“I will allow you one last chance to come with me willingly, Chloe. It will spare your friends if you do.”
“Tell him where to stick it.” Christina pushed me from behind.
Before I could say anything, we were rushed by the vampires. I rushed forward too, blowing the fire out like flame throwers and screaming from a place deep down inside where I kept the rage of my mother’s death. Drew and Gavin stood on either side of me. Gunshots filled the air while they shot at Constance and Vincent. Christina stayed behind me. I wasn’t sure if her strategy was to stay hidden or if something else was going on, but it was okay. She was safe behind me.
That's when I felt it: the burning, ripping flesh when a bullet tore into my calf.
“Oh, my god!” I screamed in pain and fell to the ground.
My flames extinguished, and I lay there in pain. It felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. “I’ve been shot! He shot me!” I screamed.
Behind me, Christina shot back at him while I desperately reached for my gun. I knew I could hit him in the heart. I never missed.
“Gavin’s hit!” I heard Drew yell.
“Damn it!” Christina hollered. “I’m out of ammo.”
Finally, my hands wrapped around the handle of the gun in my waistband. God, my leg hurt. I aimed at Trevor, ready to take the shot, but before I could pull the trigger, a loud blast rocked the air, sounding above all the other gunshots, and Trevor crumpled to the ground.
Suddenly, the atmosphere was static. Silence interrupted the chaos, and every single person looked to see where the shot had come from. There, behind the open door of the Jeep, stood Alice with a shotgun still smoking in her hands. Her blank blue eyes were wide with shock and fear. Her face was pale beneath the dirt from the woods and Oscar’s blood. We watched as her fingers released the shotgun, and it fell to the ground with an anticlimactic clank. Tears slid from her eyes.
UV shotgun shells.
Everyone’s eyes were glued, unbelieving, on Trevor’s body as it convulsed and a white light attempted to eat at his body, but his aged vampire blood repelled it. I’m pretty sure, had it been one of our bullets, he wouldn’t even have noticed, but the shotgun shell held more UV than most ammo.
Vincent was the first to come back from the pause. In a flash, he had Drew’s throat in his grasp. I shot him in the head.
Drew, covered in vampire brains and blood, kicked Vincent’s falling body with his boot.
“Ugh!” he cried out. He kicked and then shot him twice in the heart. Just to be sure he was dead, Drew reached back over his shoulder and produced a wooden stake that he rammed through Vincent’s chest.
White light emanated from the holes in Vincent as he eroded. The UV wove its way through his body, eating it away. He must not have been nearly as old as Trevor.
I fell back onto the cement and wondered where Gavin was shot, having completely forgotten about Constance until Christina jumped over the top of me and slammed her body into the hard surface of the female vampire. They both tumbled to the ground.
I watched, weakly trying to get a bead on Constance, but Christina kept getting in the way. Constance was much stronger than Christina, so of course, she pinned her right away. Christina growled at her like a pit bull. “Get off me, you nasty whore!”
Instead of using her hands to force Constance off of her, she reached downward toward her thigh and pulled out a large, lethal-looking knife and slammed it into Constance’s side, sliding it right between her ribs. Constance screamed and released Christina to frantically swipe at the knife lodged in her. Christina rolled away from the crazy vampire, grabbing her knife on the way. I finally had a shot at Constance, and I took it, straight to the heart.
Christina was on her feet already and bolted toward the last vampire, who fought with Drew. Every time the vampire made a grab or tried to hit him, Drew deflected it. Christina took a flying leap at the vampire and landed on his back. She planted her blade into the side of his body, in almost the same spot on him where she’d stabbed Constance.
She was good with a knife.
Though my attention was focused on the scene before me, oh, my god, the pain was awful.
“Drew!” I cried out, then rolled over and tried to stand. I made it part of the way up but fell back down. I didn’t even want to look at the wound. There was blood everywhere.
“Chloe, come on. We have to go.” Christina stalked over to me.
