The Bloodline War (19 page)

Dizzied by his looming presence and the scorching heat coming off his body, she swayed backward. He reached out a hand, but not to steady her. No. He twisted a large paw into the front of her bloody sweater, then balled his other hand into a huge iron mallet and delivered her an unbelievable hammer of an uppercut. The blow snapped her chin back so hard it felt like her head came ripping partially off her neck.

She hurtled backward through the air, her sweater ripping out of the giant’s hold, and crashed to the cave floor onto her shoulder blades, flipping a backward somersault and sprawling facedown. A choked sob escaped her as agony blasted through her jawbones and ricocheted around in her skull. A strange buzzing noise shut down her ears and her eyeballs rolled into the back of her head.

The feel of a hand tangling in her hair jolted her back from her momentary slip into unconsciousness. The giant yanked her to her feet, and she cried out at the burning pain in her scalp. More black dots danced before her vision, making it seem like she was hallucinating when she saw Thomal, Nỵko, and Arc stampeding toward her from various directions of the cave.
Not close enough
….

The giant tossed her onto his shoulder. Somehow she managed to act through her swimming senses and drive the sharp point of her elbow into the median nerve of her captor’s neck. His grip loosened and she threw herself off his shoulder, hitting the rock floor with jarring impact. More birdies did laps around her head, singing her a lullaby, luring her back toward unconsciousness.

The giant locked a fist around her throat and hauled her to her feet. She heard a
whoosh
, and then the giant grunted, the hilt of a dagger suddenly appearing out of his shoulder. He spun in his attacker’s direction.

Jaċken!

Straight-arming her into immobility, the giant cocked back another knife. Jaċken was much closer now, an easy target…
no!
Her vision blurred and narrowed, blackness coalescing over the surface of her eyes. She wrapped a feeble hand around the giant’s wrist, the muscles in her neck straining as she fought to pull any amount of oxygen into her lungs.

The giant threw his knife.

Jaċken twisted out of the path of the blade, spinning a full 360. The knife screamed harmlessly past, but the attack had done its job. Jaċken was diverted long enough for the giant to sling her over his shoulder again and take off for the tunnels. Within seconds, he was passing through the still-smoking gate.

The need to vomit broke over her flesh in a cold sweat. Instinctively, she now knew those passageways weren’t the way out, but the way into some—

Whirr
, then
clunch-clunch
. Two knife handles were sticking out of the giant’s back, protruding on either side of her waist. Her captor roared and flung her to the ground, adding bruised ribs to her rapidly growing list of injuries. He turned and rushed Jaċken.

Half-blinded by sweat and tears, she watched from a fetal position on the ground as the two men went at each other with unmatched brutality, fists slamming into flesh in one bone-crushing punch after another, the relentless pounding of their blows echoing off the cave walls like thunder.

She’d never seen such violence in her life. Soon both men’s chests were heaving with exertion, their faces awash with sweat and blood. Jaċken’s left eye was rapidly swelling shut, and the giant’s nose was smashed out of alignment. The battle seemed to go on forever, although it probably only lasted the twenty seconds it took for Thomal, Nỵko, and Arc to pound onto the scene. The three men arrived just as the giant seized Jaċken by the throat and hiked him off his feet. With veins bulging on his forehead, Jaċken still managed to kick the giant in the stomach. The creature flung Jaċken at Nỵko.

The two men collided, hit the ground, and rolled across Thomal’s path. With a shout, Thomal leapt over the two warriors, barely clearing them. Jaċken was back on his feet in an instant, blasting toward the tunnel.

But the giant had already disappeared.

“Shit!” Boots planted wide, his lungs working furiously, Jaċken stood at the mouth of the tunnel and glared into it. “Fuck!” he shouted into the echoing chamber, frustration and anger apparent in every unyielding line of his body.

Toni pushed onto her hands and knees, coughing weakly, her breath rushing painfully along her tender throat. Her jaw felt as if someone had taken a baseball bat to it. She tried to rise, but couldn’t. Her legs had no more substance than overcooked spaghetti.

“Oh, Jesus, Toni.” Thomal hunkered down in front of her and took her by the shoulders, his expression clouding with concern. “You’re covered in blood.” He pressed his lips together as if hiding something in his mouth.

