The Den of Shadows Quartet (20 page)

Though she had written about it many times, Jessica was not prepared. The pain in her head and her arms was nothing compared to the burning, suffocating sensation that now replaced those earlier annoyances. Despite her efforts not to, she heard her own voice shout out, a useless cry.

A wave of blackness spread across her vision, but she managed to fend it off as she yanked an arm free from Fala’s grip.

Fala shifted a bit, and Jessica felt as if her skin had just been flayed from her body; she moaned in agony as
her knees gave out under her, but somehow, just barely, she was able to grope for the knife.

She pulled the knife forward in an arc, and though she had no strength and no sight with which to aim, the blade glanced off Fala’s side, slicing open the vampire’s arm.

To a human, the wound would surely have been fatal. If Fala had been weaker, she too might have died. As it was, Jessica was certain it hurt like Hell.

Fala shrieked in rage and pain and hit Jessica, hard, on the left side of her chest. Jessica heard something snap and was knocked backward into the tree, hitting the wound on her head again.

Fala disappeared, cradling her arm against her chest. That was all Jessica saw before she sank into unconsciousness.

F
ALA COULD SHIELD HER MIND
too well for Aubrey to locate her, and neither Jager nor Moira would help him.

Only twenty minutes had passed since the tussle with Dominique, but he well knew the damage Fala could have done even that quickly. He had spent the time looking for Fala and berating himself for leaving Jessica alone, and little else. He hadn’t even bothered to replace the shirt Dominique’s knife had bloodied, but had simply tossed it in the trash somewhere.

Now Aubrey paced in Fala’s room, waiting for her to return, all the while envisioning the new forms of pain he could introduce her to if she had killed Jessica.

When Fala finally did enter the room, she looked quite a bit worse for wear. Her arm had been sliced open, and blood was still dripping from the slowly healing wound. She was trembling, though Aubrey couldn’t tell whether the cause was pain, chill, or rage.

“Damn both of you to Hell and back!” she growled
when she saw him. “Get out of my room or I’ll tear out your heart and feed it to Ahemait myself.”

Judging by her mood, she might very well try. Ahemait was the Egyptian devourer of the dead. When Fala brought up the mythology of her human background, she was best avoided.

Instead, Aubrey’s anger responded to hers.

He slammed her against the wall, his hand around her throat, and heard the crunch as her windpipe broke. The injury would heal quickly, but he could tell that, despite her high tolerance for it, Fala did not appreciate the pain.

She threw a bolt of her power at him and he stumbled back a step. Dodging quickly, he barely avoided his own knife when she threw it at him. The blade stuck in the wall.

“What did you do to her?” he demanded.

“Only what
you
should have done a week ago!” Fala snapped.

This time it was Fala’s turn to stumble as Aubrey lashed out, his anger making the blow even harder. “Where is she?” he said quietly, his voice cold.

Fala laughed. “You honestly expect me to tell you?”

Meeting her gaze, Aubrey paused before answering. He saw her expression change as she recognized the complete, smoldering rage in his eyes. “Yes.”

“She’s somewhere on the river,” Fala spat, wise enough to recognize that fighting him at this moment was a dangerous idea. “I hope the crows have gotten to her by now.”

Aubrey disappeared, bringing himself to the edge of New Mayhem, where the river passed by.

Once again he changed himself into a wolf, a creature that could move faster and more surely through the woods. Following the river, he covered a mile in only a few minutes. Finally, less than two miles from New Mayhem, in the thick of the forest, he caught Jessica’s scent and brought himself instantly to her side.

Jessica was pasty white, her breathing was wet and shallow, and her heart alternated between racing and threatening to stop.

She was alive, but not for long, and he knew no way to help her. Three thousand years of killing had taught him nothing about undoing this kind of damage.

After a moment of hesitation in which he swallowed his pride, he left Jessica’s side and brought himself to the home of Hasana and Caryn Smoke. He could sense Caryn’s magic, stronger than her mother’s, even outside the house.

Had he not killed all his gods long ago, Aubrey would have prayed that Caryn would be willing to help. Anxiously he brought himself to her side.