“I need my gun,” I said between clenched teeth. “Oscar…”
Everything was fuzzy.
“Who the hell is Oscar?”
“In the woods.” I pointed. “Alice.”
“Oh, there’s another guy in the woods. She knelt and wiped blood off of her knife using my jeans and then sheathed it.
“Thanks a lot, you hooker,” I moaned through the pain. “I need to go to the hospital.”
“Gavin needs to get there more than you,” she said. “Now get your ass in the Jeep.”
Yeah, there was absolutely no reason why she would want to help me. Just because we killed vampires together didn’t mean we had to like each other. It just meant that we hated someone else more than we hated each other. Even so, she went to Trevor’s UV-scorched body to retrieve my gun for me.
I stared at Trevor for a moment as Christina ran over to him and picked up my gun from the ground near his hands. It was so quiet. His black clothes were stark against his white skin, and they were scorched where the UV had tried to burn him away.
Christina stood and held the gun in her left hand, and then drew a knife from her sheath with her right. She lifted the large knife high into the air above his heart. She drew a deep breath, but I called out before she plunged it down.
“Don’t…” I don’t know what I was thinking. We needed to be sure he was dead, or deader, since he was already undead.
“Damn it, Chloe!” Her eyes moved back and forth from Trevor to me, her knife still raised.
“I’m sorry…” I called back. “He was my father.”
I heard her grumble while she lowered her knife and slammed it into the sheath. She stomped over to where I still lay on the ground and threw the gun down onto the pavement next to me. “You and I are going to talk about this later. We always make sure.”
I nodded and reached for my gun. When I looked up at her, I couldn’t look her in the eyes; they were so accusatory. I was a horrible vampire hunter, and the tears that slid down my cheeks when I stared at Trevor’s body proved it.
But he was my father. It shouldn't have, but it did make a difference.
Christina rushed back to the body and grasped his feet with both hands so she could drag him out of the road while I twisted around and tried to get up. I didn’t want to look at her dragging his body, but I did. It's a damned good thing I did, too.
Trevor’s hand twitched.
“Christina!” I called out. It was too late. Trevor’s grotesquely burnt arm flew upward so fast he had Christina’s throat in his grasp before she could move an inch. I let out a blood-curdling yell while I watched her try to scream, or even to just breathe..
“Drew, help!” I screamed and fumbled for my gun. I had it engaged within seconds. I sat up and shot him in the arm. The shot was enough to force his fingers let go, and after releasing an animal growl, he curled back his lips and bared his fangs, hissing at the inconvenience the gunshot wound had caused.
Drew ran and threw himself on top of Trevor, trying to pin him with his legs.
“Get the chains out of the Jeep!” he shouted.
“What do we need chains for?” I called, forgetting the pain amidst a rush of adrenaline and jumping up to help him hold Trevor. I sat on his legs to avoid looking at his monstrous face. That was not the face I’d come to know Trevor by… it was hideous, inhuman.
“The chains are silver; they can help hold vampires.”
“What? Like in True Blood! That stuff is real?”
Just then, Trevor lurched forward, tumbling us both to the ground.
He stood and sped toward me, eyes bulging, fangs bared. He didn’t even make it a few steps in my direction before I saw a chain whip by my face and wrap around him.
Shocked, having totally expected to be eaten by Daddy Dearest, I saw Christina behind him holding tightly onto the chain. She had swung it lasso style at him and trapped him beneath the cold silver links.
“What now?” I asked.
Trevor struggled against the chains.
“Free me at once!” he demanded.
Finally, it seemed Trevor, the refined vampire, was back, displacing the monster he had woken as.
Drew helped Christina hold the chain while I dropped to the ground and favored my leg. The pain came back, hard and fast, and I was bleeding everywhere. Drew looked to the sky. I hadn’t noticed, but it was brightening on the horizon; no sun yet, though.
“We’re going to tie him to a tree,” Drew stated.
“What?” I asked.
