Bane's Choice (Vampire Motorcycle Club #1) - Alyssa Day Page 0,3
in the room, this warlock emanated power from his physical presence as well as his magic. He was tall and heavily muscled, with a gleaming bald head and a jutting nose. His thin lips were pulled away from his teeth in a sneer. “The Chamber sends its regards, bloodsucker. And our demand that you vacate the territory to your betters.”
“If I had any betters, I might consider it,” Bane said, stilling his rage to an icy calm. He could feel Meara and Luke now—they were alive. Unconscious, but alive.
He needed to use his brain—strength and magic would not be enough against this foe.
When the necromancer laughed, the three warlocks in the room started to convulse, pounding their heads against the floor, over and over. “Master,” the male without a knife in his throat crooned. “Master Constantin, you will protect us.”
“Clearly, I need to get better help,” Constantin said, glancing down at them before returning his attention to Bane. “The Chamber warned me that you had magic, vampire, but they didn’t know how strong you were. Seems that our intelligence was out of date. But you’re still no match for me.”
“Haven’t seen one of your kind in more than a hundred years, necromancer,” Bane said, his voice dangerously even. “After I kill you, I hope not to see another for at least as long.”
“There are no others like me,” Constantin boasted. “I am more powerful, more versed in the dark arts, more—”
But, by the third more, Bane had heard enough. He pulled on his own magic—fueled by the elements of Air and Water, fueled by the gravitational pull of the moon, fueled by starlight itself—and shifted through time and space.
But the necromancer was ready for him and blurred across the room in a magical shift of his own. Otto and the other male warlock, somehow still alive in spite of the blood pumping from the holes where their arms used to be, cried out to their master, beseeching.
Pleading.
Constantin made a downward slicing motion with both hands toward the men’s heads, and Bane watched in disbelief as the tops of their skulls slid cleanly off, as if a razor-edged sword had sheared through bone and brain.
“If that’s how you treat your own, it’s a wonder the Chamber manages to recruit any new people at all,” Bane said, shifting the currents of his magic to shield Luke and Meara.
“There are always fools,” the necromancer replied, almost casually, pointing to Marta, who—in spite of what Constantin had just done—still crawled toward him, crooning, “Master, Master,” again and again.
Luke and Meara now safe, Bane refocused his magic, channeling it into a single, deadly spear of invisible power, and then unleashed it, hurling it across the room at Constantin. The necromancer’s head jerked up, his face contorting into a grimace. Then the necromancer flung both hands into the air, and two things happened at once: the wall behind Bane imploded, slamming into his back and knocking him to his knees, and the female—Marta—levitated into the air, Constantin using her as a human shield.
Bane’s magic ripped her in two.
Bane leapt to his feet, gathering his power for another attack, but the necromancer’s hands were already busy, flashing through the pattern of a complicated spell, fueled no doubt by Marta’s death, that pushed waves of darkness and the stink of dread into the space around himself. Creating a portal to Hell, for all Bane knew.
“Another time, then, vampire,” Constantin said. “Consider this a parting gift.”
He stepped into the portal, and the shack exploded, raining wood, stone, and debris down on Bane, Luke, Meara, and the corpses of the three warlocks.
“No!” Bane shouted, smashing through the rubble, fighting his way to his family, pain searing through his chest. If his miscalculation had cost Luke and Meara their lives…
But Meara was already shoving splintered wood and rubble away from herself and standing. “What the hell kind of magic was that? I could hear and see what was happening, but it was like I was trapped in my body. I couldn’t move… Luke? Where’s Luke?”
Bane hurled stone and wood out of his way, digging for Luke, who suddenly started to moan and then sat up, pushing debris off his body.
“Ouch. What the fuck was that? Did you kill them? I hope you killed them all.”
“Actually, no,” Bane told him, holding out a hand to help him out. “The necromancer killed his own. This may be a much bigger problem than we thought.”