Ereshki might be magically and physically depleted from her part in Dagon’s spells, but she could also take Ian out with one of those guns, and if Ian was in as bad shape as he implied, he might not be able to stop her, either.
But would summoning the darkest part of my power be worse? Tenoch had believed that so much, he’d created not one, but two assassins to take me out, if I brought it forth again. My other nature hadn’t hurt Ian before, but if I let the worst of it out, would it stop at killing Dagon? Or would it kill Ian, too?
It didn’t kill Tenoch.
The thought seared me, bringing another blast of hope. When I’d let the darkest aspect of my power free so long ago, I’d only killed the vampires who’d kidnapped me. Not the sire I loved. At the height of everything Tenoch had feared until his dying day, I’d still protected him.
Did that mean Ian was right? Was my power only as evil as I allowed it to be?
“Veritas, now!” Ian shouted.
How could I pick between over four thousand years of Tenoch’s conditioning versus Ian’s claim that he was wrong this instant? But not picking was its own choice. The walls were crashing down. Who should I believe? The sire who’d known me most of my life? Or the man I loved, yet had only known months?
Dammit, why should it be a choice between the two of them? Didn’t I have control over me, even the most frightening parts of me? Even demons had free will! Why should I be any different?
My father had chosen to “stray where it was forbidden” by impregnating Ashael’s mother and then, later, mine. He’d also chosen to lose his position as Warden of the Gateway to the Netherworld to bring Ian back after I begged him to. If the most fearsome otherworldly creature I’d met could choose despite the inclinations of his nature, then so could I!
And I chose not to let Ian get hurt by Dagon or Ereshki when I had the power to stop them. No matter what terrifying form that power took, or what I’d have to do to bring it forth, because there hadn’t been two aspects to my nature back then. There’d been only one.
“Ian,” I rasped. “When you get free, take Ereshki and get as far away from me as the pentagram allows.”
“The hell you say?” he snapped, but then I felt a resounding boom! that overwhelmed even the pain. He’d broken through the wall. Dagon’s howl of rage confirmed it.
“What I’m going to do could swallow everything in its immediate vicinity!” I said, the falling wall giving me strength to shout. “You can’t be near it, so take Ereshki and go!”
Then I reached down, feeling for the cage that housed my other half. But this time, I didn’t merely open the door or pull her out of it. No more partial measures.
I smashed the cage completely.
Chapter 42
Blackness rolled over my vision as I felt my other half rise, but for the first time in over four thousand years, I didn’t draw away to keep her separate. I embraced her, feeling a shocking surge of ice and heat as both halves began to merge into one. More shocking was how, almost instantly, she wasn’t “she” anymore. It was just me, with so much more to me than there had ever been before.
“Ian,” I managed to say between blasts that made me feel as if I’d detonate at any moment, but not with pain. With the kind of power I’d never felt before. “If you love me, trust me and go.”
I thought I heard him mutter, “Five minutes. That’s all you get,” but I wasn’t sure. I did feel him leave in a whoosh, though, a cut-off scream indicating he’d grabbed Ereshki, too.
Vow not to kill Ereshki myself fulfilled.
As for Dagon . . .
I opened my eyes. Dagon’s icy blue gaze met mine. Just as I’d guessed, the demon had one of Ian’s guns, and he didn’t hesitate. Silver rounds slammed into me, throwing me backward, but my heart was protected by the bulletproof vest.
I rolled behind the counter that had once serviced ski patrons, expecting another volley to blast through the wooden barrier at any moment. It didn’t. Instead, I only heard the rapid patter of footsteps that quickly faded.
He was running away from me.
I dragged myself to my feet. The spell that had secured the circles meant I healed slower than I would have normally, but I was healing, so I forced that unfamiliar feeling of sluggishness aside and chased him. With the pentagram’s boundaries still in place, Dagon couldn’t get too far.
