“You could just… move. Nobody is making you keep inhabiting a cursed house in the middle of a cursed horde of vampires in a place where it rains all the time forever. I can barely call down a sunbeam here. But back in the mountains? I might be able to protect her there.”
“My father would never allow it. We have to honor the curse. We have to break it. It can’t be tricked. It can’t be escaped. It’s in me, Tabby. It would come after me. It has to be defeated. They have to be defeated.”
He picks me up and carries me to the window. Outside, there are more vampires than I’ve ever seen in my life. They are gathered in the village square like an army, though that implies too much thought and planning. They are here because I am here. They’ve been attracted to the gravity of the fate that binds all of us, dead and alive.
“This is what you are here for,” he says. “This is what is coming for me. For you. For all of us.”
I see an insurmountable obstacle, a force of twisted, fetid hunger. A sense of calm washes over me as that old sense of destiny surges back into me. He’s right. This is what I’m here for. He may have stolen me, violated me, betrayed me, but none of that changes a single thing about what is going to happen here.
I say the only thing that can be said in a moment like this, where the inevitable cannot be avoided, only experienced.
“Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 12
Tabby
“You’re much braver than I have ever given you credit for.”
Skor makes the comment as we walk toward what must be death. My instincts to run have become strangely muted. I don’t know if it was the silver, the sex, or some other intense sense of fate. I have been brought here because this is where I need to be.
The village green calls us. It is a place built at a natural nexus of power. Much like the mountains which I roam, it crackles with energy. And tonight it bristles with vampires. Beyond the green, another thousand or so vampires stand on the moor surrounding the village. Moonlight casts them in muted shades. Blood is black in the light of the night. I am wearing my dress. The same one I was given to my mates in, the green gown that links me to the world I came from, to my mother, long lost to the monsters in the mountain.
I have faced a great many evils in my time, but none on this scale. This land is absolutely vampire infested. I can call downsunlight, but not enough. I would have to turn the night to day in order to kill all of them.
A light drizzle coats my face in a humid, dank spray.
I’m going to die here. Far from home. Soaked, sodden, and miserable.
Oh, well.
Skor is beside me. He’s willing to feed me to the vamps, but he doesn’t want to survive it if we fail. I can sense a little glimmer of goodness inside him, a spark that might have made him a better man if not for all this darkness.
“So we kill all these vampires and break the curse, somehow?” I ask the question in hope of specifics. I know how to kill bad things. I don’t know how to undo ancient agreements. My presence here feels like a lamp hung on a dark night. What flits to us is full of evil and hunger.
“We start killing, and we don’t stop until it’s over. But you won’t do this alone,” Skor says, as if his presence is going to make much of a difference, as if he hasn’t just led the both of us to our deaths.
“Two of us, against an army?”
“I know. The odds are hardly fair. For them,” he winks.
He’s in a good mood. I’ve seen moods like this before, and it does not bolster my confidence one little bit. This is the sort of mood that men get in when they know the end is so near at hand it doesn’t matter.
For a long moment, the vampires look at us, and we look at them. We are all capable of speech, but nothing is said. I don’tthink any of us really want to be here. We’re being pulled by forces much stronger than ourselves. This is not a battle any individual here wants to fight, but it is a battle we will all sacrifice ourselves for.
With a hissing growl, one vampire begins the attack. The temporary spell of inertia is broken, and the onslaught begins. Skor shifts, dashing back and forth around me in an effort to hold them at bay as I work my weakened magic, calling down sun to a place where the sun loathes to shine, through clouds that will not allow it to penetrate.
I still do not understand the precise mechanics of this so-called curse breaking. What if we kill all these vampires? What if every single one of them falls? What difference will it make? There will still be others in their wake. I know well enough from living in the mountains that there are always more monsters to fight.
I call the light, Skor mangles the corpses. Death rages around us in sickening waves of dead flesh. They start to pile up in a circle, creating something of a protective barrier over which the others must climb to try to reach us.
Some vampires have almost human intellect, others are little more than beasts. The ones we are fighting here are closer to zombies. They are hungry for what lies inside us. My light, and Skor’s dark.
They are vicious and they are not going to stop coming for us. Not for anything. Their fangs are sharp and their awful will is worse. My light is weakening every time I call it, and finally one of them slashes Skor hard with its fangs, pushing him out of his wolf form and into a cowering muscular naked human one.
He collapses at my feet, absolutely exhausted, and unable to defend me. The vampires close in around us, and there is less than a second to do anything to preserve our lives.
I summon the light with all my might. I lift my eyes to the sky and I remember what it was to look out from the mountains and feel all the power of the woods. I remember who I am, and where I came from.
