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Dragging in a shaky breath, I touched my hand to the cut on my wrist. “Night’s Fall.”
The cut flared white light, brightening my surroundings for a split second. Water raining down walls. A heavy door with a lock and a window. Then the light dimmed, and darkness pressed in again.
“Slayer.” The voice came out of nowhere but also right next to me.
I yelped, even though I’d been expecting it. “Ronick?” I said into the darkness, my voice breaking.
“Is Jacek here? Did you find him?”
I needed to think speedy thoughts. Blind in the dark, I lunged for his sword and scabbard. My fingertips connected with the hilt. So did his a moment later as I yanked the sword free of the scabbard. He tore it out of one of my hands, but then he shouted in pain. His grip loosened, and I wrenched the sword away. Then I shuffled backward, through the heavy door that also dripped with water. I shut it. Locked it with a loud click. Inhaled as I backed away, my eyes bugging out of my head. I’d done it. But I flicked the light switch to be sure.
A buttery glow lit the space from above, confirming that I had in fact done it.
Ronick stood in the back half of the woodshed, confined to a three-by-three space, between four dripping walls of holy water, locked up tight with no way out to hunt down and kill Jacek. The holy water collected into a basin on the floor and was pumped back up to the top to rain some more. Ronick looked at his surroundings, his mouth gaped open, and realization seemed to hit him right between the eyes as soon as he met my gaze through the wet glass window in the door.
“Give me Night’s Fall’s powers,” I said, my voice like a whip snapping the air.
“You get me the fuck out of here!” He lunged at the door, and a loud sizzle morphed with his scream on impact. A cloud of smoke burst from his body as he leaped back, thickening the air inside his cell so only two angry pinpoints of red peered out. “Get me out!”
“Give me Night’s Fall’s powers,” I said again.
He roared, rattling his frustration down the walls and quaking the wooden floorboards under my feet. “Fuck you, Slayer! I hope he draws your death out so long that you beg him to kill you!”
Keeping my face blank while my stomach soured, while my insides cringed at what he’d said, I ticked my gaze to my left. Another empty cell waited right next to Ronick’s, only without holy water sliding down its walls. That cell was how I planned to get my power back from Detective Appelt. By imprisoning those who prevented me from surviving Paul, I might be able to live my own damn life for once. I was no different than Roseff, who’d held Jacek captive all those years. I had to become that type of monster, despite the slimy feeling oozing through my veins, despite the poisonous rot eating through my heart. This was exactly what monsters did to survive, and I hated it.
I just hoped my vamps didn’t recoil in terror from me. Especially Jacek, who’d once been held against his will just like Ronick was now.
“Bitch!” he shouted. “Let me out of here!”
I turned and left, securing the bar on the woodshed door behind me and smothering the fury of his threats. Then I focused on the bites all over my body, the slightest pinpricks that were barely visible, and when their tingling piqued, I called them to me.
They appeared by my side within seconds, their amber eyes glinting with questions in the moonlight. Their gazes slid from me to the woodshed, surely hearing the muffled threats on my life seeping from underneath the door.
“Jacek,” I choked out, the backs of my eyes burning. “Please don’t hate me.”
“Never.” He stared hard at the door, listening, surely clicking things into place. He started forward, his customary grin long faded into the night. Stopping with his hand on the door’s bar, he shook his head at me. “I could never hate you, Slayer.”
Then I would hate myself enough for the both of us.
He eased the bar up and then shoved inside. I followed closely, Eddie and Sawyer at my heels.
Ronick quieted as soon as he saw Jacek, and Jacek froze. Tension vibrated the air behind me as Eddie and Sawyer took in the scene.
Ronick bared his fangs at me, violence twisting his expression. “You knew exactly where he was this whole time. You never had any intention of telling me where he was.”
“No,” I agreed. “I didn’t.”
“You’re fucking him, aren’t you?” he shouted. “I should’ve known right when I saw you, when I smelled you, you stupid—”
Jacek slammed into the door with the force of a train, his palm smacking the metal. “If you finish that sentence, that will be the last thing you ever do,” he snarled.
“Wrong.” Ronick seethed. “The last thing I will do is kill you for the death of my brother, but I’ll be sure to wait until after the dark unknown kills your little slayer here. And to think I was going to help her find the Slayer Senate.” His flaming eyes ticked to me. “You’re on your own.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said, stepping forward to look him in the eye. “I’m not on my own. Far from it. You’ll give me Night’s Fall’s magic.”
He laughed, a dark, vicious sound. “Or what?”
“Have you completely forgotten the most important thing in this vengeance scenario you planned? Your brother was the bad guy, not me,” Jacek growled. “Your brother taught me everything I need to know about torture. It would be a pleasure to put that knowledge to use.”
I sliced my gaze over my shoulder at him. I would never ask him to torture anyone, not when he’d risen above his past, accepted it as part of who he was, scars and all.
I turned back to Ronick. “I will do what must be done.”
The holy water and containment were already torture. It tortured me, too, and I very seriously doubted I could go beyond that.
“Can you all give Ronick and me a minute?” Jacek asked. A muscle in his jaw bounced, and his fists balled at his sides.
