Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
But I kick them off, drag them off, and finally find the pink-haired girl underneath.
She is in tatters. Literally. Her body looks like someone tried to flay her. Her eyes are dead and black. Her clothes ripped off. Bites all over her body.
I bend down, slip my arms underneath her, and pick her up. Then I carry her back upstairs.
When we get to Paul’s bedroom I don’t place her on the bed. I take her into the hallway that leads to my bunker. Her body flops as I descend back into my sacred underworld and the scent of dirt swirls around us.
When we get to the bunker the purple mist appears, billowing up from my feet as I walk forward into my cave.
I stop here, just past the threshold, and let out a breath. Happy to be home.
Then I kick the door closed behind me and the outside world disappears once again. In the new, comforting darkness I carry the ragged remains of Echo’s body over to the pool near the waterfall and descend into the water. I settle us on a flat rock ledge, keeping what’s left of her head above the water. Then I bite the palm of my hand and set it on top of the remains of her lips, letting the blood drip onto what’s left of her tongue.
It takes a while. I don’t keep track of time down here, but a good amount of it passes before she starts to show signs of life again.
Life, though? Is it life? It isn’t. She has not been a living thing since the day she was made. Still, it’s all she has.
She can’t die, not the way the halfbreeds did in the foyer. Because she had an exchange with me and they didn’t. The exchange is what matters. It’s how you create things, it’s how you change things, it’s how you do everything in the world of vampires.
All those halfbreeds did was drink poison. I am poison. Perhaps they could’ve drunk Ryet the way they probably drank Lucia on occasion, because Ryet is new and his blood is still developing. Lucia was never a vampire. She and Syrsee share some similarities, but Syrsee is a pure Black witch. Lucia is the equivalent of a witch-vampire halfbreed and her blood is not poison to her little minions.
She was also giving them blood from the feeder. A no-no in our world—our old world, the one across the ocean. But this was part of Paul’s plan, or else he would’ve stopped it.
He didn’t like the fact that she did it, especially when he was not directing it, but ultimately, he didn’t push back much. It was, after all, necessary to create this moment with Echo right now.
She stirs in my arms. Her skin—all of her skin—is still tattered, but even as I watch the skin begins to mend. She will not remember what happened. Not directly. So she will have some peace. This is how I’m going to repay her for doing me the favor of killing Lucia’s horde.
There is a chance that her memory of the ritual will come back, but I doubt she will live that long. I can’t let her die, not yet. She has yet another job to do for us.
But once that is done she will be on her way to Hell.
As I’ve been thinking this her body has been repairing itself. And by the time I’m done, she is looking much, much better. Still more deathlike than lifelike, but she’s making progress.
I resituate her in my lap so I can swipe the hair out of her eyes. I like to watch the life come back into them. Also, her eyes will turn color. They were blue, but they are not blue now, nor will they ever be blue again. They will be orange or yellow, or something in between.
She stirs again. A good sign. And then, abruptly, she’s back. Eyes fly open—gold, very nice—and she gasps. Her lips are a luscious pink color, her pale cheeks become flushed and rosy right before my eyes, and her hair—which was pink and cut into a bob before the horde tore it from her scalp—grows back right before my eyes. Long, then longer. And not pink, since that was not her natural color. It’s more gold than blonde, just like her eyes.
I smile down at her. “Welcome back, little baby.”
Echo is sitting next to me in the pool of water now. She’s mostly naked, but not entirely. What’s left of her clothes hangs on her upper arms and around her waist. She’s staring straight ahead at the waterfall, saying nothing. She has not quite come to terms with things just yet.
But she will. She has no choice, really. She will accept what happened, though she won’t remember it. And she will move on and proceed to live out the rest of her life, which will be short.