Even Ethan probably wouldn’t think dried perspiration was sexy.
Tired, but not at all sleepy, she searched for Jake. When she found him in the attic entertainment center, she decided that there wasn’t a room in the house that she didn’t love. Huge triangular windows bookended the room, offering a view of the lake on the west and the dark rise of the hill and drive in front of the house. Thick rugs welcomed her bare feet, a fireplace and the facing wingback chairs invited long reads and cozy chats.
Jake had sunk into the deep cushions on the sectional sofa. Demons and angels fought across a wide-screen television, and he muttered to himself when his character received a hit from a demon that sent blood flying and his life indicator shrinking.
“Is that how they look?” Horns curled beside the demon’s head. She had crimson skin and fangs, but no tail, no trident.
“Not exactly,” Jake said, leaning to the side as his character rounded a corner. “They shape-shift to look like people. They look like people when they’re demons, too, but they have more snake and goat to them. The whole scales and cloven feet thing, you know…”
The rest was lost in another mutter and a furious clatter of buttons, and Charlie smiled to herself and moved to the east window. Ethan’s truck was gone.
“You guys would make a killing as a moving service—” She broke off, looked closer. Two pinpoints of light were moving through the trees. “Jake, I think a car’s coming.”
The room went dark, and Jake was beside her an instant later, touching her arm before her scream could escape. “I did that, Charlie. I can see better if I don’t have the reflection to look through.”
He didn’t say anything about someone else not seeing in, and she fought the urge to creep away from the window, to find the nearest bed and hide under it.
Squinting, he leaned toward the glass. “It’s a little car…a Toyota. Can’t see the driver yet.”
Aside from the illuminated landscaping at the front of the house, Charlie couldn’t see anything but the headlights. “Jane drives a Toyota.”
“Jane doesn’t know where we are,” he said, but there was uncertainty in his voice. “Unless Drifter did get ahold of her, and bought her some time to come here.”
“Would he do that?” The question rattled from between her teeth.
“He might have thought he’d be coming right after, or getting here first to tell us she was headed this way.”
But because Ethan wasn’t there, it could mean that driver wasn’t Jane—or that he was hurt somewhere, or still fighting Dylan.
She didn’t let herself think of any other option.
“It’s Jane,” Jake said softly. “Maybe. Let’s go on downstairs, Charlie.”
He turned off the lights along the way; an automatic pistol appeared in his hand. Charlie hung back from the front entrance until he gestured her closer, then she stood to the side of the large double doors, trying to look through the beveled glass. The driveway wavered in front of her.
Jake’s jaw was tight. “SI’s got temperature sensors being developed so we can tell demon from human through the spell, but aside from a few prototypes, they aren’t ready yet. I wish they were.”
“Me, too.” Charlie rubbed her arms. “Can vampires shape-shift?”
“No. Yes. One, but she’s—” Jake stopped, flashed a narrowed look at her. “You’re thinking that if it’s a demon, you can go out there and you won’t be in danger.”
She’d been approaching the idea in a vague way, but when he put it in those precise terms, it didn’t sound dumb. “Yeah.”
“Over my dead body. And it would be, because Drifter would kill me. In any case, without psychic abilities you wouldn’t be able to tell until you touched her.” He held up his empty hand, wiggled his fingers. “Hot skin. Feels like you’re touching someone with an extremely high fever.”
Charlie stared out the window, trembling. How had Jane not noticed something like that?
“Damn,” Jake muttered. “It looks like she’s injured.”
“What?” She scrambled to his side. Her heart had already been racing; now it was pounding so hard it made it difficult to breathe. The headlights were swinging into the drive…definitely Jane’s car, but Charlie could only see the silhouette of her sister inside. “How bad?”
“There’s blood on her forehead and her shoulder, and she’s driving a little erratically.” A calm seemed to settle over him, and he looked down at her. “Okay, Charlie, this is what I’m going to do. I’ll put a new set of symbols on the door frame, key them to my blood, then remove Drifter’s. Then I’ll go out—and if it’s her, I’ll bring her in. If it’s not, I’m going to call Drifter and SI. I might have to run, but you’ll be okay in here.”
