by V M Black
My hunters.
I wasn’t going to escape them this time.
I held my ground. It wasn’t bravery—there was just nowhere else to go. I was out of gas and out of luck. My belly roiled with cold and terror, but I tipped my chin up, determined not to give them the satisfaction of seeing my fear.
The SUVs stopped a dozen yards away. The idling of their engines was the only sound I could hear above the chattering of my teeth.
A man emerged from the driver’s side of the middle vehicle. His wide shoulders were thrown into silhouette by the blazing headlights as he closed in on me.
The people who had been chasing me all day had won. I didn’t know who they were, and I didn’t know why they wanted me dead, but they were going to get their way.
It was stupid. I was stupid. I’d gone half crazy, trying to figure out how I was going to live in the new world that had been thrust upon me when the answer was simple. I wasn’t going to live at all.
But I wouldn’t go down without a fight. Staring down the approaching man, I formed a fist around my keys, the only weapon I had. The cards on the keychain cut into my palm as I forced the ends of the keys to stand out in points between my fingers.
“Hello, Cora. Merry Christmas.”
The words shot through me with a force that rocked me on my feet. I recognized that voice, and instantly afterward, I recognized the presence, the one that I’d been too terrified to sense. Not my attackers.
Dorian Thorne. The vampire.
He’d come to get me.
I heard a sound, a cry, and I realized that it was mine. I ran forward, half-stumbling with cold, flinging myself against his chest. His heady influence enveloped me like a drug, the darkness of him taking my breath away, even now.
My savior. My fate.
It was all his fault. The only possible motivation anyone had for coming after me was my connection to Dorian. And he hadn’t warned me, much less protected me.
“You bastard!” The insult tore from my throat. “You absolute prick!”
I hauled my hand back—the one without the keys still clenched in it—and hit him with all of my strength. He made no move to avoid it, didn’t catch my hand even though I knew that it would be trivial to his vampire-fast reflexes, nor did he flinch when I made contact with his beautiful cheekbone.
Dorian simply took the strike, then wrapped his arms around me even as I kicked and struggled, holding me against him as I worked out my fear and fury, screaming out at him, at my attacker, and at the world that had driven me to this desolate, freezing road and nearly to my death.
“You’re safe now,” he said. “I have you, and you are safe.”
I had the sense that he was trying to convince himself of the truth of those words as much as he was reassuring me.
The burst of adrenaline-fueled energy left as quickly as it had come, wringing the last strength from me. I went limp, hanging from his hold, shivering taking control of my body again even as I panted with effort.
“Safe? You’re the one who nearly got me killed,” I said. “I was going to die, and it was your fault.”
And now here I was, back in his grasp in a quite literal way. Safe from my pursuers, perhaps—but not safe from him.
He was the one enemy that I didn’t even have the will to fight—the one I couldn’t even name an enemy without a pang that said that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I’d only been able to want to strike him because he let me.
Dorian lifted me effortlessly into his arms. I made a faint protest. But his chest was solid, a certainty amid the day’s chaos and confusion. Safe and certain, the way a prison’s bars were....
“I know,” he said, carrying me toward the second of the three long black Escalades that were idling on the dirt road.
“You were supposed to save me.” It was a stupid and illogical protest—what did cancer have to do with inhuman attackers?—but it was true. Everything that had happened in the last week had been because he had promised a cure to the cancer that was killing me.
He had delivered on that promise—at least as far as I could tell. But he hadn’t told me that the cure would work by changing me into something not-quite-human or that it would blood-bond me to him forever. Not that I would have changed my mind about it, since my alternative was death.
But there didn’t seem to be much of a point in my cure if my new connection to him would paint a target on my back. Dead was dead, whether it was from cancer or a murderer.
“I know. Believe me, Cora, I know.”
Dorian’s voice was full of suppressed force, a cold fury that rolled off him in waves. I looked up at his face, really looked, and I saw lines of worry carved deep into his unnaturally perfect features.