“I-It’s not my blood,” she stammered. “D-Dev, it’s…. Is he…?”

“Nỵko’s heading over to him now,” Thomal said softly. “He’ll be all right.”

She nodded her head, the movement stabbing pain into the backs of her eyeballs. She couldn’t seem to stop crying. Maybe this was what hysteria felt like. She turned and looked for Jaċken.

He was standing several feet away, his bloody face a rigid, unreadable mask, his dark eyes devoid of emotion. “Jaċken….” Her lips trembled and then her whole body began to shake. “Don’t—” She reached out a hand to him, feeling suddenly like he was the only one who could keep all of the monsters of the world under the bed where they belonged.
Don’t leave me
.

He stood wooden and unmoving, making no effort to approach her.

You know, for someone who’s probably real smart about most things in life, you seem to have your head particularly far up your ass about staying away from me
.

She let her hand fall.

Arc placed a palm on Thomal’s shoulder. “Let’s get Toni to Dr. Jess.”

A final tear slipped from her eye. She tilted sideways, and the last thing her conscious mind registered was that it was Thomal who caught her when she fainted dead away.

Chapter Twenty

Jaċken stood in front of Toni’s bedroom door and fidgeted with the cold thermos he was carrying. Shit, just how many sandwiches short of a picnic was he? Three hours ago at Garwald’s he’d all but planted his size thirteens on Toni’s ass to get her away from him, and now here he was standing outside her
bedroom
. Fucking genius.

He should just go. He took a step backward, but then hesitated, staring at the Eiffel Tower on her door. Thing was, he might be a lot of damned things—a hard, difficult man, a real prick sometimes—but he was never undependable. Ask any of his warriors and they’d say he was the most reliable son of a bitch out there, a man anyone would want watching his six. And, no, maybe he didn’t know thing one about being there for a woman, but that didn’t mean it was sitting well with him that he’d let Toni down.

She’d needed him after that gut-wrenching near-Gwyn reenactment at The Outer Edge tonight. Not Thomal, but
him
. He’d figured out that much in the hours he’d paced his bedroom while Toni was being tended in the mansion’s basement clinic.
What
she’d needed was still a bit of a mystery to a man with his limited understanding of females, but whatever it was, he’d been too catatonic with his own fear to give it to her. Yeah,
him
, a guy who faced the possibility of death in battle as easily as he picked out his breakfast cereal. A guy who’d been beaten, stabbed and tortured more times than he cared to count had been scared out of his ever-loving mind when he’d seen Toni on the ground in Stânga Town, banged up and covered in blood.

He swallowed convulsively as he pictured her in Oţărât right now, serving as some Om Rău’s party favor. He gripped the thermos in a hard fist.
All right, enough of this crap
. If he kept on like this, he’d end up standing in front of her door doing jack diddly squat, just like in Stânga Town, maybe start in on some blubbering. That’d be real fucking manly.

Drawing in a tight breath, he knocked softly on Toni’s door. She didn’t answer. Christ, knowing his luck, she’d off’ed herself because he was such an unmitigated bastard. Muttering under his breath, he pushed open the door and stepped into her room. No one was inside…no Toni hanging from a light fixture, either, at least.

He paused to look around, some of his tension easing. The place felt like Toni now. Her delicious scent saturated everything, of course, but more than that, she’d made the room her own with a collection of paperbacks on a corner bookshelf, a different bedspread, kind of a puffy, pale purple comforter, and about half a dozen framed photographs. Most were of an older blonde woman—probably Toni’s mother to judge by the resemblance—and of a guy about Toni’s age, strawberry-blond like her, but wearing glasses. A brother? Jaċken shifted his boots restlessly, feeling oddly like an intruder, yet also suddenly wanting to know everything about her.
Do you know that I once sat on my brother for fifteen minutes to get him to let me play with his red fire truck?
That kind of shit was, you know, really cool to find out about.

He swiveled his head abruptly at the sound of retching coming from the open door of the bathroom.
Ah, hell
.

He crossed into the bathroom and stopped just inside the doorway, his gut twisting. Toni was slumped against the side of a gargantuan bathtub, her eyes watery and still haunted with the trauma she’d endured, her face colorless except for a vivid bruise on her jaw. His heart took a nosedive into his soft spot at full speed, the way it always seemed to do whenever he saw her looking so damned vulnerable. Fuck him for failing to protect her better.

