With rubber laid on the cement in two long, black, wavering lines, they left that level of the parking garage—and the shooter—behind them. Inside Eliana flared a brilliant white hope, clear and crackling like a firework: They’d escaped!
Oh, so wrong. Laughably wrong. Hope, she quickly discovered, was not particularly helpful when there were over half a dozen trained killers gunning for one’s head.
Around two sharp turns they entered a double helix exit ramp collared by thick cement columns. Both sides of the ramp yawned open between parking levels, and like swiftly descending spiders, a trio of men scuttled with effortless leaps from level to level beside them, clinging briefly to the cement columns before pushing off, heading down.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” shouted Gregor, apoplectic. “Seriously! You’ve got to be kidding!”
“Watch out!” screamed Eliana as one of the suited spiders dropped to the ramp directly in front of them and raised his weapon. She sank down in the seat and threw her arms over her face, but then there was a bump and a sickening sort of crunch, and the gun-wielding assassin disappeared under the car.
“That’s right, asshole!” shouted Gregor gleefully, pounding his big fist on the steering wheel. “Suck on that!”
Eliana turned and through the rear window saw a crumpled figure tumbling lifelessly down the ramp behind them, arms and legs akimbo, limbs bent at awkward, unnatural angles.
They hit the bottom level of the garage in a sliding sideways spin, fishtailing as Gregor struggled to keep control of the wheel.
“There!” Eliana shouted over the squealing tires, pointing to a small neon exit sign that hung on the opposite side of the level.
Gregor tightened his hands on the wheel, the Ferrari leapt forward with a near-deafening roar, and Eliana was slammed back into her seat with the sudden propulsion. As they rounded the final corner, she was horrified to see not one but two assassins standing with spread legs and raised guns directly in front of the metal gate that led to the exit.
The closed metal gate.
“Glove compartment!” shouted Gregor. “Gun!”
“Now you tell me!”
With the press of a button, the compartment lid snicked open, and Eliana snatched up the gun. It was heavy and cold in her hand, sleek and utilitarian, and at that moment she thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her life.
Gregor rolled the window down, and Eliana leaned out, aimed, squeezed the trigger, and fired off four rounds…and the assassins didn’t even twitch.
“Where’d you learn to shoot a gun, the goddamn school for the blind?” Gregor screamed.
But then one of them sagged to one knee, lowered his weapon, and looked down, surprised, at the front of his white shirt, where a dark liquid stain had begun to spread.
The other one, luminous green gaze canny and unwavering, leveled his gun at Gregor in the driver’s seat and fired. Just from that single look—murderous, certain—Eliana knew even before Gregor jerked back and hollered that the bullet would hit its intended target.
A spray of blood misted the dashboard. The Ferrari barreled ahead. Gregor’s hands slid from the wheel.
They crashed into the metal access gate at full speed with Eliana twisted sideways, gripping the steering wheel, screaming at the top of her lungs. The assassin leapt clear at the last moment, still shooting, but everything had taken on a dreamlike unreality, color and lights flashing by at hyper-speed, sound warped slow and strange as if it traveled underwater.
The beating of her heart seemed like cannon on a battlefield. The coppery smell of blood hung penny bright and thick in the air.
The gate tore from its hinges with a violent, ear-splitting screech, and they blasted through it in a shower of orange sparks. It flew away overhead like a huge, warped bird, and jagged chunks of metal and plastic from the damaged hood and both shattered headlights followed it. Something heavy caught on the undercarriage and dragged beneath them, setting off an unearthly clamor as they hit the pavement again, breaking free of the garage, and careened down the deserted collector road that ran alongside the building.
“Gregor!” she shouted, frantic. “Gregor!”
Slumped motionless in the seat, he didn’t respond.
Eliana glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see four more assassins appear in the quickly receding rectangle of the garage door, which glowed a ghostly white against the dark building and the night. Gregor’s foot was still pressed against the accelerator; she yanked hard on the wheel, and they spun around a corner onto a side street at breakneck speed, narrowly missing getting wrapped around a streetlamp.
