Invincible (A Centennial City Novel) - By Fionn Jameson Page 0,89
Tell me, my little vicious, betraying darling. Is he already dead?”
For some inexplicable reason, she turned his dark gaze to me and for one terrifying moment, I thought she nodded.
But she only smiled.
What did that mean?
“Not yet,” she said. “But who knows what will happen in half an hour? I’ve left him with someone who very much wanted to meet him.”
My throat was dry, painfully dry. “Who?”
She tapped her forehead with a long, elegant red fingernail. “Well, he’s always professed an interest in Sanguinates…especially since we killed the last one. Said something about how he never got the chance to study his own creation.”
Noir tried once again to pull free but only succeeded in receiving a resounding cuff to the side of his head that would have felled a cow. “You stupid, silly bitch. You’re playing right into Matthias’s hands! Don’t you think this is what he wanted?”
She tilted her head to one side. “I don’t care what he wants. Once I get rid of you and Vincent, I’ll be the one and only power to Centennial City. I am sick and tired of playing second fiddle to you buffoons. Do you think this constant pandering to the humans is good for our species?”
“It’s the only way we can survive!”
“Wrong!” she screamed and smacked a hand on the car roof. All of the windows blew out with a crash and a shard dug deep into my left cheek. “You think the humans are afraid of us? They think we’re some kind of joke, Noir! Well, no more. I’m not some kind of tourist attraction, you got that? I’m taking the fucking night back, do you understand me? The fucking sheep will learn to bow at our feet once again. Just like you and that human next to you.”
Noir studiously avoided looking at me. Blood was beginning to trickle down my face again. Damn it. “So, what happens now?”
She slithered off the hood, the moonlight casting a faint aura over her pale white skin. “Well, you die. Then she dies.”
“And Vincent?”
She waved a hand in the air. “Oh, I’m sure the Fellow-thingie will take care of him well enough.”
I choked on my own spit and sputtered, eyes watering. “You called the Fellowship on them?”
Her eyes narrowed with malicious pride. “Oh, they loved it. Ate it up. Ate it up even more when I told them you were betraying them all along.”
You were betraying them all along.
In that instant, I didn’t want to kill anyone more.
I would have given anything to feel her blood drip from my fingers.
She clapped her hands. “Yes, yes! Look at me like that. Glare at me like you think you can do anything about me. God, I love it. I wish I could feed off hate. Fuck blood, give me hatred any damn day.”
Marcus’s hand tightened on the back of my neck and I stopped breathing. One faint twinge of his fingers and I would breath no more.
A frightening, sobering thought.
Shit. I hated lose-lose situations like this.
“Anyways, I’ve gotta go.” She waved a hand and proceeded over to a dark blue sports car parked a few meters away at the curb of the oddly quiet industrial parking lot. “Got a few vampire lords to overthrow. Have fun, hm?”
Marcus’s body thrummed with nervous energy behind me. “What do you want to do with these two?”
“I told you, kill them,” she said without a backwards glance and when she screeched out of the parking lot, I tasted dust, thick and heavy, in the back of my throat.
Marcus sighed. “Jesus.”
I shifted under his grip, to keep my knees from turning into hamburger meat on the rough gravel, but a single tightening of his forefinger and thumb stopped me from making any more zealous movements.
“I, uh, wouldn’t move, if I were you,” he said. “I’m not exactly the most steady at the moment.”
“Your eyes. They look better,” I said, my voice sounding even quieter in the silent night in which even the crickets declined to sing. “I was worried.”
His laughter was husky. “Were you now?”
“You are not my enemy. I have never considered you the enemy.”
“Lady, you don’t even know me.”
“And you don’t know me,” I said. “What kind of hold does Annabelle have over you? Didn’t you say that Vincent owned you?”
He was silent for a moment. “You don’t know her. Vincent might own me, but he’ll at least leave a dead man’s body alone. She might be an idiot, but she’s a vindictive one. She’ll go after everyone I