Damn good thing short hops are instant.

  There’s a reason it’s a bad idea to try punching someone armed with a sword. As soon as his fist flashes at me, I instinctively parry... and lop the guy’s arm off, about two inches in front of his elbow. The fist and forearm sail forward and bounce off Allison’s shoulder. The guy shrieks in pain, gawking at the smoking stump while scrambling backward away from me. I thrust at his heart—but he’s fast and my strike falls short of making contact.

  Allison spins, apparently not realizing what hit her. She takes in the sight of me driving this guy off, then refocuses on Elizabeth and starts lobbing more fireballs.

  An abnormally tall man with long brown hair comes out of nowhere, picks Kingsley up over his head in both hands, and hurls him at the wall—only he kinda misses, tossing the wolf through the doorway into the war room. A tremendous crash of splintering wood follows. Had to be the big table.

  Oh, I guess they do have wood here. Must be expensive since it’d have to be transported from far off. The skinny ascendant gives the guy who threw him an annoyed look, then runs after Kingsley.

  Tangent, Sam! comes Allison’s thought.

  Right. My bad.

  Meanwhile, the tall guy also runs in after Kingsley. I have to believe my wolfish boyfriend can take care of himself in there. Too much going on out here...

  Another exalted comes running down the hall, heading for me, but slashes at Allison on his way by. Light shimmers around her body, dramatically slowing the incoming blade to the point it grazes her arm rather than slices it off. I twist away from Skinny and punch the exalted in the face. He’s surprisingly fast for basically a mortal, and manages to slice the outside of my left thigh before he goes flying away as an unconscious meat torpedo.

  Maybe dead with a smashed face. I dunno. I’m kinda getting worried now and might’ve hit him harder than I wanted to.

  Two more exalted run into the war room. Kingsley’s growls sound entirely angry and not worried, so I’m going to continue trusting he has it handled.

  Shit, this is rapidly getting out of control. I gotta end this fast or we’re going to be overwhelmed.

  The brute charges at me like a football linebacker, trying—once again—to bear-hug me. I’d say I dodge him like a matador evading a bull, but bullfighting is horrible and cruel. I don’t feel at all guilty about stabbing this guy in the side as he goes by. Alas, he’s too big and fast for me to score a kill shot, but he groans in pain.

  The redheaded woman races up on my left side, slashing for my throat. I duck, punch her in the jaw with my sword hand, breaking it—her jaw, not my hand—launching her willowy body into the air. A red energy bolt flies under her, momentarily connecting Elizabeth’s outstretched hand to my chest.

  Her spell doesn’t appear to cause any physical damage to my body, but it feels like I’ve been skinned, rolled in salt, and thrown in a giant deep fryer. Somehow, I keep myself from screaming since I know she’d adore hearing me suffer. Agony takes the strength out of my legs, dropping me to the floor in a sprawl. It occurs to me this feels exactly like being inside the guts of that massive demon-dragon. Is her spell tapping my memory of the most agony I’ve experienced?

  The pain abruptly stops.

  A shell of energy surrounds me, likely from Allison.

  Relief from such horrid pain is so amazing, I go limp and fall on my face. Nice cold floor against my cheek. Ah...

  The skinny ascendant grabs Allison and throws her—but she bounces off the wall like she’s wrapped in bubble packing material, gliding gradually to a landing further down the hall. Unfortunately, she’s right next to Elizabeth. Another unfortunately—I presently lack the ability to stand. The aftershock of such massive pain has my muscles on strike.

  Dammit, I gotta do something!

  Before Elizabeth can grab Allie, I teleport into the air above the bitch... and fall on her.

  Instinctively, she catches me, momentarily stunned at having the falling object she sensed coming turn out to be me. Allison takes the opportunity of confusion to scramble back a few paces and summon an energy field on the floor beneath Elizabeth as she chucks me aside like an unwanted doll... Sparkling blue light forms a disc around her feet, though has no obvious effect beyond making her look down. According to Allie’s thoughts, the magic is basically gluing Elizabeth’s feet to the floor.

