Chapter Fourteen
Doolin, Ireland
QUINN HAD NEVER been to this part of Ireland. It was a shortcoming on his part, he thought, as they flew through the night. Lucas’s helicopter wasn’t one of those five passenger sightseeing types, but a full-on troop carrier. Quinn appreciated it, even as he wondered how the hell Lucas had managed to slip it into the country. Apart from Sorley, who would surely have kept a close eye on Lucas’s property, there was the scrutiny of the Irish government, who would have plenty to say about a private citizen bringing in a piece of heavy military equipment like this. It made Quinn wonder if Lucas’s sights hadn’t been set on ruling Ireland, after all. He shrugged. If so, it was a dream Lucas would have to put aside, because Ireland was Quinn’s now. Or it would be very soon.
“How long?” he asked the pilot, who was one of his own people. Lucas’s pilot had offered to stay on, but Quinn had declined, promising he’d return the chopper in good order and before the night was through. Probably not in time to fly it back to Lucas’s estate in Kildare, however. He frowned. They’d have to hide the damn thing somewhere. Immediately on that thought, he laughed at himself. He had much bigger worries than where to hide a helicopter. Like getting rid of Sorley once and for all.
“Fifteen minutes, my lord.”
Lightning flashed in the night sky, followed three beats later by a crack of thunder so loud that it pressed on his ear drums. The thunder was still echoing through the night, when it began to rain in thick sheets.
“We’re going down,” came the pilot’s warning.
Great, Quinn thought. He was going to die in a helicopter crash only minutes away from achieving the pinnacle of vampire society. Vampire Lord. A title owned by few and always claimed over the blood and dust of one’s predecessor. And it had nearly been his. His skin tingled with goosebumps as the helicopter dropped . . . and he realized that the vamp had been letting him know they were landing. Not crashing. He looked around carefully. Vampire night sight, notwithstanding, it was dark enough in the chopper that no one should have noticed his two-second look of doubt. Next to him, Eve squeezed his hand, and when he glanced over, she winked. Okay, so none of his vamps had noticed, at least.
The skids of their helicopter brushed the ground a moment later, the wash of its navigation lights spotlighting another helicopter powering up about a hundred yards away.
“That bird’s too light to lift off in this weather,” his pilot informed him.
Taking that as the good news it was, Quinn didn’t wait for his chopper to settle on the wet grass. He pulled the door back and jumped out, searching the area for any sign of Sorley. If the vampire lord hadn’t been able to leave by air, then he had to be running on the ground. But where? And how? Almost too late, he remembered whom he was chasing, what he was chasing. Sorley was a vampire lord. He burned with not only his own power, but the power of all those who were pledged to him. The power of almost every vampire living in Ireland was tied in to his.
Quinn stopped searching with his eyes and began searching with the power that made him something other. The power that made him not simply Vampire, but a vampire lord.
Like a shutter flipping open, he saw the night filled with an array of lights, representing the life forces of the people around him. His vampires were solid flames, with Garrick and Adorjan burning visibly brighter, reflecting their greater power. And in the distance . . . the beacon that was Sorley, beaming like a spotlight against the dark sky . . . and moving away fast.
“He’s there.” Quinn pointed and started running. “In a fucking car.” He’d never catch up on foot. They needed a vehicle of their own. But this part of Doolin wasn’t exactly high density. And even if they managed to find a car or truck, grand theft auto wasn’t exactly one of his—
“Here, my lord!” Adorjan’s shout was punctuated by another booming crack of lightning, following only seconds later by the rumble of thunder.
Quinn spun around and spotted his security chief sitting behind the wheel of an older model Ford sedan, using his fists to smash the steering column. Two minutes later, he’d done something with the ignition and the engine sputtered to life. Quinn exchanged a look with Garrick as they piled into the passenger seats, privately hoping the old car had enough life left to fulfill its mission tonight. Quinn would buy its owners a brand new fucking car, as long as this one lasted long enough to catch up with Sorley.
