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My eyes locked onto his as I came to that realization, and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. Nico’s arms around me were too much and not enough, all at once. I needed space to find my air, but I also needed him to cradle me and tell me everything would be okay at the same time.
“Who did this to you?” Nico growled as his eyes studied my mouth.
The threat in his words told me he already knew my transformation hadn’t been some unfortunate accident. I ran the tip of my tongue along my teeth but found that my new fangs had already retracted.
Then I let myself remember what had happened before the bloodcrazed frenzy overtook me.
“Ty,” I spat. “He’s alive after all.”
I struggled against the rock-solid surface of Nico’s chest, and the tall vampire set me down alongside him on top of the containment wall, helping me find my feet. I ran to the parapet and gazed toward the threshold to the infernal realm.
Flames flickered behind a wall of smoke, lighting up the tendrils of shadows seeking entrance into our world. The infernal threshold still stood as it had before, dark and imposing. But the man wearing a cloak of shadows was gone.
The coward had summoned a biter, immobilized my will to make sure I was turned, and then disappeared once my coven and friends showed up. And he’d taken my mother’s spirit back to hell with him.
“Then let’s go fix that.” Nico grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the metal rungs leading back down to the walled off part of the city.
My eyes fell on the only other figure between the wall and the threshold… the body of the brave demon hunter who’d tried to fight the devil alone.
Hudson stepped in front of Nico. “Not so fast.”
Nico growled again, but kept his hands to himself as Hudson grabbed my shoulders and crushed me into a hug so tight, I couldn’t even turn my head to kiss him. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Mel, but I’m glad you’re alive.”
Jax came up behind me and wrapped his arms around us both. He kissed my cheek and then nuzzled my ear and whispered, “We’re all glad you’re alive.”
“And we’re going to kill the bastard who did this to you,” Nico assured me, his magenta eyes fixed on the threshold beyond the wall.
“We need to know what Mel knows first,” Nimue said from behind me.
I turned to face her, an icy wave of shame rushing over me. “Nim… I’m sorry.”
She waved me off. “You weren’t yourself, Mel.”
My eyes snapped up at her cavalier tone. “I could’ve killed you!”
She snorted, crossing her arms, the prosthetic one on the outside. “Not with my coven to back me up.”
She gestured to Lantos, Fox, and Rigel, and I remembered how I’d tried to bite Fox. His bloodstone pendant had made that impossible, something my bloodcrazed brain was too frenzied to understand.
“I’m sorry, Fox,” I added.
“Like she said,” he hooked a thumb toward Nim. “You weren’t yourself.”
Lan smirked at me, though Fox and Rye — an artificer and a healer by trade — didn’t look nearly as confident as the two demon hunters.
But despite his uneasiness, Fox raised up my necklaces and pendants in his hands, most created by Fox himself, and I bowed my head so he could put them back where they belonged. I wore so many more than a simple bloodstone necklace or a demonfire pendant. Those necklaces had saved my life in so many ways, and they were tangled and matted together because I never took them off. Yet in a bloodcrazed frenzy, I’d somehow known to remove them to get what I wanted — Nico’s bite.
Rye’s expression also held no fear. “Let me heal your neck. Is there anywhere else you’re injured?”
I raised my arm, looking at the scrapes. “Just this.”
Then I remembered how Tempest had lapped at my wounds. “Where’s my familiar?”
Rye’s healing magic warmed my neck, then my wrist.
Lan pointed, and I twisted to see the hellfox’s black-tipped paws daintily dancing along the parapet. Lightning flashed in the storm cloud that was her raised tail.
“Here, clumsy vampire,”her gentle voice whispered in my mind.