“Go away,” she told him, though not unkindly. “Don’t you know that girls don’t like anyone to see them barf.”

“Here.” He stepped forward and offered her the thermos. “Drink this. It’ll make you feel better.”

She didn’t take it. “How’s Dev?” she asked thickly, wiping a small towel across her mouth.

“Recovering. More worried about you.” A sentiment he could totally relate to. He squatted down on his haunches and pressed the thermos into her hand.

“What is it?”

“A mixture of juices: my own recipe. I, uh, have a bit of personal experience with puking over the things Lørke can do to a person.”

“Oh.” Her eyes ran over his battered face. “You look like reconstituted hell, by the way.”

He propped a forearm on his thigh. “I suppose it wouldn’t surprise you to hear I’ve been called worse?”

She snorted at hearing the words she’d spoken to him at Garwald’s repeated back to her. Lowering her eyes, she added, “I owe you my thanks, Jaċken. I would’ve died out there tonight if you hadn’t saved me from that fiend. Of course”—her chin came back up—“I’d like to point out that it wouldn’t have been an issue if you hadn’t kidnapped me in the first place.”

He pressed his lips together into something close to a smile. “Noted.”

She fiddled with the thermos lid for a moment. “What…happened out there tonight, Jaċken? I’ve never seen a knife do what it did to Dev. It just exploded in his shoulder. And that giant man walked through what looked like a spray of electricity as if it was no more than a field of daisies.” She met his gaze. “What’s going on?”

He sat back on his heels and sighed. “Are you sure you want to know? I mean, Christ, you’re still not entirely convinced you’re living among Vârcolac.”

She eyed him intently through a long pause. “I think I need to know.”

He massaged the back of his neck. “All right, then. Here it is. The man who attacked you is Lørke, one of the leaders of a neighboring town called Oţărât, home to another species of human. Like Vârcolac, their people are incredibly strong and fast, but their Peak 12, their aggression gene, is mutated, escalating their hostility and violent behavior off the charts. They lack impulse control and a sense of morality, they’re nearly impossible to kill, and they can create enchanted knives called Bătaie Blades, which you saw in action on Dev today. All of that makes them very dangerous beings. We call them Om Rău.” He paused.
Here comes the fun part
…. “Regular human lore and legend would probably refer to them as demons.”

She blinked once, then dropped her face into her hand. “Oh, God. Of course. Yes. “Demons” and “vampires” all living in unhappy discord together half a mile below the earth’s surface. Why not?”

He glanced aside. Yeah, he’d figured as much.

“Okay….” She opened the thermos and gulped some juice. “Okay, so how do I come into this? Why did that Lørke monster want to kill me? It didn’t seem like he was just acting out of simple demonic impulsivity.”

“Your death is the last thing Lørke would’ve wanted. He was trying to knock you senseless enough to kidnap you easily into Oţărât. He wants to breed you, same as we do. Lørke and his kind
can
have children with regular females, but those offspring turn out weaker, and with fewer Om Rău traits, so they want your Dragon bloodlines.”

Her face reddened and her brows drew down. “And you’ve known about this all along,” she accused, struggling to a standing position.

He stood, as well, his head down to hide a grimace.

“Why the hell didn’t you warn me, Jaċken?”

“Roth doesn’t like to scare the new acquisitions any more than they already are.” Another topic of contention between the two men.

“That’s great.” She
plunked
the thermos on the edge of the tub. “Have you ever lost a woman? Holy crap,” she hissed when his face colored. “Jaċken, please.” She grabbed his forearm. “You have to get me out of this place before something worse happens.
Please
. I’m in mortal danger here, stuck in the middle of some…some bloodline war between your kind and these Om Rău.”

He paused for a moment, struggling to overcome the feel of her hand on his arm so that he could stay in this conversation.

She moved closer, her demeanor changing. Her eyes turned limpid blue. “You said that you know what it’s like to feel trapped, remember?”

He became aware of her body heat, warm and feminine, and how it laced with her scent in a way that was entirely too intimate for his well-being and sanity. What she’d said was even more dangerous, forging a connection between them that had no right to be there. Had no place to go. Why had he said that to her at The Shank Took, damn him? The next time he had the brilliant impulse to comfort a woman, he should just stab himself.