Incubus Moon (33 page)

Haemon laughed at this and twisted Mark around to face him. “Yes, I shall give this one what he has only dared fantasize about.”

Mark hawked a wad of spit at him.

The vampire thrust my friend’s face so hard against the iron bars that I heard what had to be bones cracking, and yet all I could do was kneel there on the cold, stone floor, incapable of making the monster stop hurting him.

In all the years we’d known each other, I’d never seen Mark truly frightened—until now.

“If not you,” Haemon said, shaking Mark violently, “perhaps the pretty woman?”

Mark’s pain and fear transformed to desperate fury. He shoved away from the bars, twisting in his captor’s grip and locking on to his face as though he would tear it from him.

Niko barely got Christie out of the way in time before Haemon jettisoned Mark’s body into him and the two men fell in a tangle of arms and legs and out of view.

Haemon lunged for Christie.

Shock must have caused her to go rigid, because she did nothing to free herself, except shift terrified eyes from the monster clutching her to me. It was only when he smiled at her that Christie’s paralysis shattered and she began to wail in terror, kicking and clawing to break free of his inhuman hold on her.

Mark scrambled to his feet again, but Haemon kicked him back down.

The vampire jerked Christie’s head back to expose her throat. “The incubus wishes you dead,” he told her in a confidential tone, delicately pushing errant strands of blonde hair out of her eyes. “Tragically, he longs to reclaim what you took from him so long ago. His mind whispers this to me even now.”

She went slack in his grip and let her head fall to the side to stare entreatingly back at me, a single tear coursing down her cheek. “Austin?”

I could feel my face darkening with rage, yet couldn’t shout to her this was an unconscionable lie.

“You see,” he whispered, leering over at me. “He cannot refute it.”

I fought to reclaim my voice, my neck corded with strained muscles, but failed. Couldn’t Christie see it in my eyes. Couldn’t she tell that Haemon was lying?

She offered me a quivering smile, and then her face went blank when she turned to face the monster holding her once more. “Burn in hell!”

Haemon raised his free hand above his head and held it in the air for an instant. “You first.”

He brought his long fingernails down across her throat to the thick, ripping sound of parting flesh. A scarlet torrent sprayed his face and clothing, as Christie’s body thrashed and jerked in his arms, and then grew slack, the look of shock only now beginning to fade from her eyes.

Mark wailed from the cell floor, his hand reaching up frantically to grab at his wife’s, but her blood-saturated limb made her flesh too slick to take hold of.

The vampire let Christie’s body drop like an uninteresting doll and turned to me, his alabaster face a crimson horror show. “This,” he said above Mark’s piteous sobs, “is only the beginning.”

CHAPTER 34

One minute I was at the mercy of a sadistic, murderous vampire. In the next, I found myself adrift in a womb-like bubble at the center of some twilight world.

I shifted within the pliant, crystalline membrane and glimpsed a brilliant spark on the horizon, which began to speed toward me now, swallowing the indigo dusk in its path and leaving in its wake a golden firmament that stretched as far as the eye could see.

The longer I stared into this light the more the horror of Christie’s death began to relinquish its debilitating grip on me. I could feel something else (anything!) other than soul-numbing grief. Even my rage at Haemon’s savagery was receding, along with the echoes of Mark’s sobs and my dread over what would befall him and Niko.

All the pain and uncertainty that had plagued my life over the past year was being lifted from me. In its place, an unexpected sense of calm settled over me.

In the midst of this extraordinary experience, a shimmering vortex materialized in the near distance. I watched its particles swirl and drift in my direction, swelling in number until, little by little, they coalesced to form the shape of a woman. The very same tall, regal, white-haired woman who’d visited me in dreams.

There was no visible delineation between sky and ground. Nevertheless she stood not ten feet away, barefoot and self-possessed, her long gossamer gown billowing out hypnotically behind her like a ghostly sail.

Taking a few steps closer, she paused, never once shifting her focus from my ethereal bubble bobbing and dipping on the ether.

