“Jonas,” she whimpered pitifully. “Jonas.”
Ginny clawed at her chest, ready to rip it open to reach the agony in her heart and it seemed to go on forever, cracking like a whip to the rest of her insides, inflicting damage—and she experienced every brutal second of it. No way out, there was no way out and the human inside of her searched for help on instinct, turning onto her side and attempting to call out.
No one heard her. Not with the battle taking place.
The High Order no longer sat in their thrones. They surrounded Jonas in a circle, their robes in tatters. And Jonas…she’d never seen him as he was. Like a God. He fended off the attacks they hurled in his direction, capturing their energy and sending it back twice as powerful. Felling them one by one.
But they continued to rise, regroup, attack again. Unfazed.
“You shouldn’t be able to last a minute against us,” said Clarence, awestruck. “Where did you gain such power?”
Elias appeared at Jonas’s side, his gaze rife with meaning and emotion. “Threaten a vampire’s mate once, he grows stronger to protect her. Take her life? Threaten it again and again? You’ve created your own worst nightmare.”
“We don’t have nightmares anymore,” droned Jonas’s sire. “We don’t sleep.”
Not acknowledging Clarence’s comment, Elias instead nodded at Jonas. “It’s time. You’ve got this. I have your back.”
“How touching,” Jonas’s sire sneered, sailing a bolt of opaque air in Elias’s direction. Elias rolled to the side, but not before he was winged by the moving force field. With gritted teeth, he got to his feet and started to rejoin Jonas in the middle of the circle, but something caught his attention and made him smile. It didn’t take Ginny long to realize what it was. Tucker.
Tucker…and an army. Hundreds of men and women.
They thundered down the stairs around her with a deafening war cry, running head first into the fray with Tucker at the lead. The army moved at such a high speed, there was no mistaking them as vampires. One man in particular fought balanced on a prosthetic leg, a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. Several of them were knocked to the ground before they could reach the High Order—who were now unmistakably the enemy—but it was impossible to stop them all.
Despite the miserable state of her body, Ginny couldn’t help but watch in breathless triumph as the High Order were captured, one by one, held down and subdued by the makeshift army. This was it. The rightful beginning of Jonas’s rule. It all started here and she was proud of him. So proud.
Jonas stood over Clarence, his shoulders rippling with ferocity. “You die now in her name,” he rasped, raising his right hand, fisting it until his sire started to choke, scratching at the invisible hands around his throat.
“Don’t you see she is dying?” The king gasped a laugh. “She is dying.”
Jonas’s fist dropped to his side. He stiffened and twisted around, his gaze landing on her immediately. “No,” he whispered, reaching her side in an instant. “You…” He frantically ran hands over her body, brows drawn together in confusion. “You’re not supposed to be conscious. Ginny.”
She tried to speak. Nothing came out.
“Elias,” Jonas roared, his eyes wild. “What the fuck is happening?”
The light she’d been trying to walk toward loomed brighter, swallowing her, but she only made it halfway through, darkness crushing in on one side, searing heat on the other. She was being rent in two.
“Did your venom release?” Elias shouted.
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
Their voices faded little by little as Ginny started to move away from her body, like fog rolling off a bay. Jonas’s anguished below made her fight. She clawed her way back to full wakefulness, even though that was where the pain resided. Better to be in agony than separated from Jonas at the end.
“I don’t understand,” Jonas rasped, tipping her face up. “Her heartbeat is strong, but her skin cools so quickly.”
Ginny tried to communicate with her eyes that nothing was his fault. That she would find him again in the next life and the one after that…but a movement just beyond his shoulder caught her eye. Jonas was drowning too deeply in his misery to notice Clarence had broken loose of the vampires holding him down. The king disengaged their hold, spun around long enough to grasp a stake and fly in Jonas’s direction, weapon raised. Vaguely, Ginny wondered if the king’s movements would normally appear as a blur to her and nothing more, but now? She could pinpoint every step, could see the revenge flame in his eyes, hear the carpet fibers move under his feet.
And with Jonas in jeopardy, her body took over.
Power ripped through the cobwebs of pain and spiked in her stomach, shooting out to her fingertips, legs, hair follicles. Denial followed. The weight of responsibility. Without a formal command from her brain, Ginny lunged to her feet and threw herself in between the king and Jonas.