by A. D. Ryan
“Brooke,” The voice I heard was hoarse…strained and quiet. My name was repeated over and over again, and I felt something cool against my cheek. Slowly, the shadows slipped away once more, and when I opened my eyes, I was staring down at David in my arms…my human arms. I was mostly naked, my clothes having torn when I shifted, only shreds of them remaining and hanging around my neck and waist. They did little to conceal me, but I couldn’t be bothered to worry about that right now.
Pain radiated from my right wrist, left shoulder, and both of my hips, but I pushed all of that aside when I watched David struggle for another breath, blood bubbling out from a horrible neck wound. The glass had sliced through his carotid and he was bleeding out. I placed my hand over the wound, hoping to staunch the bleeding, but with every beat of his heart, blood oozed between my fingers.
His hand was on my cheek—that was what I felt when I was lost—and he stroked my cheek with his thumb. “I’m so sorry about earlier,” I whispered, pressing my face into his touch while I continued to slow the bleeding. “I was scared.”
He shook his head; it looked painful and like it took a lot of effort on his part. “N-no,” he managed to say, blood filling his mouth due to the severity of the laceration.
Things looked grim. I choked back a cry, trying to remain strong for him. His breaths came fewer and shorter in between, and I leaned forward and pressed my forehead to his. The difference in our temperatures was a frightening contrast. “Don’t leave me,” I pleaded, holding him tighter. “You can’t leave me. You promised we’d be together. You have to fight.”
Not seeing any sign of him fighting, I decided to try my hand at bargaining. I needed to make him see that he had something to fight for. Me. “I’ll marry you,” I told him between my sobs. “We’ll have babies—tons of them—just…please don’t leave me. I-I love you.”
“Love…you…too,” he managed to gasp, his lips turning up into a small smile.
I stroked his dark hair as I held him against my chest, trying to regulate his body temperature. Based on touch alone, I knew it was dangerously low and dropping by the second. The naturally pink color of his complexion was noticeably paler, and when his hand dropped limply from my face, tears fell from my eyes.
“David?” I whispered, my voice cracking with emotion. He inhaled in one more short breath and exhaled it before letting his eyes close. Afraid when he didn’t take another breath, I shook him. “David!” While he didn’t say anything or open his eyes, he took a shaky breath, and I sighed with relief. His heartbeat was still weak and uneven, but the sound of sirens in the distance told me that help was on the way. Someone must have called the cops when they heard the gunshots and all the noise. They’d make it here in time to save him. They had to.
I looked around the room. It was in shambles, the window broken, and I was sitting, practically bare-assed, my clothing shredded, in a pool of David's blood. I knew I should stay until the emergency response teams arrived, but my anger started to escalate until my skin blazed and my hands trembled. I had to find Samantha Turner and make her pay for what she did.
No, I told myself. I have to stay here. It’s the right thing to do.
“G-go,” David stammered weakly, opening his eyes as much as he could.
“No!” I cried. “I can’t leave you.”
“You n-need to find h-her. St-stop her.”
Even though I knew I should stay until the paramedics got here and stabilized him, I knew he was right. Every fiber of my being told me as much. Shaking, I slowly lowered David’s head back to the floor. “Hold on,” I told him softly. “Fight, David. Help is on the way.”
He nodded once, his eyes fluttering closed again as if to preserve his energy. Gauging how far away the sirens were, I told myself he’d be in good hands within less than a minute. I stood up and stared out my broken window. Samantha was out there. I didn’t know where, but she was close. I could still smell her. Without another thought, I launched myself into the night to go after her.
Chapter twenty-six | evasion
I let her scent guide me as I ran down the sidewalk. I kept to the shadows, hoping for the element of surprise should I find her. I followed her scent as it steadily grew, but then it faded into the night for no reason. I wasn’t sure what happened, but I was about to double-back when Nick jumped out of the yard to my right, surprising me.
