And... Thema and Kojo were creating strife in Lincoln’s clan. I needed to keep a careful eye on them.Crap.
When I entered the vamp world, I was a wild card. I had somehow managed to rearrange everything. Monique was perhaps another wild card. She was a warrior Onorio with access to magic and mind tricks. She could take over the world.
The boat-hull vision began to fill with smoke: purple, charcoal, deepest black. I flattened myself even more and reached for my body. I had learned a lot, but it wouldn’t be worth it if I got stuck here. The ceiling, however, felt solid even in my amorphous form.
Pain lanced along my forehead. I jerked, trying to get out.
“Give me the relics,” Monique said.
The pain along my forehead grew, something digging into my scalp. “Give them to me,” she said, spittle hitting my face.Monique was attacking me. My hands shot up and caught hers. I stood. Wrenched my body hard left. Shifting her over my bent knee, rotating my frame from toes to scalp. Using the bound wrists of the woman, her own weight, and the chair her feet were still taped to. Throwing her to the floor. My motion was so fast, so hard, her chair broke into chunks and sharp splinters that went flying. I landed atop her chest, a knee in her solar plexus.
Breath whooshed out of her. She grunted with pain.
I flipped her facedown, the chair slamming into the floor again. I pulled her arms up and her body back into a bow. Her bones cracked. She grunted.
I hadn’t even opened my eyes. I stretched her harder,one knee now in her spine, her head bent back over her butt. I leaned toward her ear and whispered, “Try that again, and I’ll burn your slave ship.”
She stiffened under me. Or she started fighting for breath.
I was suddenly back in her soul home.
Purple clouds rose from the bloody floor. Magic like a fine mist and smoke lifted toward me.
My mind filled with images of death. Me dying by exsanguination, my blood being collected in a big blue bucket.
A vision of Grégoire dancing with a sword against three opponents. Beheaded. Blond hair flying.
A vision of Tex bound in silver as someone killed Martha and Jangles. As his dogs howled and called and he raged.
Edmund trapped in a deep pit, mostly filled with water. Silver chains weighing him down. Silver needles stuck into the flesh of his neck, which was purple-black. Poisoned. Dying.
Is not real,Beast thought at me.
Monique was using these images to keep me out of her mind while trying to bind me.
I said, “This ain’t my first rodeo, you little bitch.” Beast’s claws ripped through the images of the people I loved being tortured. Beneath them was the bloody floor and the four bound helpers. I couldn’t see what they planned. I needed to know—
Monique slashed at me, her power like hot knives.
In the clouds of purple energies, I caught a glimpse of vampires. I saw Monique withle breloqueresting loosely on her head. A vision of Bruiser being killed, stabbed with blades.
“We will kill all Onorios who refuse to align with us,” one of her prisoners said.
Ah... I pulled back on her body and leaned away at the same time, my body weight doing the work.
From her rotting soul home, from the faces in the clouds of her magic, I heard French chatter, too fast to follow. Commanding tones.
Monique and the others were working with Europeanvamps, ones not bound, not present in the soul home. With magical assistance, the bound ones were watching the vamps. Monique planned to betray them. Especially one of them. Male. Old and powerful. Faces swept by in the rotten hull of her soul home as I searched the vamp faces. Which one was her ultimate target?
I saw a face I knew. Legolas. Melker. He was true dead. His former scions, the main new vamp in charge of his blood-family and clan had planned and carried out the attack at the house near Beaver Lake. Why was Legolas’s face here? Had we killed the new leader, or was his replacement vamp still out there ready to do harm? As the questions swirled, I saw yet another face. It tore at my memory, the name not coming clear. Then...
The purple magics stabbed at me as they had stabbed at Bruiser. Part of Monique’s power wassenza onoremagic and dark energy. Magic that drew on and used power that wasn’t hers, power that belonged to the bound bodies on the bloody hull.
Black and purple clouds of smoke, boiling and raging, reached for me. Reached for my mind.Le breloqueflashed with light. Blinding prisms of the Dark Queen’s power shoved back against the bloody darkness. The Glob sucked the darkness down into the place where it stored energy. A pocket world. I saw it, the barest glimpse of a maelstrom of energy, a black hole of magic in the Glob. It sucked her soul home dry.
Something inside Monique’s mind snapped with an audible popping sound. The purple energies whipped at me and away. I eased her to the side and stood over her, panting with exertion, watching her as the minutes crept by. She lay there limply, breathing fast, sweating, as if she had run a race. She said nothing. She didn’t turn and look at me.
I tried to see and think through all the layers of her plans. I had never deliberately set out to bind anyone to my own will, never tried to create a mental slave, but I understood why people like Leo did, just as I understood why I killed. To get and maintain control. Because without control, there is chaos. And because, once upon a time, deep down, I had believed I knew who should live or die.