He bent to scrape the door, and she leaned over him, staring through the window.
“I understand—oh, Jesus! Jane.” Her nails dug into his shoulder. Jane stumbled past the hood of her car, the front of her white shirt crimson.
A dark form darted through the shadows behind her.
“Oh, my God. Jake, hurry!”
Jake stood up, swore, and aimed through the glass. “Vampire. And—shit, I don’t have a shot. Change of plan, Charlie—I get him away from her, you get her inside and use the symbols. Drifter showed you how?”
Charlie was already nodding frantically, tugging at the door handle. Locked. “Okay, okay—”
Jake pulled her hand away from the deadbolt, stabbed the pad of her forefinger with his dagger, and said grimly, “So you’re ready as soon as you get back.”
Then he replaced the knife with a sword and twisted the lock.
The door swung open on a visual more horrific than anything Charlie could have imagined, and worse for the silence of it: her sister on her stomach, the vampire holding her to the ground with his knee on her back and using her hair to pull her head up, exposing her throat. Jane’s mouth opened in a scream, the vampire leaning forward to tear at her neck.
Then the scene was replaced by Jake’s back as he ran through the door. Charlie followed him…and it was all wrong. Sounds rushed in, but there was no screaming, nothing human except the strange whistling noise that Charlie was making.
Only two steps past the door, she slammed into Jake. He was turning, his hands on her arms to spin her around, shove her back inside.
The side of his head caved in. She felt the splatter of his blood the same instant she heard the suppressed burst of gunfire.
He vanished.
Charlie was still spinning, but Jake’s hands weren’t there to guide her into the house. She hit the solid wood beside the door, crumpled to the porch.
Get inside. But she was dizzy, looked the wrong way. The vampire lifted himself off Jane. Jane…who held two pistols in her hands.
Charlie blinked, and now it was Dylan climbing to his feet, a startled expression on his face. “I wasn’t expecting him to teleport. A shame, that. His head would have left a nice message for Michael.”
Get inside. She crawled forward. Dylan’s shiny shoes appeared in front of her. He crouched, looked into her face, and his expression was so sympathetic, so familiar, that for an instant she wanted to reach out to him.
“A message that they need to receive, because they’ve been lying to you, Charlie,” he said quietly. “Let me take you to Jane, and we’ll get all of this sorted out. She can explain everything to you.”
God, how she wanted to believe him. She’d eaten dinner with this man, laughed with him, seen the love with which he’d treated her sister.
But Jake’s blood was on her face, her hands…her finger was bleeding. Get inside.
She staggered to her feet. “Move out of my way, Dylan. You can’t keep me from going in.”
“No, I can’t.” He stood, smooth as a snake rising from his coils. Cold hands gripped her arms from behind. “But Mr. Henderson, my associate, can. Let’s take a ride.”
His SUV appeared next to Jane’s car. Charlie kicked backward, heard a satisfying grunt bef
ore Henderson twisted her wrist up high, almost brought her to her knees.
Tears filled her eyes, and she walked forward obediently, the pea gravel rough under her feet. The SUV’s alarm chirped when Dylan pointed his key at it, and the blinkers flashed.
They were going to turn her into a vampire.
Fuck this. Ignoring the agony in her right arm, she slammed her left elbow into his belly.
She didn’t get another blow in. Henderson simply lifted her, squeezed her tight. Dylan turned, frowning.
“Mr. Henderson, I told you that if you hurt her at all, or if you touch her wrong, I wouldn’t be pleased.”
Charlie stared at him in disbelief, but the arms around her loosened. Not enough to get away, despite her struggles. Henderson shoved her into the backseat, took a place beside her. His hand covered the opposite door handle before she’d done more than move an inch toward it.
Dylan slid into the driver’s seat, turned to smile at her. “Now, that’s a good girl. You learned that you can’t beat him much more quickly than I thought you would.”
