The Last True Vampire (34 page)

“I’m going to kill you,” he snarled at his most hated enemy. “And it won’t be quick.”

Another intense pulse of pain consumed Mikhail and his body curled in on itself as he tried to protect himself from an inescapable foe.

“As though Fate would allow that to happen. I’m going to finish what I started centuries ago,” the berserker said with a sinister leer. “And then I’m going to bury you in a hole so deep and so dark, you’ll pray for death to release you from the hell I’ve created for you!”

Obsidian swallowed his irises, as empty and fathomless as his black soul. A slow smirk spread across his face as he knelt beside Claire and took her face roughly in his hand. Her eyes slid to the side, but she didn’t make so much as a whimper of sound. Rather, she turned away from Mikhail, squared her face with the slayer’s, and spat in his face.

The slayer’s humorless laughter filled Mikhail with dread. “Your new female is braver than your last one.” The slayer ran his nose along her jaw, into her hair, and inhaled deeply before winding his fist in the length of her hair. With a hard jerk he forced her head back, and Claire gritted her teeth as though trying to keep from crying out. “Her threshold for pain is remarkable.…” He twisted his fist tighter and a single tear slid down Claire’s cheek. The slayer smirked and before he ran the flat of his tongue across her cheek, he turned to look at Mikhail. “She’s pregnant,” he said with wonder.

A shot rang out and pain seared through Mikhail’s shoulder. Like the burn of sunlight on his skin, it penetrated his veins, blazing a path to his heart.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
Three more shots hit him in quick succession and his back arched as Mikhail fell to his knees. Dear gods, it felt as though the very sun has risen within him and was burning him from the inside out.

Slayers converged, three of the berserkers he’d fought upstairs and two more he hadn’t seen upon entering. Mikhail panted through the pain, determined to keep a level head through the sensation that the blood in his veins boiled. Like a whip his arm reached out, snagging one of his attackers by the ankle. Mikhail brought him to the floor and climbed on top of him, burying a dagger to the hilt in the slayer’s chest. He refused to go down without a fight.

“No!” Claire screamed as another shot rang out. Mikhail’s back bowed and he toppled over the injured berserker to the floor.

Mikhail was injured. Outnumbered. But he fought with deadly determination, hacking, stabbing, and swinging out with his fist. He took a fist to the gut and another to the face. His vision blurred as his blood burned and the slayers converged, too many to fight in his weakened state.

“Mikhail!” Claire cried out, her voice nearly hoarse and rough with emotion. “I’m going to help him kill you!” she screamed at the slayer. “You’re going to suffer!”

“She’s a warrior, this one,” the slayer remarked as Mikhail was hauled up and bound with heavy lengths of silver chains. “It’ll almost be a shame to kill her.”

A roar of pure anguish tore from his chest, shaking the building on its foundation. Mikhail renewed his efforts, fighting against the blinding pain from the silver that nearly paralyzed him. The circle of berserkers closed ranks, blow after bloody blow landing on his body, his head and limbs. He fought for consciousness, but the darkness pulled him under like a riptide.

*   *   *

Mikhail snapped awake at the sound of a tortured scream that ripped through him body and soul. It weighted down his heart like a stone sinking to the bottom of the ocean and stabbed with serrated edges into his consciousness. How long had he been out? The scent of blood, heady and inviting, filled his nostrils as bloodlust mingled with his confusion. He shook the fog from his mind as he waded through hazy memory to find something solid to grasp on to. A deep ache still throbbed under his skin, the remnants of whatever sorcery those berserker fucks had infused their bullets with.

Another scream pierced the air, echoing in the enclosed space. Mikhail came fully into consciousness as Claire’s pain clawed a path through him.
No. No. No. No!
He lurched forward, ready to rush to her aid, but he found his arms bound and suspended high above him. Legs spread wide and secured to the floor with silver cuffs and a heavy length of silver chain. Confusion clouded his thoughts as he fought against his bonds. This was a memory. The ghosts of his past come to haunt him. Present and past clashed before his eyes, Claire’s tortured screams bouncing off the stone walls of the accursed tomb the slayer had left him to die in.

