Incubus Moon (37 page)

CHAPTER 37

I descended through a shroud of cool mist.

On some conscious level I knew this was illusion. Magic. Soon I’d return to harsh reality awaiting me, like having left Niko and Mark behind with real-life monsters and Christie being gone from my life forever. It also meant a chance to finish what I’d started. Only this time, I’d make sure that the Vampire Haemon and his Immortal Bitch stayed good and dead.

“Austin?” The voice came from all around me.

I startled at the sight of a pale hand emerging from the shimmering fog. It reached out slowly to wrap icy fingers around my forearm.

I tried to pull away from it, but it tightened its grip. “Austin!”

As the swirling, silver mist thinned, I was left standing in Mark and Christie’s design studio in Los Angeles. The hand was gone and it was dark beyond the tall windows. Mark was in his office arguing with someone. It was Andrea, the pretty brunette from his housewarming party. She was in the same red party dress. The one she’d been wearing the night Dimitri Ravello murdered her. Except that this never happened. Or rather, I wasn’t experiencing an event from my own memory.

She shouted something back at him I couldn’t quite make out and he slapped her across the face. So hard that she stumbled and nearly fell. I’d never known Mark to hit a woman.

I sprinted toward them to keep him from striking her again. The moment I rushed through the open doorway and into his office,
however, I was back in my carriage house in the Hollywood Hills. A trail of clothing drew me from the living room and towards sounds of intimacy coming from my darkened bedroom.

When I peered inside, there were Mark and Andrea in my bed. He was rough-riding her, using her body for his own pleasure and uncaring that he was hurting her.

“Austin, you have to wake up!”

I turned away from the disturbing scene to find that I was once again in the dungeon beneath Haemon’s castle. Incapable of speech and metaphysically bound to the stone floor, I had to relive Haemon seizing Mark in a chokehold in the opposite cell. Christie was sobbing in the arms of a terrified Niko.

Christie
…

“It is power you seek,” I heard Haemon silently convey to him. “The pretty woman is your obstacle to that power.”

Another false memory. A perverse manipulation leading up to Christie Gold’s very real and gruesome death. I sure as hell did not want to relive this again. I couldn’t.

So I channeled all of my focus on Mark, on getting inside his head to help calm him, to make him stop struggling against a creature he had no hope of defeating. But his mind was a chaotic vacuum of emotion that refused me access. Fight as I might against the maddening spell of paralysis binding me to the cell floor, I failed to break free of it. There was nothing I could do for him. Nothing I could do for any of them.

Something snapped inside him in that instant and his mind was suddenly open to me. At first, his frenzied thoughts and emotions made it impossible to zero in on the source of the fracture. Then I spotted it. A dark rift in his psyche. Like a cancer it spread outward to infect and destroy everything in its path. Real darkness was consuming the man I had known and loved since middle school. It was consuming Mark’s soul!

“Do it!” he silently shouted to the vampire. “Take her!”

Air refused to flow into my lungs and I began to choke on the horror of what I’d just heard.

Someone grabbed hold of me then and began shaking me. “Wake the hell up!”

Mark Gold was squatting down next to me, his large, cold hands cradling the sides of my face. Dark half-moons discolored the sunken skin beneath his haunted gaze, his face ashen and covered in a light sweat. He looked strung out. Worse still, we were locked in the same cell together, his words, “Take her!” a nightmare echo ringing in my ears.

He tried to pull me into a hug, but I resisted. “What’s wrong, Buddy? You hurt?”

This was no manipulated vision, no matter how much I wished it were. This was horribly and heart wrenchingly real.

I twisted out of his grip and scooted away from him until my back connected with the dank wall at the rear of the cell. I sat bare-assed on that cold, filthy stone floor and stared back at a man I didn’t know anymore. “How could you?”

At first Mark didn’t say or do anything but stare back at me with what passed for genuine confusion. Then his expression brightened. “Oh,
that
. Jesus, if it hadn’t been for your freakin’ nuclear-reactor-in-meltdown-show upstairs, I don’t think I could have. How the fuck did you pull that off, anyway?”

