Nightshade (1)

by Michelle Rowen

Declan said he didn’t hit human women. True to his word, he hadn’t actually hit her yet, but was simply deflecting her blows.

  On the ground nearby was Declan’s gun from where it had been knocked out of his grip. I reached down and grabbed it.

  “Not so fast.” The second man was in front of me. Before I could aim, he backhanded me and pain exploded in my face. He quickly retrieved the gun after it flew out of my grip.

  I thought he was going to shoot me, but instead he turned, aimed, and shot Declan in the back.

  I screamed and covered my mouth with my hand in horror.

  Declan buckled and hit the ground, landing hard on his stomach. The man went over to him and ground the sole of his shoe against the bullet wound. Declan let out a harsh sound of pain, his face smashed against the gravel. It wasn’t a scream and it wasn’t a plea to stop. More like a growl of warning from a dangerous, injured animal.

  “His name was Smith, that guy you just shot,” the blood servant hissed. “His life was worth more than some stupid formula. His life was worth more than some stupid fucking hunter and his blond bitch.” He pressed his heel harder against the bloody wound. “Now, that formula? Where is it?”

  “Fuck you,” Declan ground out.

  “That’s not a very polite answer.”

  “Fuck you, please.”

  “Maybe we’ll see what your girlfriend has to say. A little torture works nicely on most women. Makes them squeal quicker than a scarred, brainwashed piece of shit like you would.”

  “Leave her alone or you’ll regret it.”

  “Nah, don’t think I will.” The man removed the pressure from the bloody wound only long enough to bring his boot down hard on Declan’s head several times—hard enough, in my opinion, to kill him. The woman drew close enough to kick him in his stomach, then once in his face.

  Declan’s form was now very still.

  Then they turned toward me.

  Had they killed him? I didn’t know how anyone could take that much damage and live. I hated him, hated what he’d dragged me into, but the thought that he was dead scared me deeply. After all, he’d been the only thing standing between me and ... these two.

  “Sorry about that,” the woman said, a smile touching her lips that turned her previously feral expression into something much more attractive. “But when you get mixed up with a hunter, especially one who works for Carson Reyes and his people, you’re in for a bad time all around.”

  Carson Reyes. That had to be Declan’s father.

  The man drew closer so he could grab the back of my hair to hold me in place.

  “So, when did you meet scar-face over there?” the woman asked pleasantly. Seemed a major contrast to the other one pulling my hair and gawking at me like I was his latest science project.

  “T-today,” I stammered. “He grabbed me ... kidnapped me ... after what happened with the man he killed.”

  I didn’t have to give all the details, just enough so they’d think I was being completely helpful and ready to talk. Which I was. I’d be happy to tell them everything except what had happened to the formula.

  The man looked at my injured neck with interest, but nothing passed over his expression that made me think he’d figure it out. They weren’t detectives here to figure out a mystery, they were just muscle ready to kill to get what they were after.

  It wasn’t all that reassuring, actually.

  “You don’t seem like his type,” the woman said. “I would have assumed the hunter likes them way sluttier than you look. Someone he can get a blow job for a twenty without her complaining too much about his nasty looks, you know?” She slid her hand over my shoulder and grabbed the back of my long-sleeved shirt to look at the label inside. “Calvin Klein. I thought you looked like a rich bitch.”

  “I’m not rich. It was a gift.”

  “From who?”

  “My roommate. She was going to get rid of it, give it to charity, but she gave it to me instead.”

  She grinned. “Does that make you a charity case?”

  I looked at Declan, hoping to see him rise to his feet, shake it off, and come to my rescue like some sort of battle-damaged knight in shining armor. Obviously I was still reaching for that delusional silver lining when it had already rusted and chipped away.

  Declan didn’t move.

  A bullet that possibly severed his spinal cord, a stiletto heel stab wound to the shoulder, and thirty seconds of having his head used as a soccer ball weren’t exactly things that could just be shaken off. Or lived through, for that matter.

  I was totally on my own now.

  I wouldn’t be taken to see his father, Carson. That had been held up as my only chance to get out of this alive—for him to somehow extract the poison from my blood. Something a regular hospital couldn’t do for me.

  But if Declan was dead, that wouldn’t happen. I had no idea where his father was.

  Then again, there was a strong possibility that these servants would do the same thing to me as they’d done to Declan. Or worse.

  The poison in me right now was currently the least of my worries.

  My shirt. We were talking about my blue silk shirt.

  “When you don’t make a lot of money, you need to go on the barter system,” I said. “My friends and I trade all the time.”

  “We can barter, too.” The man used his free hand, the one that wasn’t twisted painfully into my hair, to trail down the line of buttons on the front of my secondhand designer shirt. His fingers then shifted to graze over my left breast. I repressed a shudder.

  I looked at the woman, hoping to see some sort of female kinship there that she wanted to help me, but there was only a tolerant and slightly bored look on her face as she watched her friend feel me up.

  She pulled a knife with an ivory handle from inside of her leather jacket and traced the tip of it lightly over my throat. “Talk to us about the formula.”

