by Cane, Laken
“Not at all,” he said, smiling smugly. “You drive, we watch for danger. If we see something suspicious, we’ll jump out and take care of business while you tend to the steering and braking and such.”
He laughed when I glared at him.
The city was in disarray, but it would get worse before it got better. Cops were stopping people, strongly encouraging them to go home and stay off the streets after the sun set. Some people listened, and some didn’t. Some couldn’t, for various reasons. More people died.
Eli read news articles to me as I drove through the city, taking backroads and side streets whenever possible to avoid police.
Apparently the homeless were safe. The vampires ravaging the city left them alone—probably their blood wasn’t quite rich and tasty enough and with the bounty of the city at their disposal, the vampires were going for healthier choices.
There were fights. Shootings. Killings. People began to take advantage of the chaos by looting and burning.
And because it was November, spirits and demons joined the fun. I saw them. I would need to control as many of them as I could, because the vampires weren’t the only threats to human safety.
How long before the military was brought in? How long before they formed a perimeter around the city and refused to let anyone leave? Maybe they’d drop a bomb on us, hoping to contain the problem. Who the hell knew? I certainly didn’t.
All I knew was that we needed to neutralize Avis and her people before it came to that.
I was late getting to Rick’s house, but he didn’t complain when he opened the door to let me in. He glanced at the four people behind me. “You have a key, Kait.”
I shrugged. “I’m not using that key if you’re home to open the door for me.” I looked at Eli. “I’ll be right back.”
He nodded and he and the others spread out on the porch, watchful and patient.
I followed the detective into the living room, and he gestured at my blade and the laminated ID badge on the coffee table. He’d put the badge on a black lanyard, and I checked it out before dropping it over my head. “Where’d you get the picture?”
He grinned, and for a second, his amusement lit his face and chased away the shadows. “Internet.”
My stare lingered on his face, memorizing that expression. I knew I wouldn’t see it often. “There are pictures of me online?” I gripped the handle of my blade, enjoying its familiar warmth before sliding it into its sheath at my hip.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Quite a few pictures of you, Kait.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What are you being so sly and amused about, Detective?”
“It’s not me,” he said, not quite grinning. “It’s the teenager inside me.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, but he wouldn’t tell me. Fine. When I got a chance, I’d search my name and see what came up. Better yet, I’d ask Max. I was sure he’d already Googled the hell out of me.
“I have my old ID in my glovebox,” I told him. “You didn’t have to get me a new one.”
“The red line at the edge of the card,” he said, “is not a quality error. It’ll tell any cop who stops you that you’re working with us and for the mayor. It was Louis’s idea. He has people watching out for you, you know.”
I nodded. Ever since I’d led the police to their son, the mayor and his wife made sure I was taken care of. “Thank him for me, will you?”
“I will. You’ll be hearing from him soon. He wants to speak with you.”
For some reason, that made my stomach tighten. Mayor Hedrick was going to need something I wasn’t sure I was ready to give. “How’s Beth?” I asked, changing the subject. The house had an empty feel to it, as though Rick weren’t enough by himself to bring life to it.
“Better,” he answered. “She has good people around her. She…”
“What?” I prompted, when he stopped.
“She’s not coming home. She’s going back to Colorado. Her parents are there.” He shrugged, trying for casual, but he didn’t look at me. “She told me half an hour ago.”
I reached out to squeeze his arm. “I’m sorry, Rick.” I hesitated, then, “Not because of…?”
“No. It had nothing to do with you or what she heard. She knew it wasn’t true. This has been a long time coming. People like her shouldn’t be with people like me.” Finally, he met my stare, and I wasn’t surprised to see that his was blank. “I have to get to work.”
“Me too.” I started to tell him to be careful as he walked me to the door, but that seemed to upset people. “Thanks for taking care of my blade,” I said instead.
“You can trust me, Kait.”
