Page 63 of The Nephilim's Finesse

“But she’ll live on in these flowers.” He smiled sadly. “I always called her my rose. She laughed at that and said there was no rose without a thorn. So I said that I’ll be her thorn forever.” Finally, he looked up. I never saw him with such a sad face. “And I am.”

I shook my head. “How can you be when she’s dead?”

“She’ll only be dead if I let her be dead. She won’t die in here.” He pointed to his heart and then his head.

“You're young; you don’t understand yet. But you'll understand if you ever love someone like I loved her.”

I was torn from my thoughts when Thorne entered the room.

“Ah, there you are.” He walked over to me and touched the petals. After all these years, he still remembered her. Suddenly, I had a lump in my throat; my chest contracted. Now, I understood. Swallowing my feelings, I walked to the couch and sat down, avoiding looking at the flowers and all they stood for.

Thorne walked to a hidden fridge, took out a bottle, and poured the red liquid into two glasses. He handed me one and sat on the chair opposite me. I took a sip of cold blood. The temperature repressed the taste but healed the slight burns on my exposed skin.

“It took you some time to free yourself.”

I shrugged. “They get more and more creative about how to detain their enemies.”

“Did you learn something useful?”

I leaned back and sipped on my drink, thinking. What had I learned in these months? I knew now what pleasure was, what feeling content meant, that I could feel more than friendship towards someone, that I now knew what it felt like to miss someone terribly.

“Nothing that would aid us in our quest.”

“Disappointing.” He pressed his lips together. “However, I salute you. I never thought of uniting the vampires to a common goal. Having one or two fledglings and my familiar was enough to bear with.”

Back in the day, we had familiars, humans who'd do our bidding. They were convenient for running errands in daylight and organising deals with humans. Until the witches forbade us from having them. They hunted them down and bewitched the familiars to kill us unexpectedly—black-hearted hags.

“But you, my darling,” Thorne smiled warmly. “You have accomplished what I never did. Uniting the vampires to fight. I’m so proud of you!”

I nodded my thanks as I saw that he wasn’t finished.

“But even more so, your pact with the demon was a smart idea, and the first steps you undertook were so promising.”

“What do you mean? The angels crushed the demons.”

He waved that point aside. “I negotiated again, and we came to a very satisfying agreement.”

I tried to stay calm. What madness would come now? That was what I feared. Thorne would take over and mould it to his goals, ignoring what I had done, what my achievement was, and what I wanted from this. In the worst case, he'd do the opposite of what I wanted and assume I would support him no matter what.

“We'll aid the demon lord to send his minions all over the earth. In exchange, they’ll kill all the witches and warlocks. After that, the Nephilim and even the fae, if they aren’t fast enough to flee into their realm.” He chuckled coldly.

In my mind, the picture of what he described formed before my eyes: demons roaming freely over the earth, doing whatever they liked, harming, tormenting, and killing humans. Chaos would erupt. I saw screaming women and men running away in the night from deformed abnormalities. I saw hunting nightmares pounce on them, inserting their long tongues into their ears and slurping out the liquified brains of their victims. War would erupt, destroying everything. Would the angels intervene? What if not? Would Earth become a second Hell?

“After all these years, you still want the annihilation of all witches and warlocks?”

He nodded. “They killed her. They don’t deserve anything else.”

“You killed the ones that took her from you. That was six centuries ago. Not one witch or warlock from that line still lives.”

Thorne shook his head. “Victoria,” he used my given name. “I don’t want to have this conversation again. I’ll have my revenge. And you won’t stay in my way, do you understand?”

I gulped and nodded. “What do you think will happen after the demon kills all the other magical species?”

“The vampires will rule over Earth.”

Stunned, I shook my head. “That’s not what'll happen. We can’t keep the demons in check. They’ll take over and create a second Hell.”

Thorne shrugged. “That’s also fine with me.”

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