by Mysti Parker
“As in a getaway van outside in the sun?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“And where will we be?”
“Waiting for him to come to pick us up.”
I guessed that the van wasn’t parked at the curb, then. Too obvious. Too suspicious. “And if he doesn’t?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
One of us was going to have to go outside and get the van. And I’d be damned if I let it be her.
So I did what I always did in these types of situations. Well, not this situation exactly since this was my first jail break, but I blended into the role of desperate, innocent vampire who needed out. Not terribly hard, and for the details I needed to do that, I would fake it until I made it.
“Where’s the van?” I asked.
“It’s the first ugly gold one in the southeast lot. Looks like some kind of 1970s rape van. Can’t miss it. Keys are in the ignition, but you can’t be thinking—”
A door below us slammed open, and Melody immediately released my hand. A guard ran up the stairs and right past us as if his ass were on fire.
As soon as he was out of earshot, I said, “We need to get to the roof.”
She stared hard at me as we rounded the landing onto another set of stairs. “You are thinking about going out there. No. No way. We need to get to security and see if we can find Zac on the working cameras. We’re not leaving here without him.”
“He’s important to you?” Yeah, bad timing, but there it was.
“Well…” She took my hand again and squeezed. “He got me in here to rescue you.”
“So I’m important?”
“You have to feel it.” She moved our clasped hands in front of us and pointed at our wrists. “Right here.”
“Yeah, I feel it.” There, and other places. “Where’s security?”
“First floor.”
“And they’ll just let us in to have a peek at their cameras, will they?”
She grinned, one that made my whole body react. “I don’t see why not.”
On the first floor, we found the door marked Security. The hallway was empty except for a vampire in silver cuffs around his ankles and two guards quickly escorting him into a room.
I tried the door. “Locked,” I muttered.
She held out a ring of keys and twirled them around her finger. “I wonder if these will come in handy.”
I snatched them from her, unable to keep the smile from my face. She was having entirely too much fun. Once the door was unlocked, we slid in one body part at a time in case we weren’t alone. Voices sounded from an adjoining room behind a closed door. We needed to be silent and quick.
Melody scanned the monitors along the wall while I searched the desk drawers. If I was going to be the getaway driver, I needed distractions to keep the focus off of me. The more the better. I found a lighter, a mostly empty glass bottle of Jack Daniels, and someone’s smelly sock. That would do. I also found a map of the jail and how to access the roof.
“There he is,” Melody muttered, pointing at one of the screens. “Third floo-- What the hell?”
I turned in time to see Chin Dimple fling something at the feet of the vampire guards surrounding him and then take off running. It exploded into a flash of violent monochrome light, followed by a dense cloud of thick black ashes. A UV bomb? Damn.
Quickly, I took Melody’s hand and led her out of the security room, my skin buzzing at the contact. “Go. Intercept him. Then get to the front door.”
She looked at me with big yellow eyes. She must’ve taken out her green contacts to better blend in, and I couldn’t decide which I liked better, a detail that didn’t matter right now.
“You’ll be there?” she asked. “At the front door too?”
“I’ll be there.”
She looked behind her at the empty hallway and then back at me with a wicked smile. “Look at the balls on you.”
I winked. “They’re not nearly as impressive as the rest of me.”
Grinning, she stepped away from me, her fingertips hooking around mine. “Go. Fast. Or I’ll have to come rescue you again.”
I nodded. “Let’s try not to make that a habit.”
I turned and left her behind, hating every inch of myself for doing so. This was insanity, fueled by an intoxicating promise of freedom. The sun would be up soon, and I was about to hurl myself out into it for a little daytime, rooftop picnic. Even worse, Melody depended on me not to fail. So I couldn’t. Yeah, I’d just met her, but still. She’d risked her life to break me out for no reason I could guess other than this weird connection. But it felt right. She felt right.
I stuck to the stairs, acting like I had every right to be there in my guard’s uniform. Groups of them flew past me without a glance as they shouted orders back and forth, totally oblivious to Inmate 204 running by.
