A crack like breaking bone drew my attention.Desiderius had torn his left arm free from the stake’s bonds, the rope shredding against his ancient strength.But this wasn’t the weakened thrashing of before—Matthias’s light had done something to the consecrated ground, or perhaps it had done something to my friends.The ground no longer repelled them; they were no longer weakened by it, but seemed even stronger now.
Ruth was next, wrenching herself free with a snarl that held more relief than rage.The ropes fell away like cobwebs before her renewed vigor.She stumbled forward, then caught herself, her movements regaining their predatory grace with each step away from the stake.
Rebecca simply slipped her bonds, her slight frame allowing her to squeeze free once the consecrated ground’s paralysis lifted.She dropped to her knees, sobbing—not from pain but from the shock of survival, of Matthias’s sacrifice, of light where she’d expected only darkness.
“Alice.”Desiderius’s voice pulled my gaze toward him as he approached, his dignity somewhat restored despite his torn clothing and the marks the ropes had left on his ancient skin.But his eyes weren’t on me—they tracked past my prone form to something behind me, and his expression shifted to something I’d never seen on his face before.Grief.Raw and immediate.
I turned my head, neck muscles screaming protest, and saw what had captured his attention.
Gabriel lay crumpled against the base of a pine tree, a stake jutting from his chest.Not through the heart—Marcus’s aim had been off in the chaos—but close enough that dark blood seeped steadily into the earth.His eyes were closed, his body utterly still in that way only vampires could achieve, suspended between animation and true death.
“When?”The word barely escaped my pierced throat.
“When you died.”Desiderius knelt beside Gabriel, his fingers ghosting over the stake without touching it.“When those bolts found your heart, he broke from his position.Tried to reach you.Marcus shot him before he’d taken three steps.”
The revelation struck harder than the crossbow bolts had.Gabriel—my progeny, the one I’d thought lost to the Order’s influence, the one who’d tried to prepare me for this moment—had thrown away his carefully maintained cover to save me.After everything, after all the careful manipulation and hidden purposes, his first instinct had been protection.
“Touching.”Marcus’s voice cut through the clearing like a rusted blade.He’d found his voice again, though it carried notes I’d never heard from him—uncertainty warring with desperate fury.“The monster shows loyalty to its maker.How very...human.”
His tone was enigmatic.I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely impressed, seeing a human connection between us, or if it was sarcasm.The war in his mind, the tension he was experiencing, was almost like a spiritual battle between the hosts of heaven and the agents of the devil within his very soul.
He stood beside his makeshift altar, one hand gripping its edge as if it were the only thing keeping him upright.His hollow cheeks had gone gaunt with something beyond his usual asceticism—true terror, perhaps, or the first cracks in a faith built on hatred rather than love.The ceremonial robes he’d donned for my execution hung askew, spattered with my blood, making him look less like a divine authority and more like what he truly was: a man who’d confused his own vengeance for God’s will.
“You should be dead.”Each word fell from him like a stone into still water.“The heart shot—I’ve seen a hundred vampires fall to less.You are dead.This is some trick, some demonic—“
“No trick.”My voice surprised me with its clarity.The bolt through my throat should have made speech impossible, but the words flowed anyway, carried by something beyond physical ability.“Just grace, Marcus.The grace you’ve forgotten exists.”
His face contorted through expressions too quickly to track—rage, disbelief, fear, and finally something like madness.It was likesomethingtook him over, and all at once, what remained of his fury poured out in desperation.His hand found another stake, one of many he’d prepared for this night of judgment, and his knuckles went white around its shaft.
“If one stake through the heart won’t finish you,” he snarled, “perhaps another will.”
He moved faster than I’d thought possible for a mortal, even one driven by fanatical purpose.The distance between us vanished in three strides, and he raised the stake high above his head, its sharpened point aimed directly at my chest where the crossbow bolt already protruded.
The stake struck my flesh with tremendous force.I felt it clearly—the point pressing against my skin just beside the existing wound, Marcus’s full weight behind it, his determination to see me finally, truly dead.
But it wouldn’t penetrate.
The wood pressed against me, indenting my flesh, but could go no further.It was like watching someone try to drive a nail through granite with their bare hands.The stake simply...stopped.
Then the light came.
Not the violent eruption of Matthias’s transformation, but something gentler, warmer—like sunrise through stained glass.It spread from the point where the stake met my skin, racing outward in waves that turned the clearing’s darkness into something softer, something that held possibility rather than judgment.
Marcus flew backward as if struck by an invisible hand, the stake spinning from his grip to land somewhere in the underbrush.He hit the ashen ground hard, rolling twice before coming to rest in an ungainly heap, his ceremonial robes tangled around him like burial shrouds.
The light continued to pulse from me, not bright enough to blind but impossible to ignore.It illuminated everything—the stakes my companions had been bound to, the horrified faces of Timothy and Elias, Father O’Malley still bound to his chair, and Marcus, scrambling backward on his hands like a crab, his eyes wide with the kind of terror that comes from seeing one’s entire worldview shatter.
I reached for the bolt in my side first, the one that had pierced my heart.My fingers closed around its shaft, and I pulled.It should have been agony, should have torn me apart, but instead it slid free like drawing a knife from water.The wound closed immediately—not healing, exactly, but sealing itself with light that left behind a mark, a stigma that glowed faintly before settling into my flesh like a scar made of dawn.
The bolts in my hands came next.Left, then right, each one leaving its own glowing signature, its own testament to what had happened here.My feet were last, and when I pulled those free, I found I could stand—not with the unnatural grace of a vampire, but with something else, something that felt almost like my mortal walk but suffused with purpose, with mission.
The marks remained.Five wounds that had closed but not disappeared, that pulsed with gentle warmth where the iron had pierced me.They didn’t hurt, exactly, but I felt them—would always feel them, I understood.
I moved toward Marcus with steps that felt borrowed from someone else—someone who’d never doubted their worth, never questioned their place in Creation’s vast design.The light still emanated from my stigmata, casting long shadows that danced away from me rather than toward, as if darkness itself recoiled from what I’d become.Each footfall on the ground—ground blackened by flame and soaked in the blood of martyrs—felt deliberate, necessary, like walking a path that had been laid out before the foundation of the world.
Marcus continued his desperate crawl backward until his shoulders struck the altar’s base.Trapped between the stone and my approach, he pressed himself against it like a child hiding from thunder.The hollow authority that had defined him for so long had evaporated entirely, leaving behind something small and frightened and achingly human.
“Stay back,” he whispered, though the command held no power.His hand fumbled for another weapon—a cross, a stake, anything—but found only empty air.“You’re an abomination.A trick of the devil meant to—“
