Unleash (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series Book 6) (35 page)

“She is not to be harmed,” Snow growled.

“She did this.” Antoine glared at her.

“No, it was her master’s doing. Aurora’s life is bound to mine.”

The darkness evaporated from Antoine’s expression, replaced by shock. “You mean if she dies…”

Snow nodded. “We must protect her and find her master. He will pay for this.”

A vampire behind Antoine cried out, the tip of a sword appearing in the centre of his chest. The body fell and revealed her master, and Aurora straightened in Snow’s arms, glaring at him. Antoine whirled on the spot to face him, his sword at the ready.

Aurora pushed free of Snow’s arms and picked up the blade she had dropped at some point, too weak to hold it then. She found the strength to wield it in the face of death, determined not to succumb to her master’s plan for her and Snow.

Snow readied his own blade, standing beside her.

Payne, Kristina, and Elissa continued to fight off to their right, battling to protect Callum and their young.

Sera, the male vampire, and Javier and Lilah fought below them on the red carpet. Across the room, Chica and Andreu fought bravely, the female succubus whizzing between the angels, sucking out their energy through deadly kisses, weakening them for her male to finish.

Aurora faced her master.

“Why did you do this? Because you knew I had gone to judge Snow well, giving him a chance to redeem himself? Because you blamed him for all the suffering and darkness that would consume me if my faith in him was proven wrong?”

He smiled darkly and preened a few unruly strands of his long black hair from his amethyst eyes. “You have too much faith in me. I came here to kill the vampire because he deserves to die… and so do you.”

Snow growled at him, exposing his fangs at the same time. It warmed her heart. He wanted to protect her from the angels and save her from her master. He still loved her.

Antoine shifted beside them, engaging a brunette female angel who dared to step into the firing line between them and her master. Another vampire joined in, battling beside him to bring the female down, tearing through her wings with claw and blade before decapitating her.

Aurora stared coldly at her master. He showed no sign of remorse or any flicker of emotion as the angel fell, exhaling her last breath. He didn’t care how many died here tonight and it sickened Aurora.

“They ordered you to execute me but gave you no deadline… so you drew it out as long as you could. You’re exploiting a loophole.” She wasn’t sure what that meant exactly but if she pretended that she did, she might get him to reveal the truth about it to her. “Our superiors are amused by that. I am not.”

His smile gained a proud edge.

“You were ordered to kill me with your own sword but you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. I hate you for that. I hate you for trying to trick me into committing suicide in order to spare yourself.” Aurora spat the words at him and took a step forwards, only for Snow to catch her arm and hold her back.

She looked over her shoulder at him and he shook his head. She knew that fighting her master would be committing the suicide she just spoke of, but she wanted to drive her sword right through his black dead heart.

Her master preened his white bloodstained feathers in the way she had witnessed him do a million times and something dawned on her.

“You shallow bastard!” She hurled herself forwards, raising her sword at the same time, but Snow held her firm, refusing to let her attack her master. Aurora tried to break free but Snow pulled her back to him, his grip on her unrelenting. “You would have been following orders if you had struck me down that day but you also would have gained a single black feather for the sin of killing a fellow angel.”

A look of sheer disgust crossed her master’s face. “I had kept them perfect for thousands of years before you were dumped on me as my ward. In only a handful of years, you threatened to undo all of my hard work.”

Aurora spluttered, unable to believe what she was hearing. He valued the purity of his feathers over her life and the life of these people around her.

“Our superiors felt it was what I deserved for not teaching you well enough as a child and allowing you to commit your first sin the night you saved this despicable creature.” Her master tossed Snow a black look and Antoine snarled beside her, his back tensing as his fingers flexed around the hilt of his bloodied white sword.

Snow moved forwards, angling his body slightly in front of hers, shielding her again. It irked her this time. She wanted to be the one to end her master. She wanted to make him pay for what he had done to her.

