“I got him,” I whispered into the mic. “He’s alive. But I can’t move him. He needs—”
From the front lawn, I heard Leo shout, “Jacques Shoffru, former Master of the City of Veracruz and Cancún, Mexico, and all hunting territories between, you are forsworn. You will meet me here, now, in Blood Challenge!” So much for the trash talk. He’d skipped it entirely and gone right for the challenge.
“He needs a vamp to heal him. Fast,” I finished, in a whisper, knowing it was too late. Eli’s heart pumped a single hard thump, then sped with shock. He was dying. His pupils were blown, wide and nearly black as a vamp’s. Bruiser slid in behind me and started working the chains holding Eli upright, iron chains, the kind a monster truck would use to haul a cattle car. As if Eli was dangerous—
A shadow flickered in the edges of my vision. One-handed, I grabbed a knife. Threw it. With muscle memory, practice, and pure luck I hit my target. But the compression bandage slipped. I grabbed it as a blood-servant fell, my knife buried in his throat. Blood gushing. Gouting. I’d hit the carotid artery. He tried to shout, but sucked in blood with the breath. Choked. I’d hit his windpipe too. He writhed on the floor, dropping the short sword he had been holding. Trying to pull a gun. Gently, Bruiser took it away from him.
The man died. I remembered to breathe. The air ached in my chest. I blinked and saw the man’s bright green eyes, as if burned into my retinas.
Bruiser checked the hallway again and returned to the chains. He loosed the bonds holding Eli upright in the chair. My partner started to slide down, boneless. The T-shirt bandages slid again and fresh blood gushed over my hands. “No! Nononono,” I whispered, repositioning the bloody cloth as Bruiser caught him. The blood was so watery, like Kool-Aid, not something to sustain life. Eli is dying. Together we eased my partner to the floor. Instantly blood soaked into the carpet beneath him, thin and watery. Fresh and weak. Tears gathered in my eyes. “Nononononono,” I murmured, over and over.
“Jane,” Alex said, his voice full of fear in my earpieces. “Jane?”
“I can’t— I don’t know what—”
From the front yard, I heard the clash of steel. The roar of vampires in a duel. “Alex, I need two things. Fast. I need Shiloh here, in this room. And I need Molly to drain the pirate. You understand? Now. No argument. Just do it. Tell them. Or your brother is dead. Do it!”
I heard Alex giving orders on the makeshift coms system. I felt more than saw Bruiser leave the room. And it was just Eli and me on the floor, my hands trying desperately to hold in the blood. To hold in the life. His pulse thumped and stuttered and raced. I leaned in and hissed, “Do not die on me. Do. Not. Die.” Tears ran from my eyes and snot dribbled under my nose. They dripped onto my hands as I sobbed, trying to be silent. Knowing that if I had to defend him, if someone got past Bruiser and I had to let go and take up a weapon, Eli would die. Right then. “If you die”—I snuffed up the mess on my face and wiped it on the shoulder of the fuzzy purple shirt—“I’ll tell all Derek’s men you weren’t as tough as they are. I’ll . . .”
Fuzzy purple T-shirt. I repositioned my entire body and held the blood-soaked wad of compression material over his neck with my knees as I ripped off the T-shirt. It was stupid to remove the compression bandage. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I whispered. But I eased it slowly back. Blood had pushed past the clot that had formed from the charmed stake. I hesitated for half a second, grabbed the stake from my pocket, wiped it cleanish on my jeans, and pressed it back into the wound. Instant clotting. I wrapped the T-shirt over the wound and tied it all off with the T-shirt’s arms, not tight, loose enough to let him breathe. I repositioned Eli’s legs up high, a mound of pillows under them. I pulled all the linens off the bed and tucked them around his body to treat the shock. I was thinking now. At last.
A hand touched my shoulder. Bruiser leaned down to me and said, so softly it was less than a breath against my cheek, “Someone is in the hallway. Shiloh has a shot. Stay down.” I saw the vamp fall before I heard the rifle shot. It didn’t echo far, not on the flat land, but the echo in the midst of the houses was fast and tapping.
On the front lawn, swords clashed. I heard Leo shout, a sound of pain. I smelled vamp blood, and had been smelling it for a while, what seemed like hours, though it couldn’t have been more than two minutes. From the back of the house, I heard a scream and the faint snap of a whip. Go, Bliss and Rachael. Just hope it wasn’t one of ours.
“Molly says she can’t draw the life from Shoffru without drawing it from Leo too,” Alex said, controlled panic in his voice. “They’re moving too fast and she can’t figure out how to separate them in the spell. Jack is pulling through the bond he has on her, using Molly’s magic against Leo. And Shiloh can’t help you. She says Leo is pulling from her and her new servants, but it isn’t enough. She says all of Shoffru’s vamps are on the front lawn. They’re closing in on Leo.” His voice in the earpieces went emotionless and low. “They aren’t going to honor the Blood Challenge. They’re just gonna kill him.”
