21. Callie

I’d cried until my eyes were raw and aching and no more tears could find their way from my body. After everything we’d done to bring down the blood bank. Everything we’d risked to save him, my dad was lost. A hopeless kind of despair filled me as I stared at the cairn we’d created around his body, my grief so sharp it cut deeper than any blade could.

Magnar had carried him to the top of the hill for me. It was the highest point for miles around, and we’d lain him to rest looking down on all of it. He was finally free.

It had taken hours to collect the stones required to cover him. My fingers were numb from the cold and coated with dirt from digging the rocks out of the soil. My fingernails were broken and bloody, but I couldn’t feel any pain from my injuries. The pain in my heart was too much to allow room for anything else.

The sun began to set as I looked at the monument we had created for my dad’s final resting place. The clear sky was streaked with lines of pink and orange, and the full moon had already risen too. It was as if the heavens had brought the sun and the moon together to say goodbye.

I clutched Mom’s wedding ring which now hung on the chain around my neck. The metal felt warm, its presence making me feel closer to my parents somehow. Like carrying it with me kept their souls close to mine.

My mind drifted to Montana, trapped with the murderers who had done this. She didn’t even know Dad was dead. It wasn’t right that she didn’t know.

I gritted my teeth as my grief began to give way to rage. Who did the vampires think they were to do this to us? How could they rip my whole world apart and feel no remorse?

The pain clawing at my soul needed an outlet, a bloodlust rising in me to rival the thirst of the monsters who had done this.

My father was gone. They’d taken Montana to the other side of the country. I was being hunted like some kind of animal. And for what?

It wasn’t right. I wanted them to pay. I wanted to make them feel an ounce of what I was feeling. I wanted to storm into their so-called kingdom, tear the walls down on top of their heads and let the sun burn them alive. Most of all, I wanted them all dead, turned to ash and rot and nothing. And there was only one way I could achieve that.

I turned towards Magnar who stood silently at my side and took his hand in mine. He raised his eyebrows in surprise as he caught sight of the determination in my gaze. There was only one way I wanted to grieve now, and that was through the violence of revenge.

“I’ll take the vow,” I said fiercely. “Tell me the words and I’ll say them. I want my gifts unleashed. I want to be a full slayer like you. I want to kill the Belvederes.”

Something sparkled in Magnar’s golden eyes, and he wrapped his other hand over mine.

I waited for him to tell me what to do while Fury burned at my hip in excitement, urging me on.

Seize your destiny, Sun child.

This was what I’d been born for. It was what I was made for. And it was what it would take for me to claim the vengeance my heart desired beyond all else.

“No, Callie,” Magnar breathed, shattering the moment of decision which burned through me, his words a slap to my face. “Not like this.”

“What?” I stared at him in astonishment.

I’d thought he would have been pleased, thrilled even. He was the last of his kind. If I joined him, then there would be two of us just as dedicated to his cause as he was now. We could stay together and hunt down the monsters who had started all of this. I wanted to help him destroy the vampires. I needed to do it.

“Not like this,” he repeated firmly. “This isn’t a decision that you should make while you’re feeling this way-”

“I’ll never not feel this way,” I hissed angrily. Who was he to tell me my own mind? “My father is dead! Don’t you get it? They killed him!”

“You know I understand that pain better than anyone,” he growled, and I remembered what Erik Belvedere had done to his father. He did understand, so why wouldn’t he help me?

“So let me take the vow. Let me help you to destroy them,” I demanded, my blood running hot.

“There are other implications, things that you don’t understand. If you take your vow, I will have to train you and then we can never-”

“I don’t care!” I yelled, snatching my hand from his grasp. “I don’t care what the price is. I would give anything to get my sister away from them. I would give my soul, my life, anything at all.”

Fury continued to grow hotter at my hip, seeming desperate for me to do this. It wanted me to realise my potential. It wanted me to become a true slayer.

I grabbed the blade from its sheath and a feeling like being submerged in warm water enveloped me. I gasped as a strange wind pulled at my hair and a power unlike anything I’d ever felt before surged around us.

I dropped to one knee, holding Fury before me before driving its tip into the frozen mud until it embedded itself there like a pillar of stone.

“Don’t do this, drakaina hjarta,” Magnar begged.

A small part of me felt his anguish like a punch to the chest, but it was nothing to the destructive power of the grief consuming me and the desperate need for revenge which urged me on.

I know the words, Fury breathed excitedly within the confines of my mind. Let me guide your tongue.

My eyes locked with Magnar’s and a fresh kind of pain hit me as I looked into his desperate gaze, but I couldn’t go back on my decision. I needed my gifts. I could feel it in every inch of my body. I had to say the words.

