“Well now, you may leave if you wish, old friend. I washed my hands of you when you were exiled.” His eyes cut to me. “But this one is going nowhere.” He paused and grinned at me. “We have unfinished business, don’t we, Tegan?” His voice was all sing song-y until it got to my name, then it turned harsh and cutting. His eyes were ablaze with hate. The vampires who came with him were still climbing up onto the roof. It seemed like the trail of them was never-ending. Half of them were already battling it out with Finn and the others while Whitfield backed me and Ethan into a corner.
My hands shook and my lip quivered, my emotions somehow overriding my magic. I tried to push past the fear and bring my magic to the surface, but it was useless.
Whitfield laughed. “Your death is coming for you, Tegan. Can you feel it? It’s in the air. Aw, look at that,” he put on a theatrical frown before grinning at the vampire beside him. “She’s frightened. Isn’t that just hilarious? How funny it is to see fear on the face of a heartless murderess.”
“You’re the one who’s heartless,” I spat, finally finding my voice. “I killed your daughter in self-defence. If she never came looking for me, then she’d still be alive today.”
“I care nothing for your excuses,” he snarled, before shouting an order to the vampires around him. “Get her!”
Finally, my magic came to me, and I whipped out a spray of sparks at Whitfield’s cronies. They jumped back, cringing and hissing from the burn. It didn’t deter them for long though. I panicked, knowing we were surrounded by enemies. There was no getting off this roof.
However, just as thoughts of giving up began to overtake me, I spotted something out of the side of my eye. Another ladder! It was almost the same colour as the wall, so it was slightly camouflaged. It led up to the next building, which was substantially taller than the one we were currently on.
Before I even had the chance to consider using it as a means of escape, Ethan threw me onto his back and leapt onto the ladder. He zoomed up the side of the building.
When we reached the next roof, Ethan kept going. He leapt across the gap between the building we were on and the next one. The force of our landing shattered through me. This happened several more times, and I couldn’t help looking back to see that Whitfield was still coming for us. Keeping one arm firmly around Ethan’s neck, I dropped the other and squeezed my eyes shut, concentrating on creating a stream of sparks in our wake. It slowed Whitfield down a little, but he and his crew just kept dodging the magic. Hell, that vampire didn’t give up easily.
At one point, I felt us going down another ladder and dropping onto the street. Ethan zoomed across to a high-rise building, and I just about made out a stairwell as we sped up it. Then we were outside again on another roof. I couldn’t gauge how much distance we’d travelled, but it seemed like we’d gone a long way. It was only when Ethan stopped running that I saw it wasn’t true. All we’d been doing was running around in circles, and we were now on a building directly across from the one we’d started out on.
“Why did you come back here?” I cried at Ethan.
“I didn’t have a choice,” he answered. “The streets are crawling with Whitfield’s followers. There’s no escape.”
I looked down and saw my friends still fighting off a never-ending stream of vampires across the way. I peered at the street below, and my heart dropped. The place was full to the brim with vampires. I couldn’t even see any humans left, and I dreaded to think that was because the vampires had killed them all. Glancing down Campion Row and out onto the Hawthorn river, all I found was more vampires coming over to this side of the city. I’d felt hopeless many times in my life, but never more so than this. Ethan was right. There really was no escape. That fact was further reinforced when Whitfield came to a stop before us.
“Now, now, Cristescu, that’s bad form. I never pegged you as the tucking tail and running away type.”
Ethan pushed me behind him protectively before addressing Whitfield. “You’ve penned us in. There’s no shame