House of Ravens (29 page)

One pins my arms down, the other sitting on
my legs. And the third, his yellow eyes gleaming in the fading
light, smiles down at me, his fangs fully extended.

With a demonic-sounding laugh, he bends
down, and his teeth prick the skin at my throat.

He’s about to rip it out. And I can’t
move.

A rounding kick connects to
one head, freeing my arms. An arm swings, staking the one at my
feet, and with a growl that makes even
my
skin crawl, a blade cuts the head
clean from my attacker’s shoulders.

“
Liv!” Ian huffs as he
pulls me up and into his arms. “You shouldn’t be here fighting.
They’re all trying to kill
you
.”

A set of Bitten rush at us from behind Ian.
I whip around, yanking Ian’s knife from his hands, and throwing it
into a woman’s chest, burying my own blade into the other’s. “We
need every body we have.”

I whip around, my eyes searching for Rowan,
but he’s nowhere to be seen.

“
Is Cora still alive?” I
demand as I lower my shoulder, ramming into someone else and
sending them to the ground before pinning them to the ground with a
stake.

“
I assume so,” Ian yells as
he continues to fight. “After I wasn’t too happy with our reunion
this morning, her lackeys dragged me off. Haven’t seen her since
then.”

“
Do you know how many of
them are in the barn?” I call desperately as I fight three of them
off.

It feels like drowning. Just when I get my
head above the surface, another wave of them comes, with ten more
of them right behind the others.

“
Too many,” Ian says
gravely.

I give a great yell as I shove a yellow-eyed
woman off of me, reaching for another stake—except I’m out. Yanking
my knife from a man’s chest, I throw it, embedding it in the
woman’s chest.

For a brief moment, my eyes search the
battlefield.

There’s
well
over one hundred Bitten
swarming the space. The bodies stack up and I frantically search
for the members of my family.

Lillian and Nial fight back to back. Trinity
gives a great scream as she cuts a head off. Danny doesn’t even
look like he’s breaking a sweat as he fights.

But Cameron, Samuel, Leigh, Obasi—I can’t
find any of them.

And the panic swarms in my chest.

“
There’s too many of them,”
I whisper. Just before another group of Bitten rush at me. Ian
gives a great war cry as he spirals around, driving his blade deep
into a chest. I level my gun, firing three times in quick
succession before the magazine clicks empty.

“
Cora!” I scream as I stalk
toward the house, breaking in a man’s face on my way. “Come out
here and face me! If you want to take the House, you’re going to
have to pry it from my dead hands!”

I feel a maniac. Death and adrenaline burn
through my veins, prepared to destroy kingdoms and worlds.

A set of teeth sinks into my arm and I swing
around, stabbing my attacker as blood rushes up to my skin.

I look up, just as the front door opens to
the tiny house. As the great sliding door of the barn opens. As
bodies flood outside, so, so many of them.

Cora steps out onto the front porch.

The Daphne I knew is not the woman I see
before me.

She does not wear sunglasses as I last saw
her. Now I see the hollow sockets that have been sewn shut. And
while she was thin before, frail, she is skeletal now. Not an ounce
of fat gives her shape. She is bone only. Terrifying.
Disgusting.

I understand now. The curse. The storm that
swirled in the sky. The sense of doom that came and went, it was
always for Cora. And it’s being executed in the form of her slowly
decaying body. Starving.

“
You can’t win,” I call to
her, at least fifty feet still from where I keep defending myself
from. “With the King’s armies, with our numbers, it’ll never work.”
I jump out of the grasp of a man, slicing through the air for him,
missing. He grabs me by the throat, only that brings him within my
reach, and I bury my blade into his ribcage, piercing his heart.
“Walk away now,” I call to Cora. “Call them off, and we will let
you all leave. End all of the death.”

Her sightless face smiles in my direction.
It’s wide, showing all of her teeth, too big for her face. It’s
completely disturbing. The jawline is the only similarity I can
draw between her and Ian right now, she’s so far gone.

