Deathless (The Vein Chronicles Book 2) by Anne Malcom
Something in her eyes gave me pause. “So you consider yourself to be the queen?” I asked, then laughed. “You have the grand plan of wearing tasteless gowns, a tacky piece of headwear and sitting on a throne made from the bones of children you’ve slain? Yeah, and they told me I was delusional when I wanted to persuade the government to make short skirts on obese people illegal.”
In a flash, Mother was across the room, her manicured hands at my throat, crushing my windpipe.
It happened, or I allowed it to happen, merely because I wasn’t expecting it.
Mother may have thrived on violence, but only when she was a spectator and instigator.
Her eyes glowed with fury and bloodlust. “You must learn, Isla, to shut that mouth before I give in to my baser instincts and rip that tongue out,” she murmured, squeezing so the bones in my throat popped and cracked, the sound echoing in my brain.
It hurt, surely, but I was more than a little satisfied that I’d rattled her enough to react in such a manner.
She let go, stepping back to straighten her dress and hold out her glass to be refilled.
The time it took for the maid to scuttle about and refill the glass was the time it took for me to heal my windpipe and glare at my mother.
She made use of my silence.
“I will have the position I deserve at the top tier of this new world order,” she informed me. “For it is what my blood entitles me to. But I leave the leading up to those who have the, shall we say, knack for it.” She paused, and through the slightly uncomfortable pain of my bones knitting back together, something moved in her eyes, a deep and sick sense of satisfaction that filled me with that same foreboding that had simmered within me since the beginning of this entire train wreck.
Her eyes flickered to the staircase and she grinned. “Boys, come and say hello to your sister.”
“Great,” I rasped, my voice scratching with the effort it took to form words.
Evgeni and Viktor sped down to stand beside Mother, both glaring at me. No, that wasn’t right. Evgeni was glaring, but Viktor was grinning in the way that I knew would be followed by some sort of pain.
“Oh, it’s sadist one and sadist two,” I greeted. “How nice I get to see both of you assholes before I kill you.”
Viktor laughed. “As insane as always, sister.”
“Coming from you, an insane person who is also a sociopath, that’s an immense compliment. Killed any babies lately? Or managed to find any females from half-decent Vein Lines to forgo reason and class and marry you?” My gaze darted between my meathead brothers. “Why don’t you just marry each other? I’m sure you’d satisfy each other sexually, and then the world would be saved from the utter horror of having any of your offspring walk the earth.”
Viktor struck first. He was always the hothead.
Luckily I was prepared and broke the arm that he’d intended to plunge into my chest.
The cracking sound echoed through the foyer, much like my windpipe had earlier. I grinned at him. “The fist through the heart again, brother?” I asked, shaking my head. “So predictable.”
I then used my strength to snap it almost off. I would’ve been successful if he hadn’t taken advantage of his new position to kick out at my legs and break my femur.
I gritted my teeth against collapsing on the ground but unfortunately let his arm go. Then he was free to backhand me with enough force to send me flying into the stone wall and crashing into a painting before we both tumbled less than gracefully onto a sideboard, crushing that on the way down.
“Viktor, darling, try not to damage the furniture,” Mother requested, sounding vaguely irritated at the loss of her tasteless décor.
Not her two children engaged in a death match. No, this had happened many times before, though I guessed this time death was actually on the table.
Not mine.
Not again.
I pushed myself up, shoving my rib back into my body, grinning through the blood in my mouth and showing fang. “In my opinion, Mother, I’m improving the décor,” I informed her.
I didn’t get to say anything more because Viktor, like the raging bull he was, charged at me. I was prepared, gripping the shard of table I’d procured and shoving it through his neck. It slowed him down enough so that I could get traction to detach the entire thing from his body.
The ripping of flesh and bone was even more musical than Lady Gaga to my ears, and I was a total Little Monster.
As was the strangled scream that came from my mother’s throat as she watched Viktor’s head tumble on top of her Persian rug.
Though I didn’t exactly know if the scream of fear was due to the rug or watching the daughter she hated decapitate the son she didn’t quite hate.
She wasn’t capable of love. She was quite likely to love the rug more.
Of course, then she found her decorum, because it wasn’t seemly to scream over a bloodstained rug or a beheaded son.
The following silence was something as beautiful as the sound of the ending of Viktor’s undeath.
“Look at it this way, you don’t have to worry about a way to cut the apron strings. He was still living at home and he was six hundred years old, for Hades’s sake. I saved you millions,” I commented.
It was at that point that Mother gave Evgeni his command. Which was what I needed, though Evgeni was slightly less brutish and dumb than Viktor. He didn’t charge immediately and his fights were more practiced, purposeful, nuanced. He circled me while I willed my internal bleeding and cracked skull and cheekbone to sort themselves out. I could fight with the pain, ignore it even, but I knew Evgeni had catalogued every single one of my injuries and would try to use them to his advantage.
“Not good choices got you here, sister,” he warned softly.
“The only bad choice I’ve ever made was shoulder pads in the eighties,” I hissed. “Killing my loving brother was even better than investing in two new Prada bags after it became apparent they were only doing a limited release.”
