His last coherent thought was spoken in a few words. “Let’s go. It’s not safe here.”
Chapter 6
Violet
VIOLET FOLLOWED THE lion into the trees, her head aching fiercely. It felt like her body was coated generously in bruises and stinging cuts. She wondered how she was on her feet at all, remembering the car crash and then waking up on the muddy bank. The humid summer night kept her wet and miserable.
“Where are we going to go without a car?” she asked him. The world seemed tilted, with her stumbling after him like a newborn duckling. The first time she tripped and fell face-first into the dirt, she wondered if she had it in her to stand. She curled in on herself with a sob, content to lay on the cool grass if it calmed some of her aches.
A massive lion’s paw pressed into the dirt by her cheek, his head nudging her shoulder. Their eyes met, but there was no compulsion or control this time. She’d seen the same blank animal expression in the lions she cared for. “You’re right. We can’t stop,” she said, struggling back to her feet.
Something told her that she was on her own here. She reached into her pocket, but her phone was gone. Her forgotten swim in the river would’ve ruined it anyway. They kept walking, more slowly this time.
He must’ve saved me, she thought, watching the lion’s outline slink in and out of moonlit patches.
Feeling some gratitude for the lion—no, the vampire—who’d gotten her into this situation seemed wrong. Especially when there was something clearly wrong with him too, as if he were more animal than anything else. Was he actually a man? She puzzled over it to keep her mind off of herself and the dried clots of dirt falling from her ruined pants.
How quickly she’d accepted that he was a mythical creature, too. Perhaps she’d taken a harder knock to the head than she’d realized. A talking lion with enemies so determined to kill him, actually a vampire. Sure, of course. She wasn’t crazy or anything.
Just to check, she pinched her arm, twinging a bruise already there. “Ow,” she muttered. It wasn’t a dream.
“I’d be more careful, love.” The lion’s gruff voice drifted back to her. This time, he waited for her to catch up to him, giving her an obvious once-over.
“Are you yourself again?” She didn’t meet his eyes, instead resting her gaze upon his flanks. His wounds seemed less severe after a wash in the river.
Inclining his maned head, he said, “Of a sort. You seem…better.”
“Not panicking or not dying?”
“Why not both?” There was a touch of humor to the words. “I’m sorry you had to be caught up in all of this.”
She opened her mouth to say her usual default. It’s all right. But was it? Her gaze fell to her mud-spattered boots. With the adrenaline of their flight fading, exhaustion was setting in fast, like lead weights tied to every muscle.
“If we survive this, I’ll replace everything you’ve lost and then some,” he continued when she remained silent.
“If,” she echoed, rubbing her arms in the wake of a new wave of goosebumps.
“Without a car, we’re sitting ducks out here. Let’s keep moving,” he said, turning to go.
“Why did we run anyway?” She forced herself to follow him, her stiff legs protesting every motion. She hadn’t been this tired in her life, and her eyelids threatened to engulf her vision. “We could have called the police. Locked ourselves in quarantine until they arrived.”
A sigh echoed back to her. “Mortals are easy to control. Even mortal authorities. Any vampire worth their salt could puppet a group of police to fire at us instead and report that they’d eliminated a hostile threat rather than gunned down a pair of innocents.”
“I already hate vampires,” she muttered. She’d felt that same compulsion, she realized, both from the lion and one of the thugs who’d planned openly to kill her and…
Stephen, so proud of his grandkids, had been senselessly slaughtered, his body laid out with the other two, and hers meant to join it. She stopped again and grasped her knees, her breath leaving her in short pants. In a way, she was beyond lucky she hadn’t joined them. But in another, a painful and sour knot tied itself just below her windpipe.
“Violet. That’s your name, right?” The lion nudged her side. “We have to keep moving.”
“They shouldn’t have died,” she said. “I don’t…I can’t…”
“You can honor their memory by surviving this night.” He was gentle as he gave her another push, this time starting her forward momentum again. Instead of letting herself crash to the ground, she took a shaky step and another.
“Try not to think about it. The most important thing you can do is walk. Follow my voice. Think you can do that?” he coaxed, staying only a few steps in front of her now.
“I’ll try,” she promised. He coached her over tree roots and around thorny bushes grown unchecked in the wilderness.
As they seemed to drift closer to the interstate and the whoosh of the occasional passing car, he said, “This will be a while. Tell me of yourself?”
“Right now?” His question startled her from the precipice of a micro nap that promised to drop her if she let it take over.
“It helps to talk.”
“I would much rather know about you then,” she said, casting a glance over her shoulder as they moved away from the interstate. If danger were to come for them, it seemed most likely that it would be from that direction.
He hummed to himself. “I wonder how much you would believe.”
“Anything. I’m a believer now,” she said, perhaps too quickly, as he was quiet except for the rustle of his passage through the underbrush to give her something to follow.
“I’m Alex Rehnquist. I’m a vampire,” he said at last.
“Uh huh.” She waited for more, recognizing a cagey tone when she heard one.
