Beloved Vampire (65 page)

He wasn’t making that mistake again. If he couldn’t take them down, he would make damn sure they took him out, and she would be safe.

“If I intended to let you survive this day, Trenton, I’d haul your ass before the Council and let you explain your actions to them.” He swept his gaze over the others. “Even if you managed by some miracle to kill me, they’ll still hunt all of you down.”

“Doubtful.” Trenton sneered, an unattractive look for his otherwise attractive features. “The Council doesn’t like you all that much.

And for all your fierce reputation, we figured a way to reach your property without detection, my lord. You’re outnumbered and cornered, and I think you’re nowhere near as dangerous as Council thinks.” He jutted his chin out, glancing at Jessica. “Why protect her? Why is she worth that?”

“This has nothing to do with my human servant,” Mason retorted. “You’ve forfeited your life for attempting to take what’s mine. As far as being outnumbered and cornered, hunting a crippled rabbit on open ground would be harder than ripping your hearts from your chests.”

He narrowed his focus on Trenton and could imagine doing it, enough that his fangs started lengthening. There was some nervous shifting, but he already knew intimidation wasn’t going to do the full job. They were too committed, too bolstered by their numbers to back down.

“You’ve gone stupid over a human cunt, the same way it’s ru mored you did three hundred years ago,” Trenton snarled. “Once we chain you down and punish her for her crime against Raithe, maybe you’d do well with some pain yourself, to remember what being a vampire is about. Maybe you’ll beg for
my
mercy.”

“This is ending only one way, Trenton. With your death.”

“Not if we get you first,” the vampire to Trenton’s right snapped. Yanking the crossbow to his shoulder, he fired, despite Trenton’s angry shout of protest.

During the exchange, Jessica had been struggling to hold on to her composure, to remain as outwardly dispassionate as Mason. As the tension built, she’d realized this was going to escalate quickly beyond a war of words. She’d warred between growing terror, anger, and an overwhelming need to escape, to run.

When the crossbow fired, that desire disappeared. She leaped up. At the same moment, Mason’s voice resonated in her mind. Not the rebuking tone he’d used in the past, but pure command, the voice of a Master who would be obeyed, or there would be Hell to pay.

Get down.

She dropped without thought, but he was already on her, yanking her down and spinning as several arrows shot over the railing, singing past the arrow that had fired at his chest. It spun off into the gardens, but one of the others went into his side, above his hip bone. Fleetingly, she realized it was where her unprotected back had been a blink before. He shoved her back down, putting her against one of the wider support posts, and then turned to confront the vampires. Snatching the arrow out of his flesh, Mason tossed it aside, ignoring the spurt of blood that stained the waistband of the jeans, though Jessica gasped as some of it splattered her skirt.

“You’ve already lost, Trenton,” he hissed, his voice roughening, traces of civility disappearing. “She is beyond your reach, and in truth, far above your worth.”

Jessica’s gaze rebounded to his face in time to see amber burst into flame, his face transforming into the rictus of a desert djinn about to unleash Hell. The voice that resonated in her head was raw with fury.
They won’t get to you. I swear it.

“Your fight is with me,” Mason stated, now ignoring Trenton, instead moving his gaze over all the rest. “Take me down,
children
, and all the opulence you see is yours. Enough to bloat parasites like you.” He bared his fangs. “But you have to kill me to get to it.”

“Actually, your fight is with all of us.”

Trenton spun around. Danny stepped out of the shadows from the open ballroom doors. She held a saber in either hand, the blades catching the flash of the outdoor sconces. Dev was at her side, wearing a brace of pistols, as well as an impressive array of daggers and wooden stakes. He had a shotgun leveled on his shoulder, the green eyes that had smiled at Jessica at breakfast now cold and steady.

“And he’s right, Mason,” she added. “The Council
doesn’t
like you. You really need to work on those people skills.”

“This isn’t your fight.” Mason kept his unsettling gaze on the vampires holding crossbows, the menace in his voice unmistakable.

“Damn right it isn’t. Doesn’t mean I’m not a part of it now.” She flicked her attention at Trenton, catching him in a glance toward the upper level. “Took care of those crossbow snipers behind the widow’s peaks. Dev’s very handy with a knife. Not to mention your servants are slow.”