“I vow to always walk in the light,” I said, and the power of the words locked my body in its position as my blood thrummed in my veins. “I will seek out those who dwell in the darkness.”

Blinding light grew to the right of me, and though I couldn’t turn my head, I could feel the presence of something far greater than any mortal or vampire as it turned its attention to me. The being moved closer, watching us and willing me on, its power seeming to flow into me as I spoke the words I shouldn’t have known, Fury pressing them into my mind, my tongue bending around them without protest.

“My days shall no longer be my own. I give them to the cause.”

Something immense slammed into my body, and I gasped as its power radiated through my blood. I couldn’t move an inch. Each breath I took was laced with something that tingled and burned its way right down into my lungs before spreading further, finding every fibre of my being and moulding it into something new. I was being reborn as a creature of pure power, my human weaknesses leaving me and blowing away on the strange wind spiralling around me.

Magnar growled in resistance as the being spread its power towards him and he was slowly forced to his knees opposite me. His eyes were filled with rage and regret as his hands closed over mine where they clasped Fury’s hilt. His rough palms were hot against my skin, and I sensed the same strange magic burning through his blood too. It flowed between us, forming a bridge from his soul to mine.

“Please stop, Callie,” Magnar growled, his words a demand, though the plea in them was clear, but I doubted I would have been able to even if I wanted to. The power of the vow had me in its grasp and the only way out was onwards.

“I dedicate myself to my mentor,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound like my own anymore. “My life is in his hands. We will be bound by our cause, forfeiting all other ties. I will follow the path he sets.”

The power in my chest surged from me to surround Magnar too, and his eyes burned fiercely as he fought against the urge to speak. The seconds dragged as he kept his mouth shut and sweat beaded on his temple. His jaw ticked as he concentrated on resisting the power pushing against his will. His gaze burned with a desperate plea for me to end this and release him from the promise he was about to be forced to make.

A small part of me wished that I could. I wanted this for myself, but I hadn’t meant to force him into something he clearly didn’t desire. He’d already lost so much, and the look in his eyes made me feel like I was ripping the final piece of his happiness away from him. But there was no stopping it now that it had begun.

I could sense the being beside us growing displeased. The swirling vortex around us grew so bright that it became hard to see Magnar’s face despite how close he was. The wind howled, sending our hair flying and whipping my coat out behind me. The being made a sound like an ancient gong ringing, and my ears pounded as it pushed its influence into Magnar until he uttered the words he had been fighting against, each one of them a growl as he tried to resist the immense power. I wondered if this was one of the gods Magnar had spoken of, come to bond us with their power and set the slayer vow in motion.

“I dedicate myself to this novice. Her life is in my hands.” Magnar locked his jaw again, refusing to finish the oath, and his eyes flared with pain as the being forced her will into him again. “We will be bound by our cause, forfeiting all other ties. I will lead her into the light.”

A sharp pain seared across the back of my left hand, and I gasped as I spotted a mark shaped like a five-pointed star branded into my skin. Magnar’s grip tightened around my own and the same mark appeared on his hand. His shoulders slumped in defeat, and he dropped his gaze to glare at the ground while the power continued to billow around us.

“I will follow the way of the slayers until the last vampire is wiped from this earth or until death releases me,” I swore, and the raging torrent of my grief rose in me again as I remembered exactly why I had to do this. It wasn’t a choice. This was who I’d always been meant to be.

Power beyond measure hit me like a tornado. If I hadn’t been fixed in place, I was sure I would have been tossed aside like a rag doll and dashed to death in the eye of the storm.

My vision wavered and I couldn’t see Magnar, or the hill, or anything else that sat around me anymore. Instead, I could see slayers, hundreds of slayers living across thousands of years. Everything they’d ever learned poured into me. Every battle they’d fought, every passion they’d felt. I lived it all again and again. All of their memories tearing into me, filling me up and ripping me apart. I was them and they were me. I had lived a thousand times before. Always dying for the cause. Always taking the vow again. Their lessons became my own knowledge, their feats my memories, their lives my own.

Fury was thrumming with excitement and its voice rang out clearly in my mind. Twins of sun and moon will rise, when one has lived a thousand lives.

The power built in me like an angry wave carried on the tide of my grief, and I raised my head to the sky and screamed. I screamed for my father and my mother and for my sister trapped far, far away.

I reached for her, my soul clawing its way out of my skin and tearing away from me in a desperate bid to find her. I needed her more than I ever had in my life, and I would damn well find my way to her now.