“
You’ve always been such a
fool,” she says, her voice again overly friendly and cheerful.
“Take a look around, my poor girl. See that now is not the time for
me to call surrender.”

I do look over my shoulder, and I can only
find Henry, Danny, Trinity, and Anna. All the others are nowhere to
be seen.

We’re going down, one by one, as the rising
tide crushes us.

“
House of Conrath, gather!”
I bellow, racing like a maniac through the masses that surround me,
fighting, killing. I swing, not causing enough damage to kill, only
temporarily wounding.

Hearing my call, the others begin to make
their way to the center of the battlefield. But the way isn’t easy.
We’re all being swarmed. There are so many bodies lining up. My
hair hangs in my face, saturated in blood. It sprays in my eyes,
clouding my vision momentarily.

The day grows dimmer as sunset bleeds into
the sky to match the earth below my feet.

And understanding dawns in my chest as it
grows darker. If this battle continues into nightfall, the Bitten
will be able to see with no problems from the day. They will be
able to coordinate and fight better.

If it gets dark, we won’t stand a
chance.

We’re going to die.

I reach Anna, and we stand back to back,
swinging, taking hits, bleeding everywhere. A few minutes later,
Danny reaches us. I still see Henry out in the distance, surrounded
by a horde.

“
We need to run,” Anna
says. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard a hint of fear in her
voice. “There’s too many of them.”

“
Not so sure we can get out
of this field,” Danny says, shaking his head as he kicks out his
booted foot, crushing in a man’s head. “They’re gonna follow if we
run.”

“
We gotta do
someth-”

But I’m cut off, completely drowned out by
the sound of a deep horn. Shaking, thunderous, deep and wild. It
vibrates out over the masses, shaking every one of us deep down to
the core.

Everybody stills momentarily, eyes turning
back toward the main road.

It’s quiet for just a moment. But the ground
begins to shake, the vibrations of so many feet pounding the
earth.

Down the road, with Noriko at the head of
what must be one hundred Born, comes an army.

They explode into the masses, limbs and
blood spraying through the air. Long swords flash through the dying
light. Screams of pain and war leap and echo through the air.

“
Conraths assemble!” I
bellow into the air. Because there’s no way this army will be able
to take the time to tell the difference between Born and
Bitten.

Through the crowd, I see Ian surface,
slashing and shooting, surging up from the masses. He cuts his way
through the Bitten. Out a little further, I see Smith, followed by
Nial.

Where are the rest?

Our small circles dart toward one another,
swinging and slashing, doing our best not to be overrun. Suddenly,
Markov pops out of the masses, his eyes glowing, his body covered
in blood.

“
Get Cora!” I bellow as we
fight. “I want her alive. For now.”

We run. We slaughter. We’re bitten,
scratched, attacked. But slowly, we work our way toward the house,
while the House of Himura mows down the Bitten army from
behind.

The tiny house sits so close, and out the
back, I see Cora slip, a bag over her shoulder, her skeletal frame
facing the woods.

“
She’s escaping!” Anna
bellows.

Suddenly, Markov and Danny are lifting Ian,
who is curled into a ball. With a great heave, they launch Ian over
the top of so many heads. He sails through the air, body
outstretched, before crashing into Cora. The two of them roll to
the ground, him wrestling her into the dirt, arms pinned behind
her.

“
Not those ones,” I
suddenly hear a voice from behind. I turn to see the Himura
warriors closing in, the warriors on the outskirts of their pack
still slaying the few remaining Bitten. Noriko’s eyes fix on me and
my House members. “The Conraths are not to be harmed.”

Through their ranks, I see Christian, Henry,
and Leigh move toward us.

Within twenty minutes of the House of
Himura’s arrival, they’ve slayed the last of the Bitten.

Bodies pile so high. There are hundreds of
them. Each an innocent life taken by Cora and her desire for
revolution. All killed for something they had no control over.