He surged forward, a quick jab to my just-healing cheekbone, shattering it once more and then darting away before I could snatch his arm and yank it from the socket.
His eyes glowed as he grinned at me. “I’ll make your death slow, sister,” he promised. “Long enough to last to your Awakening. And then you’ll wish I killed you.”
Erotic and sadistic promise lurked between his words.
Yuck.
I may have loved Game of Thrones, but that didn’t mean I wanted to get all Lannister up in here.
I was more of a Jon Snow type of girl. Namely because of his resemblance to my Thorne. Though Thorne had more muscles and was even hotter than Snow.
I sighed at the revulsion Evgeni brought forward. “Family. Can’t live with them, can’t kill them.” I paused. “Oh wait, you can kill them. Thank God.”
I jerked forward, much more gracefully than Evgeni, and stole Viktor’s move—he wouldn’t mind, being dead and all—plunging my fist through his chest and ripping out his cold and unbeating heart.
The bulging of his eyes and wet groan of pain were indeed beautiful. Better than Lady Gaga and Hozier combined. Though, that would be a great single.
I held the organ between us with a grin, then dropped it at our feet at the same time Evgeni crumpled to the ground.
I turned to face my mother, same sadistic grin in place. It widened when her horrified expression met mine.
I glanced to where she was staring, the not quite fully dead Evgeni. “I’ll finish him later. First, I would really love to finish you, and that fucking dress,” I said with a smile.
Fear contorted Mother’s features for a moment. But only a moment. Then something akin to smug satisfaction replaced it.
Right about the time I heard the thumping of a heartbeat and a roared “Isla.”
Then a body barreled into me and sent me hurtling into the stone wall once more.
I reacted quickly to the snapping hybrid going for my jugular, ripping it
Then I jumped up to see the crowd of them that had entered the room, Duncan and Thorne fighting them off.
It looked like the distraction was working. And I was mighty glad they were still alive.
I darted over to the closest hybrid, snatching it out of the air before it got close to Thorne, who had too many bleeding wounds already.
His eyes locked with mine as I snapped its neck while he stabbed another hybrid, his gaze flickering over my injuries. “You okay?” he yelled in concern.
I punched a passing vampire. “Oh yes, peachy.”
My eyes went to the twitching corpse of Evgeni.
I glanced to Duncan, who was now closest.
“Duncan, could you be a dear and finish killing my brother?” I asked sweetly.
He grinned a bloody smile. “It would be my honor.”
It was amidst the noisiness and bloodiness of battle that some sort of silence came hurtling in.
Thorne’s thundering heartbeat was still there, as was the fresh scent of his blood.
But I’d just kicked a corpse of a hybrid from my feet, preparing to take on the next one and then hopefully my mother when a cultured and accented voice spoke.
“Stop, Mon Ange.”
I froze. Literally froze in the middle of the room. The vampire hurtling for my throat was only stopped by the very accurate throwing of a knife which embedded itself in its skull.
It must have been the last thing Duncan did before he was overwhelmed by the newcomers who accompanied the owner of that voice.
“Isla!” Thorne roared.
It was his voice, the rough desperation in it, that swam through the fog created from those previous words, which were remnants of a long-dead life. From a long-dead man.
My gaze settled on Thorne—or more accurately, the vampire holding a blade to his neck.
He didn’t seem overly concerned about that. Nor the variety of injuries that sent the delicious and sweet scent of his blood through the bitter air.
No, his horrified gaze was focused on me, for some reason.
Yes, I’d had more than a few injuries myself, and my shoulder had unfortunately been dislocated, but otherwise I was quite fine.
As fine as someone could’ve been when some idiot vampire held a knife to the throat of the man she loved. I forgot the voice for a moment, everything else fading into nothingness but the bloodlust for the man who would not die in front of me.
My heels rolled back in preparation to rip the head off the current vampire threatening Thorne and the considerable number of vampires that stood between me and him.
Not that that mattered.
But then it did matter when the voice spoke again.
“I wouldn’t bother with the human, Mon Ange, though I do know you have a weakness for them.”
Again, I was frozen. Well, my thoughts of before were frozen, the voice and words working a strange magic over me.
Thorne’s panicked and horrified face left my vision as I turned in slow motion,
Then I traveled. Without moving, I hurtled through time and space—four hundred and sixty years, to be exact.
Yet the sun was not shining. My heart was not beating in my chest and my ribs were not constricted with my corset pressing into me. I couldn’t hear the laughter of children or mutterings of French or taste the champagne and strawberries in the crisp garden air.
Yet there he was, escaping the sunshine and the garden and the sweet smells of humanity to walk through the unfeeling stone, through the stench of death, carrying it with him in his ice-cold form.
In the unbeating heart in his chest.
In those crystal blue eyes that no longer held anything.
Yet they held everything.
They held the reminder of the girl who died that day.
Although they didn’t hold her. They clutched her in a brutal grip, then squeezed until she shattered and broke viciously.
And then cold, immortal hands encircled my neck, squeezing in a caress that cracked a small bone only just healed.
