Page 8 of Hell to Slay

The van started moving before I realized I should hold on, and I collided with Jax. My body was still overstimulated from drinking Mel’s blood and from having her fangs in me. His hard body against mine had me all-too-aware of every point of contact between us. The way his arm wrapped around me to steady me, the way my groin pressed against his hip, and the delicious scent of him… sweaty and musky from the battle with the demons — and me.

Jax pushed me away, and I grabbed on to a handle near the back doors as he steadied himself at the front, near the opening to the cab. The wariness in his eyes and the tension in his shoulders made me self-conscious again.

I remembered trying my damnedest to get to Jax and Hudson through the opening to the front cab, and how Hudson had used his flames to drive me back at every turn. During the frenzy, I had no control… but unfortunately, that didn’t erase my memories of what I’d done.

Jax held on to that opening now as the van merged onto the highway and Mel started telling us everything she’d learned from Ty.

“It turns out… Nico was right.” She turned her seat to give me a grim smile. “It is a devil holding open the infernal portal.”

My heart began to swell with an unfamiliar sense of coven pride. She’d been so brave, squaring off with a devil and her ex-lover to glean information she hadn’t even been sure she could pass along. I was proud she was part of my coven, despite my resistance to being in one.

She’d faced down her very probable death… and instead experienced something she’d once considered even worse.

Now she was one of us. Beings cursed with supernatural strength and the propensity for losing all control at the slightest provocation, like I had. And my frenzy had been completely pointless, because by the time I caught up to Mel, the monster who’d harmed her had already disappeared.

Tempest jumped up onto Mel’s legs and somehow banked her lava enough to curl up in her mistress’s lap. Mel had explained that when her familiar took her blood, she’d gained the ability to talk, but I’d heard the little demon’s voice in my head, too.

Perhaps that meant the little hellfox could now talk to Mel’s entire coven… or perhaps she only gained the ability to talk in my head when I’d also taken Mel’s blood, linking us that way. No one had ever had a demon familiar before, so it was hard to be sure.

“Care to explain how you came up with this devil-as-anchor theory just before a real devil turned out to be exactly that?” Hudson called back to me, his eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror.

Our agent in charge always thought I had more information than I really did.

I shrugged. “As a bodyguard, I once heard some demon hunters say they’d seen a devil at the threshold. The coven claimed the devil was the reason the threshold expanded that same night.”

“Anything else we should know?”

At the time, I took it as the overzealous talk of a coven desperate to prove themselves, but now that I thought back… “They said the devil tried to recruit them.”

Not unlike how Ty had tried to convince Mel to become the next host.

“Any idea what exactly triggered your frenzy?” Hudson asked.

I shook my head in frustration, my anger turning directly on myself again as Mel began relaying everything that had happened and speculating on what Ty might do next.

Meanwhile, my thoughts circling, I berated myself for letting Mel’s predicament push me into the frenzy again.

When Jax and I had first met, before I was turned, I’d kept distance between us for fear of ending up like my brother — a witch driven insane by the loss of his coven-mates. After Jax, I punished myself with years of nothing more than one-night stands. Jax had come too close to convincing me, so after him, I never once double dipped.

Until I met Vaughn.

My life took a turn for the worse when I got bitten and became a vampire. I turned myself in after I drained someone dry during my initial bloodcrazed frenzy. That decision resulted in a lenient sentence: one year mandatory community service under close surveillance — imprisonment, in other words.

During my sentence, I befriended my warden, Vaughn Huntley. He was a telepath, and the first words he ever spoke into my mind were an apology for the way the other wardens treated me. Newly turned vamps like me terrified most of the guards, so I did my best to keep my head down and get it over with… but I hadn’t been able to ignore Vaughn. It seemed the feeling was mutual.

After serving my sentence for a full year, Vaughn and I had become more than just friends. Somehow, despite my best intentions, he wore down my defenses, and we started seeing each other romantically.

But that was only because he’d stopped thinking of me as a vampire. He’d never seen a vampire in a bloodcrazed frenzy before. He’d never seen a vampire kill two witches without once using magic.

Sure, those two bastards had been threatening Vaughn. They’d called him a vamp lover, a pervert who wanted to fuck his prisoner. Never mind the fact that I’d finished serving my sentence months before. They’d attacked him, and the moment I heard his cry of pain, I’d lost it.

I’d lost myself in the frenzy to protect him, but in that moment of primal terror, he hadn’t understood that.

I came out of the frenzy to see him running away from me — me, the one who was trying to protect him. That’s when I realized the truth. No one could trust me. I couldn’t even trust myself.

I never should’ve let it get this far again. I thought I’d learned from Vaughn — when someone important to me was in danger, I turned into a monster, threatening everyone nearby. Including other people I cared about more than I wanted to admit.

“Jax, I’m sorry.”

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