the Well of Souls through a resourceful seduction, she had expected the father of everything, the Creator, to chastise her and remand her back to the below, re-punishing her with an even greater sentence of isolation.
But the longer she was permitted to roam the streets of the city, the more that winter transitioned into spring, she was coming to realize her freedom was to be trusted. Yet the longer she was here, and the more she trusted her freedom, the more she realized that she was, autonomous ambulation aside, still in captivity. Still imprisoned. Still weighted by chains, though she could see them no better than she could visualize the bars that penned her in.
Surrounded by potential lovers and endless possibilities for consumption on all levels, she mourned the loss of her one true love and grieved the unprecedented separation that marked the end of their relationship. Jim Heron, the fallen angel, was in Heaven now, forever apart from her—and forever not alone. He was with that little, irrelevant girl, Sissy, who he stupidly gave a shit about, and his eternity with that mealy-mouthed pathetic made Devina want to destroy the earth itself. And then start on the rest of the galaxy.
So she was getting why the Creator did not care that she was out and about once again.
It was because her Father knew that she had no real free will, for her unrequited love was a dungeon within which she would e’er be set.
A surge of familiar pain made it hard to breathe and what blurred her vision presently was no longer the rain.
As she grew desperate for a release from her suffering, she pitched the bubble at the head of the alley. Upon impact with the slick bricks, the translucent containment broke apart, shattering as glass, releasing the very anguished sound her black soul had been making since the angel she loved had forsaken her for another . . .
Without love, even evil was unhappy.
It was strange to require the very thing that she existed to destroy, and to mourn its loss as if she were mortal and the cold, thieving hand of death had plucked a prized, irreplaceable apple from one’s family tree.
This fucking sucked.
To a vampire, the sunlight was what you feared, never the night. Darkness was freedom, shadows were safety, clouds over the loud, bright face of the moon a stroke of luck. The approach of the sunrise, in contrast, made flesh creep with warning, and the greater the peach glow to the east, the deeper the terror in the chest. No matter how strong the back, how powerful the dagger hand, how stout the will, those rays of gold were a scythe that was ever sharp, a flame that never extinguished, a pool in which there was only drowning, never rescue.
Syn stood upon great stone steps with his back to the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s mansion, the humidity of the storm that had moved on lingering in the still air, like the scent of a female who’d departed a room. Before him, below him, there was a valley of pine and maple, the former fluffy with evergreen boughs, the latter studded with tentative buds that would become, in time and warmer weather, leaves that would unfurl, worthy blooms even though they sported no petals or perfume.
Disaster impended, however.
There. Behind the mountains. A faint blush, as if the cold, dark sky was embarrassed at the joy with which it greeted the coming sun.
If he stayed out here, if he cast his vampire eyes upon the deadly beauty, it would all be over. He would suffer briefly in an inferno of his own flesh, but after that, the long, chronic agony that had e’er been his life would be over.
“Cousin?”
Syn pivoted around. Silhouetted in the grand entrance, with the light from the vestibule framing his body as if he were holy, Balthazar, son of Hanst, was both a ghost and a living, breathing vampire. But that was the nature of thieves, wasn’t it. They never made a sound and they were able to steal things without being caught—because no one knew that their hand had been in an unguarded pocket until it was too late.
“I’m coming,” Syn muttered as he turned back to the horizon.
His eyes were starting to burn, and the skin across his shoulders was tightening, sure as if he were already being exposed to the heat that was to come.
As the grand door’s heavy weight shut, he was grateful that his cousin knew and