Page 82 of Veradel
“No.” I shake my head with a grimace. “That’s definitely a mix of human blood she must have drunk recently.” My stomach twists, hoping like hell it’s nobody I know.
But even if it isn’t, the fact is she chose to drink human blood. Even if the sight of a dead body feels wrong to look at on so many levels, I know this is the only way we can save Xantera—by killing them all.
“Well,” Soren says with a happy sigh. “At least that was easier than expected, right? Not even a hair out of place, alpha.” He claps Lucan on the back. “Only eleven to go.”
As soon as the last word leaves his lips, however, the Seventh Guardian jerks.
“You were saying?” Vivian asks with raised eyebrows.
A gurgled hiss leaves the Seventh Guardian’s mouth. Her head snaps upward. She shoots to her feet before any of us can grab her, but thewerewolves work quickly to surround her in an impenetrable wall of muscle and fur. She spins, the wound in her back already healing—
And then Kyra rips off her head.
I wince as the decapitated head hits one of the walls with a squelchingthud. The Seventh Guardian’s body crumples to the ground a second time, and Soren whistles.
“Scratch what I said earlier.That’sthe coolest fucking thing I’ve ever—oh, come on. Really?”
The headless corpse jerks again, the fingernails scratching at the floor in an effort to drag itself toward the head across the cavern. Gabriel steps forward and pins it down with a single, giant paw, but one of the arms whips around to scratch him, and he yelps.
“Enough with this shit,” Vivian grumbles. She marches forward to snatch one of the lit torches from its sconce on the wall. Before the Seventh Guardian’s body can crawl its way to the head, she brings the flame down upon it.
For a moment, nothing happens. Then another moment passes, and still nothing happens. The flame licks the Seventh Guardian’s body, and although her clothes catch on fire, her marble skin remains unaffected.
Worse, one of the arms swings up to snatch at the torch, and Vivian has to wrestle it out of her grip with a grunt.
“No wonder she turned her back on you,” Merrick mutters to Lucan. “She knew she wouldn’t die.”
Panic seems to settle over us like snow. If we can’t even kill one vampire when all of us are circling her, how are we going to kill the rest of them? Are they—we—completely immortal? No, that’s not possible. The Thirteenth Guardian died, I just have no ideahow.
And what if Arad or any of the others comes down to the catacombs to investigate the noise we’ve already made while we’re trying to figureit out?
“Saskia.” Lucan closes the distance between us in two strides and cups my face in his hands. “Can you think of anything that will help us? Anything Arad might have told you in the past?”
I close my eyes, straining to scrape anything useful from my memories, but… nothing. I spent so much time trying to escape Arad’s presence that I never paused long enough to glean any useful information from him, dammit.
My heart beats in my chest, slow and steady as ever, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling everything. Fear. Terror. Horror, as the werewolves behind Lucan try to keep the Seventh Guardian’s body from rejoining her head to no avail.
My useless heart.
My useless human heart.
With a gasp, I open my eyes.
“That’s it! In the garden, right before I jumped, Arad told me our hearts can’t turn to stone.” More accurately, he said,I am going to drain you dry until you are just as much of a stone as your helpless mother. Well, except for your heart. The only thing that can’t turn to stone is your useless human heart. “And since we all started off as humans—”
“Even a vampire’s heart would still be vulnerable.” Lucan snaps his fingers and kisses my forehead, but before he turns around, he casts one last look at my chest. As if even more scared now that he knows how I might die as well.
But I push at his shoulder. “Go!”
He spins on a heel, dripping with murderous power. Just as the Seventh Guardian’s body reaches her head, fitting it back onto her shoulders so that sinews begin to reconnect, Lucan’s claws shoot out of his fingers, and he punches through her chest.
When he rips out her heart, the Guardian falls to the ground for a final time.
“Burn it,” Lucan says with obvious disdain. The thing clutched in his fist isn’t a pulsing, bloody organ like I’d imagine, but a sad little lump of charcoal gray, the color of the ash we left behind at the door of the Wall. Obviously something that hadn’t been used in a long, long time.
Without looking over his shoulder, he tosses the heart toward Vivian, who shrieks and bats it at Soren. “Ew, I don’t want to touch that thing!” he hollers, but catches it anyway before it can land in the puddle at his feet, grimacing as he holds it out. “Fuck, get it over with.”
Merrick pinches the bridge of his nose, grabs the flickering torch from Vivian, and holds the flame out to the heart. With bated breath, we wait…