He had been scared, I realized with abrupt clarity. He had been almost as scared as I was.
Scared of losing me.
He ducked to set me in the passenger’s seat before I had time to process that realization. The leather was so deliciously warm against my frozen body that I couldn’t even summon horror at the thought of my bloodied shirt pressed between me and the seat.
I knew he wanted me. Needed my body and my blood. For my part, it was impossible to resist his attraction—his vampiric influence meant that any merely human scruples went out the window as soon as he turned the force of his will on me.
I craved him because I must. But did the idea of losing him frighten me?
I wasn’t sure.
“Let me see your injury,” Dorian ordered.
Of course he’d noticed it. He noticed everything.
“It’s healed already,” I said, but I had no choice. Shoving my keys in my pocket, I turned in the seat so that my back faced the open door.
Dorian’s hands on my back sent tendrils of heat curling through me even in my half-frozen state. He carefully pushed the shredded remains of my hoodie and t-shirt up my back, sliding his hands across the smooth skin beneath.
I knew what he saw there: faint silvery marks, the only evidence of how the creature’s claws had slashed me in the attack. Any human would have needed to seek medical attention immediately after such a wound.
Lucky for me, I wasn’t fully human anymore.
“She ruined my hoodie,” I muttered. “It was my favorite. And probably my pants, too, and I’ve had these since high school.”
“I will buy you another,” Dorian said flatly.
“I’m not four years old. I don’t want another. I liked this one.”
Unaccountably, I felt tears prick my eyes. I hadn’t cried once the entire time I thought I was going to die, but now, at the thought that my UMD hoodie was shredded beyond repair, I had to clear my throat and blink hard several times.
Stupid.
Dorian pulled the edge of my shirt down again. He hooked an arm around my chest for a moment and pressed a kiss into my hair. I leaned back against him, closing my eyes, my body wakening to his touch.
“I will not lose you now.”
His words were so soft that I thought for a moment I might have imagined them. Then he stepped away and swung my door shut. Bonelessly, I sank back against the seat, wishing that he hadn’t let me go.
Wishing I were truly free.
Dorian circled around in front of the headlights to swing into the driver’s seat beside me. There was, I noticed, some kind of short shotgun strapped to the console between the seats.
“My car,” I said weakly as Dorian put the vehicle into gear. My Gramma had given me her Focus when I got my first off-campus job in college. I couldn’t just abandon it, even if it had probably been totaled in my escape.
“I will send someone for it.”
The other two SUVs started moving, echoing Dorian’s flawless three-point turn that got us facing back the other way.
Back toward D.C.
“I’m not sorry I hit you,” I said as I buckled my seatbelt. “You’re the reason that...thing tried to kill me. You have to be.”
“I am sure I deserved worse.” There was
no hint of irony in Dorian’s voice.
I studied his profile, high forehead and aristocratic nose balanced by a long jaw. His expression was unreadable.
I said, “I thought I was a goner when I realized I’d lost my phone. How did you find me?”
His eyes were fixed to the bumper of the SUV in front of us, the elegant planes of his face thrown into high relief by the light of the reflected high beams. “I had a GPS tracker installed on your car. As a precaution.”
“Oh,” I said. Because that was totally a healthy, non-stalker-y thing for him to do.
I considered objecting to the invasion of my privacy, but under the circumstances, I decided I couldn’t really get upset about it. Whatever his reasons, he’d been proven right.
But I realized I’d expected him to explain he’d found me through some kind of vampiric superpower. The reality was somewhat anticlimactic.
“It will be months or years before our bond is refined enough that I will be able to use my sense of your distress alone to locate you,” he added.
Well, then. “You just let me know when that happens,” I said. Because I needed an even bigger case of the screaming meemies around him. “So who the hell just tried to kill me?”
