Chapter 16

I t was impossible to resist the sway of the carriage and rhythmic rumble of wheels, and I drifted off, waking with a literal jolt a short time later as the carriage come to a halt.

Ezekiel sat preternaturally still opposite me, his features wreathed in shadows, book abandoned on the seat beside him.

I was about to ask what was going on, but he held up a finger to silence me, canting his head to the side to listen to something I couldn’t hear.

I reached for my sword, tucked in its holster beneath my seat.

“Don’t,” Ezekiel said. “I’ll handle this.”

“Handle what?”

My nape went cold, and my scalp tightened in warning. Something was coming. Something was out there.

I reached for the drapes, intending to pull them back, and Ezekiel gripped my wrist. “Don’t do that. Don’t move. Stay here.” He reached for the door handle, and it was my turn to grab him.

“I’m your watcher. I’m here to protect you.” Amusement flickered across his face and the urge to punch him raced through me. “Do not underestimate me.”

“I won’t, as long as you don’t overestimate yourself. This is not something you can protect me from.” He pressed his lips together. “This is something that I must face. Alone. Stay here.”

“Come out, murderer.” A woman’s voice drifted into the carriage, echoey and haunting. “Face what you’ve done.”

What the heck? “Ezekiel…”

He smiled thinly. “Oh, look at you, worried about your king.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Only because I have to.”

“Of course.” He leaned in slightly, his breath warm on my cheek. “You’re just doing your job.” A shiver of anticipation rolled up my spine, and his mouth curved in a self-satisfied smile.

He swung out of the carriage before I could reply, slamming the door closed behind him.

I slid close to the window and tugged back the drape a little to peek out.

Ezekiel stood a few feet away, his back to the carriage as he faced off against a large group of people dressed in various styles of old-world clothing, but the one that stood out the most to me was a young woman dressed in a beautiful ball gown, hair up in an intricate style. She looked like a princess, but it wasn’t just her outfit that drew attention, it was her face—heart-shaped with a Cupid’s bow mouth and wide eyes fringed in inky lashes. She was a beauty, petite and delicate, except for the fire of hatred burning in her dark eyes.

“What do you want, Emelie?” Ezekiel asked.

“I want my life back,” the woman in the ball gown said. “We all do. But that can’t happen, and so we want you to join us.”

The moon chose that moment to peek out from cloud cover, lancing across the scene and straight through the people to highlight the forest beyond. My pulse skipped.

Damn. They were all ghosts.

“I’m sorry, but I must decline your offer,” Ezekiel said. “I have a prior engagement.”

“Do you believe this to be a jest?” Emelie said.

“Not at all. I believe that a century of death has made you delusional.”

She took a step forward, her lips a sneer. “I’m not the one who’s delusional, Tepes.” The moonlight dimmed, then flared bright and Emelie was no longer a beautiful princess but a bedraggled woman in a mud-smeared gown, hair in wild disarray and a bloody wound on her neck.

The other specters around her changed too, their crisp, clean clothing becoming muddy or torn, their throats mangled and bloody.

“When you stole our lives, you were at your full strength,” Emelie said. “We were too weak to stop you. But now you’re newly awakened, and we have a century’s worth of power between us.” The wind picked up and the moon ducked behind a cloud as if to avoid witnessing what was to come. “Tonight, we will claim our vengeance.”

Yeah, I couldn’t allow that. I grabbed my sword and stepped out of the carriage.

Ezekiel’s shoulders tensed, and I didn’t need to look at his face to know he was pissed off with me for disobeying his order.

But I didn’t take orders from him.

Emelie jolted in surprise at the sight of me, then fixed Ezekiel with a disgusted glare. “You fiend.” Then to me, “Come, we will protect you.”

The ghosts moved closer, bringing with them the crackle of static and the acrid scent of ozone. Every hair on my body stood to attention, dread pooling in my belly even though I was pretty sure they meant me no harm.

