The Last Vampire- Complete series Box Set

by R. A. Steffan

  I remembered the odd way that electronic devices seemed to behave when Fae were around, and nodded. “Okay. I can’t say I’m too thrilled about the way we seem to keep relying on Nigellus for rescue, but kudos. That’s still a solid plan.”

  Rans shifted in his seat. “As I’ve said previously, Nigellus has a vested interest in keeping both of us alive. The list of people for whom that’s true is a markedly short one these days, and mostly contains names that I’m hoping don’t become embroiled in this mess any more than they already are.”

  Guthrie, I mentally supplied.

  The last thing Rans’ demon-bound human friend from St. Louis needed was to get tangled up with angry Fae. The poor guy had enough supernatural problems already. Albigard was probably on that short list of people who might help us as well, though I suspected things would have to get a lot worse than they were right now before Rans would overcome his grudge enough to even consider the latter as an option.

  “I think we’re approaching civilization,” I pointed out, as farmland gave way to what looked like a collection of factories and warehouses ahead.

  Rans directed me to a gas station and convenience store set at the edge of the commercial district. I ducked inside to use the restroom and pick up supplies with the cash he gave me, trying not to look like someone who was driving a stolen car. Or like someone who was wearing borrowed sandals and no underwear, for that matter.

  I emerged a few minutes later armed with a bottle of orange juice, several bottles of water, a can of mixed nuts, and a bag of potato chips. Breakfast of champions, right there. Rans was chatting amiably with a Latino guy driving a red SUV. He gestured for me to join them, and I approached, pasting a friendly smile on my face.

  Nope, buddy... no braless fugitive car thieves to be seen here. Just a perfectly nice, perfectly normal girl who isn’t remotely the granddaughter of a succubus. See? Nothing suspicious about me in the least.

  The guy smiled back. His eyes dropped to my chest, where my nipples were no doubt visible through the faded cotton of the worn band t-shirt. Rans followed the guy’s gaze and sighed. A couple of sharp words delivered in Spanish, and our unwitting chauffeur’s gaze snapped back to Rans, whose eyes were now glowing with that familiar, unearthly light.

  A few more words I didn’t understand, and Rans gestured me into the SUV’s back seat. I settled in, while he did the same in the passenger seat.

  “You speak Spanish, huh?” I asked, not very surprised, somehow.

  “Spanish, French, Italian, and a smattering of German,” he said. “Also Welsh and Gaelic, though I’ve been told my accent is appalling.”

  I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes.

  “Of course you speak seven fucking languages,” I muttered under my breath, shaking my head. “If I live long enough, maybe I’ll learn Esperanto just to spite you.”

  He ignored me in favor of directing our new friend out of the parking lot, traveling in the same direction we’d been going before. Traffic grew heavier as we approached Modesto proper, but we turned off the highway before we got into the heart of the city, entering an area that looked more rural.

  I saw the substation in the distance as soon as we turned, looking oddly ominous with its towering metal lattices and the dark storm clouds looming in the background. The whole thing was surrounded by a chainlink fence that was easily twice as tall as I was, but I could make out a small outbuilding nestled to one side of the towers and cables.

  Home, sweet home, I thought. I guess it’s cheaper than a motel, anyway.

  Rans continued to deliver directions in Spanish, and the driver pulled onto the gravel drive leading to the locked gate.

  “Deténgase aquí,” Rans said. “Nos deja salir y regresa a la gasolinera. Entonces olvida que alguna vez nos has visto o hablado.”

  The driver nodded in agreement with whatever Rans had just told him and turned off the engine. The door locks popped open a second later. Rans leapt out and opened my door, holding out a hand to steady me as I hopped down to join him.

  “He’s going to drive straight back to the gas station and forget he ever saw or spoke with us,” he explained.

  Indeed, as soon as my door slammed shut, the SUV fired up and the driver backed onto the deserted road and sped away. I stared after him.