Nodding, I turned toward Sawyer and Eddie in the doorway, their expressions hard as stone and just as difficult to read.
“We’ll be right outside if you need us,” I said.
The three of us strode out but left the woodshed door open a crack. Eddie paced the yard in tight circles and raked his fingers through his hair as if to reconcile what I’d done. Sawyer gazed over the fence at the cemetery. The longer the silence stretched, the faster my knees threatened to buckle under the weight of what I’d become.
A monster. All because of Paul.
“Sawyer. Eddie,” I whispered to their backs. “Please say something.”
Sawyer stepped toward me just as I started to break.
A sob welled in my throat and then cracked through the night. “I’m a monster,” I whispered. “Just like R—.” Ronick’s magic still prevented me from saying his name or any name like his.
“No.” Sawyer cradled my face between his large hands, his expression pained like I’d hurt him.
“If he doesn’t give me the sword’s power, then what do I do? I couldn’t tell you guys, Sawyer. I couldn’t—”
“Belle—”
“If Detective Appelt doesn’t give me my power back, then I’ll imprison him too.”
“That’s—”
“How many people will I have to lock up and torture just to survive Paul?” I hissed. “What if I end up hurting you three or turning into something that you hate?”
“It’s not possible, Belle.” Sawyer’s thumbs massaged away the tears streaming down my cheeks. “You didn’t see the state of Jacek when I found him, a shell of the person you know today. I had a conversation with Roseff before Jacek killed him. The man was a lunatic, and I guarantee you he never had any doubts or reservations about what he was doing. You are not him, do you hear me? He didn’t deserve to live. But you do.”
His words penetrated and wound through the inside of my skull until I could at least draw a breath again. Progress. Jacek was right—I couldn’t do much else if I couldn’t breathe.
Eddie stepped toward us. “You are blindingly bright, Sunshine, but maybe you’ve forgotten something about books.”
I sniffed and barked out a weird laugh that sounded like a hiccup. “We’re talking about books?”
Sawyer sighed, still smoothing my cheeks. “It’s the only language he knows.”
Eddie hopped up onto a pile of logs covered in a blue tarp that hugged the fence and sat so he had a clear view of both the woodshed and the cemetery. “You once said, and I quote, ‘No other slayer after me should ever have to go through this bullshit.’ If you want to save lives, including your own, that makes you the hero, not the villain in the book world. You do whatever you need to do to get that done, especially if it means roughing people up who are stupid enough to get in your way.”
Sawyer nodded and joined him on the log pile with the all the grace of a butterfly despite his size. “Ronick made his choice a long time ago. I don’t know anything about this Detective Appelt, but if he stole your power, that does not make him a good guy.” He gazed at me, his orange-yellow eyes intense but warm. “He deserves what’s coming to him.”
I sighed, suddenly exhausted even though the night had just begun. Night’s Fall weighed heavily in my hands, but with my vamps a safe distance away, I flung it up in the air just to see what happened. It flopped back down in the grass. Damn you, gravity. I bent to retrieve it and then leaned it against the wood pile.
Sawyer stared over the fence at the cemetery. “I did say that to defeat a monster, you have to become a monster, which I think you’re doing the best way you know how. Paul wants to kill you, and you want to live just as much, if not more than what he wants. Two powerful, opposing beings battling it out in a ferocious display of claws and fangs sharper than mine.” Smiling, he held out a hand to help me up next to him. “And guess who’s winning?”
I grasped his hand but stumbled on my way up, some of the logs shifting dangerously. “Apple pie?”
They both chuckled, but it was filled with humor. The best sound ever.
Sawyer planted a kiss on the top of my head as I settled between them. “You are winning.”
I really couldn’t argue with that since I was still alive. Still, this battle was far from over.
Keeping my ears glued to the low murmur of voices floating from the open door of the woodshed, I rested my head on Sawyer’s shoulder and gazed out over the view of the graveyard across the empty lot. Since my slayer powers were no longer shoving me out the door to patrol, I could stall and soak up this moment before I threw myself into the fray. There would still be patrolling and staking and general mayhem, and I was sure Detective Appelt would come looking for me at the one place he had to know I’d be.
Then of course there was Paul, still lurking around every corner of my subconscious when he wasn’t raining horror down on my whole world.
Just one more minute of peace, of being sandwiched between two of my three favorite creatures on this planet.
“Sunshine...” Eddie gazed at my hand resting palm-up on my knee like he wouldn’t mind munching down a few of my fingers. Instead, he touched his fingertips to my wrist, then slid them around to pick up my hand. He placed it delicately in his open palm set on his thigh and slid my fingers up until they threaded with his.
My breath caught. I was touching him. I lifted my head from Sawyer’s shoulders just slightly, worried I’d make a wrong move that changed Eddie’s mind.
He smiled out at the graveyard, the biggest one I’d ever seen on him. I grinned, too, the first in a long while, my chest brimming with warmth. Despite everything, I was the luckiest girl on the planet.
In the very near future, my life would surely be another shitstorm. But right now, there wasn’t any other place I’d rather be.
* * *
The End of Book 2