He didn’t. I found him at the end of the star’s tip on the top of the ridge, beating against the spell that didn’t allow him to go any farther. He had his mobile phone in his other hand, of all things, and he screamed “Now, now, now!” at whoever was on the other end of it.
“Did you not pay attention when Ian and I said that no one can teleport into or leave the pentagram until dawn?”
He whirled, boyishly handsome features almost deformed from the hatred that twisted them. “Stay away from me.”
“Stay away?” I repeated, closing the distance between us. “Stop? Don’t? Please? How many times have you heard those words? I remember that they only amused you . . . and incited you to greater acts of cruelty.”
“You cannot best me in your condition.” A snarl that sounded more desperate than confident. “You can barely walk!”
He had a point. I wasn’t nearly healed enough to fight him, and his distance from Ian meant that he was in far better shape than he’d been before. In a hand-to-hand battle, Dagon would win. That’s why I wasn’t using my hands.
“True,” I replied. “But I am my father’s daughter.”
I let the power I’d only accessed once before rip through me. When it overflowed, I saw Dagon through eyes no vampire had.
Darkness poured from him in putrid waves, staining even the ground he stood upon. Not a glimmer of light broke through it. Unlike most people who committed terrible deeds, Dagon hadn’t been warped by cruel circumstances or a distorted view of what was best for the world. No, Dagon knew exactly who he was and what he was doing, and he’d taken the darkest joy in both.
I had my own darkness, made up of the other side of eternity instead of the stain of too many foul deeds to count. I let it billow behind me like a cloud before it pooled at my feet, widening as it snaked toward Dagon. He saw it and leapt back, but the barrier of the pentagram left him nowhere to go.
“What are you doing?” His voice, always so confident, cruel or amused, now sounded plaintive. “Stop! Stop, please!”
I ignored that, just as Dagon had ignored similar pleas countless times before. At last, everyone who’d pled for mercy from him and received none would get their long-overdue justice.
“No,” I said, my voice booming in a thunderous way I’d never heard before. It sounded, I realized, like my father’s did when he was angry. “You’ve been sentenced.”
I plunged every bit of that otherworldly power inside Dagon. It didn’t curl around the water and blood that plumped his skin and made his features as ruddy as a youth’s; it went deeper, wrapping around the foulest part of him.
His soul.
Dagon screamed as I grabbed that part and pulled. For an instant, there were two Dagons: the body that made up the demon and a translucent duplicate that struggled in my power’s grasp. I pulled again and his soul broke the surface of his skin, blurring it. The darkness around me became liquid and plummeted to depths that went all the way to the netherworld.
This was what Tenoch had seen back when his enemies kidnapped me to coerce him into complying with their demands. Tenoch hadn’t yet reached the point where he was so powerful that few dared to cross him, and as a new vampire, I hadn’t been able to defend myself against Tenoch’s older, stronger foes. But being at the mercy of the merciless again had triggered a frenzied PTSD attack that brought forth the darkest of my other abilities. Tenoch had arrived to see me ripping the souls out of my captors, forever causing him to fear me.
Now, it was Dagon’s turn to fear. I tightened the grip my power had on his soul, about to rip it free—
“Veritas,” a shocked voice gasped. “W
hat are you doing?”
I would have expected that question from Ian. Telling me to do my worst and actually seeing it were two different things. But this wasn’t Ian’s voice. It was feminine, and it was speaking in Mandarin.
I turned around, confirming Xun Guan was indeed behind me, as close as the encircled pentagram would allow. She wasn’t alone. No fewer than four council members were with her, with an additional two Law Guardians and six demons flanking them.
I let out a short laugh and turned back to Dagon. “That was the call you made? You had your demons teleport Law Guardians and some of the council here?”
Dagon’s grin was back in all of its cruel glory. “Yes, and”—he raised his voice so those watching us could clearly hear him—“I know demons aren’t usually the ones to do this with the vampire court, but I’d like to lodge a formal complaint.”