  “I know where it is,” I said, blinking back my tears of panic.

  The man’s hand stilled. “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  They exchanged a look.

  “Where is it?” the woman asked.

  “I give it to you and you let me go. You don’t hurt me. And you tell your buddy to keep his fucking paws off me.”

  She appeared to mull that over. “You killed our friend.”

  “I didn’t kill him. Besides, you killed my—” I looked over at Declan and felt my chest tighten to see how much of him was now covered in blood. “You killed him. Doesn’t that make us even?”

  “He’s still breathing.” She flicked a glance in his direction. “But I doubt if he’ll wake up.”

  I cringed. “So we’re even.”

  “You prove to us you know where it is,” the woman said, stroking a piece of blond hair back from my forehead and tucking it behind my ear. “And I promise we’ll let you live.”

  “Without torturing me. Or hurting me.”

  “No need to torture or hurt you if you have what we’re looking for. We’re not heathens.”

  She sounded sincere. Maybe that was only wishful thinking.

  “Let her go, Davis,” she said and took a step back. “Time to cut our losses and get what we came here for.”

  His expression soured. “Matthias won’t give a shit that Smith gave his life to retrieve the formula.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Let her go. Now.”

  Davis leered at me for another moment before he finally released me. “Fine. Have it your way.”

  “You’re going to destroy it?” I asked. “The formula?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at both of them warily, expecting them to hurt me, but they didn’t. The woman held the knife like she knew how to use it, though. The man just stood next to her with his arms crossed, watching every move I made.

  Then I walked toward Declan’s unconscious form and went down on my knees next to him. His face was bloody. The eye patch had shifted so I could see the scarred, hollow socket
where his eye used to be. For some reason, a flicker of sympathy went through me at that, rather than disgust. I pulled the eye patch back into its proper place.

  Then I patted him down and located the case containing his serum in the left pocket of his jeans. Not too many other places for him to hide it. I looked it over to see that it had no markings, nothing that might give away what it really was.

  I pressed my finger against the side of his throat and was surprised to feel a weak heartbeat. He looked like he should be dead, but he wasn’t. Not yet, anyway.

  I stood up again and faced the servants, holding the black case out to them. “Here.”

  “He actually had it on him?” the woman asked with disbelief.

  “He took it from Anderson before he shot him. Didn’t have enough time to hide it anywhere.”

  She nodded at the man and he snatched it away from me, unzipping it to look at the pen needle and unmarked vials of clear liquid inside.

  I kept my face as emotionless as possible. I was sure that I looked terrified, but that wouldn’t give me away as a liar.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Five samples left. Anderson said what he had today was all there was.”

  “Give it to me.” The woman held out her hand and the man gave her the case. Her gaze moved over the contents slowly before she zipped it up and tucked it into her jacket pocket. She glanced over to where Declan lay. “He took you as a hostage to get out of San Diego, right?”

  I nodded shakily. They believed Declan’s serum was the formula. I held my breath.

  “Hunters have their own rules. This one,” she nodded at Declan’s still form, “I’ve heard things about him. He’s cold-blooded, even more so than the rest of them are, and some think he’s undefeatable. Doesn’t look like it to me. Maybe his reputation was only something created to put fear into the hearts of vampires and their clan.”

  “Is that who you are? Part of the ... vampire’s clan?”

  “I’m part of Matthias’s clan. He takes care of me. And in return, I take care of him by eliminating any threat like this poison.” Her expression soured.

  “But ... but you’re human.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re not a vampire.”

  “Not yet. Matthias doesn’t give eternal life to just anyone. We earn it by choosing to give our human lives over to him without question.” She smiled and stroked the side of my face. “You don’t understand, of course. But if you met him, you too would want to give him everything you have to give—your body, your blood, your very life.”

  I highly doubted that. “I don’t want to meet him.”

  “Pray that you don’t. He’d devour a little thing like you in minutes.”

  I forced myself not to look away from her. “You promised you’d let me live if I gave you the formula. Well, I gave it to you.”

  “You did. Thank you.” She glanced down at Declan again before returning her gaze to mine. “There was a time when I was a lot like you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I was an ordinary woman who couldn’t defend herself. One who had to stand behind a strong man for fear of being hurt.” She leaned closer to me. “Strong human men are a myth. They’re all weak, selfish, and can be manipulated. Or killed.” I felt something cold touch my hand. It was her ivory-hilted knife. “Take this.”

  “Why are you giving me this?”

  “This man took you.” She touched my neck, sliding her fingertips along my bruised skin. “He hurt you. That’s unforgiveable. This weapon is for when you wake up. You can kill him and take your power back by spilling his blood. A symbolic gesture. One that could make you worthy of being in Matthias’s presence, if you ever choose to be.”

  I looked at her, my eyes wide. “When I wake up? Wake up from what?”

  She moved out of the way to make room for Davis who, with a leering smile, looked me up and down. I braced myself for what he was going to do and held the knife tighter in my grip as I prepared to defend myself.

  However, the gun came so fast I couldn’t duck it. The blow against my temple from the cold steel was more than enough to knock me out cold.