“And I’m a shapeshifter. It’s a vampire thing, to simplify things for you. We have bloodlines, and I’m from the bloodline that shapeshifts.”
“So, you’re usually not a talking lion? Thank god.” She uttered a laugh and then found that she couldn’t stop a stream of manic giggles from escaping.
“I’m only a talking lion when I want to be,” he said dryly, flashing her a glance. With moonlight reflecting from his eyes, they lit like twin drops of green light. Very un-lion-like, she thought. “Except now. I’m stuck, else we wouldn’t have a problem right now.”
“How do you get stuck as a lion?” She was still giggling, a pair of tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Poison. My enemy has been experimenting with compounds that might cause this. I was poisoned, flung in that box, and taken to your zoo to be set up as a killer and put down tomorrow, I imagine.”
She saw that quarantine cell once more, its sand running red with shed blood. Bile struck the back of her throat, and a fit of coughing interrupted her laughter. “Who’d you piss off enough to do that to you?” she croaked.
Alex paused, both to let her catch up and to consider. “You know the company Haven Entertainment?”
“Who doesn’t?” she said. Haven Entertainment did it all, hosting television shows, the news, and even had its fingers in some of the most recent blockbusters.
“It was founded before the radio was invented by a man who’s wanted me dead for even longer. The name at the head of the company changes, but the man does not. His name is Bryant Collins.” His voice was full of heat, as inflexible as his face was in expressing the hatred that flowed between him and this other man.
Violet frowned to herself. A man in charge of a company that huge had to have all the money and resources he could possibly desire. “How old does that make you?” she asked. Older than the radio, apparently.
“Ah-ah. Don’t you know it’s rude to ask a lion his age?” he said lightly. “It’s your turn anyway. Tell me about you.”
Mouth already open to follow that dodge, she acknowledged he’d told her more than she’d expected. Yet she was left holding more questio
ns and uncertainties than ever. “I’m Violet Reynolds. I’m married to my job, and it would seem I’m about to get a divorce.”
After what she’d seen, she didn’t know if she could ever return to her job and fall into the same routine with three person-sized holes missing. Her throat clenched, and she cleared it awkwardly. “I…was quite heavily involved in the PR effort for the male lion’s debut. His name was Enzi, and I wonder if your…enemies…if they did something to him too.”
“Not that I would know, but I can have my people look into it,” he said, a note of sympathy to his voice.
“Thank you,” she said, sighing. “I mean, what’s there to tell you? I left home at eighteen and never looked back. My dad lost his arm in a freak accident at work and became a mean ol’ drunk overnight. My mom got pregnant with another man’s baby and ran off with him, leaving me alone with my dad and his parade of girlfriends.” A stirring of old resentment hit her belly, but it was better than the exhaustion nipping at her heels.
“Before you worry, don’t,” she continued. She hadn’t told many of her past for the pity that would result. But it was old news, wounds that’d long scarred over with the combination of time and professional help.
“Then I won’t worry,” he said. “I appreciate your candor. It’s refreshing. You strike me as the kind of person who learned early on to appreciate animals’ simpler natures.”
“If you mean that they’re better than people, yeah. Tell me of a scenario where an animal would’ve done something like this to us,” she muttered. She very much felt like a grounded bird being tormented by a bored cat, wondering when and if she were taking this peaceful moment for granted.
“Nature is far more brutal than you give her credit for. But you’ll find little out there crueler than Bryant Collins and his men.” He shook his head, stopping in a clearing far from the sound of the interstate. “I think we should stop here to rest.”
She didn’t need him to say it twice, lying down in a patch of overgrown grass with a grateful sigh. There was no thought to what bugs or other things could be sharing the grass with her. She’d deal with them in the morning.
“I’m going to try shifting,” Alex said. Cracking her eyes open to watch, she barely mustered the energy to lift her head. She expected something flashy, like a blast of light and the sudden appearance of a man in place of a lion. Instead, his bones popped and crackled as they shifted position. It sounded painful from his groan.
His transformation lasted only a few seconds, but the end result was not what they were hoping for. He shrank dramatically, fur shading darker as he became a black cat, a handsome tom save for the chunks of fur missing along his flank. A smile touched her lips despite herself, and she reached out to try coaxing him to curl up with her for sleep like she would her own cat.
Alex arched his back with a feral hiss, darting off into the underbrush. There’s that animal side to him again, she thought to herself, offering a tired shrug. He’ll be back. She closed her eyes.
When dawn was close, she was thrown over a stranger’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Barely a murmur of protest passed her lips before a cloth smelling of sweet chemicals and copper pennies was pressed to her face. She slept like the dead after that.
Chapter 7
Violet
VIOLET WOKE IN a haze of disorientation, her head feeling like it’d been cracked open and stuffed with cotton fluff. She wasn’t lying on a bed of grass, as she’d expected to find herself, but instead inside a cinderblock-lined bathroom lit by fluorescents. The corners of the room were caked in dirt, and cobwebs had taken up residence on the ceiling. She cringed to be in such an unclean space, making to stand.
