Page 40 of Vampire Sins
“I sense Jet down there,” Luke said, pitching his voice low as if he was afraid someone might hear us. He glanced at me, his eyes flaring with the silver magic of his angelic blood. “Don’t you feel him?”
A cold sweat broke out over my body and I looked down at my runes. I still wore my lingerie, but the runes for Luke, Xavier, and Nate blazed with healthy magic. The rune for Jet, the one at the top of my navel, was cold and silent with only the faintest hum to assure me Jet was here, somewhere. I ran my fingers over my cold rune as panic threatened to take ahold of me.
“Jet? As in the dragon, Jet?” Nate asked, his voice painfully loud in the grim silence.
Xavier hissed at him. “Keep your voice down, mortal. We’re not alone.”
Goosebumps broke out over my skin. So, the creepy ominous sensation that there was a monster lurking in the distant fog wasn’t just in my imagination. Great.
“Jet’s a dragon shifter,” I whispered as I knelt and ran my fingers over the coins. They were surprisingly warm to my touch. “He’s one of our bond.”
Luke knelt, his jaw flexing before he spoke. I was right to say that Jet was “our” bond, and not just a bond that belonged to me. Luke was the one who sensed him because all of my guys were bound to one another, even if that magic used me as its medium. “Tell us about him,” Luke offered. “If he’s really under all of these coins, then he feels as if his greed has buried him alive. What did he crave most?”
I bit my lip as I thought about my brief time with the dragon shifter. I felt like there was so much more to him than a first impression. “He’s part of the Hugh Modali, an ancient dragon lineage from his mother’s side, but his brother was the one who inherited the throne. He challenged Jin, he won, but I don’t think that’s what Jet really wanted.” He hadn’t taken joy in killing his brother. Jet had done what was right, but I imagined his insecurity of his claim to the dragon’s throne hadn’t magically gone away.
Nate joined us and swept his hand over the coins, sending them shifting like sands. “A scorned bastard denied his birthright, huh? I can relate to that.” Nate gave me a wink, but there wasn’t much humor in his gaze. This particular suffering was a little too close to home. “I don’t know the guy, but if I were him, I would want power. Those who had power over me wouldn’t be able to tell me what to do anymore. I’d want something they’d respect.” His gaze fell to the coins. “I suppose for dragons, that would be gold.”
Xavier hummed his agreement. “The mortal’s right. Jet’s sin is that he covets a denied birthright, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. That desire has devoured him from the inside for a long time; it’s become his greatest sin.” Xavier rested a cool hand on my shoulder that was protected only by the thin veil of my lingerie’s fabric.
“So what do we do?” I asked just before thunder rolled over the landscape, sending the coins shifting and ringing their song through the endless sea of gold. Whatever we were going to do, we’d better do it fast.
Xavier released me. “I’m afraid it’s both simple and arduous.”
Luke breathed a long sigh. “We dig.”
Jet
I couldn’t breathe. Something cold and shifting crushed me from all directions. The cold tang of metal filled my mouth. My delicate sense of smell flared at the lack of oxygen and I suppressed the urge to thrash. Whatever was crushing me moved with me and if I moved, I’d only make it worse.
I’d recognize this sensation anywhere. This had been a reoccurring nightmare I’d never quite gotten over. Golden coins buried me alive. The very same measure of wealthy of my race was what destroyed me. In some of my dreams I managed to dig myself out, only to be greeted by black fingers that stretched over the sky and devoured me all the same.
There was no digging out of this one. I couldn’t move; couldn’t expand my chest to take in needed breaths. I reduced myself to short, small hyperventilating puffs as I slowly suffocated. Panic threatened to take me under, but a distant sound gave me hope. Someone was digging from above.
I wasn’t alone.
This wasn’t like my nightmares. This was too vivid… and no one ever came to dig me out in my dreams. I instantly knew that Sonya was here and she was trying to get to me. That knowledge kept me alive. I fought for every small breath. I attempted to shift, forcing my muscles to contract and my tattoos to turn into scales, but I couldn’t divert my mass into a dragon’s body with this amount of weight crushing in on me.
Growling with frustration I was forced to stay still as coins shifted above. It wasn’t enough to lessen the massive weight, but luckily I had my arms above me as if I’d fallen here. Warm air hit my fingers, the coins shifting to finally free them so that I could move the joints just above my wrist. A muffled voice came through as a hand gripped mine.
“Jet! Hang in there!”
I would have smiled, except that an unmistakable roar sounded in the distance and the coins shifted from low beneath my feet, pressing hard against my ankles as something surgedup.
The Azure Dragon had followed me here. Shit.
Frantically I jostled my hand, hoping that was signal enough that I needed to get the hell out of here.
Sonya
Poor Jet was trapped under a massive pile of coins. He was lucky that he hadn’t suffocated already, but the way his hand thrashed told me that we didn’t have much more time. His tattoos swarmed over his knuckles and hardened into scales. He wanted to shift, but he couldn’t with the coins pressing down on him.
I scooped handfuls of the coins and tossed them aside, but no matter how hard I dug the coins seemed to fall back in on my dragon shifter.
Luke, Xavier, and even Nate helped me as much as they could. Xavier blurred with his vampiric speed and ferried coins farther away from us than necessary. Clearly this layer of hell had coins as far as we could see and I imagined it didn’t matter how far the vampire might take away this pile. The coins shifted like a massive sea and seemed to undo our work as quickly as we cleared coins away.
“This is hopeless!” Nate growled as he took armfuls of coins and pushed them out of the way, only to find the coins shifting back and undoing his work.
I growled, because we’d managed to uncover Jet’s hand, but we couldn’t seem to get any further. Hell was doing some weird voodoo shit and working against us.
