“I can’t help it!”

“Lies! You’ve never properly fought them!” With a wave of his hand, he slammed my back against a broken bookcase before pulling me toward him again. “There will be no more of this. You will not only fight them and keep them from controlling you, but you will learn to harness their own powers for your benefit.”

An ugly bitter laugh escaped me as he stepped away and my head fell back. “That’s nonsense if I ever heard it.” I chuckled, letting my head fall forward again. My hair dropped down to crowd around my face, partially obscuring my vision of Nick. “Fight Jabari? He’s centuries old. He could crush me with a thought if I so much as tried to defy him. He has some kind of power over me that I don’t understand and can’t fight.”

The creature rushed toward me in a flash and wrapped his large hand around my throat. I felt his powers release me half a second before he flung me across the room and into the side of my toppled desk. A loud groan echoed through the room as both my body and the desk skid across the hardwood floor before finally hitting the opposite wall.

I slowly lifted myself into a kneeling position so I could glare up at him. “Don’t you think I want to be free of Jabari?” I demanded. “I would love nothing more than to shove his damned powers down his throat and let him choke on them, but I can’t. I can’t fight him. Hell, I can’t even sense his powers until it’s too late.”

“Then let me give you the gift you would have had already if you hadn’t messed your life up with these bloody nightwalkers.” He waved his hand at me and I found myself cringing, all the muscles tensing in my body as I waited for another wave of pain to come crashing through my frame. But it never happened. There was only Nick’s laughter as he mocked my surprise and fear.

And then it came to me, as if a heavy veil were being lifted from the world. I could sense . . . energy. Different kinds of energy as it flowed in and around me. I could feel the earth and her steadily beating pulse. I could feel the hum of energy buzzing in my own body. I could sense the energy rolling off Nick in fat, swamping waves so it seemed to fill the air, suffocating me as I struggled to pull above its weight. It was unlike anything I had ever seen or felt before. Once, many months ago, I had sensed the powers of the earth, and being a nightwalker, I was always in touch with blood magic. However, the energy that tumbled away from Nick seemed to fit neither of these categories. He was a massive ball of power and something else . . .

“How about a test drive, father mine?” I mocked, pushing to my feet. Narrowing my eyes on his smug face, I tapped into all the energy swirling around me, not caring whether it came from blood, earth, or whatever Nick was, and let it fill me in a rush. I summoned up my powers and flung a round of fireballs at him with enough speed that I was sure he wouldn’t be able to dodge them. And he didn’t. The fire struck him in the center of his chest and washed over his body, covering him as if it were a second skin. His laughter bounced around the room as he took a step toward me, still covered in flames.

I stumbled a step backward, hitting the desk behind me, and steeled myself for the next round of blows as my mind frantically searched for another way of attacking. I had no weapons on me, only the power I had been born with. Running wasn’t an option. Nick had already proven that he was faster than me. So I waited for my punishment for striking out.

But it never came. He laughed at me and extinguished the flames. “That’s my girl,” he said, and patted me on my bruised cheek. “Now you just need to use that energy you can sense against those who are trying to control you. Prove to me that you can harness their own powers for your means. Control Jabari. Control Danaus.”

Something in my chest twisted at the sound of the hunter’s name falling from Nick’s thin lips. I wanted to keep Danaus as far from this creature as I possibly could, but I knew looking into his twinkling black eyes that it wasn’t even a remote possibility.

“And if I refuse?” I lifted my chin as I clenched my teeth.

“Then you are useless to me as you are, and we’ll have to start from scratch,” he said with a grin. He pressed his hand into my stomach and leaned in close. “I can still undo what was done.”

“What?” I demanded, my stomach twisting into a tight knot.

“Make you human again.” My mind halted at the very thought. Human. Again. I couldn’t ever be human again. I didn’t want to be human ever again. I was a nightwalker. I had been a nightwalker for more than six hundred years. It was all I knew.

Nick sent a pulse of energy through my system and I felt a jerk in the middle of my chest as if something had tightened its fist around my soul. At the same time, my heart thudded in my chest and I took a ragged gasping breath, feeling like I had been holding it for the past six centuries. I could feel blood rushing through my veins and warmth pulsing through my body again. Oh, no! I was alive again.

“No!” I screamed, grabbing his hand with both of mine. “No! You can’t do this! Don’t take this away from me!”

“Then heed me, daughter of mine,” he bit out. “Prove to me that you can wield the powers of the hunter and the Ancient, and I will leave you as you are. Otherwise, I will turn you human again and you will bear me a child to replace you.”

“A child?” I stopped struggling as the horrible thought screamed through my brain. “But you said you were my father. It would be a monster.”

“It wouldn’t be the first monster I’ve graced this world with.” Nick released me, and I slid down the side of the desk as my legs gave out. Sitting on the ground, I stared straight ahead, blind to the world around me.

“Listen to me, Mira,” he said slowly, drawing my gaze back to his smiling face. With a wave of his hand, one of the silver-plated hourglasses that had been smashed to pieces reassembled itself in midair, leaving the black sand to collect perfectly in the upper glass chamber. Nick set the hourglass between my legs, tipping it so the sand ran into the empty chamber. “You’ve always felt like time was running out for you, and now you know why. I’m here and I’m waiting for you. Do as I ask and you shall be rewarded. Fail me and I shall make you human so that you can breed me a child to take your place. I will be watching, but remember, your time is running out.”

Valerio found me sitting in the middle of my destroyed library, my eyes locked on the hourglass as I tried to will the sand to stop falling. My thoughts were a shattered wreck and I was left bobbing in the middle of the black sea, clinging to the one thing that I had been sure was impossible: Nick could turn me human again.

After centuries of being a nightwalker, of endless nights of blood and violence, it was the one place where I felt I belonged. I was hated and feared by most of my kind, I had allies that would rather see me staked, but being a nightwalker was all I knew. It was home, and I couldn’t go back now.

But my heart beat and blood rushed through my veins, if only for a moment. My lungs had burned until I took that first gasp of air, refilling them completely for the first time in far too many years. Worse still, my soul had been fully anchored within my frame as if it had settled back down in the hole that was now the home to the monster that craved the blood I fed on so frequently. For a flicker in time I’d been human again, and all I had felt was terror.

“Mira?” Valerio whispered, glass crunching under the hard soles of his dress shoes as he stepped into the room. He had magically appeared, streaking across the vast distance from Venice to Savannah. And for the first time in my existence, I had sensed the swell of power before he appeared and knew exactly who it was. Nick had truly awakened something within me.