I took in his frazzled expression, his eyes wide, mouth open as he looked me up and down. “Jesus, Brooke,” Nick exclaimed, horrified. “What happened?”
“I… David… He…” I stammered. He waited expectantly, and I immediately realized how this must have looked to him. What was worse, he wasn’t entirely wrong: this was my fault.
“It wasn't me,” I rasped. He remained silent, and I grew defensive, like maybe he didn't believe me. “I swear I didn't do what you must be thinking!”
Eyes widening in surprise at my outburst, Nick held his hands up in surrender. “I know,” he assured me softly. “I was at the house already. The place was crawling with cops. I got as close as the broken window and caught a brief glimpse before I was almost spotted. I followed your scent here.”
A cold breeze picked up, reminding me that my clothes weren’t doing what they were intended to, and I shivered.
“Come on, we should find you some clothes,” Nick offered, but I stopped him.
“We can’t. I have to find her. She’ll get away.”
“I’ve got her scent. I’ll help you track her, but first, we need to get you into something that’s not going to get you noticed,” Nick explained, leading me to a neighboring house.
All of the lights were out as we walked through the yard and toward the back door. I had my suspicions about what he might do, so when he reached for the knob, I stopped him. “This is illegal,” I hissed.
“You need clothes, and we don’t have time to go shopping,” he shot back.
There was a metallic snap as he turned his wrist and broke the doorknob. “Wait here. I don’t need you tracking anything inside.”
Looking down at my legs, I noticed the blood and dirt that covered them, and I understood. He wasn’t gone long, returning a few minutes later with a damp towel, long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and a pair of sneakers. “These should fit.” I was about to start stripping when Nick shook his head. “Not here. The alley.”
Once we were shrouded in darkness, I wiped the blood from my body as best I could before stripping out of my torn clothes and putting on the others. The clothes he’d stolen covered any dried patches of blood that remained on my body, and for that I was grateful. But I could still smell it, and it only invited flashes of David’s barely breathing body.
I replaced that image with one of the paramedics helping him. In that vision, he was still weak, but he was awake and the bleeding had stopped. By the time I got back there, he’d be okay. Maybe even in the hospital, but he’d be okay. He had to be.
Once I was changed, Nick took the towel and my clothes, tossed them in a near-empty trash bin, and lit them on fire. I really had to fight to ignore the fact that he was destroying evidence, but I understood why. As I watched the flames brighten the alley, its warmth spreading toward me, I reflected back on what the hell just happened.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nick draw something to his nose, and I recognized it as the scrap of fabric from the window.
“Hey,” I whispered, approaching him. “That's evidence.”
Nick turned around, eyebrows raised. “You really want your entire department—your father—chasing that thing? Trust me when I say it won't end well. She's headed back to her nest. There are more of them.”
The thought of more of those—whatever she was—running around stressed me out, and I could feel the beginning stages of the change happening again. My bones shifted, muscles realigned. What the hell was going on in this world?
The dancing flames were almost hypnotic, making it easy for me to get lost in thought as I replayed everything that happened and
tried to make sense of it all. This woman—Samantha Turner—was dead. We found her body in the park, completely drained of blood, and yet, she stood in my living room, looking and acting stronger than any other corpse I’d ever come across. How was that even possible?
You know how it’s possible, Brooke, a voice told me. You just refused to believe it was possible before now.
I remembered how her eyes had darkened, how her strength rivaled my own, how sharp her teeth were as they grazed along my skin… I gasped, but before I was able to dispose of the idea, Nick came up behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders, anchoring me in my new reality.
“She’s a vampire, isn’t she?” I deduced, feeling the tension in Nick’s hands. He turned me around slowly. His brows were raised and his eyes were wide as he regarded me. “And not the warm and fuzzy wanna-be type.” Nick still didn’t reply, possibly out of shock that I figured it out. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
Offering me one solitary nod, Nick beckoned me closer. “Yes,” he replied hoarsely. “Vampires do exist…and the woman who attacked you is one of them.”
