Endless Night (18 page)

“Why? Tell me why? How? How in the fuck did you orchestrate that massacre?”

She smiled with bright red blood trickling down her lips from her cracked nose. “I see all. I am all. I want all.”

“Power? That’s it? Jesus, run for president for God
’s sake. What makes you think hooker blood will give you ‘all’?” I spat my words into her pretty little face while I clung to her tightly coiled hair.

“Specific, very specific
offerin’s,” her teeth were turning a lovely shade of red from her blood.

“Fuck you, cryptic bitch
.” I released one hand from her hair. Holding her tightly with the other hand, I reared back again and came down with a crack to her face. “I am so goddamned tired of you mother fuckers being so fucking cryptic!” I screamed into her face until I felt the tender skin in my throat scratch under the pressure. My fist came down on her bloody face again and again and again until her blood splashed across my face.

Hands wrapped around my waist and life became a series of slow motion events. Strong arms held me tight as they pulled my heavy body from atop the bloody mess of Madam Azelie. My hand let go and my body went a little limp. Tiny screams came from my bloody throat and I sp
at red from my mouth. I wanted to kill her. I wanted my strong fists to pummel her perfect face into the pavement. She was the reason I was in this mess. It was her. It was all her. It had always been her. Why? I had no fucking clue. How? Who the fuck knew. But I for damn sure wanted to know more. Mostly, I wanted to stop her. By any means necessary.

Cyrus cradled my body in his arms as he dragged my lifeless feet across the asphalt and toward the waiting car. The car, whose driver had never left his position at the wheel, was right where we’d left it in the drive. My eyes never left the lifeless body of the tiny witch woman. She lay sprawled on the cold pavement, bleeding from her pretty little face, and I wanted to go back for more. My body didn’t fight Cyrus; I knew in my subconscious I supposed, that I’d never win that fight, but in my head I was right back there with her, stomping her fucking murderous head into a pile of meat.

I watched her as Cyrus opened the car door and shoved me into it. He didn’t bother pushing me across the seat; he crawled right over the top of me and took the seat behind the driver. My eyes stayed focused on the bloody heap on the ground a few feet ahead of the car. Cyrus mumbled something to the driver, it sounded French maybe, and the car began rolling forward. We were leaving. Driving away to safety and leaving this bloody mess behind. The car crept forward and moved past the body.

Air filled my lungs and stayed there. As we passed the bloody mess on the pavement, her little hand lifted. Wiggling her tiny fingers, she waved at me as her white teeth flashed in a sardonic smile through a mask of blood.

I blinked my eyes hard and when I opened them again, we’d passed her and were on our way out of the driveway and onto the main street. I twisted and tried to look out the back window, but my attire didn’t allow that much movement. In a last glimpse through a minuscule look out the back window, Azelie was gone.

I am fucked.

Chapter Seventeen

My breaths were coming in ragged, half choked, spurts. All the rage and homicidal urges were ripped away the moment I watched that pretty bloody face smile through all that blood I’d left behind. If she was strong enough to torment me after a beating like that, she was certainly strong enough to come back with a vengeance, and beat the living shit out of me. If not worse. Shit, likely worse. She was, however, a murderess in her own right.

Like the Goddamned pot calling the kettle a murderous bitch, eh.

“Eh, he, eh, she…she fucking smiled at me,” I choked out in the general direction of Cyrus who was diligently checking every direction he could for further danger.

“You are an idiot, Dylan Hart.” His words actually hurt my feelings. It’s was rare I allowed that to happen, but it did. My defenses were down, I guessed.

“Well, fuck you too,” I sputtered as I forced my corseted body to twist and turn to see in every direction.

Fear was making its way up the back of my throat and threatening to burst from my lips in the form of vomit. Or maybe it was the corset.

I leaned forward and looked out the front window in an attempt to calm my heaving stomach. There were no traffic lights, or traffic for that matter, and I knew we had to be close to home. Or the temporary home I’d left my shit in for the weekend. The headlights shined along the white line in the center of the road and I focused on that for a minute or two.

Fifty feet ahead or so, I picked up the silhouette of what looked like a dead animal in the road. If the driver didn’t see it, we’d run it right over and spread the carnage even further. The car sped along and we grew closer to the image in our headlights. It was a body. It was a woman. Her naked chest obvious in the bright lights of the car. The driver watched straight ahead, as hired drivers tended to do, your business was rarely theirs, seeming to not see the figure in the road. We barreled down the lane as I watched his foot never lift from the pedal. He was going to plow right into the woman in the street. Less than ten feet from the body, I saw the inevitable. Atop a lovely set of shoulders lay a bloody stump where a head should have been.

I
thrusted my body through the center of the bucket seats and screamed, “You’re gonna hit her!” I pointed through the windshield directly at the headless body that lay flat along the darkened street. I was too late. The driver never had a chance to even try. We plowed right through what should have been thick meaty flesh without even a thud. Through the front window, light fog spewed up over the hood and reflected the light from the headlamps.

