But that was where it stopped. I had to figure out how to make it work.

What did I need to do?

Mallucé’s teeth were in my neck, tearing. His stiffly gloved fists were eighty-mile-an-hour hardballs in my sides, trying to force me to uncurl so he could take the amulet back. The pain was rapidly becoming more than I could think past.

The Dark Hallow was useless.

If I’d had time to learn how to make it work for me, I’d have had a chance.

As it was, I’d managed to do just enough to really piss Mallucé off: I’d proven myself epic when he wasn’t.

As he continued to pound me, I had a sudden insight into his character: At the core of it, beneath the monstrous villainy, the vampire was a self-indulgent, spoiled bully. Not a sociopath at all, but an out-of-control, petulant child that couldn’t stand anyone else having better toys, more wealth, or greater power or, in my case, being more epic than him. If he couldn’t own it, do it, or be it, he would destroy it.

My mind revisited the bodies he’d left at the Welshman’s estate. The terrible ways they’d been killed.

No one was coming for me. I couldn’t make the amulet work. Rotted though he may be, I was not and would never be a physical match for Mallucé. There was no way out for me. That was just the truth of it.

When all the control you have over your world gets stripped away, leaving you no choice but to die—the only difference how you do it: quickly or slowly—life distills to a bitter pill. The pain I was in made it easier to swallow.

I would not let him make me a quadriplegic.

I would not let him take my mind away from me. Some things are worse than death.

He was in a blind rage, more intense than I’d felt coming off him yet. He was on the brink of total loss of control. I braced myself to fuel it, to push him over the edge.

I remembered what Barrons had told me about John Johnstone, Jr.’s past. The mysterious “accidental” death of his parents, how rapidly he’d disassociated himself with everything they’d stood for and been. I remembered how Barrons had provoked Mallucé with references to his roots, and the vampire’s instant, livid fury, his irrational hatred of his own name. “How long have you been insane, J.J.?” I gasped out, between blows. “Since before you killed your parents?”

“It’s Mallucé, bitch! Lord Master, to you. And my father deserved to die. He called himself a humanitarian. He was squandering my inheritance. I told him to stop. He didn’t.”

Barrons had provoked Mallucé by calling him Junior. That was my name, bestowed upon me by Alina. I wouldn’t pervert it by using it on him. “You’re the one that deserves to die. Some people are just born wrong, Johnny.”

“Never call me that! You will NEVER call me that!” he screamed.

I’d nailed it, a name the vampire hated even worse than Junior. Was it his mother’s special name for him? Had it been his father’s belittlement? “I’m not the one that made you a monster. You came that way, Johnny.” I was nearly out of my mind with pain. I couldn’t feel one of my arms. My face and neck were dripping blood. “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,” I chanted. “Johnny, little Johnny. You’ll never be anything but a—”

The next blow turned my cheekbone into a blossom of fire. I dropped to my knees. The amulet slipped from my hand.

“Johnny, Johnny,” I said, at least I think I did. Kill me, I prayed. Kill me now.

His next blow smashed me into the rear wall of the grotto. Bones snapped in my legs. I sank mercifully into oblivion.

SEVENTEEN

I don’t know where dreams come from. Sometimes I wonder if they’re genetic memories, or messages from something divine. Warnings perhaps. Maybe we do come with an instruction booklet but we’re too dense to read it, because we’ve dismissed it as the irrational waste product of the “rational” mind. Sometimes I think all the answers we need are buried in our slumbering subconscious, in the dreaming. The booklet’s right there, and every night when we lay our heads down on the pillow it flips open. The wise read it, heed it. The rest of us try as hard as we can upon awakening to forget any disturbing revelations we might have found there.

I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was a child. A dream of four distinct, subtly varied tastes. Two of them weren’t entirely unpalatable. Two of them were so vile I would wake up choking on my own tongue.

I tasted one of the vile ones now.

It saturated my cheeks and tongue, made my lips draw back from my teeth, and I finally understood why I’d never been able to put a name to it. It wasn’t the taste of a food or drink. It was the taste of an emotion: regret. Profound, exquisite sorrow that bubbles from the wellspring of the soul over the mistakes we’ve made, over the actions we should or shouldn’t have taken, long after it’s too late and nothing can be done or undone.