“Because I didn’t know he could. But we’ve prepared for this. This is the war we were expecting to fight. Nothing has changed.”
“No. No, we aren’t prepared to fight a war. I, for one, never got told we were facing down a man who could destroy an entire city with his mind. You never sent me that little note. And besides that, you know what else has changed? We could have stopped it, Al. We had a chance. And you fucked it up!” Eddie was frantic in his anger, his voice higher pitched than usual.
Maxine sank to the ground, sliding her back down the wainscoting. Her dress and the chain pooled around her feet. It was not the only chain she wore. The monster that had unleashed the chaos she felt burning in her mind was the same one who held her far less physical leash. The one that connected to her mind and her soul.
The one she had welcomed in. The one whose hand she had willingly taken. The one who she had allowed to woo her and win her. “This is my fault…” Her murmur, which she thought was too quiet for them to hear, broke through the argument the two men were waging. She shuddered, her body covered in a cold sweat.
“What, Maxine?” Eddie prompted her gently.
“Are you all right?” Bella asked.
No. No, she very much was not. The fear of all those in the city was consuming her, like a deer that had fallen to a wolf’s hungry teeth. It was drowning her, and she did not know if she could survive the tumultuous waves.
So many were dead or dying.
So much pain.
And it was all because of her.
She could have stopped this. She could have stopped him, if only she had been strong enough to try. She had held his soul in her hands. Instead of casting it into the void like she should have, she cradled it to her chest, selfish and self-centered in her need to be embraced for the first time in her life.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she did not care enough to wipe them away. All she knew was blood on her hands and beneath her nails. Sticky and hot. She could taste it. But there, mingled with the fear and the agony, was hunger. Joy. Need. Pleasure. “This is my fault,” she repeated numbly.
Lust for blood clashed with the pain of being torn to pieces. Prey and predator, victim and violence, and she felt both at once.
And I could have stopped this.
She was shivering. The city was dying, the city was feeding, and there were both teeth digging into her and the sensation of sinking fangs she did not own into supple flesh. She wanted to retch.
“No, no, Maxine…” Bella sank down close to her. The young huntress reached for her hands but stopped. She didn’t dare touch Maxine’s bare skin. And for that, Maxine was exceedingly grateful. Instead, Bella chose to place them on her knees over her dress. “You are not to blame.”
“But I am.” She curled her hands into fists and pulled them closer to herself, dragging the chain across the floor.
“No. Dracula has done this, not you. He has killed these people. He has attacked the city. You have done none of this.”
“But I…I could have tried. I could have attempted to stop him.” She looked up at the younger woman. Bella was so pretty—so full of life, so seemingly innocent. And her life was likely to end here in this war. None of them would survive this, she was certain. Alfonzo, Eddie, Bella, they would all die. All because of her selfishness. “I could have tried to destroy his soul.”
“What? How?” Alfonzo walked up to her.
“The same way I could destroy any of you, were you foolish enough to touch me.” She couldn’t meet Alfonzo’s gaze. She looked down for lack of anywhere safer. She needed the pain to stop. She needed the sound of the screams to go away. She ran her hands into her hair and gripped the strands in her fists, pulling them tight, trying to use that to give her something else to focus on.
“You can destroy his soul,” Eddie said through a heavy exhale. “Fuck.” Now he was the one pacing the room. “Oh, Hell, Maxine.”
“You can kill him.” Alfonzo was watching her keenly. Something close to madness glittered in his eyes. Something that scared her a great deal. “You can kill him for good.”
“I…” Maxine didn’t know what to say. She only knew that she wanted to crawl into a dark place and hide. Somewhere far, far away from the hunters, the vampires, and all the death that cried its warpath outside her door.
“Then I’m going to make sure you get that chance.” Alfonzo leaned down and picked up the chain that ran to her wrists. He wrapped it around his palm a few times. “I’m going to make sure you’re going to want to do it when you get there. Bella. Eddie. Get your things. We have a war to fight.”
“No, I—”
It didn’t matter what she said. The crusader had his goal. Alfonzo smiled down at her, and there was no friendship in his expression when he did. “We have a war we can finally end.”
Dracula stood upon the roof of his temporary home, still lost in thought. Now his new fortress, it was the city’s library. By the looks of things, it had recently opened. The paint smelled new, at least to him. But his senses were keener than most. Either way, this building was now his. It was his in the same fashion that all the rest of the city now belonged to him.
The reproduction gothic church that stood across from his home would have an amusing new use. He had plans for it already. What an odd and curious human behavior—to build new places in the fashion of the old. It was an attempt to cling to their past as though it were somehow better and grander than their future.
The past is only ever lesser. What may come is all that will ever give us hope.
He looked down at the corruption spreading through the streets and alleys of the young American city. He had unleashed his curse in full. He had become an unwelcome disease that had taken hold of the center of this little outpost of humanity.
“You are a plague upon your house. You will be a plague upon the world.” He remembered those words spoken to him so long ago, when he could feel the grit of sand in his teeth and taste unwelcome and bitter blood in his mouth. “You will be alone forever.”
He drove away the unwelcome memory with a growl. His beloved empath had dredged up several preserved corpses from the bottom of the bog in his mind. It was disconcerting.
A sign proclaimed this place “Copley Square.” He could not care less. The sign that once stood proudly in the center of the plaza beneath him was now twisted and bent by some terrible nightmare. And a nightmare had come, indeed. He watched his power spread, the shadow consuming all that it touched.
The sound of screams hung in the darkness of the never-ending night.
It made him smile.
This city had thought it understood fear when he had turned the moon to blood. Now it would know true pain. It would know true death.
It, like Maxine, would know what kind of demon he truly was.
“Master. Is this…is this truly wise?”
Ah, Walter. The vampire was a rare direct child of his blood, one of the few strong enough to withstand the kind of power his kiss brought. One of the few creatures with the mental capacity to handle immortality for longer than a few hundred years. Or so he hoped. Walter was also forever attempting to play the role of the conscience that Vlad had given up a long, long time ago.
“It is certainly not wise. It is anything but. Yet it will happen regardless. Where is Zadok?”