  “I hope we don’t come to regret the lack of a vehicle,” I said, clutching my plastic bag of convenience store food.

  “It will be less obvious that anyone’s hiding out here, without one,” Rans said briskly, already heading down the long driveway toward the chained double gates. “There’s a clear line of sight to a cellular tower, but if worse comes to worst and Nigellus isn’t reachable within a reasonable period of time, it’s only a mile-and-a-half or so to the nearest busy road. We can commandeer another ride if we need to.”

  I shrugged, since I couldn’t exactly argue with his logic. My experience of playing a wanted fugitive only spanned a few weeks. His, by contrast, spanned centuries. As we approached the massive structures responsible for routing power to thousands of households in the city, I imagined I could feel electricity vibrating the air molecules around us. But, hey... if that invisible aura acted as Fae repellent, I was more than willing to risk an increased possibility of future brain cancer.

  The chain and padlock holding the two halves of the gate closed looked pretty solid—right up until Rans grasped the padlock with both hands and ripped the shackle open. If I hadn’t seen him use that same trick on the very day I’d first met him, it would have been shocking as hell. Even knowing his strength as I did, it was still hard to reconcile what he’d just done with reality.

  “No padlock is safe,” I quipped, unable to help myself. “Just take it easy on the gate hinges, all right?”

  He shot me a long-suffering glance as he unwrapped the chain and swung one of the gates open wide enough for us to slip through.

  “I’ll remind you that I paid handsomely for that shed door, as well as the padlock that was attached to it,” he said mildly.

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed. “You sure did. Not to mention the lock you broke on the back door of my house. You’re a regular Bob Vila, you are.”

  He closed the gate behind us, rewrapping the chain and hanging the padlock in its former position, twisted closed so that it would appear to be locked from a distance. We skirted around the massive rows of machinery, heading for the little prefab building that would act as our shelter until we could get hold of Nigellus for help.

  Rans examined the structure’s door, trying the knob and confirming it was locked up tight.

  “Hinges,” I reminded helpfully. “If that storm breaks while we’re here, I’d rather not have the door hanging off them because you broke it so we could get inside.”

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” he said, and disappeared into a cloud of vapor.

  For about the thousandth time in the past couple of months, I breathed through a silent, ‘How is this my life now?’ moment. The thick mist flowed across the walls of the small building, seeking. I lost sight of it as it disappeared around the back. Long seconds ticked by, and then the lock on the door clicked. It swung open, revealing Rans standing inside, looking both reassuringly solid and faintly smug.

  “Ventilation holes in the soffit,” he explained. “No broken hinges needed. Happy?”

  “Ecstatic,” I replied wryly, and brushed past him.

  The place was a dump. A giant control board covered one wall like something out of an old sci-fi B-movie—crowded with antiquated switches, lights, and dials that I wasn’t about to get anywhere near. Aside from that, the amenities consisted of a desk and a single rolling chair, both with so much dust coating them that I couldn’t imagine they’d been touched in the last decade.

  “Well,” Rans said, faux-cheerful. “This is... nice.”

  “I feel like I should point out that it was your idea to come here,” I shot back.

  For lack of anything better to do, I set my bag of supplies down and rolled
the chair outside before beating the dust off of the cracked upholstery. The desk was too bulky to mess with moving it outside for cleaning, so I sacrificed part of a bottle of water and one of the napkins I’d stuffed in the plastic bag to swipe the worst of the grime off its top.

  Rans gave the area a quick visual sweep. After I dragged the chair back inside, he locked the door and took up a post next to the building’s single window where he could keep an eye on the entrance to the substation. Meanwhile, I flopped down in the chair and dug into my junk food, interspersing it with swigs of reconstituted orange juice.

  “Once you’ve eaten, you should try to get some rest,” he said, without looking away from the window. “I’ll keep attempting to contact Nigellus.”

  “How’s your phone battery doing?” I asked. “I borrowed a phone off Edward before I left Hell, but he said it was probably dead after spending several days there. I didn’t get a chance to check it, for obvious reasons.”

