Dance in Shadow and Whisper (Marionettes of Myth #1)

Chapter Twenty-Two

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I had left my body. I had left this moment, and this life. There were no sounds, no sensations, nothing chaining me to my own bones as I stared down at the man who was my father. Solara had fallen to all fours, her face contorted with a sob, but there were no tears. She couldn't cry. Vampires couldn't cry. She could kill him, she could plant a bullet in his body and end his life and take away the man who had raised her, but she couldn't give him tears.

And there was no bullet wound in her.

He had changed out the cartridge.

He had changed it out for a magazine of blanks.

He had known all along that she would come for him, and he goaded her, and she couldn't cry for him.

Fire burned in my stomach and it spread, contaminating me, surging through my veins, searing with flames that scraped at the walls of my body like claws of red-hot iron. Flames flooded my throat, and when I tasted fire across my tongue, I knew what it was. It erupted from my lips.

I screamed.

My voice was raw, so unhinged, blazing from my lungs to the sky. My body heaved out the sound, wrung me of it, peeled my flesh from my bones and made my ears bleed. It was ugly, and it was repulsive, and it was me. Burning up. It burned me up. A fever that sickened me to my core, torching me with the heat of the sun, hacking open my chest.

I couldn't grasp why pure sunlight reflected off the tower walls and the sidewalk and the cars that shrieked to a stop. Solara cowered away with a scream as her skin sizzled from the light, her hair a red twister in the virulent wind. I lifted my arms. The scream faded from my lips.

Sunlight.

My flesh glowed in perfect summery brilliance as if I had caught fire, bathing the area in daylight. Liquid sunlight seared through my veins, and as I realized it, as I began to understand what was happening, the light only brightened. The wind picked up and my hair twirled and snapped.

My eyes landed on Solara, cowering, smoldering like any vampire who had developed the most severe intolerance for sunlight. Her screams affected my brain like any scream impacted a demon. Her voice shivered in my veins, caused me to reel from the agony of it, forcing me into moment of numbness.

But then I recovered.

She had killed them. Both of them. Their sacrifices were a result of her insanity.

I would not allow her insanity to kill anyone else.

Fury charged through my system. The rest of the world fell to the back of my mind.

I lunged for her. The monstrous creature inside me snarled as I tackled her down to the sidewalk. Another scream powered through my gritted teeth, through elongated canines. My blazing fingers wrapped around her throat, searing her skin, my arms covered in the jagged red swirls and sigils of the demon form, alit like sunspots. The shadows came alive like a thousand hands and reached for me, echoing her wail, but my fingers plunged into her hair and fisted, ready to rip her head clean off her neck and end her.

Something tackled me.

My back slammed against the concrete.

It wasn't her, and it wasn't her shadow, and it wasn't anything I'd ever felt before.