Terror was setting in, leaving her cold and shaking. “Where’s Jane?”
“Safe at home with me.”
She didn’t try to make sense of that; she’d never been good at word games, and she suspected a demon was a master. “Where’s Drifter?”
Dylan was right—she couldn’t physically defeat them, but Ethan could.
He would.
“McCabe? I don’t know.” Dylan’s eyes changed, the whites and irises glowing a brilliant scarlet. Horror crept into Charlie’s veins and began a morbid dance with fear. “But I hope he comes soon. I’ve got a message for him, too.”
Shape-shifting into Charlie’s form and waving at Jane through the window might have been a bit more successful if Jane hadn’t been so devoted to her work.
The light in her upstairs office was likely keeping her from seeing him when he did take the opportunity of darkness and a street empty of traffic to hover at her window. The remainder of the time he spent in the small fenced backyard, watching the demon.
Sammael didn’t appear all that concerned that a Guardian was outside the house; he lounged on the recliner in the unlit room, reading the Sunday paper, tipping it down now and then to cast a shit-eating grin at Ethan through the sliding glass door.
Until the grin slipped, and confusion flitted over his features, his focus moving behind Ethan.
Ethan spun around, caught Jake before he landed in a bleeding heap at his feet. His breath sucked in hard through his teeth when the sight, the smell hit him.
Oh, Christ Jesus. The kid’s head had been shot to hell.
Jake’s brain couldn’t be much good, but it must be functioning enough that he’d teleported here—his Gift manifesting in a moment of pain, terror.
A hard shake and roaring Jake’s name roused him. His lids opened a slit before closing again.
“Jake, goddammit! Is Charlie still in the house and the spell up?” Ethan’s voice roughened, tore at his throat. “Is Charlie in the house?”
No verbal response—but failure and urgency filled the kid’s psychic scent.
God Almighty.
A bone in Jake’s chest snapped as Ethan grabbed him up tight and launched into the air. Couldn’t leave the kid behind in the yard—Sammael would be out within a second to kill him.
“You get to a Healer!” Ethan had to shout over the wind, the torrent of his wings. “You anchor yourself to Michael or Dru, just like you did to me, and you teleport yourself to them. Or else you sink deep and stay underwater, and put your mental blocks up until it heals. You understand me?”
Jake’s psyche had barely shifted to indicate that he did understand when the lake appeared below them.
Ethan let him go, and was halfway across the expanse of the water before the kid hit the lake’s surface.
The scene that had taken place at the house was as clear as if had happened right in front of him. Jane’s car, the heavy footprints in the gravel that intercepted hers, the blood on the ground. Ethan bent and sniffed, just to make certain: demon blood.
He didn’t vanish any of the evidence. Human and vampire blood laying dead and heavy in his cache felt bad enough; demon and nosferatu blood tended to creep around his mind, like a bit of the creature still existed in the tiny drops.
And though he was certain Charlie had been in the vehicle whose tracks led away from the driveway, he took an extra second to check the interior of the house—Charlie wasn’t hiding in any of the rooms. The second set of symbols scratched in the frame near the front entrance and Charlie’s bloody handprint on the porch told their own story.
It was the same ploy Charlie had suggested—just showing up outside the window—but given a demon’s touch. She and Jake hadn’t had a chance.
But there might still be time to get to her. Sammael wouldn’t want to force the transformation on her, but wait until he’d been able to manipulate and convince her to accept it—whatever it took to convince her.
Most likely, that would be Jane.
Less than ten seconds after arriving at the house, Ethan was in the air again, flying over the northbound road and mentally testing the occupants of each car, forcing his rising panic into cold determination, sending his probes in an ever-widening search. If her mind was open, he’d find her quick. And if she was projecting…
He prayed it wouldn’t be pain.
Charlie couldn’t tell if Dylan’s glowing eyes watched her in the rearview mirror—there were no irises or pupils to judge the direction of his gaze.