  I pick myself up, shake off the last of the effect of the pain spell, and move to take advantage of the bitch being stuck—except the brutish ascendant grabs Allison. I redirect my charge at him instead, trying to chase him off her. He flings Allie aside, making no effort to defend his chest from my sword, and punches me right in the sternum.

  The Devil Killer penetrates an inch or three into a body so damn dense it feels like I stabbed something slightly softer than a tree. My ribcage, on the other hand, is nowhere near as tough as this son of a bitch. Can’t tell if only a spot in my sternum cracked, or if my entire ribcage split in half front-to-back. My turn to crash on the floor and go sliding. The stab wound I gave the brute ignites like a magnesium flare. He grimaces in pain, clamping his hand over it. My sword might not have landed a killing strike, but it’s definitely crippled him even from such a shallow hit. Bringing my sword near their ascendant form is like waving filet mignon in front of a dog, only the Origin is the dog in this case. It really wants these bastards who have been eluding oblivion for so long to come home.

  Tall Man flies out of the war room and smacks into the wall like one of those ‘splat gummy’ toys kids throw, sticking wherever they hit. His robes are shredded and bloody. At least one arm and both legs appear broken. He hangs there, stuck.

  I lay still, waiting for my ribs to knit.

  The redhead runs at me—but Kingsley dashes into the hall and bites the back of her dress, dragging her to a stop. Bare feet have zero traction on bloody stone floor. Evidently forgetting for the moment she’s a powerful ascendant dark master, she screams like a horror movie victim as he drags her backward into the war room.

  Elizabeth, seeming mildly perturbed, attempts to unstick her feet from the floor, largely ignoring the chaos around her.

  Before me, the brute growls and raises a fist. As he does, a cloud of dark crimson fog forms around his hand, coalescing into a shiny snake seemingly made of blood. The instant it’s completely solid, the serpent shoots forward like an arrow. Allison throws a counter-spell at him, causing the blood serpent to veer off course and hit the wall twenty feet past me rather than stab me in the heart. It splatters on contact.

  Furious, the brute whirls on her. Allison raises both hands—and the big dude goes flying away as if caught in a category five hurricane existing only to him. Head over feet, he tumbles all the way to the end of the corridor, some thirty yards away, before smacking into a display stand holding a fancy suit of leather armor.

  The redhead’s screaming in the war room shifts from terror to anger. Kingsley snarls. Lots of banging and crashing follow. Tall guy finally peels off the wall and hits the floor. He’s got the same expression on his face as I do. We end up looking at each other while waiting for our bones to knit.

  “What are you even doing here?” wheezes Tall Guy in Pierre’s voice.

  Wow. Dude doesn’t look like how Pierre sounded at all. I was expecting a little five-foot-two blonde guy. Not the complete opposite.

  “I can’t let her enslave an entire world,” I say.

  “Why do you care? It’s not your world.”

  “Those who care about others only when they have a personal stake in the game are almost as evil as she is.” I gasp at the pain of talking, but continue anyway. “Besides, I didn’t come here to wipe out all dark masters, just to stop her from enslaving everyone here.”

  “We have lived in the shadows for far too long,” rasps Pierre. “It is time for us to become true masters. I’m tired of hiding from the world. They should serve us.”

  “Seriously? Who cares about power? Is it really worth the headache of management?”

  A heavy crash comes from the war room. Allison throws a spell on Elizabeth, wrapping her arms in blue energy ribbons, pinning them to her sides. I swear the bitch gives Allie an ‘are you kidding’ sneer before breaking out as easily as if she’d been tied with toilet paper.

  Pierre winces as his left arm crunches back into place.

  “Damn, I’m a little jealous,” I say. “You guys heal way too fast.”

  He ignores me.

  “Is it worth it?” I ask.

  “Worth what?” snaps Pierre.

  “Risking everything when the cost is being so close to oblivion?” A sharp snap comes from my ribcage. Oh, goodie. Guess the whole thing didn’t break. That would’ve taken longer to mend. I sit up.

  “You,” snaps Elizabeth while glaring at Allison. “Make yourself useful.”

  Elizabeth’s command to kill me overwhelms Allison’s thoughts. I force myself up to my feet in time to dodge the first of her energy bolts, but she keeps chucking them at me. I feel like a damn Japanese Zero diving at an Allied warship through a hail of anti-aircraft fire. Allie’s tennis-ball-sized energy bolts whiz past me one after another, close enough to set off tingles in my skin.