The tempo of my heart increased until all I could hear was my blood pounding through my veins and in my ears. His confirmation shouldn’t have made me uneasy, but it did. I no longer lived in a world where the only monsters out there could be handcuffed and put behind bars. Vampires and werewolves were in a league all their own. How could I fight that?
“For decades—centuries, even,” Nick continued, “we’ve hunted vampires. It’s just what we do.”
Every word he said affected me in the exact opposite way I thought it would. I figured I’d have been less receptive to his explanation, ready to slough it all off as the ramblings of a crazy person. So it surprised me to find I actually felt better knowing all of this. It was like everything made sense now.
“So, yes,” Nick said. “She is a vampire…” Another pause, this one lending an extremely dramatic air to our conversation. “But she’s not the one you need to worry about.”
My blood turned to ice in my veins, and my body prickled with sweat. “Sh-she’s not?”
Nick shook his head solemnly. “The one you need to worry about is the one who sent her.”
“Wh-what do you mean ‘the one who sent her?’” I asked, my voice trembling slightly.
Nick took a moment, probably trying to find the best way to explain himself—he’d always been cautious, especially as of late. “We—the Pack and I—are almost certain that she was turned as a message…to you. We’ve been tailing her for a week now.”
Confused, I stepped back, the backs of my legs hitting a pile of trash. I fought the tremble in my knees, using someone’s fence to hold myself up as this new information swirled in my head like an early morning fog. “A message? From whom?”
“From the one we’re hunting,” he replied, staring down at his hands. My eyes followed his gaze, watching as he fidgeted and cracked his knuckles nervously. “Gianna.”
That was the name of the club we had been searching for. Clearly not a coincidence, I realized. This information made me dizzy, almost as though I’d been on a carousel that was moving much too fast, and my head buzzed. Who was Gianna? Why was she sending someone after me?
Before I could verbalize any of these thoughts, however, something shoved its way to the front of my mind. It was muddled, but eventually the image cleared, and I remembered something I saw recently. Something I never thought to tell Nick about until just now because I didn’t believe it to be true at the time.
“She was there,” I mumbled.
“What?”
My vision blurred as the image in my head sharpened. “At the club…” Still confused, Nick turned to me, and I brought my eyes to his. “A couple weeks ago, David and I took the statement of a girl at that creepy nightclub, and the owner brought us surveillance footage of a man and a woman making their way through the bar.”
Nick cleared his throat, his eyebrows pulling together as something strange flickered through his eyes. It disappeared before I could figure out what it meant, but it bothered him. That much was obvious. “A man? You’re sure?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed, recalling more and more of the tape. “The way they moved was eerie, and the girl we questioned described her interaction with them as almost hypnotic.”
“Compulsion,” Nick interjected, shaking off whatever haunted him moments ago. “Their very presence can be intoxicating for humans.” Pausing briefly, he looked at me as though afraid to say whatever was on his mind. But he found the courage necessary. “Do you have it? The disc?”
“It’s at the precinct.” I wondered why he asked at first, and it didn’t take long for me to pick up the reason behind his question. “Locked away in an evidence locker. Why?” I only asked because I could be assuming wrong…at least, I hoped I was, because he couldn’t possibly be asking me to—
“I’d like to see it,” he replied. “Can you get it?”
I stared at him a moment, uncertain if I heard him correctly. Of course I did; I just couldn’t believe he would even suggest it. “You want me to just waltz right in there and take the disc?” Nick stared at me, his expression blank yet expectant. “You know that’s obstruction, right? I could get into a lot of trouble.”
Looking apologetic, he shrugged. “I do realize that, I just thought maybe…” He sighed, running his hands over his face. “Maybe I’d be able to see something that might have been missed.”
“I’ve watched it repeatedly,” I explained gently. “Other than the way she looked at the camera—”
“You saw her face?” I nodded and saw that same haunted flicker in Nick’s eyes again. “What about the man?”