It was one thing to shoot or kill someone, but it was an entirely different prospect to watch them slowly char to death.
Christina let Drew have the chain, strode up to Trevor, and got in his face. “Yeah," she said to Trevor, "we're going to make sure you burn.” She drug out the last word, taunting him.
In response, Trevor snarled, “You must free me, this instant. If you manage to kill me, I swear an oath that you will find death at the hands of my avengers.”
Christina flipped her ponytail off her shoulder. “I’ll look forward to that. Now, let’s move.”
After a moment of discussion about which tree would be best to use because of the direction of the rising sun, Drew and Christina dragged Trevor to one of the trees close to the edge of the road, an exposed and solitary tree that would experience maximum sunlight when the sun finally rose.
Thank god this road was somewhat unused this time of year. That would have been all we needed for a car to come speeding along while I lay in the road bloody and shot, while my friends chained a guy to a tree. Then I'd have to explain how that guy was my father. Yeah, that would go over well.
I hadn't even noticed that the goon who had guarded me back at Trevor's house apparently had disappeared with the second car. Trevor's promise of his cohorts avenging his death was likely true. I realized more was at stake here than simply seeking revenge for my mother's death. The enormity of the situation weighed heavily on me.
Trevor struggled against them the whole way and more chains were added over the top to secure him to the tree. The UV shotgun shell, the UV bullet in his arm, and the flames that had scorched him had left him weak enough the silver chains were likely to hold him easily, if I knew anything of my vampire history, now that I knew it was all true.
For me, exhaustion and severe pain were setting in. I found myself wondering about Gavin, Alice, and Oscar, but I didn’t have the energy to get up and go see how they were.
I fell back onto the cement and stared at the sky while I listened to Trevor scream at Drew and Christina. The opening in the tree line above the road was quite wide, and the sun was rising. As the rays of sunlight drew closer, I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to watch Trevor tortured. I felt the sun hit me before it hit him. The warmth soothed my cold skin; it felt good. I tried to mentally prepared myself for what I knew was about to happen.
Minutes later, I heard screams from Trevor while he begged to be released. Those screams turned to painful wails, wretched, ear-piercing screams that could only have ended in death. Even though I didn’t think I could bring myself to look, some part of me knew I had to.
I turned my head and opened my eyes. I saw Drew and Christina stood far from the writhing, flaming body that Trevor had become. Through the flames, I could see his dark hair had been singed off and his skin was melted like wax in some spots and black and charred in others.
Ugh. I turned my head back the other way. His suffering went on for only a few more seconds before it was finally over and the world around us was mostly silent again. My mother's death had been avenged. Trevor had finally gotten what he had wanted so badly: to see a sunrise again.
Drew moved by my side, and he spoke softly. “He’s gone Chloe. It’s time to go. I have to help Gavin now.”
And then he was gone from my side.
“Crap!” I tried to stand again. I managed to get up and sort of zombie-walked to the Jeep, leaving a trail of bloodspots behind me.
I was coherent enough to hope Gavin was all right. Distantly, I could hear Drew tell Christina she was going to have to take Gavin to the hospital in the Mustang and then take it home. I watched them load Gavin into the car while he yelled at them to be careful, calling Drew all sorts of terrible names.
“Shut up!” Christina yelled. “We’re trying to help you, dumbass.”
Alice still sat behind the door of the Jeep. I bent down and grabbed her hand. “Alice, we have to go. Can you get Oscar?”
She looked up and stared me in the eyes. “Is he dead?”
She had known Trevor best. She was his housekeeper, but she had also been his lover. In a strange sort of way, she was also his partner. Of any of us, she had the right to be emotional about his death. He was all she had known for so long.
“Yes. He’s dead.” I glanced at the tree where his body had been. Ashes were all that was left of the once proud Trevor.
Alice cried. I had expected emotion, but she bawled uncontrollably. I didn't know what to do to comfort her, but I knew we needed to get moving. “Come on, Alice. There’ll be time for this later. Right now, we have to get out of here and get to the hospital. Gavin’s hurt.”