Right before the building they’d left behind disappeared from sight, she saw all five dark figures in the rectangle of light transform in a violent eruption of black fur and sharp fangs and sleek, sinewy muscle that shredded their tailored clothing into a spray of black-and-white confetti that hung suspended for a moment before drifting slowly to the ground.
With savage roars she heard even above the strung-out whine of the engine, five impossibly huge black panthers leapt forward from powerful hind legs and took off after the car at a flat-out run.
It was five o’clock in the morning in England, the palest blush of dawn beginning to spread pink and lavender over the smoke-dark hills. Thrushes and sparrows had begun to stir in the dewed branches of trees and sing their first, tentative songs of the morning, and the fog that curled in thick fingers around trunks of pines and elms had begun to lift. All the little creatures of the woods were still abed, but in the village of Sommerley—quaint as a postcard, tucked back against the New Forest in a lush, green valley far away from the prying eyes of civilization—one creature was wide, wide awake.
She was pearl pale and feminine, a poet’s muse of golden hair and Mona Lisa smiles and quiet, effortless grace. Born a commoner, she was now a Queen, the most Gifted and powerful Queen her kind had seen in centuries. She could read a mind with a touch of her hand, she could change from woman to mist to lethal, cunning predator, among other things. She could even, when the mood struck, change into something that quite shocked and offended all her predator kin, and made her happy precisely because it did.
Cats thought birds were lesser creatures, silly creatures, good for only one thing: snacks.
But for the moment she was only a woman, sitting upright and breathless in bed, listening to the low, rumbling voice on the other end of the telephone.
“…and if you grant me this, I will agree to join the confederacy. I’ll agree to…your terms.”
Jenna had never met the man on the other end of the phone, but she knew him regardless. Celian, leader of the Roman colony, gave her husband fits.
She glanced over at that beloved husband now, sleeping on his back with one heavy arm thrown over his face, his muscular chest bare and gleaming in the pale morning light. His other arm was still wrapped around her naked waist; he hadn’t moved, even when the shrill ring of the phone broke the stillness of dawn.
Leander always slept like the dead after a long night of loving. Which meant he almost always slept like the dead.
“Tell me, Celian,” Jenna said, tracing a light finger down her husband’s chest. At her touch, he stirred and made a low sound in his throat, then sank back into slumber. “Why would this Demetrius—your brother, you call him—take it upon himself to do what he did? He must have known what the consequences of his actions would be. Help me understand why he would risk so much, for what appears to be so little.”
There was a pause, a cleared throat, another pause that felt pregnant. Then Celian said simply, “Love.”
Jenna’s hand stilled. “He fights for love?” she whispered, arrested.
She heard the long exhale from so many miles away, heavy with a hundred unnamed things. “Are our ways so different, Jenna?” He refused to call her Queen as steadfastly as he’d so far refused to join the Council of Alphas, which she didn’t hold against him; in his place, she’d feel exactly th
e same way about both. This also gave Leander fits. “Where you’re from, will a man not forsake everything he has for the woman that he loves? Even, if necessary, his life?”
Her eyes found Leander’s sleeping form again. No, their ways were not so different. They were not different at all. She murmured, “Even if the woman he loves is the new leader of the group that’s been trying to kill us for centuries?”
Silence. Sudden, crackling anger she felt like a hand around her throat. “Eliana is not her father—”
“No,” Jenna agreed, “she’s not. But she is the daughter of the madman who left my sister-in-law maimed for life, who tortured and killed many of my kin, who kept the heads of his enemies like trophies, and who,” her voice lowered to steel, “had me tortured and beaten near to death.”
Celian had no answer to that. Jenna went on, “Blood follows Blood, Celian. It’s the way of our kind. What proof do you have that she—or her brother—hasn’t followed in her father’s footsteps?”
