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Death's wings stroked the night in violent caresses as he lowered from the sky. He levitated above Malphas in the sigil. In the background, the mortal blood-filled fountain spilled over tremendously. Blood flowed in rivulets down the white stone, flooded the ground further with Dunkin's mess. Red crept over the grass, pooling over the sigil imprisoning Malphas, until it drowned the intricate lines.

Malphas chanted in low, velvety tongue. The muscles in his arms tautened. His eyes lifted, his head tilting skyward toward his Death. The sigil ignited against Malphas' fingertips, burning his skin, but he showed no signs of pain as he ripped through the barriers of the sigils like it was nothing. Ravens launched from their branches at once, soaring above us before spiraling around him like a twister, throaty cries reverberating off each other like starving vultures.

Shadows hissed from all directions, strobing in and out between shapes of creatures and formless tendrils. They crawled against the ground on all fours, approaching the vampires like fast slinking predators. One of the vampires dared to attack a shadow, and the darkness latched onto him like a parasite. It plunged down his open mouth, down his throat, and the vampire went down fast with a gurgled, painful scream, as if his insides were being shredded apart in a blender. The vampire's body jolted, and skin suctioned to bone as the blackness shadow ripped the life straight out of him. Blackness thrust out his eyeballs, his ears, gore splattering the surrounding men.

The shadow finished as a horde of well, zombies, and skeleton-like animated creatures lurched into the clearing of the graveyard with auras of pulsing black power.

"Hell yeah!" Wolf roared, holding a decapitated vampire head in his hand. "It's about to get Z-War up in here, bitches!"

The vampires sprang back in shock, knocking into each other to get away from the other shadows and undead corpses slunk closer too. The stench of rot smothered any other scent as the zombies opened their decayed jaws with horrifying howls and attacked the vampires in swarms. The shadows and corpses glided where they were needed to imprison and debilitate the vampires, enough so that the Reapers and Death's Fallen were able to finish off the job and decapitate them.

Holy shit.

Locked in place and overawed by the sheer madness transpiring around me at a rapid pace, I gazed at the paling faces of Dunkin's vampires. They didn't stand a chance in this battle. And, I feared, looking back up at the cruel expression on Death's grisly full form face, neither would he.

"Party time, boys!" Denim said, cocking his machine gun.

"Yee-haw, motherfuckers!" Flash shouted.

Blade unleashed steel from his belt.

Death slashed his hand through the air and the fountain of blood exploded, thick crimson liquid spraying out from the top. The newborns, splattered by the liquid which fueled their very being, uncontrollably lurched themselves at the fountain to lap at the blood with their tongues. A trap, as Death's Fallen and Reapers slaughtered the bunch of them.

Suddenly, a hand clamped down on my arm and my mouth. Before I could even react, the world blurred. Then I was being dragged back into the dark, underneath the shadows of trees and shrubbery.

Crashing back to earth, I writhed against my captor, the slippery material of my shirt aiding in a miracle as I wrenched free and rolled across the dirt. A foot kicked me in hard the stomach, knocking the wind out of me as I wheezed. The padding between my shirt and my abdomen must have absorbed some of the impact, because I was certain that kick alone could have done me in.

"This is the mortal girl of importance?" laughed a voice.

"She's just an ordinary girl," said another. "A weak little rabbit the Grim fucks."

"Let's gut her and see if her insides are lined with gold."

One of them grabbed onto my ankle and hauled me across the dirt. This time, I writhed against the ground and managed to turn over, kicking out as hard as possible with my free leg. A bell rang out like a clink of metal as the toe of my heavy boot slammed into solid flesh. Chicklet sized pebbles fell into my lap, and I realized I'd kicked him in the fangs. The vampire in front of me cried out, and adrenaline coursed through my veins, as I fired a beam of power at the darkness in front of me, connecting with the corpse of a vampire, who went airborne splintered a tree.

I stood up fast. The will to survive took over, but I couldn't see how many there were in this space. I couldn't see anything. My mind harked back to training with Death, how he'd turned off the lights and forced me to listen.

Shuffling. My left hand shot out with the intention to protect myself and light shown across another one of the newborn vampire's faces. I fired a bullet of light at his chest. I'd hardly a second to react to the blur of another vampire attacked. An icy palm cracked across my face. My whole body flipped mid-air, before I slammed into the frozen ground. I must of bit down on my lip because I tasted blood. Pain exploding in my face and involuntary tears building in my eyes.

