She was lost in thought trying to gather wool from sheep as naked as mole rats when Winters drew a gleam of black out from under his coat. He fired the gun before she processed that it had been a gun and not his knife he’d been prepared to draw all night.
She actually saw the bullet leave the barrel and felt the displaced air as it passed close to her face. She knew when it collided with its target because at the same time her heart paused in a horribly familiar stutter.
Dillon.
He was several feet behind her. She whirled in time to see the impact of the projectile as it hit his chest. She staggered. He jerked and went down backwards, knocked off his feet.
She didn’t have time to wonder what kind of Dirty-Harry gun Winters must have used to get that effect. She only had time to realize that Winters had the upper hand.
The hole in her Maker’s chest was a smoking crater and, for the first time, his face held a tortured grimace instead of sexy seduction.
But, he wasn’t ash yet.
Her heart began to beat, irregular but strong, as Winters approached. The gun, the huge gun, was in one hand and his familiar blade was in the other.
Dillon didn’t move as Winters aimed the gun and brandished the knife.
Holly did.
Her body was smaller than Dillon’s, but it must have made one hell of an impossible-to-miss target when she stepped in the path of the next bullet. Winters shouted and lifted his arm and still the shot grazed her upper arm with a sudden searing pain.
She was knocked sideways, but immediately straightened. Without thought, she backhanded Winters. He was a big man, but she wasn’t just Holly Spinnaker anymore. His body jerked sideways as if she was Muhammad Ali and his wooden blade fell to the ground. His face snapped to the side and it took several long agonizing moments for him to slowly bring it back around. Blood welled up from the corner of his mouth.
“Get back,” Holly warned. She spread her arms to make herself a better shield.
Dillon moaned behind her.
Winters was six feet plus some inches of determined executioner and she was five feet plus some inches of hurting, confused, scared monster, but the one thing she knew was if Dillon died so would any hope she had of finding her mother.
“I’m going to finish this here and now.”
Holly was transfixed by the swelling of Winters’ lip. She didn’t look up to meet his eyes. She had hit him. She had made him bleed.
“What about my mother?”
A sluggish flow of blood oozed down her arm. It didn’t justify the blood on Winters’ lips, but it did distract her from the guilt. Her arm throbbed hotly, a horrible reminder that she was losing what little bit of heat she had.
He had shot her. The last few nights of violence hadn’t prepared her for the suddenness of this fight.
“He has to die now. We can’t play his games. He’ll win, eventually. It has to stop.”
Holly trembled. Her heart was finally starting to establish a rhythm, but her arm ached and she was going into shock. Her skin tingled. Her breathing was shallow. Getting shot by a ginormous gun was as traumatic as getting bitten by a vampire. The fact that Winters had fired the bullet made it almost worse. No matter how much she tried to see him as a threat, she hadn’t seen him that way, not really.
She refused to waver. He aimed the gun again. This time he intentionally aimed it at her.
“Move.”
Holly thought about fangs and vampire strength and speed. She had all of those weapons at her disposal and yet some part of her wanted to give Winters a chance to decide not to shoot.
She looked into his eyes and tried to see some softness there. She tried to see some spark of belief in her.
In the end, she didn’t have to choose between violence and faith. Dillon chose for her.
He rose up—not like a wounded man regaining consciousness—more like an acrobat who accidentally fell during the Olympics. He leapt to his feet and smoothed the frosted waves of his hair. He flicked the folds of his leather coat back into place and brushed off graveyard dust as if she and Winters weren’t locked in an unbearable standoff several feet away.
“Damn fine aim from more than ten paces, my friend, but not fine enough.”
Dillon tossed back his impossibly sun-kissed hair and lifted his chin. He looked at Holly not Winters. A slow smile began to grow. The corners of his mouth tilted with it. A woman with less self-control than Holly might have been fascinated by the little wrinkles of mirth that arose around his lips. She might have been distracted from a life and death moment of fear and betrayal by the heat of seduction rekindling in his eyes.
Holly told herself she was not that woman even while she was struck by the way Dillon reclaimed his vitality right before her eyes. The moon loved his angular jaw and it highlighted his features as if it was directed by dedicated stagehands and he was their favorite star.
Holly’s arms were still outstretched and her cheeks began to burn as Dillon took in the scene of her coming between him and the vampire hunter. Despite the dust on his clothes and the charred flesh on his chest, he looked pleased. Tickled even. His eyes flashed a wicked I-told-you-so glance at Winters, but they came back quickly to flash a more intimate invitation for her alone.
“You are somethin’ else, darlin’. Looks like I owe you.” Dillon paused and narrowed his eyes. He had seen the blood on her arm. He no longer looked pleased. In fact, he looked so angry that Holly tensed. She wasn’t sure, but she was fairly certain that she saw Winters’ death in Dillon’s eyes. The gun wouldn’t matter and neither would the blade, that’s the promise she saw burning in her Maker’s sky-blue eyes. How had she ever thought they were icy?
He took a step and Holly knew she wouldn’t let Winters die, not even for her mother, but before she could realign herself with the vampire hunter Dillon swayed.
