Page 78 of Caretaker

I didn’t hesitate. With Amias defending against the vampires and Clayton and Alejandro taking on the humans, I sprinted toward Madalyn’s cage. Gunfire sounded, but I didn’t stop.

Yes, I was aware of the futility.

It would not stop me.

“Don’t kill her,” a man screamed—I was unsure if it was the warden telling his men to take me alive, or if it was the judge begging for his wife’s life.

And before I reached Madalyn’s cage, I was tackled from behind, and they took me down.

The baton flew from my grasp and the men threw themselves on top of me, crushing me, and I could not move. I tasted dirt as my teeth scraped through what felt like a pound of dirt, and it was that dirt that made me remember Silverlight.

There was power inside me, and there was power inside her.

And she was mine.

I couldn’t move as I was crushed into the ground, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need my voice to call her to me. I felt my left arm snap, and my nose crunched, and I had a second to think that the vampires were going to go insane with the scent of my blood heavy in the air.

Then I fell into darkness, I dove into it, I embraced it.

And I screamed silently for my Silverlight.

I reached for her.

I commanded her.

And she came.

She flew up through the ground toward me. She cut through earth and rock and bone—I felt it, just as I felt her.

She sliced through the ground, and she attached to my arm, and she lit the world on fire.

The strength of her attachment and the resulting halo exploded the humans from my back, and I found my feet without any conscious thought—one second I was dying beneath a pile of brutal men, and the next I was standing with a power those men had never known attached to my body, my mind.

As I swung her in an arc, killing three vampires who were just a little too close, something on my chest vibrated. I had a moment to think a huge bumblebee had gotten caught in my shirt, and I automatically glanced down.

Rhys’s pin, shaking and glowing, detached itself from my shirt and fell to the ground, and it began to grow. It began to change.

And a millisecond later, Rhys crouched where the pin had been. He leapt to his feet, clothed, armed, and so full of death and nightmares that despite myself, I fell back, terrified.

Silverlight could not hurt him. Her halo was repulsed and he walked through it like a ghost through a wall, and I did not know him at all.

No wonder he wanted to keep his secrets.

I would never tell, and no one else would recognize him, surely, because it was as though he were carved from coal—he was the night. He was anything he wanted to be.

He whirled and became a long, black sword, slicing in half three humans who came at us with guns blazing. He absorbed the bullets and spat them back at another group of humans, and then he was lost to me as Silverlight demanded her own share of blood.

The vampires fell as they tried to reach me, and with my sword leading the way, I raced toward Madalyn.

And that time, no one could stop me.

The judge was crouched at her side, his face a mask of agony, unable to break the chains that held her. I ran Silverlight through them and they parted like butter.

She smelled like death, filth, disease.

But I also caught another scent, stronger than the others, which wafted from her body and slid into my nostrils.

That scent belonged to Amias.

I drew back in horror, unsure, but there was no time to linger on the meaning behind that scent. Later. Later I would linger.

“Pick her up,” I told Bennett, “and stay behind me. I’ll get you to safety.”

I thought I saw Amias lying on the ground a few yards away, but I couldn’t stop to see. Vampires, long starved and driven mad, ripped through the night. They took on the humans who’d enslaved them, but still, their need for food was larger than their rage, and they swarmed toward me and the freed Madalyn, hoping for a taste. Desperate for a taste.

They had no chance. Silverlight wouldn’t let them near us.

And with the moon still strong in the sky and the vampire-killing sun hours away, Silverlight and I rushed Judge Bennett and his beloved wife to the safest place on the island.

The Byrdcage.