Serpent's Bite: A Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy (The Last Serpent Book 4) Read online

  “Madeline isn’t joining us today,” Elroy said.

  “But I thought Tom said—”

  Tom then quickly turned around, drew back the lock, and turned back to look at me, his face now pale, drained of all blood.

  “What the hell is going on here?” I yelled, glaring at Elroy, but he wasn’t sitting down anymore; he was standing up, and glaring right back at me.

  With a harsh, spoken word and the winding of his arm, he hurled a ball of green light that struck me in the chest with enough force to send me flying over the chair I had been meant to sit on and falling to the floor, out of breath and entirely disoriented. I tried to stand, but the room was spinning. Worse, I was starting to hear voices, as if there were people circling all around me, taunting me, whispering things into my ear.

  “What did… what did you do to me?” I yelled, but the voices were getting so loud, it was almost impossible to hear myself speak, let along hear any sort of response from the man who had just done this to me.

  I saw the table with the tea and the biscuits, and reached for it, hoping to push myself up, but my hands didn’t find purchase, and instead of grabbing the table, I grabbed the silver tray, sending cups and plates and cookies flying. The strength went out of my body, and the side of my head hit the carpeted floor with a thud. The world continued to spin, faster and faster, as if I were stuck in a tilt-a-whirl, and all the while, the voices closed in, a maddening cacophony of sounds that made me want to scream.

  Only I couldn’t.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Consciousness came like a migraine, slowly and inevitably, though my eyes had trouble accepting the command to open that my brain was giving them. Around me I heard voices, and while I couldn’t hear what was being said, I knew the people speaking were Tom and Elroy.

  Again, I tried to force my eyes open, this time succeeding just enough to see a line of white through one eye. Slowly, the one eye I had managed to open adjusted to the light, and I was able to see a small fraction of my surroundings; I was in the same room I had fallen unconscious in, and I was lying on a table.

  “This was a mistake,” Tom said, his voice now coming into sharp focus. “We’ve just made a huge mistake. You do know that, right?”

  “If I wanted your advice I would ask for it,” Elroy said, “And if this is a mistake, then it’s a mistake you caused.”

  “Me? How did I cause this?”

  “Your failure to recruit her in the first place. If you had been successful in winning her over, then maybe we would be in a more favorable situation.”

  “Oh, really? And how do you figure that?”

  “Maybe if we explained—”

  “There is no explaining anything with her. She thinks we are the bad guys here; she doesn’t see what we’re doing, and she isn’t going to magically understand and accept our science.”

  “We would have made her accept it, but that all hinged upon your ability to bring her to our side, and you’ve royally fucked that up not once, but twice, so now this is the situation we’re in.”

  Tom exhaled loudly. “What are we going to do when they come looking for her?”

  “The magic I hit her with won’t wear off for another couple of hours. By the time she wakes up she’ll be in her bed, believing all of this was a bad dream.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Are you doubting my powers?”

  Silence. “No…”

  “Good. Now, let’s get on with this quickly. The longer we wait, the less time we have to weave the spells around her mind that’ll keep her from remembering anything.”

  I struggled to turn my head to get a better look at Tom and Elroy, who were standing to the right of where I was sitting, but instead of seeing them, I saw something else; a blood pack hanging off the side of the table. Looking at the pack, I noticed two things. First, someone had stuck an IV into my arm, connecting it to the blood pack. Second, the pack of blood was almost full.

  How much have they taken? I thought, distantly.

  Tom came into focus approaching the bag. I saw the way the sun shone off his blond head, and wanted to tear it off with my teeth. That son of a bitch had double-crossed me, he was taking blood from me, and I couldn’t move. I watched him carefully remove the tube siphoning my blood from the blood pack. He then attached another, new pack, hooked it on to a small, toddler-height rack, and went over to a table where he had instruments to work with.

