by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
“Oh.” As he turned back to her, she could see that one of Sarge’s eyes was already swollen, and there was a nasty gash caked with coagulating gel on his forehead. “So, you’re telling me that you’re hunting the boyfriend now.”
Bea’s body flashed in her mind’s eye, melding with Sarge’s own wounds. “Yeah.”
“And when you catch him, what’re you going to do? Give him a love tap?”
She couldn’t answer.
“Goddammit,” he said. “Nothing’s changed with you. And don’t think I’m idiot enough to let you tag along with me so you can get me wounded again when I move to cut his head off.”
“He killed Beatrix.” The sentence left an aftershock of grief, and she pursed her lips, holding back the anguish.
A slow burn consumed Sarge as he gripped the steering wheel.
“And,” she said softly, “he deserves to be punished. The vampire part of him.”
“You think there’s any human left in him?” His voice was as bruised as her own conscience. “Even after seeing that body ripped in half when you pulled it out of the wall hole?”
Don’t think of it, she told herself. Just survive.
“Sarge.” She just wanted to clear the air. To go on. “I’m so sorry for that day.”
He reached for the ignition. “Want to say sorry?”
“Yeah.”
“Then bring me your boyfriend’s heart.”
He started the engine, preparing to be on his way and kill Griff without a second thought.
And why shouldn’t she let him? Griff had become one of her monsters.
But, deep inside, he was still the guy who made her smile just because he talked in his sleep. Just because of the way his mouth shaped itself into an O when he was thinking of a new way to design an Internet site. Just because of the way he looked at her over breakfast tea.
The Jeep’s engines gunned, tires squealing and burning rubber. As it bucked away, Camille launched herself, grabbing onto the rails spanning the rear storage area. Her body caught air, hands losing purchase on the rails, as she held on for dear life.
Sarge skidded the vehicle around a corner, and her legs swung out, flailing. When her boot nicked a lamppost, she scrambled, diving into the Jeep’s back seat.
“Aw, what the hell?” yelled Sarge over the engine. “You’re gonna hurt yourself.” Then he skidded to a stop, face red as he avoided looking at her again.
Did he care if she smashed into a pole? The realization warmed her, bathed her in guilt, too. Camille climbed into the front, just as if she’d been expected and was a teeny bit tardy.
“Let’s find that police radio,” she said, wanting to make Sarge more comfortable by avoiding the real subject.
“Don’t take those chances.”
He thought about what he’d just said, then hunched over the steering wheel, glared at her. “This ain’t going to work, you know. Even if you think you’re hot stuff for sticking a stake in that other lady vamp. The one who made sweet vampire love to Griffie.”
Damn him. He knew his words were lethal. “It wasn’t easy killing Mina. Or Claudia.”
“The blonde?” Sarge shrugged. “That was good aim. You learned how to shoot a crossbow.”
“I had plenty of time to practice.” They idled in front of a cemetery, darkness shrouding even the street lamps. Camille glanced at her watch tracker. Nothing. “I see you added laser technology to your beloved crossbow. Doesn’t that dull your instinctual fighting methods?”
“I’m not much for all that ‘intuition’ anymore, just as I noticed you’re not using those feel-good sci-fi knockabouts. Looks like we’ve both lost our faith.”
She hated that he was right. Hated that he couldn’t stop bringing up her terrible choice in the woods.
“I’ll say it again, Sarge. I’m sorry.”
“Would you do it again?” he asked, voice low, soft with something that made Camille shift in her seat.
The breath chopped in her lungs as she searched for an answer.
“That’s what I thought.”
It was dark, and she couldn’t be sure, but she thought his eyes clouded a little.
“You seem to have recovered,” she said, trying to accentuate the positive. “Except maybe for that leg. But even that doesn’t seem to slow you down.”
“They used bionic parts on it,” he snapped.
He probably wanted to keep up appearances, so she let it go. “I want to make it up to you.”
“Howard.”
He leaned toward her, face-to-face. His overshadowing bulk, his scent—blood, sweat, grime, musk—got to her. Thrilled her ever so slightly.
Or maybe she was feeling ill again.
“You know what I dreamed about while I was laid up in a hospital bed? You know what kept me going?”
“The lunchtime Jell-O?”
He hovered a breath away. “Not really. It was the thought of pulling Griffie’s limbs off one by one.”
Stung, Camille blurted out, “You blew your chance tonight, then.”
Great going, she thought. Just as you two were getting onto civil ground…
A bitter grin crossed his lips. “It sure as hell won’t happen again.”
With that, he gunned the Jeep, leaving the conversation dead.
But if there’s one thing Camille knew about herself, it was that she wasn’t really into letting matters rest in peace.
Chapter 16
As they’d cruised the streets, Camille’s watch tracker had been silent, and she’d actually wondered if they weren’t moving farther away from Griff rather than toward him.
Then they’d struck pay dirt. Sort of. A cop car had been parked in front of the Cismigiu Gardens, a lone policeman shadowed in the front seat. So Camille had seized the opportunity while Sarge waited in their vehicle.