A lone newborn vampire approached with its fangs elongating in its mouth. It reached out, grabbed me by the throat, and squeezed. My feet momentarily left the ground as it picked me up and raised me high in the air. I feared I would die like this as I struggled with all my might to get one last gasp of air, when the vampire cried out and its grip loosened. I landed on my back, blood sprayed all over me. As the vampire roared in agony, I realized its hand, which had been wrapped around my throat, had been severed completely from its arm, and said hand was still dangling to the neck of my armor. I shrieked and chucked the hand off of me, where it landed with a splat somewhere in the dark.

Whoosh! The vampire reeled back again with a choked sound, and through the gaps in the trees, the moon shown enough to paint the portrait of the dismantled one-hand vampire now clutching at its chest. Another object sliced through the air like a bullet and perforated its neck, the sickening noise of blood spraying. Still, the creature focused back on task and stumbled toward me with its jaws wide open.

Blade sprinted into the clearing and leapt onto the vampire, tackling it to the ground and landing on its chest like an assassin. His one weapon impaled the vampire's eye, and his other sliced the vampire's neck to the bone.

Two more vampires followed behind Blade, perceptibly wounded but still alive.

One of them came toward me and my body vibrated to life with fear. Once more, I found myself choosing fight over flee. Light shown from my right hand before I fired a punch with my right, slamming into the porcelain of another newborn. I ducked at the peripheral swipe of a hand toward my face and landed in a low crouch. Blade dove over me and rolled onto his feet to slice another newborn to pieces.

Another vampire grabbed my armor and threw me ten feet, my teeth digging into my lips as pain exploded in my shoulder. Blade let out a howl, and I turned my head in time to see a vampire bite down on his neck and ripped off flesh.

Beside me was the splintered tree where I'd thrown another vampire. I tugged hard at piece of splintered wood to free it and moved with a newfound madness to kill. Sprinting into a lunge, I drove the spiked wood through the back of the vampire attacking Blade. The vampire finally released Blade and spun, just in time to meet my reared back fist. Gloved knuckles demolishing into bone with a sickening crunch, the sonic boom of my power like a clap of thunder as the vampire's face burned away to ash.

Shuffling behind me kept the action going as I turned to look back over my shoulder and arched my leg up in a backward roundhouse, kicking the last vampire in the chest. His corpse knocked into Blade's expected knife, which separated the newborn's head from his spine in one quick motion.

With no other creatures to fight, Blade and I breathed hard and looked at each other in shock across the clearing, a pile of dismembered vampires in our midst.

He clamped a hand down to the wound on his neck with a wince, the shock of the moment over. "Bloody fucking fangface venom. Makes me heal slower."

"I might have something in my Mary Poppins bag." I quickly shrugged off my backpack off and searched for a first aid kit. When I sprayed some kind of antiseptic on his wound, Blade hissed and glared at me in a way that reminded me of Death. Deciding he should do the rest, I handed him the first aid kit. He took out a big piece of gauze and slapped it haphazardly onto his neck.

"That's good enough," he said, handing back the kit. "Thanks."

"No, thank you," I said, in total disbelief that Blade of all people had swooped in to help me. And that he had said thanks.

"I noticed you were gone," Blade explained without prompting. "The other Seven were neck-deep in battle. One of us had to make sure you were still breathing."

"I thought you hated me," I said with a small laugh, smudging away a droplet of blood dripping down my cheek.

Blade gave a small chuckle. "I hate everybody. Equally." He swiped his knives across his pants to clean them. "That was impressive back there, lassie. Maybe there's hope for you yet."

A sense of confidence washed over me, and I couldn't help but smile.

Blade rolled his eyes. "For feck's sake, don't make this emotional. Get your knapsack and let's get back at it."

We trekked back to battlefield and hunkered down in a dark spot to find the main path to the mausoleum remained in total anarchy. Wolf took out creatures one by one from his place perched in tree, releasing arrow after arrow from his crossbow and speared them in their skulls and heart. Leo was on the ground with Death's Fallen, cleaving away with his sword, while Denim and Gunner sprayed bullets that sizzled as they met the vampire's flesh. Romeo and Flash were tag teaming with hand-to-hand combat.

"So, do we just...jump in guns blazing?" I whispered to Blade and shot at imaginary targets with my finger-guns.

Blade glared at me as if the answer was obvious.