  I knew, however, that I wouldn’t be watching for long. With every second tat passed I felt myself growing fainter, and fainter. The room slowly began to spin again, and darken at the corners of my vision, only this time not because of some kind of magic, but due to good old-fashioned blood loss. If I was going to do anything, I needed to act now or not at all.

  The only question was, would I hurt myself more by trying to break free than if I just waited? Elroy had said he didn’t want to kill me—in fact, he wanted me to forget this had ever happened, meaning his anonymity was important to him. That bastard wanted to do what he was doing here, and then trade niceties with me in the hallways. Only he hadn’t banked on my waking up earlier than he had expected, and if that wasn’t some kind of sign that I needed to break out of this, fast, then I didn’t know what was.

  Swallowing hard, I tightened my left hand into a fist, but only managed to make the fingers twitch.

  “Are you sure you can do this here?” Elroy asked Tom.

  “Yes,” Tom said, “If we’d had free use of the other facility this would be much easier.”

  “That damn yank coming back to the warehouse really fucked us there; if he hadn’t gone snooping, the warehouse wouldn’t have been shut down. But we’ll make do here. First, we need to know if her blood is as potent as everyone thinks it is. If it is, then we’ll take it to the other facility and you’ll be able to make as much of it as you want. We’ll bleed her every week if we have to.”

  Turning my eyes on Tom again, I watched him pour two fingers of my blood into a beaker, then set the pack carefully down on a specially designed holder. Tom them ran his hands over the beaker and began to murmur to himself. A static charge rose in the room, similar to what I had consistently felt around Kyle, only this one seemed to be radiating away from Tom and filling the room. The hairs on my arms and on the back of my neck began to rise into points, sending a surge of adrenaline through me that allowed me to make a fist with my hand.

  Tom then cupped the beaker with his hands, blew into it, and the blood in the beaker suddenly evaporated into a bright, mist like substance I had seen once before—in the phials we had retrieved from the drug-dealing vampire. Quickly, Tom grabbed a small phial and with a gesture of his hand ushered the supernatural energy inside. He then stuffed a rubber stopper into the mouth of the phial, containing the energy and preventing it from escaping.

  That’s… me, I thought, he’s taking pieces of me…

  “It worked?” Elroy asked, examining Tom’s work from a safe distance.

  “Better than it’s ever worked before,” Tom said, “No other supernatural’s energy has been this easy to extract… it’s almost like hers wants to be free of its earthly ties.”

  “Well, now isn’t the time for science. Now is the time to get what we need and prepare her for the second part of this ordeal.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was the idea of being made to forget, or someone reaching into my mind and tampering with my memories to fit the narrative they wanted me to believe, or if it was seeing my blood be transformed into pure light that someone else was going to do God knew what with, that flipped the switch in my mind. Whatever had triggered me didn’t matter, what mattered was getting the damn drip out of my arm and breaking free.

  Instead of reaching for the tube attached to my arm and pulling it out, I pushed what energy I had left inside of me into causing my wings to grow. I wasn’t tied down, wasn’t strapped to the table I had been set on, so when my wings exploded out from under me, all seven feet of them, the force of the
ir awkward, rapid growth was enough to not only topple me over, but also smack Elroy on the back of the head.

  “Son of a bitch!” Elroy cursed.

  Tom stood and turned, his face now ashen white at the sight of me, forcing myself to my feet, my wings folded behind me, but my face twisted with rage. “You!” I yelled and pointed a hand with nails as long as knives and as sharp as diamonds at him. “I trusted you.”

  My heart was pounding, my vision shaking and darkening, but I advanced on him, my wings knocking over everything they touched. Tom put his hands up as I went to strike him across the face, rage pumping through me now, my intent as clear in my mind as it was in my heart—cut him, hurt him, make him bleed like he made me bleed.

  But I didn’t get to Tom.

  Elroy stepped in front of his student, his hand blazing with green light. Acting on instinct, my wings closed around me just as Elroy hurled the ball of magic at me. I felt the magic strike the protective cocoon my wings had created, and the point of the impact stung, and burned, but I hadn’t been knocked back, nor was I feeling any of the disorientation I had felt before.

