Chapter 36
Daniel felt the bullet as if it had entered his own body, and he leapt to his feet and roared out his rage to the world, ignoring the three soldiers who were aiming their guns at his head. Both the blood bond and the soul-meld served to tell him how much pain Serai was in, and the fury took him, rolled him under, ground him into shattered bits of madness and despair, until nothing was left of Daniel but a berserker’s insanity and a nightwalker mage’s terrible power.
“Enough,” he roared, and he used his magic to blast through the cuffs and rip the soldiers’ guns from them. He blew a man-sized hole in the side of the command trailer and shot through it, bowling over everyone who got in his way, including the colonel himself. He soared through the air, racing through the sky faster than he’d ever flown before, intent on reaching Serai and determined to kill anyone and everyone who had hurt her.
He swept into the cave on a wave of wind and wrath, smashing into the vampire who knelt near Serai.
“I will kill you,” Daniel snarled, and the vampire looked startled for a moment, but then he joined the battle with deadly intent.
They leapt at each other, crashed into the walls and ceiling, and tried their damndest to kill each other. Daniel finally remembered his daggers, the ones that the soldiers hadn’t bothered to take, since they were so sure of their pathetic silver cuffs and their pathetic guns, and he drew them in midair.
“Now, you will die for harming my woman,” he shouted, but the boy shouted something right back at him, distracting him, and the vampire knocked one of his daggers out of his hand.
“He didn’t harm Serai, he was helping her,” the boy shouted again, and Daniel glanced at the woman, who was nodding, and he realized that neither the boy nor his mother’s heart rate indicated deception.
Terror, but not deception.
“Enough,” he called out, just before the other vampire hurled Daniel’s own knife at him. Daniel ducked easily, snatched his blade from midair, sheathed both daggers, and then held out his hands, palms facing the other man.
“If you truly tried to help her, I owe you my gratitude, not my anger,” he said, struggling to force the berserker rage back down where he could control it. After the fury came the bloodlust, and he could afford neither at this time.
The vampire raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Do you expect me to accept your apology?”
“Didn’t offer one,” Daniel said, heading for Serai now that he was in control enough to manage the bloodlust, in spite of the delicious smell of the blood pumping from Serai’s leg. “What happened?”
The woman raced over to him, then slowed as she approached, clearly nervous about what he might do. To her credit, she didn’t let fear stop her from kneeling down next to Serai and pressing a cloth pad over the bleeding wound.
“They shot her. Those damn soldiers. First they threw a knife that stabbed my son, clear through his shoulder. Serai used the King stone—the Emperor—to heal Ian, but then they shot her and we don’t know what to do.” She turned golden, tear-filled eyes to Daniel. “I want to help her but I’m no healer. I don’t know how to use the Emperor like that. Do you?”
Daniel started to reply in the negative, but then he realized that he might, indeed, know how to heal with the stone. He shared Serai’s power, didn’t he? He stared down at Serai’s pale, pale face and knew a moment of pure and utter terror.
“Don’t you die on me, you hear me?” He kissed her forehead and then her lips. “Don’t you even think about it, because I will follow you into the deepest level of the nine hells and bring you back.”
The vampire approached warily. “Ivy, you should tend to your son. He needs you.”
Ivy glanced at her son, who was snoring quietly on the floor, and then stubbornly shook her head. “No. She needs me. I promised I’d do anything for her. Anything she ever needed. I’m not going to fulfill that promise by letting her die five minutes later, Nicholas.”
Daniel whipped his head around to stare at the vampire. “Nicholas? Regional-head-of-this-area in-league- withslimeball-vampires Nicholas?”
“I know you, too, Primator,” Nicholas said darkly. “Don’t be so quick to cast stones.”
But Daniel had lost interest. None of it mattered. Nothing but saving Serai. He took a deep breath and reached out to the blazing fire of the purple gemstone that she still held in her hands.
“Do or die,” he told them, or told himself.
And then he dared to touch the prized gem of the sea god—a god who hated vampires above all else—in order to save the woman he loved.
Chapter 37
Brig closed his phone, smelling something fishy even though he was a long damn way from the ocean. First off, Smithson hadn’t been quite the upstanding citizen the higher-ups had been touting. Brig was an old hand at working the military communication channels, and he’d gotten the gouge—the unofficial but critically important scoop—on Smithson’s background on the call he’d just taken.
Second, there was a kid in that cave. A human kid. A kid that one of St. Ives’s men had thrown a knife into. If the vampire hadn’t killed the murdering bastard, Brig might have done it himself.
Third, there was the vampire that had just blown through the side of the trailer like a shoulder-launched missile. Brig had interviewed a lot of men and women in his day, and he could sniff out integrity like a bloodhound with a brand-new nose.
That vampire had integrity, and he’d cared about nothing but saving his woman. Not plots or conspiracies or any other damned thing.
The phone rang again.
“You have a go, Colonel St. Ives,” a familiar and abrasive voice said in his ear.
“There’s a kid in there, sir. A human boy. The vampire’s hostage, from what intel could discover. A complete innocent.”
With hardly a pause, the voice continued. “Collateral damage. Regrettable, but unavoidable. You have a go.”
Brig stood there, staring at the phone for a long time after the line went dead.
“Fuck
He had a grandbaby to meet, and he’d be damned if he’d meet him or her with another child’s blood on his hands. It was way the hell past time to retire.
He headed out of the trailer, laughing at the man-shaped hole in the wall, and then he stood and watched his men as they loaded up and fell back.
“Good luck, Daniel with one name,” he finally said before he went to find his jeep.
Chapter 38
Serai fell into the magic, the beautiful, terrible purple fire, and she surrendered to the pain. After all, she’d completed her quest. Succeeded at her task. She almost laughed. The portal would come for her, now that she lay dying with no hope of ever returning to Atlantis.
It had been a fair enough exchange. Her life finally held some meaning; some purpose. Instead of living or dying as a useless and unused specimen of breeding stock, she’d escaped and saved her sisters.
It was enough. It had to be enough.
She regretted Daniel, though.
A surge of pain smashed through her, and it took her a minute to realize it wasn’t from the Emperor draining her, or the bullet wound, which was healed now anyway, but it was the pain of losing Daniel, after having found him
