Deathless (The Vein Chronicles Book 2) by Anne Malcom
More than most.
Even more than the vampires who seemed to think they had monopoly over it.
Letting them think that was probably wise.
Sophie wasn’t wise. Even though she was a couple of centuries old, wisdom did not come with age.
One needed only to look at a four-hundred-year-old vampire named Isla to know that.
A stab of pain twisted in her stomach, so strong, so intense she almost doubled over.
Almost.
She wouldn’t look at Isla. Couldn’t. Because then her friend, the only true one she had in immortality, would present her with what she’d seen all too much of in her life.
Death.
And the final kind. Not the kind Sophie experienced in order to make sure she lived longer than her less magical human counterparts.
The kind you didn’t come back from.
She could have given in to that pain, but that would’ve made her weak. Isla didn’t approve of weak, almost as much as she didn’t approve of sweater sets.
So she chose the emotion that Isla would approve of.
Rage.
Her hands sparked with blue in preparation for such an action. The power in the recesses of her body stirred, shaking at the chains she’d put there in order to hide the entirety of the magic that may just kill her.
She wasn’t afraid of that power now. Or death.
She and death were old friends, after all.
“Sophie.” The harsh voice gave her pause, just as she was about to unlock those chains.
She blinked away the haze that the magic had started to bring over her vision, the wooded area of Thorne’s backyard coming back into view and the slayer standing in front of her in clear color.
The slayer who had no place being in front of her. No place looking at her the way he did.
“Silver, step away if you don’t want to be a pile of limbs that Thorne will have to use as firewood,” she instructed, her voice morphed slightly with the power she was forcing herself to swallow.
She had to.
It wasn’t an empty threat. Unleashing the power from her depths would mean casualties if anyone was standing too close. She knew that. She knew it because even the small taste was shaking her, making her feel like her skin might just split because it was too much for her body to accommodate.
You couldn’t just do that, welcome immense power into the world without first learning how to control it.
Sophie knew that. But then logic had no place when death was around.
And death had been around far too much. Therefore, logic was a long-forgotten friend.
If it ever was a friend at all.
“I’m not goin’ anywhere,” Silver said firmly.
Her hands crackled once more, the power in her body recognizing the challenge.
It took all her willpower to not unleash it on the attractive yet obviously suicidal slayer.
He watched, rapt, as the sparks illuminated the very molecules of the air and then petered out, retreating into the cage she kept them in.
“You want to became a charred version of a slayer?” she asked, her voice husky with the exertion. It may not have been a marathon, but working with power required energy, both mental and physical. Her mental energy was waning, stricken and ruined considering she’d just watched her best friend die. “You don’t, right? So get the fuck out of my way,” she hissed.
He folded his arms in the gesture that these males seemed to think was a soundless form of communication of their strength and general badassery.
Little did this baby slayer know that Sophie had more strength in her little finger than he did in his entire body—literally. And she and the corpse of a vampire inside held the throne on badassery that all the slayers in their little gang couldn’t even aspire to.
But one must stroke male egos; that was how she’d survived in Salem, after all. That and she spelled all the preachers to go after every single witch who pissed her off—after she bound their powers, of course.
Another story for another day when she wasn’t mourning the loss of the only creature on the planet who might approve of such things as mass murdering women who slept with her boyfriend.
As she sucked in air to mutter a small spell to put Silver in his place, and make sure he stayed there so she could leave, a rush of air whipped her hair around and Scott appeared in front of her.
Blood stained his cheeks, trailing out of the one eye he had left. Vampires survived on blood, and it also leaked out of them when surviving got to be a little too much.
She reasoned that, on better days than this, the patch covering his empty socket and the scar peeking out from underneath it actually improved Scott’s general look. Made him look less like a college frat boy who date-raped girls on the regular.
But now she didn’t think much of it, apart from hiding the flinch at the etching of despair on his features.
Her own were carefully schooled.
Scott was young, hadn’t yet learned the importance of not wearing feelings on your sleeve and how deadly such a thing could be to your life and sanity.
He’d learn or he’d die.
Sophie had done both.
But Scott’s death would likely be far more final than hers.
Half vampire or not.
“It’s not true,” he stated, his voice somehow firm and weak at the same time. Like if he said it, it might make it so, make it reality. But also in a way that he knew reality, fate and the universe herself did not listen to the words of anyone, even immortals.
Especially immortals, because they cheated death, for a time anyway. No one was truly deathless, not even Sophie, despite the many deaths she’d experienced and lived through.
Sophie regarded him coldly. “The corpse in the room not ten feet away would beg to differ,” she said, ignoring his flinch. “And not the corpse that’s still walking, talking, insulting ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the population. As in dead. Bury, burn, bronze in the middle of Barneys kind of dead.”
Scott’s grief came on her in waves but she shrugged it off. She’d turned most of that off, the taste of emotions that had become stronger and more palpable since her powers had become so.