  Taking the opportunity, I sprung out of my protective shell and hurled myself at Elroy, grabbing him by the collar and throwing him to the floor. I wound back my right arm, stretched my fingers, and brought a set of claws down across Elroy’s face, sending a spray of blood up against mine. Elroy screamed, but I couldn’t hear the sound clearly—it was muffled, as though underwater. My senses were dulling, I was fading fast, but I had to keep going.

  Hit him again, I thought, and I did, only this time Elroy managed to block my attack with his own arm, and while my claws dug deep into the skin of his forearm, it wasn’t his face I had hit, and that made me scream with frustration. When I went to hit him again, Elroy’s eyes began to radiate with smoky, green light, and seeing that caused me to hesitate.

  He gritted his teeth and called for Tom, who reached out for Elroy’s hand, then both men burst into a cloud of inky black smoke and disappeared right in front of me. I slumped to the ground, no longer supported by the body I had been sitting on a moment ago, holding myself up with my hands. Heart pounding, vision darkening, I scanned the room for any trace of them, but they were gone, and that wasn’t all.

  With the chaos subsided, I was able to notice the blood trickling down my arm, only it wasn’t mine, it was Elroy’s, and seeing that brought with it plenty of satisfaction.

  The only problem was, I had burned out my energy reserves so fast, and darkness was coming fast. I fought with every ounce of my strength to crawl toward the door, but my body wasn’t responding, like it had already given up. The adrenaline that had been powering my body was gone, leaving only the cold numbness of impending death.

  So soon, I thought, as my head began to swim, maybe because they took so much blood…

  I let myself fall on my front thinking that maybe, resting would help. But there was only one thing that would help me now, and that was the energy of another person, and there wasn’t anyone in sight, and nothing to do but wait for the moment when the darkness would come to usher me into whatever realm the living went when the reaper called their names. But for one, bright moment, the darkness cleared, and I saw not Vik, Raph, Liam, or Aiden, nor did I see Dante, or a host of Angels, instead it was a demon.

  It was Leo.

  He swooped up beside me, rolled me on my back, and kissed me deeply. For a time, I couldn’t act, couldn’t move, but as his energy began flowing into me, pulled from him like a black hole draws in everything around it, I felt my strength return, and I pushed into the kiss, taking more, as much as I could before Leo finally ripped himself from me, stumbling over himself and falling to the floor not far from where I lay.

  Slowly, and with great effort, I turned my head to look at him. He was down, but conscious and breathing, and so was I.

  Leo had saved my life.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  He reached for me from where he lay, and I reached back. He hadn’t given me enough energy for me to stand on my own, but I could at least touch his hand, and when I did, a powerful force gripped me, and zipped me through a dark tunnel of almost nothing, bringing both of us to the Alexandria’s infirmary where Dante, a second later, had come rushing in, Madeline by his side.

  Dante had picked me up with a grunt and placed me on a hospital bed before helping Leo get back up on his feet. As Madeline came between us, I watched Leo touch his ribs and saw his hand come away sticky and red. The sight of it made me even more nauseated than I was, but as soon as Madeline’s hands touched me, and I felt that cold-warm infusion of magic pour into my battered body, the nausea dissipated like fog pushed away by a powerful wind.

  I took a breath as if it were the first breath I had ever taken, and, finally, passed out.

  When I opened my eyes again, Dante, Leo, and Madeline were still there, talking quietly amongst each other. I couldn’t have been out for long judging by the way that my arm was still wet with blood, even if the blood wasn’t warm. I blinked hard until my eyes adjusted and then croaked, and that got Dante’s attention.

  He rushed to my side, picked up my hand, and held it to his mouth. “Lilith,” he said, concern permeating every inch of him, “How are you?”

  “Alive,” I groaned.