  “I’m at about sixty percent,” Rans said. “Good to go for some time yet.”

  Silence fell. I crunched potato chips and debated breaking it for several minutes before I finally caved.

  “So... are we going to argue about me running off again?”

  That pulled his attention away from the world beyond the grimy window.

  “Why? Would arguing about it change anything?” he asked, as though genuinely curious.

  It bothered the hell out of me that the queasiness I felt over the prospect of broaching this topic with him rivaled the queasiness I’d felt when I realized the Fae were coming after us earlier.

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Remember, you’re talking to the girl whose entire experience with relationships before now consists of dating a guy for a few weeks, sleeping with him, and then being summarily dumped.”

  His sharp blue gaze softened a bit. “In that case, you can rest assured that it is, in fact, possible to want to shake someone until their teeth rattle while also loving them.”

  My throat closed up, making it suddenly hard to breathe.

  “And don’t worry,” he continued. “I have several centuries’ worth of experience with resisting the urge to act on the teeth-rattling part.”

  “I’ll just bet you do,” I managed.

  The silence settled again. I swallowed several times, trying to wrestle everything inside me under control.

  “I don’t... know how to reconcile all the crazy puzzle pieces of what my life has become,” I tried to explain. “You... my dad... the war... all the people who refuse to just leave me the hell alone, simply because of who my grandfather was—”

  A brisk tut-tutting noise came from the corner opposite where Rans was standing by the window, and I stiffened.

  “Oh... you poor dear,” said a terribly familiar female voice. “That must be terribly difficult for you, mustn’t it?”

  With a gasp, I shoved away from the desk and stumbled to my feet as Myrial stepped forward, emerging from the shadows— the slash of a cruel smile cutting across her striking features.

  SIXTEEN

  RANS WAS BETWEEN the two of us in an instant, placing me protectively behind him. I hadn’t even seen him move.

  “How did you track us?” he asked in a low, dangerous voice, his hand slipping unobtrusively to the small of his back.

  From my position behind his shoulder, I saw his fingers rest on a very familiar knife hilt. My experimental salt dagger, I realized with a shock. He’d brought it with him when he’d come to wait for me in the cavern.

  Myrial’s smile broadened, the corners of her eyes crinkling merrily. “Ha! Funny you should ask that, bloodsucker. Imagine my surprise when my connection to my dear little granddaughter disappeared behind magic wards a few days ago. Though perhaps someone should have warned her that killing a magician also breaks any warding powered by his magic...”

  Edward. I felt rage bubble up in my chest like an erupting volcano as I remembered body parts on the floor and blood on the walls.

  “You vicious bitch,” I hissed, feeling angry enough that I was about one second away from grabbing the salt dagger from its sheath at the small of Rans’ back and taking my damned chances with the demon in front of us.

  Myrial blinked liquid eyes at me.

  “Vicious? Not at all, dear. The silly old coot is safely back in one piece, isn’t he?” She laughed harshly. “You may be part demon, but you’re still an ignorant little whelp. Everything in Hell is about power. Gaining it. Losing it. Taking it. Once you understand that, nothing in the demon realm will remain a mystery to you. But, of course, that assumes you’re going to live long enough to gain such an understanding.”

  If I’d been able to focus past my towering rage, I might have recognized why Rans pressed my body closer behind his at Myrial’s words. As it was, it came as a complete shock when the demon popped out of existence in front of us, reappearing an instant later at my side. Her hand shot out, fingers closing around my upper arm like claws.

  I heard Rans’ snarl of animal fury the instant before the interior of the grungy outbuilding disappeared, melting away into blackness.

  * * *

  When reality returned, we were outside... and Rans wasn’t with us. I ripped my arm free of Myrial’s grip and looked around frantically. Briefly, I registered that the advancing storm clouds still roiled across the sky, covering roughly the same portion of the blue vista as before. Seeing them, I took comfort in the knowledge that I was apparently in the same general area of California as I had been. But that comfort lasted for only an instant.