That was when I felt a tiny shudder ripple beneath me and which soon expanded to encompass the entire sphere. She was testing the protective shell’s framework, its physical limits.

I wasn’t sure whether or not to be grateful to her. Given the way my life had been going as of late, maybe it was better to remain safely inside my protective bubble.

The woman’s expression hardened. “It is not I you should fear, but that which comes for you, my boy.”

I gave a bitter laugh. “Lady, you’re a couple of dead bodies too late to be reading me a warning label. The Big Bad already found me.”

Joy Ebersole and Christie Gold were irrefutable proof of that, and Mark and Niko were probably next. Yet here I was, floating around on my ass in some bizarre dreamland talking to a cryptic fairy godmother I had no reason to trust. What I really should be doing was figuring out a way back to the only two people I had left in the world, if they were even alive to go back to.

“Loyalty to humans should be of no concern to you.”

“Well it is,” I hit back. “Those people are everything to me.”

The woman rushed my cocoon, fixing on me from the other side of it, her conviction radiating physical heat in her violet gaze. “And your undoing.” Her words dripped with contempt. “You cannot possibly conceive of the evil that
still
comes for you.”

My once serene bubble began to vibrate again, only this time it emitted a dissonant buzzing that assaulted my eardrums. The strident sound appeared to be having a similar effect on the white-haired woman, as well.

She bit down on the pain and pressed her palms against the outer membrane surrounding me. “We haven’t much time left.”

I watched her eyes close, at which point she tilted her head skyward and began to recite what I took to be a silent prayer.

I mimicked the placement of her hands from my side of the crystalline shell, simply because my own body willed me to do so. She wasn’t controlling my actions, but rather I was reacting to something that the muscles in my body (not my brain) understood better than I did.

The instant I positioned my palms beneath hers, an intense jolt of energy leapt between us. It struck the membrane and penetrated its malleable crust, shooting, hot and electric, into my hands and down into my forearms. The white-haired woman above me was undergoing a similar phenomenon, but the resolve in her expression did not mirror the panic I could feel beginning to take root in my own. The bluish-white glow in my hands was beginning to burn like hell. Try as I might, I could not prize them away from the transparent casing.

Whatever she’d set into motion, it secured me to the wall of my ethereal cocoon and was beginning to cook me from the inside out! It was Dimitri’s yacht all over again!

Just when I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, the membrane between our palms gave way and the intense burning was replaced by the cooler contact of skin against skin.

The glowing light and intense pain vanished the moment we interlocked fingers and gave the other’s hand a reassuring squeeze. The whining buzz that had intensified to the roar of jet engines had also been silenced, as a series of extraordinary images flashed behind my eyes.

In them, I witnessed a monumental palace of gold, silver, and ivory marble etched by a jagged mountain range. Twelve beautiful females of diverse ethnicities, dressed in flowing white gowns and sharing the same long, platinum hair, stood holding hands in a semi-circle before an admiring throng of radiant men and women. Behind them sat a massive
stone altar draped in crimson velvet. On a raised dais above this was a double throne of precious metal and gemstones. A broad-shouldered man with raven hair who looked astonishingly like me perched on the edge of the smaller throne, his gaze alight with keen anticipation as he regarded the regal woman standing in front of the altar. The very same woman standing over me now.

“You see?” She gave a furtive glance over her shoulder and, returning her focus on me once more, intensified her grip on my hand. “You belong with us, my boy, with your own kind.”

“Who are you?” A swell of excitement rippled through me as I awaited her response.

She offered me a melancholy smile. “You already know the answer.”

From the night I’d first discovered adoption papers at the bottom of Laura’s jewelry case, struggled for months afterwards to uncover the smallest breadcrumb regarding who and what I really was, only to be met with failure and frustration at every turn, I’d dreamed and prayed this day would come. Here she was at long last, my birth mother, standing before me.

God, I had a thousand-and-one questions for her, but I also wanted to bask in this incredible moment, to savor every second of it.

“Come!” she said with greater urgency.

I looked up at her and shook my head, our hands still clasped together. “How?” The hole we’d made in the skin of the cocoon was in no way big enough for me to escape through.