“I don’t know.” He seemed more tightly contained than he usually was, the intoxicating influence of his presence extending only a few inches from his body. It seemed thicker, though, dark and seething. The thought of touching him like that frightened me.
Scared or not, I wasn’t willing to let his answer go. “Seriously. You have so many enemies that you can’t even hazard a guess about who would want to kill your—your—” I didn’t even know what the word was for a once-entirely-human who had been changed by bonding to a vampire.
“Cognate.”
“What?”
“We call you a ‘cognate.’”
“Fine, your cognate,” I said.
“Yes. Unfortunately, I do have that many enemies,” he said calmly. “And so do you, though you should be inviolable to most. And not one of whom should have even known that you exist. Not yet.”
The sounds of a muted exchange behind me made my gaze flick up to the rearview mirror. We weren’t alone in the car. There were four hulking silhouettes in the middle and back rows of the SUV. At least one of those men exuded a variation of the sensation that I had always associated with Dorian. Another vampire. And I suspected that the other vehicles each had their own squad of heavies inside.
So Dorian had been able to assemble this group in a matter of minutes to come riding to my rescue. Which meant that he’d been expecting trouble, or at least had prepared for it.
That realization was hardly reassuring.
“If you can’t say who, then how about what? What was the creature that attacked me?” I asked. It didn’t even occur to me that he might not know.
“A djinn.”
“Gin,” I repeated blankly. “What?”
“Another word for them is genie—but no, not like you’re thinking.” His voice was calm, reasonable, as if he weren’t discussing made-up things. “A djinn is much more like what you imagine a demon might be in your popular culture. They are very strong—stronger even than a single vampire, though not as fast, so they frequently hire themselves out as mercenaries.”
My look must have still been incredulous. All I could think of was Disney’s Aladdin and the I Dream of Jeannie reruns I’d seen once when I was sick. But he shook his head.
“You know the kind of child who likes to pull the wings off flies? Who burns ants with a magnifying glass just to see them writhe? That’s your average djinn, but with people. No bottles. No wishes. If they were human, you’d call them psychopaths.”
“So she was hired to kill me,” I said slowly as the front SUV in our motorcade led the way back onto a paved road.
“Yes.”
I shuddered. “I guess it’s a good thing whoever it was chose someone who liked to do their work up close. If they’d hired a man with a gun, I wouldn’t be here now.”
“Habit. Vampires tend not to trust bullets as more than a deterrent. They’re good at slowing us down, but unless the shot is perfect, they aren’t entirely reliable with our kind.” He shrugged. “Or maybe the orders were to kidnap you if possible and kill you if not. She wasn’t specific, and we didn’t ask.”
“You don’t know who hired her?”
“According to my friend Clarissa, she didn’t know. It was an anonymous transaction.”
“You trust her answer?”
“She wasn’t in a position to lie.” The words had a decisive finality about them.
I rubbed my wrist, where the tiny teardrop-shaped bond mark stood out against the skin. For a moment, I felt a tiny bit sorry for her.
Yeah, only a tiny bit.
The radio bolted onto the vehicle’s dashboard crackled to life, interrupting my thoughts.
“Mr. Thorne, it looks like we have a problem here.”
Chapter Two
Dorian grabbed the handset. “What is it?”
“Scouts are reporting a roadblock.”
“Aethers?”
“Police.”
“The police,” I said urgently. “They were possessed or something. They tried to shoot me.”
Dorian nodded curtly. “I thought Etienne had sorted that,” he said into the handset.
“He dealt with the department. These must be puppets.”
His jaw flexed, annoyance flashing in his eyes. “Right, everybody. You know what to do.”
He hung up the handset with a decisive click and flicked off the headlights, dropping back slightly to let the rear SUV pass.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
He didn’t look at me as he jerked the quick-releases that held the gun to the console between us. “Can you shoot?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, if I guess if I had to—”
“Then don’t worry about it,” he said tersely, pulling the gun free.
