Chasing Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) (43 page)

Vangie had rolled back to her feet as well; she bent over into a crouch and ran at me, aiming for my midsection. Sidestepping to avoid being head-butted in the stomach, I seized her by the neck as she started past me, pulling her up straighter and swinging myself around so that her head was hanging backward over my shoulder.

“No, sister!
Don’t!” she gasped.

“You showed no mercy, so you shall receive none,” I replied coldly. “From this day forward, I have no sister.”

With those harsh words spoken, I jerked down with both hands, snapping Evangeline’s neck in two. Her body went limp immediately and I threw it on the floor like so much garbage. I stared down at her, my heart frozen, my chest heaving, and then as the rage returned to me I kicked her forcefully. Then I kicked her again, and again, and again, kicking until I was spent.

Tears spilled from my eyes freely as I turned and looked over at Mark’s still form. I walked over to him, feeling numb, and lifted his head so that I could see his face. His eyes had fallen closed and his lips were already turning pale as the blood drained away from his head. I leaned forward and softly pressed my lips to his, squeezing my eyes shut as I pulled the knife free. I choked on a sob as I turned away from him again and
walked back over to where Evangeline lay. I knelt down, thrusting the knife into her throat and feeling no remorse whatsoever as I proceeded with the bloody task of cutting her head off. I certainly had the strength to remove it with my bare hands, but I thought using her own knife, the knife she had killed my love with, a bit of poetic justice.

“Saphrona,” Lochlan said when my task was done, “come let me free. We have to help Juliette.”

After I had kicked Evangeline’s head across the room, I walked over on auto pilot and helped Lochlan free himself from his chains. When that was done, I turned and started back over to Mark, but he took my arm to stop me. “Saph, you can’t help him now,” he said quietly. “But Juliette may still be alive, and she needs us. We’ll make quicker work of those bastards if you go with me, you know that.”

He was right—Peter and Martin still needed to be dealt with, if Juliette were to be saved. I nodded stiffly and followed him out of the room.

*****

When we had exited the basement, Lochlan and I immediately heard the sound of Juliette screaming from somewhere above us—the second floor, I thought. Part of me was glad that she hadn’t given up, that she was still fighting.

My brother and I raced toward the source of the screams, flying up the stairs almost as if they didn’t exist. We found the two men and Juliette in the third room on the right-hand side. Juliette was tied to the bed and Martin was atop her, while Peter stood next to them watching and laughing.

His laughter, of course, abruptly ceased when Lochlan and I burst into the room. My brother launched himself at the vampire who was currently forcing himself on Juliette, rolling him off the bed with his arms locked around his ribs. I took the other one. Peter wasn’t much of an opponent. I exchanged a few blows with him but he was no match for me, not in the state of mind I was in. I had his arms torn off in seconds, followed in short succession by his neck being broken.

I turned at a loud noise. Lochlan had done me one better—he had actually ripped Martin’s head off, and he roared in triumph as he threw it across the room. Seeing Peter’s head was still attached, he moved over to him and gave him the same treatment.

I moved to the bed to free Juliette from her bonds. I looked her over quickly as I pulled the blanket up and wrapped her in it; thankfully, they had not re-broken her arm or broken anything else. She was, however, bruised up and in pain, and I knew that the psychological ramifications of what had been done to her were scars that would take much longer to heal.

She trembled as I pulled the blanket together over her naked form, sobbing as I placed an arm around her shoulders and drew her to me. Lochlan wisely stayed across the room, but he watched us, a look of pain on his face.

Juliette quieted after a moment, and looking up at me she said, “Where’s my brother?”

A sob caught in my throat and tears welled in my eyes as I recalled that gut-wrenching moment when Evangeline had thrust that knife into Mark’s heart.

“Saphrona, where is he?” she asked again. “Where’s Mark?”

“He…” I closed my eyes, but that didn’t work. I just saw that horrific moment again. “He’s… he’s d—”

I dropped my face into my hands, sobbing. I couldn’t say it—couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that the most amazing thing in the world that had happened to me had been taken away in a split second.

“Mark is dead,” Lochlan said quietly. “Evangeline stabbed him in the heart.”

Juliette shook her head. “No. No, he can’t be! He’s—he’s an immortal human! The dragon lady said so! He’s supposed to be immortal!”

I sniffled loudly, wiping at my eyes roughly as I said, “He may still be. There’s a chance he’ll come back like the stories say.”

She looked at me. “Then there’s a chance! If the part about
dhunphyr
living forever was true, surely that must be true, too, right?”

“Unfortunately we can’t be sure of that,” Lochlan said. “But I promise you we will do everything we can for him—because by God, I don’t want to be having to attend two funerals, let alone one.”

*****

Lochlan and I carried the bodies of Diarmid and Mark up from the basement and laid each one in a large, comfortable bed, our father in his own room and Mark down the hall. Juliette placed a call to her mother and asked her to come over to help tend Mark, and Lochlan told us he would go to the blood bank. He planned to get enough blood for both men, because Mark would possibly need the transfusion if he did indeed wake up. Loch also said that having human blood ready for when Diarmid woke would be better than having a ravenous vampire on the loose. The bodyguard Lochlan had staked with a pen had also been moved to a room to recover, and of course some of the blood would be for him, too.

As for the bodies of the four dead vampires, we took them out to the large fire pit that had been built in a corner of the back yard, piled them all up, and allowed Juliette to throw the match. The fire they made blazed tall and bright, and no doubt Diarmid’s neighbors would have questions about what we were burning back there.

After Lochlan had left to go to the blood bank, Juliette and I were alone in my father’s house. Because she still needed something to wear, I took her up to Evangeline’s room, and told her to take whatever she wanted. About the only good thing to come out of that horrible morning so far was the discovery that she and Evangeline were exactly the same size—so at least she didn’t have to spend the day wandering around wrapped in a blanket.

