Incubus Moon (41 page)

“Niko!” I cried out.

Instead of driving the blade into my lover’s throat, Haemon twisted it at the last instant and plunged it sideways into Mark Gold’s heart, whose shriek of agony rivaled the deafening peals from the ever-increasing gonging bell.

Mark’s lips formed a perfect “O” as blood spewed from his mouth to spray across Niko’s face and bare torso.

Haemon faced him now, driving the handle and his entire fist into and through Mark’s chest, until the ruby blade exited his back in an explosion of gore and chromium light.

Within seconds, the man I’d known since the age of fifteen, the man who’d chosen to become a killer, was gone forever.

Kassandra let loose a blood-curdling scream, though not over Mark’s dramatic death. The guards flanking her had taken her by surprise. Ripping away her robe to expose her pale, olive nakedness to the frigid night air, the Slavic brothers restrained her while the two vampires flanking the space Mark had once occupied rushed to recover the heavy chains used on Niko, and then descended on her like hungry wolves.

“
Perdonami
!” Kassandra’s eyes widened in terror, her breasts quivering as she struggled.

“You expect mercy in exchange for betrayal?” he raged over the tolling bell, all semblance of sanity erased, the bloody dagger still smoldering in his fist. “Do it!” he commanded his men.

Kassandra’s pleas turned to agonized wails when her vampire captors bound her naked body with the same silver chain that had been used on Niko. Wherever it touched her the metal instantly ate away her flesh and muscle, sinking deeper to adhere to the bone below.

The vampires guarding me moved to join their brethren. The one who’d driven his staff into my gut removed an object from his pocket, which I couldn’t see from my position. Whatever he was holding,
Kassandra’s terror multiplied. She was shaking her head violently, her long, dark hair flying wildly about the scarred side of her face.

When the guard stepped back, she was convulsing and choking on the silver gag-ball he’d forced into her mouth. A mesh strap attached to it had been secured around the back of her head and allowed for no slack. It muffled her piteous screams, but blood and bits of raw flesh spewed from the corners of her lips in futile attempts to spit out the scorching orb.

“Master,” one of the guards called out to Haemon. “The moon!”

The black sphere, with its electric blue aura, had reached its zenith in the nighttime sky, just as the bell gave a final, thunderous peal.

In its wake, an icy wind swept the temple, extinguishing the fires in every brazier. This should have cast the interior into complete darkness, except that a phantom glow began to emanate from the wall-embedded crystals.

The buffets of biting air somehow failed to penetrate the freezing mist rising and coalescing into a luminous, cloudlike mass that snaked up and around my ankles. It pressed in on Haemon and me, climbing now to our knees before stopping to hover at our waists.

Niko managed to scramble to his feet, his wrists still bound together. The cold, vaporous mantle swelled to engulf the altar, but then abruptly retreated to just below the rim of the granite slab, pulling back rapidly only to slam into the base of the altar again in the same way that storm waves crashed against a breakwater.

Haemon simply stood there, indifferent.

In the face of an otherworldly event, when the power for which he’d thirsted for millennia was almost his, the screams of a tortured companion and fear and awe that it inspired in his vampire guards meant little or nothing to him

In a blur of crimson and flashing silver, he rushed me.

“Now, child!” the
Dark Mother’s
voice commanded.

Fragments of iron links whirred past me from my shattering restraints, and not a second too soon. I blocked Haemon’s arm in time to keep him from driving the jewel blade into my chest. I fought against him with truly awesome strength. But it wasn’t enough.

Haemon had been immortal for more than two thousand years, with the added advantage of being fueled by pure madness. That flicker of doubt in me was all he needed to sink the tip of that ruby dagger into the flesh above my heart, from which a fount of blood pooled up and around the wound. It ran in a thin line down my chest and onto my stomach.

In that same instant, something shifted inside me. Or more precisely, two elements collided and merged; the terrifying power of the moon coupled with my own primal, supernatural instinct.

