32. Erik

“We have to get to Valentina!” I shouted to Magnar as he ripped off limbs with his bare hands. A mound of broken vampire bodies mingled with the dust, forming a ring around us.

Several more sprang onto the pile to intercept us and I split the earth open again, taking the living and the dead with it.

Magnar stumbled back from the ledge as the great fissure left us with a handful of our enemies.

We slashed through the final Biters blocking our path to Valentina and Magnar leapt to my side as we sprinted into the forest.

Trunks whipped past me, a veil of green. I was moving so fast the world was nothing but a speeding blur in my periphery. Magnar matched my pace, our boots ripping up the mud beneath our feet and spewing it out behind us.

A biter ran to intercept us and was dashed to pieces as he met the full force of our bodies colliding with him like a truck.

A blade stuck out of my arm and I yanked it free with a hiss of pain, throwing it forward with the speed of a bullet as I spotted Valentina’s entourage up ahead.

The male it hit turned to ash and Valentina glanced over her shoulder with terror in her gaze. She raised her hands and the heavens crackled expectantly. Lightning sped toward us, so blindingly white it was as if she was bringing the entire sky down on our heads.

She planted her feet, screaming fiercely, the sound raking against my eardrums. The lightning forked down from every direction and I shifted the earth, trying to bring it up to shelter us.

A boom sounded behind us in the mountain and a ripple of impossibly strong power ripped every tree around us from its roots.

Magnar and I hit the ground, carving a great crater in the earth as we skidded forward under the immensity of the shockwave. The storm flashed and died above us and every ounce of light in the world seemed to falter with it.

Silence reigned as I clawed my way over the mound of earth before me and Magnar moved at my side; two warriors united in our single cause. We crested the dirt and my gaze fell on Valentina and the surviving group of biters beside her.

She gasped in horror, slamming a hand to her chest. A beat reached my ears, then more and more of them, clamouring in the chests of our enemies.

Valentina’s cheeks flushed with colour and she shook her head, fear spewing from her eyes as she looked toward us.

They were human. All of them.

I glanced at Magnar, reaching for my own heart as he did the same. Nothing came in response.

His lip peeled back and he rose to his feet as the world seemed to shudder around his gallant form.

I rose beside him, my thoughts abandoning me. All I knew was that our enemies were human, weak, wholly vulnerable. And we were not.

Magnar and I charged forward, ripping the biters apart as they tried to scatter in vain. Blood and bone broke under my hands and no ash came. They fell apart, their humans forms shattered beyond repair.

Valentina remained standing, backing up step by step. She knew she couldn’t run. Defeat flared in her gaze and terror clutched her beautiful features.

“No – please!” she begged, falling to her knees and clasping her hands together as she gazed up at us in a desperate prayer.

Magnar strode forward at my side and I bared my fangs, the fury at what this woman had done to us thickening the atmosphere.

I caught her by the throat, a hunger for revenge singing in my veins.

“We have the right to bite,” I snarled, heaving her into the air.

Her screams bled into every space inside me as I dug my fangs into her neck and ripped into her flesh with no desire for her blood. Death was what I wanted, painful and enduring.

She slapped and kicked and thrashed, but her mortal body held nothing of the power she needed to defeat me.

I shoved her to the ground again, spitting her blood out. Magnar raised one of his swords over his head.

“For my mother!” he roared, slashing it down through the air in a deadly arc.

Valentina’s shrieks were cut off as he beheaded her, his blade slamming into the ground with such magnitude that the earth was carved apart.

Her blood mixed with the soil as her ruined body lay at our feet.

The mountain boomed again and another wave of power flooded the land, this time like a rush of wind, forcing us to our knees side by side as the air battered us. Magnar rested a hand on my shoulder and I laid one on his, gritting my teeth as the gods’ took hold of our bodies. Their strength dripped through me, wave after wave and my immortal flesh changed under the onslaught. My blood grew hot, near boiling then simmered, simmered, simmered to a deeply human warmth.

The quiet ache in my throat faded to nothing and I felt my fangs retracting and smoothing out.

I gasped as my heart thumped, then again and again, jolted to life as electricity charged my veins and drove blood through it for the first time in over a thousand years.

My body weakened and my muscles tightened against the strange tide that rolled through me. The wind died and quiet rang in my ears.

I rose to my feet and my legs trembled beneath me. I sucked in a long breath of air, my lungs expanding, my chest rising. My heart quickened in response as I dragged in another deep breath.

I was alive. Human. A monster no more.

Magnar stayed on his knees and I eyed the flush of colour in his cheeks, mortality shining from his skin.

I shut my eyes and relished the fluttering beat of my heart beneath my palm as everything I’d ever wanted came to fruition. The prophecy had come to pass. We’d paid our debt. And no divine power or immortal existence could ever compare to the human body I was returned to.

I was me again; a man who’d been living in a shell, frozen in time, captured by a curse and was now, impossibly, free.