Chapter 43
I actually looked behind me again to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. How dare Dagon bring the police to a demon-and-death’s-daughter fight! He truly was an asshole.
“Veritas!” Haldam’s voice cracked the air like a gunshot. Of course, Dagon had made sure the council’s official spokesperson was among those here. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Let me go, and you can make up any story you like,” Dagon hissed, now too low for them to overhear. “Kill me, and they will all see you for the traitorous abomination that you are.”
I’d often feared that one day, I would slip up and be caught. Turns out, my fears hadn’t been ambitious enough. You didn’t call pools of darkness pouring from me and wrapping around Dagon while magic crackled the air and my silver gaze cut through the ephemeral darkness a slip. It was more like a landslide.
Yet, oddly, I wasn’t afraid. Maybe the ice-cold calmness from my newly blended nature was overpowering the more volatile emotions of my vampire side. Maybe it was the fact that deep down, I’d always known this day would eventually come, so now that it had, it was almost freeing.
Dagon’s gaze gleamed with malevolence. “You can thank Ian for my finding out what your vampire identity was. If he hadn’t sued the council when you left him, it might have taken me months to realize that the bitch I sought and the spouse-abandoning Law Guardian named Veritas were one and the same.”
As if he’d summoned him, Ian appeared. This was the first I’d seen him since we’d been freed from the circles, and I was appalled.
“Taken quite a lot,” he’d said of the effort it took to break down the wall. That didn’t begin to describe the damage. His severed right arm was only a small stump protruding from his right shoulder while his left arm was stripped of all flesh, the horn still wrapped around his knuckles as if it had fused with his bones. His left shoulder only had some rough sinews attaching it to his collarbones, and his whole body looked shrunken, as if it had cannibalized itself for energy during his battle to take the wall down. Worse, he didn’t appear to be healing.
Please let him just need lots of blood. Or time for the magic’s ravaging effects to leave him. Please, let this not be the cost of him saving me!
Whatever his body looked like, Ian himself hadn’t changed. “Who called the bloody cops?”
“Dagon,” I replied, looking back at the demon.
His soul might be swimming right beneath his face, but it didn’t lessen the venom in his smile. It enhanced it.
“Long ago, you stripped me of all my power and position,” he said in a caressing voice. “Take my soul now, and you will know what that feels like, Veritas. And you will rue it.”
He’d never called me by a name before. I’d only ever been “girl” to him. Now, my name left his lips as if it were a curse.
I glanced back at the council. If I tried very hard, I might be able to do what Dagon said and pull off a “this isn’t what it looks like” defense. I could say my eyes and the darkness billowing behind me was the result of a spell Dagon had hexed me with, and point to the dead Anzus and all the damage done to Ian as proof of what the demon could do.
Or, I could think up a cleverer defense. I could literally say anything to persuade them to believe that what they saw wasn’t caused by a forbidden hybrid lineage and illegal magic . . . if I let Dagon go instead of killing him.
That’s why he’d had his acolytes teleport several members of the vampire council plus a handful of Law Guardians here. It was, to use an American term, his Hail Mary pass.
“Kill me, and you lose everything you’ve built during the many years of your life,” Dagon repeated, as if I was too stupid to realize the implications myself.
“Veritas, explain this!” Haldam commanded.
Dagon’s eyes gleamed with almost a feral light. “Yes, explain, or prove what you are beyond all doubt—”
I yanked his soul out. Dagon’s body collapsed at the loss of the writhing, diaphanous form. Seeing it, the council members and Law Guardians recoiled in horror. Then they let out a gasp when I drew Dagon’s silently shrieking soul right up to my face.
“You don’t get away again,” I said. “No matter what this costs me: You. Are. Done.”
Then I threw his foul, reeking soul into the darkness that pooled at my feet, giving the new Warden of the Gateway to the Netherworld—whoever that was now that my father had been fired from or abdicated the position—another passenger to transport to the most feared section of the afterlife.
