by Kristie Cook
I blinked a couple of times against the pure darkness of night in the middle of a forest until my vision adjusted. Vanessa was in her jacket, leaning against a tree trunk, her arms across her chest, and her eyes moving, never stopping for long in any one place. She was keeping watch over me.
A white paper bag sat on the ground between us. My mouth watered at the scent, even if it was that of cold grease. I stretched my arm out, but couldn’t reach it. She nudged it with her boot, pushing it toward me.
“I hope you’re not a vegetarian,” she said.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked as I tore open the bag and through the wrapper around the hamburger.
“Went to town. Just over that ridge.” She nodded toward my left. “We might have a bit of a problem. I hope that burger keeps you satisfied for a while.”
I was too busy eating to speak. What’s going on?
She narrowed her eyes at the sound in her head, and spoke aloud, clearly indicating her preference. “I didn’t get the full story, but the military is cracking down. Apparently, they’re looking for anyone not human.”
I choked on the bite I’d been trying to swallow. Vanessa had to pound me on the back to dislodge it from my throat. I’d have bruises between my shoulder blades in the morning. Well, even more than I probably already had from our wrestling match.
“They know? The norms know?” I asked with disbelief.
The moonlight danced off her white-blond hair, making it look silver as Vanessa shook her head. “I don’t think so. I eavesdropped on a couple of guys in uniform—police, border patrol, National Guard, I don’t know. Anyway, from what I heard, the norms are suspicious of our existence, but have no proof yet. There were uniforms all over the place. The guys said the borders are lined with military.”
I stared at the ground and chewed for a moment as I considered this new obstacle.
“This is all part of the Daemoni’s plan, you know,” Vanessa added.
I squinted up at her.
“No, I don’t really know. Tell me,” I said before taking another bite.
“Turning norms against each other. Country against country. They’ll make everyone suspicious of each other to instigate wars. Then they turn the wounded, leaving the Norman armies weak and outnumbered, and that’s when they’ll come out. The Daemoni. They’ll come out of hiding and take control. They’re taking over little cities, like Key West and Savannah, getting reading to move in on the big metros. They’ve infiltrated the governments worldwide. It’s only a matter of time.” She watched me as I shuddered. “Of course, they need to get rid of the Amadis first.”
“So we need to move faster, before they get to Tristan.” I jumped to my feet, hoping it wasn’t already too late. “Let’s get going.”
“Wait, there’s more. If the military is guarding the Canadian border so heavily—a border between allies—then something’s going on. Someone’s working with them, possibly more than just planting ideas in their heads. One or both sides of the border may be protected by a mage. Or certain towns might be. We might not be able to flash everywhere we need to.” She peered at me in the darkness for a long moment, then blew out a breath she’d apparently been holding. “How far does your mind reach?”
“I don’t know. I actually haven’t tested it in quite a while, but a couple of miles last time I checked.”
Her lips twisted in a grimace. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but keep it open with mine. If we try to flash into a shielded area, we’ll bounce off and might not land in the exact same place.”
“Sounds like an adventure,” I muttered, once again wishing I could go home, be with my men, where it was safe and . . . No. It’s not safe. You have to make it safe.
We flashed several times, through Canada and all the way through Alaska, with no problems. Vanessa now easily flashed place to place, going farther, pushing my normal limits, and with little energy drain. I barely caught a glimpse of each place we appeared before she popped away again, and I followed her. As we made our way up the coast of the Pacific and across the Alaskan tundra, the air became colder with each flash, and the moonlight bounced off snow and ice rather than running rivers.
We finally hit the western shore of Alaska, the Bering Strait in front of us, and an island in the distance. In one more flash, we’d be deep into Russia. But Vanessa sucked her breath in, and didn’t disappear right away. I turned away from the sea and toward land, took in the scene and echoed her gasp. Rather than a vast landscape of snow reflecting the moon, several large, tan tents were spread in front of us, along with Hummers and snowmobiles. Big spotlights shone down on us, making me blink several times.
We’d apparently appeared right in the center of a makeshift military installation, and at least thirty rifles pointed at us from all directions. At least they were all norms.
“Looks like we have our proof, boys,” someone said. “Humans don’t just appear out of thin air. I knew the Russians were hiding them.”
“What do we do, sir?” someone else asked, but I already knew what the first guy was thinking. I gathered him to be the commander, and what he wanted to do with us wasn’t good. Shit, fuck, damn.
“Lock ’em up for now,” he ordered, and the circle of men moved toward us.
“Let’s get outta here,” Vanessa’s voice rang in my head, just as my own thought came to mind.
Wait! No. I have an idea.
Vanessa glanced sideways at me, her eyes lit up. “We’re gonna fight them?”
I didn’t have time to lecture her about not fighting norms unless absolutely necessary. I only had a few seconds as the men crossed the fifty yards to reach us, and I needed that to share my idea, sparked by Rina’s plan with my books—to expose just enough truth to ignite a little fear in the norms so they’d learn to better protect themselves.
“Don’t do anything stupid now,” the man in charge said as the group moved as one, closing their wide circle around us.