He righted himself quickly, but not before Holly saw surprise flow across his features.
For the first time, his blue gaze sought out Winters over her shoulder and did more than glance over him.
“We’ll continue this another time,” he vowed. It was said man to man as if he acknowledged Winters as an actual entity to be dealt with for the first time. In wounding Dillon, Winters had attracted the attention of a powerful adversary. In wounding her, he had sealed his fate. Holly knew her Maker too well. She heard his plan for Winters in each parting word.
Winters aimed his gun at Dillon’s back, but he didn’t fire because, once again, even wounded, the vampire was gone in an instant.
Holly lowered her arms and walked back toward the church. She didn’t look at Winters. She didn’t speak. Her arm throbbed and so did her nerves. She would have tried to stop Dillon. She wasn’t sure if she would have been anything more than a gnat in his path.
She wasn’t tracking Winters with her senses. She was distracted. That’s why a hint of spice didn’t warn her before she was grabbed and turned and pinned against the hard rock wall of the chapel.
“You don’t get to say who lives or who dies. You don’t get to decide when or where or how. I’m the vampire hunter. And. I. Will. Kill. When. I. Please.”
He punctuated each word by pressing her harder against the wall. His face was millimeters from hers. His entire body was a lean and muscled instrument of intimidation. The tension in him spoke of fury and inevitability and of…pain?
Holly tilted her chin back and met Winters’ gaze. His brown eyes had become familiar at this point, but they were darker than she’d ever seen them, like espresso brewed at midnight. Those eyes didn’t shout at her about jeopardizing a mission. They held darker, deeper accusations about trust and betrayal.
“I’m sorry I hurt you.” She forced herself to watch as a trickle of blood trailed down the side of his jaw. “But I can’t stand by and let you kill the one chance I have of finding my mother.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of you being a pile of ash with no say in the matter.”
As usual, his fl
ip words were deadly serious. Any ground she had gained in the past nights of being together and working together was lost. She was back to square one. He looked like he wanted to knife her and be done with it.
Guilt aside. The hurt in his coffee-colored eyes aside. She was so not going to die right now after making it this far.
Holly shifted her focus from the cut on his lip to the tension in his body. She could feel every flexed muscle from his chest to his heels as he pressed her against the wall. In fact, if Dillon wasn’t part of the equation, if she could ignore the gun and the pain in her arm and the look in Winters’ eyes, the situation wouldn’t be unpleasant. Not at all.
Her skin was warmed by his. Her lips were close enough to feel each teasing breath from his. And certain parts of him felt almost ready to forget why they were pressed close and focus on what a man and a woman did when they stood pressed so closely together.
Her shift in focus didn’t go unnoticed. His grip on her shoulders loosened and his body temperature went up a perceptible degree.
“I’ll kill Dillon and your mother, Holly.” He didn’t say “and you”, but the threat was there between them. “Don’t get in the way again or…” Her time would come sooner rather than later she assumed.
Suddenly, Holly was angry. He was determined the physical attraction between them was some kind of supernatural thrall. He was determined that she was one dangerous-slash-sexy cowboy’s call away from becoming a willing slave. And he was determined to kill her mother. The first two might be up for debate, but the last was not.
“Don’t threaten her again,” she warned.
Holly’s new body was almost immune to the pressure he was exerting to hold her in place. She was held because she allowed it. Just as she allowed him to dig his fingers into her shoulders. Her pale skin would bruise, but those marks would be gone in seconds—unlike Winters’ lip she had busted, which would accuse her of treachery for days.
Still, she would add to the busted lip if she had to. She would crush him if she had to.
“So, you don’t care if I threaten Dillon even though you risked your ‘life’ for him?”
If it weren’t for her mother, she would have let him kill Dillon… Please God. She had to believe it. Winters could doubt all he wanted to, but she had to believe she was still in control.
“For my mother,” she asserted.
“She’s worse than dead by now.”
“No.” Amazingly, her defiant refusal to give up on her mother didn’t send him over the edge. The polished knife was on the ground several feet away, a dormant but threatening gleam.
His eyes were still dark, but mysterious now, unreadable.
Holly was beginning to ache. They were locked in a tense pause with death and betrayal between them, but every nerve, every cell in her body longed to relax against him. It wasn’t vampire mojo. It was good old-fashioned exhaustion. The kind that made you look for a soft, strong place to fall.
She didn’t want to champion Dillon. She didn’t want to hurt Winters. She didn’t want to fight the good fight all the way to her mother’s side only to find a monster she didn’t recognize.
She wanted to be comforted in a lover’s arms. She wanted laughter and sunshine and she wanted, just once, to see Winters smile.
It wasn’t going to happen.
Holly pushed Winters away. She ignored his surprise. She ignored his dive for the knife. She tried to ignore that her arm was all better save for a hint of a twinge especially when Winters’ acrobatics to drop down, retrieve his blade and roll to his feet had caused fresh blood to well up on his lips.
“All I have left is my mother.”
It wasn’t an accusation or a statement about his refusal to care. It was bare, bald fact.
“Dillon—” he began.
