35	KING WITHOUT A CROWN

THE APARTMENT WAS ALL WHITE, and when Oliver woke up, his first thought was that maybe he had died and gone to Heaven. Only he was never going there. He was immortal now, a vampire; he had chosen to live on earth forever. Maybe it was all a bad dream, and when he got out of bed, Finn would be alive and well, and everything would be just the same as ever.

Except the girl who walked through the doorway was not his love but his friend. Mimi smiled at him sadly. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’m living in a nightmare. Wake me up, will you?”

“You’re safe with me. Kingsley cloaked my apartment, they won’t find you here,” she said. She placed a glass of water on the side table. “Look at us, nothing ever changes; we’re still here, still fighting Lucifer.”

“Lucifer is dead.”

“Yeah, that’s what I kept telling Kingsley, too,” she said. “Buck up, Oliver, we’ll figure it out.”

“Mimi, how you’ve changed,” he said with a smile.

“Have I?”

“You were never this optimistic before.”

“Well, we did get him last time,” she said.

Oliver brooded on that. They hadn’t seen each other in ten years, and they should have been catching up on their lives, sharing stories. Instead, only the heavy weight of grief hung between them. He had been so proud of all he had done, so proud of his work, what he had built, and now he had lost everything.

“What happens now?” he asked aloud.

“Rest,” Mimi said. “Rest. When Kingsley gets back, we’ll figure out what to do.”

She left him alone again.

Oliver slumped back into the pillows. What happened back there? Had he really killed her? How had he lost control? He had stopped—he knew he had to—he would never deliberately kill her. Oh, God—did he kill her?

Finn.

Where are you?

This can’t be real.

She was killed by her vampire and she was blood bound to him. He held the blood of the Coven in his blood, he was their Regis but now his own Venators were after him, they were hunting him; he was a criminal.

Mimi told him that there was something going on, about some drug Kingsley had discovered that was being distributed by the Committee to the mortal populace. It was contained with club kids for now, but who knows where it would end. Angel blood, it was called. There was a traitor in the Coven, just like before. His Coven. His peaceful, wonderful Coven. The community he had brought back from the ashes. The community that was now falling apart, right when they were to celebrate its return. What was his mistake? What had he done wrong?

There was something in Finn’s blood, he remembered…

Angel blood. Infection.

How had he not seen it before?

Poison.

It was why he had lost his sense of taste, his sense of smell, why the sun had started to hurt his eyes. Whatever had poisoned her had also poisoned him. The darkness was inside him as well, but he had to be certain.

He put on a robe over the pajamas Mimi had loaned him and walked out to the living room where she was on the phone.

“I need to see her,” he said. “I need to see Finn. I need to see her body.”

“Yes, we do,” Mimi said, putting down the phone. “Oliver—I don’t want you to freak out, but it might be too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“That was Kingsley. The two dead girls are gone, and he just found out that Finn’s body disappeared from the morgue a few hours ago,” she said, her face ashen.

“What do you mean, it just disappeared? Dead bodies don’t just walk out the door!” Oliver yelled. Then he knew.

He stared at Mimi.

She stared back at him.

Oliver suddenly remembered everything. Everything that happened when he drank Finn’s blood last night.

The taste of the silver poison.

It spread throughout his entire being, and as he drank from her, he realized the poison was not meant just for him or his blood, but the blood of the entire Coven—which he had just taken into his soul during the investiture ceremony. If he let the poison run its course, it would infect every vampire in the Coven, turning them into their enemies—

Silver Bloods—

Vampires who hunted vampires—

Lucifer’s army—

A new demon army would rise from the Coven’s ashes, and he would be in the middle of it, as their dark and fearless leader. The darkness would be alive within him.

If he let it.

He had to fight it.

Fight the ghost, fight the shadow, fight the creature that was starting to gain control…

Oliver fought. He struggled against his hold on Finn’s neck, attempting to extricate himself, to remove his fangs, but he could not—and so the only way to fight was to drink harder, to suck out every molecule, to cleanse the poison of Lucifer’s soul with his own blood, to let it wash through his own spirit, a soul that had been blessed by the Almighty, and he would hold it in his heart; and he would not let the blood of the Coven, that bright, shining star in the center of his universe go dim; he would accept the darkness first—he would take all of the darkness into himself…

He took the darkness. I accept your anger and your rage and your hate, and I meet it with love. I take it all. I wrap my soul around your anger and your fury. He drank from her blood, filled himself with the poison, and took it all—

—and in the end, he won.

The darkness was defeated in a blazing light of his surrender, and when it was over, the poison was gone.

Defeated.

He told Mimi what he just remembered. “I was able to stop the worst from happening, to stop the Silver Bloods from taking the Coven. But in order to do so, Finn died.”

“But she’s not dead, Oliver,” Mimi said. “That’s the worst part about all this.” She picked up her ringing phone. “Kingsley says to meet him at Coven headquarters. He knows who’s behind it, and he wants you there when they arrest him.”