Chapter 20

I"ve never felt such pain in my life. I never imagined such unbearable agony could even exist.

Fire, spurts and licks and whorls of golden-white flame, surges from my pores, envelops my skin, ignites the fine hairs on my arms and legs and neck.

It burns, fuck, it burns.

This is where I do something epic. Access heretofore unknown levels of power and vaporize her or turn her into a chicken and cook her over a spit or something.

I can"t.

All I can do is scream.

My legs buckle, my knees shake. I can"t see, can"t breathe, can"t catch my breath to keep screaming, so my lungs run empty and still my brain tries to make me scream, doubling me over and forcing me to retch in a futile attempt to catch my breath.

Just so I can scream again, so I can express the horrific torment searing me from the inside out.

If I hit my knees, I"m dead, and it"s all over.

She"s right there, right in front of me. Not a foot away, cackling like a hyena at the sight of me, on fire, screaming in agony.

"Didn"t know magic could burn, did you, infant?"

Well.

That was a mistake.

I'mnot on fire—only my vitality is.

I delve into my mind, hunting for something specific. Magic burns, inside. Ignited, conflagrated, searing and scorching but never being devoured, never used up. My magic, the level of it, is untouched. It"s just…on fucking fire.

But lucky me, I"m not just a fae.

I find what I"m looking for: a kind of dividing line. A chasm, narrow but infinitely deep, dividing my soul—fae, and vampire.

Dividing my body.

I am fully both, and yet not fully either, nor yet a complete admixture of both. Yeah, it doesn"t make any sense to me either.

I"m a vaer, and I can do this:

I tap into the burning magic, accepting the renewed heights of agony as the enflamed vitality coats my mental hands, catches the edges of my mind and my soul like liquid flame swallowing me whole. I can"t breathe, but I don"t need to. I tap into the magic, unable to scream, and the pain becomes fury, becomes rage, and I use that, as well.

I visualize a glass dome and I slam it down over the hemisphere of my being that is fae—vitality and all. Nothing in, nothing out.

My vitality continues to burn inside the dome, but it is removed from me, for now.

Instantly, the agony vanishes.

I straighten, slowly, and suck in a shuddering breath.

My fangs elongate, and I feel my eyes become subsumed by the black, and I feel icy cold steal over me and feel my skin turn to marble, to granite.

"What?" Calliope is shocked, again. "What—what did you do, child?"

There are so many things I want to do to this vile, ancient creature.

Too many options.

So…

I punch her in the nose.

My fist is a block of ice-cold marble propelled by inhuman strength.

It"s something akin to a rock smashing through a watermelon.

Her nose crumples, and her cheekbones, and her jaw. Blood spurts, lovely, delicious, fragrant fae blood, honey and sunlight—tainted, but still so sweet.

It flecks my cheeks and nose and lips, and I lick it.

I feel her respond, because of course it"s not that easy. She sends a bolt of healing through herself, enough to keep her alive but only just.

She doesn't have much power, I realize. Her vitality is a vast lake, miles across…but only a few feet deep.

Mine?

It"s a true ocean. Thousands of leagues across, and miles deep.

She, like my grandfather, has had eons to learn how to do much with very little.

The power of practice, I suppose, is the lesson, here.

Fuck the lesson.

Calliope staggers backward, gasping, gurgling, clutching her face.

I feel the internal, infernal conflagration gutter and go out, but I leave my fae self encased for now.

I pounce, giving in fully to the vampire in me, letting its primal savagery take over.

I snag a handful of thick coarse white hair and yank her skull backward, chin high, dancing behind her—blood sluices down her throat, and she chokes on it.

What a waste of such deliciously powerful blood.

Her hands reach for me, claw at me—I let her. They try to gouge my eyes, but scrabble harmlessly at my cheeks.

I slam my fangs into her throat and draw a deep pull of her blood, blocking the pheromone, allowing her to feel the fullness of the pain as I suck her blood down my throat.

It"s hot.

Ripe.

Pungent.

Honey and sunlight—sour honey, and weak sunlight. And more—the rotten things. The power of destruction bubbles in her blood.

I pull.

I catch glimpses of her life: bright Greek sunlight and rippling azure sea; a hovel of sticks and mud on a shoreline. A mother, exiled as a "witch". Children mocking, mocking, mocking.

A child, a village bully, drained of vitality and left for dead on his mother"s doorstep.

A flight across the Aegean on a makeshift raft.

Years and years and years alone, on a rocky, barren island, subsisting on roots and herbs and the occasional fish—and the vitality of wayward fishermen.

