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Trenton tightened his lips in fury. As the invaders shifted, muttered, Danny looked toward Mason, saluted him with the right blade.
Then she was in motion.
Go into the house. As Danny charged and the shotgun roared its first report, Jess heard the uncompromising command in her mind. Mason sprang forward with the blond vampire, both faster than she could follow. The two crossbow holders fired, but Jessica saw instantly that the weapons were only effective if the vampire was immobile or caught unawares in the sights. Both arrows went wide, and in that blink of time, Mason and Danny were among them.
The first crossbow holder, the one who’d taken the shot at Jessica, was Silas, Trenton’s closest crony. He attempted to meet Mason’s charge and was knocked down like a sapling, Mason taking him to the stone tile. Her brain locked up, everything in her freezing as Mason plunged his fist through the chest cavity and came back with the heart, flinging it away and snapping Silas’s neck in almost the same motion. Springing up, he left him in his death throes to meet the rush of two more.
The crossbow of the second vampire skidded across the tiles as Danny knocked his arm up with her guard and then skewered him, bringing up her booted foot to shove him off her blade. She smoothly sidestepped as Dev’s knife sliced through the air above her shoulder and lodged in the throat of one of the human servants. By good fortune it was the servant of Mason’s next opponent. The vampire stumbled, gripped by the brief paralysis that afflicted younger vampires when their servants were killed. That moment sealed his fate, and another heart hit the tiles with a sickening splat.
Jessica screamed, startled out of her shock, when the seven from below scaled up the walls and joined the fight, but none paid any attention to Jessica. As Mason had accurately stated, they wanted the property more than they wanted Trenton’s vengeance. If they took him down, they got them both, and he was far more of a threat to them than a girl cowering against the railings.
Despite their greater experience, Danny and Mason were now vastly outnumbered. Jessica jerked herself out of her stupor. Seizing the abandoned crossbow, she scrambled away from the fight.
Mason, locked in combat with another vampire, caught the flash of a stake coming down and swung to the side, knocking his vampire opponent into the human servant who’d made the attempt. Dev was suddenly there, sweeping the man’s legs as he brought the butt of his shotgun down on the skull, crushing it and ducking aside as Danny swept by with her dual swords, a spinning, graceful dance Mason knew even Amara would have envied.
Mason yanked one of Dev’s stakes out of his improvised baldric as he passed, and jammed it into the chest cavity of his third victim. As he bent to yank it free, reuse it, an arrow whizzed over his head. He spun in time to see one of two vampires rushing his back fall to the ground, the arrow lodged in the heart cavity.
He ducked the rush of the second one, seized him about the waist and brought him down on his knee, breaking his spine like kindling. He flipped the stake and used it again, then sprang to his feet, back-tracking the path of the arrow.
Jessica had made it to the opening to the ballroom, but not to hide, as he’d ordered her. As he watched, she reloaded the crossbow with remarkable speed, but he wasn’t interested in her impressive weapons training or marksmanship.
Jessica, get under cover. Now.
Trenton had vanished, and Mason didn’t like not knowing where he was. Plus, while the vampires were focused on him, if she kept firing at them, they would decide she needed to be handled on her own merit. Damn it, Jessica—
As she shouldered it to take aim again, he swore. “They never listen.”
“Tell me about it,” Danny grunted, lunging past him. Her blade slashed, spraying them both with blood as she disemboweled the screaming vampire. Close behind them, he heard the report of one of Dev’s pistols.
Mason flung himself at two more coming at him, a vampire with a mallet, his human with a mace. When he knocked the mallet loose, he caught the mace’s chain, swinging the servant toward the ballroom. Jessica’s next arrow went through his back, so Mason could spin around and crack the vampire’s neck.
Danny and Dev had been fighting in a rotating, loose back-to-back triangle with him, so Danny finished off the vamp with a decapitation strike. Mason pivoted around, seeking Jessica again. In that moment, everything slowed and stopped, for he found Trenton. And Trenton found Jessica.
The vampire leaped from the recesses of the ballroom when her head was down to reload. She cried out when he seized her about the waist, knocked the bow from her hands and threw her up against the outside wall with bone-crushing force.
If rage alone could have killed Trenton, he would have been dead. But it wouldn’t, and she was a human going toe-to-toe with a vampire. She made a futile attempt to bring up the arrow she still had clutched in her hand. Mason moved faster than he’d ever moved before, but Trenton plunged the steel spike into her chest just as his hand reached the vampire’s shoulder.