On the top floor, a ladder stretched up the wall to the rooftop, and once I opened the door that led out, the orange streak in the sky slammed into me like a wall, bouncing me back inside. That would’ve been the smart thing to do. Instead, my legs weighted to the max with doubt, I stepped outside.
I had just minutes, tops, before sunrise.
In the distance, a helicopter whirred, not visible yet, but I had a feeling that was about to change.
I sprinted for the southeast corner of the building, pouring on my vampire speed and whatever other kinds of speeds I happened to have. Before the edge, I slowed, spotted an open dumpster below to my right, and jumped. Damn. And shot out of that stink like I’d just sat on a blowtorch. But not before setting the inside of the dumpster on fire with a splash of Jack from the bottle and the lighter I’d taken.
Then I spotted the gold van about fifteen yards away, past a dead lawn and the fenced-in work shed. Ugly was right. Not at all inconspicuous, but beggars can’t be choosers. I ran toward it, my skin prickling with heat. The orange streak in the sky had grown, now with bright yellow smudges. I gritted my teeth against my growing panic. No more looking at the sky. Ever.
When my feet hit the parking lot, the helicopter whirred closer, sounding almost right on top of me. I dropped and scooted underneath the van. The helicopter’s shadow crawled over the cement, a huge bug with rotating legs. I bet it was vampire proof.
Frustration burned into my hands until they clenched into fists. I didn’t have time for helicopters. The fact that I saw its shadow on the ground wasn’t a good sign. Eventually, after I bit down so hard on my teeth that I thought my eardrums had cracked, the whirring faded.
Time to move.
But first, a little fire. I fished out the glass bottle stuffed with the sock and lighter from my pockets, soaked the sock with the rest of the Jack Daniels, wedged it inside the bottle, and struck a flame to the cloth. Then I rolled the bottle across the ground as hard as I could. My troubled youth had taught me it wouldn’t actually explode any cars, but it would sure cause the pressurized struts and shock absorbers to fly around like bullets. Another distraction. Which was exactly what we needed.
I hauled ass out from underneath the van. Blinding light pummeled down on top of me. No time to think about it. I tried the driver’s side door of the gold van. Locked. Tried again. Still locked or stuck or holy fucking shit.
“You’re kidding me,” I hissed.
Heat ripped down my back. A faint sizzling started up my skin, growing louder.
Through the window, the keys were in the ignition. Locked inside the van. Smoke wafted up from underneath my collar, the tips of my ears, my whole body a match about to be lit.
I gripped the handle and tore the door clean off. A short-term solution since I still had to drive the damn thing. I threw myself inside, cranked the engine, and peeled out of there.
In the rearview mirror, the flames started from my sock cocktail caught on a tire of another car. Somewhere in the distance, over the roar of the engine, the helicopter whirred again.
Smoke still lifted off my body, though less now since the van
had a tinted windshield. My hands were blistered and red, and my whole body felt like I’d thrown myself into an oven, but I was still alive.
I squealed to a stop in front of the jail. No sign of Melody or the other guy. I couldn’t wait for them. No, fuck that, I had to wait for them because they’d risked everything to break me out, a stranger neither of them knew. For all they knew, I was a killer. Who would do something like that for me? And what was with this crazy connection I felt to Melody?
So where was she? I was a sitting duck. A stupid sitting duck in a doorless van that would pour in sunlight as soon as I cleared the building.
The helicopter drew closer, but I didn’t dare peel my eyeballs away from the front door to look for it.
My wrist burned, rivalling the heat of the sun, and then she burst through the doors. Chin Dimple ran on her heels, and seconds later, a whole slew of pissed-off guards, guns drawn, but they weren’t brave enough to fling themselves out into the sun.
Brave. Stupid. It was all a matter of perception.
Bullets flew.
