He shook his head once and grabbed the girl’s wrist during her next attempt. After snapping her arm, he followed up with a punch. He struck her again, driving her up against the wall.
The smell of smoke wafted in through the open door. She started to step away from the wall, so he pushed her roughly bythe shoulder. He brought his dagger back, ready to drive it into her heart.
She closed her eyes and tilted her head back as if believing she could flatten herself into the wall and survive. Bloody tears ran from the corners of her eyes. She was so young. So incredibly young. Like Amber, his sister.
Amber. He had a sister named Amber, and he wanted to see her again.
Kill!
He started to bring the blade in, but the girl whimpered, and the sound tugged on his memory. He … he had seen her like this before … he knew her. How?
Detroit, his rational mind provided.Janiyah Williams, age fourteen. Missing three weeks, last seen outside a library. A missing person’s page filtered through his inner mind. He had researched her. Seen her on a dark street on a rainy night with smoke on the air. She had been running. From … from hunters.
I didn’t want to kill her then. I don’t want to do it now!Zack screamed, the frustration of his lust for death combating his inner self. He couldn’t pull his blade back from where it was. He still wanted to drive it forward too badly.
“Zack!” Thomas shouted.
“D-dad?” Zack managed to turn his head.
Thomas had an arrow notched in his favorite bow. Zack’s mom had always claimed it was too slow of a hunter’s tool, that there was no point teaching archery to the kids. And so Zack hadn’t learned his father’s skill. “Let her go, Zack.”
“I … I can’t.” Zack tried to move his arm, but it was like pushing on a door that only opened with a pull. His body believed that was the wrong direction.
“Please,” Janiyah whispered. “You let me go before.”
“Before?” Thomas asked.
“Detroit.” Zack clenched his jaw as his hand slid another centimeter forward. Much more and he would pierce her skin. “Dad, you have to stop me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Thomas replied.
“If you don’t, I’m going to kill her and then you,” Zack cried. “Please, Dad!”
Resolution hardened Thomas’s expression, and he raised the tip of his arrow. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Dad.” Tears streaked down Zack’s cheeks. “But hurry, I’m losing control.”
Thomas loosed the arrow, and it sailed through the air. Zack closed his eyes, expecting pain in his chest. Instead, he had a splitting headache and then darkness as Janiyah snapped his neck.
CHAPTER 58
“I should have killed you centuries ago,” Seamus said.
“We all make mistakes,” Roger replied. Keeping Seamus talking provided him an opportunity to weigh his possible strategies but also let Seamus heal. Bastian’s fire dome wouldn’t last forever. If Roger couldn’t kill Seamus, he at least had to injure him enough that he couldn’t prevent the retreat.
The upside of the fire was that Seamus was limited in space; the downsides were that Roger was in that space, and the light from the flames made the shadows nearly nonexistent. The touch of them was too distant, and Roger wasn’t about to sacrifice any power in trying to grow them in spite of the light.
“You have made plenty of them,” Seamus taunted. “So many great loves turned to join you in immortality, and yet not one still stands beside you.”
Seamus was attempting to goad him into an attack, to strike out in rage without calculation. But Seamus’s words didn’t ding Roger’s mental armor. After all, three of those relationships had died because of Seamus’s actions; James had left because of Roger’s cowardice, and Phoenix had barely been a lover. Both James and Phoenix were out in the world, living their lives,Quinn’s and Roger’s first sirelings were dead, and Ezra was madly in love at long last.
Roger didn’t rise to the bait.
But maybe he will.
“Remind me how many homes you’ve had?” Roger asked. “Not individual houses—you abandon those almost as often as you drain your entire collection. But we had to leave Devil’s Cove because you were scared of the English Navy and then Southern France because you couldn’t control your hunger. Paris because you killed a hunter and pissed off his family. London for nearly the same reason. Virginia was a scant time, and then there was New York. I almost thought we’d make it in New York. Then you insisted that we move here.”
“To protect my ungrateful spawn from the chaos that continuously embroils that domain.”