A hoarse scream erupted from her throat. It wrenched in Mason’s vitals, the threat of an impending severed connection between him and his servant. A mortal blow. He stumbled into Trenton, but still managed to slam him forward, take him through the outer brick and inner Sheetrock of the ballroom wall. It was enough to knock his opponent insensible, but Mason wasted no time beyond putting him down to scramble to her side.
It was fortunate no one was in his path, for he couldn’t tell friend from foe. Everything was an obstacle between him and Jess.
Danny and Dev fell back to flank him then, putting the ballroom at their backs as he went to one knee by her. Allah, be merciful, she was soaked in blood, her body jerking, her eyes unfocused. Death throes. He could feel it in his own marrow, in the strangled pounding of his heart. The remaining vampires and humans were closing in, decimated but still greater in number than their small force, particularly now that only Danny and Dev were able to engage.
Run . . . Jessica’s eyes focused on him, struggling to hold his gaze. Her voice in his head was faint. It’s senseless for us to both die. Meant to be. Can’t go back to my world. Can’t . . . stay in yours. Proof . . . should have died . . . in tomb.
Habiba , you go nowhere without my permission. We go together or not at all. Picking up the pike that had gone through her chest, he drove the sharpened end into his own. She gasped, strangling on a cough. His lips curled back at the agonizing pain, the sudden gush of heart’s blood, the richest blood a vampire could offer to a servant. Urgency taking precedence over care, he gripped the back of her neck and brought her mouth there, flooding her mind with his voice, his demand.
Drink, habiba . We will argue about this later, but you must live.
He repeated it, holding her close against his chest as her mouth moved awkwardly against him. Inserting his fingers between them to guide the flow of blood, he brought her lips to the place the blood was flowing most strongly. Her hand gripped his arm, a silent answer to his strong emotion. Dizziness took him. He knew he should be helping Danny and Dev, that if they lost ground, they were all lost. But if he left her now, she would die.
I refuse to live without her. She is my third-marked servant. A servant follows her Master into eternity. She is afraid of the dark, and I won’t let her be alone in the dark.
He was lost in such thoughts, pleas, prayers or threats, he didn’t know which. It took a battle cry, thunderously deeper than the rest of the battle noises, to return him to the present. Lifting his head, he blinked hazily to see two vampires spinning away from the back of the attacking group, their clothes and flesh on fire. It was an Irish war cry that had heralded Jacob, brandishing two torches. He staked another vampire with one of them in a swift move that exploded fire out the vampire’s back. Then he was darting forward, cutting a swath through the now confused group.
He was shouting. “Fall back! Duck down and—”
Abandoning gestures or words, he dropped the remaining torch, caught Danny and Dev’s arms and plowed forward, bringing them down over Mason and Jessica, their three bodies shielding the two wounded as the world erupted behind Jacob’s broad shoulders.
Mason, with his back to the wall, holding Jessica fast against him, saw the remaining vampires spin around, warned by Jacob’s yell, only to confront a puzzling nothingness. A nothingness that exploded with a lethal percussion. Abruptly, seven remaining vampires and a handful of human servants were jerking, convulsing like dolls being shaken violently. Only their feet remained rooted to the ground, an appropriate choice of words, Mason realized, given what erupted from their bodies.
Branches speared out of their arms, the main leader shooting out from their wrists, obliterating hands in horrifying expulsions of flesh and blood. Vegetation bloomed, fresh and green from the branches, spattered with blood as smaller branches erupted from the soft tissue orifices of the eyes, noses and ears. Skin sprouted bark, and heads disappeared in the enclosure of thick trunks that shot up from the ground. Limbs broke and shattered as flowers and fruit bloomed. The feet expanded into fully mature root systems, cracking the marble tile like sharp gunshots. The verandah rumbled ominously.
Jacob cursed and pressed them back into the ballroom. The three helped shift Mason, since he could not move without releasing Jess, and blood loss was leaving him weak, so weak he felt disoriented. If not for the reaction of the others, he would have been unsure if the fantastic scenario occurring before him was happening or if he was slipping into a blood-drained hallucination. Half of the wide verandah area gave way under the weight of the new forest, still thickening and expanding. As tile, plaster, wood and brick crashed with a deafening cacophony to the lawn below, the trees held their position along the slope of concrete and marble.
The rubble evolved into a hill as lush grass and runners of white morning glories overran it. Expansive jasmine bushes filled in the spaces, perfuming the air, mixing with the scent of blood in Mason’s nose.
Jessica had lost consciousness against him. He didn’t know if she’d drunk enough. But her heart still beat, faintly, and her wound was closing under his hand, pressed against her sternum and curve of small breast. Please, Allah, let it mean she’ ll be all right.