The words were abrupt and unexpected, heavy with seriousness and a feeling of urgency, and I stopped walking to face him. “I know.”
He studied me for a few seconds. “Do you? Do you really trust anybody?”
I swallowed. “When I can.”
He nodded. “Call me if you need me. Be careful out there.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “You too, Detective.”
He didn’t mention the serial killer and I knew he would have if there’d been any new developments, so I didn’t waste time questioning him. He stood on the porch watching me and the four wolves walk back to my car. I was sure he’d like to have questioned me about them, as well, but it was not a night to ask questions.
I stopped when I reached my car, goosebumps rising suddenly on my skin. I lifted my face to the cold, fresh air, closing my eyes as I inhaled. None of the wolves said a word, just stood quiet and ready.
“She’s close,” I told them, finally. I was suddenly glad for the protective vest my contact had sent me. I hadn’t forgotten the troll in the tunnels. The dog-turned-vampire had been right up there with some of the most horrible things I’d ever seen. I hadn’t told another soul about that dog. And now that I’d learned that some of the vampires were able to withstand a waning sun, I had a new item to add to the junk drawer of horror in my mind.
And though I had yet to see her, Avis Vine was in that drawer. Avis Vine, who was standing in the shadows of the night, watching me. I felt her there, the bitch, her and her evil intent. She was on a mission to destroy not only me and those I loved, but the city and the vampires. She was going to die, but in her misery, perhaps she didn’t care. Most vampires feared their waiting afterlife more than anything else in existence.
She had to know I was going to send her to that afterlife.
“Where is she?” Eli murmured. He didn’t search the shadows, didn’t make it obvious that we knew she was there, but it didn’t matter. She was taunting us as surely as if she’d been standing in the middle of the street with a dead human in her arms.
The detective’s street, a quiet residential street to begin with, was completely silent. His neighbors were mostly older professionals, and they took the law seriously—as well as the danger lurking outside their doors. They’d blockaded themselves in their homes, pulled their blinds, and wouldn’t have answered a knock on their door no matter what.
Smart people.
Rick left the porch and headed for his car, surprised that I lingered. “Kait?”
For a few seconds, I was frozen with terror, imagining Avis watching him, licking her lips with eager, greedy hunger, dreaming of making me watch as she tore him to pieces.
“Rick,” I said, my voice hoarse. “Get in your car.”
He pulled his gun immediately and crouched slightly, turning in a half circle to check the area. “Where, Kait?”
Shit. Everyone wanted to know where she was. I didn’t know. She was every-fucking-where. Her scent wafted to me from behind me and down the street, from the hedge at the front of the house across the way, from the roof of the detective’s house.
She’d rushed around, leaving her scent to confuse me, and I could not pinpoint exactly where she now stood.
“Eli, get Rick,” I said, my voice calm even as my heart thumped like an out-of-control drum. And only when th
e wolves surrounded the detective and brought him into the safety of our circle could I force myself to relax enough to think. “Give me a second,” I said, before anyone could speak.
And there in the eerie quiet of the cold street, I went to get my wolf.
Chapter Fourteen
Then suddenly, she was there on the street, her vampires fanning out behind her.
Avis wasn’t a weak woman. She wasn’t even a woman. She was a creature that Frederick Axton and his seer had created from something that had once been human. She was muscular, with bone-white fangs that protruded from her mouth. They looked almost fake, like plastic teeth a kid might buy for Halloween. Her skin was scaly and yellow—probably her liver was shot—and her brown irises floated in the dull yellow of her sclera.
I’d expected her to be skeletal and ill and rotting from the inside out, but other than the jaundice and the abnormal teeth, she looked…grotesquely fit with her bulging muscles and her thick, shiny hair. She wore a fitted, sleeveless white dress that bared her biceps and ended mid-thigh, and a pair of black ankle boots. Maybe she was around thirty years old, maybe sixty. It was nearly impossible to tell.
She was a monster.