Rumors off a witch, a siren—I see her reflection in a pool of rainwater, and she was, then, truly and shockingly beautiful.

Kings sailed to her shitty little island and sought her advice, her power. Traded riches for simple glamours she could work in her sleep.

Traded their fines and most handsome young sailors and soldiers and princes for love potions and wisdom elixirs and "prophecies". She would woo and seduce the young men, play with them, show them the most erotic night of their lives…and then drain them of vitality and toss their corpses to the sharks… which she glamoured to do her bidding: devour the evidence

Rumors, legends, and stories abounded. Was she the real Calliope from the myths, returned to mortal lands?

No.

But she let the mortals believe it.

All this, I see, in a matter of a heartbeat, maybe two—heartbeats I taste, feel, hear.

I draw her blood, and shatter the glass dome over my vitality, and draw her magic into myself.

I feel her trying to scream, trying to fight.

Roots curl around my ankles, creep up my thighs.

Let them.

Dirt wells up around my ankles, up to my knees, up to my waist, and roots twine and wind around my chest and throat and try to choke me.

The fire erupts in my veins again, but it"s a flicker of candle flame rather than the wildfire it was before.

I barely feel it.

In fact—I share the flames with my prey.

I don"t know how. Another instinct.

Fire soars skyward around us, a curtain of golden-white flames twenty feet high in a ragged dancing sun-hot ring around Calliope and me.

They devour me. My hair ignites, becomes burning vitality, and my skin ignites, and my eyes ignite.

Calliope burns.

Her blood refuses to mix in my veins, like oil and water.

Her vitality…it"s like sludge, rather than water.

Fuck, I can"t take it. Not her blood and not her vitality.

Let it burn.

I let the fire consume me, let my vitality WHUMP into flame, and now instead of my magic burning, it's hers, like jet fuel burning on the surface of the sea.

Her blood burns in my veins.

Someone is screaming—her, and me.

Dirt wells up around my eyes and into my nose and mouth and chokes off my scream, and I taste grit and soil with the sour honey and drab sunlight of her blood, and

I let that burn too.

Let it all burn.

The roots burn, searing my skin where they touch, and the dirt burns in my nose and mouth and eyes and hair.

Calliope burns.

I burn.

Mae?

Caspian"s voice is cool and soft and gentle and sweet and it is home, it is comfort.

Destroy them all, Cas. They surrender, or they die. This is war, after all.

The mortal in me is burning up. Being consumed.

These fae are merely obeying orders…

But they should know better.

Calliope is ancient, and so much age and so much power takes time to burn away, to be consumed.

I hold her in place and drink her blood and drain away her vitality and I let the flames burn it all away until there"s nothing left but bones.

Even then, I hear her screaming down in the black depths, and I feel her raging against the implacable pull of Death, the currents of which drag her down, uncaring and insentient.

Death is no friend, Death is no master.

Death is the final destination, so far as I know.

Slowly, her screams fade in the recesses of my mind, quieting, and going silent.

The wall of golden-white flames reduces to a ring of licking, creeping liquid fire on the ground, and then it vanishes.

"Maeve?" Caspian"s voice, a few feet away.

Voices—moans, whimpers, crying, groans.

I can"t see.

Everything hurts.

Hurt is not enough of a word.

There isn"t one.

I blink, but I"m not sure if my body complies, or if I can"t feel it, or if I don"t have eyelids anymore.

Burning, burning, burning.

"You"re on fire, Maeve."

Oh. Still?

I thought the fire went out.

Oh.

I"m still burning—Calliope"s blood still burns within me, her vitality still burns within me.

"C-can"t—can"t…stop," I whisper, whimper. "Her blood…her magic. Has—has to…burn…away."

"There are too many, Mae." He is in pain. "I can"t take them all on by myself."

I smell Death, and fae blood.

And magic.

"Why…why can"t I see?" I grate out, my rough and hoarse and hissing.

"You…your eyes, your hair…everything is—you"re on fire, Maeve. All of you."

"Stay—away."

"Yeah, I got that."

"How many."

"How many are left?" I nod, and he groans in pain. "Too many. More came while you were…doing whatever you were doing in that huge pyre."

"Killing her."

"The old fae woman?"

"Ancient. Evil. The source of…old myths."

I sense them, out beyond me. The fire—it aches inside me. The pain is so white-hot it almost doesn"t register. Almost.

I sense so many lives. So many points of heat and blood. A hundred? Two hundred?

They don't want me to succeed.