Show them what you have, I told Vanessa.
Her eyes flicked toward me again with questions in them, but she shrugged. “If you say so . . .”
In a blink, she had her jacket unzipped and her fingers were working the buttons at the top of her bustier.
What—No! Show them your fangs. Let them see what they want to see. Scare them—just don’t bite.
She stuck her bottom lip out. “Where’s the fun in that?”
“We don’t want to hurt you,” the commander continued as his men came dangerously close to us. “Just be good—”
I shot a small bolt of lightning out of my hand, and it hit the ground in front of the commander. All of the men jumped back a pace.
“Now, see, that was stupid,” the commander said. “That’s not being good.”
“We don’t want to hurt you,” I said, keeping my hands held up, palms out, as they started closing in on us once again. Purplish-silver electricity crackled over my fingertips to give them a good show.
With fangs fully extended, Vanessa blurred around the edge of the circle, stopping a couple of times to half-lunge at the line with a threatening hiss. The men paused. She returned to my side, her lap completed in maybe two seconds, and I thought we’d shown them enough to believe whatever they’d heard. I was about to tell Vanessa to flash.
But, unfortunately for us, they were either avid fans of my books or, as Vanessa suspected and much more likely, someone had fed them secrets. Because they knew exactly what to do to protect themselves.
Shots cracked loudly through the air. A moment passed before I realized what they were as smoke trailed out of the barrels of several guns and the smell of burnt gun powder filled my nose. Vanessa’s body jerked in response, and four soldiers were on top of her before she even hit the ground. From her screams, I knew immediately those were no ordinary bullets and no ordinary handcuffs they tried to clamp on her flailing wrists.
They knew to use silver, and it must have been enchanted since she was now Amadis.
For a mome
nt that felt like minutes but probably lasted only a second or two, I watched the soldiers trying to overpower the vampire. The silver might have weakened her, but she wasn’t going down without a fight—she was mad as a, well, as a vampire who’d been shot with silver. Two more men joined their comrades, trying to pin Vanessa down, while others trained their guns on her.
Had they forgotten about me? Should I use this distraction to flash away and save myself? She was a vampire. Surely she could overpower them, especially with my blood in her, and escape. Besides, she was likely setting me up anyway, leading me to my own capture or death. Perhaps this was a blessing.
Vanessa snarled and growled, and her body bucked against the captors as she tried to fight her way out. Another shot cracked the air. The vampire screamed with pain. And I had no decision. There was only one right thing to do.
“Vanessa!” I shrieked as I blurred to the frenzy. I grabbed a soldier by the jacket and threw him off, but the sounds of rifle chambers clicking into place stopped me from grabbing the next. All twenty-something guns were now trained on me. I froze, hands in the air.
They shot me anyway.
Chapter 24
White-hot pain seared across the back of my calf. Again in my thigh. Too shocked at first to react, two bullets hit me. I didn’t wait for more. I dropped and rolled, then sprang to my feet and ran at them in a blur. Adrenaline pumped through my veins as I shot electricity at some of the men and waved my hand at others, sending them flying through the air. My fists grabbed the coats of two more men, one in each hand, and I yanked them off of Vanessa and threw them to the side. They landed with simultaneous thuds in the snow about ten feet away.
Another soldier swung his gun at me. I caught it in one hand while flipping around in an aerial cartwheel, knocking him out when my boot collided with his temple. He crumpled to the ground. I grabbed Vanessa’s hand.
Can you flash?
“No!” she screamed as her body jolted from the ground just as another round of gunfire cracked through the air. The barrels had been aimed at me. Vanessa took the hits, her body wrenching with each one. She fell into my arms.
Hoping my flash with Tristan from South Beach wasn’t a fluke, I held the vampire tightly and flashed. I targeted right across the Strait, to the island I had seen from the shore. We appeared—both of us—at the top of a snow-capped cliff, the sea far below us. Nobody around.
As soon as I let her go, Vanessa collapsed in a heap. The searing pain finally registered in my mind, and a scream hurled out of my mouth. I dropped to my hands and knees next to the vampire, clamping my jaw shut against more cries. The wounds healed immediately, and the pain began to recede. I blinked away the tears so I could inspect Vanessa’s body. They’d only been trying to incapacitate her the first time with shots to the legs that were already healed. But three more holes patterned her leather jacket—the bullets that had been meant for me. Blood leaked from these, but not nearly as much as expected. A closer inspection showed the wounds already closing.
“I need . . . your dagger,” she gasped. “Gotta . . . cut . . . these out.”
“I’ll do it.”
“No! Just . . . give it to me.”
I pushed myself around to sit next to her. My calf and thigh still throbbed, but the bullets must have only grazed my skin because I felt no foreign objects lodged underneath.
“Vanessa, you can’t do surgery on yourself,” I said, exposing the dagger and removing it from its sheath as I leaned in closer.
“Watch me.” In one swift motion, she’d snatched the blade from my hand and had discarded her jacket. Her eyes squinted, and her lips curled in a grimace as she dug the tip into her right shoulder.
