38. Destroy Destroy Destroy

Ash’s thought was a frost-kissed bullet carving through her overtaxed mind:

Left flank, three with knives, rushing.

Liora’s answer was the shadow already coiling around their ankles. She didn’t turn, never needed to. As Ash blurred into a pale streak of lethal motion, her darkness yanked the hunters’ feet out from under them.

Her magic served as the perfectly timed tripwire for his slaughter. From her periphery, his fangs found a throat, flesh tearing and crimson gushing as the mortal flailed.

Simultaneously, she severed a spine, claws sinking deep. The woman’s body went limp, only her petrified eyes moved as Liora slit her throat.

They moved like two parts of the same devastating equation. The result was death. Her shadows murmured in her ear, and she sent a thought back to Ash as he grabbed a wicked piece of shattered glass.

Duck. Twist. Slash up.

He obeyed, and a scream rent the antiseptic-stained air as blood fountained from a hunter’s ripped artery. He was a phantom in the green emergency light. All the saw was a twist of frost, righteous fury, and displaced air.

She never saw him move, only felt the chilled absence he left behind. Then, the wet crack of a neck breaking three yards to her left. She wore a satisfied half-smile as she focused on her fight.

Her own work came louder. Whips of shadow, obsidian, focused, and final, sliced through Kevlar and tracheas. Scarlet misted the air, pooling thickly on the white tiles. Ten left.

She blinked, and Ash stood beside her again. Bullets raced at them; her shadow wall absorbed them. Ash bent down in a rapid, fluid motion, grabbed a scalpel off the floor and flung it.

With a sickening crunch, it lodged inside a hunter’s brown eye. He fell forward, driving it right into his useless brain. The smell of piss, sour sweat, and iron clogged her wrinkled nose. Liora glared at her vampire even as heat flared between her thighs.

“Still fighting like a gutter rat, I see.”

He grinned, swaying slightly, silver eyes blazing and full of familiar mischief. A weighty tension bled from her shoulders at the sight of its survival.

They hadn’t broken him. Her shadow crawled up his legs to steady him. The strain of holding the leash on her power hadn’t eased by sharing it with him.

“You love it,” he shot back as ice spun from his fingers and froze the blood in another hunter’s veins.

She huffed a short laugh, a hot flush crawling up her scaled neck. He had proven himself in the theatre, but here, where it counted—he was a revelation.

Centuries, I’ve lived through centuries of mongrels who thought to leash me, fuck me, outpace me.

Males who barked orders and would rather die than submit to a stronger female. Women who cowered, sobbing as they clutched rosaries.

He doesn’t flinch. He is beside. No one has ever been a mirror.

Five hundred years and the universe had at last spat out something worthy of her shadow. And here he was... tall and glacial and lethal beside her.

They fought back to back, minds melding, blinking, and breathing in sync.

Three more died within seconds. One from ice-clogged lungs, the other with a dark tendril spearing his heart.

The organ still beat as the shadow tore it out of his chest and consumed it. A third simply vanished into a knot of darkness that spat out a lump of fleshy pulp.

Six left.

Her gaze scanned the room as two walls vanished. A tremor rang through the Shroud. Her heartbeat kicked up, breath strangling in her throat as she clenched her teeth. Shit.

They had only a few minutes to get out before her magic swallowed the place. Ash’s head whipped to her, brow arching as he caught that thought.

Killing them isn’t enough for you, Red?

Her head shook. Eyes like onyx daggers as she ducked a blade aiming for her neck. Her blood ran scorching hot, sweat beading on her forehead as static buzzed around her horns. She swept her leg out, knocking the hunter down.

She tore his head from his shoulders a mere second later.

Ash whistled, a thrum of cold delight seared through their bond, his grin widening. She answered his mental question as she dragged in a breath, trying to ease the magical strain and pressure building inside her.

Nothing survives. You leave one root in the earth and it’ll grow back.

He inched closer, a cool hand wrapped around her wrist, frost fractals dancing on her gold-cracked skin. His thumb pressed against her racing pulse as the floor rumbled.

Her claws itched to mark, to claim. His tainted scent infiltrated her senses and made her teeth grind. Her muscles coiled as her magic whispered warnings to hurry. She and Ash backed toward the exit.

Lightning whips slashed from her fingertips to the remaining hunters. Ash panted, stumbling into her. The mortals thrashed and screamed through locked teeth as electricity stiffened every muscle and boiled the blood in their veins.

Roasting them alive, scorching through to the bone until the stench of charred flesh and burnt hair became impossible to ignore. Ash nodded, chuckling hoarsely.

“You need to learn to share, Red. Could’ve left one for me.”

“I did.” She nodded to the doctor crouched by the door she’d sealed shut.

His wobbling lips dripped spittle and tears as they streamed down his terrified face. He sobbed, shaking so hard the door rattled. He pleaded with them to spare him.