Dead bitches popping up everywhere. Mike had said eight, right? Eight mother fucking foggy dead girls to trip over? Fuck my life!

“Dylan!” Cyrus called from behind me.

“Miss, would you please take your seat. There is nothing in the road.” The driver remained so calm I wondered if he was on drugs.

My body flopped back into my seat and I felt a sob threaten to reveal itself. “What’s happening to me?” I asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

“Dylan, it’s time to go home,” Cyrus said without any precursor.

“What is happening?” I asked, feeling so weak, so suddenly, like someone had hit me with a tranquilizer dart. Not that I would know what that felt like.

“You are being cursed
.” His words hung in the air so thick, I thought perhaps I could reach out and touch them.

“That’s not true,” I argued, hardly able to open my eyes anymore. Tears were imminent
. I felt them, and my body was doing everything it could to prevent that. Soon, the anger would come back and stay for good until the threat was gone. It’s was a vicious cycle that had allowed me to live a mostly normal life, thus far.

“At this point, turning your back on her magic will do you no good.”

“She killed those girls, Cyrus. It was her,” a tear squeezed from my closed lids and trailed down my cheek.

“I know,” his hand touched along my face and stealthily wiped the tear away.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’ll inform Malcolm. But first, I am putting you on a plane back home. You are going to call Mike.” I scoffed and rolled my head toward him. “You are going to call Mike, you will need him, and you are going to tell him to pick you up at LAX and take you to his house. You will wait there until we get back.”

“Isn’t going home enough? The bitch can’t get me five hundred miles away.” Seemed legit.

“Just do it. Until now, Dylan Hart has done whatever Dylan Hart has wanted to do and it has put you into a position you may not get out of unharmed. Now, you will do what I tell you to do and maybe you’ll survive this mess. Until then, consider yourself cursed,” his hand gripped my arm as his words spewed through clenched teeth.

“And who in the fuck are you? I don’t see any shining armor lying around anywhere, so I doubt you’re here to rescue me.” My eyes were open now. Here came the anger. “I would’ve never gotten into this mess had it not been for that bitch in the first place. I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t know you. None of this shit would even exist to me if it weren’t for her murderous greed. Malcolm, Dominika, you, all of this vampire bullshit would not even be a thought in my head without
her
. That bitch. Now, now, I’m seeing headless things lying about. I’m flailing around on the floor bleeding to death from phantom wounds.” His eyes squinted. “Waking from dreams of bloody children and dying from your bite amongst shiny coffins in the basement.” Cyrus clenched his jaw and shifted his brows and I knew I’d struck a chord. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

“You’ve been hallucinating
.” He waved his hand through the air as if waving away my words.

“But how much of that was surrounded by truth?”
My chest heaved up and down with each eager breath that found its way passed my lips.

Seconds passed with no further response from Cyrus. The car was quickly approaching the macabre antebellum where we’d been staying. I stared at the man, clenched jaw, flared nostrils. He was hiding something.

My hand was perched atop the handle of the door when the car rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the house. I didn’t give Cyrus another second to react before I flung the door open and bolted up the walk. Stopping for a millisecond to open the iron gate, I ran as fast as my fat little legs could carry me. I ran up the walk, through the beautiful darkened landscape, and onto the shadowed porch. It’d never occurred to me that the door would be locked when I started running, but feet from the door it dawned on me it might be a problem. Not risking the chance of looking back, I stuck my hand out and grabbed hold of the brass knob. It turned freely and I swung it wide open.

My feet slid across the slick floor as I tried to gain traction through the entryway and toward the door below the stairs. I’d left the door open, but I didn’t care. In fact, it was the only light I had to show me the way. No one was home. They were all still back at the banquet hall enjoying their fancy dinner and
comradery. I, on the other hand, was running through the empty, dark house of the Primus of the House of Porte, in search of a basement full of caskets likely there to house the undead. Or, the supposedly undead.

I slid to a stop and slammed into the adjoining wall next to the door under the stairs. It was very obvious someone had gone a little overboard with the floor buffer. I had to see for myself.
During my weekend of the endless night, I had to know if there were coffins in that basement. It really didn’t do me any good, I knew. It didn’t change much. Only proved my dream was spot on. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream at all. Nothing changed unless it proved that all along, these harmless Sanguinarians had in fact been the real deal. Then, of course, that changed everything.