Shaking my head, I said, “No. He seemed to be a little more reserved…guarded.”
“So you didn’t see his face? You couldn’t identify him?”
Confused, I furrowed my eyebrows. Why did it feel like there was something he wasn’t telling me? “No.” The relief on his face after hearing my reply was even more perplexing than the troubled expression he wore moments earlier, and it brought back my earlier question. “Nick? Why me? Why did she send Samantha after me?” He didn’t answer at first, so I kept going. “Is it because I’m a cop? Because we were closing in on her?”
His dry laugh echoed around us. “Cops are of little concern to Gianna,” he said very matter-of-factly. “She could obliterate your entire team within seconds.” When I didn’t understand him right away, he exhaled loudly. “Just like we can smell them, they can smell us. I’m assuming your scent was all over that club.”
Something stirred inside me, telling me that it was more than that, and I was suddenly thrust back to when Samantha was in my house. I wracked my memory until I remembered it was something she said that made me feel like this wasn’t about what I am, but who.
“She said that if you found me alive to tell you this was your fault,” I whispered, drawing Nick’s full attention as he swallowed thickly. He definitely knew something. “She also mentioned a fire up in Alaska.” Nick’s face blanched as he held his breath. I could smell the light sheen of perspiration that covered his body, and his heart picked up speed. I was like a human lie detector now. “Did she send someone after me because of that?” While he didn’t vocally confirm this, I could see in his tense expression that I was right. “Why?”
“I-I can’t say for sure,” he stammered slightly. I sensed he wasn’t being entirely honest, but before I could call him out on it, a breeze picked up, bringing with it Samantha Turner’s scent.
We both turned our heads to the mouth of the alley, and there, standing confidently with her arms crossed, was Samantha Turner. Her mouth spread into a wicked grin, canines gleaming against her ruby-red lips. “Tag,” she said. “You’re it.”
Chapter twenty-seven| regret
Nick and I wasted no time running toward her. She moved so quickly that I thought maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me. Her lingering scent on the air made me realize I wasn
’t. My endurance was incredible, surge after surge of adrenaline pumping as I pushed myself faster and faster. I was gaining on her, and she knew it. It caught her off guard and frightened her. I lapped up her fear like it was my oasis in the middle of the Sahara.
Maybe trying to throw us off, she hopped a fence and then led us down another alley, farther away from my house. I jumped the fence with ease, Nick followed, and we kept pursuit. When I saw the flashing red and blue lights in the distance, I got distracted and faltered slightly. My instincts to destroy her kept me going, but my heart wanted me to go back home and check on David.
I was torn, and I didn’t know what to do.
Samantha jumped at my momentary lapse and sprang for me. Nick and I didn’t see it coming, because one minute she was leading us in one direction, and the next she was flying at me, teeth and claws engaged as she dove for my face.
She got me to the ground, straddling me while her hands wrapped around my neck for a second time that day, and she started to squeeze the life out of me. “They wanted you alive, you know,” she sneered. “But I think you’re more trouble than you’re worth. I’m sure they’d believe me if I cited self-defense.”
My vision started to darken as I tried to wrench my body from beneath her, but before I could succumb to it, her body was ripped from mine, and I gasped for air, each glorious breath feeling like a red-hot poker was being shoved down my throat.
I pushed myself into a sitting position, rubbing my neck as my eyes focused on what was happening. Nick was holding Samantha more than a foot off the ground by her neck. She didn’t seem fazed by his hold on her. Her body remained still and she smiled down at him evilly.
“Where’s Gianna?” Nick demanded, his voice deep-throated and rumbling.
Samantha grinned wickedly at him, her eyes glimmering but narrow. “Gone.”
“Gone?” Nick queried. “Somehow I doubt that. She’s sadistic, but she’s not stupid enough to leave a loose cannon like you in charge of something like this. Tell me where she is.”