The noise was incredible, like the fighting dogs Mal had told her about. But this wasn’t Rodney’s calm pack logic, establishing dominance without real damage. This was a primal melee, as the others tore at Leonidas, pummeling him as he’d done to her.
But he was fighting them, and Elisa knew he was much stronger. Picking up Jeremiah, he spun the boy away from him with a snap of popping shoulder bone and shoved him nearly twenty feet away, sending him tumbling across the grass. He clawed at William’s face, caught his collar and started to flip him over his head, but Miah launched herself at his front, taking Jeremiah’s place. The girl was screaming, not the pitiful, fearful mewls of earlier. This was a shrill scream like the ferocious cheetah, sending out a call to warn others away from her territory.
Elisa tried to move, but things weren’t cooperating. She couldn’t even seem to move her arms without spears of blinding pain shooting through her sides and neck. Everything felt wet with blood. It was as if she’d fallen into some terrible, rank billabong and come out coated in viscous red mud, the sand turning it into grit.
Leonidas seized Miah by the throat. When he plunged his fist forward, Elisa saw it hit her midbody. She wished she could have looked away fast enough, because that fist exploded from Miah’s back, splitting flesh and bone, the image forever seared across Elisa’s mind.
“No . . .” Despite the pain, Elisa tried to reach out, tried to do something. Miah was tossed away from him. The girl landed near her, her loose arm flung above her head, fingers brushing Elisa’s bloody calf. In that second, the second when Leonidas’s eyes followed her track, Jeremiah returned. The boy plowed into Leonidas’s chest and abdomen, his torso tucked in a bullish charge, head down, arms close to the body.
William let go, jumping back. Elisa cried out, not understanding why William would leave the fight, knowing Jeremiah couldn’t take Leonidas toe-to-toe. But then she saw why.
Leonidas spun around, trying to dislodge Jeremiah, a howl bursting from his lips. As he did, she saw the stake he’d knocked out of her hand earlier. The point of it was jutting out of his back.
Jeremiah’s arms and legs were wrapped hard around him, holding that stake in place between them. Leonidas roared, beating the boy’s back so that she could see the ribs caving in like a matchstick creation.
Jeremiah, no . . . She was able to roll to her side, and peeled her lips back in a feral snarl, fighting the pain, daring it to stop her as she crawled forward, touching Miah’s twitching arm. She couldn’t get farther than the girl’s bare foot, her vision starting to blacken and gray. She’d pass out if she tried to get to Jeremiah. While some part of her suggested that unconsciousness would be a blessing, she couldn’t leave them alone to face this. She pushed her forehead into the torn-up ground, gripping Miah’s ankle with her blood-smeared hand, fighting for awareness.
She lifted her head again when Leonidas hit the fence with a harsh clang and started to slide down it. Jeremiah still clung like a burr to the larger boy. He lifted his head, locking gazes with Leonidas. Jeremiah’s face held a terrible expression as the life died out of Leonidas’s. His lips formed words; then he was falling, dropping to the ground, back still propped up against the fence.
That ringing tone of impacted metal died to a hum, then was gone, leaving silence. A silence broken by Miah’s wheezing, William’s faint growling and what she realized were Jeremiah’s sobs. He had the one hand so firmly locked on the stake it was halfway into Leonidas’s chest cavity. The boy leaned into Leonidas’s dead body, such that it looked like he was curled in his lap, his temple against Leonidas’s shoulder as his own narrow ones shook.
His head turned, though, his eyes finding her. The starkness in that gaze pierced Elisa to the core, hurt her more deeply than anything had ever hurt her in her life, even Willis’s death.
Chumani was wrong. She wasn’t all that brave, because she couldn’t find the strength to do anything now. Not think, or move, or hope or feel. Not to face terrible, desolate truths. She could only look at Jeremiah’s face and think this kind of blood would never, ever wash away.
22
SHE’D placed the radio on the stump, and when she had, the weight of the books alongside had kept the receiver depressed. Kohana had been listening to gospel spirituals, but he’d deliberately kept them turned down below his preferred blasting volume, just in case Elisa needed something. Or Chumani wanted to banter with him. When the static crackled on the walkie-talkie at his hip and he’d heard the maid’s voice, Mal’s command came through his mind, through all their minds, at the very same moment.
Kohana wasn’t surprised to find the vampire already on the move. They all knew his growing bond with the pretty miss. But his own reaction—all of them, felt through that shared bond—was the same. The girl was impossible not to love. Please, Great Spirit, let nothing happen to her.