  In front of us stood a collection of perhaps a dozen armed, beefy cops, hands resting on pistol grips and baton handles. And, at their head—Caspian. The Unseelie Fae who’d tried to capture me in St. Louis, throwing my life into chaos. Who’d tortured me in the Fae realm of Dhuinne, before arguing that I should be summarily executed for the crime of having been born to a half-demon mother. Hatred surged inside me.

  “You,” I breathed.

  “Demonkin,” he replied silkily, his voice caressing the word. “How very nice to see you again.”

  Myrial clearly wasn’t interested in my touching reunion with my tormenter. “I told you the whelp would be near Hell’s gate, Fae. Yet even with that foreknowledge, you were unable to capture her without my assistance. How incredibly tiresome.”

  I stared between them, trying to get enough brain cells firing to understand what the hell I was seeing. Caspian and Myrial were... working together?

  What the what?

  “Oh, you have got to be shitting me,” I said faintly. “Sorry, but this situation was already plenty fucked up without the cut-rate Bond villain and the Wicked Witch of the West being in bed together.”

  Caspian’s flat green gaze landed on me with shallow, reptilian loathing. It was the same expression I imagined a deadly rattlesnake would wear right before it struck at something that was pissing it off.

  “Enough prattle,” he said. “Men—kill that creature. Slowly.”

  It took me a precious half-second to realize that I was the creature in question. Honestly, I wouldn’t have thought my adrenal gland was capable of pumping out any more adrenaline than it had already dumped on me when Myrial appeared and snatched me away from Rans. Turns out, I was wrong.

  Several of the Fae-controlled cops cracked their knuckles menacingly and started toward me, some reaching for batons and pulling them out, ready for use. I started to back away, my eyes darting around in search of any sort of escape route as the hot wind from the approaching storm blew spirals of hair into my eyes. I could try to run, but Myrial could just teleport to wherever I was and grab me again. My eyes flew back to the cops, frantically seeking a way out of the situation. An instant later, something clicked.

  Men. Oh, my god. They were all men.

  Without stopping to think too closely about it, I ripped off my threadbare t-shirt and threw it aside, my breasts bouncing at the sudden movement.

  “See anything you like,
boys?” I snarled through bared teeth, and started striding toward the line of burly cops. Several of them hesitated, their eyes dropping to my chest. Curls of instinctive human lust wafted toward me like invisible tendrils.

  Quick as a flash, I grabbed those tendrils and pulled.

  The men I was drawing animus from stumbled toward me like iron filings being pulled by a magnet. I gritted my teeth and yanked harder, even when clammy hands touched me—pawing and grabbing. Part of me—the human part—started gibbering a silent refrain of oh god oh god oh god as I was groped by five horny men fueled by lust and the desire for violence. Or was it six? The part of me that wasn’t human licked its lips and reached for the new tendrils floating toward me, as more of the cops grew excited by the sight of their fellows touching me.

  And... one of those tendrils wasn’t human. My eyes flew to Caspian—his form barely visible through the shifting gaps between heavy bodies. Our eyes locked for an instant, and I snatched at that prickly Fae energy so I could drag as much of it into me as possible—damn the consequences.

  I’d fed passively from crowds on several occasions now, but I’d never actively pulled animus from more than one person at a time. It was a hell of a lot easier than feeding selectively, as it turned out. There was no fiddly filtering of one individual’s energy from another. No careful restraint to avoid taking too much. Nope—this was brutal. Feral. Eat or be eaten.

  I hated the feel of their hands on me with every fiber of my being... and I loved the feeling of their strength siphoning into me with equal ferocity.

  I loved it even more when the first one’s eyes rolled back. He slumped to the ground, convulsing. A second cop followed, and a third. Somewhere off to the side, I heard Myrial’s delighted laughter in response to the growing chaos. As more of the humans fell, I became aware of the two that weren’t giving me anything to feed from.