And suddenly, she was there, our souls colliding with a force that stole all breath from me and made my heart stutter with shock. I was looking through her eyes at a hall full of monsters, and a surge of memories rushed between us like a tide crashing against a cliff face.

Monty? I breathed, but I had no body to speak the word, so it simply echoed through the space between the cracks in the world, snapping her attention onto mine. Somehow, the word itself had gotten lost along the way, nothing but a sense of self passing from me to her.

I felt her panic and confusion, my vision merging with hers, the hillside where I’d lain our father to rest swimming between the view of a hundred vampires who were all looking up at her in a room draped with finery. My grief flared and I felt her shock, her horror as she reacted to the memories slipping from my grasp and racing across time and space to reach her. I tried to convey all that had happened since the moment she’d been taken from me so brutally, showing her everything.

A hundred scenes flitted from my memory to her mind at high speed, the impossibility of this connection between us stalling my heart in my chest. It couldn’t be real. Yet I knew it was, the power of the gifts I’d been granted with my vow unlocking this magical bridge between us.

I felt Montana’s bewilderment as I showed her all I could, trying to explain in memories what I couldn’t communicate with words. She balked at the rows of humans in those strange, glass coffins at the blood bank, the fear I’d felt in that place transcending this link between our minds. And once I was certain she’d seen that, I gave her more. Vampires snarling, biting, dying at my hands and his. Magnar Elioson. The mere thought of him had my mind relaying image after image, blood spilling at the feet of the frighteningly fierce slayer, vampires falling to ash and ruin all around him.

Montana flinched at the rush of information, the images moving so quickly between us that it was impossible for her to make sense of them, and the more I tried to take hold of the visions, the more they leaped about.

She blinked and the memories faded away, offering me a view out of her eyes, something telling me that what I was looking at was the present, the monster staring up at her the very same one who Magnar had warned me about.

Erik Belvedere’s face was a mask of unblemished porcelain, his features cut from glass and radiant with ungodly perfection. Montana’s eyes met his roiling gaze, and the hunger I found there set my heart racing with terror. He wasn’t just looking at her like she was a meal to devour, his gaze was locked on hers like a creature set on utter destruction. But as I focused on the sense of Montana surrounding me, I didn’t feel the world-altering terror which should have accompanied the sight of that beast. There was fear there, but it wasn’t nearly so potent as it needed to be, like she didn’t fully grasp the danger she was in.

I tried to cry out in the space between our souls, any words I might have been trying to push her way lost, but the grief which consumed me made its way between us, the final moments of our father’s life flashing from my mind to hers as I dragged her into a vision of him lying in my arms, his bandages stained with too much blood. His face was deathly still, the truth of his suffering plain to see, the end of his life absolute.

My pain and grief tore through the void between us as Montana stood surrounded by the monsters who had done this, our dad’s death ringing in her head like a gong. I felt the crack in her heart as it fractured at that truth, the power blazing between us roaring beyond the confines of my control. She took it in with a clarity that tossed her into a black pit of despair, one she would never be free of.

I tried to call out to her again, tried to tell her I was coming for her, that nothing in this world could stop me, and whether in reply to that or not, the tide of memories slipped between us again, her mind pressing against mine, showing me all she had survived since our separation.

I recoiled at the sight of the four vampires who called themselves royal, their beauty making my stomach knot with hatred as I saw flashes of humans being presented to them, wrapped up in fine clothes like playthings trotted out for the amusement of monsters.

Confusion tore at me, my mind lost as to why they would do any such thing and suddenly I was staring at a group of unnaturally beautiful children.

My heart stalled in my chest as I gaped at them, the truth of what they were and what those heinous creatures planned on using my sister for swimming through me with a cloying clarity.

No,I gasped, horror and grief colliding between us, more visions of our father dancing across the line which merged our minds.

It was too much, the power of this connection making my limbs quake and mind shatter as I tried to hold on to my twin with all I had, not wanting to leave her in that place. The mountainside flickered, becoming that room again, the vampires all staring as Montana began to fall, Erik’s eyes widening as he lurched for her collapsing body.

My sister fell into an eternity of darkness, as pain splintered through her that was layered with grief, the truth of all that had happened overcoming her. Dad’s death sliced into her heart, a jagged wound weeping as the horror of it surrounded her, cutting into me too.

My mind couldn’t take it, my body close to breaking from the force it took to maintain that connection. Despite how desperately I wanted to stay with my sister, I felt my grasp on her slipping.

I fell backwards as I slammed into my own body once more, and like a switch had been flipped, everything went black before I even hit the ground.

As my consciousness swam in an eternal sea of darkness, one thing stayed with me among the abyss. Montana was alive. And we would be reunited.

Whatever it took.

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