“You must do the rest, my boy. Use your mind, it is all you need to—”

A bolt of lightning crackled overhead, sending tiny pinpoints of light to swirl around the outer edges of my vision. The intense, chromium flash had also charged the air around us, leaving behind an acrid odor and also caused the fine hairs on my body to stand on end.

“Do it now!” she commanded, but then jerked her hand away from mine and turned abruptly to search some remote spot on the horizon.

Another blinding flash of lightning rent the sky. The thunderous boom that followed shook our environs and the once vibrant horizon sped toward us at dizzying speed, devouring all the light in its path.

I stood up within my cocoon and didn’t need to be told what was coming. I knew the thing driving that terrible darkness.

In my mind, I saw myself standing once more at the precipice of that ancient gash in the earth. It was calling to me, wooing me to take that last step and plunge into eternal darkness.

The white-haired woman brought fists down onto the energy field still encasing me in a desperate attempt to breach it, but failed. Her violet eyes searched mine, her hands still balled tightly above me. “Spurn her, my son, for she will bring only death and destruction.”

She?

The cocoon tightened around me, suffocating me. I was gasping for air that was simply no longer there. Despite the rising panic taking hold of me, I forced myself to do exactly what the woman had instructed me to do and used my mind to envision the shield collapsing. I held onto that thought with literally my last breath, until I felt the shell begin to hum again, then fracture, before shattering with such violence that the white-haired woman was knocked backwards into the air and hurled several yards away, where she crumpled to the ground, unmoving.

Why I was unharmed I didn’t know or care. All that mattered in that moment was whether or not she was alive or dead. She was my mother, the key to unlocking the mystery of who and what I really was. I couldn’t lose her now.

“And yet there is so much you do not comprehend,” a dark voice boomed.

An insidious shudder ricocheted through me, insinuating its icy touch into every muscle and bone, every artery and vein in my body,
as I whipped around in a futile attempt to search out the owner of that terrifying voice from with the increasing darkness.

“Austin?” the white-haired woman moaned.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding and sprinted to her aide. Halfway there, her body started to twitch, then rose sharply into the air.

She hung suspended by some invisible force, her mouth slack with stunned disbelief, her violet eyes glassy and unfocused as she tried to choke out something through quivering lips.

In horror, I watched her stiffen in agony as a fist exploded through her chest in a shower of crimson gore and fractured bone. She blinked down at the blood-drenched fist protruding between her breasts, at me with a mixture of shock and regret, and then opened her mouth to scream, but a cyclone of obsidian air descended on her to swallow the sound.

I rushed forward to grasp the hand she held out to me, but instead of being sucked up into the emergent twister, I was blown backwards and away from it in time to see her garments shredded by the black, crystalline particles of spiraling air.

Helpless to stop what was happening, I lay sprawled on the ground while her gown disintegrated around her, followed by the rest of her form. My mother was lost to me forever.

As the windstorm subsided, the temperature plummeted. With it arose the cloying scent of rotting citrus. I remembered that smell. Knew what it heralded.

The
Queen of the Damned
.

An amorphous shape materialized in the exact spot where my mother had been consumed. I shivered in the freezing air, my legs crooked, my hands and arms bracing me from behind and ready to push me up to a standing position at the least provocation, as the evil form glided ever-closer toward me from within a dense mist. Through it,
similar to that long ago night in my bedroom, I caught fleeting glimpses of an ivory arm, a bare shoulder, or hint of leg.

“Mourn not Shayla’s loss, my child,” the very same dark, glittering female voice said, “for you have but one true mother, and I am she…”

CHAPTER 35

I shot to my feet, ready to fight the insidious creature lurking within the cold, roiling mist.

Instead, I found myself face-to-face with an exotic beauty whose olive complexion and glossy dark hair, swept up and away from her face to fall in gentle waves over her shoulders, only added to her captivating good looks. The woman’s ivory silk blouse, tapered slacks and high heel boots were right off a Paris runway. She was female beauty personified.