Chapter 35

Chapter

Thirty-Five

S erenity

I took a step toward Louis, but a loud, unnatural howl stopped me in my tracks.

The wolflike and yet not wolflike creatures lunged at Enzo, Dimitri, and Gianna in a blur of matted fur and twisted limbs. Enzo met the first one mid-leap, his hands sinking into its throat. Dimitri and Gianna moved in perfect sync, back-to-back, as two more of the hell-creatures circled them. The fourth one went straight for the fallen girl, its jaws opening impossibly wide.

I lunged for her arm, sweat-slicked fingers scrabbling against her leather jacket. The wolf’s teeth gleamed too close, blinding white in the darkness. My heart slammed so hard I could barely breathe, barely think. I grabbed again, fingers trembling so badly I could hardly keep my grip. The jacket slipped through my hands like water as massive jaws snapped inches from her leg.

Then Louis was there. Not the Louis I knew, the thing wearing his face. His hands tangled in my hair and the woman’s blonde strands, yanking us both back with inhuman strength. He slammed us against the crypt wall so hard my teeth rattled. Stars exploded behind my eyes, and the taste of copper flooded my mouth.

Rough stone scraped against my back as he held us pinned, its cold bite nothing compared to the ice in his eyes. Those weren’t Louis’ eyes anymore—the warm brown that had danced when he teased Joy and me was gone, replaced by something dark and ancient that looked at us like we were insects to be crushed. My chest seized with each desperate attempt to breathe, ribs screaming in protest where they’d hit the wall. Fear clawed up my throat, and beneath it surged something even worse—grief for the man who’d been Joy’s and my protector, now twisted into this monster.

Behind us, I heard the sounds of battle: snarls and growls mixing with the impact of bodies, the wet tearing of flesh, the crack of stone as someone or something hit the tomb walls. But I couldn’t turn to look. Louis held us immobile, the things under his skin writhing faster, like they were feeding off the violence around us.

I tried to summon my power. Healing light flickered in my chest, wanting to help, wanting to burn out whatever was inside him even though Angelo said it was impossible.

You can’t heal me,” he whispered in my ear, his breath cold where it should have been warm. The voice was Louis’ but fractured, multiple voices trying to speak through one throat. “Louis isn’t here. We are many.”

I stuck out my chin in utter defiance. “I can heal you. I know I can.” I struggled against his grip, trying to turn to face him so I could look into those eyes and find some trace of the man I knew and loved. “Louis, please. I know you’re in there. Fight them.”

His grip tightened, fingers digging into my scalp. “The crypt,” he hissed, but this time his voice was different. Strained. Fighting. “Get...the dybbuk box...before...” The things under his skin twisted violently, and his next words came out in that horrible splintered voice again. “Foolish girl. He’s trying so hard to reach you. It’s almost... amusing.”

Tears streamed down my face. The thing wrapped Louis’ fingers tighter in my hair, using me like a shield as he turned on the other girl. “Now, bitch, if you want your little vampire to live, you’ll get the dybbuk box.” His voice had that horrible multi-toned sound again, like a choir of the damned singing through Louis’ throat.

“Please don’t kill him,” she pleaded. Raw anguish broke through her careful control, and I realized this must be Rose—the one Gianna had mentioned. Valentin’s wife.

He shoved her and she fell onto one knee, catching herself against the crypt wall. “Get the dybbuk box or we bleed him out.” The things under Louis’ skin writhed faster, excited by her pain. “Slowly. While you are forced to watch.”

I didn’t even know what a dybbuk box was, but from the way Rose’s face had gone white, it was something that should stay locked away in that crypt.

She gritted her teeth, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth where he’d slammed her into the wall. “I can’t get the box if my wrists are tied.”

Louis slapped her across the face so hard her head snapped to the side. The crack of palm against flesh echoed off the tombs. “Shut up.”

“But she’s right. She can’t pick up the box with her hands like that.” My voice shook, but I had to try to reason with the thing inside him.

He looked at me and red flames ignited in his black eyes, like someone had lit hellfire behind them. It stole my breath away, turned my lungs to ice. He held out his hand, and I watched in horror as his fingernails lengthened, curved, turned into razor-sharp claws that gleamed in the moonlight. Each finger elongated with a wet, cracking sound, like joints and bones breaking and reforming.