I dived out of the seat into the back so Melody and Dimple could fly in after me. Smoke wafted around Melody. Her face reddened. The sizzling started up and then intensified, and she still had about ten feet to go.
Guns kept firing.
“Run zigzag so you don’t get hit!” I shouted, but I could barely hear myself.
And then they were tumbling in, first Melody, then Dimple. The van shot forward with Dimple at the wheel, knocking Melody into me until we lay flat in the back. I held her close, the searing in my wrist fading into calm warmth.
“Are you all right?” she asked, her hand over my dead heart, staring down at me with big, beautiful yellow eyes.
She was asking me that. Me. Even while her own skin was smoking and blistering.
I laughed as bullets hit the back of the van, and we got the hell out of there. She laughed, too, as she melted into me with relief. Her body against mine caused all sorts of dirty thoughts to run through my head, even after a jailbreak. Especially after a jailbreak. But I was also aware that we’d both just stepped out into the sun and needed time to heal. Time to run.
Her chin trembled as her gorgeous eyes met mine again. “My real name is Wren.”
“It could be Bertha for all I care. Thank you.” I was free, all because of Wren and that other guy.
Whoever this Wren woman was, she was gorgeous and deadly, like silver poison in an unbreakable vial. And I desperately wanted a taste.
Chapter Seven
Wren
“Are you two okay back there?” Zac yelled over his shoulder. He drove like a maniac on a tiny gravel road not meant for anything with wheels.
“If you can call okay feeling like I’m in a rock tumbler, sure.” I held on to the only semi-steady thing in the van –Ashe, who had wedged himself against the back corner and the wheel well.
It didn’t have the cushy upholstery of a minivan, just an empty cargo space. But it lacked any windows except those in the front. Depending on which way Zac turned the van, sunlight randomly invaded the interior through a couple of bullet holes in the windshield and the rear doors. Every time it shone through, it managed to hit skin that had already been burned. The tops of my ears were blistered, as were my hands. I could tell my face had sustained a mega sunburn as well, though I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.
Smoke still rose from poor Ashe’s back. His hands had blisters that were already clearing up before my eyes. He could heal quicker than I could, apparently.
Ashe sat up a bit and took off his stolen guard’s shirt. Pity he still had his original one on under it, but at least it got me a few millimeters closer to his skin. Then he grabbed a folded up windshield sunshade that stuck out from under a black garbage bag full of stuffed animals of all things. I grabbed a purple duck that had fallen out during our wild ride and snuggled it beneath my chin as I nestled closer into Ashe’s embrace.
With a soft smile, he unfolded the sunshade and draped it over us. “That should keep the sun off you, until we get to wherever we’re going. So…where are we going?”
I ventured a look up into Ashe’s copper eyes, which were filled with worry and wonder and something deeper that sent fire to my core. It was a much more pleasant feeling than the fire crawling across my skin as it struggled to heal itself.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted.
“You look so much like—”
“My mother?”
“Bronwen was your mom?” He swallowed hard and averted his eyes, as though seeing her in me struck a bad nerve.
“Yeah. Did you know her?”
He shook his head. “I saw her a few times on VTV. That’s all.”
“VTV?”
Zac made another sharp turn, jarring us against the wall of the van.
“Hey! Take it easy!” Ashe held me tighter, which squeezed my ribs like a hungry boa constrictor, but hey, I wasn’t about to complain. I was concentrating on how well his hard angles fit against my curves. And his scent – it was intoxicating, like fresh cut cedar.
“I know what I’m doing, thanks,” Zac yelled back. Now that we’d rescued Ashe, which I’d have to remind Zac was his idea, he was acting like a dick about it. Almost as though he was jealous.
I sat up and peered out the windshield. He was taking us deep into a wooded area. The thick canopy blocked the sunlight, thankfully. Was that why he was taking us farther into the boonies?
“Don’t worry about the sun,” I said to Zac. “We can stay covered up well enough.”
