AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I threw my head forward as hard as I could, smacking my forehead against Cassius’s. He cursed loudly and his grip loosened just enough for me to struggle with everything I had within me. I jerked hard, tearing sideways, and managed to get him drop me to the floor. I lifted my knee, slamming it into his groin, and pushed with everything in me.
Cassius teetered backward, losing his battle to the momentum as he tripped over Leif’s leg. I snatched the amulet from Cassius’s neck as he fell, ripping the chain and breaking it.
“How do I destroy it?!” I screamed at Leif.
Leif looked up at me, blood dripping from his nose, his expression more pained and hurt than he had in the alleyway after I’d burned him. He held out a hand. “Give it to me.”
I held it closer to my chest. As if I would trust him with anything anymore. But I knew he knew what to do with the amulet. He could give me back my magic. I could kill Cassius. Val. Every single vampire in this gods forsaken coven.
All I had to do was what Leif had wanted me to do all along: Trust him.
“You don’t have the luxury of not giving that to me,” Leif said as he coughed blood onto the floor.
Fuck it.He was right.
I handed Leif the amulet. Leif pushed himself off the floor and pressed the amulet between his hands, muttering a spell as he did so.
Cassius groaned loudly and stood, pain wracking his features. I kicked him in the side, sending him back against the wall again.
“Hurry!” I shouted.
A burst of magic filled the hallway again and the amulet shattered in Leif’s hands. Immediately, my fire warped back around my body, sifting from inside the amulet and across the hallway to me. Life. Power. Both surged through me with a blazing warmth as bright as a thousand suns.
It was overwhelming. Heady.Powerful.
And it did not let up even as I lunged for Cassius.
Palm out, I dodged an attack by Cassius, only to slam my hand against his chest. He didn’t have a chance to so much as inhale before his entire body went up in dark black flames.
I turned, feeling as though I were on auto pilot, and headed for the grand hall and all of the vampires still alive.
“Wait!” Leif shouted as he grabbed my arm.
I peeled his hand away from me with a flamed-wreathed fist.
Leif cried out as the shadow flames burned his skin—and the ward against Mrak.
I grinned as the skin melted away and gasped as a pleasurable presence coiled around me. Now that Mrak’s tendrils wrapped around my body, a cocoon from neck to foot, I realized how empty everything had felt before as I’d descended into Cassius’s den.
“Cassius is dead,”Mrak noted, pride echoing in his voice.
“And others,” I admitted as Leif looked up at me with pleading in his eyes. “There are more.”
“Finish them.”
Mrak’s presence disappeared once more as I entered the grand hall. The other Lunar League demon hunters had the wards against Mrak as well. But none of them could stop my magic, and whatever amulet Cassius had, he hadn’t shared it with his other vampires.
I attacked the vampires first. Shadowed fire burst from my hands and body, full columns of flames that engulfed Val and her enforcers. Anyone left standing after the demon hunters had killed so many died at my hands. And when the Lunar League’s hunters turned on me, I couldn’t find it within myself and my need for vengeance to let them live.
I moved without caution. Fired magic without care. Flames scorched the floors and walls, the plush couches and the privacy curtains. Everything I saw burned, and everything withinmebecame a haze of fire and darkness swirling together into one.
It happened so gradually, I couldn’t stop it. A shift from being in power to feeling so completely out of control. A few vampires dead. One woman lost to collateral damage—a mistake.
Cassius. Val.
Fire burst around me.
Enforcers. The rest of the vampires.