My shaking hand grasped the knob and turned it over in one smooth motion. I heard Cyrus calling from the walkway, still chasing after me I’d guess. I had no time to wait around and see. I took the stairs two at a time not caring if I ate shit and tumbled head first down the stone steps. At least I’d be at the end. I bounded down, toward the dim candle light that waited at the end. It was exactly as I’d dreamt it. I knew, just knew when I reached the end, around that wall, there would be rows of shiny, lacquered coffins. If there were coffins, if it was exactly as I’d dreamt it, what was to say it was a dream at all? What was to say that was the reality and I had woken at seven in the morning, only to be placed back in my room by my vampire suitor. My head played the scene over and over as I approached the end of the line. The moment of truth was upon me as my foot hit the bottom floor.

I stumbled and an arm wrapped itself around my waist and stopped me from tumbling forward to hands and knees. Before I could regain myself, the arm pulled me up and away from the bottom of the stairs. I leaned forward as far as I could trying to peer around the stone wall. At the edge of my vision, I caught a shimmer of shiny, lacquered wood gleaming in the candle light. I kicked my feet and fought against the arm that carried me away from my discovery and back up the steps into the house.

Faster than I’d made it down, I was back up and being tossed onto the slick wood floor. I slid on my butt a bit when I hit the floor with a thud. The front door was still open and allowed light to spill in and onto the face of Cyrus standing over me. He glared at me through his thick, fanned lashes
. In his period garb, I felt like I’d been carried back in time to an era where men controlled their women by force.

“What in the fuck are you doing? What are you hiding?” I asked from my spot on the floor. It was the second time I’d yelled at someone from sitting on the
ground and I was beginning to feel kind of stupid about it.

“What the fuck am
I
doing?” he asked in a huff and paced a bit before continuing. “Do you realize where you are? Do you have any clue what you’re getting into? What you’ve already been involved in? You are so ignorant to the world you live in.” He shook his head. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“What’s in that basement? A coffin? There’s a coffin down there. More than one
.” I was beginning to feel like Charlie Brewster.

“Do you not realize there are more pressing matters at hand here? Like the fact that there’s a very pissed off high priestess after you right now.” His fancy demeanor he liked to have in my presence disappeared and a jerky guy took its place.

“Stop skirting around the issue,” I pressed on.

“Ugh, get up. Go get what you need. You have five minutes, or the car leaves you here with me. And her,” he stopped moving, stopped breathing and stared at me until I thought he was going to crawl right inside. “Go. Now.”

Going against everything that made me up as a human being, I got up. I got up and ran up the stairs as fast as I could. I never even looked back at him. No matter how much I wanted to know the truth. No matter how badly my curiosity wanted to know everything it could. I knew that curiosity didn’t just kill cats. It also killed nosey little journalists who didn’t know when to get the fuck out of dodge.

I counted on Cyrus to make some kind of travel arrangements for me while I got my shit. Either that or he was going to let me sit alone at the airport and wait on standby until something opened up. I honestly didn’t care either way. I just wanted out. I wanted to go home.

I pulled my phone from my tiny clutch and plopped on the edge of the bed. I really didn’t want to call Mike. In fact, he was the last person I wanted to know about my predicament, but Cyrus was right, to an extent. Mike needed to be aware of the situation. He was hard at work on this case and the fucking perpetrator fell right into my lap. No matter how hard it was to believe. Sometimes the truth was stranger than fiction. Or so they said.

With an over-the-top sigh, I dialed Mike. The line rang on and on while I rehearsed what I’d say in my head. I’d tell him I was in trouble and he’d get all melodramatic and blame it all on me. I’d tell him how it wasn’t my fault and I he couldn’t keep me locked up in a bubble. He’d tell me how incorrigible I
was and remind me he’d told me it’d end badly. I’d tell him to get fucked and he’d do just that. Nothing would be resolved and I’d end up right back where I was sitting in that room all alone, only I’d be pissed off at one more person. Another sigh and his voicemail picked up. I listened to his spiel and left my condensed message after the tone. He hadn’t answered. No matter how much my outward bad-ass protested his assistance, on the inside I knew he was the only one I could really count on. Sometimes I wish I would’ve realized that sooner, or at least admitted to it. We had too many issues to ever be a thing again, but a piece of me missed him fiercely and wished I could take back all I’d done.

I shook my head and rid myself of those thoughts. Living in the past
got you nowhere but ass backwards, so I just didn’t do it. Leaving thoughts of Mike for another more appropriate venue, I stood and began the ridiculous dance of trying to remove my corset.

Buttons lined the front from the bust to my waist, this was how I’d put it on originally, but since Tatum had tightened my cinch it’d become nearly impossible to get enough leeway on a button to undo them. I tried to reach behind my back and tug at the string to loosen the lacings but I couldn’t even find the ends of the knot. One hand reached over my shoulder and the other up from the curve of my back, an attempt to come at it from both ends, but my fingers never found the looping tendrils of a silky bow. Grunts and groans escaped my throat as sweat began to bead around my hairline. I spun like a dog chasing its tail and knew I probably looked like a fucking idiot dancing around just trying to get undressed. How idiotic this all was, vampires and witches and corsets, oh my!