I took a step forward, and Ezekiel grabbed my arm.

“Unhand her!” The air whipped past my face as some unseen force slammed into Ezekiel, knocking him back several steps and dragging me with him.

“No!” Emelie’s chest heaved, and I knew instinctively that she was about to blast him again.

“Stop! I’m not a victim.”

“Not yet you aren’t. But you will be. He’ll toy with you, and then he’ll drain you dry just like he did me.” Black stuff leaked from her eyes and dripped down her cheeks. “He’ll make you believe he isn’t a monster. He’ll tell you he’s simply misunderstood, then he’ll take you into the middle of nowhere and tell you to run, to run as fast as you can because he prefers to hunt his prey.”

Ezekiel’s eyes flinched in what I might have thought was a wince of remorse if I didn’t know him better. But I’d witnessed his atrocities firsthand, so Emelie’s story, although horrific, didn’t surprise me.

I yanked my arm out of his grip. “You make me sick. The more I learn the more I wish I hadn’t taken this fucking job.”

“We can discuss your feelings later, Miss Lighthart. Rest assured they are invaluable to me; however, now is not the time for a heart-to-heart.”

“You have no heart,” Emelie said.

“You can’t kill me. You know that,” Ezekiel said coolly.

“I know,” Emelie said. “But I can ruin your year. Damage you so badly that you’re unable to continue. No more victims. No more innocents need die.” Then to me, “Run!”

I was lifted off my feet and thrown to one side. Ezekiel’s bellow of rage was cut off by a loud whoosh. I scrambled up to see him pinned to the ground by an invisible force. His teeth clenched, and his body vibrated.

“Stop!” I scrambled to my feet. “You have to stop.”

Why weren’t the bat boys helping? Dammit, Ezekiel must have ordered them not to interfere. They obviously took his orders seriously, unlike me, and just as well.

I ran at Emelie, swiping my sword through her form.

She misted into nothing, but Ezekiel remained trapped. Blood was leaking from his nose now.

“No!” I swiped at another ghost, and another. They misted only to reform again, continuing their collective assault on the vampire king.

Ice gripped my nape, and Emelie appeared beside me. “What is wrong with you? Did you not hear my account? Can you be so taken with this monster that you would fight for him?”

“I’m not taken with him. I know exactly who he is and what he’s done, but he’s my charge. Mine to protect by The Order of Helsing, and I won’t allow you to hurt him.”

Her eyes flinched at the mention of the Order. “You can’t stop us.”

The atmosphere crackled with dark energy, and it was all directed at Ezekiel, whose eyes had gone glassy, his form almost slack beneath the assault. He didn’t have long, and my blade was useless against these specters.

“You’re right, I can’t stop you. But you can. You talk about protecting the innocent, right? Well, I’m an innocent doing my job. Protect me.”

I threw myself into the path of the destructive energy and on top of Ezekiel. Pain sliced through my back and down my sides. It dug claws into my head and tugged at my brain.

My scream died in my throat, humbled by agony as my body locked, all muscles screaming for release from the torture.

“No…” Ezekiel’s protest was a whisper. “Don’t…hurt…her.” His arms wrapped around me as the darkness inside me stirred and the hot needles in my blood turned to ice.

Rage burgeoned inside me, the beginning of a hurricane, because why should I have to take his pain for him? He was the monster. He was the one that deserved to writhe and scream, not me. My fingers curled against his biceps, digging in.

“No…” Emelie stumbled back a step. “Oh…” She clutched her head. “Stop!”

The shroud of talons digging into me was ripped away, and my body hissed in relief, sagging against Ezekiel.

“Go,” Emelie said. “What lies ahead for you is worse than anything we could do.” The wind howled one last time before falling silent. My misty breath dissipated as the temperature rose a notch.

Ezekiel’s heart beat slow and steady against my cheek for several achingly long seconds in which I found I didn’t have the energy to move. But in the next, he was moving for us both, gathering me up into his arms and standing as if he’d simply been resting not being assaulted by phantom blades and fiery needles.