Then his claws swiped through Rose’s bindings with surgical precision, cutting her loose but leaving thin red lines on her wrists where they’d grazed her skin.

“Get the box,” the thing inside Louis growled, “or your vampire will die a slow, agonizing death.” Those claws flexed, dripping something dark that sizzled when it hit the ground. “Perhaps we’ll start with…yes…his eyes.”

She glanced at me, and in that moment I understood. Once she gave him that box, she was dead. We both were. Some things were meant to stay buried in those crypts.

“Rose, don’t give it to him!” Dimitri cried out from the fray. He ripped into another wolf’s throat, blood spraying across his expensive shirt. “Seriously? I just bought this shirt. And honey, if you open that door, we’re going to have a very long conversation about poor life choices!”

He was fighting wolf after wolf, trying to reach us, each movement a deadly dance. Every time one fell, another materialized from the shadows in an endless game of whack-a-mole. Dimitri and Gianna fought back-to-back, their movements lethal and precise, but they were getting nowhere. Blood and fur matted the ground around them.

Gianna cried out, her voice strained with desperation, “Serenity, use your shield to protect us!” She ducked under snapping jaws, only narrowly avoiding teeth that could tear through her vampire flesh. Blood matted her usually perfect hair.

“You’ll never do it in time,” Louis taunted, the claws of one hand pressing into my scalp. His other hand shot out, his razor-sharp claws hovering over Rose’s chest, right above her heart. “Use your power to protect them, and I’ll rip Rose’s heart out and eat it.”

He leaned closer, his breath cold in my ear, and my entire body went rigid as the memory of Joy’s slumped body flooded back. Her blood on the floor, her face so swollen I barely recognized her. Bile rose in my throat as those same hands that had beaten Joy pressed against my skin. “And I’ll make you watch. Just like I made you watch what I did to Joy.”

I wanted to scream, to fight, to do something—anything—but the memory of Joy’s battered body paralyzed me. Because I knew with sickening certainty that he’d do worse to Rose. And he’d enjoy every second of making me watch.

Rose put her hand on the door and it slid open as if by magic, ancient symbols lighting up under her touch.

“No,” I whispered, the word catching in my throat. A vision slammed into me—Rose and I lying broken on the stone floor, our blood pooling together, Louis standing over us with that terrible smile. The same smile he’d had after torturing Joy.

My mouth opened in a silent scream, but terror froze the warning before it could escape. The scrape of metal against stone as she pulled the door open was the sound of a coffin lid closing. Because that’s what this crypt was about to become—our tomb.

My legs shook so badly I nearly collapsed. We were going to die. Rose was going to die. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it.

The darkness beyond seemed to breathe. I wanted to race in there and get out of the terror around me, but something told me the real horror was waiting inside that crypt.

It was as if the thing could read my mind. “You’ll never make it,” Louis said as he lifted a strand of my hair with his claw, the sharp point grazing my scalp. “Though watching you try might be… fascinating .”

I placed my hands on his face. “Louis, fight it, come back.” Something slithered underneath my palms, like snakes writhing beneath his skin. I fought back the urge to recoil.

Power flooded through me, the familiar warmth turning into a burning river. I poured it all toward him, trying to bring back my father, trying to burn out whatever darkness had nested inside him. Light blazed from my hands, illuminating the tombstones around us.

Anger and hate flashed in the creature’s red eyes, turning them into pools of blood. The things under its skin moved faster, agitated by my power, and its face contorted into something that had lost all humanity.

Every ounce of power poured through me, light burning beneath my skin until I thought I’d burst. I searched harder, looking for any trace of the real Louis beneath the corruption. There had to be something left—some ember of the detective who’d protected Joy, who’d always risked everything to keep her safe. My power probed deeper, my fingers clawing through ashes for a spark.

But instead of finding the true Louis, I only ignited the anger of the darkness inside him. It writhed against my light, slipping away like oil on water. Where my power should have cleansed, it just made the evil more obvious—the way his soul had been hollowed out, only to be stuffed full of something ancient and cruel. Angelo’s warning echoed in my head: once Balthazar corrupted someone this deeply, there was no coming back.

I kept searching, desperate for even a flicker of the man who’d been Joy’s protector. But each pulse of power only revealed more emptiness, more proof that Angelo had been right. The thing wearing Louis’s face wasn’t him anymore. It hadn’t been for a long time.