I feel them. I feel their hearts. I cast out and search, sense, attune. Is this fae or vampire, this ability to scent their soul, their intention?

Neither. It"s just…me.

"S-stand, and…and face them," I say to Caspian.

I feel him comply. I direct my senses through him, through the bloodbond—which is a golden river of pure light streaming between us, a river I can swim upstream within, until I reach him.

I see through his eyes, then.

And I see an army.

Fae. Vampires. Shifters. Armed and armored, with immortal weapons and with automatics and tear gas and flashbangs and riot shields.

Bodies lay strewn about, littering the street. Ripped limb from limb, eviscerated, exsanguinated, drained, decapitated.

Caspian is soaked with blood, from head to toe.

Bare scalp drips blood. Chin, lips, ears. He bares his teeth, and they too are coated crimson.

He is shot in several places, stabbed, cut, and blasted with some immortal energy weapon.

And yet he survives—his pain is mine, and mine is his, and my life is his and his is mine.

We are one.

So much Death—Its waters run deep, here.

"What do I do?" Caspian mutters.

"Nothing."

The fire burns, burns, burns, but it"s thinner now, less hot. I still can"t see, but I can feel my body.

God, it hurts. Everything hurts.

I find my feet, and feel shards of concrete stab my soles, crunched into nothing beneath the marble of my vampiric flesh. Bones crumble—Calliope"s.

I can"t see—everything is white, white, blinding, dancing, moving white. Like closing your eyes and staring at the sun.

I feel Caspian beside me, and take another step. Agony rocks me, and I shake—I feel Caspian move, but jerk away.

"Don"t! I don"t know what the fire will do to you, Cas."

"Mae, you—"

"I know. It"ll be fine. I"ll be fine. Eventually."

I step out into the no-man"s-land between Caspian and me and the forces arrayed against us.

I hear gunfire chattering and feel my coven through the bond—killing, fighting, running.

Magic thrums inside me. I call upon it, no longer merely cupping a palmful or dipping a toe. I dive into the turbulent, burning sea of magic and swim in it.

Become it.

"IMMORTALS!" My voice booms like thunder, echoes like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

"HEAR ME!"

The city falls silent.

Birds no longer chirp. Traffic, rerouted around this warzone, stills. Horns no longer honk. Sirens no longer howl.

Gunfire ceases.

I can almost see, now. Images dance, outlines and silhouettes wreathed in flame.

I lift my arms and extend my hands like Moses parting the Red Sea—the Charlton Heston version, beloved by my mother.

"I am a vaer." I don"t need to shout—magic carries my voice. "I am a vampire and fae—the child of a vampire and a fae. I am one of you, and I am more. I am your future. You wish to be free from the Treaty? You wish to bear children? To see your family lines continue? Look beyond the mortals! Look beyond your own kind!" I reach for Caspian, and take his hand; the flames lick up his hand and arm, sizzle on marble and die out. "This is my bloodmate. With him, I have conceived a child. The first of a new breed of immortal."

I feel a myriad of senses reaching for me, and I let them caress my womb, taste the life there, smell the nascent heartbeat that will grow there.

I hear and sense shock rippling through the ranks.

"Your superiors want me dead or captive—they don"t want the change that I represent. They want you to hate me, to fear me. My mother was the victim of an experiment; I didn"t ask to be born—to be CREATED, no more than any of you asked to be born under the restrictions of the Treaty. None of us asked to be weighed down by the Treaty, by the limitations of immortal reproduction.

"I am NOT advocating war against the mortals! We can live in harmony with them—if we can find a new path forward."

A figure steps forward—my sight is still somewhat obscured by flames, but I think the figure is a vampire. Old. Male. Powerful, and fearsome. "You ask us to mate with our enemy?"

I laugh. "Your enemy? Who is your enemy? The fae around you? The fae you"re working with to capture or kill me? The fae you"ve lived peacefully alongside for almost three hundred years? Perhaps not peacefully, but they"re not your enemy. Shifters are not your enemy. There is no enemy. Mortals are not. I am not. Fae, vampire, shifter…and vaer. we are one race. One people."

"What will your offspring be?" he asks.

"I don"t know." I clasp Capian"s hand tighter. "My child we be loved by me, and his or her father, whether vampire or vaer or something else."

"We have existed under the status quo for hundreds of years. Why should we change anything on your word?" this is a fae, a young female.