Suddenly Death soared over the graveyard with two screaming vampires in his clutches. He pitched their mutilated bodies to the earth and spiraled down toward for seconds, snatching two more newborns by their heads with his massive claws and tearing their heads right off as he went.

His enormous wings arched down, pitching his monstrous frame back into the night, the sound of his laughter thundering over the pandemonium in wicked amusement. He was bathing in the grisly glory of the war beneath him.

I wondered how far gone he was. How much of his control he'd sacrificed to unleash his full form. All of that power and without his scythe, could he even come back from it?

The stench of the vampire's blood mingled with the mortal sacrifice's already in the air. The grass, dirt, paved stones of the pathway soiled by crimson and blanketed by Death's darkness. Ravens launched themselves to the ground to join the feast, morphing into frightening demons as joints and ligaments snapped into place. Malphas' demons reformed from the ravens, ripping apart the rest of the newborns with blackened fangs, claws, terrifying porcelain faces.

A mighty wind blustered our surroundings, knocking me apart from Blade. When I hit the ground. I craned my neck up to the sky and fell back to my knees, flashes of images moving into animation, silent, like a dream on mute. A cloaked rider. A woman with blonde hair and a swelled stomach. A man dragging his chained feet. The flickers slowed. A mirror beneath a willow tree blanketed by vines, pushed aside by a child's fingers. An amorphous figure emerging out of the mirror. Ahrimad manifesting into his full form, standing over Aleaxandru with a glaring coldness in his dark eyes...

Ahrimad... Another visual of Ahrimad came clear focus. He was in the mausoleum, and he was almost unrecognizable, drastically different than the last time I'd seen 'David Star.' He looked too thin, too sickly, like a parasite drained him from the inside-out. His cloak–Death's old cloak– draped off of his wiry body. He stood in front of a floor to ceiling mirror with a surface like water. As he turned away from the portal, he silently roared, his eyes glowing a wrathful amber. The skin of his face pressed tighter against his skull. His scythe swung out, his face tautened with fury, the portal rippling closed behind him––

"DEATH!" 

A scream ripped through me as I returned back to reality, my mind scrambling as I clutched the pendant around my throat and hyperventilated. I tried to understand what I'd seen in the vision, but it quickly became the least of my worries, when I frantically looked around and remembered I was in the graveyard. With a wall of shadows in front of me. Crawling away from the shadows in confusion, I hurried to my feet and looked around me. I stood trapped, untouched from the sounds of war around me, surrounded in a circle of Death's shadows. 

A barrier had formed between me and them. Between me and everybody. The Reapers, the Fallen, the vampires. Through the misty darkness, I could see the outline of their bodies as they continued to fight in the graveyard.

The shadow prison stretched outwards, forming a larger clearing of darkness. When I ran forward and tried to escape, the darkness hissed and spewed out toward me like claws, and I reeled away from it in shock.

Suddenly, the adrenaline shooting through my veins told me these shadows surrounding me weren't protecting me.

Coldness spilled down my spine. I whirled around, just as Death's boots touched the ground. He stood tall and monstrous with his wings tucked behind his back, his head pointed slightly down. Posed, like a calm, deadly statue. 

For a horrifying second, I didn't think he recognized me. My vision pulsed to the rhythm of my pounding heart, as that thought became the answer. I had been imprisoned by these shadows. 

For him.

* * *

OHHHH SHIT! *jumps around, pulling up pants* A DEATH! 

Holla back if you got that reference. Or don't. See if I care!

HELLO AGAIN WOW HI! So, this chapter is honestly longer, but I was having major trouble connecting a bunch of scenes that I wrote and had some second thoughts about certain things that I need to play out perfectly into book 3 (hehe), but I wanted to get something out before the HOLIDAYS!!!! 

AHHHHHHH OK so MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY HOLIDAYS or HAPPY NEW YEAR and if you don't celebrate any of that then HAPPY KAT-CHAPTER DAY and HAPPY BEAUTIFUL YOU!!

Yes, I ate a lot of cookies and I'm sugar-high right now. And I have three questions that might not pertain to you!

1. What is everyone hoping to get for Christmas?

2. Sksksks?

3. SCREAM CUPCAKE IF YOU WANT MORE #FADE!!!!!!!! (??????)

4. (I know, not 3) DID YOU WATCH THE FAN VIDEO BELOW????? NO??? GET TO IT, #FADE SHIPPER!!!!!

https://youtu.be/25ad40T0n0o