I hoped he’d listen. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t.
His hand beckoned me forward. I felt myself zoom up until I faced him. Thankfully, he’d decided to listen this time.
“What do you seek from me?” he asked.
I’d long since ceased being afraid of him, but I’d never felt comfortable with him. Whatever name religions gave him, the Warden of the Gateway to the Netherworld was not a relaxing figure. “I need an hour to pass in my world, but no more than two, before you return me to the ones I marked with my blood.”
He didn’t smile. That would be too human a reaction, but the faintest flicker in his expression made me wonder if I’d amused him. “Do you?”
I’d once begged him for something he didn’t give me, so I didn’t know what my odds were with this request. Unlike the other one, this was small, and hopefully, he was in a generous mood. “Please,” I said. “This is very important.”
He extended a hand and a small, narrow vessel appeared on the river. “You know the cost of a bargain with me and what you forfeit if you fail.”
“Oh, I’ll fill your boat,” I said with grim purpose.
Without another word, I was zooming backward and the Warden, the river, and everything else faded from my sight. Then brightness exploded in my vision and I saw the tops of buildings as if I were falling from a great height. I instinctively braced, but I didn’t have a body, so I felt no impact when I hit one of them.
I went through several floors, everything blurring, before I found myself looking down on an underground parking garage. Ian was there, and he looked far more worse for wear than when I’d last seen him. He had multiple silver harpoons protruding from him that were secured by chains. No fewer than a dozen vampire guards held the other ends of those chains. The tips of the harpoons must have been hooks, because every time Ian moved, they ripped open large pieces of his flesh.
The Simargl was there, too, chained inside a metal cage. The Nordic vampire stood next to the cage. From the way he kept checking his watch, he was expecting company soon. Time to crash this party.
I aimed for Ian’s shoulder that I’d marked with my blood and everything went black. Before I could see again, I caught snatches of conversation.
“Where’d all those ashes come from?”
“They’re pouring out of his shoulder! Look!”
“Now something’s moving in them.”
“It’s big. It’s coming up out of the ashes. What is it?”
“Holy shit, it—it looks like a woman!”
I brushed my silvery gold-and-blue hair out of my eyes, my gaze finding Ian. For a split second, I saw him through the otherness in me instead of my vampire nature. Lights burst from him, hallmarks of the integrity and inner nobility I already knew he had. But darkness also swirled around those lights, and it wasn’t only from his brands. Ian had had inner demons long before he made his deal with Dagon.
At that same moment, Ian looked at me. Recognition lit his face, making me glad I’d showed him this appearance before. I’d half expected him to be frightened when he realized I was the creature forming from the ashes near his feet. His captors certainly screamed as if gripped by terror. But elation washed over Ian’s expression. Then he bent to yank me into his arms despite the harpoons tearing bigger holes into his flesh.
A spray of his blood hit me. Rage took over. They had hurt him. They had hurt him and he’d let them because I’d told him to go with them. Now, I would avenge every single drop of his blood. I let my hands grip his for the briefest moment. Then, naked except for the ashes clinging to me, I launched myself at Ian’s captors.
The good thing about having my former body explode is that it cured me of my hangover. This new body wasn’t exhausted or filled with chemicals. That meant I was at full magical and physical capacity. I unleashed my powers like a fireworks finale on the Fourth of July. Truth be told, I might have been showing off a little. Ian had really impressed me with his fighting skills. Now, I was showing him what I could do.
When I was finished, nothing in the garage moved except me, Ian and the Simargl, who was doing circles in his cage in excitement. “Missed you too,” I told him, making a mental note to give the Simargl a name as soon as possible.
I pulled a coat off one of the dead guards. The coat was bloodstained, but it was black, so the blood didn’t show as much on it. It would have to do until I could get some real clothes. I shook the worst of the gore off it before I put it on. Then I pushed my hair back, wishing I had a clip or hair tie. The long tricolored mass always seemed to swirl around my shoulders as if blown by a hidden breeze when it was down.
Finally, I used magic to blunt the forked edges of the harpoons embedded in Ian so I could remove them without taking out more hunks of his flesh. When they were all out, Ian stared at the dismembered remains of the bodies, at the wreckage done to several cars in the garage, and then, finally, at me.
His former elation was gone. Now, the full weight of everything that had happened was in his gaze.
“I told you I’d see you again,” I said in a feeble attempt to lighten the tenseness of the situation.
“That you did.” He let out a short laugh. “And then you exploded all over me.”
A weird sense of shyness overtook me. Then again, I had exposed myself in the most extreme way possible by doing that, so perhaps it wasn’t so weird. Still, I tried to deflect. “It looked worse than it was. You saw your shape-shifter friend temporarily die when she let herself get decapitated by the council’s executioner—”
“Stop,” he said shortly. “No more lies, half-truths, or omissions. At first, I thought you were a demon-possessed vampire because you could do magic by your will alone, something no vampire can do. Then I tasted your blood and thought you were demon-branded, like me. Thought it was Dagon who’d branded you and that’s why you wanted him dead, but now . . . I have no idea what you are. You’re right; I’ve seen demon-branded people ‘die’ before. They don’t spontaneously catch fire and explode. They also don’t rise from a pile of ashes that somehow poured from the same spot where you marked me, and their eyes don’t glow silver like yours did, so for the last time, what are you?”
I found myself wishing I was still drunk. It would be so much easier to admit to this next part if I had chemicals numbing my nervousness. “You know about the vampire half. The other half . . .” I gave a hapless shrug. “Depending on the culture or beliefs, there are different names. Demigod. Nephilim. Phoenix. Titan. Hellspawn—”
“Was one of your parents an angel, a demon, or a god?” he interrupted.
Only Tenoch had ever known the truth about me, and he’d exhorted me countless times to tell no one. All those long-ago warnings rang in my head as I said, “I once asked my father what he was because I couldn’t figure it out. He never answered me, and he’s not the type you press. You’ll see what I mean.”
His gaze narrowed. “What do you mean, I’ll see?”
My swipe encompassed the corpses strewn around the garage. “I couldn’t come to you immediately or you’d still be at the hotel with too many innocent people close by. I also couldn’t wait too long or they would’ve delivered you to Dagon. For that kind of precision, I had to make a suitably large offering. My father will be here soon to collect it.”