Every inch of my naked body was coated in a sticky, soot-like layer from
having gone nuclear
, as he put it. I rubbed at my forearm to find healthy skin beneath it. That was about as far as my relief went. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“What then?” Mark stood up and folded arms across his chest. “’Cause it’s a little distracting trying to talk to your best bud when he’s got his naked on.”

He tossed something over to me that he’d retrieved from his rear jeans’ pocket. The small, seemingly innocuous, bundle landed at my feet.

I studied it before reaching forward to retrieve it, and then shook it out in front of me, ignoring the flurry of dust particles and the stale scent of the fabric. It was an old dress shirt.

It wasn’t the suspiciously convenient gesture that set off the alarm bells in my head, but the unsettling gaze Mark leveled at me. The tension ratcheted up between us, and those same alarm bells were now telling me not to take my eyes off of him for a second.

I pushed up to my feet as well, the muscles in my legs and back protesting the movement. I was stiff and sore all over, but I slipped on the musty shirt anyway. The arms, however, were too short and the shirttails not long enough to cover all of my nakedness. Taking it off, I used the sleeves to tie the shirt sideways around my waist, all the while keeping Mark in my line of sight.

He appeared to be taking in my predicament with perverse interest.

“You could at least try to show some fucking remorse,” I ultimately answered, unable to keep the heat out of my voice.

Mark shrugged “Ain’t gotta clue what you’re talkin’ about, Buddy.”

I should’ve sensed it right away. The weird, strung out vibe he’d been throwing off, the fact that all of his cuts and bruises were healed. Only vampire blood, and lots of it, could have restored a person this fast.

Mark offered up a chilling smile. “Oh, you meant
that other thing
.”

In the time it took me to blink, he was on me.

We tumbled to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs, while he gnashed razor-sharp fangs at me, trying to sink them into whatever flesh he could get his mouth around.

I drove an elbow up into the underside of his jaw. His head snapped back and against the wall of mortar and stones, but this was hardly a deterrent.

In one fluid movement, he shot to his feet again.

“Just like high school, eh, Buddy?” His mouth was smeared with blood from the wound he’d inflicted on my arm. “And you’re still as big a pussy as ever.”

“Not such a pussy that he didn’t see right through you.” Haemon stepped from the shadows, his contempt manifest.

Kassandra approached as well, but she wasn’t alone. Niko struggled against her, one eye so badly swollen that it had sealed shut. His neck was also bleeding from a vicious bite wound. He stared back at me with his good eye through a mixture of horror and relief.

Mark gave a hollow laugh. “Tell me, Buddy. Did the whole cock suckin’ thing happen when you turned into this…whatever it is you are, or did you always like it?”

“I dunno, Mark. Have you always been a wife murderer?”

Hard-boiled rage erupted behind his icy gaze and he made to lunge for me, but Haemon’s arm shot through the iron bars of the cell and jerked him backwards by the hair. The metal gave a deep groan of protest. “Enough!” he commanded.

Mark shook off his grip and turned on his maker. For one glorious instant I thought,
Do it. Let them fight and slaughter each other
.

It looked as though I was about to get my wish, because Haemon unlocked the cell door and darted through it, stalking up to within inches of Mark.

Despite his standing half a foot taller than the elder vampire, the man who I thought had once loved me, the man who’d never shied away from a fight in his life, who’d sacrificed his own wife to become a fucking bloodsucker, astonished me by backing down.

Then I caught a fleeting exchange between Mark and Kassandra that forced me to reconsider who Mark’s actual maker was.

If I were Haemon, I’d watch my immortal back around those two.

Kassandra followed Haemon inside, dragging Niko into the cell along with her. She moved to stand next to her consort and, with her free hand, held out a book to him.

It was the same book Shayla had dropped during the cave in at the sanctuary.

Haemon grinned as he took it from her and caressed the old leather facing.

“We recovered it from the rubble of my brother’s lair,” she said with a slight toss of her come-hither, screen siren hair that dipped over the left side of her face. When she looked over at me her expression soured, “And we couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Yes,” Haemon added with mock appreciation. “That impressionable young mind of yours led us right to my old friend’s island hideaway. Thank you for that.”

It was impossible to give a damn about some old book when all I cared about was getting Niko away from Super Bitch.

Then again, it was three powerful supes, and who knew how many bodyguards lurking, against just me. But that was the thing about total desperation. It made you foolish enough to risk playing the odds.

