Stone Guardian(92)

“Go fuck yourself. No matter what you do to me, I’m not helping you.” Brave words, but the more he spoke, the smaller she collapsed inside. Gods, she wasn’t a warrior. How was she going to stay strong?

The vampire smirked at her. “You think we’ll hurt you? You are mistaken. We would not touch you. We need you. This one, though,” and he grabbed Taneasha by the hair, making her cry out as he dragged her beside him. “We do not need her.”

There was no sly creature here. Now all that was before her was a scared girl, a very young woman who had tried to break away from her family in the stupidest way possible, and was now confronted with a price she could in no way pay.

Taneasha held out her hand toward Larissa. “Miss Miller!”

“Get off her!”

The vampire regarded her coldly. “If you do not do as I say, I will skin this girl alive before your eyes. And if that does not make you change your mind, I will capture another of your students and do the same thing tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after. And I will continue until you agree to help.”

Taneasha was screaming in fright, spittle dripping down her mouth. Cold sweat broke out over Larissa’s skin as nausea threatened with every breath she took. “I’ll do whatever you say, please don’t hurt her.”

“That easy?” He threw Taneasha into the arms of a waiting male. “And here I thought you weren’t going to help us. So you’ll sacrifice the entire realm for a few pathetic brats. Or maybe you’ll sacrifice the realm to appease your own conscience, so instead of feeling like a murderer, you can cry and wail about how you were tricked.” The vampire smirked. “Pathetic.”

To the men, he said, “Get ready.”





Chapter Thirty-Three





Wulver strode down the corridor to the meeting room, stopping inside the doorframe as Fallon’s raised voice filtered into the corridor, “Next time I see the Oracle I’m going to take one of those spiky shoes she likes to wear and nail her in the throat!”

Fallon and Aislynn were both present. Aislynn noticed him first, giving her head a little shake as well as a small shrug to her shoulders, a what can you do? move. For her part, Fallon was standing in the middle of the room, hands on her hips and posture as aggressive and aggrieved as it got outside of the battlefield, that sword of hers looking as if it was practically vibrating on her back. He might need to order her to the sparring rooms tonight. Maybe Rorth would be brave enough to partner her.

Wulver leaned against the doorframe. Might as well get comfy while dealing with the seething swordswoman. “Kyo’s not too happy with the circumstances, either.”

Fallon’s gold eyes were hard behind narrowed eyelids, her mouth a compressed line so tight there was no delineation between lip and jaw. “Then he should have had the balls to deny the Oracle. Larissa Miller was here. We had her safe, we could have figured everything out, and instead we had to play games.”

In her naivety, in her constant fight against the powers surrounding them, this was where Fallon’s weakness lay. While he had a few moments when he envied her fight, times like this weren’t among them. “When don’t we play games? When aren’t we at the whims of this god or that force? You talk like this is a rare occurrence.”

A muscle ticked at where her jawline met her throat, but she didn’t answer. Aislynn jumped in, no doubt to calm the negative energy vibrating in the room. “What are we going to do about Larissa Miller now?”

Wulver shook his head. “We are not to go near her unless it’s a direct order from Kyo.”

That started Fallon up again. She threw up her hands in a violent motion and started pacing the room again, though this time she kept her focus fixed on him. “Fuck, Wulver! She needs to be here! I don’t know how the hell she fits into their plans, but they want her bad. I don’t want to be sitting here while she plays ga-ga eyes with a gargoyle!”

He’d already had enough crap dealing with Kyo this morning. He didn’t feel like going through everything again because Fallon couldn’t accept reality. He pushed back from the doorframe and growled from the back of his throat as any alpha answering a challenge would. “It’s over,” he said, and even to his own ears his voice was deeper with an echo of a wild animal running through it. “And you will not touch her. Am. I. Understood?”

Fallon’s jaw worked as she engaged Wulver in a stare down. Something flickered behind her eyes. It reminded Wulver of a lizard, that inner eyelid which would close and reopen. It was so fast it barely registered in the conscious mind, but it left the Wulver unsettled. Fallon relaxed her shoulders and took a step back, her arms coming to hang beside her body. “Yeah. I understand.”