“Orina, look at me,” he demanded. I did so from beneath heavy eyelids. He studied me for a beat. “You’ll live.”

My eyes fluttered closed, and when I opened them again, I was lying under a blanket in the carriage with Ezekiel watching me from the seat opposite.

We were in motion, the drapes cracked open a little to let in moonlight.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

I felt like I had a hangover. “Fine. You?”

“No permanent damage, at least nothing that a decent feeding won’t cure.” His jaw flexed. “However, you could have been seriously hurt.”

“I took a gamble, and it paid off. I knew she wouldn’t kill an innocent.”

“Emelie’s hatred for me is much greater than her desire to save one innocent woman who she probably deemed complicit to my horrific nature by association. Your gamble didn’t pay off, Miss Lighthart. Emelie had a vision and that is what halted her attack.”

“A vision?”

“She was a seer, and it seems that she still is, even in death. It was the only reason I took her as a lover.”

“You dated her?”

“I courted her, yes. I deflowered her, made sure she was enamored with me in the hopes that she would see my future, but when she failed to give me what I wanted, I killed her.”

The way he recounted his actions…he might as well be reading out a fucking grocery list. “You killed her because she wouldn’t have a vision about you? Did she even have any control over them?”

“No. But it didn’t seem to matter at the time.”

“You’re something else, you know that?”

“I killed many people last century. Probably too many.”

Was that remorse in his tone? Wait a minute. “One murder is all it takes to be too many.”

“How ironic that it’s in death she finally sees my future.” He sighed. “And I do not have her confidence, therefore I will never know what she saw. A cutting punishment indeed.”

“It must be bad for her to stop her attack.”

He shrugged a shoulder.

“You don’t care anymore?”

“I’m not sure I ever truly did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it was all an excuse to play with my food…”

“Fucking hell.”

He cut me a sidelong glance. “Control your indignant pulse, little Silver. I’m in a delicate state at this moment and feeling more than a little peckish, and the race of blood through your veins is akin to a siren’s song.”

I breathed slowly and evenly to calm myself. “How much longer before we reach Dracmore?”

“Several hours yet. You should sleep.”

“You just told me you’re hungry. I am not sleeping.”

His laugh was dry and brittle. “You wear the amulet of protection. I couldn’t feed on you even if I wanted to.” A sly look crossed his features. “But feel free to remove it if you like…”

“Yeah, when hell freezes over.”

He snorted softly, leaned his head back on the cushioned seat back, and closed his eyes. “Rest now. I’ll wake you when we arrive.”

I could see his pulse beating beneath his jaw, more of a flutter than a steady tempo. His naturally pale skin looked almost blue in places where his veins were more visible, and there were dark smudges beneath his eyes hidden in the shadows cast by his thick dark lashes.

He was hurt.

More than he was letting on.

“Why didn’t you order Godor and the others to help you?”

He smiled. “And how do you fight a spirit with blade and claw?”

“Fine, so why stop at all? You could have picked up the pace and kept going.” In the silence, a thought occurred to me. What if he’d wanted to face Emelie? Maybe he even felt he deserved to be hurt by her, that he owed it to his victims, and if that was true, then it could only mean one thing…He was beginning to feel remorse. Remorse, which was a key pillar of his humanity.

“Spirits as a rule can’t hurt me. Many have tried. But I guess Emelie is no ordinary spirit.”

Wait, he hadn’t expected her to be able to hurt him? So he’d gone out there because he’d believed he was safe? “You confronted her to gloat?”

“I don’t gloat, Miss Lighthart.”

“Then what?”

“Maybe I was simply bored. Carriage rides are so tedious, after all.”

My heart sank.

So much for the remorse theory. “You know what, I will go to sleep after all. Enjoy the rest of your tedious ride.”

I rolled away from him and closed my eyes. This weekend couldn’t be over fast enough.