  Elizabeth remains occupied, detangling herself from the sticky magic. The brute chases me around while I dodge fireballs. He’s so big, he eats one or two, forcing Allison to slow down the barrage so she doesn’t shred him. Another two exalted run into the fray, dragging me into a roving sword fight. They’re much faster than a human but still can’t keep up with me. They do land a few lucky scratches before I’ve wounded them too much to keep fighting.

  Tammy’s mental presence surges over the mind link from Allison, punting Elizabeth out of her head. Allison stops machine-gunning me and stares with an ‘I’m so sorry’ expression.

  “Not your fault. I know what happened.”

  I stop short and spin on the brute, grabbing the Devil Killer in both hands and hacking as hard as my supernatural nature will let me swing at his left knee.

  His body is incredibly tough. Still, I slice deep enough that his own weight and the momentum of him chasing me splinters his femur above the knee. He goes down hard, landing on his chin. I vault his sliding body and sprint for Elizabeth.

  The crashing inside the war room is getting out of hand.

  On my way past it, I peer in the door to see Kingsley caught in a fight against the redhead and two other ascendants. Elizabeth leaps out of the magical ‘glue’ patch, laughing at me as a group of exalted spills into the corridor from an archway, blocking me off. It pains me, but I can’t allow my soft heart to doom this entire world, me, Kingsley, and Allison.

  Doing my best to set emotion and guilt aside, I wade into the charging exalted. These men have obviously trained more at sword combat than I have, but the advantage in strength and speed is mine. I see them going for fancy moves and parries and can maneuver around them before their motions complete. Still, my attacks mostly sever limbs. I’m trying as much as I can not to kill any mortals.

  So damn glad I found Sebastian. If I hadn’t started training with him, I’d be having another Nordic zombie fight where all my effort went to defense. Exactly... not the most relaxing of vacations.

  As I hack through the exalted, Elizabeth seems amused. Oh, that bitch. She’s got to be toying with us. Maybe she finds it funny to force me to hurt innocent people. Each dark master who gets close to my sword seems to realize I hold their mortality in my hands. One bite from the blade is enough to convince most of them to play dead or get out of my way.

  One guy, alas, has too much confidence in ‘merely possessing’ a human.

  Sebastian’s training causes my reflexes to move faster than my brain. Without thinking about it, a parry becomes a counterattack, stabbing a dude in the heart. Predictably, the mortal dies instantly… and the Devil Killer eats the essence of the dark master who had been possessing him.

  The sight of the glowing energy flowing into the blade finally puts a look of concern on Elizabeth’s face. Yeah, she’s not stupid. She knows if I get her with my sword before they have another Void made, her ass is going to merge back into the Origin. At least, I think this sword is an express train back to the hundredth dimension. Might be total oblivion, but really, what’s the difference? Didn’t Einstein say energy can neither be created nor destroyed? That’d have to count for souls too, so it must be Origin Express.

  Another ascendant and more exalted throw themselves between me and Elizabeth. The ascendant doesn’t seem too happy about it, almost as if Elizabeth is mind-controlling him.

  “I’m not here to kill you all!” I shout. “I want only to stop her from destroying this world. Stand down and I will not hurt you.”

  The ascendant before me hesitates.

  I leech psychic energy from the men in front of me, manufacturing a second wind and attacking in a surge. The exalted keep coming, relentless and mindless. What do the dark masters care if the human they’re riding dies? I lop an exalted’s hand off, parry two incoming sword strikes, and kick a guy in the face, knocking him back into the ranks behind him. I can’t even tell where Allison went or how Kingsley’s doing. Max said I only needed to keep Elizabeth occupied until they got here, but we’re clearly losing now.

  If I can end it, I have to.

  I teleport past the mass of exalted to a spot beside Elizabeth.

  As if expecting me to do exactly this, Elizabeth’s already facing me when I appear. She thrusts her hand at me in a ‘stop’ gesture. The stone floor between us undulates like goopy mud, then stretches upward into a blunt-tipped spear, smashing me in the gut.