I cursed. “Okay. Tell Evan to get up here any way he can. Tell Bliss and Gee to help him get in through the back door. Tell them all to get to Eli and save him—I don’t care what it takes.” I yanked the mic off me and tossed it across the room. To Bruiser, I said, “Cut the light.”
“What are you doing?”
“Flying by the seat of my pants.” I yanked up the chains from the blood-soaked floor. And stalked out onto the porch.
Below me, Leo and Jack Shoffru fought in a ring of vamps and humans, like a couple of homicidal kids on a playground, both bloody, scored by dozens of cuts. They were surrounded by a nimbus of magic, sparking and red. The reddish magic around Jack was a haze that glittered with black and red motes of pure power. Motes that stabbed at Leo. Burrowing into his skin. It was death magic, Molly’s magic. And I knew I could survive it.
Jackie Boy wanted the blood diamond. If Shoffru ever got his hands on it, all hell would break out. Hell on earth. That could not happen. I had to find a way to destroy that thing. Somehow. Later. For now, I had to endure. And suffer Molly’s death magics. Again. Deep inside, Beast growled, more vibration than sound, the reverberation echoing through my soul home like a slow-beating drum. Below me, Leo seemed to take heart from the sound and in a move so fast I couldn’t follow, he cut Shoffru three times: groin, kidney, and face. Blood splattered across the lawn, black in the security lights. Leo shouted, and I felt the shout through the binding, holding me close to Leo.
I climbed up on the railing, one hand holding the chain, the stronger arm steadying me on the narrow iron barrier. And I picked out Jack’s second. A lone vamp stood to one side, the circle of vamps bowing out around the ground she held. Shoffru’s heir. She was tall, muscular, with a small waist and broad shoulders, her hair cut short to the scalp. She was armed to the teeth, and those teeth included fangs two inches long. She also had two long swords, one on each hip. And she had a nose ring.
In an instant, I put it together—the reason the scents had never worked for me. The reason the timeline hadn’t worked for me. It wasn’t Shoffru who took Molly. Who took Bliss and Rachael. Jack had used his heir, pulling strings in the background, letting his heir, Cym—Bancym M’lareil, I realized—do the dirty work. Sending a woman to host a party. To approach women. To take them away. And it was the woman who smelled of the Damours’ lair, and who had been working with Adrianna, maybe for a long time. I remembered the look they had shared at Leo’s party, long and full of desire. The woman had been working for and with Jack all this time. Jack hadn’t been working alone, just by himself. How sexist of me was it that I had never once considered a woman as the culprit? And, for sure, she was part of the magic that was hurting Leo. Somehow she assisted it. I narrowed my eyes and focused Beast’s night vision on her. She was holding a sword in her right hand, the naked blade reflecting a streetlight. She held something else in her left hand, something small. Something shiny.
Blood Challenges are formal things. They almost always, depending on the language of the issuing challenge, required a second. They always had rules. And witnesses. I didn’t know enough about them to say if using magic was against the rules. I didn’t know if what I was about to do would cause me problems in the future. Or problems for Leo. And I just didn’t care. Not anymore. I sought out Shoffru’s second, aimed my body at her, and shouted. “Hey, Cym! You want some of this?” And I leaped.
Beast flooded me with her power. In midair I swung the chain over my head. It whirled. And wrapped around her as I landed. With a clank-snap, the end of the chain, tacky with Eli’s drying blood, caught her. Secured her. Holding to the end of the chain, I rolled, seeing the vamps scatter around me, the ground absorbing the impact of my landing. And I pulled the chained vamp with me. End over teakettle. She dropped whatever she had been holding and I grabbed it up. And I started to burn. Three red motes scuttled through the flesh of my palm and under my skin. Into my blood.
Beast screamed. Her scream shrieked through my own throat, tearing. I tasted blood. I rolled to my feet. With my weak arm, I let go the chain and pulled a stake. Rammed it into the second’s heart. She went still. Maybe true-dead, maybe not. But true-stopped. I pulled a throwing knife, my arm aching. My flesh on fire. And I threw it.
As knife throws went, it sucked. The blade flipped in midair, losing power and trajectory. And hit Shoffru in the back, just below his neck on the right side, nicking the muscle before it tumbled to the ground. Shoffru whirled to me. He was vamped-out. Fangs like tusks, eyes like the pits of hell. Terrifying. He let go of the pull on Molly’s magic and whipped back his sword to take my head.
Beyond him, in the irregular circle of vamps and their dinners, Leo dropped to his knees. He was bleeding everywhere. Red motes of power scuttled like roaches under his skin. He was dying. Eli was dying. Rick was gone. Molly was as good as gone.