I left Juliette to her fishing from Evangeline’s closet and went down into the room where Mark had been placed. He was clean of the blood that had been spilled and his dignity had been restored by having his clothes put back in place (except for his shirt, which we never did locate). I lifted the edge of the blanket I had covered him with and crawled in beside him, laying my head on his shoulder and my arm across his cooling chest.

“Don’t leave me,” I whispered as I began to cry again. “You probably can’t hear me from wherever you are, but I’m talking to you anyway, and I’m begging you—don’t leave me, Mark. I love you and I need you. If you’re gone for good then you’ve taken a huge part of me with you, and I may as well die too, like the stories say. I can’t live in this world without you.

“Come back to me.
Please
come back to me.”

*****

For three days I laid by his side, day and night. I neither slept nor
ate,
no matter how many times Lochlan, Juliette, or Monica encouraged me to do so. I only took one transfusion of blood through an I.V., because I’d been shot, and I never got up except to use the bathroom. Then I was right back in the bed beside Mark.

At some point on the second day, Lochlan or Juliette had gone to my house and retrieved Moe and Cissy. I thought it was part of their attempts to lure me out of the bed, but it didn’t work. In fact, the Chihuahuas were content to
lay
in the bed beside me or down by my feet, wishing only to be near me. I found only small comfort in their presence, but I was still glad to have them close by.

I couldn’t bring myself to do anything other than lay there beside Mark’s still form, holding him and talking to him like I was trying to urge him out of a coma. I was grieving and desperate, and I didn’t want to let him go. His love had been a beacon in the night for me, and had shined all too briefly. He had not even been a part of my life for a week and already I had lost him. It wasn’t fair.

What had I done to deserve this? I wondered. Was it really so wrong of me to have wanted as normal a life as possible? Was it wrong for me to turn my back on my father for abandoning my mother when she had needed him the most? Could I have been more welcoming and caring toward Evangeline—had I done so, would she then have become so full of hate that she had concocted a plan meant to ruin me? What could I have said or done differently to prevent all of this?
Could
I have prevented any of it, or had it always been meant to happen this way?

Well, if it had, then it
sucked
, royally. Again I thought of the unfairness of it all, wondered at the injustice of introducing such love and happiness into my life, giving me a future with someone, something I could look forward to, only to rip it violently away just days later, right when I had begun to grow accustomed to his presence. I saw then how even the most devout person could question their faith in a God that would allow such devastation to occur. I did not want that, did not want what was left of my soul to be tarnished by anger.

But then what was the point? Why did it matter if I was angry? Perhaps God had rejected me because I was part vampire—maybe we were soulless beasts after all. Maybe my torment was my Hell, and I was damned to live this way for the rest of my life. It would be so much easier if I could just get it over with, if I could just die, right here next to the man I had loved with every fiber of my being in only a few short days. If I was dead, then I wouldn’t wonder, I wouldn’t be angry, I wouldn’t be afraid, I wouldn’t be in this horrible, body-numbing pain, with only my grief and six pounds of
canine to comfort me.

If I died, I knew my animals would be taken care of. I wasn’t worried about them at all. I could only think of how much pain I was in without Mark, and how much worse it would be if regeneration proved to be one of the stories that weren’t true. My grief was eating me up inside, and however much I wanted it to end, it seemed that I would not get my wish…that it would just go on and on, forever.

*****

I was startled awake by the sound of barking. Not even aware of having fallen asleep, I sat up and rubbed my eyes. It was dark in the room, either late at night or early in the morning. Moe and Cissy were on the bed with me, standing on Mark’s legs and barking at him.

It was then that I realized that I was feeling something different from him. Instead of the hollow emptiness I’d been feeling since the moment he had been stabbed, I now could feel a slight…well, buzzing is the only way I could think of to describe it. As I turned sharply to look down at Mark, I thought of a light bulb with its filament sparking, trying to come to life so that it could bring light to a room. Though I tried to quell it for fear of being disappointed, I felt hope ignite within me as I tentatively laid my hand on his chest, over the scar that now marred its perfect lines.

And then suddenly he took a loud, gasping breath.

“Mark!” I shouted, turning now so that I was kneeling beside him on the bed. I picked his hand up with my free one and held it over my heart, keeping the other over his as his heart began to beat, slowly at first and then steadily gaining rhythm. His breathing was shaky, but he was
breathing
, and feeling the movement of air through his lungs brought tears of joy to my eyes.

“Come on baby, open your eyes,” I encouraged him softly. “Look at me, Mark. It’s Saphrona, honey, I’m right here. I’ve been with you this whole time. Open your eyes and look at me, please!”

Slowly, painstakingly, his eyes opened, and he looked up at me with the faintest of smiles.

“Hey,” he
said,
his voice hoarse and weak. “I know you.”

“I know you, too,” I said with a laugh, then bent over to press my lips lightly to his.

“I had…the worst dream. At least…I think it was a dream,” Mark said. “I died, and you were begging me…to come back to you. And I was trying…but every time I got close…I would see this hand …coming at me with a knife in it.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m afraid it wasn’t entirely a dream. Evangeline stabbed you in the heart, and you died. I couldn’t feel your life force anymore.”

“What?”

I blinked, wiping away the tears that had fallen. “I don’t know how to describe it. I didn’t even know it until it was gone, that I could feel your life force through the bond. When you…when you died, I felt so empty, so alone. All I could think about was that if you didn’t come back to me, I was going to have to die too, so that I could be with you again. I thought God was punishing me for being part vampire—I thought so many
crazy things. And then, just now, I felt you coming back to life. I don’t know how, but I felt it. And now you’re here with me again, and oh, God, I love you!”