Chapter Twenty-Nine
The beast he’d kept caged for so long crept from the darkness, craving blood and violence and death. And Nikolai finally planned to feed the creature to its fill. His favorite dagger in hand, long blade sharp and ready, he marched forward in the direction they would come, sensing the three men flanking behind him. The smell of horses was on the wind, lots of them. The hart wolves would sense them, too.
“They’ll leave their mounts outside Silvane and come by stealth,” offered Nikolai. “Look to the trees, not just the ground.”
He sensed the change of energy in the air, knowing two of them had shifted. Nikolai glanced back to see Bron, now his fierce black hart wolf, trotting into the woods ahead of him. Connell was close behind him. Dane still followed behind in human form, a steady snow beginning to fall.
“The queen will have sent an army infected by sanguine furorem. They’ll be savage. And thirsty.”
“Good,” replied Dane, deep voice rough as rock. “Desperation makes men make mistakes.”
Nikolai agreed with a tight nod, swiveling to face the quiet woodlands, sensing the presence of his own kind drawing nearer. “I appreciate that you and your brethren are here, even though this isn’t your fight.”
Dane grunted. “Intruders in our woods, coming to harm one of our own. It is our fight.”
Nikolai understood by the tenor in his rumbling voice that Sienna was to them one of their pack, a sister. He was suddenly grateful for them, for their protection of her all this time, long before he knew her. They’d kept her safe, a lovely woman living alone in the woods. So vulnerable. He could barely get words past his throat, thick with all the fear and dread of what could have been should she not have had her wolf guardians.
“Thank you,” he said gruffly, meeting the gold-eyed gaze of Dane.
“As I said. She is one of us.” In a blink, he shifted into the giant beast of a hart wolf, eyes narrowing on the woods as he trotted quickly on silent feet.
Nikolai marched forward, smelling vampire on the wind. “Come, you fucking bastards.”
He stopped on the path, standing in plain sight, and closed his eyes. He thought of Sienna—beautiful, loving Sienna—standing on a crate and pouring her heart out for the cause of the Black Lily, lying beneath him with trusting eyes and a more trusting soul, burning at the stake with pain marking every line of her face, dying in his arms and taking his heart with her. And coming back to life…
No way in hell would he let that go without retribution. Vengeance seduced him with the promise of blood and death to his enemies. The beast inside smiled at finally being unleashed to wreak hell and deliver pain.
Nikolai opened his eyes and watched the blur of vampires as they flashed through the woods, coming closer. He kept perfectly still, letting them come to him. Dead ahead, striding straight up the path was the one he wanted most of all. Gripping the hilt of his dagger and clenching his other hand into a fist until his knuckles cracked, Nikolai held steady. And waited.
Volkov strode forward with astounding confidence, arrogance, the tails of his black coat whipping behind him. Hundreds of vampires fell in line within the naked trees, branching out in staggering waves. Many of their mouths were bloody from recent feeding. The queen was arming her soldiers in the most lethal of ways. Volkov came closer within a few yards and stopped, a grin widening his face with menace.
“It seems we have good news.”
Nikolai refused to answer, remaining frozen, as his beast crept forward, black claws pushing open the door, sharp teeth ready to rip throats.
“I’m surprised she survived.” Volkov lifted his head, inhaled deeply with his eyes closed, then opened them, ice-cold gaze boring into his. “But she most certainly did. I can smell her. So sweet. I’ll be so pleased to see her again. I wasn’t quite finished with her yet.”
“You will die before you step foot beyond me.”
Volkov laughed, the chilling sound echoing into the boughs. “One vampire against an army.”
“I am not alone.”
Volkov’s gaze flicked over the perimeter, finding no one at Nikolai’s back. Though hesitant, he spewed more filth, his voice low and grating. “This time, when I have her in my bed, I’ll take more than her blood. I’ll sate my hunger till she begs in pain and agony for me to stop. But I won’t. You can die knowing I’ll keep your red witch alive a very, very long time.”
And that was it. Nikolai’s monster broke through the cage. He charged. Volkov leapt forward on a snarl. In a swift maneuver, Nikolai bounded two steps up a tree, then dove on top of Volkov, embedding his dagger in his back with a satisfying crunch.
Volkov, pumped high with human blood, cried out and threw him off. He blurred several yards away trying to reach the dagger but to no avail. Nikolai smiled and sauntered closer, slow and steady. The army of Legionnaires circling. One helped Volkov and removed the bloody dagger.
