Karissa’s silent demand to make sure, as well as his own need, had him pushing his awareness out into that dark ether, grasping once more for the lost connection between him and Gabby, even though he feared what he knew he would find. The mate bond was truly gone; either her hatred was too strong or it had been irreversibly severed by the evil she’d been exposed to here.
“Fuck, Gabby, what did they do to you?”
Not every bit of blood on her body was from her mindless massacre back in that foyer. Beneath the drying blood and the more recent sticky paths of red she’d drawn from Annie were patches of brown surrounding still-healing wounds and yellow-black bruises.
They’d hurt her. Again. And for that alone he wished he could go back, revive them, and then tear them apart again for her. Maybe he’d even join her in her madness because he knew, just knew, that when he’d done what he needed he’d be there anyway.
His hand flexed around his knife. Strike to the heart. Quick and easy.
No, never easy. Not when it was Gabby. Even if it was just the shell of her body and not his Gabby. With sinking comprehension he realized he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill her. Couldn’t end her misery. Only obviously she could end his.
Her mouth twisted into a snarling smile as she bent down, grabbing up a scalpel he hadn’t noticed before. Not a very good weapon but…She lunged. His arm automatically came up to block, her puny knife skittering uselessly off his blade, but he’d underestimated her. Claws slashed deep across his side, tearing through his shirt and ripping parallel tracks of flesh from muscle.
He stumbled back, putting distance between them as he tested the wound. Not by any stretch of the imagination fatal, but shit, it stung. “Hey, cookie, I know you like it kinda rough, but don’t you think that’s—”
She screeched and charged, and crazed as she was didn’t bother to watch his knife this time. All he had to do was follow through on instinct and take the strike, but again he failed, instead twisting out of the way.
“Stop it, Gabby. This isn’t you. You don’t want to do this.”
She narrowed her eyes, likely because she was pissed at missing and regrouping, but he couldn’t help but…
“Do you remember me, Gabby?”
“I don’t need to remember you. You’re one of them.”
“Who’re them?” he asked automatically, his mind reeling at the fact that she’d actually spoken.
“The ones that betrayed me,” she hissed.
He sucked in a breath. That was it. Just that simple stream of conscious thought, even if twisted, sent his hope soaring. He took a deep breath, passing his knife back to his other hand. Her pupils widened, a hiss of disbelief slipping from between her teeth.
“I’m never giving up on you, Gabby. Not while there is breath in my body,” he told her, knowing in the depths of his heart it was true. If there was a mind beyond the instinct then somewhere in there was a soul. And he would not let that soul be won by darkness.
“Let’s see if we can fix that then,” she said and threw the scalpel at his face.
He ducked before it speared him through the eye, though he lost a good swath of hair in the process.
Useless. Your Gabby is gone. You know she’s gone.
No, she wasn’t. Not if she could reason. He just had to help her find the right ones. So he spoke to her, his voice hoarse from the desperate effort he put into trying to bring her back as he blocked and evaded each of her attacks. She was completely enraged, her assaults no more than senseless charges in response to each memory he tried to restore to her. But it wasn’t until he mentioned Roland and the caves that something flickered in her eyes, a momentary banking of the crimson fires.
“I told him, you know,” he said, leaping on the chance that this was the key. “I told Roland he was your father. He came here tonight. To save you. Put both himself and his mate in danger to do so.”
“You lie! You lie!” she shrieked, not even bothering to attack him this time but held her fists over her ears like a child.
“Why? Why do you think I lie?”
<<Unloved. Unwanted. Alone. Betrayed.>>
He sucked in a breath, both elated and torn anew at the misery-laden thought she’d unwittingly projected. “Oh, Gabby, no. That’s not true. That’s the lie.”
He moved forward, reaching for her. She screamed, leaping at him, fangs bared. He didn’t try and strike her, but her sudden forward movement as he was reaching brought his knife into contact with her upper arm.
She hissed and retreated, her eyes glazed and confused as she clamped her hand down on the wound. For a moment she looked just like the scared vampire he’d found chained up inside the dilapidated building back in that coal mine; a helpless child, hiding behind bravado, though she couldn’t fathom why she’d been left for dead. She hadn’t been helpless, of course, nor had she been the child he’d first thought, but she had been betrayed by her maker and left for a crack in the cloud cover.
And you promised never to use your knife on her.
“Shit…Gabby, you moved and I…” He reached for the bond again, and this time he swore he felt something, only it was immediately severed by a blast of evil so strong it left his head ringing and his knees threatening to crumble.
<<See? Even now he seeks to end you. This bastard Paladin who has as little blood as you do. Why should he be accepted when you aren’t?>>
Valin gulped in deep breaths, trying to draw his shields back around him even as his mind whirled. He knew the feel of that mind voice. But it was impossible, he’d watched the man, or rather vampire, die in a cave by Roland’s blade four months ago.
“Who is it, Gabby? How did they convince you to believe these lies?” Valin asked as he sheathed his knife. This battle was no longer a physical one, but one for his mate’s soul. She was still in there. But whoever that was whispering lies into her head had somehow sunk his black claws into her, smothering her true self beneath his pall of evil.
How, though? How did they so completely and absolutely obliterate her will when years of Christos’s tortures didn’t before?
Gabby straightened, the lick of her cold fury lapping the edges of Valin’s shields. She dropped her hand, her fingers flexing as she stared him down. Valin sucked in a breath, his own gaze fixated on the blood trickling from the split in her gray-cast skin. It was black. Thick and oily. Like some sort of poison coating her veins.
Being careful not to open himself fully, Valin reached out with his senses. He could feel the lingering evil of horrors past permeating the air, but it was the sucking chasm of evil that he associated with Lucifer himself that he sensed seeping out of the blood weeping from her wounds.
“Blood tie.” He shook his head. It was the only explanation for how deeply and completely the evil had invaded her soul. Somehow Lucifer had managed to poison her very essence with his evil, the blood that sustained her eroding the lightness within her soul, his Gabby’s soul, with each beat of her heart.
No, not Lucifer, one of his minions. Someone who knew just how to break her too…
“Fuck, Gabby. He’s still alive, isn’t he?” No, not still alive, resurrected. Somehow Lucifer had brought Christos back, only now he was more than a pawn of evil, but evil himself.
And his blood runs in Gabby now.
He took a step forward. “You have to fight him, Gabby. You beat him before, remember? In the cave? You broke the bond then. I watched you do it.”