“I don’t have Dillon or won’t have him, anyway. Don’t you get it? I’ve said no to him again and again. I’m not giving in…ever. Quit assuming I’m a minion in the making.”
She wanted to say “don’t give up on me”, but that was ridiculous because he’d never believed in her in the first place. She had to believe and she would. All by herself.
It was almost easy to ignore the blade as she turned her back on him. It was almost easy to walk away. If only she could forget his smudged and bloody face. If only the ache in his eyes didn’t follow her like a haunting shadow she couldn’t leave behind.
***
Winters shook with unexpended adrenaline. His body had been ready to sink the blade, but he hadn’t. He still felt the sinking sensation in his stomach when he remembered the bullet ripping through Holly’s arm. He should have felt disappointment that he had missed her heart. He didn’t. He’d been glad. And more freaked than ever.
What more did she have to do to deserve it? She was currently vowing to save one vampire and had taken a hit meant for another. And that damned fiend had loved every minute of it as if Holly was his Juliet proclaiming her love.
Winters pulled his hand out of the hotel wall where he had punched through plaster. If only the wall was Dillon’s chest and the white powder in his fist was the beast’s black heart.
He should have ashed her instantly for what she had done. Instead, he’d held her…well, yeah, hard…but he’d held her and worried about her arm and Dillon’s hold over her and his body’s reaction to her closeness.
Thank God he hadn’t kissed her. It meant he still had some control. Before she pushed him away, he had wanted to. He had wanted to stake his claim on her lips. No pun intended. He had wanted to erase the taste of Dillon from her memory. Eradicate it. To show that he was here and now and vampires be damned.
Only she was a vampire. And there was the rub.
Feeling for a vampire meant he was losing it.
Winters looked at the .45 on the nightstand. The gun had almost worked. He had tasted hot triumph laced with gunpowder when his shot had knocked Dillon off his feet. When Holly had jumped in front of the second shot, he’d tasted dread and coconut.
He gingerly moved the side of his mouth and cringed. Holly was alone and vulnerable and hurting. She also had a wicked backhand slap that had his ears still ringing.
For her mother, she’d said.
But Winters couldn’t shake the feeling of betrayal or the memory of Dillon’s look. The freak had looked smug. The vampire had assumed her help was a gesture of affection, a sign that she was his. Was he ignoring the obvious? The vampire might be right. Thus, the handful of wall in his fingers.
He had learned two things tonight.
Holly couldn’t be trusted. He would have sworn that was a fact he was already aware of, but he had to admit he’d been relaxing his guard around her. She wasn’t an ally. She wasn’t a friend. She sure as hell wasn’t someone he should be kissing. And tonight she had reminded him of that.
And the gun had almost worked. The beauty and simplicity and poetic justice of his knife notwithstanding…the gun had almost worked.
He thought if he had pierced the vampire’s heart he would have been rewarded with ash.
Holly had given him the idea. She had a reflection. She crossed rivers. Tonight, she had even walked into the church and crossed herself in front of the altar. You had to figure it would be stupid to operate solely based on old superstitions.
He had to admit the magnum felt a whole lot more lethal in his hand then a bottle of holy water would.
Of course, if he was prepared to consider that vampires weren’t supernatural, then where did that leave him on the whole in-the-thrall-of-a-vampire front. He’d kissed Holly once. He’d thought about it more. If it wasn’t a spell of some kind, then what was it?
He’d been thinking of it as thrall or vampire mojo, but maybe it was as simple as mutant pheromones or hypnosis. Or maybe he just had the hots for a monster.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if some fairy godmother had flown down from the North Pole and gifted Holly with a Siren’s call. She was dangerous. She had power. He was a vampire hunter an
d she was a vampire. End of story.
Only why was he pretty certain he would die before he let Dillon take her away?
Knight in shining armor? No, he was sure knights didn’t go around shooting the women they…championed. Still, after a very long night, he was energized.
The gun had almost worked.
At this point, almost seemed like success.
Chapter Thirteen
Holly watched her blood—Dillon’s? Winters’?—swirl down the drain. She was too tired to think of Psycho. Her arm was tender, but there was only a pink slash where the bullet had tracked.
Winters had shot her and some of her life was literally draining away. She was too numb to care.
She had saved Dillon.
The monster who had killed her sister and her father. The monster who had left her with a twisted half-life. The monster who had stolen her mother.
If she hadn’t stopped Winters, her mother would be lost and she would be left with nothing but pain and unanswered questions. It didn’t make it okay. She felt like a traitor. Dread came in to fill up the empty spaces the blood had left behind because she didn’t know if it had only been for her mother’s sake.
Her head accepted that rationalization, but her heart sighed and the whisper in her chest sounded suspiciously like Dillon’s name.
The sight of her Maker on the ground and helpless should have been cause for celebration, but she suspected her cells would have mourned if he had died. Dillon had power over her body. She wished it was magic…something she could scoff at. Unfortunately, it seemed much more real. A tangible, physical threat as solid as a noose around her neck.
Holly sucked in a shaky breath and let it out as she washed. She wanted to go to Winters and beg him to understand, to forgive her for saving Dillon. Problem was, she couldn’t quite forgive herself.
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