The Damned (The Beautiful #2)(24)



He is much larger than I am, but I have the advantage of speed. I try to lunge for his back, thinking to bring him to his knees, but my coat constricts my movements. I tear it off as I evade another attack. Rage colors my sight red, my white shirt and waistcoat falling to the mud in tattered strips of linen and wool.

Thoughts are for the foolish. If I wish to win, I must become fear. I must become Death.

Cambion aims a punch at my stomach. I manage to twist away, my motions like those of a coiled asp. I do not recognize his feint until it is too late. Before I can redirect myself, Cambion’s right hook lands against my jaw with a crack of thunder, the reverberations ringing in my skull. I blur backward to buy myself a moment to clear my head, pretending to stumble and overcorrect in the process. Then I charge at him, my fangs bared.

He is a foot taller than I am. As wide as an ox, his blood mixed with that of a demon I do not recognize.

But I am a Saint Germain. Running through my veins is the blood of the oldest immortal in the American South. The blood of vampire royalty.

And I have never run from a fight, in either of my lives.

Fury seething beneath my skin, I launch a series of punches at his stomach, doubling him over with the intention of sinking my teeth into his throat and ripping his windpipe from his body. As I pull him close, instead, he grabs me by the waist and lifts me above his head. The night sky and all its twinkling stars flash across my sight as I pry back the fingers of his left hand, a dark satisfaction winding through my limbs as his bones break in my grasp. He howls, the sound causing the cypress branches around us to shake. Cambion spins in place, hurling me through the warm mid-March air. The moment he lets go, I drag my clawed hand across his meaty shoulder, drawing blood as I fly above the mud-filled ring. I land upright in a pile of sawdust, my feet sliding through the muck, my arms raised at my sides.

He glares in disbelief at the gashes on his upper arm. At the ribbons of torn flesh dangling from his shoulder. At the shattered fingers of his left hand.

Then the wounds on his shoulder begin to darken. Begin turning into stripes, which grow and multiply across his back and down his arms. The lines in his eyes become starbursts of black and gold. Both rows of his teeth begin to lengthen and form fangs. His skull widens. His scarlet hair lightens to burnished copper, whiskers bursting from beside his lips. When he howls again, it is no longer the howl of a man.

It is the roar of a tiger.

Incredulous, I take a step back.

Concentrate, Sébastien.

A voice blares through my mind as if it were my erstwhile conscience, though I know that to be far from the truth. It is a voice I know all too well. I blink again in shock.

Concentrate! the voice demands once more.

My uncle. As my maker, we are able to communicate without words. I’ve witnessed him issue orders to Odette and Jae and Madeleine in such a fashion, though he has never attempted to do so with me in the month since I was turned into a vampire.

I don’t know why he would choose now—of all times—to make use of it.

What in hellfire is this thing? I shout back without words. For I have never seen a half man, half beast like this. The shifters I know—the Grimaldi wolves—take full form when they change, resembling the earthbound creatures that hunt the forests in fleet-footed packs. It is why they are able to blend into the night and move about without anyone the wiser.

But Cambion is not a tiger. Nor is he human. He is a creature of both worlds, one with the face and fangs of a jungle cat and the body of a man.

A thing of the swamp.

It does not matter what he is, my uncle replies. You must destroy him or be destroyed.

One of these days, I will give my uncle the sound walloping he is due.

Cambion roars again. His claws—longer and sharper than they were before—gleam as if they have been dipped in molten glass, a liquid as dark as ink dripping from their razor-sharp tips. He charges at me again, and I am frozen still for half a beat.

Move, damn you! my uncle yells into my head. Not as a man, but as a vampire.

I remember how Jae dodged me the night I first woke to my second life. How he spiraled through the air, defying gravity. I close my eyes and leap. For a second I am suspended in darkness, the branches of the swamp flashing around me, the night sky twinkling beyond. Then I arc my body through the damp heat, landing in a crouched position, my fangs bared, an inhuman hiss ripping from my throat.

Cambion snarls and attacks, his fangs dripping with saliva. We clash in the middle of the ring, the crowd around us in a frenzy. He growls and snaps his jaws at me. My fingers wrap around his thick wrists, preventing him from slashing through my skin with his inky claws.

It is exhilarating, allowing the fury to control me. Granting leave for the monster in my blood to take hold. I want nothing more than to rip Cambion limb from limb. To crush his bones in my hands and drain him dry. To destroy before I am destroyed.

I can hear my uncle’s laugh in my skull.

My blood sings as the demon caged within is fully unleashed. The veins in my arms bulge, and another bestial howl punctuates the night.

It is me.

Then I snap to one side and hear Cambion’s left wrist break in my grasp. His cry of pain brings a smile to my face. Before he can recoil, I leap onto his striped back and bury my fangs in his neck, ready to make good on all my promises. He swipes at me with his uninjured hand, and when his claws break through the skin of my forearm, I relish the pain. Laugh as I take in a hot draft of his blood.

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