  I fly backward off my feet, sailing butt-first through the air for a second before crashing to the floor and curling up in pain. Perhaps just witnessing a dark master die has affected Elizabeth’s calm. She no longer appears to be blasé and confident. Mostly, she looks like bridezilla watching someone trash the wedding she’d planned to the tiniest detail… with a small trace of existential dread.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” I rasp, cradling my gut. “Just swear you will not try to take over this world, and we can stop this.”

  “You don’t learn,” snarls Elizabeth. “You’re going to keep following me forever. I’ll never know peace.”

  “Hey, now you know how I’ve felt for the past, oh, fourteen years.” I pull myself up to my feet. “Can we stop this idiocy? You have immortality and power already. Do you really need to rule over normal humans?”

  “You know nothing of power!” shouts Elizabeth—right before throwing a lightning bolt at me.

  I dive into a somersault, narrowly avoiding a thick, serpentine shaft of white-hot electricity that sears a jagged black stain into the stone. The bang is louder than a shotgun.

  Some vampires, especially older ones, think of humans the way humans think of cows: livestock for food. Then you have ones like Elizabeth. She thinks of humans more like grapes, as in, more insignificant than even animals.

  Enraged—and perhaps reminded I possess the ability to destroy her permanently—Elizabeth goes into a frenzy of chucking lightning bolts at me. The amount of mental energy I inhale to empower myself from the nearby exalted knocks four of them out cold. Despite accelerating myself to the upper limit of my abilities, I’m forced to run away down the hall to have any chance of dodging the rapid-fire barrage of lightning coming from Elizabeth.

  A number of exalted give chase.

  The next lightning bolt strikes four of them, knocking them flat—dead or unconscious I can’t quite tell. Kingsley the wolf comes flying out of the war room, hits the wall, and lands in the corridor, favoring his two left legs. The brute blurs after him, appearing almost like a teleportation beside him, ramming his falchion into Kingsley’s side.

  The giant wolf groans and slumps into a heap, no longer moving. He rapidly shifts back to human form.

  “I despise werewolves,” says the brute, in Dormund’s voice.

  I begin to thrust my sword at an imaginary opponent, teleporting beside Elizabeth in mid-attack. The Devil Killer’s tip pierces her left shoulder from behind; she spins to her right, letting the blade slip out of her and go past. I barely manage to swing the blade down to catch her caustic scimitar, stopping it before it bites into my stomach. She’s got the fear of death in her eyes.

  Self-preservation wins out.

  Frantic, she flicks her hand at me, summoning a wave of invisible force that knocks me staggering away. Pierre, the redhead, and the skinny man all surround me, attacking. Swords are everywhere. It’s all I can do to keep parrying. Realizing I’ve got seconds left before one of them gets the upper hand, I teleport back to Elizabeth. My sudden absence causes Skinny and the redhead to stab each other.

  I appear right in the path of a lightning bolt flying from Elizabeth’s outstretched fingers.

  Too late, I realize she’s reading my mind. Teleporting at her is basically giving her a free shot on me because she knows exactly where I’m going to appear. Since she’s become afraid for her existence, the gloves are off.

  I’d say the lightning hurts, but it kinda doesn’t. My whole body goes numb and loses control. I flop to the floor, twitching like a tuna on the deck of a fishing boat. Tiny sparks crackle up and down my limbs, a stinging army of electric fire ants sizzling. My body refuses to respond to my brain. Electricity overwhelms my nerves. I can’t feel anything more than the zapping, nor can I move.

  Redhead, Skinny, and Pierre hurry over to surround me.

  Shit. Not good. At least since I’m momentarily paralyzed, they are content to gloat for now.

  Allison—somewhere out of my sight—emits a bark like a kicked chicken. Our mind link tells me she lost consciousness. It didn’t drop, though. No idea why they didn’t kill her, but I’m not gonna question it. Small favors.

  “I grow tired of Samantha’s interference.” Elizabeth sighs in a way like she’s being forced to break a friendship because I’ve gone just a little too far. Sorry, lady, but we didn’t have a friendship. “End it. And use that irritating sword of hers. I do not want her coming back.”