Where There’s Smoke, There’s a
Dead Vampire
It takes a few seconds, but the smoke—or whatever that thing is—finally catches on. It relinquishes its hold on Jaxon and arrows straight for me.
Which, gotta say, is probably the most terrifyingly awful thing that’s ever happened to me in my life.
But considering the alternative is standing around and watching another person I love die, there is no alternative. And so I open my arms and gather the smoke toward me. Once it’s surrounding me, I take a breath, start to suck it in.
“No!” Jaxon roars.
Suddenly, I’m falling backward, flying backward off the altar and halfway across the room while Jaxon stumbles to his feet. He’s nearly gray at this point, but he manages to stand tall as he holds his hands out in front of him. Then slowly, slowly—so slowly I think I may have a heart attack watching him—he starts to compress the air between his hands into a spherical shape.
As he does, the entire room—the entire tunnel—starts to shake. And then it starts to crumble around us.
And still, Jaxon doesn’t let up. Still, he continues to compress the sphere, his hands slowly rotating in a circle as he pulls more and more energy, more and more mass into
the sphere.
The smoke flattens itself out, starts streaming in the other direction, but Jaxon is having none of it. He just starts pulling harder, until stones and candles and vases filled with blood start flying across the room toward him. He takes it all, pulls it all into the sphere and then reaches for more, until even the air in the room is streaming toward him in what looks and feels an awful lot like a tornado. And with the air comes the smoke, no matter how hard it struggles against Jaxon’s power.
It’s getting harder to breathe as Jaxon absorbs more and
more of the oxygen in the room, but I don’t even care. I just drop to the floor the way they taught me in fire safety and try to breathe whatever’s left down here as I watch him draw the smoke inexorably closer to him. Closer and closer and closer.
Soon even Lia and I are caught up in the energy suck, getting dragged across the floor by Jaxon’s power and his indomitable will. I don’t try to fight it, don’t do anything that might possibly make this harder for him. Instead, I just give myself over to Jaxon and trust that somehow he will keep me safe, even from himself.
He always does.
He’s got the smoke in his grasp now, floating between his hands as he struggles to condense it, to break it down into whatever he needs it to be so that the vortex or whatever he’s got going on in there can absorb it.
But the smoke isn’t going down without a fight. Every time it looks like Jaxon might have it contained, a small stream escapes his hold and he has to start all over again. But
Jaxon has a will of iron and more power than I even imagined possible inside of him. He won’t give up.
Instead, he spins the sphere between his palms faster and faster. The ceiling starts caving in, the walls fall to pieces, even the stones on the floor start to crumble. And still Jaxon doesn’t relinquish his hold. Still, he continues to pull.
The oxygen in the room is getting thinner, and I’m really struggling for breath now. He must be, too, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he continues to manipulate every single thing in the room.
The smoke struggles to escape one more time, but with a roar, Jaxon yanks it back inside the sphere once and for all. And then he just shuts it down, just turns off the conduit or the energy suck or whatever it is so that everything around us just settles.
The room stops shaking, the walls and ceiling and floor stop breaking apart, the remaining candles drop to the floor, and the oxygen slowly starts to stabilize. I settle back against the ground and just breathe for a few seconds, even as I watch Jaxon condense the sphere between his hands into a glowing orb only a little larger than a tennis ball.
And then he pulls his hand back and fires it straight at Lia.
It hits her in the stomach, and her whole body arches off the floor. She gives one last terrifying gasp as she absorbs the energy, the matter, the smoke. Then she looks straight at him and whispers, “Yes. Finally. Thank you.”
Seconds later she explodes into a cloud of dust that slowly settles back onto the ground.
All I can think is that it’s over. Oh my God, it’s finally over. “Jaxon!” I turn to him, try to crawl toward the only boy I’ve
ever loved. But I’m weak, so weak, and the altar is too far away. Instead, I hold a hand out to him instead and call his name over and over and over again.
Jaxon staggers across the altar toward me, then half jumps, half falls off of it to the ground below, where I’m waiting for him.
He takes my hand, brings it to his lips. And whispers, “I’m so sorry,” before falling into a dead faint at my feet.
“Jaxon!” Frantically, I call his name. “Jaxon, wake up! Jaxon!” He doesn’t move, and for one, terrifying second I’m not even sure he’s breathing.
Somehow I find the strength to roll him over. I press a hand to his chest, feel the shallow movement of his chest up and down, and nearly sob in relief. But there’s no time for that, not when he’s still bleeding out from the chest wound Lia gave him. And not when he’s turned a pasty, sickly white.
“I’ve got you,” I whisper to him as I grab on to one of the ragged strips Lia actually left on my shift and rip it off. I ball it up, press it firmly to Jaxon’s wound in an effort to staunch the blood. “I’ve got you.”
Except I don’t have him. Not really. Not when he could die on me at any second. He’s lost so much blood—more than I have at this point—but I don’t know what to do about it. If I leave him and go for help, he might very well bleed out while I’m gone. If I don’t, he may bleed out anyway, since I can’t seem to staunch the blood.
Desperate, I look around for any untouched jars of the blood Lia had lined up around the altar earlier today. But they’re all gone now, sucked into Jaxon’s vortex or spilled
onto the floor around us.
“What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” I mutter to myself as I try to get my panic-stricken and pain-addled brain to work. Jaxon’s heart rate is slowing down and so is his breathing. I don’t have much time to do something, anything to save him.
In the end, I do the only thing I can think of. The only thing left for me to do. I tear open one of the wounds on my wrists until it starts bleeding freely again, then press my wrist to Jaxon’s mouth and whisper, “Drink.”
At first, there’s no reaction as my blood trickles onto his lips. Seconds stretch into what feels like an eternity, and I start to despair. If he doesn’t drink, he’ll die. If he doesn’t drink, we’ll both—
Suddenly, he roars back to consciousness. His hands clamp onto my arm like a vice as he sinks his teeth into my vein, drawing in my blood with a desperate, hungry pull.
It feels both familiar and foreign, the sensation of him drinking from me. There’s the usual mix of pleasure and pain, but this time, the pain is sharper as he greedily consumes my blood. Despite the sharp discomfort, relief floods over me as the room around us fades to black.
There’s no resisting the darkness this time, no need to fight it, because I’m not alone. Jaxon is with me, and that’s all that matters. So when the next wave of blackness rolls in, I surrender to it.
I give myself over to the darkness—and to Jaxon—trusting that somehow, everything will be okay.
Trusting that Jaxon will make sure of it.