From this fusion, a furnace-like blast of heat detonated at my core, which I thrust out into the temple. The release generated a visible shockwave that didn’t so much radiate outwards as it sought the cluster of guards surrounding Kassandra. It struck each one of them, flinging them backwards and into the air away from her, as she slipped beneath the turbulent, phosphorescent mass, casting long, misty tentacles up to seize and envelope each of the stunned guards.

Suspended within their foggy prisons, high-pitched screams rose to form a dreadful chorus above the howling wind as, one by one, the vampires went up in explosions of brilliant copper light, until nothing was left of them.

One, however, stood untouched by my power.

Only moments ago, Haemon burned with the boundless conviction that all he desired was within his grasp. Now, he knew it was true. “I will have what is mine!”

He crushed his other hand around mine on the handle of the dagger and used all his might to sink the ruby blade deeper into my chest.

Niko shouted my name in the same instant that a jolt of burning pain zapped my power source and blood began to flow profusely from my larger wound.

Why had the
Dark Mother
brought me this far, only to see me die at the hands of a crazed vampire with a god complex?

Her laughter rose above the baying wind, as the weapon slipped in a little deeper, sucking even more of the formidable power out of me and into an exultant Haemon.

The temple gave a great shudder and groan, followed by a massive column of air that descended from the center of the moon and down through the oculus to form a funnel around us. The same sinister vortex that had obliterated Shayla in my false vision of her and now sealed Haemon and I within a freezing pillar of air whose whirling base spread out to connect with the undulating mist on the temple floor.

Haemon’s eyes filled with gleeful malice. “Time to die, incubus!”

Without hesitation, Niko leapt from the altar and into the tumultuous sea of fog. He thrashed against the thick mist and gale force wind, but it held him mired. “Austin!”

Haemon laughed and drove the length of the dagger into my heart.

The metal hilt bit into my flesh and muscle and I wailed in agony. A shooting, electric pain spiraled outward from deep within my chest, while the energy from the moon abandoned me in favor of its new victor.

I’d failed. Now I was going to die.

The twister swelled around us before drawing in on itself again. The air grew denser, colder, transforming into fine crystals of black ice that cut and abraded my skin and obliterated all view of the ancient temple and Niko still struggling in vain to reach me.

Pitiless Death was here to rob me of my one chance to kill the monster who would enslave the world. Death, who would now keep me
from ever again holding Niko, from feeling the warmth of his touch or the caress of his hair on my face as he kissed me.

There was something even more painful and devastating than facing Death in this forsaken place. The realization that I was leaving Niko alone and at the mercy of a psychotic fiend.

I gasped for air, as more energy poured out of me and into Haemon. The handle of the dagger snapped away from its jewel blade and clattered to our feet, where it was whisked up into the icy vortex. The cutting edge, still lodged in my heart, turned to liquid fire.

Haemon grinned broadly at the jagged ruby shard protruding from the gash in my chest, and then slammed his mouth against my throat. The monster would take everything from me; my incubus power, my very life, and every last drop of blood along with it.

Coiling powerful arms around me, he gorged himself on my life-force, sucking and biting and tearing at my flesh. As he did so, the intense pain and heat radiating around and within my heart began to liquefy the ruby blade. I could feel the crystal dissolving, merging with the delicate tissue and flooding the chambers of my heart, until it had permeated the organ, only to re-solidify and prevent the flow of blood from being siphoned out of my body.

“Vampire!” The
Dark Mother’s
voice filled the whirling column of air pressing in on us. “Did you truly believe the Power of the Incubus was yours to plunder?”

Haemon stopped sucking and started to gag. He tried frantically to pull away from my throat, but couldn’t. He was bound to me, his fangs deeply rooted in the flesh of my neck.

It was in that same instant that a tremendous rush of energy slammed back into me.

“Take him into you, child!” the
Dark Mother
hissed. “Do it now!”

Renewed strength suddenly imbued my hands and arms with movement, which I used to reach inside his crimson robe and entwine around
his smooth, marble-like torso. My fingers glided up along his ribcage and over the sculpted firmness his shoulders to his neck, the rich fabric of his robe parting for me, as I reached up for his bald, gleaming head.