It was necessary, since even the small bite of Thorne’s sorrow she’d experienced nearly brought her to her knees.
And, interestingly, Rick’s.
She narrowed her eyes at the flicker of the vampire king in her peripheral, pacing at the edge of the woods.
It was his fault.
That was it. Finding someone to blame, settling the entirety of such an event on someone else’s shoulders made everything clearer. Starker.
For it was the king of all vampires who had inflicted those injuries in the form of a public execution that had Isla’s death on the agenda, when it was merely meant to be torture of some demons and a cocktail after.
He had brought her in front of the vampires of the court, her own family, and tried her for treason—love for a slayer was of course one of the worst crimes a vampire could commit.
It didn’t matter that he hadn’t intended to execute her, merely making it seem so.
Nor did his ignorance of the spell rendering her nearly mortal serve as an excuse.
It might to a logical mind.
Without a second glance at either of the men—or one man and one vampire man-child in front of her—she rushed towards him.
Silver’s emotions followed her. Which meant his body did too, as she had lost purchase on her spell while she was calling up the powers she’d bound tight.
“It’s not worth it, Sophie,” he growled.
She didn’t slow, nor did she tamp down the sparks at her fingers.
“Revenge is always worth it,” she hissed, her voice morphing with the power she unleashed.
The king, for once, did not take notice of his surroundings. Grief made people weak. It was the best time to strike.
Plus, he had no right to feel such an emotion. He was the entire reas
The hot sense of satisfaction that came with hitting the vampire with the full voltage of her power momentarily chased away her own sorrow.
She welcomed it, the bloodlust she had tasted only through proximity to vampires; now that very same need coursed through her veins. That need to suck the life from the one who took someone from her.
She would become a bloodsucker, except instead of sucking the blood from Emrick, the king of all vampires, she’d use her power to drain him of everything. His immortality first.
He had slammed into a tree with the force of her power, cracking the trunk so it looked half cut by an axe that was Rick’s body.
It worked well enough.
He had been caught unaware, but he was a warrior and a thousand-year-old immortal. He was immediately ready to strike back, jumping from the remains of the bark, ripping away the pieces of trunk that had impaled him.
He was quick, darting halfway over the distance that separated them in less than a second.
Sophie was quicker.
With a flick of her fingers, he was frozen in the middle of the clearing that seemed far too calm with the chaos swirling around the day.
She sensed Silver’s approach. And his intention. So with another flick of her pinky finger, using it with a little grim satisfaction, she froze him in place. She didn’t rightly need to use her pinky finger, or any finger at that. She wasn’t Sabrina; magic didn’t need hand gestures. But it was the theatrics of it all. And Isla was ever the drama queen, as well as a vengeful bitch when she wanted to be, so what better way to honor her memory than with vengeance splashed with a touch of theater.
“Sophie,” Silver gritted out.
Another flip of her hand had his mouth snapping shut.
The power pulsed through her at such a rate that those spells, small as they were, didn’t take an ounce of her energy as they should. No, as she focused her attention on the king of all vampires, her energy increased, as did the power she’d locked down.
Now that it was unleashed, there was no control. It was a living thing inside her. Something separate than her. Something ancient. Something terrifying. And at this moment, apt.
Because when presented with death, what else was left to fear?
What do you have left when you no longer fear death?
She stepped forward, dried leaves crunching underfoot, not noticing that the very leaves on all the living things she passed died and withered merely from her proximity.
If she had noticed, she would’ve been disappointed, not at the magic in her creating dead things but that it didn’t work on undead things.
Yet.
But it would.
She circled him, her power morphing, changing her in such a way that she knew she approached a cliff, a precipice. In which the Sophie she was for two hundred years would die for good this time, replaced by whatever this power would birth.
Not good.
Not evil.
Just pure power.
Perhaps a god.
She only noted the approaching cliff distractedly, not worrying about the freefall and that final death.
Her eyes were on Rick’s granite jaw and the way his eyes were hard with the stare of a creature that had looked death in the eye many a time. After all, he was a creature that credited its existence to Hades himself. And Hades lurked behind her eyes.
“You’ll meet him properly this time, not just acknowledge him and then escape,” she hissed, leaning into his face. “No, he will grasp you in his claws and drag you down to the underworld. But not before I’m done with you.”
She didn’t use a hand gesture that time, merely flared her eyes slightly as the Ichor of his immortality drained from him.
His body jerked despite the spell that kept it still. She imagined having the Ichor of the gods ripped from your being would be painful.
Then she remembered the pure hot agony just with the small taste of Thorne’s thoughts. The half-remembered pain of her own grief that was no longer familiar to her. The cliff was nearing, after all, and as she sped towards it, the layers of her being seemed to melt off.
