“But what if she trips and her throat accidentally falls on my teeth?” She prowls, catlike, angling around me.
“Where is my sister?”
I ask, not wanting any answer this vampire could possibly provide and increasingly terrified it’s not Artemis who is hurt. It’s me. I just don’t know it yet.
Jane jumps, and my stake is out and in hand by the time she lands on me. She poofs out of existence.
“Look, we don’t want to hurt you.” The male voice steps into the light. It’s another vampire, tall and broad-shouldered, face already vamped out in contradiction to his statement. Next to him is a shorter vampire whose spiky Mohawk has gone limp in the rain.
“Why are you here, then? Who said not to hurt me?”
He shrugs. “I was all for making you sit quietly in the rain waiting alone for a few hours, but Jane likes—liked—to chat.”
Every alarm bell in my body is going off. No no no no no. There was only one person who knew where I’d be tonight. “Whose instructions?”
He reaches into his jacket and pulls out one of those shock sticks the cloakers used. He hasn’t touched me with it, but it jolts me to my soul nonetheless. “We need another hour. So we all wait calmly, and then everyone leaves. No one gets hurt. We get paid, you go home with all your blood safe and warm on the inside, where you want it.”
The only reason I can think that Artemis—oh gods, Artemis—would want me stuck in a cemetery in Dublin was so that I wasn’t at the castle. The castle filled with people I love and demons I swore to protect. That crawling black thing in me roars to life, darker than the night, soaking me from the inside out. The vampire doesn’t have time to dodge before my foot connects with his head.
The second vamp lunges for me. I duck under his arms, twisting free and lashing out with a vicious kick that sends him flying. I see a moment—one perfect, clear moment—when I can stake him and be done with one of them.
But the growling thing inside me doesn’t want this to be done. I turn and kick the first vampire in the head again. He stumbles backward, and I jump, switch-kicking the Mohawk vampire. I throw him into the lamp, the bone-on-metal sound ringing through the night. The tall vampire, shock stick lost, grabs me around the waist. He lifts me off the ground. I slam my head back into his face, hearing bones crunch.
I get my feet down and tug him over me, throwing him flat on the ground and dusting him with a single, brutal stab.
When the Mohawked vampire lunges for me again, I drop to my back and use his own momentum to propel him up over my body and down onto the ancient, peeling picket fence around a small burial plot.
He moans in pain. But moaning is a very different sound from poofing.
The fence impaled him but missed his heart. He kicks and bucks, trying to get free. I walk to him, standing over his snarling, monstrous face. And I feel nothing. Not anger. Not elation. I finally gave in to it all, and instead of being relieved to finally let go, I’m hollowed out and empty. I channeled the darkness, used it, and nothing changed.
I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I have to be wrong.
“Who wanted me here?” I ask.
He grabs for me, but he’s still stuck on the fence. I take a small step back, and his hands claw at the air in front of me. “You can stake me. I won’t tell you anything.”
“Okay.” I stake him. I’m once again alone. I already know the answer.
All this was a ruse to get me out of the castle. The castle where Doug—Sean’s lost prize—is, where my mom is, where Rhys and Cillian and everyone I love is. I dial my mother as I race back toward the car. “Someone’s coming. It’s—” I choke. “It’s Artemis and Honora. Don’t trust them. Go on lockdown.”
There are a few heavy seconds as she processes what I told her. “Done.” She hangs up.
I throw myself into the car. “Setup,” I say, slamming it into gear and flipping a very illegal U-turn. “Artemis. She set me up. She set this all up.” I toss the phone at Leo. “Tell me the second you get any texts.” The phone dings, and I resist lunging for it.
Leo reads it quickly. “?‘Everyone accounted for. Lockdown initiated.’?”
Maybe they haven’t had time to launch an attack yet. The vampires did say they needed to hold me there for another hour. Hopefully, talkative Jane blew it for them. “They were probably hoping they could just walk in. But the castle knows they’re coming. And Artemis and Honora haven’t been there since we created the lockdown procedures. They won’t know what to expect.” I shake my head, disbelief numbing me. “Artemis. She’s going after the castle. I never should have let her leave with Honora. This is my fault.”
I clench my jaw, strangling the steering wheel imagining Honora’s perfectly lush and thick dark hair, that smug smile, those clever eyes.
“You’re not okay.” Leo’s eyes are heavy on me, even though my own are glued to the road blurring beneath us.
“Of course I’m not okay! The castle is probably under attack, Artemis is behind it, and I’m not there!”
“No, I mean, more than that. I saw you in that fight. It didn’t seem like you.”
I wanted to have this conversation. Needed to. But I couldn’t make myself because it felt too important and scary. With this news, it feels less scary. “Ever since you gave my Slayer power back to me, it’s felt different.”