“You wanted me to suffer,” she said, enraged by that and the thought that he had masqueraded as her companion for all these years, pretending to care about her when really he had been biding his time, waiting for Snow to commit enough sins. “You watched me as I bore Snow’s sins, my feathers turning black one by one, and then Snow went two centuries without committing another. Oh, how that must have annoyed you!”

Her master scowled at her, and she hated him more than ever. She had thought he had been happy when Snow had stopped sinning, driven into isolation by his bloodlust, taken away from the world by his brother. In reality, it had annoyed her master, forcing him to bide his time, waiting for Snow to sin again.

And when that had failed, and Snow hadn’t sinned, he had changed his plans.

“You waited until I gave in to the temptation to visit Snow again, knowing that when I did you could punish me, turning my final feather black. You could make me judge him.” Aurora readied her sword. “You son of a bitch!”

She broke free of Snow’s grasp and attacked her master, catching him unawares with a direct strike across his upper arm, slicing deep into his white armour. Her sword came away bloodied and her master’s purple eyes flashed with fury.

He attacked but Snow was there, blocking his blade, driving it away from her. Antoine joined forces with the other vampires, keeping the other angels at bay, out of their fight with her master.

If she could kill her master, then it would send a message to her superiors, a warning that she would come good on her threat to destroy every angel they sent to Vampirerotique if they didn’t withdraw the troops. She was sure they would choose the sensible course of action and recall them, and she would have spared Snow and his friends.

If only.

Her master was ancient, almost as old as their superiors were and almost as powerful. No one had defeated him or even come close, and he had battled the strongest demons in the realms of Hell, surviving each battle without a single wound.

She had wounded him though, and he couldn’t kill her directly without committing the sin of killing a fellow angel. He needed to kill Snow and have her die because of her link to him, leaving him untainted because he had only killed a demon. She could take advantage of that if Snow would only let her. The trouble was, she knew he wouldn’t want her to fight her master alone. He would fight to protect her, placing himself between her and her master, even when it made sense for her to be the one to fight him.

Aurora timed her attacks with Snow’s, slashing at her master whenever he blocked Snow’s blade, leaving himself open.

The angel was too fast.

He easily countered her, quickly switching between blocking Snow and blocking her. She tried to come around behind him but he shifted, nimbly moving so he continued to face them both.

An angel broke through the ranks to help him, forcing her to break away to attack him instead. Her master lured Snow further away and, although Snow fought viciously, he landed blows, slicing Snow’s arms and his chest. Each cut on his body appeared on hers and she grew weaker, the pain stealing her strength and her focus.

It was her master’s sword that could give them simultaneous injuries, and possibly that weapon alone. If she could get it away from him, she could perhaps give them a chance to defeat him.

Antoine came up behind the angel attacking her, savagely slicing down his back, scoring his white armour and bloodying his wings. She used it as a chance to attack the angel.

Her sword cut through his middle, spilling his entrails across his front. Antoine was gone in a flash, moving so swiftly she could barely keep up, and someone cried out behind her.

She wheeled around to face them and found Antoine there, his sword buried deep in the gut of a female angel who stood with her sword still raised above her head, ready to strike Aurora down.

Aurora’s heart skipped a beat at the thought she might not have sensed the attack before it was too late. Even though she was sure Antoine had only saved her because the blow may have killed his brother too, she still thanked him with a brief smile before launching herself back into the fight.

Snow and her master had moved further away, a swath of angels blocking her path to them now. Snow had landed several blows but the cuts on her body said that he had taken more.

Crimson soaked her dress, turning it almost completely red, but she wouldn’t stop fighting.

She struggled to battle her way through the angels with Antoine’s assistance and her head spun when her master slammed his fist and the hilt of his sword into Snow’s temple. She staggered backwards at the same time as Snow and then screamed in agony when a sharp pain pierced her shoulder, echoing Snow’s bellow as the sword stabbed into his flesh.