Ash grinned, fangs nipping her jaw before he blurred. She faced the other succubus, lip curling, shadow fangs bared.

Mara, she remembered, not Maya. Bones crunched and snapped, and a series of pitiful yelps rang out behind her.

The girl’s tears had turned her tan skin ruddy as Liora prowled toward her. She scooted back on her hands, her head shaking, loose dark hair full of broken glass and wood shards.

Liora had been there the day Mara rose from her grave and started her second life as a succubus. Her belly twisted itself into knots.

She couldn’t let this betrayal go unpunished.

A sensation like a wasp stinging her heart radiated behind her sternum. Killing her own kin had never gotten easier.

The silence it left behind always howled. It was necessary; justice demanded it.

Still, each step closer ached like an ulcer in her mouth. Mara tried and failed to speak as Liora lifted a hand. Her shadow spear reared, flying for the traitor. She had no room for mercy.

Mara braced for it, watery eyes slamming shut as Liora held her breath. The spear never reached her.

Ash threw himself in front of it. The shadow punctured his shoulder. He stiffened, wincing, and groaning as his body rocked back. She choked on her gasping inhale.

Everything in her went silent, eyes widening as her lungs stopped working. Heat and nauseating adrenaline poured through her, teeth gnashing. She pulled the shadow free of his shoulder.

Her hands shook so hard her brittle claws kept clinking together as she shouted, “Why the fuck would you—” Ash grinned, pained, but unrepentant. “You’re not killing her. Only me.”

Mara quaked on the floor behind Ash. Liora’s darkness stitched his wound shut, gentle as nuns mending their habits.

A small scar was all they left behind. Her heart pounded, frothing behind her sternum like a pot of boiling milk spilling over, mouth sour. She swallowed thickly.

He clutched a small object in his bloodstained hand as she gaped at him.

Her veins fizzed as pain pounded at her temples. Her wildfire blood rushed in her ringing ears. The ceiling abruptly dematerialised, and an unspoken warning rippled through her shadows.

They had to hurry. Her jaw ached, a muscle feathering and throbbing, as she kept clenching it. She wanted to tear her hair out. She bit back a frustrated scream and directed a command at Mara.

“Run. Don’t look back. Never let me see you near him again.”

The weeping succubus didn’t need to be told twice.

She scrambled clumsily to her feet, black blood blooming as glittering glass cut into her scrabbling hands. She bolted through the now-open door. Ash sagged as his thumbs moved across a phone screen.

She frowned as she approached him. Scarlet droplets jeweled every bare inch of his pale skin. Shadows formed a smoky exoskeleton around him to keep him upright when his knees buckled.

“What the Hell are you doing now? We have to go.”

He nodded as spiderweb cracks threaded every wall and floor remaining. Seconds. She had seconds to get him out. Her clawed hand gripped his arm just as he snapped the phone in half and flung it.

“Had to let them know they failed. And tell them why,” he said, shoulder bumping hers as he leaned close. “You came for me.”

“I came to destroy this place,” she deflected despite her pulse skittering as his hand found her hip.

She couldn’t ignore the sight of Mara’s poison marring his flesh in dark veins. They should be gold, but she hadn’t had time to heal him.

She had only given him the strength and power needed to fight his way out alongside her. It had to wait until they got back to the warded penthouse. He tried to hide his pain.

Liora caught his every suppressed wince, every slight stumble, and spotted how tensely he held himself to stay upright. His body was trying to collapse, but she ordered more of her shadows to go to him.

They hooked under his arms, behind his thighs, strengthening the other tendrils wreathed around him. He pushed into her space, freezing breath ghosting her neck and raising gooseflesh.

“It’s the same thing with you. Admit it. You missed me. Even your shadow’s did.” She heard his smirk though she didn’t see it, thighs trembling as gold veins spread up her neck. “It’s holding my hand.”

She glanced down. Her shadow had indeed curled around his palm and rested on the pulse-point in his blackened wrist.

Liora snarled, but let it stay where it was, ignoring the old impulse to pull it away. She shivered as his lips pressed to the shell of her ear.

He didn’t smell like hers anymore, and it made her stomach lurch, venom drenched her mouth. Bile rose to scald her throat.

“If you ever let anyone touch you again, I’ll flay your skin myself.” The threat wouldn’t stay inside her mouth.

Ash laughed. Bloodied, buckled, and smug as always, weaker than she liked.

“Kinky,” he winked, and she rolled her eyes, the corners of her mouth twitching.

Nothing seemed to change that infuriating, provoking part of him. She stilled as her shadows writhed, sending their shrieking psychic alarm through her and him.

The air itself tasted of copper and ozone. As it failed, the entire island shuddered and rippled as if made of gelatine.

No one would ever revive this cursed place. She’d make sure of it. She grabbed Ash by the arm, dragging him out of the lab.

