Beast of the Damned #2

*Chapter Seven*

~TRISTAN~

There's little time to contemplate the disintegration of the angel whose wings were as black as the veins that cover me other than he hadn't a golden luster to his skin. That means he's an exiled. The exiled usually have their wings torn from their backs when they denounced their god, yet this one still sported wings.

The aimed attack on Kinley's life by one of the fallen angels of the God of the Heavens gets knocked from forethought when the steel of my father's double-sided sword sparks against the metal of my armor.

I duck, missing the next blow poised to lob off my head. I scarcely get my fingers wrapped around the leather hilt of my sword before my blood-enraged father gets his teeth sunk deep into Kinley's neck.

The tear in Kinley's lip is unhurried in its healing, her earlier injury today having used up her allotted stipend of the Prince's blood.

If Thron gets hold of her, that chunk of skin hanging from her lip will be the least of her worries.

"Run," I order, the hunger her freed blood is crafting turning my father's dark eyes into a violent haze of out-of-control thirst.

I've been there before, the seduction of a massarra's pure life force a sin against nature that's meant to be devoured by us devils of darkness. Kinley's cinnamon life force is an invitation to evil, and my father is adhering to primal instinct.

"I said run, human, run!" I place my foot against my father's stomach and shove him back, sending him crashing into the stone wall behind. Cracks shoot out, zigzagging around his frame.

A petrified Kinley remains motionless, specks of my blood dripping onto her face as she looks up at me. She stares at the teeth that have bitten through my armor. All that stands between her and a sudden death is the bone in my forearm. It snaps under the force of my father's bite.

Kinley scrambles to find traction amid the chairs she's knocking into in her frenzied attempt to run away. She doesn't look back. She keeps running, her long tresses being blown in the swift currents of air that signal my father is right on her heels.

Kinley makes it into the hallway. She covers her head as she tries to go right, the stone wall in front of her crumbling. All she can do is pivot before the next blow takes place to her left. This time, it is my father who slams me into the wall. His hands squeeze around my throat as he lifts me off the ground.

Venom streams from my father's lengthened fangs before I feel a crack. A piece of bone breaks off and lodges into my esophagus. It doesn't compare to the searing pain that comes after when he rams the serrated steel of his double-bladed sword into my shoulder with his free hand. He twists the blade, driving it through me until the blade gets ensnared in the exposed rebar of the wall.

"Her blood shall be mine. And when it spills, it will flow like a river that will drench these lands until all the light within her drowns in the darkness that awaits her," he says in the ancient vampiric tongue. The abundance of venom coating his throat making his accent thicker, darker, and more worrisome.

I clasp my hands around his to keep him from severing lucid thought. My hands go gray. He's successfully overpowering me by squashing the central pathways my power runs through. While vampire hearts are designed to filter the blood that nourishes us, divine magic is what makes it possible. Our supernatural cells are a current of live energy that moves through us. It's why we don't need a beating heart to survive yet still need the organ to live.

Thron squeezes harder, shattering the bones in my neck and sending them puncturing into my central nervous system. I can feel the power in me trying to surge, yet it falters unable to make the connection as the chain of synapses have been broken. It doesn't matter how swiftly my cells try to repair the damage and reroute the nerves carrying the ebony power that thrives in me, my father is one crushing step ahead.