C
ARYN HAD NEARLY FAINTED
from fright when Aubrey first appeared in her room, but his rapid explanation had shoved all personal concerns out of the way, making room for the disciplined healer to come forth. She had been working now for nearly an hour.

She was from the oldest known line of healers on Earth, but even her abilities had limits.

She felt weak from fatigue. Her clothing was soaking wet from when she had accidentally fallen in the river, and her heart was beating twice as fast as normal. Her face was stained with worried tears as she chanted and held her left hand, palm down, over Jessica’s heart, channeling much-needed energy into the dying girl. Her other hand was constantly moving — soothing Jessica’s brow, holding her hand, or drawing power from the earth.

Jessica’s heart had been beating evenly for several minutes, but now it skipped once and Caryn gasped in pain, her chant stopping.

“I can’t do this.” Fresh tears rolled down her face.

“Should I get Hasana?” Aubrey suggested. “Maybe she —”

“She won’t,” Caryn interrupted, remembering her mother’s anger when Jessica had left the house the day before. “She hates your kind and calls Jessica a traitor to the human race. Monica would have helped; she could have done it. But I just
can’t
. I can’t save her, and I could kill myself trying.”

“Is there anyone else?” Aubrey asked, sounding frantic.

“Vida would kill her,” Caryn answered, “and Light’s dead.” She cast Aubrey a sharp glance, knowing that his kind had murdered Lila, the last in the Light line. “All the others are too weak. Whoever did this broke one of her ribs, and now there’s blood in one of her lungs; she’s going to start drowning in it soon. Besides that, she’s just about drained. It’s amazing I can even keep her heart beating at all. Plus, she’s got at least a dozen other injuries … I don’t know of anything in science or magic that can heal her.”

Caryn looked beseechingly at Aubrey, hoping he knew something she did not.

He knew nothing she wanted to hear. “I can kill — I can’t heal,” he sighed.

“I’ve been channeling my own … I don’t know what to call it …
life
into her, but if I keep doing it we’re
both
going to die. No witch short of an Arun could survive this, and they’re part vampire …”

Caryn trailed off, defeated.

“I could.”

She looked at Aubrey blankly for a moment after he spoke those words.

“Unless Fala decided to tear her heart out, her injuries are really rather insignificant to my kind,” he clarified.

Finally Caryn understood. She had channeled from other witches in the past. If she could take energy from a vampire and give it to Jessica … would that heal her?

It might.

“I could kill you accidentally,” she warned him.

“I’ve lived a long time.”

“This is very definitely going to get me disowned,” she muttered, hoping her mother would find some way to forgive her. “I need you on my right,” she told Aubrey.

After he had shifted position, Caryn placed her right hand just above Jessica’s heart, one of the three strongest energy centers. For healing, the heart center was best.

There were no words to accurately describe what she did next. Her own energy centers were open, forming a path from Aubrey to Jessica, and now as she tapped into Aubrey’s —

She gasped as the power flowed through her. That was all it could possibly be called. Not life, not
chi
as Hasana called it or simply energy as Monica had taught her, but pure, unrestricted
power
. No wonder his mind was so strong …

Caryn forced herself to control the power, which required all her years of practice, and then focused on channeling it into Jessica.

Jessica’s own aura was strong, and Caryn wasn’t surprised to note vampiric traces in it. She directed
Aubrey’s power to the areas of Jessica’s injuries, where the girl’s aura was weakest.

First she focused on the crack in Jessica’s skull. It knitted itself together within seconds, and the blood that had pooled inside was reabsorbed into the veins as they repaired themselves.

The lung came next. The organ collapsed into itself and then regrew — small like a child’s at first, but quickly expanding to full size. The rib mended in moments.

The rest of Jessica’s body healed just as quickly, simply from the overflow of power. Caryn was grateful, since she was becoming sleepy. How could she be so exhausted with all this power running through her?

