The tension in the room escalated as Azrael waited for Alexandre to make the first move. His sire was watching Jacob’s transformation with interest, having not moved an inch. Normally, it would have irritated Azrael to know his opponent was waiting until they were ready. That sort of condescension from Alexandre only served to make him nervous. He had no idea how much strength his sire had, or what kind of skills he might possess. There was a greater than normal chance he and Jacob wouldn’t be leaving the penthouse alive.

Alexandre had lived for an unknown amount of time and had probably picked up several tricks along the way. Merrick had not been old enough to stand against a raging werewolf, and had been too cocky. Alexandre was sure of himself, but Azrael bet the elder vampire wouldn’t make any arrogant mistakes. He doubted Jacob was the first werewolf Alexandre had faced over the years and he was watching for the faintest glimmer of silver. As far as he knew, no vampire was strong enough to tear a werewolf apart, and silver would be Alexandre’s greatest asset in the upcoming fight.

“Going to do something or not, leech?” Jacob growled now that he was finished transforming.

Azrael couldn’t help but glance at him in surprise. “Fuck, you can still talk when you’re like that?”

Alexandre sighed. “And again, I realize just how little you know, how young you are.”

Jacob huffed. “I can talk, but I’d rather fight.”

Alexandre sneered at Jacob. “So very true of all of your kind. Inhuman beasts who pretend themselves noble warriors. All you do is slaughter and maim, without regard to what you might be destroying.”

Jacob growled. “That’s a lot of judgment coming from something that can’t live without feeding off the blood of people. Bad enough that you steal people’s lives, but you like to play games with them too. You’re a blight on this planet.”

Alexandre motioned to Azrael. “And yet—”

“He’s nothing like you, or that other asshole,” Jacob retorted.

Alexandre smiled. “And on that, I believe we can both agree.”

A strange sensation tickled at the edge of Azrael’s awareness and he lashed out in reflex. He managed to shove Jacob away from him just as what felt like a truck slammed into his chest. Alexandre had moved so fast Azrael had barely been able to see him, leaping forward to attempt to knock both Azrael and Jacob off their feet with each hand. Only that strange sense of Azrael’s had saved Jacob, sending the werewolf stumbling away as Azrael slammed into the floor. The pain that radiated from his chest told him something had definitely broken. It was probably a good thing he didn’t need to breathe, because he was almost sure a lung had collapsed.

“Did you sense that? My, you really did hold promise,” Alexandre mused as he turned to Jacob.

“Go—to—hell,” Azrael managed to wheeze as he tried to sit up.

“If you had lived long enough, you would have discovered that hell isn’t a place. It’s a state of mind that follows you around for eternity, my dear Azrael,” Alexandre told him.

Jacob lunged for Alexandre, hitting thin air with his claws. Alexandre stood half a foot away from where he’d been before, watching Jacob impassively. The werewolf’s surprise mirrored Azrael’s own as they stared at Alexandre. Azrael had never known someone could move as fast as Alexandre, and he’d never been hit by anything as hard either. He’d known they were out of their league in trying to fight Alexandre, but he hadn’t realized just how outclassed they were until now.

Jacob didn’t appear to care all that much as he leapt for Alexandre again and again. His claws were deadly blurs through the air as he tried to grab hold of the vampire. Azrael couldn’t tell if his sire was toying with Jacob or trying to gauge the werewolf’s measure. Either way, it appeared Jacob wasn’t getting remotely close to landing a blow. No matter how hard he tried to hit the elder, his blows found nothing but thin air. Alexandre always seemed to move in the blink of an eye, appearing safely out of range from the last blow.

Azrael could feel the wound in his chest beginning to stitch together, his vampiric blood moving quickly to repair the damage. It had taken only one blow from his sire to deliver what would have been a lethal injury had Azrael been human. He knew that, until he was older, Jacob was still the tougher and stronger of the two of them. Despite his considerable strength and size, however, Azrael feared what kind of damage his sire would inflict on Jacob. It was fear that drove him to his feet, pulling his hand away from his chest and attempting to dive into the fray once more.

Another blow rocketed Azrael through the air, crumpling him to the ground with a groan of pain. He hadn’t even seen the retaliatory blow coming. One moment he’d been trying to get ahold of his sire so Jacob could land a blow, and the next he was a useless heap on the ground. Alexandre stood over him the next moment, clicking his tongue in admonishment.

“For all your skills, it will never be enough to best me, Azrael. Even with your pet, you will never leave this place. You know, I think I would have been willing to allow you to keep the beast as a pet, if you hadn’t decided to turn on your own so easily. Your heart is your weakness, Azrael, even as it is your strength. A pity I must cut it out in order to spare myself further trouble,” Alexandre mused, as he was suddenly twirling the long silver blade he had given to Azrael.

Azrael’s eyes widened as he saw Jacob stalking behind the elder vampire. His mouth widened to shout a word of warning, but the words froze in his throat when Alexandre moved with that dizzying speed of his. Jacob’s raised hand stopped moving, a low noise coming from him as he realized there was a blade between his ribs. Azrael watched in horror as the wound sizzled and smoked around the blade embedded in Jacob’s flesh.

“And a pity you didn’t stay in your cave, beast,” Alexandre told Jacob conversationally.

Jacob snarled, bringing his clawed hand down to wrap around the vampire’s throat. “I’ll bury you first.”

Alexandre chuckled, even as Jacob’s claws drew blood. “You werewolves never fail to surprise me. Even with a silver blade between your ribs, slicing up into your heart, you still find the will to try and kill me. You must be in an extraordinary amount of pain right now, just do us both a favor and die.”