Jessica noticed several of Dev’s blades were bloodstained, as Danny offered a chilling smile. “You shouldn’t ever use first-marked servants for an attack.” Her blue eyes glinted with a tinge of red, revealing a hint of the formidable Region Master that Mason suggested she was. “No way for them to tell you they’re dead, or under attack. If you want Mason’s land, have the balls to fight him like a vampire, not a fucking human hunter.”

Trenton tightened his lips in fury. As the invaders shifted, muttered, Danny looked toward Mason, saluted him with the right blade.

Then she was in motion.

Go into the house.
As Danny charged and the shotgun roared its first report, Jess heard the uncompromising command in her mind. Mason sprang forward with the blond vampire, both faster than she could follow. The two crossbow holders fired, but Jessica saw instantly that the weapons were only effective if the vampire was immobile or caught unawares in the sights. Both arrows went wide, and in that blink of time, Mason and Danny were among them.

The first crossbow holder, the one who’d taken the shot at Jessica, was Silas, Trenton’s closest crony. He attempted to meet Mason’s charge and was knocked down like a sapling, Mason taking him to the stone tile. Her brain locked up, everything in her freezing as Mason plunged his fist through the chest cavity and came back with the heart, flinging it away and snapping Silas’s neck in almost the same motion. Springing up, he left him in his death throes to meet the rush of two more.

The crossbow of the second vampire skidded across the tiles as Danny knocked his arm up with her guard and then skewered him, bringing up her booted foot to shove him off her blade. She smoothly sidestepped as Dev’s knife sliced through the air above her shoulder and lodged in the throat of one of the human servants. By good fortune it was the servant of Mason’s next opponent. The vampire stumbled, gripped by the brief paralysis that afflicted younger vampires when their servants were killed. That moment sealed his fate, and another heart hit the tiles with a sickening splat.

Jessica screamed, startled out of her shock, when the seven from below scaled up the walls and joined the fight, but none paid any attention to Jessica. As Mason had accurately stated, they wanted the property more than they wanted Trenton’s vengeance. If they took him down, they got them both, and he was far more of a threat to them than a girl cowering against the railings.

Despite their greater experience, Danny and Mason were now vastly outnumbered. Jessica jerked herself out of her stupor. Seizing the abandoned crossbow, she scrambled away from the fight.

Mason, locked in combat with another vampire, caught the flash of a stake coming down and swung to the side, knocking his vampire opponent into the human servant who’d made the attempt. Dev was suddenly there, sweeping the man’s legs as he brought the butt of his shotgun down on the skull, crushing it and ducking aside as Danny swept by with her dual swords, a spinning, graceful dance Mason knew even Amara would have envied.

Mason yanked one of Dev’s stakes out of his improvised baldric as he passed, and jammed it into the chest cavity of his third victim. As he bent to yank it free, reuse it, an arrow whizzed over his head. He spun in time to see one of two vampires rushing his back fall to the ground, the arrow lodged in the heart cavity.

He ducked the rush of the second one, seized him about the waist and brought him down on his knee, breaking his spine like kindling. He flipped the stake and used it again, then sprang to his feet, back-tracking the path of the arrow.

Jessica had made it to the opening to the ballroom, but not to hide, as he’d ordered her. As he watched, she reloaded the crossbow with remarkable speed, but he wasn’t interested in her impressive weapons training or marksmanship.

Jessica, get under cover. Now.

Trenton had vanished, and Mason didn’t like not knowing where he was. Plus, while the vampires were focused on him, if she kept firing at them, they would decide she needed to be handled on her own merit.
Damn it, Jessica—

As she shouldered it to take aim again, he swore. “They never listen.”

“Tell me about it,” Danny grunted, lunging past him. Her blade slashed, spraying them both with blood as she disemboweled the screaming vampire. Close behind them, he heard the report of one of Dev’s pistols.

Mason flung himself at two more coming at him, a vampire with a mallet, his human with a mace. When he knocked the mallet loose, he caught the mace’s chain, swinging the servant toward the ballroom. Jessica’s next arrow went through his back, so Mason could spin around and crack the vampire’s neck.

Danny and Dev had been fighting in a rotating, loose back-to-back triangle with him, so Danny finished off the vamp with a decapitation strike. Mason pivoted around, seeking Jessica again. In that moment, everything slowed and stopped, for he found Trenton. And Trenton found Jessica.

