My heart was pounding so hard I thought I’d be sick. The cage reached the ground, and Imani swung open the steel bars of the door and stepped behind the figure before yanking off the cloth with a flourish. A girl knelt inside the cage, her head bent and her hands bound in front of her with a steel chain. Her black hair hung to her shoulders, and she wore a black corset top and a black and purple skirt above a pair of worn combat boots.
“Delilah,” I gasped.
Her head jerked up, and she shot to her feet and lunged forward. “Let me go, you creepy old bastard,” she screamed at Mr. Ravenwood as a chain holding her to the floor of the cage jerked her to a stop.
“Imani, you can release her,” he said. “We’ll hunt her down if she runs.”
“I’m not an animal, you sick fuck,” Delilah snarled at him. “You don’t hunt people down.”
“You’re alive,” I breathed, hope springing to life inside me again. Especially when I caught the scent of vampire coming from her. She was like me now. Yes, I had friends who were vampires, but Viktor and Svana had been vampires too long. They’d been broken, had accepted the way things were. Delilah obviously was in my camp on this one.
“No, I’m not fucking alive,” she snapped. “I’m a vampire, Timberlyn.”
Imani undid a lock on the chains holding Delilah to the cage, and the bonds around her waist and hands fell to the ground around her feet. I shrank back when I saw the hatred burning in her eyes.
“Now, isn’t this a sweet little reunion,” Mr. Ravenwood said.
“I gave my life so that you could take down the Wolf family,” Delilah said, stomping toward me. She stopped in front of me, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “And did you do it, like you said you would?”
I swallowed hard and shook my head. “They’re not the bad guys here, Delilah.”
“No, you fucking didn’t,” she answered, as if I’d never spoken. “I knew you were full of shit, that you were creaming your panties over their muscles just like every other airheaded bimbo at that school. But I let you convince me otherwise. And guess where that left us?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You lied to me,” she hissed. “You made me believe you were going to take out the assholes. You know where I spent the last year? In a cage like a fucking monster, because that’s what I am.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, my throat tight. It was true. She had gone into those woods to take down the Wolf boys with me. She’d died, and I hadn’t. I’d taken their side.
Delilah’s eyes bored into mine with the same intense hatred as she continued in a slow, deliberate voice. “While you were shacking up with your dreamboat, I’ve been experimented on, and trapped in a cage, and fed humans when they knew I couldn’t help but kill them. And you know why? Because apparently witches don’t make very good vampires, and I didn’t turn the right way. So I got special treatment.”
“I’m a vampire, too,” I said, tears pooling in my eyes. “I know what the hunger feels like. I know you couldn’t help it.”
“No, I fucking couldn’t,” she said. “Just like you couldn’t help yourself when one of those assholes batted his eyes at you, right? Well, I’m sure it was all fun and games for you, but they killed me, Timberlyn. I’m a fucking monster now. A creepy, undead, bloodsucking parasite. And for what?”
“We’re still people.” A tear escaped and rolled down my cheek. I swiped it away and reached my hands out to her. We both stared at the splintered piece of wood still clutched in my hand for a moment. “We can still make a difference,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” she said, swallowing hard. “We can.”
Without warning, she lunged for me. My hands jerked up instinctually. Delilah let out a choked gasp as the makeshift stake still clenched in my fist tore into her. I screamed, trying to release my grip, to get away from her. But her hands had closed around mine, holding it tight around the wooden weapon. Her gaze found mine, and through her gasping breath, she whispered, “You’re so fucking incompetent.”
I stared back at her, too stunned to move. She’d done it on purpose. She’d run herself through with the blunt end of a broken branch rather than stay a vampire.
She angled the piece of wood up, toward her heart, and pushed my hand away before throwing herself forward on the ground. A sickening, ripping sound broke the silence, and the broken, bloody end of the stake tore through the back of her shirt and protruded toward the canopy of bare branches overhead.
I screamed and dropped to the ground beside her, grabbing at the stake without thinking. A jolt of electricity volleyed up my arm, clenching my hand around the stake and contorting every muscle in my body. I gasped, crying out in pain as the current ripped through me.
“Timberlyn,” Viktor cried, falling to his knees and yanking me away from Delilah. My breath was ragged as I sat there, trying to process what the fuck had just happened. I could feel Delilah’s magic sitting uneasily inside me in a