She wouldn’t budge. She acted as though she hadn't even heard me.
Damn it. We really needed to go.
“Drew!” I called. I used the Jeep for support and limped around it. “Drew!”
He heaved the door shut on the Mustang and glanced at me. After we watched Christina reverse the Mustang, then slam into drive, peel out and speed away, Drew hurried over to us.
“We need to get Oscar,” I said, my breath coming in short pants. Fatigue had kicked in now that the adrenaline had worn off. All I wanted was to lay down and go to sleep.
“Get in the Jeep, Chloe. I got this.”
I did what he said and crawled into the backseat of the Jeep. I closed my eyes for just one second and woke up in the hospital.
Groaning, I forced my eyes to open through the fog of medication. I could feel thick bandaging all around my leg. I lifted my head a little, pulled the thin hospital blanket over, and saw my calf was, indeed, covered in a thick bandage. Oddly enough, I kind of wanted to see it. I officially had a battle wound.
I let my head fall back on the pillow and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, I turned my head to the side and found Drew asleep in the chair next to my bed.
He had stayed with me.
I took that moment while he slept to examine him without him knowing I was staring at him. He sat kind of sideways in the chair, head tilted and leaned against the wall. The hood on his sweatshirt was pulled up, covering his hair. For such a tough guy, he had really long eye lashes. I was actually a little jealous of them.
He must have showered and changed, because his skin and clothes looked clean.
I watched him sleep for so long he must have felt my eyes on him. They fluttered open and settled on me.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Hey,” I whispered back.
He shifted in the chair until he sat forward and leaned toward me. “Are you feeling better?”
I nodded. “Better now. I think they have me on pain meds.” I lifted my wrist to show him the IV.
“I’m sorry I let you get shot.”
I rolled my eyes and laughed. “Yeah, how could you?” I asked him sarcastically. “I’m not sorry. I’m just happy I’m not dead.”
Finally, he smiled. “That’s a good point.”
I looked down at my leg. “So how bad is it?”
“Actually, it could have been way worse. The bullet
hit toward the outside of the calf. It completely missed the bone. It went in and out.”
“Ugh.”
“You’re pretty lucky it didn’t hit the bone or anything.” He tried to make it sound good. “You should heal pretty well.”
“Well, I’m probably going to heal faster than you think,” I told him
He raised his eyebrows. “The vampire thing?”
“Yeah, I should probably get out of here before the whole thing is healed up, and they think I’m some miracle child or something.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.” He nodded.
I looked around the hospital room. “Where is everyone?”
“Alice and Gavin are down the hall in their own rooms, and Luke is around here somewhere.”
“Oscar?” I really hoped he was okay. I couldn’t remember anything after getting in the Jeep.
“He’s being treated at home by our own medics.” When I raised my eyebrows, he spread his hands out. “Well, we couldn’t exactly bring him here with all those bites.”
He was right. “Why is Alice here?”
Drew leaned back in the chair again. “The doctors say she is suffering from shock. Other than that, she doesn’t have any injuries.”
“Oh.” I reached down and fiddled with the blanket. “I hope she’s going to be all right… like, mentally or emotionally, or whatever.”
“She'll probably be fine. They said that most of the people who go through this recover with rest and relaxation.”
“Well, what did you tell them happened to us?”
He shrugged. “I told them we were walking home from the movies when some guys tried to mug us. We fought back, and they shot you guys. I suppose the cops will want to talk to you once they know you're awake, which is probably another reason to get out of here soon.”
I supposed that would have been a believable story. Believable enough anyway.
Suddenly my mind took me back to the road, and I was reliving the face-off with the father I’d never known, trying to kill him. I was shot and lay helpless on the ground while the people who came to rescue me fought the vampires. I wished I could have been a better fighter and could have held my own more, or least been more help than the hindrance I felt I'd been.
The Vampire Hunter's Daughter The Complete Collection Page 19