Zoe didn't even see it coming. One minute, she was standing there, talking to Ezekiel and the next, her right leg felt like it was on fire. Zoe whimpered, reaching down and wrapping her hands around her lower calf.

"Zoe?" Ezekiel asked, kneeling down beside her. "What's wrong?"

"My leg." Zoe whimpered, looking up at him with green eyes shining with tears. "It's burning."

Ezekiel sighed, pushing her hair behind her ear and giving her a tender look. "It's started."

Zoe gave him a panicked look, blinking back tears. "What's started?"

"William's death." Ezekiel said. Zoe nodded and dug her fingers into the skin of her leg, whimpering against the pain. She sat there for almost ten minutes, fighting against the pain, until the intense burning sensation spread to the rest of her body and it felt like her entire body was covered in flames and it was such an intense, unbearable sensation that Zoe screamed, burying her face into her arm to muffle the sound.

"What's happening?" Zoe whimpered into her sleeve. "Why can I feel it? Why can I feel the flames?"

"A Sire Bond essentially means you're linked to him." Ezekiel started. "When the Bond is in its last minutes, when the Sire is the most desperate, a temporary link is created, in which the Sired vampire literally feel what their Sire can feel."

Zoe nodded and screamed again, sinking her teeth into her sleeve to muffle the sound. She rocked back against the lounge, whimpering softly as she squeezed her eyes shut. Desperately, Zoe thought back to her training from SKUL and tried to remember everything they'd taught her about dealing with pain.

Ezekiel could see her struggling with the pain and he made a split-second decision. He could either leave her to suffer through the pain, or he could knock her out so that she wouldn't wake until her humanity was no longer hers, leaving William to suffer through being burned alive alone – as it should be.

Separating himself from his emotions, Ezekiel reached forward and grabbed both sides of Zoe's head, quickly snapping it to the side. The crunching of bones snapping filled the still air, replacing the sound of Zoe's laboured breathing, and Zoe slumped back against the couch. Ezekiel knew that he'd broken her neck, but he felt no remorse for it – Zoe was a vampire, like himself, like Sky, like Dan. True, they were all different types of vampires, but they all healed the same – she'd wake not long after William was dead.

Knowing fully the type of person Zoe would be when she woke, Ezekiel leaned against the wall with his arms folded over his chest, blue eyes focused on the redhead slumped against the couch.

Sky watched as slowly, the flames of Aneisha's making reduced William to a pile of ash on the ground. When all that was left was the ebony-coloured Ash, Sky smiled sadly and looked up. "Say hi to Mummy for me, Daddy?"

Dan looked over at her sadly. He expected that her relationship with William had been much like his own with Katarina – difficult and flawed in many ways, but she had still loved him, no matter what, because he was her father.

Gasping, Aneisha stumbled back and let Tom catch her. She didn't object as he put his hand on her arm and let him lend her his strength, revelling in the feeling of it racing through her body, strengthening her. When the feeling faded, Aneisha closed her eyes and smiled, turning her head so that her cheek was pressed against his jacket. Tom grinned down at her and wrapped his arms around her waist, ducking his head and kissing her gently. Aneisha smiled into the kiss, reaching up and placing her hand on his cheek.

When they pulled away, Aneisha turned to look at the wall, watching as Dan pulled the sword and two daggers that had held William in place from the wall, while Sky picked up the third dagger from the floor.

Dan and Sky passed the weapons to Tom, who stashed them in his bag, and as Sky knelt down beside the pile of ash that used to be William, Dan sat down at the table put his head in his hands.

"Dan?" Aneisha asked, looking at his aura. It was dark, so dark that she couldn't determine the part that was shadowed, marking him as undead, from the rest. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah." Dan moaned into his hands. "Just give me a minute."

"Just leave him, Sorceress." Sky said, standing up. "He's just willingly taken away his own girlfriend's humanity. Leave him to wallow in the sorrow of that knowledge before he has to go and see it."

Dan knew that his sister meant well in her words, but they stung like a knife to his heart and he made a strangled choking noise as he lifted his head, pushing tears out of his eyes. Without even looking at the dhampir, he said, "Why don't you just shut up, Skylar?"

Sky stared at him. "What the hell is your problem? I just killed my own . . . Oh. Sorry, Dan."

Dan grunted in response and dropped his head back onto the table, letting the tsunami of guilt wash over him as he hoped against all hopes that he hadn't just given Zoe the last piece of crap, the one that would cause her death.

Zoe wasn't eased into consciousness. One minute, she was sitting, slumped against the couch like a corpse and the next, she had shoved Ezekiel to the floor, a hiss coming from between her teeth.

"Zoe – " Ezekiel started.

"Sorry, Zeke." Zoe said, smiling. "But you'll want to keep me here, so that Dan and Sky and the others can turn me back into Zoe, the sweet little girl who was wrongly Turned into a vampire. Well guess what? I'm not a sweet little girl. Not anymore."

Then, she snapped his neck and was gone.