Shocked silence filled the air. I used it to concentrate as I pulled back my power. To my surprise, it went easily, without the struggle that had marked my former issues with my other nature. The darkness that had pooled around me vanished, too, revealing the dry, hardened earth of winter, and when I turned around, I could see that my gaze now glowed emerald, not silver.
The demons gave a horrified look at what I’d done before teleporting away. Guess they didn’t care about Dagon enough to attempt avenging him, or they knew they’d need bigger numbers to try. Either way, word of what I’d done would travel. If I didn’t have a bounty on my head in the demon world before, I would now.
That was fine. When they came for me, I’d be ready.
Haldam was the first to find his voice. It shook, but to his credit, his words weren’t fearful. “Arrest her!”
What was left of Ian’s muscles coiled; a panther about to pounce. Dawn peeked over the horizon. Soon, the pentagram’s confining barrier would be down. Ian must not think he could teleport us away, so he was readying himself to fight.
“Ian, don’t!”
He paused, anger and incredulousness washing over his expression. “You think I’ll let them take you?”
At that, every one of the Law Guardians drew a weapon. His threat could not have been clearer. But in his current condition, a fight with them could prove deadly for Ian.
I could use my abilities to overcome them, but they didn’t deserve to have their souls ripped out, and I wasn’t sure I could stop myself from doing that versus only tearing out their blood and water. That power felt too close to the surface, too ready to be unleashed again. If I let it out again so soon, who knew what would happen?
“You will let them take me, Ian,” I said, struck with an idea. “Then you’ll call me later, when you’re someplace safe.”
His breath blew out in the harshest of laughs. Then he swung around to glare at the newest council member, who muttered, “You won’t be alive later,” under his breath.
“Ian!” My voice rose as the promise of death filled his gaze. I couldn’t let him attack the council, for many reasons. “I said when you get someplace safe, call me.”
The killing rage left his gaze. I heaved a sigh of relief. Good, he understood. Then, I turned to the council.
“I demand a formal trial before any sentence is carried out. Considering my millenniums of service, it’s the least I deserve.”
“She is right,” Hekima said, though her glance held no hope for the sentence to be anything except death. “We will reconvene in Athens, where all eleven of us will be present. Until th
en, Veritas, you are under arrest. One of you, restrain her.”
“You’ll have to wait a few minutes,” I replied calmly. “The barrier around this area doesn’t drop until dawn.”
They tested that, of course. Then they stood on the other side of the barrier, exchanging awkward looks with each other.
Ian came over to me. I took his hand in mine and winced at how I only felt bones. Please, let him heal, I thought again.
He must have sensed my worry because his mouth curled. “I’ve come back from worse, or so I’ve been told.”
This was the second time that fighting by my side had reduced him to a near-skeletal state. “Marriage is proving to be harmful to your health,” I replied with a shaky laugh.
“That’s saying something for a vampire,” he quipped. Then his amusement faded and he said, “Ereshki is dead,” with savage satisfaction.
How he’d managed to kill her in his state was remarkable. Then again, Ian had always surprised me—and anyone who dared to underestimate him.
“Good,” was all I said.
The sun was coming up. In moments, it would shine through the smashed-out windows of the ski lodge and touch the blue diamond, breaking the boundary on the encircled pentagram.
“I love you,” I whispered, reaching for his hand again.
He squeezed, the horn making a cracking sound as if it had turned into nothing more than a dried twig from all the power it had expelled taking down the walls of our trap.
“Love you, too, my little soon-to-be-former Guardian.”
I felt the spell drop the next moment. A breeze came from the pentagram as the potent magic was extinguished like a candle being blown out. The council members and Law Guardians felt it, too. They shifted before one of them put a tentative foot over the invisible line that had been blocked off before.
Ian’s bony hand tightened around mine. For an instant, the trees, lodge, and mountainous slope began to blur. Then that blur collapsed, and he gritted out a curse.