  5

  SON OF A BITCH.

  Gravel bit painfully against the side of my face. It was the first thing I noticed when I came to. My head felt like it had spent some quality time in a tightening vise. Or, possibly, hell itself.

  I’d never been hit like that before. Never. And the sharp backhand from earlier had been the first time a man had struck me in my entire life. Two in one day, from the same asshole, and that didn’t even include being shoved around by Declan already. That was entirely enough abuse for a Tuesday afternoon.

  I reached up to touch my mouth, expecting to feel shattered teeth, but they all seemed to be intact and not loose or in danger of falling out. I touched the rest of my face to find everything still in the right place. Pushing myself up to a sitting position, although a bout of dizziness slowed me down, I shielded my eyes and looked up. The sun seemed to be as high and bright as it had been before. However, enough time had passed that the blood servants were nowhere to be seen.

  They hadn’t killed me. No, instead they’d knocked me out. Anger flared inside me at the thought. It was hardly necessary. It wasn’t as if I would have chased after their car like an enthusiastic golden retriever.

  I looked around. Still next to the abandoned house, about fifty feet away from the useless old black car with its newly flat tires. The dirt road was beyond the gas station, although I couldn’t see it from my current vantage point. To the right of me lay the body of the bald man the servants called Smith—they’d left him behind. According to the bullet wound in his head, which bore a striking resemblance to the one Anderson received earlier in the day, he wasn’t getting up anytime soon.

  To the left of me, Declan was sprawled in the same broken position he’d been in earlier. Still unconscious.

  I crawled toward him clutching the knife Cruella de Vil had given me and checked his pulse again. It seemed even stronger than before. His shoulder was bloody from where I’d witnessed Cruella’s heel going in. I ran my left hand over the pockets of his bloodstained jeans searching for his phone—there was another deep injury on his hip causing the massive blood flow there. When I located it, which probably would have been easier if I wasn’t dealing with a scrambled brain, I pulled it out, only to find that it was broken.

  “Fuck!” I yelled and threw the useless gadget away from me.

  No phone. So much for calling in the good guys to save me.

  At that moment I wanted to kill him—to do exactly what Cruella told me to do and plunge this knife right into his heart.

  Suddenly, Declan’s fingers wrapped around my wrist and I shrieked, looking down at him with shock. His blood-shot gray eye was barely open, but it was trained on me. His lips moved a little. I couldn’t hear anything for a moment.

  “My ... serum ...”

  I tried to pull away from him, but he held on to me tightly. My hand was slippery with his blood. “What about it?”

  “I need more time ... to recover. You’ll have to inject me when ... my alarm ... goes off. You ... have to.”

  “I don’t have to do anything.” I clenched my shiny new knife tighter.

  “You need to get me out of the sun.”

  “Or what? You’ll melt?”

  “No. It prevents me from healing. It weakens me. And ... and I need water. A lot of it. Now.”

  Demanding little bastard, wasn’t he?

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him his serum was long gone, on its way back to Matthias, the goddamned vampire king of California, but his eye closed again and his grip loosened enough for me to scramble back from him and get to my feet.

  I scanned the surroundings and wasn’t happy with what I saw. In other words, not a hell of a lot. I half expected tumbleweed to blow by in this one-gas-station ghost town. Was it only a few miles back to the highway? I could
flag someone down. We weren’t that far away from civilization. My ankle was still tender from when Declan had thrown me into the front seat of his now-useless car, but it wasn’t that bad. I could manage.

  Without looking at Declan again, I started walking away from him and the man he’d killed.

  “You can’t leave me here,” he called after me in a pained, raspy voice. “You can’t go to a regular hospital. You need me if you want to live.”

  I ignored him. My head throbbed, my neck ached, and my veins still felt strange, stretched, and tender. But I was still breathing. My heart was still beating. And, despite what he said, a hospital sounded like a wonderful destination.

  Poison, I’d tell them. I’d been poisoned. I didn’t know with what exactly—no need to mention the vampire thing—but my life was in jeopardy. Please help me.

  And they’d help me. Of course they would. That’s what hospitals were for.

  Declan had to be lying when he said that doctors couldn’t help me.

  My health insurance was paid up. May as well make use of it.

  I got to the road. Which way had we come from? The gas station—now that I gave it a good look, didn’t seem like it had been open for business for half a century—had been on our right when we’d arrived. So I turned left. The heat from the sun beat into me.

  Declan was going to bleed to death.

  Good. He deserved it.

  I wouldn’t allow myself to feel any guilt about my decision to leave him there. Still, the unwelcome emotion gnawed at my insides.

  What else was I supposed to do? It was his own fault he was in this situation. If he’d given them the formula when they’d asked for it, he wouldn’t have gotten the life beaten out of him.

  Wait a minute.

  I stopped walking for a moment. No, that wasn’t right. I was confusing his serum with the formula. It wasn’t the same thing.

  Declan hadn’t told them the poison was in me, which would have been the truthful answer. He’d told me to get behind him and then for me to get to safety just before things went downhill. He said he was going to protect me.

  Protect me. Right. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.