“I can’t speak for her brother,” he replied, his voice tight, “but Demetrius believes Eliana is innocent, therefore so do I.”
It wasn’t enough; the Council of Alphas would say it wasn’t nearly enough to grant the favor he asked, even with his willing capitulation to join them and bow to their will. Demetrius had broken ranks and gone against orders, and that made him dangerous to them all. No matter how much Celian believed in him.
And yet…and yet…
Outside a bird began to sing, a high, trilling warble in the stillness of the pink-lit dawn. Jenna glanced at the expanse of lead-paned windows that ran along the east wall of their bedchamber and saw beyond the sill a tiny white butterfly bobbing above the planted flowerbeds with bumpy grace, settling finally on the open bloom of a rose. The flower didn’t even tremble under its weight.
Life is pain and everyone dies, but true love lives forever.
Her mother’s words. They came back to haunt her at odd moments like these. She’d died years and years ago, but Jenna often wondered if she was still out there somewhere, watching over her.
Reminding her.
Jenna herself was the product of such desperate love and granite loyalty, a child of two star-crossed lovers who paid the ultimate price for their dreams. She knew what it meant to risk everything, to gamble on love, to lose in the end but never regret one brilliant, doomed moment because what was gained was worth every sacrifice, even death.
Perhaps Demetrius would come to regret following his heart. Perhaps he would be lucky enough to find true love, or cursed enough to lose it—only Fate could tell. But Fate was burdened with the minutia of the universe, and sometimes she needed a little helping hand.
Jenna sat a moment longer, thinking, then came to a decision in her usual way: she went with her gut.
“I’d like to meet this Demetrius of yours, Celian,” she said softly. “And you, too. I admire that kind of loyalty. It’s very rare. And I’m sorry…that we all got off on the wrong foot. The last thing I want is more fighting. More bloodshed. We’ve all had too many years of that.” She paused a moment, allowing the silence between them to deepen. On the other end of the phone, Celian waited, his attention honed sharp as the tip of a knife. Firmer, she said, “I’d like to see you join the confederacy, Celian, but I won’t force you to, even under the circumstances. If we’re going to work together, it has to be on equal footing. You have to want to join us. I know all too well what our laws are like.” She smiled, a wry twist of her lips. “Fortunately, I’m above them. So you have your two days. Make them count.”
There was a beat of astonished silence before she heard Celian’s low, amused chuckle. She imagined him shaking his head. “Well, for all the ways your husband and I disagree, at least we can both agree on his taste in women.”
“I’ll tell him you said so.” Jenna glanced back at Leander. Without another word, she ended the call.
She made another call—quick and to the point—and then set the phone back in its cradle on the nightstand beside the bed and snuggled into the space between Leander’s strong arm and warm body, the safest spot in the world.
He turned his head and mumbled something incoherent into her hair. “Sleep, love,” she whispered, closing her eyes and tightening her arms around him. “Go back to sleep.”
They had hours yet before the sun would crest the mountains and he and the Council would discover what she’d done. They might as well both be rested for what lay ahead.
Belief in Fate, like belief in God, requires a certain suspension of disbelief, the ability to accept without physical proof that there is something larger than yourself operating behind the scenes in the universe, there is a Plan that’s being followed and your own small life is a part of it.
That was a concept so foreign to Keshav it was rendered not only unimaginable, but entirely ridiculous.
An assassin by trade and by nature, Keshav believed not in Fate but in Chance, Fate’s blind, gleefully chaotic sibling who had no long-term Plan but wreaked havoc on hearts and lives just because he could. Keshav had seen and done too many horrible things to harbor any tender notions of a benevolent God. He knew God was a concept humans had created back in the days when they’d first crawled from the mud, gasping air with amphibious lungs. God’s primary function was simply to help soothe the primal, animal terror of death.
The primary function of Chance, on the other hand, was to really screw with you.
Perfect example: his current situation.
