With the best grin he could manage, Roger turned around to face her. “It’s a tiny bump in the road.”
Nell had a sharp look in her eye, clearly sizing him up and determining fact from fiction. Though he did his best to keep his expression relaxed, she only hardened and scowled at him. “What if Seamus doesn’t accept this bargain?”
Then I’m in the middle of the sea with a leaky boat, no wind for my sails, and an albatross around my neck.Roger slid his phone into his pocket. “Then I’ll convince him to.”
“How?” Nell said.
Roger shrugged with one shoulder. “I have been surviving him for centuries. I’ll figure it out.”
“That has come to mind before.” Nell’s eyes flared ruby red once more. The color of her irises overtook her whole eye. The shadows around her grew thicker and darker. “You are a survivor, Roger. A lie here, a pretty tale there, anything to slide free. Anything for a smile, a caress, and the ability to waltz away without a scratch.”
“Nell,” Roger said, dropping his carefree act, “I don’t know what you’re thinking?—”
“That the last three months have been nothing but a con,” Nell snarled.
The temperature plummeted, and a thin layer of ice blossomed across the practice mat in a radius around Nell. Her scent of the grave was earthy and salty, a mix of the land she’d been buried in and the salt of the sea she’d called home for five hundred years of her immortal life. She was invoking power that Roger had rarely seen, and she was doing it without faltering like Seamus did. The shadows darkened the room, stretching out from the corners and toward the center.
A hard fear twisted in Roger’s gut. She could crush him into paste. He had to find some way to convince her that he was honest. “Do you think I put myself in a box?”
“Perhaps you did,” Nell snapped. “Perhaps it hasn’t been thirty-some-odd years. Perhaps this has been Seamus’s way of toying with my defenses. Of spying.”
“Oh yes, and I conveniently staged everything with Zack?” Roger scoffed. “What would be the point of that?”
“If he’s in on it, I will find out after I am done wringing answers from you.” Nell raised her hands, her fingers poised like a marionette puppeteer.
Shadows lifted from the floor and formed four inky-black tendrils. When Nell motioned with her hands, the tendrils shot forward.
Roger relied on his speed to dodge out of the way of the tendrils’ first attempt to grasp him. The ice spreading out from Nell was growing thicker, the mat becoming slicker under his feet. He nimbly darted out of the way a second time.
“Nell! You’re being ridiculous!” Roger used the steel knife in his hand to cut through one of the shadows reaching for him while he spun away from another. The knife passed through the tendril without issue—and without causing any damage to it.
His throat hurt, and his stomach started to burn. He was reaching the end of his strength.Or am I? Nell hasn’t fed tonight, and she’s doing this kind of magic.What did sheknow that he didn’t? At what age had she started to manipulate shadows? Was it truly something only an older vampire could do, or could he master them?
His racing thoughts distracted him, and he failed to pull his left wrist out of the way of one shadowy tendril. It looped around him and pulled, throwing him off-balance. As he tried to pull his arm free, another latched onto his right knee. Then the other two caught his other wrist and other knee.
With a jerk from Nell, the tendrils tightened and yanked him down to his hands and knees. Roger dropped the knife on his way down out of reflex.
“Poor, pitiful,weakRoger.” Nell lifted her chin, her regal demeanor only elevated by the glow of her eyes. “Whose pawn are you? Seamus’s? The boy’s? Dmitri’s?”
“No one’s,” Roger growled.
A tendril came out of the shadow beneath him and latched around his throat. It tugged on him, attempting to pull him against the mat.
What could he do against her?
I’m a vampire. A goddamn immortal bloodsucker of the night. I have survived for centuries. I will not be schooled like some disobedient dog.
With a snarl, Roger embraced his own power. A century had passed since he’d last fully indulged the magic within him. The power had a solid weight to it, like a sword in his hand, only his whole body was the sword.
The shadows had an unnatural movement to them from Nell’s infusion of will and power. But he could feel the slither of them, and that was new. Beneath them, in some unseeable place, was a pit of cold power that he could brush his fingers against. He had never studied magic. He had no clue what he touched, but he recognized the strength of it. The danger.
She had control of the darkness in the room, but there was one shadow that should belong to him more than her: his own. He sought it, discovered it hidden among the others. The vagueness of it had his shape and a hint of the grave that smelled like him. Shadows having a smell was also new, but he didn’t stop to admire that.
Mentally, he grabbed his shadow and pulled on it. Wrestling it from Nell’s influence was like trying to take the lead with a forceful dance partner. He slid and slipped and burned with want.
And it broke free from her control. Relief rushed through him, and he almost lost his grip. But if she could make the shadows do more, then he could. He imagined a blade, sharp and dark, and sliced through the tendril holding his throat.
Nell’s control faltered, and Roger pulled himself up from the floor. The tendrils were still looped around him, so he used the shadow blade to cut through the one on his right wrist. He gripped the blade’s handle. It was ice-cold but real, and he used it to free himself of the other tendrils.