Nikolai knew it wasn’t a fatal blow, that it would heal swiftly with the amount of human blood he’d gorged on. His intention wasn’t to kill. Not yet. He’d make good on his promise to his beloved. Volkov would know the meaning of pain before he drew his last breath. With less confidence in his step, Volkov sidled forward flanked by three vampires on either side.
An eerie howl erupted. Volkov and his men swiveled to look behind them. Another howl shattered the silent wood. Then another to the east. And another to the west. Dozens of pairs of golden eyes gleamed from the shadows. Snarls and snaps of teeth came from every direction.
“Did you forget why Silvane Forest is forbidden to vampires?” asked Nikolai, marching faster with determination.
“Those beasts are no match for us.”
“We shall see about that.” Nikolai blurred forward to capture his prey.
…
Sienna wrenched her hands together, gasping when she heard the chorus of hart wolves echoing in the forest. The hartstone’s beacon urged her to join the fray, but she had promised Nikolai. So she paced by the hearth, waiting for news. Praying.
She’d cleaned Riker’s face and chest as best she could, soaking several towels with red. He’d not moved, but the gashes on his face and his chest seemed to be knitting together. She wasn’t sure about his legs. They’d been crushed brutally by heaven knew what. But he seemed to be in a very deep sleep while Nikolai’s blood healed from within.
When the door clicked open, it hadn’t been long, but she sighed with relief, thinking Nikolai had returned already. But the sickening figure who stepped into the room rolled her stomach with nausea.
“Hello there, milady,” said the ghastly Boris, grinning, canines extending long out of his mouth.
At once, she backed up, gripping the fire-iron behind her back. He circled in. She stepped away, putting the sofa between them. His expression was a mixture of wonder and wickedness as he perused her body from top to toe.
“Not sure how he fixed you.” He sniffed the air like a dog, wrinkling his nose. “You’re not a vampire. So that wasn’t the trick.”
She brandished the iron in front of her. “Stay back.”
He laughed. A guttural, frightening sound that raised gooseflesh on her skin. In a flash, the iron flew across the room and clattered to the floor and Sienna was pressed to the wall with Boris’s large hand wrapped around her throat. She gripped his wrist, digging her claws in, which had no effect. He dipped his head and leaned into her hair and inhaled.
“Mmm. Very sweet. But how’d you do it, witch?” His hard, black eyes held hers. “I watched you burn.”
Yes, he’d gloated in the carriage as he delivered her on the step of doom into the hands of more monsters who stripped her body and tied her to post, then set her on fire. A humming pulse swirled in her belly, blooming outward. She welcomed the fire-flower, willing it to open for her.
“Get your hands off me, creature,” she spat.
He grinned wider, his canines sharpening more. “Volkov has business with you first. But when he’s done, I’ll be happy to take the leftovers.”
The bloom spun into a spiral of burning energy filling her chest, bosom, arms, legs, hands. Boris flinched as he watched an ethereal glow emanate from her skin.
“I said, get your hands off me.”
By instinct, she punched out with her inner force, a pulse of orange flame leaping off her skin and scorching her attacker. He bellowed and fell onto the floor, clamoring backward. Filled with conviction, righteousness, and the need for absolute vengeance, she slapped her hand in the air toward the monster. A sinewy rope of fire extended from her wrist and wrapped his throat, sizzling his skin.
“You know what I am now, don’t you, vampire?” she said, knowing now what the hartstone had made her. “I am the Red Witch of the Wood.”
With a snap of her wrist, the fire-rope sliced through his neck and severed his head in a clean, cauterized cut. His head rolled to the floor, eyes and mouth still moving as it thunked against the wall, smoking.
…
The wood was alive with cries of agony and death. The black oaks stood as sentinels and witnesses of the carnage spilling vampire and hart wolf blood on the new fallen snow. Bron streaked by, leapt in the air, and attacked a vampire scrambling up a tree, shaking it by the leg till it was a mangled, twisted mess. As it writhed and tried to crawl away in the snow, Bron crunched into his throat and snapped his neck.
Dane grappled with two vampires at once, one clinging to his back and trying to sink his fangs into him. But the burly wolf was too ferocious for them, shaking them both off. He clamped his jaws on the face of one and shook till his head popped free. The other started to run, but Dane was on him, a paw between his shoulder blades as he ripped his head off, too. Dane swiveled and charged another leaping for his brother.