He stuck out a hand and grabbed my neck, his claws digging into my flesh like ice-cold needles, squeezing tighter and tighter around my throat. I choked and beat on his wrists, my lungs screaming for air. My fingers scraped against his skin, my stomach heaving when I felt those things squirming underneath it. Tears filled my eyes, and I kicked at him, but my movements grew weaker with each passing second. Black spots danced at the edges of my vision, and a high-pitched ringing filled my ears.

He only chuckled and opened his mouth, revealing rows of sharp teeth where Louis’ warm smile should have been. The teeth kept growing, multiplying, his jaw unhinging like a snake’s. “You shouldn’t have tried to heal us. Balthazar will lose his prize now. He will be most displeased.” His breath smelled like rancid meat and sulfur.

A loud snarl rippled through the night, something from humanity’s oldest nightmares that vibrated in my chest and made my heart stutter. Louis turned, and a massive black wolf plowed into him with the force of a freight train, forcing him to loosen his grip. His claws raked across my neck as he released me. I collapsed onto the ground, desperately sucking in air.

The black wolf and Louis battled each other, a dizzying blur of fur and flesh and spraying blood. When the wolf’s teeth tore chunks from Louis’ body, black smoke leaked out instead of blood, curling into the air like living shadows.

Louis’ eyes filled with fear as he backed away—the first real emotion I’d seen in those hellfire eyes. For one horrible moment, I saw my Louis there, the man who’d protected me and Joy, trapped inside his own body as it was torn apart. But then that writhing darkness poured from his wounds, and I knew the real Louis was long gone. The wolf’s jaws clamped down on his throat and ripped it open. Blood gushed out like a crimson waterfall, but it was dark, thick, moving like oil.

I pressed my hand against my mouth, caught between relief and horror. Relief that the thing wearing Louis’ face was dying, horror at watching the death of the good man he’d once been. Bile burned in my throat as twisted darkness poured from his ruined neck, taking with it the last traces of Detective Louis DuPont.

The wolf shifted into Angelo, the transformation fluid and violent all at once, bones cracking and reforming in the space of a heartbeat. He’d found me like he always did, appeared exactly when I needed him most. But he wasn’t—he couldn’t be—he was powerful like no other vampire, but this? My breath caught as I watched him straighten up, deadly grace in every movement, Louis’s blood still staining his mouth crimson. Everything I thought I knew about him changed in a heartbeat, but one thing remained constant—he’d come for me. He always came for me.

In one brutal motion, Angelo plunged his hand into Louis’ chest and ripped out his heart. The sound was wet, horrible—one I’d hear in my nightmares forever. The heart in Angelo’s hand was black and pulsing, covered in runes and symbols that moved like living things.

He crushed it in his hand, and black ooze burst through his fingers.

Louis screamed, but it wasn’t his voice. It was that choir of the damned again, shrieking in collective agony, the hellish sound shattering the stained glass in nearby tomb windows. Black smoke poured out of him like living darkness, then spun out of control, hurtling toward the church, back to Balthazar. It left Louis an empty, discarded husk that crumpled to the ground, face frozen in its last moment of fear.

“I’m sorry, Louis! I’m sorry, Louis.” The scream tore from my raw throat, tasting of blood and salt. My vision blurred with tears as I stared at his body lying there like garbage, destroyed by evil.

Angelo grabbed me, his grip iron-strong but gentle, careful to avoid the claw marks on my neck. Bloody scrapes ran down his face and his usually immaculate suit was shredded, soaked in blood that wasn’t his own. Long cuts across his chest were still healing, the flesh knitting together only slowly—whatever he’d fought to get to us had been profoundly powerful.

“I told you not to come.” His voice was harsh, but his eyes held ancient sadness. He’d seen this before, I realized. How many times had he seen people lose the ones they loved to darkness? “You couldn’t have healed him. Louis was gone. Only the demons inhabiting his body remained.” He pulled me against his chest, trying to shield me from the reality of what I’d lost. “He was gone the moment they took him. What you saw wasn’t him anymore.”

I tangled my fists in his bloodied shirt. “I should have listened to you. It’s my fault he’s dead.” Grief and rage and guilt crashed through me like a tidal wave and my voice broke as I sagged against Angelo while the sounds of battle continued around us.