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I left the library with this force at my back. For a brief moment, it felt as though someone was holding my shoulder, both reassuring and guiding me as I fired magic at every vampire I saw on my way toward the exit.
“Go!” I yelled to the feeders free from now burning vampires. “Escape!”
I didn’t want to hurt those innocents. Feeders like me—we hadn’t had a choice when we’d been captured and brought here. But with this magic, I could free myselfandthem.
I grinned, a manic sort of feeling replacing my fear. I cackled as vampires charged toward me, trying to stop me, but they burned at my touch. It was a wild feeling—a fleeting sense of satisfaction—every time my fire reduced a vampire to dust before me. Behind me, back in the library, Cassius bellowed, a pain-filled cry releasing through the halls of Lazarus’s now burning feeder community.
From every room I passed, I urged the innocent feeders to escape, before I filled the air with flames. From every bench I approached, I ripped away vampires gripping their feeders tightly for one last drop, and turned them to ash.
“Yes,”the entity’s voice urged me, sounding like he drew both satisfaction and pleasure from every vampire’s death.“Show them who you really are. Show them you are protected. That you have been gifted real power.”
But with every step toward an exit from the feeding community, with every new flame reducing a vampire to cinders, I grew less aware of my actions. Less in control. It was if I were drunk and sifting through a heavy sea of consciousness that kept slipping through my fingers like sand. So out of control that as I encroached on a group of people, I almost attacked them before pulling back when I recognized their faces—Willa and other feeders. A ladder to the surface standing before them. She was helping them escape.
“Aisling?” she asked.
“Go,” I heard my voice say, but I had not commanded it to do so. “Escape while you can.”
Willa tugged on my dress as I passed her by. “What about you?”
“I’m going to end this.”
Again, my mouth. My voice. But not my will.
The entity.
What are you doing?I asked as we left behind Willa and the feeders she was helping to escape.
“Freeing you the best way I know how.”
By taking over my body?
“Do you trust me?”the entity asked in my mind as we stopped by a mirror. My face was covered in soot now as flames licked the walls of the community’s halls. I saw only myself—no, that wasn’t true. There was a faint outline of some sort of person or creature behind me, smoky and barely there.
“Trust? No.” I could never trust that easy and quick after I’d been sold into this community by extended family. “I want to escape. I told you I’d owe you for life.”
“Aisling!”
I turned fast, panic rising again within me as Lazarus’s form came into view.
“Don’t you dare!” He barreled toward me, a nightsteel blade drawn at his waist. “Get back here, now!” Anger had turned his cheeks red. Around us, chaos reigned as the fires spread.
“Then for life it shall be,”the entity said.“As promised.”
The last thing I saw—the last action I was aware of before it felt like losing consciousness as the entity took over my body—was my fist raise and hurl a ball of fire at Lazarus’s chest. My vision darkened as the fire burned his skin and the nightsteel blade raked across my arm.
I saw Lazarus drop to the ground, as Jackie’s body had, before bursting into flames.
The rest was a blurry memory of my body under another entity’s control. The fine print of whatever deal I had made.
But Lazarus was dead. And his empire was burning.
Within hours of escaping Lazarus’s burnt feeding community, I found myself three hundred dollars richer and safe, clean, and fed inside a hotel room. It took some work to find a pawn shop that would accept jewels from the bag I’d stolen from Lazarus. Not because the jewels and gems were random and valuable, but because many of the shop owners regarded my appearance with apprehension. A thin, dirty dress covered in soot. Unkempt hair. Blood from two fang puncture wounds on my neck. I had been a mess when I had escaped Lazarus’s feeder community. And it appeared no one else could see Mrak any better than I could, which was a blessing because I still wasn’t sure what this entity was.
But, one lucky pawn shop find had changed everything for the better.
I sat now on a plush bed with crisp, clean white sheets and wrapped in a beautiful bathrobe. I could have gone to a motel to save money. It probably would have been safer overall. But I’d walked by this extravagant hotel and something called me to it.
Room service trays full of food surrounded me. I picked at them slowly as the day drew on. The sun set over the city, casting light into the room through large windows. Every now and then, my gaze drifted toward the TV. Then to the room phone. Then back to the city outside.