I searched his eyes, unable to look away from the man I thought I’d buried yet at the same time carried with me for going on half a millennium.
The human man I’d thought I’d loved.
Who I thought I’d killed.
“Surprised, wife?” he asked gently, thumb moving over the area of my neck where he’d snapped a small bone so hard it had popped from the skin.
He pushed it back in just as a rough growl, a bellow, sounded through the chamber.
I didn’t glance that way because my molecules had seemed to still at the presentation of a living corpse. I was familiar with living corpses—I was one, after all—but I didn’t expect that of my human husband, whom I’d witnessed my mother murder, to be presented to me with cruelty in his gaze and fangs in his gums.
“Yes, I expect you are surprised,” he continued, his French accent still prevailing but dampened some by the years of speaking English. Of walking on this earth.
Undead.
While I’d carried his human ghost around in my mangled heart.
“You were a beautiful human, but you make a rather stunning immortal,” he mused, eyes running over my face. As did his hand. The other stayed gripping my neck and keeping me in place with the firm promise of ripping it from my body should I move.
I couldn’t move. Even without the hand.
The hand from my face trailed down the center of my chest, ripping the already torn blouse to expose my breasts to his hungry and cold eyes.
Another bellow, somewhere beyond this moment, that had to be a hallucination of some kind.
But the icy grip of reality taunted me that all of this was in fact happening.
His fingers traced over the ridges of the area where my heart had once beat for him.
Where it had broken for him.
“Yes, my wife is such a beautiful immortal. Much more than I’d imagined. And once we rectify the situation of your humanity and those attached to it, she will be utterly radiant.” His eyes flickered to the side, where the thundering heartbeat and waves of fury and fear had been hurling from.
“But first, I’m sure you’re wondering how I’m standing here in front of you, aren’t you?” He gave me a conspiratorial smile. “Well, I wish I could apologize for the treachery, but the problem is, I’m just not sorry. Not at all. I got to spend the last days of my human life fucking my little wife into oblivion while knowing the promise of immortality awaited me. And such an immortal life that was beyond what my bloodline could offer me.”
He paused, his fingers trailing between the ridges of my breasts. His eyes followed them for a moment before they met mine once more. “You see, I’m not born into a line that boasts a connection to the Ichor of the creator himself. No, I was much more of a ‘street’ vampire, as your mother would call it. That was until I was offered an opportunity to ascend the station my blood had given me, and all I had to do was play the part of a vulnerable human and make you fall in love with me. And I played my part very well. I even found myself growing quite fond of you. I have followed you with interest throughout the centuries. I would have come to claim what was rightly mine, but I was rather busy building a revolution. You see, I have the unique gift of being unremarkable. For it is the remarkable vampires who can’t live in the shadows they were born to. I thrive in the shadows, alongside the many who weren’t born remarkable and don’t have blood to make those shadows into grandeur with false light.”
His eyes flickered to the sparkling chandelier above us. “So I was recruiting the darkness dwellers within a race already banished to the darkness by humans and myths and the fear of being unmasked. And not just vampires. I’m charismatic, you see. It’s only the elite vampires who consider themselves above mixing with different species. It’s with me that the idea came to unite us all under a common purpose. To bring us all to the light, of course. Then watch the fucking world of humans
His accent on the harsh words was like a blade to the soul I’d created around his death.
“So there you have it, Mon Ange. The knowledge that my human murder was merely an inhuman death and a birth into my immortality and position at the throne, which I consider mine not through blood or divine right but through the darkness. Navigating it, becoming the lord of it and those who reside in it.” His eyes flickered to my mother.
“Not bad for a street vampire, if I do say so myself. Though I will need a queen. And I already have you. I do already own you,” he mused. “Once I exterminate anything that tries to challenge that, of course. And who has sullied that which I own with its human paws.”
The rage and violent promise of his words did something to the frozen molecules of my body, trapped somewhere between the past and the present.
Perhaps it was the words. Or the threat. Or sense returning, however little I had, finally clutching me in its grasp, firmer than the cold hands at my neck.
Or it was the emotions of the one I’d loved, truly loved more than this creature in front of me. The ocean of feelings crashing against the harsh rocks of my psyche, breaking through suddenly and brutally.
I didn’t move because, despite my rage combined with Thorne’s, he did have me vulnerable. I knew a death grip when I felt one.
Jonathan had one on my neck.
But Thorne had one on my heart. And his death would crush it. I was going to crush Jonathan either way.
“I’m not yours,” I hissed through his grip at my neck. “I never was. And the only thing I’ll be to you is the vampire who kills you.”
He regarded me and my words. “There’s the bloodlust I need in a queen,” he murmured. “Though unfortunately, you’re wrong. I’ll be the one to do the killing. I will admit you’re good at it, but I’m better. And I’ll make sure to be the vampire who kills everyone you care about and then kills whatever humanity lurks within that package I own before I claim it. For now, I’ll have to be the vampire who kills you. Because I’ll do you a mercy to make sure you don’t have to witness the death of your love. It’d be just cruel to make you witness that twice in an eternity.”