Page 35 of Vampire Sins
I stopped in my tracks and gaped at her. “And my father?” I wasn’t sure how I’d feel if he was dead. Sure, we were trying to subdue him with the toxins, but I wasn’t sure even that could kill him. I just wanted to protect Sonya.
She misinterpreted my shock and grabbed my hand, patting it and enveloping me with a moment of warmth as her shield partly covered me. “Your father is fine. Apollo must have boosted his power before he died, because there’s no sign of deterioration from the toxins he’s digested.” She tilted her head. “Have you changed your mind? We don’t have to go after him again. I’m sure that Hades has everything under control by now.”
She didn’t know my father very well if she thought he’d retreat to Seattle and pretend as if nothing had happened. No. He’d been planning this for hundreds of years. He’d fathered a demonspawn and laid the groundwork for some diabolical plan. No way this was it.
I growled with frustration, my anger taking over and helping me forget about the ruthless cold that made my nose go numb. “He’ll go to one of this thrall houses, eventually. We’ll just dose him again.”
Her gaze flicked to me, and for once, she was unreadable. “You’re okay with that? More girls will die.”
“Of course I’m not fucking okay with that,” I said, wanting to sound outraged, but then a sensation just above my heart made me clutch at my chest and buckle over.
The fuck was this?
“Nathanial?” Pink said, a bite of worry in her tone. When I didn’t respond, she tried again. “Nate?”
I groaned as a searing pain stretched over my chest as if someone had stabbed me with a hot poker. I ripped away the layers of my coats, no longer able to feel the cold. I was hot. So fucking hot I was about to boil from the inside.
When I got down to my bare skin, I spotted the source of my agony. A blazing tattoo bled red light over my skin and smoke drifted into the air as it bored itself deeper into my body. “Pink?” I cried. Whatever this was, it wasn’t good, and it felt like I was fucking dying.
Her eyes went wide. “Nate, I—” She swallowed hard as her gaze flicked to mine. I’d never seen her look defeated before, but that’s exactly what reflected back at me in her eyes. “Nate, listen to me. You’re able to experience something very… unpleasant. Just remember the person who gave you this mark. Remember why you care for them.”
I cried out as another stab of pain rippled through me. The world blurred and red-hot heat settled over me as I slipped through the ground. Yes, through the fucking ground into the earth.
There was only one place that was this hot… and down…
I reached for Pink, but she was already too far away. The ripples of a red breeze enclosed over me and then there was only darkness and screams.
Envy
Sonya
“He’s goingto be okay, right?” I asked, hating how high-pitched my voice had gone. Nate was human. Even if my bond could keep him alive in hell, he wasn’t like Luke or Xavier. He didn’t have supernatural powers to give him a boost.
Xavier settled the human onto the ground and backed away, giving him space.
Nate’s clothes had barely survived the portal that had brought him here. In spite of the dire situation, I had to keep my eyes above the curve of his abdomen. I’d missed my human and even if he was mortal, he had a body that could compete with any incubus.
He groaned, but didn’t wake up. The weak sound made my heart twist and reminded me where we were. We were in the third circle of hell, the layer that identified with Nate and his ultimate sin.
Envy.
Statues circled us and stared down, each representing a different supernatural race.
The most prominent of course was Derek, the Incubus King, who loomed over us with his cock rigid and the white marble of his sculpture depicting him as the object of sex and desire. His power glowed in a crown atop his head and he stared down at us with a disapproving scowl, likely how Derek often looked at his human son.
There were so many statues. Aside Derek stood Nate’s mother, Silvia, with her wings spread wide and her eyes made of lifeless stone that glowed with her silver power. She looked neither disapproving nor appeased, but rather just as inanimate as the stone that depicted her. This was how Nate saw his mother. She was dead to him, just as he was dead to her.
The statues weren’t all people I recognized. One of the male muses garbed in traditional roman apparel stared down, Ares, and I only knew him by the iconic sword he wielded. It gleamed in the distant flares of hellfire and looked ready to strike us down if we made one wrong move.
The rest ranged from a mermaid, a siren with scales over her face, a dragon with the head of a human, a vampire with fangs bared, then it got weird. A panther. A wolf. Shifters, I guessed.
“Remember, this is the realm of envy,” Xavier reminded me, bringing me out of my appraisal of the statues. If they were clues, then they weren’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. Nate hated his humanity. He hated that he was powerless and surrounded by so many reminders that he’d been born on the wrong side of the species. “You need to save Nate from himself. You need to prove to him his importance.”
I blinked at him, then down at the unconscious form at my feet. Nate’s rune glowed hot on his chest and the skin around it puffed with an angry red. “He’s rejecting our bond,” I whispered, more to myself than to anyone else. It stung that Nate would fight it. I knew that I’d left him on his own, but it wasn’t because I’d wanted to.
Xavier and Luke gave me space as I knelt and stroked the hair from Nate’s sweat-dampened forehead. “Nate, can you hear me?”
He stirred under my touch, but didn’t wake up. I jerked when a howl sounded in the distance.