The packs of hart wolves filled the night with fierce growls and crunching bone and snapping limbs. Nikolai had no idea there were so many hart wolves lurking in Silvane Forest. But now he was glad of it. These vampire fledglings were hardly a match for skilled warriors.
Nikolai and Volkov had been in their own death dance for far too long, while the wolves fought several opponents around them, dispatching them quickly. Nikolai was ready to end it. They circled each other once more. Nikolai tore his ragged shirt from his chest and tossed the frayed garment to the ground, relishing the kiss of cold snow on his heated skin. They’d sliced each other several times, the wounds healing slower and slower.
Nikolai hadn’t felt his own claws prick from his fingers in ages. The most primitive aspect of the vampire, claws extended only when more monster than man took hold. Nothing felt better than tearing through Volkov’s flesh and hearing him scream.
No. That wasn’t true. The best was yet to come.
With an evasive lunge, he leapt and somersaulted through the air over Volkov’s head. Landing directly behind him, he gripped him with his forearm across his throat, his other around his gut.
Even now, Volkov laughed, a maniacal sound knowing his life was at an end. “Tell me, lieutenant,” he taunted, still using Nikolai’s lost title.
“Dying words? Go on. Say them.”
“Is this rage because I tasted your girl? Or is it because she liked me better?”
“Enough.” Nikolai dug deep into the flesh of his belly and ripped, pulling out the sinewy muscle, hot blood streaming into the white snow with a hiss. Volkov screamed.
A tumult on the main path snapped his attention. Wolves still snarled and yelped nearby in battle with their enemies, his own kind. But vampire cries lit up the falling night along the trail. Orange light emanated from the gloom. Volkov was limp in his death-clutch as his lifeblood drained away, but not quite dead.
Nikolai dragged his body, an arm hooked around his throat, to the trail to see what new devilry had stumbled into the wood. There he found it was heavenly, not something from hell walking up the path. Frozen, rooted to the spot with Volkov still in his grasp, he watched in rapturous awe the most beautiful sight he had ever seen.
Sienna was encased in gold, red, blue, and orange flames, her arms spread wide, palms up, the fire flickering from the tips of her fingers, sparking off of her crimson gown. The folds of her skirt billowed as she strode forward in long, confident strides, the downy snow melting as it hit her blazing aura. Her auburn hair floated around her head like a halo, burning bright with copper flames. The sight of her was stunning, but nothing compared to her face. Glowing with an inner light, her expression was one of a woman who knew her power, of a queen newly crowned, of a goddess wielding retribution upon her helpless enemies.
The hart wolves stepped aside as she walked the path, falling snow melting upon her halo of golden fire. The vampires, bloated on blood and their own superiority in the throes of sanguine furorem, charged toward her. Nikolai opened his mouth to warn her, but there was no need.
One by one, she felled them all. With a flick of her finger, blades of fire flew from her palm and found their mark, piercing the heart of each vampire in her way, incinerating them into ash from the inside out. The first twenty fell at her feet with frozen looks of shock right before her fire filled them and they died in a pile of black ash.
“Sienna,” he whispered, unable to say anything more. Her name was a prayer of worship on his lips, the fire goddess lighting up the cold night with swift punishment for their enemies.
Volkov gurgled in his grasp. He’d almost forgotten. While vampires circled more cautiously, she drew closer to Nikolai.
“Let him go, my love.”
He stared in awe, this woman he loved with all his heart, burning in a halo of flame that didn’t touch her skin but rather kissed her with beauty and might. He dropped Volkov to the snow.
With one hand, she reached out. A curtain of flame shot from her body and lifted Volkov till he was hanging in the air almost in the boughs of the trees. He screamed, kicking and swinging his arms to no avail as the flames licked around his body.
“No mercy,” said Sienna. She pulled an arm back and launched a ball of blue flame from her palm. Hitting him like a cannonball, it spun him up into the night as he bellowed and burned far into the woods till they could hear him no more.
With utmost calm, she sauntered forward to Nikolai, then faced the line of vampires encroaching on her right. “Fight with me, love.”
Shaking off the awe, he put his back to her to face the vampires encroaching from the left. “As you wish, sweetheart.”
Allora, Bron, Connell, and Dane circled in with them, readying to fight the vampire horde. They descended as one, falling in from the shadows and the trees, but they were no match for the hart wolves’ ferocity, for Nikolai’s skill, or for Sienna’s fire-magic. One by one, the vampires fell till the few dozen that were left alive limped and skulked away back to the Glass Tower.