Her master grinned and kicked Snow in the stomach, sending him falling backwards. The sword fell from Snow’s bloodstained fingers and clattered across the stage, and a look she didn’t like crossed his face when his gaze sought hers.

A dreadful sense of finality pressed down on her and she shook her head.

She redoubled her effort to get through the angels to him, clawing and shrieking like a wild thing, desperate to reach Snow before he did something crazy. He wanted to protect her and end her master, and she had seen him fight enough times to know he was going to go all out and lay everything on the line in order to defeat the angel.

Antoine must have sensed her desperation to reach Snow and seen the look on his brother’s face, because he hacked at the angels, using all of his strength to cleave through their armour, killing them with a single blow.

Snow found his feet, stared at her a moment, and smiled. “Forgive me.”

He launched himself at her master. Barehanded. Her master grinned and thrust forwards with his blade, a direct hit that skewered Snow’s broad chest close to his heart, and speared hers too, chasing her breath away.

It didn’t stop her vampire.

He ploughed into her master, wrapped his right arm around the front of his throat, locked his other hand around his wrist behind her master’s head, and dropped to one knee, bringing her master down backwards over his outstretched thigh.

The crunch of the bones in his neck snapping was loud in the theatre, silencing the battle as all heads turned towards the two males.

Snow followed through, landing on his front on the stage floor next to her master’s body.

Aurora pushed through the stricken angels, rushing to him in spite of the fierce debilitating pain emanating from her chest, throbbing in every inch of her. She couldn’t breathe. Blood drenched the front of her dress and pooled beneath Snow too. He wasn’t moving but he couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be. She was still alive. Barely.

She crashed to her knees beside him and tried to pull him over onto his back. He cried out when the sword’s blade dug into the stage floor and tears filled her eyes. She had to pull it out. She grasped the hilt and tugged. The wet sucking noise and the feel of his bones scraping along the blade turned her stomach.

Antoine was at her side in a heartbeat, helping her pull the sword free of his brother’s chest, his gaze locked on Snow’s face. “Don’t you dare give up.”

She wanted to say those words to him too but couldn’t speak through the blood steadily choking her. She coughed, trying to clear her throat and lungs, desperate to tell Snow not to leave her. She wanted him to live.

She glanced up at Antoine as they finally pulled the blade out and Snow slumped onto his back, his head on her knees. Tears streaked Antoine’s face and Sera looked as though her whole world was falling apart as she came to a halt behind him and saw Snow.

The angels around them disappeared, revealing Snow to everyone in the theatre.

Aurora couldn’t take the oppressive wave of sorrow that flowed through them and crashed over her, or the grief that shone in their eyes and beat in their hearts.

She stroked Snow’s cheeks, her own tears blurring her vision, willing him to come around.

He couldn’t be dead.

She had fought so hard for him.

He had fought so hard to live and to protect those he loved, her included.

Her pain faded as she stared down at him, her touch leaving sombre streaks of dark colours on his skin. Her only comfort was that if he was to die from this terrible wound he had taken to save everyone he loved, that she would soon follow him.

Her pain would be short lived. She wouldn’t suffer as his brother would, or anyone else here who cared about her beautiful warrior.

She hoped that wherever their journey led them, they would see each other again.

What if they didn’t though? That thought gripped her heart with icy sharp claws, spilling fear into her veins.

She was heavenly and he was classed as demonic.

What if she was taken to Heaven and he was taken to where the dead resided in Hell?

There was only one way to make sure that didn’t happen. She wanted to be with him in the afterlife. She wanted to live with him, just as he had desired, even if their home was the dark bowels of the underworld.

Aurora clung to Snow and didn’t hesitate, her love for him giving her the strength to do what she had to do in order to be with him no matter what happened.

She tipped her head back and stared up at the lights rigged above the stage.

“I renounce my duty,” she said, her voice firm and level, showing none of the pain crushing her heart to pieces.

She dropped her head, bent over Snow and cried for him, shedding heavenly tears for the last time as her wings began to fall apart feather by feather.