She didn’t budge. Her hands flexed uselessly behind her, tied to the back of a solid, wooden chair too heavy for her to move. The throbbing in her ears grew in intensity as her heart pattered.
Great, I’m the damsel in distress, she thought, feeling what she could of the rope securing her arms. It was too well-tied to manipulate.
She sagged in the chair, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. What did she remember of her situation? Foggy words from last night seeped into her memories, of Alex the vampire turned lion talking about his longtime enemy, the owner of Haven Entertainment. That man must’ve arranged her kidnapping, but to what end?
Who would pay ransom for her? She had no family to speak of, having not spoken to her father in a decade and her mother in even longer.
She couldn’t count on Alex, who’d run and hid the moment he’d transformed into a housecat. If he were still a lion, he could’ve fought off whoever had come to grab her in the middle of her rest. Would he even try to save her now? He was probably far safer without her as baggage.
Bowing her head, she acknowledged that if she was to get out of this alive, somehow, she’d have to save herself.
She’d have to tell them of Alex, who’d gotten her in the middle of his mess. She felt a sort of loyalty to him that balked at the thought, even though it was his fault her car was junk. If he were better off alone, as she thought, it made no sense that he would save her and let her slow him down as she stumbled through the night. There was no means to an end there. He was still a stranger, and she couldn’t count on him to rescue her again.
Not that anyone gave her the chance to talk her way out of this. Time passed, measured in the drip of a leaky faucet and the fast throb of her heart. There were other people around; she could hear the murmur of their voices, sometimes close. There was no way to kid herself here—anyone who would tie her to a chair in a dirty bathroom wouldn’t be a friend to her for an interrogation.
When someone finally came to check on her, he burst into the room with little preamble. Two people followed, setting up a chair for him and wheeling in a cart piled with various tools. He dismissed his assistants with a wave, leaving Violet alone with a man she assumed was a vampire.
There was little different about him that would suggest it despite an attractive face and muscles a gym rat would drool for. He didn’t move with any particular kind of otherworldly grace, instead dropping his weight into his chair with a sigh like any man would. When he spoke, there were no long fangs, but his eyes…
Entrancing. A shade of brown close to amber, they were more prominent and noticeable than any man’s that she’d met, almost meant to be noticed and stared at. She had already learned that to glance in a vampire’s eyes was to become a puppet to their whims, so she kept her gaze on the thick vest he wore instead. It looked like something straight from an action movie, only missing the camouflage and string of bullets looping over one shoulder.
“Hello, Violet,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. There seems to be a misunderstanding.”
“How do you know my name?” She relied on the smooth humor in his voice to know there was neither pleasure in their meeting nor a misunderstanding.
“Well, you’re something of a celebrity. With a little visit from our men, it seems you’re a murderer now.” It felt like he’d submerged her in cold water, every hair on her body rising with alarm.
“I didn’t kill anyone!” she protested, jerking her arms with fists balled.
“Tell the nation that. Your face was on the nightly news,” he said. Taking his phone out, he showed her an old photo of her posing with one of the older lionesses. The website headline was obvious even from a distance. She’d made national news, but not in a good way. Her face went slack with a heavy combination of denial and disbelief, choking off any words to her defense.
“That’s just good business, Miss Reynolds. We can’t go telling the truth, can we?” He grinned, a flash of white at the corner of her eye. She glanced over to see that he did indeed have fangs, the lethal points replacing his upper canines and almost reaching the bottom gum line. “No one would believe the vampires and magic side.”
She found her words on a gasp, part outrage and all shock to see that he really was a vampire. They existed, and she’d landed smack in the middle of
two factions of them overnight. “But they’d believe someone without a motive would kill three random people?” she snapped.
“Like a charm. So, now you know what’s at stake.” He placed his phone back in his pocket, reclining in his chair like a lounging king. “What if I told you I have the power to run a correction on this and lift the blame from you?”
“People only believe the first thing they read,” she said, sounding numb even to her own ears. They’d taken the most important thing from her—her job. Such a sought-after position would be impossible to get back with a cloud of doubt and hatred following her. Over something she hadn’t done, no less.
“You underestimate Haven. So, you help me, and I’ll help you. You can go back to your life with only a few scratches.” He sounded like he believed her only a bit roughed up, wearing a self-satisfied air as he waited.
“Depends what kind of help you want from me,” she said, resigned to at least hear him out. She’d expected something like this, but agreeing to work with someone was made more difficult when she was already fostering a raging hatred toward him and his smug face.
“You can start by telling me where Alexander Rehnquist is,” he said, flipping his hand. “We found you, so we assumed he would be close by. Did that lion abandon you?”
“Not that I know of,” she said. So they thought Alex was still a lion. She didn’t volunteer his change of form as she glowered in his general direction.
“Hmm. He killed four of our men. Two were in the car that chased you, and you left that car there. Why?” he asked.
There was a car they could’ve used? She blinked rapidly for a moment, remembering waking up from her impromptu swim. “I was in no shape to drive,” she said, imagining how badly she would’ve weaved in and out of lanes in that state.
Dream Walker: Blood Legacy Series Book 1 Page 3