She’d lured the cop out, hands pressed against the blood on her shirt, pretending to have been attacked. When the poor young lawman had gotten close enough, she’d sprung to the back of him, wrapped her arm around his throat, then squeezed until he’d passed out.
Then the radio had been hers for the taking.
“I hate doing that,” she said, hopping back in the car with the squawking communicator. Mainly news from the nightclub. Nothing more. “He just wanted to help me.”
Sarge took off, streets a blur of headlights on concrete. “You should be used to working people over.”
Another round of guilt seized her, so she didn’t offer a comeback.
Instead, they didn’t talk at all, just listened to the radio. She knew he wanted its information, too, and that was a big reason he was tolerating her presence. Or was there something more? Something she’d seen that night at the castle in the tunnel when she’d accidentally hugged him?
Forget it, she thought. Just clue into the radio.
Were the police just slow in finding Griff’s new victims? Or did the calm have something to do with that so-called gargoyle Sarge had seen chasing down Griff’s cab?
Who knew if Griff was still even on a rampage? There’d been a moment in the nightclub when she’d seen the man she loved reappear. Right before he’d dived behind that red-velvet curtain and into the hole in the wall. He’d looked at her with a save-me plea, had said her name as if he couldn’t understand what was happening to him.
“Camille?”
She startled, still in her Griff world. But Sarge was the one who’d said her name.
Suspicious of his sudden familiarity, Camille waited for him to continue.
He was watching her as if he cared. Sarge. Caring. That was some sort of oxymoron.
He went back to concentrating on the road, much to her relief.
“When are we going to meet up with Ashe?” she asked, searching for conversation.
He paused. “Ashe retired.”
Camille allowed this news to settle. “I thought you were a team.”
“He refused to come with me this time.”
“Protective Ashe?”
Camille recalled the gentle Wiccan, the way he’d taken care of all of them during the castle mission. “What happened?”
Sarge exhaled, as though telling her how he hadn’t died would really cramp his style.
Then, busying himself by scanning the streets, Sarge spoke, voice casual. “I thought it was over when your boy wonder chucked me out of that chopper. Remember that, Howard? The first time he tried to kill me?”
“It’s crystal clear.” Her stomach started doing its acid dance of remorse.
“Well, during my military training, I learned a little something called a spider fall.”
“That’s what operatives are taught to do when they scale down tall walls,” she said, shrugging off Sarge’s impressed glance. “I read while Griff was—”
“And that’s how I didn’t end up in fifty pieces when I fell from the Huey,” he said, obviously not wanting to hear about Griff. “I used the tree to control my gravity. But your boyfriend managed to land on his vamp feet, the bastard, and we proceeded to engage.”
The beginning of the end, she thought.
He continued. “I have to say, Pretty Boy is one of the tougher vamps I’ve fought. Besides Nicolae.”
“We think it’s because of the way the strigoiaca blood mixed—”
Sarge held up a finger. “Science talk.”
“Oh, yeah.” She couldn’t help smiling. “Not your bag.”
“Right. I’ve told you, vamps are vamps. It’s no use trying to explain them.”
If she hadn’t come to that same conclusion tonight, she might’ve argued.
“So…Ashe?” she asked.
“Right.” Sarge slowed down at the sight of a deserted car. “He got me to a hospital, tried all his healing powers on me, then when I was able to talk around the holes in my head, he laid into my ego.”
Like Sarge, she went on alert while they drew up to the car, but relaxed once she spied two people kissing in the front seat.
Sarge moved on, shaking his head. “There’re still people in this world who have the luxury of making out on a dark road.”
The affectionate couple brought that striking awareness back to the atmosphere, marking the air with unspoken tension.
Couldn’t it just disappear? “Ashe didn’t want you to hunt anymore?”
“You got it. He whipped up one last swan song of a protective spell and said he didn’t have the strength for anything more. Said he couldn’t stand to see me self-destruct. Thought this so-called vengeful mission of mine would end up stealing my soul or something.”
“Why? You’ve hunted before.”
“But I’ve never hunted another human.”
The words stunned her. “Is this about me more than Griff?”
“It was.” He’d said it so softly she wasn’t even sure there had been an answer.
She thought of all the times she’d imagined him following her throughout Bucharest: at the library, the markets, on the streets…
“You were keeping tabs on me, Sarge?”
“Yeah, just limping along the streets, biding my time.” He gauged her with a glance. “Waiting.”
The way he looked at her made her face heat up. “Did you ever come into the laboratory to—”
Now his eyebrow was raised. Oh. Evidently, that Sarge sighting had been her own doing.
“So you were thinking of me, too, huh, Howard?”
She didn’t answer. What could she say?
“Good to know.” He laughed, settled into his seat. “A man can only hope.”
She tingled a little, and she wasn’t liking it. “When you say you were waiting, biding your time, all that James Bond villain nonsense, what exactly did you mean?”
“I meant that I was doing some reconnaissance. Seeing when I could get to your boyfriend…and to you.”
“Get to me?”
“Being almost dead gives you a lot of passion. According to what’s been written about you in the papers, you should know what I’m talking about. You know about death.”
