This Side of the Grave (Night Huntress, #5)(89)

He stopped at my laughter, his face almost mottled in its fury. I didn’t say anything, but instead, pointed behind him toward the hill.

He turned, his mouth sagging a little at what he saw. Someone, I wasn’t sure who, had rounded up the remaining ghouls and brought them out in a group onto this section of the cemetery. At a rough estimate, there were a little more than twenty of them, and their hands were folded on top of their heads in the universal gesture for surrender.

“Looks like your people know a losing battle when they see one,” I said, relishing the stunned look on the ghoul leader’s face. That quickly changed as he glared at them, his rage palpable in his expression and the harsh scent wafting off him.

“How dare you betray me this way!” he thundered at them.

I tapped him on the shoulder with the tip of my borrowed sword. “Hate to interrupt,” I drew out, “but you and I have still some business to conclude.”

Apollyon looked at the sword and then at me before glancing back at the surrendered ghouls. I didn’t take my eyes off him or relax my grip on the weapon. I wouldn’t swing until he was ready, but neither would I give him a present of dropping my guard. I already knew Apollyon didn’t fight fair or we wouldn’t be here now.

Therefore, I was somewhat taken aback when he spread his arms out, palms open. “Go on, Reaper, strike me down with flames! Or freeze me with your mind. Show my people the power they so recklessly refuse to stem.”

Even his last moments would be filled with hateful rhetoric, I thought in disgust.

“Give him a sword,” I said to Bones, who’d come out from behind the group of ghouls, Veritas at his side. He was blood-spattered and his clothes were torn, yet he moved with a lethal precision that said he could have fought all night. It shouldn’t surprise me at all that he’d think to bring the ghouls out here to witness their leader’s fall.

“I don’t need any unusual power to strike you down,” I told Apollyon once Bones thrust a sword into the ground near the ghoul’s feet. “I’ve got silver bullets in my left side and they hurt like damn and wow, but pick up that sword and I’ll still beat your ass, I promise you that.”

Apollyon looked at the blade and then back at me. “No.”

“No?” I repeated in disbelief. “I’m offering you a fair fight, jackass! You’d rather I just hack your head off and call it a day?”

Apollyon turned toward Veritas, dropping down on one knee. “I surrender to the Guardian Council of Vampires.”

“You sniveling little shite, pick up that sword before I rip your head off with my bare hands,” Bones thundered at him.

Apollyon’s expression was twisted with a crazed sort of triumph. “You can’t kill me if I surrender to a Guardian. None of you can!”

I regarded him with amazement. This was the person who’d been responsible for bringing vampires and ghouls to the brink of war in the fourteen hundreds? And who’d made a damn credible effort to do it again in the twenty-first century?

I’d seen a lot of villainous instigators in their final moments, but while none of them had relished their own deaths, few had ever groveled as much as Apollyon was doing now. He even edged closer to Veritas in a sort of hop-crawl, until he was clutching the blond Guardian’s red-stained pants. I couldn’t believe a person who’d devoted so much of his life to the pursuit of mass genocide could be so spineless in the face of his own defeat. It reminded me of history’s accounts of Hitler’s final hours. Looked like both of them were cowards at heart.

“This is who you were following?” Vlad asked the other ghouls, voicing my own inner scorn. “I’d kill myself in shame if I were you.”

Veritas looked at Apollyon, her ridiculously youthful features hardened into an expression of pure contempt.

“You think to find mercy from me?”

She snatched at Apollyon’s single long piece of hair, ripping it away from his bald spot and using it as a lever to tug his head back. I almost lost it right there, because damn, that was cold.

“You repeatedly seek to destroy my people, and you think I will grant you asylum?” she all but growled.

“You must,” Apollyon said, his voice cracking at the last word.

Veritas straightened to her full five feet six inches, but with her sizzling power and imperial presence, she might as well have been nine feet tall.

“Malcolme Untare, you who have renamed yourself Apollyon, for inciting others in your species to murder and insurrection, you are hereby sentenced to death.”

He let out a shriek that Veritas ignored. She leaned in until her mouth brushed his ear, and only my close proximity let me hear what she whispered.

“You miserable worm. Jeanne d’Arc was my friend.”

Then she kicked him, avoiding his grasping hands to stride away with a “Die on your knees or take the fight she offered you. I care not which,” thrown over her shoulder.

My mouth gaped at this tidbit about my famous half-breed predecessor, but I snapped it shut. Note to self: Don’t get on Veritas’s bad side. She holds a grudge for centuries.

Then I looked down at the ghoul, feeling my former hatred ebb. For all the lives he’d been responsible for ending and his blind, centuries-long quest for power, in the end, Apollyon proved to be too pathetic to hate. He wasn’t even worth killing, but if I let him live, my current and future enemies wouldn’t see it as mercy. They’d see it as a weakness they could exploit. With a clarity I’d lacked before, I understood why Bones did what he did with my father, and why Vlad let his ruthlessness be seen more readily than his finer qualities. It wasn’t out of sadistic enjoyment or to pick fights. It was to prevent them.