perverted even her sweet heart. Your Beast cannot back down from this challenge any more than I can rescind it now.”
“I am not a monster,” I whispered, hoping it was true.
“Yes, you are. Just like me, just like I was made.” His hand caught under my jaw and he tilted my head forward, I thought for a horrible second to kiss me. Then his mouth opened and his teeth caught into my hair and tore raggedly against my scalp and I screamed as I felt his fangs grate against my skull. Blood poured out from the wound, covering my eyes as the wound took its time to heal.
“Summon your Beast,” he told Dren with bloody lips, “or next I will suck out her eyes.”
Dren had been trapped at the far side of the room, scythe up, unsure what to do next. He incrementally lowered the scythe. “Anna!” he bellowed. “Get up here!”
There was a sound at the stair and Jorgen emerged with a swollen belly, like a mockery of the child I carried inside, and Anna came up after him.
“Good boy,” she said, petting his massive disfigured furry head. Then she looked over to all of us.
She was a sight. A horrific yet beautiful sight. Her blond hair was tinted gray from all the newborn vampire dust. Her clothing was torn. But she was intact, and there was a sad smile on her face.
“In the tales of the Beast that I’ve heard, the Beast does not have friends. So imagine my surprise when you requested that we save her,” Raven said from behind me.
“Your storytellers are wrong then. I have many friends—and also many enemies. Which are you? Choose carefully.”
“Like you would give me a choice.” What had Gemellus done to turn him into this? There was a wheezing gasp from the wrestling vampires as Wolf gained on Gemellus. I could see where Wolf’s fingers were straining into the meat of Gemellus’s windpipe; if Gemellus gave him even one more half inch of leverage, he would twist it free.
“Just because you were raised without
honor does not mean there is none.”
“And all of this?” He twisted us both to look through the glass at the carnage below. “Ignored? Erased?”
“We have ways of making you forget.”
I could feel him weighing his options as he held me. Trust someone he’d never met, who’d just destroyed his livelihood, love, and house, or play his final awful card? The blade hovered, burning me as he considered, and I knew the moment he’d made up his mind. Poor Natasha; Raven never was going to be able to outrun his past.
This is it, baby. I’m sorry. I loved you and your father.
Then he released me. I fell to the ground in limp surprise. The knife clattered beside me, dropped.
Had he—were we?—I twisted to look up at him, but nothing had changed. “Edie, pick it up.”
My hand reached for the knife like it was told.
“Kill her, or kill yourself. You choose.”
The silver blade was a living thing in my hand, twisting in the air like a snake. Either I pointed it at me, or it had to be pointed at Anna.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I looked hopelessly at Anna, and at Dren, and at Gemellus, fighting myself. I didn’t want to die. But I didn’t want to kill her. The blade wavered as I tried to make up my mind, picking between two horrible options.
“Help me. Please,” I begged anyone who could listen. I took a staggering step toward Anna, as if pulled by the knife.
If I did try to kill her, would she kill me? What if she somehow changed me now? That would be a way out, but it wouldn’t save the baby. I needed to live—but could I live with myself knowing that I had killed a friend?
“My people have your land surrounded and we’ve already killed everything in this building,” Anna said. “End this, and I swear I’ll let you live until dawn.”
“You heard her. Go to her, Edie.”
I took another stumbling step forward. “I don’t want this. Make it stop. Gemellus—”
“Don’t talk to him,” Raven commanded. Dren stepped forward to intercept me, but Anna put her hand out, denying him.