A flicker of clarity crossed Niko’s face. I think he knew what I was about to do.

I sprinted toward him, but Haemon thrust a hand in my direction, palm open. I stopped in my tracks, rooted. He squeezed his hand into a tight fist and I began to choke. Then he made a thrusting motion, and I flew backwards into the rear of the cell, where the stone wall blocked my body’s trajectory. My spine convulsed around spasms of electric-hot pain and tiny pinpoints of light danced at the edges of my vision, as I slid down to the base of the wall.

I couldn’t feel my legs anymore.

Fuck
.

CHAPTER 38

Paralyzed by the shooting pain along my spine and the complete absence of feeling in my legs and feet, an eerie stillness began to settle over me. With it arose the faint trace of rotting citrus. I’d never forget that scent. It heralded the arrival of the presence that had visited me that long ago day at Psychic Joy’s, the one who’d conjured up an image of Shayla’s death.

The
Dark Woman
had come among us.

Did the others sense her nearness, feel her icy touch? I wanted to lift my head, check for their reactions, but couldn’t move.

The scent intensified and the floor beneath me grew colder. There was no breeze, no discernible explanation for the abnormal drop in temperature that seemed to shift and expand with conscious intent, as if the cold was a sentient being. It rose up to envelop me, seeping into my skin and numbing the sharp pain along my damaged spine. As it further penetrated into my organs and bones, I made a feeble attempt to call out, but gagged on the putrid air.

When Haemon, Kassandra, and Mark all stepped into view, icy tendrils were snaking their way along my spinal column, taking root in the vertebrae and nerve-endings, before shooting into my legs. Gazing up past the trio of vampires to the ceiling of my cell, I watched a layer of frost form on the soot- and water-stained stones above their heads in a shape that corresponded to my position on the floor. Why hadn’t any of them noticed it?

“Put the boy with him,” Haemon instructed.

“As you wish,” Kassandra said. She shoved Niko so hard that he fell on top of my chest, making me cry out in pain from the added weight crushing my spine.

Soon, more vampires came into view. The two henchmen who’d escorted me to Haemon’s bedchamber stepped up to stand on either side of him now, along with four others I’d seen in the foyer of the castle who stepped up behind Mark and Kassandra.

Mark
. There wasn’t a hint of remorse or compassion in his expression for me, for my predicament. I meant nothing to him. Not when inconceivable power, I knew he believed, would soon be his. Christie and I were certainly proof of his lack of attachment to anything deeper.

Kassandra’s expression hardened as she looked down at me. Her hatred of me was palpable. She could not wait to see me die.

When it looked to me as though she might act on her rage, a surge of frigid air swept over us, and I silently bade Niko to lie still, to say or do nothing to provoke the vampires.

He nodded faintly to let me know that he’d understood.

“Mourn not the betrayal of a weak, human mind,” a voice whispered inside my head. The
Dark Woman
was speaking to me; her voice a relic that belonged to that terrible dream place, to that ancient gash in the earth. “His treachery shall soon be rewarded.”

And with her ominous declaration, the cloying stench of the grave grew unbearable. I could feel it uniting with the cold taking root inside me.

“I summon She who guides the way,” Haemon recited above me, extending his hands to Kassandra and Mark, who’d moved in to form a modest circle around Niko and me.

“Dream Mother,” Kassandra spoke. “We implore you.”

Was that laughter from the shadows?

“Grant us passage to the world beyond,” Mark recited stiffly.

Several of the new vampires, all of whom were male, bore waxy scars on their bowed faces. Their unease, as they waited for the trio’s invocation to resume, was palpable.

“Part the Gates of Shadow,” Haemon implored, removing the amulet from around his neck and dangling it by its chain with outstretched hands above us, “and grant all here safe passage.”

Two things happened next. The frigid cell floor began to vibrate and the talisman sparked to life. The tarnished metal glowed deep amber, as brighter etchings appeared in the form of glyphs at its outer edges that hadn’t been there moments before. The green gemstone at its center, I noticed, was absent. More significantly, the paralysis and searing pain from my injury were rapidly diminishing, allowing me to raise my head in time to see a shimmering halo with a dark void at its center begin to expand outward from the amulet.