Soft, wracking sobs reached his ears and Mikhail gave a violent shake of his head. The walls that closed him in weren’t stone but concrete. And though he might have been underground, this was no tomb, but a basement. The events of the past hours trickled into his consciousness and his anger burned fresh, returning his clarity like a breeze banishing autumn leaves.

“You’re awake. Good.”

Mikhail’s head whipped around to the sound of the slayer’s voice as a vicious snarl tore from his throat. He pulled on the silver chains, the metal searing as it dug into his flesh. “Still claiming your chains are woven with the hair of archangels, slayer?”

The slayer gave a soft chuff of laughter. “That story doesn’t quite pack the same punch as it did a few hundred years ago. Besides, you’re arrogant enough to believe that you’re above the reproach of a human god.”

Now it was Mikhail’s turn to laugh. “Aren’t you, berserker?”

His gods were just as old as Mikhail’s, and none of them had anything to do with a human notion of deity. Their kind had walked the earth for eons, remnants of magic and superstition long gone from the human lexicon.

From the shadows Claire sobbed quietly. Mikhail forced his gaze to remain locked on the slayer. The longer Mikhail kept him engaged, the better. Until he could free himself, he’d offer Claire any sort of respite he could. On the surface, he was calm, nothing like the mindless animal he’d been the last time he’d been trussed up by this particular slayer. But under the surface an inferno of rage blazed within him and he vowed that for every ounce of pain Claire felt the slayer would experience it a hundredfold.

The slayer didn’t answer, just fixed Mikhail with his emotionless black stare. The soft soles of his boots were soundless as he crossed the concrete floor. He turned, every line of his face accented with hatred and his lip drawn into a disdainful sneer as he flipped on a light.

Mikhail’s gut bottomed out at the sight of Claire, tied to the long table with lengths of rough braided rope, blood coating nearly every inch of exposed skin. Her pants had been stripped from her body, leaving her clothed in little more than her underwear and a strappy shirt that barely covered her torso. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, as though blocking out the outside world would somehow free her of her torture. The calm that Mikhail had fought so hard to maintain shattered at the sight of her and the mindless, rabid animal clawed to the surface of his psyche.

“You will suffer the pain of a million deaths!” Mikhail railed. A wordless sound of pure anguish exploded from him as he fought against his bonds. “Your torture will span centuries, slayer!”

“You know
nothing
of suffering,” the berserker seethed.

While Mikhail fell victim to his rage, the slayer remained calm. He retrieved a silver dagger from the foot of the table and returned to Claire’s side, leaning in close to her ear. His gaze, black and fathomless as his soul, locked on Mikhail, as he spoke to Claire. “Your mate is angry over his helplessness, I think. Though he should be proud of the strength you’ve exhibited. I’m afraid the mother of the vampire race cannot be suffered to live, however.
I
will not allow it.”

He sank the blade into the flesh at Claire’s collarbone, tracing a bloody path from the hollow of her throat to her shoulder as he cut. Mikhail thrashed as her back bowed off the table, a scream of pure terror and pain ripping from her and ending on a strangled sob.
“Claire!”
His own voice boomed in the vast basement, pinging off the walls as though down the length of an endless cave. She refused to open her eyes, but he needed her to see him. So she would
know
that he would gladly die before he let her endure any more pain.

The scent of her blood called to him and Mikhail’s fangs throbbed in his gums as the bloodlust rooted deeper, his throat aching with a dry fire. Her wounds were extensive. She’d lost pints of blood on the slayer’s table and she didn’t have much more to give.

“I’m going to feed you to the newly turned, you berserker fuck!” Mikhail shouted. A smile that was pure madness lit the slayer’s features as he drove the blade deep into Claire’s upper arm. She tried to scream again, but either her voice was gone or her vocal cords were too damaged to produce a sound. The hoarse rasp was worse than any scream, though. It lacked the force of her earlier protests, and Mikhail knew that if he didn’t do something Claire would not be long for this world.

He could try to filter what little strength he had back to her, to help her withstand the slayer’s torture. But if he did, there would be nothing left for him and escape would be impossible. His captor was right about one thing: Mikhail’s helplessness had laid him low.