I had pulled my wolf to the surface so I could get a better idea of her exact location—I’d never planned on shifting. There were many reasons for me wanting to hide my shift, most of them good reasons. I didn’t want to show my wolf to Rick or the humans who were likely peering from their windows with their phones recording the encounter. I didn’t want to lose my demon blade. I didn’t want to out myself or the wolves to the public.
So I didn’t shift, but that was okay. I would still kick her ass.
“Rick,” I said quietly, “get into the car and lock the doors.”
He didn’t answer or move to obey me, and from the corner of my eye I saw him holster his gun and hold his hand out. After only a slight hesitation, Eli pulled a stake and slapped it into his waiting palm.
“No, Detective,” I murmured. But I understood. The vampires had made him afraid, and he did not like being afraid. They’d taken him once, and he hadn’t been prepared. He hadn’t even known they existed. Now, he was going to fight back, even if it meant his death.
I could relate.
But Rick was a cop. He dealt with guns and humans, not stakes and vampires, and I was terrified that he was going to get hurt. It wasn’t that I thought he was weak. It was only that he was human, and I cared about him, dammit.
Part of my mind was on protecting him when the vampires struck, and I knew the break in my concentration was dangerous. Avis knew it, too, so Rick was the first one she and her followers went for.
“Kill the human,” she screamed, and in a blur of movement, the vampires were on us. And they were damn fast. Unfortunately for them, so were wolves. Normally, I’d have gone into the battle with joy and enthusiasm, but I was too filled with worry over the detective. How could I fight and keep him safe at the same time?
Especially when he wouldn’t let me.
If it hadn’t been for Joe, I honestly think the detective would have died there that night. Apparently Joe had been watching, though, keeping an eye on me for the mayor. Joe took that job very seriously, and maybe he’d stuck a tracker onto my car, courtesy of, I was sure, Mayor Hedrick.
Avis had extended her claws—claws that were at least five or six inches long—and swiped a trench down my face and neck before she went for Rick. I would have shrugged it off, but the burning pain became something I hadn’t felt before from the teeth or claws of a regular vampire. It was like her claws were tipped with icy poison, and as soon as she sliced me, that poison began drifting through my bloodstream, its coldness freezing and slowing my muscles, my heart, my brain.
With my hesitation, she sliced her claws down my chest—and the council’s man, Saul—didn’t let me down. She couldn’t get through the fabric of the protective vest. And whatever the cloth had been spelled with hurt her as much as her poison hurt me.
She screamed and attempted to retract her claws, but they were stuck in the layer of magic protecting me. Before she could strike desperately at me with her free hand, I blinked through the blood obscuring my vision and did what I’d only done once before—I partially shifted.
I couldn’t stop the snarling growl of my wolf as I released my claws, but there was so much noise that my growl was lost in the sound of a battle that had gone quickly vicious, bloody, and painful.
And Eli wasn’t trying to protect the one human among us—he was trying to protect me, a wolf more powerful than he was, simply because his alpha had commanded him to do so.
The other wolves were trying to stay in their human forms to avoid showing themselves to the world, and because they were wolves—wolves with stakes—they didn’t have to shift. Yes, it would have been a more level fight, quicker, certainly, but they forced sharpened stakes through the chest walls of the enemy, and no matter that Avis and her crew outnumbered us, the vampires began to fall. They were trampled under heavy shifter foot, and as Avis ripped herself free of me and we began to fight in earnest, I saw Joe swinging a wicked, serrated machete, taking the heads of whatever unlucky vampires got in his way. “I’ve got Rick,” he roared.
And finally, I could concentrate on Avis Vine. Joe was fighting his way to the detective, and he would protect him because Joe was part of my crew. He knew what I needed him to do.
Eli was a different story. Avis and I tumbled through the night, locked together as we both attempted to get the upper hand—she once again clawed my face and in a desperate frenzy attempted to sink her fangs into whatever part of my flesh she could reach, I was quietly amazed by her strength. The fight was taking everything I had. I tried to go on the offensive, but too often I found myself having to defend. She was a force.