Chance had not been on their side at the police station. A few moments more and they’d have had their target firmly in hand. But Chance had decided her erstwhile lover would get there first. Fine, Keshav could deal with that, and he did. They swiftly and silently removed the body of their fallen comrade from the wreckage of the building, and then they retreated, they regrouped. They decided on the best spot for a temporary grave—he’d be reburied later in his home soil because it was an abomination for any of their kind to molder in an unnamed grave in a foreign land—and discussed their next move.
Then Chance lobbed them a lovely golden apple: driving from the burial site, the girl ran across their path. Literally, right across it. They were at a stoplight on the outskirts of the city, waiting for the light to change, and she’d sprinted across the street in a blur of raven blue hair and long legs and disappeared over a fence into a quiet neighborhood backyard.
Keshav looked at the other members of The Hunt. They looked back at him. Then, without uttering a word, they abandoned the car right in the middle of the street and took off on foot after her.
Then Chance had found it amusing to equip her with a gun and a human sidekick with a sports car.
As the taillights of the Ferrari faded into the distance down the Rue de l’Arbalete, the five remaining members of The Hunt slowed from a sprint to a trot, and finally to a standstill. In flashes of swirling gray Vapor, they Shifted back to human form and stood naked in the middle of the empty road, watching.
“Couldn’t have been driving a Fiat,” commented Calder beside him. Originally from the Quebec colony, he was lean and rangy, with a thick scar that ran in a wavering line from his jaw all the way up to his hairline, bisecting one eyebrow. He never said how he’d gotten it, and none of the others had asked.
“Zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in three seconds,” answered Ang, a member of the Nepal colony who had a fetish for expensive cars. He collected and restored them in his spare time. When he wasn’t killing things. “Top speed over three hundred twenty-five kilometers per hour…We’re fast, but not even we can beat that.”
“All right,” said Keshav, cool. He knew Chance wasn’t done with them yet. “Let’s clean up and call it in.”
Clean up was assassin parlance for get rid of the bodies. Two of the team were still back at the building, one felled by bullets, the other flattened by over a ton of metal. The bullets he understood; travelling at over a thousand miles per hour, a bullet headed in your direction affords only m
illiseconds to react before you’re dead. A car, on the other hand—why that idiot hadn’t just Shifted to Vapor was beyond Keshav’s comprehension. He deserved to get run over.
One by one, the five assassins now did exactly that. Five glittering gray plumes of mist gathered sinuous as smoke, surged up into the cool weight of the night sky, and headed back the way they’d come.
Laurent had worked for nineteen years as the head of the emergency medicine department at the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne, one of the oldest and most prestigious hospitals in Paris. He’d seen nearly every trauma and injury in his long career, and it had been many years since he’d been surprised by what occurred in hospitals, by what people did to one another in anger or to themselves in despair.
But tonight had proven he still had the capacity to be shocked.
He heard their approach first. He’d been standing at the nurse’s station near the sliding doors to the entrance of the ER, flicking through the admitting form for a patient with a severe head cold who was convinced she was dying of plague, when from somewhere down the street outside came the distinct sound of a car screeching to a protracted halt, its brakes locked and screaming in protest. Whatever the driver of the car had been trying to avoid, he failed spectacularly because the car in question came flying into the hospital parking lot and collided with half a dozen parked cars as it careened to and fro like a pinball in an arcade game, and then as Laurent and the night nurse at the desk watched in openmouthed horror, it made a beeline for the sliding glass emergency room doors.
At full speed.
He leapt over the desk, grabbed the frozen nurse by her fleshy white bicep, and ran.
At the last second the driver gained a measure of control over the car. And by measure, Laurent would later tell his wife, I mean une petit quantité. A smidge. A squealing sideways slide slowed it down enough so that when the low-slung sports car finally made impact with the building, it only destroyed the row of groomed rosemary bushes along the front walk, the wrought iron railing beside them, and a portion of the low brick wall where he sat contemplating his sins during his smoke breaks. A rather substantial portion, but it could have been much worse.
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