It falls to the ground with a clatter.

Blood is steadily leaking out of his wound, but Jaxon doesn’t seem to even notice. He’s too focused on Lia. Reaching over his shoulder, he grabs Lia by the collar and pulls her over his head and onto the ground at his feet.

I expect him to use his powers on her now, but instead he plunges his hand down, aiming straight at her chest. She rolls away at the last second, tries to kick him in the face. But he grabs onto her leg and twists it, fast and hard.

A sickening crunch fills the air, followed by Lia’s howls of pain. Jaxon grabs on to her hair, prepares to break her neck and put all of us out of our misery, but before he can do it, the black smoke circles his neck and starts to choke him.

He claws at his neck, tries to get it away from his throat, but it’s not letting go no matter how hard he wrestles with it.

Somehow, Lia is on her feet again. Her left leg is bent at an unnatural angle, but she’s standing, arms raised as she starts that horrible chanting again. The spell only seems to make the smoke stronger as it continues to strangle Jaxon.

He’s sheet white as he falls to his knees and tries to wrestle with something he can’t get an actual grip on. Blood continues to seep out of his chest wound, and I know if I don’t do something, Jaxon is going to die right in front of me.

I can’t let that happen.

I crawl forward, hands stretched out in front of me as I search for— My fingers come across the cold steel of Lia’s ceremonial knife, and I grab onto it with all of my waning strength.

It’s sharp and it cuts me, but I barely feel the pain as I push myself up off the floor. And swing the knife at Lia’s chest with every ounce of strength I have left in my body.

She’s wide open, her arms spread out to the sides, so I connect. The knife makes a sickening squishing sound as it sinks through skin and flesh to the organs below.

She doesn’t scream this time. Instead, she rears back with a strange gargle-gasp and falls straight backward onto the floor.

The horrifying rattle coming from her chest tells me I punctured a lung instead of her heart, but at this point I don’t actually care. As long as she’s out of commission, I’m good. Or I will be as soon as we figure out how to get the greasy black smoke off Jaxon, who honestly isn’t looking much better than Lia at the moment.

If he’s not strong enough to pry it off—with or without his telekinesis—I know I’ve got no shot. So I do the only thing I can think of, the only thing guaranteed to get the smoke to let him go.

I open my mouth and take a long, slow breath.

   62

Where There’s Smoke,

There’s a

Dead Vampire

It takes a few seconds, but the smoke—or whatever that thing is—finally catches on. It relinquishes its hold on Jaxon and arrows straight for me.

Which, gotta say, is probably the most terrifyingly awful thing that’s ever happened to me in my life.

But considering the alternative is standing around and watching another person I love die, there is no alternative. And so I open my arms and gather the smoke toward me. Once it’s surrounding me, I take a breath, start to suck it in.

“No!” Jaxon roars.

Suddenly, I’m falling backward, flying backward off the altar and halfway across the room while Jaxon stumbles to his feet. He’s nearly gray at this point, but he manages to stand tall as he holds his hands out in front of him. Then slowly, slowly—so slowly I think I may have a heart attack watching him—he starts to compress the air between his hands into a spherical shape.

As he does, the entire room—the entire tunnel—starts to shake. And then it starts to crumble around us.

And still, Jaxon doesn’t let up. Still, he continues to compress the sphere, his hands slowly rotating in a circle as he pulls more and more energy, more and more mass into the sphere.

The smoke flattens itself out, starts streaming in the other direction, but Jaxon is having none of it. He just starts pulling harder, until stones and candles and vases filled with blood start flying across the room toward him. He takes it all, pulls it all into the sphere and then reaches for more, until even the air in the room is streaming toward him in what looks and feels an awful lot like a tornado. And with the air comes the smoke, no matter how hard it struggles against Jaxon’s power.

It’s getting harder to breathe as Jaxon absorbs more and more of the oxygen in the room, but I don’t even care. I just drop to the floor the way they taught me in fire safety and try to breathe whatever’s left down here as I watch him draw the smoke inexorably closer to him. Closer and closer and closer.

Soon even Lia and I are caught up in the energy suck, getting dragged across the floor by Jaxon’s power and his indomitable will. I don’t try to fight it, don’t do anything that might possibly make this harder for him. Instead, I just give myself over to Jaxon and trust that somehow he will keep me safe, even from himself.

He always does.

He’s got the smoke in his grasp now, floating between his hands as he struggles to condense it, to break it down into whatever he needs it to be so that the vortex or whatever he’s got going on in there can absorb it.

But the smoke isn’t going down without a fight. Every time it looks like Jaxon might have it contained, a small stream escapes his hold and he has to start all over again. But Jaxon has a will of iron and more power than I even imagined possible inside of him. He won’t give up.

Instead, he spins the sphere between his palms faster and faster. The ceiling starts caving in, the walls fall to pieces, even the stones on the floor start to crumble. And still Jaxon doesn’t relinquish his hold. Still, he continues to pull.

The oxygen in the room is getting thinner, and I’m really struggling for breath now. He must be, too, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he continues to manipulate every single thing in the room.

The smoke struggles to escape one more time, but with a roar, Jaxon yanks it back inside the sphere once and for all. And then he just shuts it down, just turns off the conduit or the energy suck or whatever it is so that everything around us just settles.

The room stops shaking, the walls and ceiling and floor stop breaking apart, the remaining candles drop to the floor, and the oxygen slowly starts to stabilize. I settle back against the ground and just breathe for a few seconds, even as I watch Jaxon condense the sphere between his hands into a glowing orb only a little larger than a tennis ball.

And then he pulls his hand back and fires it straight at Lia.

It hits her in the stomach, and her whole body arches off the floor. She gives one last terrifying gasp as she absorbs the energy, the matter, the smoke. Then she looks straight at him and whispers, “Yes. Finally. Thank you.”