As they ran through empty corridors, the walls dissolved into the void she’d created faster and faster. Leaving behind an open field of white tile, their boots hammered over.

Her shadow threads had done their job well, but coldness settled in her as they half walked, half ran. Her chest was caving in. Mind-numbing as the strain reached a critical point. Gold veins had splintered every inch of her.

They glowed, popping and pulsing like red-hot coals trapped beneath her skin. Her jaw tensed, eye twitching along with the vein in her scaled temple. She’d used almost every drop of magic she’d gathered for this fight.

She had enough to get them home, start healing him, barely.

Daylight beckoned straight ahead as the stairwell they’d just left suddenly blinked out of existence. Ash arched a brow. She shook her head. Her mind was fraying from the sheer weight of all the power she’d wielded.

She’d controlled the tendrils while saving him, ensuring they didn’t move too fast and devour the island before she found him. It had cost her. Emptiness yawned, chewing at something deep within her. Now, her darkness was in control.

The rest of the hunters’ base dissolved as though nothing had ever been there. The sea-breeze lashed at them as they fled. Grass compressed underfoot. The crash of ocean waves and their briny tang saturated the oxygen she greedily inhaled.

“Jesus Christ, Red. Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

She snorted. It changed to a throaty shout as the demon inside her demanded to get out. Oh, gods.

It was as if invisible blue flames shrouded her. Her soft tissue baked, and it singed her tattered edges. Her bones quaked, vision doubling as she struggled to suppress it and run.

They stumbled as the ground split open. She loosened the chain on herself to ease the boiling sensation scalding her insides. Her tail lashed free, winding around his waist and pinning him at her side.

His rime-gloved hand smoothed over the scaled edge as she convulsed and ensured he wouldn’t fall.

“Shut up. You’re always on my bad side. You seem to like it there.”

Ash smirked, nodding. His chest thrummed, the bond singing as he tilted his head. Guilty as charged. Feral Liora was her most honest state. She looked like she was on the verge of imploding as her glamor flickered.

The gilded veins branching her skin, her thinning scent—hunger. More extreme than he’d ever witnessed. He pressed closer, letting her tail tighten and squeeze him. Its heat made him sigh softly as her shadows veiled him from the sun.

He’d almost forgotten it could harm him. He glanced around as even the gravel near where the building had stood evaporated.

He had thought she’d burn everything, leave nothing but ashes behind. She’d chosen to erase every piece instead. He shook his head.

Romance equaled destruction to monsters, he supposed. She’d deny it to her last day, but he tasted the truth she’d told herself all the way here, all the way to him.

I need him. I need him. I need him.

He sent a thought to her.

I missed you too, Sweetheart.

She never replied—the world trembled. The split in the ground widened, and magma glowed in the cracks like a dragon’s maw before the flame spewed. Seawater boiled as it swept into the fissures.

The entire island rocked and rolled. He nearly fell, but her shadows yanked them airborne. Forming wings behind her. He spied the quakes running through her limbs, his brows knitting together as she struggled.

Her claws raked over the leather covering her stomach as she bent at the waist. His mind whirred as she quivered, heat rolling off her to scald him. He splayed an icy hand across her arched back.

Fingers digging into her as he ordered, “let go, Liora. Now.”

She thrashed her head and screamed. He let frost crackle up her spine and waited. Watching as she heeded his command.

Her true form ripped free in increments. Pale skin covered in obsidian, opalescent scales. Her braids turned void-black and writhed between her serrated antimatter horns. They lengthened with her claws.

She couldn’t release the wings. She must’ve spent too much power to unravel them here. Her voice lost all humanity. It echoed, a roar like the smash of a tidal wave destroying cities.

“Die,” she ordered the island.

Right before her shadows enveloped and phased them, Ash memorized everything to immortalize it later. To finish his record of her past, start writing their present. The ground splintered until magma and water steamed across the entire expanse.

In one second, the island ate itself alive. Fire and water and earth battled, none winning. Next, it vaporised. Nothing but foamy waves marked the spot it had lived.

Fucking hell. His mouth opened and shut; all his clever comebacks failed him. The scale of her power was staggering.

He wished he had a pulse so he could feel it pounding in his neck. She was a menace. His menace. Her tail held him close, crushing him to her chest.

“Hold on.”

He hadn’t even thought of letting her go. He loosed a sigh, body slumping and his throat burning. Darkness swallowed them, and his borrowed strength failed as they rode the shadows home.

His smirk stayed welded on as his message to Dr. Vele’s masters flashed in his mind to show Liora.

Experiment failed. Subject-37A’s bond is not transferable. The “closed loop” requires mutual spite and ruination.

37-A would rather die than replace her. The succubus... she’d rather kill you all.

Her low, rumbling growl of approval, and her tail’s possessive constricting grip were all he ever wanted to know.