“Too much.”
That brought a halt to this discussion. As if sensing her disquiet, he said, “You guys had that lab heavily guarded.” He turned the corner, onto a street with green apartment courtyards and wrought-iron fences that cast gnarled shapes. “So, I had to use an alternative means of infiltration. Tina.”
“Bea’s assistant?” The chippy with the curly brown hair and big blue eyes?
“Jealous?” He sounded hopeful.
She wasn’t about to feed his Mount Everest-size ego. “You slept with her for information?”
He shrugged.
Why did it bother her to hear this? Sarge was a normal—well, sort of normal—red-blooded American male. Guys had sex. A lot of it. Everyone knew that.
So what was the big deal?
“Then let me get this straight,” she said, speaking through her teeth. Then she loosened her jaw, willing herself to mellow out. “You used Tina to tell you what was happening in the lab. You knew Griff was getting better, and that must’ve really gotten to you, because you couldn’t come in to kill him before all the vampire was washed out of his body. Why didn’t you try to storm the fort? I mean, you were special ops.”
“Thanks for the confidence, but even though I’m damned good at what I do, I’m not stupid.”
Just vengeful. “What a plan. Why didn’t you just move on to the next vampire the world had to offer, Sarge?”
“Because,” he said, heating her with his gaze, “we’ve got unfinished business between us.”
Camille closed her eyes, wishing there hadn’t been any subtext to his comment. In her personal darkness, everything jumbled together, confusing her.
“Camille,” he said, “why do you do it?”
Opening her gaze to the world, she took a deep breath, exhaled. Here it went.
“Because I can’t live with myself if another one dies. Everyone I love seems to leave me, almost as if I’m the one who’s cursed or something.” She cleared her throat of emotion. “If Griff doesn’t come back to me, I’ll die inside this time. I’m so afraid that will really happen.”
The air stilled, laden with silence.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Sorry. She was the one who owed him a million apologies. “Sarge, I—”
“Damn!” He slammed on the brakes, threw open the door. Hopped out of the Jeep. “We can talk later.”
Thankful for the interruption, she followed, wielding the machete.
They came upon an abandoned taxi. It’d crashed into a stone wall, the hood steaming, the driver’s door open, just as if someone had jumped out and ran away.
“What are the odds?” Sarge said, limping over to it.
He bent inside, ran his hand over the driver’s seat. When he reemerged, his fingers were covered with blood.
“Pretty good odds, I’d say.” Camille came to stand next to him.
Now they didn’t have any leads. The police radio hadn’t produced news, and Griff had switched transportation on them. Even her tracker wasn’t helping.
This was the end of the line, wasn’t it?
“Maybe,” she said, “this is hopeless.”
She collapsed against the taxi, face tilted to the moon. The tears were coming again, the emotional baptism that would wash her clean before permanent guilt settled in.
Sarge stepped in front of the light. But the golden mist of a street lamp revealed his concern.
Voice soft, he said, “We’ll find him, Camille.”
“And then what?” She choked, tried so hard to hold back the stinging disappointment, the worry and fear.
For the first time, she really looked into his gaze, past the surface of the emerald color and into his eyes. They were a well of deep emotion, fathomless, enigmatic.
Slowly, he bent over her. She held her breath.
Was he going to…?
He dipped down, caught her lips with his, warming her during this cold moment.
At first, she was taken aba
ck by the tender pressure, the soft brush of innocent assassination. Then she closed her eyes, pretending she was somewhere other than a Romanian street, accepting the comfort. The care.
He stroked a callused hand over her cheek, cupped his palm against the curve of it as if in half prayer.
We’ll find him, Camille.
And then what? she heard herself ask again.
Forcing open her eyes, she stiffened, pushed away. What was she doing?
Crushed by her rejection, Sarge backed away, posture framed like a wary animal.
Now that she could think again, she realized that his irises reminded her of something scarier: the leaves of a sunflower. Sharp, green, cutting leaves.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, words riding the edge of anger.
Anger at herself. Confusion. The memory of the Griff she’d loved was lingering, begging her to still have faith in his redemption.
As Sarge stood there, hands clenched at his sides, Camille’s watch tracker started blumping.
Blumpblumpblump…
Wait. How could it suddenly have gotten so quick?
No time to think about some kiss.
“Timing,” Sargent muttered.
Both of them whipped out their machetes and stakes, double fisted, coming back to back with each other. They circled around as her watch grew louder.
“Aw, no.” Sarge’s deep voice vibrated through his back and into hers, jarring her senses.
“What?”
“You can turn around.”
She did, taken aback by what awaited her.
It was the most beautiful man ever, with long white hair. Glowing violet eyes. Shining fangs. Gray robes.
“Hello, Hans,” Sarge said, keeping his weapons up.
She did, too, unable to look away from the vampire, shocked that Sarge was conversing with him and not wielding that machete.
Then something Sarge had once told her came back, echoing in her mind.
I’ve kept a vampire or two alive in my day—if they can help exterminate the worst of them.
Maybe he hadn’t been lying to her.