The vampire sat next to her, blocking every attempt she’d made for the door or Dylan’s head. The demon was driving fast, but she’d have risked jumping out at speed to avoid what Henderson had in store for her.
His hunger was almost palpable, and when he wasn’t avoiding her fists and elbows, he stared at her hand, her neck.
“Mr. Henderson,” Dylan said. “Heal her. There’s no need to torture yourself before it’s time to transform her.”
Henderson’s cold hand clamped around her wrist. She kicked and pulled when he opened his own thumb against his fang, but couldn’t stop him from spreading his blood across the cut Jake had made on her finger.
She frantically wiped it off on her pants the second he let her go.
Dylan looked over his shoulder, flashed an affable smile. Then the blood disappeared from her clothes, Jake’s blood from her hands and face. “That won’t do anything to you, Charlotte, except heal it. Take a look.”
Charlie set her jaw, stared straight through the front window.
“Vampire blood can heal just about any injury. It can’t cure naturally occurring diseases or cancers, but it can give anyone suffering them some strength, take away some of the pain…so you can see why Jane might have such a vested interest in re-creating it, modifying it for medical use.” A hard note slipped under Dylan’s friendly tone. “Of course, maybe you can’t see why, considering that while she was caring for your father as he wasted away, you were knitting him a scarf from prison. Didn’t even get to the funeral, did you? But I bet that bright red yarn looked great in the casket.”
Bastard. Her lungs drew in tight on themselves, her throat closed.
“And Jane worries about you, Charlotte. A lot. She’s told me several times how she wondered if you’d pull your life together. Do you know how much pain you’ve caused your sister?”
She met Dylan’s eyes in the mirror. She’d already beaten herself up for all of this; she wouldn’t let him do it again. “Yes.”
His brows shot up. “Well, that’s good. And you should know how happy she is with what you’ve done in the last two years, though—” Dylan’s lips pursed, and he bobbed his head as if he was agreeing with himself. “No, I simply can’t see why she’s so pleased. And I think that if she’s going to worry, it should be about something worthwhile, not whether you’ll get your little degree and go on to live a little life.”
Charlie swallowed the hurt
and betrayal ripping at her chest. Of course Jane had spoken about her to Dylan. The betrayal here wasn’t Jane’s, but the demon’s.
“Don’t you want to be a part of something great? You and Jane, working together? Initially, Jane may not agree with the way I’ve gone about it—but once she sees the big picture, I think she’ll come around, too.” Dylan’s voice softened, and a whimsical smile curved his lips. “She’s a visionary. She’s what humans should be: intelligent, modest, kind…and dedicated to improving the world. She’s perfect.”
“Jane, perfect?” Charlie echoed wryly, trying not to expose her disgust. He really did love her sister—but it was so corrupted, ugly. “I don’t think so. Live with her a few more years, Dylan.”
“I intend to.”
He slowed for a red light and Charlie jumped for the door again, but Henderson yanked her back against his side. They were nearing the bridge that would take them back to Seattle. Once they were in the city, it would be more difficult for Ethan to track them down.
Did Ethan even know that she was gone? He had those psychic abilities, and had said she projected…Could he feel her terror now?
And he’d also told her he could get images if she thought them hard enough and wanted him to see them.
Charlie closed her eyes, pictured the bridge, and focused on him seeing it with everything in her.
“That’s a good idea, Charlotte. It’ll bring him right to us. I’ll add my own to it.”
Henderson stiffened beside her, and Dylan laughed softly.
“Mr. Henderson is a vampire, so he can’t see what I’m sending, but he gets the feel of it. And I’m afraid it’s making his bloodlust worse. Isn’t that true, Mr. Henderson?”
“Yes.” The response was strained.
Charlie turned her head, really looked at Henderson for the first time. A little pale, yes—but otherwise normal in just about every way. Khaki pants, an unbuttoned cotton shirt over a Henley, deck shoes. His light brown hair and soft green eyes might have been pretty if she’d seen them across the bar.
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