Adorjan drove, speeding after Sorley, trying to stay on the road as he followed Quinn’s directions. The black night was absolute, broken only by repeated lightning strikes that threatened to blind, instead of lighting the way. Quinn could still follow the vampire lord’s blazing trail, but unfortunately, magic didn’t care about roads or physical obstacles. It said, “over there,” and left the rest up to Quinn, which was a pain in the ass. He’d managed to overlay his inner vision on the physical reality, but between the disorientation of seeing two views at once, and the rapid twists and turns in the rickety car, he found himself wondering if vampires could still vomit.
“I can’t see a thing!”
Quinn was startled to hear Eve’s voice coming from the back seat. How the hell had he missed her jumping into the car with them? And what the hell was she doing there? He had no time to worry about it, however, as Sorley’s power signature took a sudden dive. Was he blocking? But, no, it reappeared a moment later, just as their own car skidded down a short incline, and Quinn realized the road had entered a series of short dips and valleys.
“Fucking coward. He’s a damned vampire lord,” he muttered, holding on as Adorjan fought the car back under control. “He should act like it.”
“Where does he think he’s going?” Garrick asked, as confused as the rest of them.
“He’s not thinking at all,” Quinn said. “He’s just running.”
Sorley’s power signature abruptly stopped moving. It was sudden enough that Quinn closed his eyes, wanting to get rid of the physical, so he could concentrate on his vampire senses alone. A second later, he opened his eyes, just in time to yell, “Stop!”
Adorjan spun the wheel frantically. The ancient car and its nearly bald tires skidded in a full circle before coming to a shuddering stop only a few yards away from a fifty foot drop into the Atlantic Ocean.
“Fuck,” Eve breathed, and Quinn’s heart nearly stopped at the reminder of her humanity. He and his vampires probably would have survived the fall, albeit, not without significant damage. Enough to let Sorley escape, at least. But Eve . . . she would almost certainly have died.
Quinn shoved his door open and rounded the car to where she was climbing out from behind Adorjan’s seat. “Stay here,” he ordered, then bent to give her a hard kiss. “Please.” He didn’t know if she’d pay attention, but there was no time to argue. Sorley was out of his vehicle and running for a long, low building to one side. Quinn didn’t know exactly where they were, or what the building was, but he wasn’t going to give Sorley another place to hide.
Quinn stopped chasing after Sorley long enough to lob a concentrated beam of power directly in front of Sorley, cutting him off and forcing him to change his trajectory, away from the building.
Good, Quinn thought viciously. The last thing he wanted was to chase the coward through miles of corridor. For one thing, it would leave too many questions for the human authorities, but, more importantly, it would be too fucking time-consuming and an even bigger pain in his ass than this damn car chase.
Quinn finally brought the craven vampire lord to ground, high on a grassy cliff, with nowhere else to run. Sorley spun into a defensive crouch, knees bent and hands curled into claws. His face bore no signs of humanity, the sophisticated mask torn away to reveal the monster within—fangs bared, gleaming brightly with every crack of lightning, and eyes burning a sickly green with his power. The color was muddled, as if it had once been a pure emerald, but had been overtaken by something dark and unnatural.
Sorley sneered as thunder roared and the rain grew impossibly heavier, icy cold needles that threatened to slice every inch of exposed skin. “Can’t use your precious fire now, can you, boy?”
Quinn laughed and loosed his power completely, holding nothing back. Pale blue flame blossomed all around, surrounding him with a power that screamed with the joy of being free. It had been locked away for so long. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d fully embraced the glory of what he was. Vampire lord. Born to rule. And, by God, he was going to fulfill that destiny or die.
He filled one hand with the bright, blue flame and made it dance, twirling it around and through his fingers, smiling when he looked up and caught Sorley’s look of dismay. “It’s not fire, you fool,” Quinn called. “It’s magic.” And then closing his hand around the flame, he lifted it in a blindingly fast move and threw it at Sorley, laughing when the vampire ducked.
Sorley snarled his rage and attacked, moving with that incredible speed of his, spinning to one side an instant after he launched a pounding series of attacks on Quinn’s shields, pummeling the same spot over and over again, as if hoping to weaken it enough to break through. It wasn’t a bad strategy. The smallest hole in a vampire’s shield could be fatal. But Quinn hadn’t wasted the last few years. He’d practiced and honed the use of his power until it was second nature for him to shift energy around, to reinforce the point of attack, and launch a counterattack of his own. He’d also designed a fluid defense, one that could take his opponent’s strategy and use it against him. Having witnessed Sorley’s speed only hours ago in their first battle, he now did exactly that.
