Chapter Fourteen

Something Wrong with the Night

 

On the way to the city, an image of Rhys floated into my mind.

I’d had a power growth spurt. A big one.

I was ready for the demon.

Maybe I was ready for Rhys.

I felt ready. I felt beyond ready. Probably I was just eager and wanted to be ready.

Thoughts of Rhys helped distract me from my worry for my hunters and the city and even for the captain. He’d gotten angrier over my attachment to my supernats, and his anger was bringing out his inner asshole.

Still, I worried about him.

Frank Crawford had a lot on his shoulders.

I called Shane but got no answer. I hadn’t really expected to. A hunter couldn’t stop in the middle of killing vampires to chat on the phone.

I knew that, but I called Clayton, as well. He didn’t answer either.

“Be okay,” I whispered, and drove faster. There was no traffic, and the night seemed vast and endless.

I called Angus.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m almost to the city. I just needed to hear you.” My insides shook, as did my voice. It’d been a long, stressful night, and it wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. And I was still carrying around the nagging anxiety I’d picked up earlier.

“I’m right behind you.”

I frowned. “What?”

“I’m not letting you face the city without me. Not tonight.”

“Bay Town needs you.”

He grunted. “You need me, girl.”

“But…”

“I need to be where you are,” he said.

I couldn’t help my relief. It just was.

And then his headlights appeared in my rearview, and my stomach eased. “I see you,” I murmured.

He followed me to the city, and when we parked and left our vehicles, there wasn’t time for anything but fighting. Vampires were everywhere.

No. Rifters were everywhere.

At least it seemed as though they were. In reality, there couldn’t have been more than six or seven of them. But they were huge, fast, and vicious, and in my mind, they were many.

Silverlight was ready for them. I was ready for them. My sword lit up the night sky, and the rifters screamed as I sliced through them like butter. Their screams sounded like laughter.

I needed to find my hunters because there was something wrong with the night.

For the first time in a long time, I longed for the sun. The darkness was no longer kind. It was no longer mine.

The city was full of blood and death and tears. Everything was magnified—the sounds, the sights, the scents—and I knew the humans were feeling it even more than I was.

They were stunned and overcome. Some of them were dying, some were dead, and some were turning. Humans stared from windows, their faces white blobs of terror, and watched me and mine try to regain some control of their world.

A woman rushed from her house, screaming, and flung herself atop a fallen man.

And the man they’d bitten—her husband, I figured—began to twitch.

The streets and tiny yards were littered with twitching bodies.

I released my rage in a hoarse scream and turned in circles, searching for rifters I could not see.

They were gone. But more would come. Many more. The damage a few of them had done was enormous. If hundreds of them poured into the city, the city would be destroyed. How could a few hunters and supernaturals defend the humans against dozens of stronger, faster, twisted vampires who could go inside homes? Who were immune to silver?

I didn’t know.

The huge horror of our reality began to really sink in.

And the humans…

The humans were my people as much as the supernaturals were my people, and their pain was my pain.

“Trinity.” Clayton’s voice was gentle when I turned to look at him. “We have to give them the true death.”

I nodded but didn’t move.

Shane was already busy, his blades flashing as he jogged from body to body, making sure they stayed down.

“How could those few have killed so many?” I asked. But it was more a statement of shocked realization than a question.

A wailing woman, huddling protectively over one of the bodies, began to scream when Shane approached her.

“Go away,” she begged. “You can’t take my boy. You can’t have my boy.”

Shane murmured something I didn’t catch and glanced uneasily my way.

“No,” the woman said. “He’s not dead. See? He’s moving. Please don’t kill him. Please don’t kill my boy.”

I shuddered, and then, with reluctance in every step, I went to help Shane.

“But why?” the woman cried when I drew a blade. I left Silverlight inside me. She wasn’t needed. Not then. “He’s still my Josh. He’s still in there. Can’t you see?”

I knelt beside her, and Shane and Clayton walked quietly away to tend to the other turned humans, some with family beside them, some alone.

“He’s a vampire now,” I said, gently, though I felt like screaming. “And he’s suffering.”

New vampires were feral and hungry. That was all they were. Without an older vampire to develop him, Josh would likely die anyway. But if he managed to survive, to “age,” he would kill anyone or anything he could grab so he could feed. He needed the immediate and sustained exchange of blood and the care of his maker—or at least an older and capable proxy—before it was too late and his baby vampire brain was twisted into something black and rotten.

Josh wasn’t in there. But his grieving mother saw only her son, and she did not want to let him go.

A little while earlier, she’d have demanded the death of a vampire without thinking twice—but now it was her child who lay upon the street, and she would never again look at a vampire with quite as much hatred, disgust, and disdain.

Bright sides.

“I’ll take care of him. He’s always been such a good boy. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Her smile was wide and terrible. “I’ll tend him, don’t you worry.”

“He’s…” My voice broke. “He’s suffering. You have to let him go.” I did not want to end him with her begging me not to. I would if I had to, but I didn’t want to.

Crawford came to stand at my back, and policemen walked the streets, trying to restore some sort of order to the fucked-up mess. No one really knew what to do.

Reporters flooded the area with camera crews and microphones, shrill and excited. Hysterical.

I felt Angus and my hunters slipping up behind me and I glanced over my shoulder, cataloging injuries in a glance.

Then I caught sight of Amias, half hidden in the shadows of the house across the street. I felt his stare, his intensity. His desolation. We were connected, for better or for worse, and I felt his struggle.

He could not save them, those baby vampires, as much as he wanted to.

Because the infection and the hunters had managed to severely reduce the number of vampires, he would feel the need to begin to rebuild. But he was only one vampire, and the humans had been turned by rifters.

Amias had said the turned were useless to rifters. For all I knew, they were useless to regular vampires, as well. Surely being turned by the twisted created only more twisted.

Then pearly pink fingers slid through the sky, like bright ink on black paper, and when I took my stare off the coming dawn, Amias was gone.

Seconds later, the sun touched the new vampires, and they began to burn.

Screams worse than anything I’d heard in my life burst from their gaping mouths. Josh’s mother screamed with him, and all over the city voices sharp with unimaginable pain lifted in a sort of gruesome, heart-wrenching symphony.

Chills raced over me and goosebumps dotted my skin. Shuddering with horror, I set about silencing that sorrowful music forever.

And finally, I put Silverlight away and stood with my men, blood dripping from my fingertips to splat upon the pavement.

For a little while, the darkness was conquered.

The long night was over.