Ian and Smith drag Cora back to the front
steps of the tiny house she’s been living in. It’s amazing how much
expression is carried in the eyes. Her not having any, it’s hard to
tell what she’s feeling.

But the look on Ian’s face is quite clear:
Disgust. Horror. Disbelief.

I can’t even imagine how this must feel for
him.

“
Why?” Ian asks in a ragged
breath. “All of this? Why would you do this?”

The emotions are all there, just under the
surface. He’s barely keeping himself under control. I see it in his
white knuckles. In the way his teeth are clenched. In the
brightness of his eyes.

“
I tried to give you
something more,” she says with absolute confidence in her voice. “I
tried to give you the life I so badly wanted. There are so many
great, big things in this world, things even you do not understand.
Why shouldn’t
all
of us have the chance to grasp them?”

“
Look at all these people!”
Ian screams, throwing out his hand to the bodies that surround us.
She cannot actually look at them, but in this moment, it doesn’t
matter. “They are all dead because of this.
You
did this.”

“
I tried to change the
world,” she says quietly, still with no regret in her voice. “When
the one person I thought would have my back turned on me, when he
broke his promise that he would not contribute to this mad system,
I knew something had to be changed.”

“
It was you, wasn’t?” I ask
through the crowd. “You dug up my mother, not Jasmine. It was you
who triggered me. All the chaos and the politics and war.” Emotion
bites my eyes as I recall the moment that finally broke me. That
day changed me for the worse.

“
The potential was already
there, my friend,” Cora says as the smile begins to grow on her
face. It’s a cold and terrifying thing. “You only needed a little
push.”

“
You used me,” I say,
shaking my head. “You pretended to be my friend. Do you feel
nothing anymore? Are you that cold? What about Elle? You never even
came for your daughter.”

“
I tried,” she suddenly
snaps. “But she never left your house, and my Bitten failed in
retrieving her.”

I remember now. When Elle called me after
the break in and she was bitten. They were supposed to take her
back to her mother.

“
Fourteen years,” Ian
seethes. “You’ve been gone for fourteen years. You left us. Did you
just expect us to be a happy little family again?”

“
I expected you to help me
change the world!” Cora bellows. “You were born with so much
potential! I gave you what I could. I made sacrifices for us
all!”

“
So you turned your back on
your children?” Ian asks. The look of betrayal on his face, it’s
enough to break my heart. “I was ten.” And there, I crack. Tears
pool in my eyes. My bottom lip trembles. “Elle wasn’t even quite
two. And you left us.”

Cora takes a moment to respond. And I can’t
even imagine the twisted thoughts going through her head.
“Eventually, we all have to realize that this world is bigger than
us. We do what we have to.”

A shot rings out through the silent crowd.
We all jump, turning to see the tiny figure walking through the
crowd.

Elle, her eyes bloodshot, tears streaming
down her face, but looking completely empty and calm, walks across
the field of bodies, carrying a rifle.

My eyes widen, and I look back.

Cora hangs limp between Ian and Smith. Blood
seeps down the front of her shirt. Her hair hangs around her face,
absolutely still.

“
You don’t abandon the
people you love.” Elle’s voice comes out very small and quiet in
such a vast space. But her words pierce into the hearts of everyone
around her.

Slowly, Ian lowers Cora to the ground, his
eyes cold and distant as he takes in her lifeless face.

I blink once, the world moving very slow.
Very quiet.

It’s over.

This war that has been raging for nearly
eleven months. The one that caused so much pain. That ended so many
innocent lives. The one I went to prison for.

It’s done.

“
I thought this was going
to be more of a fight, the way you talked.”

I turn to see Noriko walking up behind me.
She has one small spray of blood across her cheek, stretching to
her nose, but other than that, she looks perfectly put together and
clean.

I don’t have any words for a long moment.
Too high of a high, and then too low.

“
Thank you,” I finally
manage. My tongue feels too thick, my throat too dry to speak. “We
would have died had you not shown up at just the right
moment.”