John came back to himself slowly, while his brain fought to separate past from present. It wasn’t easy. He could feel the memories tugging at him, and for once, he wanted to stay with them, to relive again the moment when she’d finally turned to face him, her expression surprised and relieved and then, for some reason, chagrined.
Until she’d gotten to her knees, taken his face between her hands, and told him the last words he’d ever expected to hear: “My name is Cassie Palmer, and I love you.”
The demon council had wanted him dead, with no way back to torment them, and so had used one of the biggest weapons in their arsenal.
They just hadn’t realized: he had a bigger one.
He could see it all again, so perfectly: the ancient god, forcing his way through a tear in the sky, countless stories tall, a giant the color of blood and framed in fire. It had seemed like the end of the world, but when Cassie stole his breath in a kiss, when his arms wrapped automatically around her, when their bodies met and melded and a new kind of fire caught between them, he had felt an answering power of a completely different kind.
He’d always hated his demon heritage, but in that moment, he’d been glad, exultant even, that his father was prince of the incubi, and that he held within his veins the ability to multiply magical energy through passionate union. And passionate it had been.
And searing and frightening, because he’d never done this before, never had the kind of relations that demons called sex. Not the mere meeting of bodies as the humans did, but the fusing of souls, of lives, of power, so much, so hot, so overwhelming, that every time the feedback loop came back around, and energy poured out of her into him, he was sure it would be the last time, that it would rip him apart.
Yet, every time, his incubus took all she could give, exulting in it, feeding from it, and magnifying it, many times over, before sending it back. Until finally it was too much, until his blood had felt like lava and his hair had literally smoked, until he knew they were both about to come apart at the seams because no one could contain this. He’d sent it back, one last time, and watched, exhausted and confused, still thrumming with the power his demon had fed from, and had still not made a dent in what Cassie took.
And used to rip open the skies, to tear apart the pathways between worlds and to bring another old god into the fight.
John had stared in awe as two ancient beings clashed in the skies above him, and almost felt like he could join them. He still did, weeks later. Power thrummed in his veins, tingled his fingertips, snapped behind his eyes.
Which suddenly flew open as the realization hit: that was where all the extra power he’d been using had come from. The left-over energy from the vast amount that had been used to kill a god. The energy that he and a demigod had made together.
He threw back his head and laughed, laughed in spite of it all, laughed at fate, which never ceased to play with him, but for once had smiled on him, too.
Like Cassie, who had saved him again, and didn’t even know it.
And then something gave way beneath him, and he fell three stories with a rope wrapped around his leg, suspended from what looked like a trash heap laid across the space between a couple of closely packed buildings. And ended up swinging back and forth in front of the biggest goddamned vampire he’d ever seen. For a moment, John just stared, the laughter dying in his throat, because the creature had to be seven feet tall and was built like a tank.
He hit like one, too.
But weirdly enough, it didn’t look like he’d planned to. He started to say something, then shot a glance over his shoulder, where the sound of running feet were coming down the small alley. Then he sighed and turned back around.
Sorry, he mouthed, making John blink.
And then the world exploded, along with what felt like John’s head, and he knew no more.
Chapter Eight
S creaming and drums.
Screaming and drums.
Screaming and drums, drums, drums.
It was the first coherent thought John had, as he swam back to consciousness, with the second being the realization that he was bouncing against a gigantic spread of flesh and muscle that he assumed was someone’s back. John was no lightweight, being between a hundred and seventy and a hundred and eighty pounds in his underwear, depending on how hard he’d been hitting the gym of late. Yet he’d been thrown over a massive shoulder and was being carried about as easily as a child.
Vampires, he thought, slowly coming back to his senses.
As soon as he was able, he cast a silent spell to glamour his eyelids, allowing them to look closed while he gazed around. It was a simple enchantment, but it shouldn’t have worked. The magic itself was minimal and might have gone undetected, but John’s breathing and heartrate had sped up, and there were probably other signs detectable to a vampire that he was awake. Yet, if he noticed, the creature carrying him gave no sign.
Or perhaps he did, for who could tell in here?
It sounded like they’d just entered the seventh circle of hell.
Instead, it appeared to be a ramshackle wooden building the size of a warehouse or large barn. It was poorly made, with numerous gaps between the roughhewn planks that formed the walls, and appeared to date back centuries. But the story wasn’t the building, but what it contained, which looked like every damned vampire in the city.
All of whom were yelling their heads off.
John couldn’t see them very well since there was no artificial lighting. Merely lines of greenish gray storm light from outside leaking in through the gaps in the walls and striping the scene. But he had a hazy impression of a wooden dais at the far end of the room, set four or five feet off the floor, and crowded with people. There were even more people hanging off multi-tiered seating on either side of a large open space covered with sawdust, which reminded him of the bleachers he’d torched back in Vegas.
He fervently wished he could summon some of that fire now. But he didn’t have the strength, having given his all back in the alley. Not to mention that this many vampires—because ninety percent of the room appeared to have fangs—could drain him in an instant, even through shields he wasn’t sure he could raise anyway. It didn’t help that it felt like his skull had been cracked open, to the point that he wondered if the wetness leaking down the side of his face was brain fluid.
Something splattered darkly on the floor beneath him.
No, only blood.
John couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or not.
Before he could figure it out, he was dumped onto some old wooden boards that had been used to patch an even older stone floor. He was outside of the big open area, if only just, near a collection of barred metal cages almost as tall as a man but too small to hold the number of war mages who had been crammed into them. Far too small.
For a moment, John felt his heart stop.
But there were tell-tale signs of movement here and there—the flutter of fingers, the rise and fall of a chest, the twitch of an eyelid—so they weren’t all dead. But they were close. One of the men’s faces was pressed against the bars of the nearest cage, and he already looked like a corpse: pale lips, pale skin, and sunken eyes that spoke of dehydration, but not of the water variety.
Drained, John realized, or partly so, like all the rest. Leaving them alive but too weak to do anything about their condition, if they were even aware enough to know what it was. He expected the same thing to be his fate and braced for an attack, but nothing happened.