Allora in her white wolf form stood on the path and howled. She was met with a chorus of chilling howls, the crystalline night shaken with blood and death and the eerie baying of hart wolves in victory.
Nikolai watched as dozens of wolves ghosted past him, a few casting him a wary glance before trotting one after another back into the darkness. Some of them had shifted into human form, helping one another to carry their injured. And a few of their dead.
Striding forward to Sienna, Nikolai caught her gaze. Her blaze dimmed, the flames sucking back inside her body as he drew closer, leaving her with a slim ethereal glow.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, noting the blood staining his bare chest.
He had no words, gathering her into his arms before he crushed his mouth to hers and kissed her deep. Her fire still simmered on her skin, warming him in the most complete way. With a groan, he pulled away and pressed his forehead to hers, cupping the back of her head and keeping her there as he rocked gently. She kept her hands wrapped around his waist, giving him the moment he needed to be sure all was right. He opened his eyes to find Sienna watched him with her sweet green eyes, sparks of gold still flickering. All was so very right in his world.
A mournful wail broke them both apart. The howl was familiar.
“Allora,” she said.
Nikolai grabbed her hand, and they ran off the trail to find Dane, the man, kneeling over his fallen brother, Connell, whose lifeless eyes stared up into the sky where snow drifted down onto his bronzed face and body. A snap of piercing electricity marked Allora’s shift, then she knelt beside her brother weeping, cradling his head in her lap.
“No, dear Connell,” she whispered, brushing his chestnut hair away from his brow. “No, dear one.”
Bron stood silently watching, his black coat soaked in vampire blood, his head bowed.
Dane knelt beside his sister and gently closed Connell’s eyes. “Good night, my brother,” he whispered, the jagged tattoos covering his back, arms and chest seeming more stark and savage against the snow. With no words of anger or fury, he lifted his brother in his arms and walked away toward the heart of the forest. Bron followed. Then Allora, stifling another sob before shifting into her white wolf form to escort her brothers, one living and one fallen, to their clan’s home somewhere in these woodlands.
Sienna swiped a tear from her cheek and hiccoughed on a sob. “We should go with them.” She stepped forward.
Nikolai stopped her with a gentle tug. “No, sweetheart. They need privacy now.” He swept her up into his arms. “Close your eyes.” He pressed her head into the crook of his neck to ground her as best he could before speeding her home. He needed to get her there. Safe.
After depositing her on the sofa and dragging out into the woods the body and decapitated head of the vampire he recognized as Boris on her living room floor, he returned and bolted the door. After a quick check on Riker, who remained unconscious, he started a fire, then pulled her into his lap on the sofa.
They said nothing at all for a long time, the night’s events sinking in with pain, regret, victory, and sorrow. He sifted his hand through her hair, watching the fire. She kept her head against his shoulder until finally, she lifted up and cupped his face with one hand, the world held in her sage-green eyes.
“Tell me we will be all right.”
“We will be more than all right.” He knew the despair breaking her expression into grief was not only about what they’d lost, about who they’d lost, but about who they might still lose in the future. “Listen to me.” Now he cupped her cheeks, sliding his fingers into her hair. “We will win this war. Despite losing Connell, and what they did to Riker”—he swallowed hard against his own pain—“we won this battle.” He swiped the tear rolling down her cheek with his thumb. “You won, sweetheart.”
He couldn’t begin to explain to her what the sight of her full to the brim with the fire-power of the hartstone had done to him. The hartstone remade humans into beings with a power befitting their souls. Nikolai’s love was made of fire and light. He’d always known this, but now she did, too.
She pressed her forehead to his as he’d done before. “I love you, Nikolai.”
His heart tripped, recognizing the truth and good in her words, which settled the beast within him so that he could tuck it away until he needed the monster again.
“As I love you, sweet Sienna.”
He tucked her close, her face nuzzled against his neck, and washed away the pain with soothing strokes and gentle caresses, just as the falling snow outside thickened and covered the bloody carnage in the woods. Time and compassion and comforting words would soften the battle scars of this night. Nikolai needed this to be so, for he knew the war was not yet over.
For now, he would hold this precious woman and her tender love close to his heart. He would let her heal his own long-suffering wounds, like jagged shards in his soul. He would cherish his beloved Sienna and strengthen for another day.