"I"m not changing anything—or rather, I'm not saying you should change anything." I lighten my body and use a burst of magic to lift myself upward on a geyser of air—levitating, it would seem. "My existence is the change. I am the change. The status quo is gone, Luorana Mackenzie. The status quo was eradicated the moment my grandfather, Elias Sparrow, had my mother kidnapped and forcibly impregnated against her will by a nameless, faceless vampire—who was as much a victim as my mother, Eliza Sparrow. The status quo was changed when I was born, in secret, because my mother feared for her life, and mine. The status quo was destroyed when my mother was executed without a trial, without charges, and without reason other than the Tribunal and IRRC"s desperation to keep my existence from becoming public knowledge among immortals.

"Why? Because of what I represent: a chance for immortals to step into society with mortals. Not superior and not a guilty party to be punished. Just different.

"They fear the change, the intermixing of immortal blood—fae with shifter, vampire with fae, shifter with vampire. What will it be? What will we look like? What powers will we have? No one knows. But it"s that or continue the slow death of immortal kind—that is the future we face. How long can our kind last? Another twenty years? A century maybe? We may live forever, but we can"t reproduce. My line, the Sparrows, will live on. Caspian"s line will live on—and did you know that my bloodmate is the last immortal born before the Treaty? The last legal one, at least."

I cup my belly. "Till now. And yes, you can enforce the rules. You can try, at least. But I will not allow you to harm my child or my mate. And if you think you can defeat me, I invite you to try."

Still levitating on a geyser of air, I let the flames ignite along my arms and hands and legs and feet—harmless, this time. A trick.

Absurdly, I only now realize I"m nude. The fire burned away my clothes.

And my hair…

My hair is fire. Not on fire—it is fire. White-gold flame, dancing around my shoulders, luminous and glittering with fae magic. Even when I douse the flames on my skin, my hair burns.

Strange.

My eyes burn—I see them through Caspian"s eyes—tongues of fire flicking in my eye sockets. Painless, but strange.

Through the fire, I see their life. Their doubt. Their fear.

I sense it. Smell it.

No one steps forward to challenge me.

For a moment, I feel relief. Maybe I"ve done it.

Maybe I"ve begun the process of convincing them—

Black purple orbs belch out of Hastaxi, a hundred of them, all at once. Gunfire crackles.

I pull a page from Calliope"s playbook and summon a wall of earth, not a fountain of soil but a mountain of stone between the immortal army and Caspian and me.

Too late.

An orb, slow-moving but implacable, smashes into Caspian"s chest, and I smell burning stone and roasting flesh.

"NO!"

The agony is mine, and his.

I pour healing magic into him, an endless river of it, and more, and more.

It"s not enough.

I catch my bloodmate as he falls and I turn and I run.

I pour healing into him, but all it does, no matter how much I blast into him, is keep him alive, barely.

I run.

And I run.

I reach a river, wide and deep and fast, clogged with boats—and I leap it.

I feel them.

I feel their fear and taste the unreasoning hate in it.

I hear Alistair in my mind, and Fin, and Stirling, and Andreas.

I"m weeping—bloodtears luminous with magic—and where the tears fall upon concrete sidewalks and blacktop roads and cobblestone alleys, roses bloom.

Yet, where my feet fall, Death treads. A river, following me, haunting my footsteps, rotting the roses as they bloom, icing the streets.

Hawks plummet from the sky.

Pigeons topple over mid-hop. Rats sink into sewer rivers, drowning.

A baby cries from a window, and I reach out a metaphysical claw and haul Death away.

No—No.

Where am I?

Cas?

Caspian.

In my arms, his eyes are faint and milky white, his skin marble and pale. I rip open my wrist with a fang and press the seeping wound to his mouth.

"Cas? Cas. Cas, please."

My legs give out.

Maeve?

Alistair, Fin, and Stirling, voices overlapping in my brain as they feel Caspian fading.

"No, no, no." I sink to my knees, Caspian"s head on my lap. His eyelids flutter. He sips at my vein, but it"s not enough.

The streets are deserted, or I"d snag an innocent mortal sacrifice them if it would keep my mate alive.

Maeve, it's okay.His voice is faint. You have to keep going.

"Not without you, Cas. I can"t. Not without you."

I sense him, first. An alien presence, a weird scent, an unfamiliar soul"s tang on my tongue.

Then I hear him.

A snarl—a threat that ripples down my spine, igniting primal terror.

The fear of things that lurk beyond the shadows of the campfire, glowing eyes that skulk beyond the cave.

I raise my head and look to my left—I"m in the mouth of a blind alley, surrounded by dumpsters and trash, and the corpses of rats slain by Death"s presence in my wake.

He is a wolf.

No, not just a wolf:

A shifter.