The slayer wandered down the length of Claire’s body, tracing her lacerated flesh with the bloody tip of his dagger. A pained whimper filled Mikhail’s ears and Claire’s body reacted to the contact with grotesque twitches that turned his gut. The slayer circled Claire’s belly with the tip of the blade, an almost gentle, loving gesture. His eyes met Mikhail’s and he quirked a brow. “Do you think it’s a boy?”

The Sortiari have killed your females, ripped the wombs from their wretched bodies, and burned the abominations growing inside of them in sacred flames.

Words from his past took root in Mikhail’s mind and once again in he was in that tomb, centuries ago, with nothing more than the knowledge that his race had been eradicated to keep him company. The tightly reined control he held over his emotions snapped, and with it the length of silver chain that bound his right arm to the crossbeam above him.

His left arm came next, the large metal eyelet pinging on the concrete along with the chain. History would not repeat itself. He refused to relive the loss that had nearly killed him. The Sortiari might have thought themselves the guardians of Fate, but Mikhail was about to show them that he refused to bow to their visions of a future where his kind did not exist.

Where Claire did not exist.

His battle cry shook the walls that surrounded him. The sounds of heavy footsteps on the stairway behind him troubled him very little in his single-minded purpose to free Claire and murder her captor. The slayer abandoned his post, giving Claire the moment of respite Mikhail had prayed for. Though weakened by the silver, he used its weight to his advantage, hauling up the heavy metal chains in his grip and swinging them high above his head. It was an effort of sheer will to bear their weight, but there wasn’t a force upon this earth that could prevent Mikhail from protecting his mate or the life of his unborn son.

With a hop backward the slayer barely missed the length of chain as Mikhail swung it toward the berserker. He tried to keep his focus centered on the impending battle and not on his mate, who’d become still as death on the surface of the table. Their connection arced, though admittedly not blazing in his soul as it once had. Claire’s fire was quickly dying, and if he didn’t do something soon to save her he had no doubt that he wouldn’t survive the loss.

The four remaining berserkers entered the fray. Mikhail let out a guttural shout from the effort, concentrating his force at the males who’d yet to find the strength of their battle rage that would lend them invincibility. He took them out with a wide sweep of the chain, and they fell on top of one another in a heap of tangled limbs. Another managed to duck beneath the chain and Mikhail caught him, wrapping a section around the beast’s neck and pulling tight to choke the air from the berserker’s lungs. “Are you a coward, slayer?” Mikhail snarled at his ancient enemy. “You’ll let your comrades suffer to save your pathetic flesh?”

The slayer drew a second dagger from a sheath at his side. “Hold!” The barked command gained their attention in an instant and the whole of his forces went still. A warning growl, like that of an enraged bear, rumbled in his chest and black swallowed the whites of his eyes. The slayer snarled, revealing his elongated incisors. “I didn’t get to kill your bastard of a father,” he said with regret. “Or your whore of a mother. You think you’re noble, but you’re nothing more than shit on my boots!” His accent thickened and spittle flew from the slayer’s mouth with each emphatic word. He paused as his attention was drawn to the blood dripping from his dagger. Claire’s blood. His next words were low, nearly inaudible, as he raised his eyes to Mikhail: “And I won’t suffer a single one of you to live.”

CHAPTER

27

Mikhail fought like a male possessed, but he was flagging. The silver had weakened him considerably, and he found its weight harder and harder to lift. His enemy was fast. Strong. Possessed of the strength and infallibility of the berserker. A more vicious creature Mikhail had not met, and by the way his opponent fought it was obvious that the slayer had been—and still was—a formidable warlord worthy of the title.

At the root of it all, his hatred for the Sortiari fueled him forward past the pain and exhaustion. That these supposed guardians of Fate would hide behind their foot soldiers only served to prove that in their hearts they were nothing more than faceless cowards.

The rallying shouts of the slayer’s comrades grated on Mikhail’s ears. While Claire bled to death on that table the berserkers stood by and watched the spectacle before them, eagerly riveted to the blood sport on display. Raw burns marred his wrists and ankles, sweat trickled down his brow and soaked his shirt through. His pants were tattered and hung from his hips, tripping him up more times than he could count. But Mikhail fought for the life of his mate. The life of his child. For his very future. And he would not stop until one of the berserkers managed to run a stake through his fucking heart.