“The silver,” I said, not knowing how she could stand even more than what had already peppered her body.
“A perk to being Amadis now,” she said through gritted teeth as she maneuvered the dagger around until the bullet popped out. She sighed as her skin closed right up.
“It doesn’t hurt you?”
“Oh, it hurts all right.” She gasped as she dug the blade into her side. “Hurts like a motherfucker. But if I were still Daemoni, I’d be wishing to die to escape the pain.”
She removed the bullets quickly and expertly, as if she’d done this before. I made sure to return my dagger to my side before we both collapsed on our backs.
“We should have flown after all,” she mumbled as we stared at the star-studded sky. There seemed to be more stars here than there had been in the Australian Outback. And they were so big, so close.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Why didn’t we? Oh, wait. Something about this way being faster? And safer?”
“Shut up,” she muttered.
“Bite me,” I said.
“Don’t tempt me.”
We lay in silence for a while, neither of us particularly wanting to move on yet.
“I think we would have been better off showing our boobs,” Vanessa finally said, breaking the silence.
“Maybe.” I laughed. “I can’t believe that’s what you thought I meant. As if . . .”
“Trust me, it works. You’ve been given beauty and a hot body, why not use it?”
I blinked. “Never crossed my mind, actually.”
“The Angels gave it to you for a reason. Well, you get it from your vamp DNA—the Ancients gave us physical beauty to better attract our prey. But the Angels enhanced yours for a reason, right? Because norms respond to beauty. I mean, even before the Ang’dora, you were—”
“What?” I’d never forgotten her words when we’d first fought in Key West. “You were disgusted by me.”
“Yeah, because Se—I mean Tristan still wanted you. And you didn’t compare to this.” Her hand flipped off the ground, waving at her curves. “How could he not want this?”
I kept my mouth shut, but could hear Tristan’s voice saying something about that not being his style, especially everything that came with it. Even now. He’d picked me.
“I’m sorry you went through all that with him,” I said quietly. “I don’t know what it’s like to not be with someone you want—”
“Of course, you don’t. You always get what you want.”
“Oh, please. You think I wanted to be the freak growing up? To move around all the time and never have any true friends and no family that I knew of? That I wanted to be thrown into this crazy world with supernatural creatures that shouldn’t even exist? To have my husband taken from me for seven freakin’ years and to know that he may never be completely free from his creators who want nothing more than my head? That I want to someday lead an entire society that depends on every decision I make? Whose future won’t exist if I don’t have a daughter against all possible odds? Oh, but wait. I must have wanted to have a boy so I could just hand him over to the enemies and lose him forever. No, Vanessa, I don’t always get what I want.” I paused, then couldn’t resist adding, “If I did, you would have been dead two years ago.”
My rant was met by pure silence. And then a musical laugh. “Touché.”
“But no,” I said quietly, “I’ve never had my heart broken in the same way you have. And I’m sorry about that.”
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter now.” Vanessa cleared her throat. “Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with using what you’ve got. It’ll make your life a lot easier. Men don’t usually go around shooting beautiful women unless provoked. Such as you had us do.”
I ignored her spot-on jab. “We’re Amadis, though. We don’t use any of our gifts unless there’s a good reason.”
“And getting out of there alive so we can retrieve the stone is a pretty damn good reason.”
She was right once again. Another weird moment for the night: Vanessa teaching me how to fight like an Amadis.
“Of course, I don’t recommend that with the Daemoni,” she added. “Rape is one of their favorite past-times. You don’t need to worry about Normans—you just proved you could handle them—but Daemoni . . .” Her voice trailed off, and
then she sighed. “I can’t believe I stayed one for so long.”
Statements like these made me wonder whether she really was setting me up or actually helping me, especially because her thoughts and emotions always corroborated her words. In fact, as I thought about it, I couldn’t remember a time Vanessa had actually lied to me. I didn’t always like what she said, but at least she’d always been truthful.
Maybe she’d give me an honest answer to my question about our current topic of conversation. I couldn’t bring myself to ask Tristan because I didn’t know if I could stand to hear the truth from his mouth. I’d been trying to dismiss the nagging thought, telling myself I really didn’t want to know, that it didn’t matter because it was in the distant past. But I couldn’t let it go, especially when the topic kept coming up.
“Can I ask you a question?” I finally blurted. “About Daemoni and rape . . . I think I should know . . . if Tristan . . .”
I stammered, as if my tongue didn’t really want to ask the question.
Vanessa turned her head to look at me. “He never raped, as far as I know. He never needed to—women were practically raping him.” She chuckled, though no humor colored the sound. “To be completely honest, he drove Lucas nuts when it came to anything with women and children. Seth claimed he was too much of a warrior to be bothered with them, that having anything to do with them was a waste of his time and power. He would only take on the big guys in battles because the younger ones weren’t worthy. But I knew—and I’m sure Lucas knew—Seth had a soft spot. That’s why I fell in love with him.” She let out a sad sigh.
I gulped down the lump in my throat. “But I’ve seen his memories—women and children’s faces . . .”
“Did you actually see him hurting or killing them directly? Him personally?”