  Madeline and Leo came over to the bed, but didn’t crowd me. “You’re lucky,” Madeline said, “Another couple of minutes and you would have gone to meet our maker.”

  “Leo…” I said, “Thank you.”

  “We’re even now,” Leo simply said, nodding.

  I sucked in a breath of air and tried to sit up, but my body screamed, and I settled back against the bed, heart hammering, head trembling, fingers numbing.

  “You can’t exert yourself right now,” Madeline said, “You lost a lot of blood, and magic healing can only take you so far. Your body needs to do the rest.”

  “Tom,” I said, “Tom and Elroy. Where are they?”

  “We don’t know,” Dante said, “Leo says they used the same teleportation magic he knows to get away. It’s the only reason you’re alive right now. He sensed the sudden, familiar surge of power and came to the source to find you bleeding out on the floor.”

  “Thank you… really.”

  “It was you or them,” Leo said, “I could have chased them by following the conduit they had gone through.”

  “Can you still chase them?”

  He shook his head. “That’s beyond even my level of skill.” Behind Leo, standing by the door to the infirmary, I thought I caught a glimpse of Kyle trying to get a look at me, but he quickly disappeared.

  “Could anyone else do it?” I asked.

  “Not that we know of,” Madeline said, “The school is on lockdown, no one is allowed in or out, and Tom and Elroy’s quarters are going to be searched, but you don’t have to think about that right now. Right now, what we need to know is what exactly happened. Do you think you can tell us?”

  “Those bastards are double-crossing assholes, is what happened.”

  “Did they drug you?” Dante asked.

  I nodded. “They did, not with a drug, but with magic. I was with Kyle in the alchemy lab. We were hanging out when Tom showed up, asked if I wanted to have tea with he and his mentor. He told me you would be there too, Madeline. I wouldn’t have gone otherwise.”

  “I understand,” Madeline said, “Then what happened?”

  “I walked with him, got to the room, his mentor was there… when I asked why you weren’t there I saw Tom freak out, then his mentor hit me with some kind of magic spell that gave me some sort of panic attack and then knocked me the hell out.”

  “Fucking warlocks,” Leo growled.

  “That’s a powerful spell,” Madeline said, “You woke up early?”

  “I did. Elroy hadn’t been expecting me to. They were going to wipe my mind clean and make me forget what they were doing… I take it you know the rest?”

  “We do,” Dante said, “They were extracti
ng your essence from your blood—the same process that was used to create the drug we’ve found circulating around.”

  “Yeah, only making the drug out of mine was much easier than making it out of anyone else’s. They’d said as much.”

  Madeline and Dante exchanged grave looks. “Do you remember anything else?” Madeline asked, “Anything else of note?”

  “Not really… once I started my escape, everything went too crazy for me to keep track of. One minute I was scratching Elroy to pieces, the next minute he and Tom were both gone.”

  “And we have no idea where they went,” Madeline said.

  “That’s not true. I know where they’ve gone.”

  “Where?” Leo asked.

  “Take a guess.”

  He scowled. “The fucking warehouse.”

  I nodded. “Tom had mentioned it, said he wished he could have been using the facilities there to work with my blood. I think that’s where they’ve gone now.”

  “Why do you think that?” Madeline asked.

  “Because they know we can’t follow them. They know Leo is hurt, they know Vik, Raph, Liam, and Aiden are gone, and now they know I’m hurt too.”

  “They know everything and they’re three steps ahead of us,” Dante said, “But that doesn’t mean they’re going to get away with what they’ve done to you.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “You’re not going to do anything,” Madeline said, “You’re too hurt, I told you. Leo is, too.”

  “Can’t you heal him with magic?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. Like I said, magic will only heal so much. What we’re doing right now is working on a theory which may help us anticipate some of their next moves.”

  “What theory is that?”

  “The possibility that everything that’s happened to you, and us, has been orchestrated,” Dante said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean us coming here, abandoning the house in Germany, even sending the others away; there’s a possibility that someone has made it so we would all be here, in London—”