And most of it was magic.
I balled my fist and hit her in the face as hard as I could, which was pretty damn hard, and as she flew backward, I took the opportunity to yank my demon blade from its sheath. There was no time to think, really. I was fighting on instinct alone. But the second I drew my blade, it was like time slowed down.
The blade glowed, lighting up my hand, its warmth rushing through me to counteract the icy magic from her lethal claws. Now I was a hundred percent.
We were no longer in the detective’s driveway with the others. We’d ended up in someone’s backyard across the street, and it was dark. Not too dark for vampires and wolf shifters, though, and I saw her eyes widen as she leaped to her feet, her short dress billowing around her muscular thighs.
I viewed everything with a clarity I hadn’t had even a few seconds earlier. The line of red-tinged sweat running down her face, the frosty breath escaping her pale, parted lips, the gray aura of magic surrounding her like a wispy ghost…and her sudden terror.
I smiled, and there was my psycho, not quite taking over, but making herself known. “Run,” I murmured. At that moment, there was no worry over the detective or the humans or even the city as it crumbled. I spared them not a single thought. There was only my joy in chasing this vampire. In catching her, and in killing her.
A switch had flipped inside me, and I embraced the change with everything I was. My body tensed, as hers did, as we both prepared to run. She would have more speed than me, which would make the chase just a little more thrilling.
Thrilling because I could lose her. She could escape. She was strong, insanely quick, and running on a dark magic that I wanted to taste. My heart was beating impossibly fast and hard as a storm of overwhelming energy gathered inside me, and we stared across the dark yard at each other, frozen, for that breathless millisecond.
In that moment, she was preparing herself to die. Like the line of sweat running down her face, an equally bloody tear slid from her eye.
And then, she whirled, and in a blur of movement she raced away. I sprang, as well, my head full of her scent, a scent that would quickly fade if I hesitated. And I would have had her. I would have killed her—we
both knew it.
But a huge, warm body torpedoed from the darkness, ramming me so hard I lost my balance, my blade, and for an instant, my senses. Eli’s wolf. He thought he was rescuing me. Protecting me.
He’d lost me for a little while, and I could imagine his worry that he had let his alpha down and I was lying in the darkness, dead.
The bastard lost me my kill. I would have had her. Now, she would redouble her efforts, but she would not meet me again. She wasn’t stupid.
“You bastard son of a bitch,” I said, and shoved his heavy, bloody body off me. Not only had I lost my blade when he’d rammed me, but the pain of every wound I’d suffered that night, including what felt like a half a dozen broken bones from Eli’s “protection,” roared suddenly through me. My enormous boost of adrenaline was gone.
I would have to shift if I wanted to heal quickly. But first, I would have to find my blade, as it had been knocked from my grip. Two others rushed into the yard—Wyatt and Avery. I guessed Brian had stayed behind to guard the detective and, to a lesser degree, the machete-wielding Joe Patrick. Honestly, right then, Joe was the only one of them I felt I could depend on. He understood what was important and didn’t treat me like a delicate flower in need of protection.
I didn’t look at Eli as I began to walk a grid through the yard, exhausted and hurting. I was afraid if I looked at him, I might stab him in the eye when I did find my blade. But I decided right then and there that from now on, I was hunting alone. I wasn’t accepting them and then giving them the slip, either. I would stand my ground with Jared and tell him to keep his damn wolves.
If he couldn’t see me as the power I was, that was his problem.
Finally, Eli loped away, and I was glad to see him go.
“Are Rick and Joe okay?” I asked Wyatt.
He didn’t answer for a few seconds, and when he did, there was definite hostility in his voice. “The two humans are just fine,” he said, “but Brian is dead. I put him in the back of the car so we can transport him back to Shadowfield. I do hope you won’t mind having to ride with a dead wolf.”