“I’m not worried about the sun. More worried about the chopper. I think I can lose them in here. We’ll be able to circle back into town so we can ditch the van in a parking garage. You two can hide in here while I go rent another one.”
“What about Birdie?” I asked. “We can’t just leave her there. My whole damn life is in that car.”
“We’ll get you somewhere safe, then I’ll make sure you get your car back safe and sound.”
“I hope you know where you’re going,” Ashe said.
“GPS is my friend.”
I laughed. “If you get us lost in a nest of horny inbred rednecks, I’ll offer you up first.”
He narrowed his eyes at me in the rearview mirror.
Now that we weren’t being shaken until our fangs rattled, Ashe helped me sit up with my back against the wheel well, facing him. “You’re not healing very quickly, Wren. When’s the last time you ate?”
I sneaked a peek at the rearview mirror, where amusement flashed in Zac’s eyes. “Well, I snacked on a guard at the prison and before that…um, a rat.”
“A rat? Are you on some kind of weight-loss diet? You don’t need to be, trust me.”
“Um, thanks, I guess. But no, that’s just what I eat sometimes.”
“Whatever floats your boat. What kind of DBDs do you like? I know a good place with great-tasting ABs and a few Os, but they’re kind of expensive.”
I blinked at him, realizing I must seem like a total idiot for not knowing all those acronyms. Maybe I’d heard them before and had forgotten? Maybe the sun had melted my brain so part of it had leaked from my ears. There were so many questions swirling in my head, I didn’t know where to start.
“You don’t know what DBDs are, do you?” Ashe asked.
I shook my head.
He gently bit his thumb, lifted my hand, and streaked his blood across the blistered skin. It bubbled and soaked in. The blisters shrank and disappeared, leaving my skin smooth again.
Staring at it, I recalled a day when I was maybe five or six. My mother and I were staying at a motel somewhere in Texas and had just watched Interview with the Vampire the night before on TV. The scene where Brad Pitt as Louis watches the sun rise for the last time as a human really stuck with me. I probably didn’t understand that he wasn’t a vampire, and he looked so warm and handsome in the golden glow of morning.
We had gone to bed before sunup as usual, the heavy drapes pulled ac
ross the window to keep out the daylight as we slept. I woke up and saw the light peeking from the edges of the curtains, thinking that maybe I could see the sunrise just like Louis did. So I crept out of bed and crawled under the curtain. I did indeed see the beautiful orange and pink glow of sunrise as it silhouetted the Adult XXX Emporium sign across the road. For about two seconds, I was mesmerized, until the sun popped fully over the sign. My face immediately heated to what felt like two thousand degrees.
I screamed. My mother was there in a flash. She grabbed me and bounded into the space between the two double beds. I was crying so hard, I didn’t understand what she was doing, but now I remembered her biting her thumb and rubbing it over my skin. I had always assumed she was just drying my tears. But the burn subsided quickly. That’s when she told me the only sunrises we could see were on TV, that being in the sun for longer than a few seconds could be deadly to us. I’d managed to avoid the sun fairly well since then…until today.
Ashe repeated the process on my other hand and was applying his blood to my forehead when I snapped back into reality. His blood smelled like him times five, with the distinct twang of old, dead blood like I’d smelled in Hotel Enigma. I took his hand and flipped his wrist over, then brought it to my lips.
I felt him tense up, like he might yank his hand away, but instead, he watched me with a steely intensity as I gently bit down and sucked up some of his cold, thick blood. It tasted even better than it smelled, not like food really, but more like a blood-flavored medicine. The effects were immediate. I could feel my skin tingle and stretch as the remaining blisters faded away.
I sucked again, swallowed more. All my senses fired at once. My eyes read Ashe’s cool blue temperature signature, along with the reddish purple of a slightly warmer area in his crotch. My ears picked up on the tha-thump, tha-thump of Zac’s heart.
“Wren, that’s enough.” Ashe slowly pulled his wrist away.
I jerked it back to my mouth, bit down, and sucked. I needed more. Lots more.