Haemon’s arms fell limp at his sides, making it easier for me to push the robe over his naked shoulders. Sliding it down to his waist, the sleeves snagged in the crooks of his elbows. He sought to raise his arms to stop me, but the leading edge of the heavy fabric began flapping wildly in the cyclonic wind. He was paralyzed, arms locked, while I glided fingers and palms over the smooth, porcelain sides of his head, until my thumbs hooked under his jawbone. My hands locked onto his skull and I jerked his head and mouth away from my neck.

Haemon’s black eyes widened in dumbstruck disbelief and searched my own. He could see his own terror mirrored in my eyes—eyes that I knew were no longer sapphire blue, but a cold, sinister black. It was as if Haemon were seeing himself in me.

I offered him a thin smile. “Time to die, vampire.”

The vortex drew inward and caught the hem of Haemon’s robe. Instead of tearing him away into the tornado of sharp, whirling ice crystals shredded the garment, leaving Haemon bare-chested and trembling before me now, a mixture of panic and rage animating his expression.

I gazed up into the frightful countenance of that black moon and its pulsating blue corona one last time and I shouted, “
Mater Obscurum
.
EGO sum vestri imperator!
”

Haemon opened his mouth in a twisted grimace, but I clamped mine over it, swallowing his scream and the unimaginable stream of dark energy—vampire energy!—slamming into me.

Intense heat and cold warred inside me, coalescing into one terrifying yet glorious stream of inconceivable power.

“
Imperator Obscurum
!” The
Dark Mother
cried in response.

The raging storm of black ice began to subside, spiraling upwards through the oculus and out into the nighttime sky. No longer centered,
the moon was slowly transitioning away from the temple, its departure pushing back the chilling tide.

Once the wind, ice, and dense layer of fog further dissipated, the ancient temple gradually revealed itself once more. Niko stood in the same spot, his shock and relief patent, his wrists no longer fettered. Nothing else human or supernatural stirred. Kassandra and the vampire guards were no more. And although fire did not return to the copper braziers, the wall-embedded crystals continued to give off a faint glow, bathing the temple and its contents in what might as well have been sunlight for how well I could see through my new eyes—vampire eyes.

A sudden profusion of orange blossom and ancient power rippled through the temple.

I looked away from the cautious smile beginning to form on Niko’s face and into the amalgam of incredulity and defeat on Haemon’s. The amulet still hung around his neck, but soon became riddled with tiny fractures, before utterly disintegrating.

That talisman was the only means of return to our dimension.

The
Dark Mother’s
voice echoed softly over the domed ceiling. “Inconceivable power flowed through you this night. The amulet is nothing compared to what you have harnessed, to the power which resides within you now. You can do with it whatever your imagination holds. Whatever you desire…”

I looked into Haemon’s eyes once more. His hatred for me burned as bright as ever, but it was human loathing. Every cell in my body validated this, told me that the man I held in my grasp was just that, a man. The ritual had made Haemon mortal.

More satisfying still was that
he
knew this to be true.

I let go of him and Haemon collapsed to the floor, his breathing labored. He hadn’t taken a true breath in over twenty-four-hundred years.

When I left the lip of the stone circle that had been my prison, it was to go to Niko, who I gathered into my arms and just held. All the guilt, horror, and pain of the past week washed over and through me in one raw, emotional wave. The nightmare was finally over.

“Easy,” he half-laughed, half-winced. “You have the strength of two gods now.”

“No,” the
Dark Mother’s
voice spoke softly. “Of a
Dark General
.”

I unwound from our embrace to step back and take all of him in, to marvel at his strength and bravery. Beneath the cuts and bruises, the bite marks and swollen eye, he was still my beautiful Niko; the same smiling rascal who’d got me to scale a mountain.

We’d both survived the nightmare and triumphed over the monsters.

I pulled him into a gentle kiss, thrilling at the warmth of his skin, the press of his lips against mine—something I’d feared, only moments ago, would be lost to me forever.

“My
Dark General
,” she added. “Strong and fearless, and who shall do my bidding.”