Immortals After Dark 03 - No Rest for the Wicked

fight savagely, shrieking her fury and orders over the deafening thunder.
    Pointing her sword, she directed bowswomen with their flaming arrows and witches with their spells, as they hurtled their strikes in bright trails at the enemy.
    She had blood running from her temple and the corner of her lips, and her blond hair was braided for battle. Her eyes were silver. She was absently marking the vampires she’d killed.
    He was awed...
    A massive vampire with a battle ax traced behind her. She hadn’t sensed him in the melee. Sebastian tensed to trace—
    “Bastian, no!” Kaderin screamed over the clamor from behind him. He turned, saw her handing the wounded sister into the other’s arms. Kaderin ran for him. “I’ll kill you!” He finally let her lead him away, though it went against everything inside him to leave her here.
    When they met the sisters at the doorway, Kaderin said, “And believe it or not, I get out of that scrape. He ended up wearing that ax as a hat all night.”
    Sebastian yanked her to him and kissed her, pride filling him. “You were magnificent.”
    “Were?”
    “Are. Always will be.”
    “Bastian, we’re going back.” She gave him a watery grin.
    They’d saved them. He had them all here and felt twenty feet tall.
    Yet then he spied her sword glinting twenty feet away. “Your sword? I can get it—”
    “Leave it, Bastian. It’s not important anymore! We have to go!”
    No, she loved that sword. He traced to it, snatched it up, and traced back to them.
    The injured sister weakly screamed, “Vampyre!”
    A blade slipped between his ribs.

41
    T old you they’d try to kill you,” Kaderin whispered with a quirked eyebrow. She’d begun rolling a bandage around Sebastian’s torso, now that Rika had been tended to.
    He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck as Dasha burned holes with her eyes. “I believe Dasha wishes she’d sunk the blade instead of Rika,” he muttered. “And twisted it.”
    Kaderin knew she needed to separate Dasha and Sebastian, but she didn’t want to let either of them out of her sight. Even as she bandaged him, she couldn’t help glancing at her sisters—Rika lying pale on the couch, Dasha beginning to pace—as if they’d disappear.
    Sebastian stroked her shoulder. “They’re back with you,” he murmured. “They’re not going anywhere.”
    “I know. It’s just so strange.”
    Rika and Dasha began speaking in a mixture of old tongues.
    “What are they saying?” Sebastian asked.
    “They think you have some kind of dark magic to make me want you. That undoubtedly I’m in thrall to you.” Once Kaderin finished up with his bandage, she rose and said, “I’ll just go put Rika in bed and talk with them in the back for a bit.” And explain again that all of us would be dead if not for him.
    She didn’t miss that his eyes darkened. He thought she was already drawing away.
    Perhaps that was the only thing she could do at this time.
    She lifted Rika and motioned for Dasha to follow. Dasha did so—after casting Sebastian a savage look.
    In the bedroom, Kaderin laid Rika in bed while Dasha resumed pacing. “You knew he was a vampire. And you still fell in love with him? He’s fine, to be sure,” Dasha added, moving from one foreign electronic object to another, tilting her head as she lifted a clock and then a stereo speaker. “But you risk his turning.”
    Kaderin sat on the bed beside Rika. “Myst’s husband hasn’t turned. It’s only when a vampire kills as he drinks. So if he drinks an immortal who can’t die like that, he’ll be immune—”
    Her expression aghast, Dasha snapped, “You are not saying that you and Myst offer yourselves up as food.”
    Kaderin bit her lip. “When you put it like that, it sounds worse—”
    “How else can it be put?”
    Rika coughed, a rattling, ugly sound. Then, in a faint voice, she asked, “Does he actually live with you here?”
    When Kaderin nodded, Dasha said, “You pluck us out of a war with vampires, then expect us to live with one?”
    Kaderin exhaled, not even bothering to explain the difference between Sebastian and other vampires again. How could they believe that so readily when it had taken Kaderin weeks to see it?
    Dasha lifted a hair dryer and peered down the barrel. “And what in the hell is this?”
    “It dries hair.” Kaderin reached forward and flipped on the switch. Dasha gasped as she aimed it at herself, then at Rika in the bed, giving Rika a look that could only