“Jacob,” Azrael croaked as he realized Jacob was weakening. The smell of blood was thick in the air, and Azrael knew he didn’t have long before Alexandre decided he was going to simply drive the blade up into Jacob’s heart. His desperation rose, overriding the pain in his body, and the beast in his mind scrabbled madly at the edges of his thoughts. Azrael didn’t have a plan or any escape route, he had nothing that would get them out of this. All he had was himself and the monster in his thoughts that he’d borne since he became a vampire. It didn’t care much for his human emotions, but it certainly cared about the threat to his well-being at the hands of Alexandre, and about the smell of blood. It wanted something, and Azrael, in a moment of desperation, released the control he kept tightly wound around it.

A cold fury he’d never felt before in his life filled him, drowning the last remnants of physical pain. He moved faster than ever before, leaping from the ground and onto Alexandre’s back. The elder vampire had barely twitched in reaction before Azrael’s fangs drove into Alexandre’s throat. Blood, thicker and richer than anything Azrael had ever tasted, filled his mouth and poured down his throat. Blood that had survived centuries and grown stronger than anything else Azrael had known began to pump through his own veins.

“You miserable—” Alexandre began with a hiss of anger.

Azrael held tight as he felt his sire begin to move, trying to yank Azrael off him. Under the thundering drum of the blood filling him, Azrael could hear Jacob snarl with renewed vigor. The fingers below Azrael’s mouth tightened, and Azrael dimly realized Jacob was using the last of his strength to hold onto Alexandre.

“Release me, beast!” Alexandre shouted, struggling in desperation now.

Azrael drained Alexandre’s blood faster than he had drained anyone else before. He could feel his sire’s movements growing more frantic, but they were growing weaker as well. The strength of a vampire lay wholly in the blood, and Azrael was glutting himself on a feast of Alexandre’s power. His entire body vibrated with its strength. Both of the crippling wounds Alexandre had inflicted on him were gone, the pain a distant memory.

Azrael felt the thunderous beating in his head begin to falter and stutter. He’d never drunk from a vampire before, at least as far as he could remember, and was surprised to realize it was the sound of Alexandre’s heart. Vampire hearts didn’t beat, but somehow, Azrael could hear his sire’s heart pumping weakly. Each second that passed was one where Alexandre’s heart tried to pump blood that was quickly draining from his body.

His sire’s hands fell away from Jacob, and when Jacob released Alexandre, it was only Azrael who held onto him. They slid to the ground as Azrael maintained his hold, greedily taking in the last of Alexandre’s strength and life. The heart gave a few weak flutters, and something heavy seemed to slip from Alexandre and into Azrael. He flung himself away from Alexandre with a desperate gasp, an overwhelming sensation of darkness and icy coldness filling him.

“Gabriel?” Jacob asked, his voice weak but filled with concern as Azrael lay motionless on the ground.

Azrael realized that he’d drunk from Alexandre until the vampire died. If the sensation of draining a human until they died had been sickening, he had no words to accurately describe the sensation of draining a master vampire. His stomach churned and roiled, feeling as if it were trying to shift from one end of his body to the other. There were flashes of heat, followed by cold, and then nothing but a vibration that filled every inch of his body. It wasn’t quite weakness or sickness, but it was too much sensation to handle at once. His mind whirled in a tumultuous storm of experience and power that threatened to drive him mad.

“I need—a moment,” he heard himself gasp, as Jacob murmured to him softly once more.

He didn’t know how long he lay there, trying to make his head stop spinning and his thoughts realign. It was hard to think around the sensations that filled him, bouncing one thought into another and spawning a dozen more in its place. It was nothing like causing the death of a mortal, being less about experiencing a piece of the mortal’s death, and more like the passing of centuries of life flowing into Azrael’s mind. He couldn’t tell if he was actually experiencing any of Alexandre’s memories, but he was catching flashes of color, scents he couldn’t identify. A song he didn’t know the name of ran in circles through his mind.

When he could finally form a coherent thought, he forced himself to sit up. The room stood out in sharper colors than it had before, with lines more defined than he’d ever seen. His hearing was so acute he could hear people on the street a few stories below, though only their voices. The muscles of his body felt more solid, and he wondered what kind of strength he possessed now. Every part of his body felt more alive, more real than ever before.

His wandering gaze fell on Alexandre’s body, taking in the gray skin and sightless eyes. Azrael had never known that sunlight and fire weren’t the only ways to kill a vampire. He had discovered a third method in a moment of desperation and fear. For all the years he’d spent, the places he’d seen, and the events he’d survived, Alexandre had been undone by his young child and a single werewolf. Drained of his blood, of his life, Azrael’s sire looked small and unimportant. The spirit of the vampire that had once made him look both invincible and impervious to the world, was completely gone. There was so much about his sire he had never learned, and now he would never know.

His voice sounded even more resonant to his ears as he spoke. “We did it.”

“Yeah, we did,” Jacob grunted, now human sounding.

The weak sound of pain in the werewolf’s voice jerked Azrael’s attention from Alexandre’s lifeless body. Jacob stood against the couch, holding himself up in the tatters of his clothing. The blade had clattered free from his ribs at some point, probably when Jacob had turned back to human. The wound was pouring blood, showing no signs of letting up as the injured skin around the wound continued to smoke faintly.

Jacob grinned, his knees beginning to give out. “But I think it’s a little early for me to celebrate.”

“Jacob!” Azrael barked as ice cold fear washed over him, watching as Jacob slumped to the ground.