Page 134 of Death is My Ride or Die

The sky ruptured with lightning, striking the fountain between us and the enemy. As the vampires lurched back, Death launched into the sky with a single jump, levitating high over the graveyard. His skin darkened to the color of night, a horrific, hellish silhouette of a monster against the moonbeams. Two enormous wings, concealed in obsidian shadows, beat the air in thunderous, rhythmic strokes, and the trees bent away from the movement as if in fear.

He was a reawakened nightmare: skin like midnight, wicked horns curving down the side of his skull, his bare upper body rippling with lethal muscle. The green hues in his eyes were masked by dusk, a lethal fury pouring outward in the form of a noxious smoke. Darkness expelled from his every pore, haloed the crest of his head like a magnificent crown, and curtained behind his back—a royal cloak fashioned from shadows.

“I call upon the dead of night,”Death’s monstrous, guttural voice thundered.“Souls from Hell, I summon. Draw from the crimson life soaking these graves. Awaken, my dead. Crawl from your dark depths and serve me. Awaken, awaken, awaken, bones from beneath. Stir from your slumber and rise. Rise, and serve your master!”

The ground shuddered with such force that it sent us all off-balance. Stone cracked in the distance, gravestones fracturing one by one, row by row, the bone-chilling moans of the dead unleashing across the graveyard.

How much had Death sacrificed to unleash his full power? All that energy and without his scythe—could he come back from it?

Shadows hissed from all directions, strobing in and out between the shapes of creatures and formless tendrils. They crawled against the ground on all fours, approaching the vampires. One of the vampires dared to attack the darkness, but it latched on to him like a parasite. It plunged into his open mouth and down his throat, and the vampire dropped with a gurgled, painful scream, as if his insides were being shredded apart in a blender. The vampire’s body jolted, and skin suctioned to bone as the shadow ripped the life straight out of him.

Death soared over the graveyard with two screaming vampires in his clutches. He tossed their mutilated bodies to the earth and spiraled down for seconds, snatching two more newborns with his massive claws and tearing their heads right off. His enormous wings arched down, pitching his monstrous frame back into the night, the wicked rumble of his laughter thundering over the pandemonium.

He was bathing in the grisly glory of the war beneath him.

The shadow finished as a horde of, well,zombiesand skeletal animated creatures lurched into the clearing in the graveyard with pulsing auras of dark power.

“Hell yeah!” Wolf roared, holding a vampire head in his hand. “It’s Z-War up in here, bitches!”

The vampires sprang back in shock, knocking into one another to get away as the shadows and undead corpses slunk closer. The stench of rot overpowered the air as the zombies opened their decayed jaws with horrifying howls and attacked the vampires in swarms. The shadows and corpses glided where they were needed to imprison and debilitate the vampires enough so that the reapers and Death’s Fallen were able to finish the job and decapitate them.

“Party time, boys!” Denim said, cocking his machine gun.

“Yee-haw!” Flash shouted.

Death slashed his hand through the air, and shadows sliced into the blood of the fountain, spraying it everywhere. The newborns lurched toward the fountain to lap at the blood with their tongues. A trap, as Death’s Fallen and the reapers slaughtered the bunch of them.

Suddenly, three vampires jumped on Leo at the same time as hands clamped down on my arm and my mouth. The world blurred. Then I was being dragged back underneath the shadows of trees and shrubbery.

Crashing back to earth, I writhed against my captor, the slippery material of my jacket aiding in a miracle as I wrenched free and rolled across the dirt. A foot kicked me hard in the stomach. Romeo’s padded vest between the foot and my abdomen thankfully absorbed the impact.

“Thismust be the mortal Ahrimad wants,” a vampire hissed.

“She’s just an ordinary girl,” said another.

They grabbed my ankles and hauled me across the dirt. This time, I writhed against the ground and managed to turn over, kicking out as hard as possible with my free leg. The clink of metal rang out like a bell as the toe of my heavy boot slammed into solid flesh. Chiclet-sized pellets fell into my lap. His fangs. The vampire cried out, and adrenaline coursed through my veins. I fired a beam of power at the vampire, who went airborne and splintered a tree.

I stood up fast. The will to survive took over, but I couldn’t see how many vampires were in this space. I couldn’t see anything. My mind harked back to training with Death, how he’d turned off the lights and forced me to listen.

Shuffling. I had hardly a second to react to the blur of another vampire attacking. An icy palm cracked across my face. My whole body flipped in midair before I slammed into the frozen ground. I must have bitten down on my lip because I tasted blood. Pain exploded in my face, and involuntary tears sprang to my eyes.

A lone newborn vampire approached with its fangs elongating in its mouth. It reached out, grabbed me by the throat, and squeezed. I struggled with all my might to get one last gasp of air when the vampire cried out and its grip loosened. I landed on my back as blood sprayed over me. As the vampire roared in agony, I realized its hand, which had been wrapped around my throat, was severed completely from its arm, and the limb still dangled from my neck. I shrieked and chucked it off me. It landed with a splat in the grass.

Whoosh!The vampire reeled back again with a choked sound, and through the gaps in the trees, the moon shone enough to show the one-handed vampire clutching at its chest. Another object sliced through the air like a bullet and perforated its neck, with the sickening noise of blood spraying. Still, the creature focused on its task and stumbled toward me with its jaws wide open.

Blade sprinted into the clearing and leapt onto the vampire, tackling it to the ground. His one weapon impaled the vampire’s eye, while his other sliced the vampire’s neck to the bone.

Two more vampires followed behind Blade, wounded but alive.

One of them came toward me, and my body vibrated with fear. Light shone from my right hand before I fired a punch out, slamming into the porcelain jaw of another newborn. I ducked at the sideways swipe of a hand toward my face and landed in a low crouch. Blade dove over me and rolled onto his feet to slice another newborn to pieces.

Another vampire grabbed my armor and threw me ten feet, my teeth digging into my lips as pain exploded in my shoulder. Blade released a howl, and I turned my head in time to see a vampire bite down on his neck and rip off flesh.

Beside me, I found the splintered tree where I’d thrown another vampire. I tugged hard at piece of wood to free it and moved with a newfound madness to kill. Sprinting into a lunge, I drove the spiked wood through the back of the vampire attacking Blade. The vampire released the reaper and spun, just in time to meet my reared-back fist. Gloved knuckles demolished bone with a sickening crunch at the sonic boom of my power.

I turned to look back over my shoulder and arched my leg up in a backward roundhouse, kicking the last vampire in the face. Blade finished him off by ripping his head off and kicking the dead corpse away with a crunching wallop.

With no other creatures to fight, Blade and I breathed hard and looked at each other across the clearing, a pile of dismembered vampires in our midst.

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