Behind me, I heard hard, metallic noises as the other men in the car readied their weapons.
“I thought that bullets didn’t work,” I said weakly. My unnaturally sensitive vision had adjusted to the darkness quickly, but I could see no sign of a roadblock, only the bouncing red taillights of the vehicle in front of us.
“Oh, they work well enough,” he said, shifting the shotgun’s pistol grip to his left hand. “The effects just aren’t often permanent—unless the opponent is human, which these seem to be.”
The radio spit and crackled again. “Thirty seconds.”
Dorian raised an eyebrow at me. “Can you answer that?”
I blinked, then scrabbled at the radio handset. My fingers found the button. “Uh, got that.”
“Fifteen seconds.” I could see lights ahead now, blue and red, bouncing off the landscape and into the night, but I still couldn’t see the cars themselves past the bulk of the SUV directly in front of us.
“Got it,” I said again.
“Put it back,” Dorian said. “And hold on.”
I fumbled to hang up the handset, then grabbed the edges of the seat with both hands as Dorian look a hard right off the road. I braced as the SUV dipped down into a shallow culvert and went grinding up the opposite slope and into the open field. The car bobbed and swayed as it ran across the furrows, jerking me against my belt.
Dorian jerked the wheel again, and now we were running in the dark parallel to the road with only the glow from the dash breaking the total blackness of the night.
Suddenly, I saw the roadblock out of Dorian’s side window, a line of four police cruisers angled across the road with three more behind. In the flashing lights, I could make out the cops hunched behind their cars, pistols and rifles at the ready as the two other SUVs came bearing down on them.
The radio came alive a moment before the first one struck. “Mark.”
The lead SUV hit the puncture strip across the road without slowing, the tires seemingly unaffected by the sharp spi
kes. With a squeal of rubber and metal, it barreled into the front line of cruisers, throwing them aside like toys as the cops dove out of the way.
The second SUV jerked off to the left of the road before it hit the strip, circling around the blockade on the opposite side as the first pressed forward. The lead Escalade churned into the back two cruisers, which gave way slowly in a burst of gunfire. A cop fell to the ground as we passed. Someone screamed.
“Oh, my God,” I said, looking back.
The lead SUV made it through the roadblock behind us as the second one angled back toward the road ahead of us.
“It’s not over yet.” Dorian’s face was set in taut lines, but his eyes never wavered from the field in front of us.
A tangle of overgrowth blocked our way ahead, and Dorian turned the wheel back toward the road just as half a dozen motorcycles buzzed out of the stand of trees, bearing down on the other SUVs and blocking our only path out.
Dorian hit the window control with the butt end of the shotgun’s pistol grip. As the window lowered, he calmly leveled the barrel out of it, toward the bikers. He squeezed the trigger, and the report of the shotgun tore through the night, hitting my eardrums like a solid force.
The shot caught the lead rider in the chest, knocking him off and sending his bike sliding across the asphalt in a shower of white sparks.
I gaped, the scream caught in my throat, but the other bikers came on, pulling pistols from their leather jackets as they closed in on the SUVs.
We bounced onto the road just behind the Escalade that had pushed through the blockade, last in line again. There were more shots, the sharp, short barks of the bikers’ guns answered by deeper retorts from the SUVs. Dorian rolled up his window again.
A biker blasted past Dorian’s window, then one flew past mine. For an instant, I was looking at his pistol through the window, pointed straight at me. I jerked to the side reflexively, but there was nowhere to go. The gun fired, and a tiny spider web of fractures appeared at the point where it struck the window as the biker was whisked away, but the glass held.
“Bulletproof.” I could hardly believe my luck.
“Hardened. Not proofed,” Dorian said briefly, yanking the steering wheel to the side to slam into another of the bikers who was attempting to pass. The rider went flying, the mass of the SUV making his body flop like a helpless ragdoll as he spun off into the underbrush.