Page 39 of Eternal Surrender

I shook my head. “Jacob’s a vampire.”

“That’s right.”

“Paradom, you have to stay away from the Stone Masters. They’re vampire hunters.”

He glanced back down the long, gaping earth tunnel trailing off behind him. “They used to be.”

I tried to hold back and not rush him. “They still are.”

“Can you move objects?” He asked the same question again.

I shook my head no. “What other abilities do you have?”

He rolled his eyes into the back of his head. “I get to see inside your soul.”

“How do you mean?”

“I see the answers inside of you. That which is hidden deep. The truth that lies within that brings peace to your heart.” He looked excited. “We can break down walls with merely our mind!”

I cursed Jacob for not warning me about what to expect when I found him. I was left with confusion and a real sense of dread that I was now further away than ever from a resolution.

“Not that far away,” Paradom said. “And the plan is quite brilliant.”

“What plan?”

Paradom looked puzzled. “The one you’re part of.”

A thundering filled our small space and a wall of earth moved in our direction, rolling toward us; the bulldozer’s engine revved. We were being buried alive.

“Paradom?” I tripped, spitting out dirt, bolting after him, bending low to avoid the fast crumbling ceiling.

But he was already gone.

Chapter Eight

Extract this dusty ash saturating my mind, these cruel and devilish spectral thoughts that refuse to leave and hack out this pain, gauge it entirely, for only then will serenity know my name again.

I’d been kissed by insanity.

Standing motionless in the center of Belshazzar’s main bar, drenched in blood, I stared dead ahead, ignoring the gawking vampires that only now I was becoming aware of.

Snuff out this miserable torment. . .

With racing thoughts, I tried to hold onto the tenuous reality that clashed in the worst kind of way, smashing memories together and making no sense, threatening my will to go on.

After barely escaping the bulldozer and losing Paradom, I’d headed out of his den, quickly returning to the city center. The idea I’d become anything like him consumed me; a fright so blinding it had me spinning still.

Paradom had left me with more questions than answers, but there was a fragment of hope that some of the things he’d talked about were true, like the scrolls really existing and I could only guess that Jacob had sought out Paradom looking for answers for me.

The rest of the evening had continued to spiral downward fast, and I had the faint recollection of slaughtering an entire gang in a poorly lit alley just off Tottenham Court Road, after one of them went for me with a knife and threw an insult I didn’t much care for. After chastising the thug for his rudeness and finding little amusement in our verbal sparring, I’d sucked him dry. Not wanting to leave his friends out of our dark soiree, I’d dealt with the other four, leaving their bodies scattered in front of an old, crooked dumpster missing a wheel.

Hence the blood.

Grateful not only for the sustenance but that our disagreement had been quickly resolved, I’d headed to the only place that understood the art of pain, the age-old craft of forgetting or as a poor second, the gift of numbness.

Belshazzar’s, the majestic domain where outcasts felt welcome.

Something trickled down my forehead, and I wiped it off with the back of my hand, assuming it was blood.