Seriously, who was this guy? I knew it was his creature rising, and here I was thinking there was no creature I knew that could rise like his could. A lot of beings were underground, but none that I knew that had a body above the surface.
Whoa!
I yelled in my head, my entire body jerking.
Stop. He was in my head, and he was speaking to my creature. She’s clueless. You need to wake and hel—
HOLY FUCKING HELL!
She rose and she rose fast.
She hurled herself from wherever I’d been storing her, and after that, I held on as things happened, things I did, things that I knew I’d never forget.
I rose in the air, or she rose in the air, and as if I was watching myself from outside of my body, she shot her hand out. A command sparked from her eyes, and she pulled the energy from every single vampire in the room. Not just the room. Energy was streaming in from the hallways, and a back door was thrown open. More energy burst from it.
As I watched, as she took the energy and seemed to harness it around us, the vampires dropped to the ground.
They had no energy left. The more they exerted, she took it, and she was using it to fuel herself/us and Kieran. Because of it, the ground stopped shaking, and whatever creature he had inside wasn’t rising any longer.
He inhaled the energy, and I watched as it went through his body.
He leapt, a sword materializing in his hand as he did, and he made one motion with it. He completed the motion at the same time that he dropped to the ground.
A second later, he waited, stepping back toward us/her.
She/I was still draining the energy from the vampires, but we watched as Quesadilla’s head slowly fell off her body.
Before our eyes, she crumbled to the ground. The rest of her vampires crumbled as well. I felt all of their hearts stop…and I was waiting.
I glanced at Kieran. “No dust?”
A flare of annoyance flashed over his face, just as the sword vanished from his hand. “This is not a fucking television show.”
“Oh.”
My voice sounded weird. It was a mix of hers and mine. Hearing her voice now, and not in my head, was surreal. As fast as she rose, she returned back to where I kept her, and she was purring like a cat now.
“I thought you said I didn’t need to eat their energy.”
He was walking across the room for a phone that had dropped from Quesadilla’s body. He spared me a look as he bent for it. “You didn’t eat their energy, but you used it to fight them. Your creature will be sated for five years on what they gave her tonight.”
Oh. Good to know. I guess.
“How’d you know all that stuff, about the vamp who seduced my ex?”
“I didn’t. I was reading her mind.”
Oh.
Wait.
“She sent three-hundred vamps to that club.”
He gave me a grim look. “She did.”
“Would they die like these did when you killed her?”
He was going through her phone but looked up at me. “I didn’t kill her.”
I looked at the head that had rolled from her body. “How more dead do they have to be?”
“Her body and head will need to be burned, as well as all of the vampires here. She might be dead. She’s connected to them. If one lives, she can survive off that one vampire until a new body’s been made for her.”
“What?”
Holy crap.
“They’re like the scourge of the Earth. How do you know—never mind. I don’t want to know. I’ll get depressed from the answer, no matter what it is.” As I was talking to myself, he used his phone to make a call.
They answered, and he said, “I need Quessadiline’s entire compound burned.”
“You got her?”
“I got her.”
“Got it.”
He hung up and made another call as he started to leave the room.
I hurried after him, and I was running since he was moving so fast.
The front door was opened and we stepped out, the vehicle still there and his driver waiting.
The second call answered and Kieran said as he got inside, “You have three-hundred vampires heading to Bass. We’ll be too late.”
I was moving around to my door when his words hit me.
I had known. He said it inside, but my knees locked when it registered.
Nik.
Nik was at Bass.
Three-hundred vampires against those demons? Demons didn’t have ‘connections’ to keep each other alive like vampires did. And I knew demons better. They’d hiss and fight. They had superhuman strength at times. Some could use magic, but most couldn’t. It was something the masters kept to themselves, so no one rose to challenge them.
Nik was going to die.
Once our vehicle was on the way, I turned to him. “My best friend is at stake. I don’t give a fuck what you are, but whatever you are, unleash him. Now.”