The vampire leaped from the recesses of the ballroom when her head was down to reload. She cried out when he seized her about the waist, knocked the bow from her hands and threw her up against the outside wall with bone-crushing force.

If rage alone could have killed Trenton, he would have been dead. But it wouldn’t, and she was a human going toe-to-toe with a vampire. She made a futile attempt to bring up the arrow she still had clutched in her hand. Mason moved faster than he’d ever moved before, but Trenton plunged the steel spike into her chest just as his hand reached the vampire’s shoulder.

A hoarse scream erupted from her throat. It wrenched in Mason’s vitals, the threat of an impending severed connection between him and his servant. A mortal blow. He stumbled into Trenton, but still managed to slam him forward, take him through the outer brick and inner Sheetrock of the ballroom wall. It was enough to knock his opponent insensible, but Mason wasted no time beyond putting him down to scramble to her side.

It was fortunate no one was in his path, for he couldn’t tell friend from foe. Everything was an obstacle between him and Jess.

Danny and Dev fell back to flank him then, putting the ballroom at their backs as he went to one knee by her. Allah, be merciful, she was soaked in blood, her body jerking, her eyes unfocused. Death throes. He could feel it in his own marrow, in the strangled pounding of his heart. The remaining vampires and humans were closing in, decimated but still greater in number than their small force, particularly now that only Danny and Dev were able to engage.

Run
. . . Jessica’s eyes focused on him, struggling to hold his gaze. Her voice in his head was faint.
It’s senseless for us to both
die. Meant to be. Can’t go back to my world. Can’t
. . .
stay in yours. Proof
. . .
should have died
. . .
in tomb.

Habiba
, you go nowhere without my permission. We go together or not at all.
Picking up the pike that had gone through her chest, he drove the sharpened end into his own. She gasped, strangling on a cough. His lips curled back at the agonizing pain, the sudden gush of heart’s blood, the richest blood a vampire could offer to a servant. Urgency taking precedence over care, he gripped the back of her neck and brought her mouth there, flooding her mind with his voice, his demand.

Drink,
habiba
. We will argue about this later, but you
must
live.

He repeated it, holding her close against his chest as her mouth moved awkwardly against him. Inserting his fingers between them to guide the flow of blood, he brought her lips to the place the blood was flowing most strongly. Her hand gripped his arm, a silent answer to his strong emotion. Dizziness took him. He knew he should be helping Danny and Dev, that if they lost ground, they were all lost. But if he left her now, she would die.

I refuse to live without her. She is my third-marked servant. A servant follows her Master into eternity. She is afraid of the
dark, and I won’t let her be alone in the dark.

He was lost in such thoughts, pleas, prayers or threats, he didn’t know which. It took a battle cry, thunderously deeper than the rest of the battle noises, to return him to the present. Lifting his head, he blinked hazily to see two vampires spinning away from the back of the attacking group, their clothes and flesh on fire. It was an Irish war cry that had heralded Jacob, brandishing two torches. He staked another vampire with one of them in a swift move that exploded fire out the vampire’s back. Then he was darting forward, cutting a swath through the now confused group.

He was shouting. “Fall back! Duck down and—”

Abandoning gestures or words, he dropped the remaining torch, caught Danny and Dev’s arms and plowed forward, bringing them down over Mason and Jessica, their three bodies shielding the two wounded as the world erupted behind Jacob’s broad shoulders.

Mason, with his back to the wall, holding Jessica fast against him, saw the remaining vampires spin around, warned by Jacob’s yell, only to confront a puzzling nothingness. A nothingness that exploded with a lethal percussion. Abruptly, seven remaining vampires and a handful of human servants were jerking, convulsing like dolls being shaken violently. Only their feet remained rooted to the ground, an appropriate choice of words, Mason realized, given what erupted from their bodies.

Branches speared out of their arms, the main leader shooting out from their wrists, obliterating hands in horrifying expulsions of flesh and blood. Vegetation bloomed, fresh and green from the branches, spattered with blood as smaller branches erupted from the soft tissue orifices of the eyes, noses and ears. Skin sprouted bark, and heads disappeared in the enclosure of thick trunks that shot up from the ground. Limbs broke and shattered as flowers and fruit bloomed. The feet expanded into fully mature root systems, cracking the marble tile like sharp gunshots. The verandah rumbled ominously.