“I will take away your immortality,” she promised, her voice thick and not really her own. Another voice, the voice of whatever it was she had unleashed, spoke at the same time as her, echoing beyond the words, so much so that the molecules of the air twisted in discomfort at the power filtering through it. “And then I will let you taste mortality. Taste it, experience the brutal claim of it.”
She paused, sucking deeper—his Ichor, his life, his immortality— watching in delight as his fangs sank into his lips as he fought against the pain.
“Then, and only then, once I have mangled your soul as much as I can, that’s when I will pass it off to Hades to do with what he will,” she promised, circling him. “It will be ruined but he will find new ways to torture it. If he uses his imagination.”
It was close, the end of his immortality. The air shimmered with the power of the connection between the two of them. She could see the glints, like icicles sparkling in sunlight trailing from him to her.
Though there was no sunlight. Light had no place here.
She had almost absorbed it all when something hit her side. Hard. The power in her recoiled as it momentarily stopped the exchange, cutting the connection abruptly.
Despite the power of the impact, she hadn’t moved. The power inside her didn’t will it to be so.
But the cliff was still in the distance, very close but far enough away that the old her was distracted by the impact and the scent, and the vampire who had toppled to the dead ground after trying to tackle her.
She could’ve bound him in place too, the weak young one with only one eye, fear and grief spiraling off him.
But she didn’t.
For no other reason than she wasn’t off the cliff yet.
The sparks in her hands flared in impatience with their thirst for it.
More power.
Blood.
But she watched the vampire struggle, its arm hanging from its shoulder limply, the power of the impact having dislocated the bone from the socket. It must have been painful but he ignored it, meeting her eyes, his body flinching with the pain caused by the power there.
Excruciating pain, she imagined.
Even for an immortal.
Especially for half of one.
But he didn’t look away. “Sophie, this isn’t what she would have wanted,” he gritted out, his voice thick with the effort it took to manipulate the sound waves she now owned.
“This isn’t about what anyone wants,” she hissed. “This is about me. About us,” she corrected, acknowledging the being inside her on an afterthought.
She was growing impatient and the cliff was growing closer, which was rather comforting even when, at the corner of her mind, the piece of her that remained panicked at the proximity.
Became aware of the true death should she tumble from the cliff.
He snatched her hand as she tried to turn again, the power itself almost obliterating him while barely giving her pause.
Although it did give her pause. Enough to watch him crumble lifelessly to the ground and stay there, which was good. Happily she turned to finish what she started—death.
But as her eyes locked on the vampire king’s—which were hardened without fear, only resignation of the underworld—something gave her pause.
Another presence in the clearing, a taste to the air which cut through the bitter stench of death.
It wasn’t life,
but something sweet and sour and the same time. With an edge of an emotion that had no place there. Or in this wretched world at all.
Hope.
“Really? Dude, going on a weird witchy killing spree is the way you were going to play it after my timely death? I don’t hate it, but I thought you’d try to be a little more original.”
The sarcastic voice cut through the power and brought the tumultuous ride to the cliff
The being inside her hissed in protest, but she turned despite it, though the effort was tearing her in two.
Isla’s bloodstained couture greeted her first. Then she met her friend’s emerald eyes, sparkling with life and sarcasm, like always. Her hair glinted off the sun like blood spilling from her skull, tangled in places. Yet it was possibly the only place she didn’t have blood.
Her stained red lips stretched into a grin, revealing fangs.
The power was not ready to leave even as Sophie clawed at it to go back to its cage, fighting to find her own voice and silence the other.
“How?” she gritted out, her voice thick but her own.
Isla shrugged. “Apparently slayer blood isn’t fatal to this vampire. It’s like the immortal version of those green juices humans think cures cancer. Apart from Thorne’s blood obviously chasing off witchy curses, it doesn’t kill me as promised. And it tastes delightful.” She kissed the tips of her fingers like an old Italian woman, then tilted her head at the scene around her Sophie was just noticing.
Dead plant life in a ring like a nuclear bomb had been set off; the lifeless form of Scott; the frozen king of vampires, hovering between immortality and the grave; the equally frozen and mute slayer.
Emerald eyes flickered back to her. “Now I do like the fact that girl power is well in play here. The Spice Girls would be so proud. ‘If you wanna be my lover, you gotta let my friends almost kill you with weird power.’” She frowned. “Doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easy. So how about we stop killing Rick, defibrillate Scott, let Silver go and talk about this over cocktails?”
Her voice and words may have been easy but Sophie didn’t miss the undertone, or the slight way her body was poised, ready for attack. The power inside recognized the threat, jumping from the cage she was struggling to close and encouraging her to strike. To end them all, and specifically the vampire in front of her.
Her best friend.
The one who should have been dead, as the gods willed it.
But they didn’t seem to.
She sent the lock home on the cage.
But not before that otherworldly voice whispered to her a premonition so sure that she knew it was future reality better than she knew that classic rock could only be heard on vinyl.