Fashioning his power into liquid flame, he threw it ahead of the fleeing vampire, then used Sorley’s speed to bend it around, until it engulfed him in sizzling magic. Sorley twisted and screamed, too lost in agony to think. If he’d taken a moment, he’d have known it wasn’t true flame, and he could have countered it with magic of his own. But the fear of fire was written in the deepest strands of human DNA, and while vampires might consider themselves a higher evolution, they were still human at the core.
And so Sorley fought fire, not magic. He rolled on the wet ground and raised his arms to the pouring rain, to no effect. Quinn’s power was unrelenting, trapping his opponent in a seamless cocoon of flame that slowly turned from agonizing blue to a killing orange that took hold of Sorley and burned away first his clothes and then his skin, blackening his bones while the vampire lord still lived. Quinn watched longer than he should have, relishing Sorley’s torment, even while recognizing the cruelty of it and knowing it made him less human. But then, he wasn’t human any longer. He was Vampire.
Finally, he walked over to the blackened mass that had been Sorley and, reaching through a fire that had no power to harm him, he plucked the vampire lord’s heart from between his crumbling ribs. Holding the beating heart in his hand, he dug deep within himself and brought forth a final reservoir of power, a pure, white flame so bright that it cast everything around it into shadow. Quinn cloaked Sorley’s beating heart in that flame, until it, too, blackened and disintegrated into ash, to be washed away by the cleansing rain.
Quinn didn’t notice when the rest of Sorley’s body dusted into nothingness. He slumped to the ground as his magic was sucked back into his body, compressing it into a hot core that was always there, but lay quiescent for now, seeming as exhausted as he was. He welcomed the cold rain, his eyes closed, every muscle loose with relief that the battle was over. And he’d won. He was the Lord of Ireland, ruler of all her vampires.
He smiled despite his weariness and gathered his strength to stand, when a force heavier than any he’d ever encountered crashed into him, slamming him back to the ground as a thousand voices all crying out as one overwhelmed every sense he possessed.
“Quinn!”
He heard Eve calling his name, heard her arguing with Garrick who was holding her back. What the hell was . . . oh right. The damn territorial mantle. Forcing himself to focus amidst the cacophony of screaming demands, he insulated himself from the others, the vampires who were now his to defend and protect, vampires who relied on his strength for their very lives. This was the burden that came along with the power of being a vampire lord.
Pulling his awareness back until their demands were a unified hum, instead of a thousand or more unique voices, he gathered his strength and said quietly, “Enough. I’m here. Ireland is safe. Go back to your lives, and . . . shut up.” He added that last in utter exasperation with their whining. Fuck.
He opened his eyes and looked up, meeting his cousin’s gaze with a nod that said, “We did it.” Garrick grinned and released Eve, who raced over and caught Quinn when he would have toppled over, what little strength he’d had after the battle having been consumed by the struggle to subdue his new subjects.
Eve’s arms felt good around him. She was his humanity. Her heart beat strongly, blood pumping beneath warm, soft skin, as she murmured love and encouragement, stroking him as one would an injured child. The image made him grin as she struggled to help him stand. He was a foot taller and far too heavy, but that didn’t stop her. Nothing stopped his Eve when she set her mind to it. Not even physics.
Garrick and Adorjan stepped in to help, dragging him back to his feet, half-carrying him back to their rickety car while Eve held his hand.
“The pilot wants to wait out this weather,” Garrick told him from the front seat, when everyone was finally back inside. Quinn’s head rested on Eve’s shoulder in the backseat, her arm around him, her soft breasts pressing against his arm. “He says he can fly, but he’d rather not. And Sorley’s house is empty. We can hang there in the meantime.”
Quinn laughed. “It’s my house now.”
His cousin and Adorjan both joined the laughter, but Eve said, “Wait. Won’t his heirs get—”
“Not in the world of vampires,” Quinn told her, hearing his words slur with exhaustion. “What was his is now mine. And that includes everything.”
“Ugh. Even that awful Donnybrook house? You’re not going to live—”
“No,” he said around a yawn. “Later,” he mumbled, his eyes closing. He was aware of Eve kissing his forehead, and then nothing.