Page 34 of Eternal Surrender

It was hard to leave her, especially like this. But she was in capable hands. I had sealed her with an ancient mark.

Now, she was untouchable.

Chapter Seven

Within minutes of leaving Ingrid with Blake outside Belshazzar’s, I was flying toward London’s Regency Graveyard, tracking the vampire I believed to be Paradom, up and over the cemetery wall and heading fast through trees.

Pausing briefly beside a sunken grave, I could no longer see the blur I was tracking and cursed myself for losing him. Wind chimes carried on the breeze; the weather turning colder and threatening rain.

There was a bulldozer parked to the right of the deserted graveyard, and something told me they were going to be using it here, making room for the encroaching city. Judging by the few remaining graves this place was hundreds of years old and anyone who might have disputed the desecration was probably dead. A terrible scent carried, and I wondered if the construction had already disrupted one of the graves.

Something struck my back.

I picked up the coin that had been thrown at me and examined the 1829 shilling crested with King George IV’s head on one side and a lion standing atop a crown on the other. Directly ahead was a grassy bank camouflaged by overgrown vines and enshrouded in rotting moss was a rusty old gate.

I yanked it open and eased my way through, cautiously following the dirt pathway that seemed to run beneath the small hill.

Ducking to accommodate the low earth ceiling, I proceeded, pinching my nose, trying to stop the pungent smell from stinging my nostrils, tasting putrid air and trying to find the will to continue.

I’d smelled rotting flesh before, but this was something altogether different and it stirred such disgust that I questioned going any further. Up ahead in the darkness, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

Hanging upside down in a bat-like pose was a creature that almost resembled a human, but his flesh was leathery and his face that of a wrinkled old man with nothing but tufts of hair on his shiny bald head, his mouth twisted in misery.

I brought up my right hand and covered my face with my sleeve, willing the nausea away.

The myth that vampires turned into bats came to mind, and I shuddered, studying this creature and wondering how he’d evolved into this.

“Who are you?” I whispered, making sure my pathway was clear in case I needed to break for the exit.

The creature’s crinkled eyelids opened.

I gestured. “I mean you no harm.”

He inclined his head as though trying to see me the right way up, but his body remained still. I unraveled my fingers to show him the coin in my palm.

His lips moved sluggishly, his crooked mouth revealing the sharpest teeth as he formed silent words. I held up the coin.

He pointed a long, wizened finger, exposing his claw. “Someone did it to you, too.”

“Did what?”

“Exactly!” he said.

“Who are you?” I feared the answer.

He grinned. “Paradom,” he murmured.

I barely stopped myself from stumbling and checked the ground for anything else that might trip me up or trap me in. The scent was coming from his den not from him.

“They sent you to kill me?” he mumbled.

“No.” I motioned my sincerity.

“Pity,” he muttered to himself. “Can you pass me that?”

Before me stood my worst nightmare and Catherine’s threat that I’d become something like him was too much.

The cruelest revenge.