Kohana lurched through the house, snatching up his shotgun and making it down the steps and to his ATV faster than he’d moved in a long time. He took the walkie-talkie with him, though hearing what was happening, the screams and growls, he damn near ran off the mountain, pushing the small vehicle past safe speeds. But they needed to get there as soon as they could, for Mal. In a situation like this, a man was likely to do all sorts of crazed things. An enraged vampire, protecting what he considered his, would leave a swath of death in his wake.
Mal cut a path across the leopard’s territory, streaked over a corner of the cheetah’s base, heard his shrieking cry. He was scenting blood and danger on the wind, just like Mal. Elisa’s thoughts and the quick images he was seeing only made him push himself faster. The rest of his mind tracked the staff. Kohana’s race up the slopes in his ATV, Chumani, Tokala and the others coming from the habitat area and open preserve, already preparing their weapons.
It didn’t matter. They were all going to be too late. That stubborn core of steel of hers had come forward, poured itself over every fear, every lick of sense and self-preservation she had. He’d thought he could hold her back, but Leonidas, the conniving little monster, had known he couldn’t. The fledgling had signed his own death warrant, but with his warped bloodlust fully unleashed now, he didn’t care about that, any more than Victor had.
Leonidas had likely been plotting this, looking for his chance every moment, just as Mal had suspected. With that chaos as well as bloodlust always clouding the forefront of his mind, there’d been no way Mal could decipher it until it came to fruition. He hadn’t anticipated the vampire having one singular focus, Elisa, but it made perfect sense. Leonidas was a combination of vampire and psychopath, a damaged child betrayed by all the parental figures in his life. Focusing on the latest person who’d tried to step into those shoes, he’d destroy her as the symbol of all the rest.
Mal emerged from the woods, the cuts from whipping tree branches healing under his torn shirt even as he moved in ground-eating leaps down the steep slope to the fledglings’ compound. The maelstrom reached his ears now. Cries and growls, screams and roaring. As he came into the open clearing, he saw Miah tossed aside, a bloody mess that landed near Elisa. The maid’s clothes were torn and blood-soaked, her leg at an odd angle. Black rage coated his mind, momentarily making him as insensible and blood-driven as Leonidas, but then Jeremiah’s hoarse yell yanked his mind back.
It was a challenge, roared in his thin, young voice as he launched himself into Leonidas. The stake drove in, carried by sheer will through Leonidas’s body as Jeremiah clasped him in a bone-breaking hold. William, holding the older boy back, jumped away and rolled free, his job done.
There was that terrible struggle, the death moment hanging on the edge of a precipice; then Jeremiah and Leonidas were against the fence. Leonidas slid down, life going from him.
Mal had harshly trained his staff not to respond to emotional imperatives in a crisis, but even now he waged a brief, painful war with his own gut reaction. Forcing himself to slow and evaluate what threats remained was one of the hardest things he’d done in a very long time. He grappled with the need to tear apart everything between him and Elisa.
Nerida was curled in a ball on the stump. She hugged the pole that held the controls to the outer gate and the fledglings’ cell doors. Her hand was still resting below those release buttons, making it clear who’d let the others out of their cells. She was vibrating so hard her small buttocks were quivering against the rough wood.
An eerie silence had descended upon the group, a quiet that seemed to connect and bind them. Jeremiah was still huddled in Leonidas’s lap. Matthew had crept out of his cell, gone to Miah’s side. He was stroking her hair, making a quiet noise Mal recognized as grief, held hard inside the boy’s throat, as if he feared letting it out. William moved to him then and stood at his back, watching to see what Mal would do. He was the lone sentry, for Jeremiah had his eyes closed, head bowed. His hand, still fastened on that stake, was coated with blood and gore from Leonidas’s insides.
“Nerida. You need to go back inside now.” Mal spoke quietly, dialing back the lethal fury coating him that could add to the mix of an already volatile situation. He wanted to get into that enclosure area, to touch, to reassure, more than he wanted anything else. But she was alive; she would survive. He had to handle this first.
Nerida slowly uncurled, stepped off the stump and to the ground. Looking at his wet and muddy boots, coated with torn grass, she held her ground to speak one word in that fanged slur.
“Help?” Her dark eyes shifted to the blood-soaked ground around Miah and Elisa. “Miah. Leesa.”
“Yes. We’ll help them.” His jaw tightening, he reached out.
She dropped, covering her head and bringing her legs up. He stopped in midmotion. Something turned over hard inside Mal’s chest. Something that was deepest sorrow and hell-born rage, all at once. He swallowed.
“I’ve changed my mind. Stay right here instead.” He spoke when he could trust his voice to be calm, as if nothing unusual had happened. “When we determine how she is, I’ll let you come see her.”