She was trying very hard not to think about what this process was going to do to her. She knew only one story that involved channeling the vampiric aura: Midnight Smoke, mother of Ardiente Arun, had drawn the vampiric aura into herself to save a human from becoming one of them. Since then, all Midnight’s ancestors had carried a vampiric taint. Ardiente and Midnight had split from the line they had been born in and become the first in the Arun line. Caryn was descended from their relations, who had continued the Smoke line.

Caryn was feeling light-headed. There was nothing more she could do for Jessica; if this wasn’t enough, then nothing would have worked. She quickly closed off Aubrey’s power centers, then her own, aware that if she passed out before doing so she would probably kill all three of them.

With her eyes closed, she focused on Jessica yet again, trying to ascertain what still needed to be done.

While most of her body had healed, Jessica was still all too human. The newly healed areas needed the support of more blood than she had. Fala had taken too much.

“We should get her to a hospital, or she’s still going to die,” Caryn said, her voice uneven. “She needs blood.”

For a moment Aubrey looked up, and his black eyes held no warmth as they focused on Caryn and then fell to her throat. She could see the effort as he turned his head away.

He was no longer the perfect, drop-dead-gorgeous immortal he had been. He was paler than ever, and his eyes were unfocused. He looked as if he had been drained as surely as Jessica had. Of course, when it came to his kind, power and blood were often all but interchangeable.

Caryn lay down as another wave of fatigue washed over her, and watched silently as Aubrey tried to rouse Jessica.

J
ESSICA COULD BARELY BREATHE
past the pain in her chest. Every muscle in her body had cramped, and she was shivering with cold.

Jessica!
She recognized Aubrey’s voice in her mind, though she had never heard him sound so distraught.

Slowly she dragged herself into the waking world.

No, not dead … I wouldn’t hurt so much if I was dead
, she thought absently. It was difficult to form a coherent sentence.

Aubrey pulled her attention back to him.
Not dead yet
, he said quickly, bluntly.
But you will be soon if we don’t do something
. He paused, shaking her a bit to keep her attention from drifting away.

Careful. I’m not sure that arm is still fully attached
, she answered, her wry humor returning to her.

I can bring you to a hospital, and they can give you blood. There’s probably still time
, he told her.
Or if you want it — I know you said before that you did — I can give you mine
.

If she’d had the breath to do so, she would have laughed.

Did she want to be a vampire? To stay in New Mayhem, in the community that had been her life for years; to be with Aubrey, the only one she’d ever felt completely at ease with; to never be prey again?

Then there was also the bonus of immortality and the tempting idea of pummeling Fala into a bloody smear on the wall.

You need to ask?
she finally said, and heard Aubrey sigh with relief.

Of course, she would be the first of his line —
her
line, she amended, realizing she’d soon be a part of it — to have been asked. They had been changed for various reasons — on a whim, out of spite or hatred or love. But not one of them had had a choice in the matter.

Jessica smiled wryly as she realized the favor that Fala had unintentionally given. Jessica had fought for her life when Fala had taken her blood, and now had free choice as Aubrey offered his.

Aubrey drew his knife — the same one he had used to shed Ather’s blood years ago, when he had been changed. He slid the blade across his skin at the base of his throat, and he pulled Jessica toward him to drink.

She had known this moment in the lives of each of her vampiric characters; had described it in words and tasted it in dreams. But never had she fully understood it.

As she drank, she closed her eyes and abandoned herself to the sweet taste and the feeling that came with it. The English language had no way to properly express this rolling power that filled her like blue
lightning, slipping into every molecule of her body and changing everything it touched.

Jessica tried to cling to the sensation, but a gentle numbness began to ease across her skin and into her mind, like the first tendrils of sleep. She was only vaguely aware of the fact that her heart had slowed and stopped, and only distantly did she realize that she was no longer breathing. The inevitable blackness of death stole over her, and she succumbed to it willingly trusting that she would wake shortly.

Jazlyn was in constant pain for the first few days, but even that pain served as a welcome reminder that she was alive
.

The first thing she did was go to the church, inside which she had not dared set foot since the day she had been changed. The priest blessed her and listened to her confession, which she abridged for the sake of his sanity
.