by Laken Cane
But the berserker…
Would she eventually taste Owen, try him out, give in to her desire to see what he’d be like naked and hot and rough?
Owen called to her¸ no matter how hard Strad might wish otherwise.
Someday she might answer.
Maybe.
“But today is not that day,” she murmured.
So she strode toward her house, her mind eager with thoughts of the waiting berserker and dark with thoughts of the cowboy.
When Owen stepped out of the shadows at the corner of her house, she wasn’t surprised even a little bit.
“One thing,” he said, before she could speak.
“What?”
He smiled slightly and walked to her, and when he was standing close enough to touch her, he pushed back his hat and stared down at her with unreadable eyes.
“Owen. You shouldn’t.” She sounded weak.
Where the cowboy was concerned, she was so fucking weak.
“You and I aren’t finished, Rune. No matter what happens, just remember that. We’re not finished.”
“What’s going to happen?” she asked, frowning.
“Just…” He shook his head, then leaned down until his lips almost touched hers. “When you’re fucking him, remember how it feels to want me.”
He grabbed her hand and pressed it against the front of his jeans.
She shuddered. “God, Owen. Fuck.” And before she pulled away, she squeezed the hard bulge straining beneath the soft fabric of his clothes.
She wanted him. That wasn’t even a question.
That didn’t make her a bad person. It made her…human.
She took a deep breath and stepped back. “Go home, cowboy.”
He slid his hot, hot stare to her lips. “My time will come.”
“You need to stay out of the berserker’s way.” She stepped past him, then turned back. “You’re part of Shiv Crew. I don’t want to lose you.” Then, she went on, almost unwilling to let the next words leave her mouth. “You need to stop chasing me. I have to get shit straight in my head. You got it?”
Yeah, maybe it was more than that, but that was all she was willing to say.
He refused to answer, just watched her, his eyes narrowed and glittering with need. Desire.
She felt his hot stare on her back all the way to the house. Even after she slipped inside and shut the door behind her, after she leaned against it trying to get her breath back, she felt his stare.
Fucking cowboy.
“Rune.”
“Fuck!” She put a hand to her chest. “Dammit, Berserker.”
He leaned against the wall, his big arms crossed, watching her.
Shit.
“I’m going to have to kill him.”
“No, you’re not.” She hoped her hand wasn’t shaking when she pushed her hair out of her eyes. “I belong to no one but my fucking monster.”
“You’re wrong,” he said, and like a snake, he uncoiled and shot a hand out to grab her wrist.
She jerked free, but even as strong as she was it took some effort.
She walked past him, down the hall and into her bedroom, his presence behind her making the fine hair rise on the back of her neck.
As though he were a threat.
The kind of threat she liked.
Fuck me.
She shuddered.
She wasn’t ready for him when he turned her toward him and forced her wrists behind her back. He held her tightly, painfully, with one hand, tangling his other hand in her hair. “You need the danger of him,” he said.
The berserker used to scare you…
She started to speak, to deny, maybe, but all that came out was a ragged breath.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
She just stared at him, unable to say a word.
“Trust me, Rune,” he murmured.
“I’m fucked up,” she whispered, not even sure if she’d spoken the words or thought them.
“I love you. But I can’t be everything you need me to be until you trust me.” He tightened his grip on her wrists. “Until you believe that I fucking love you.”
Still, she said nothing, just stared up into his eyes.
“I see the anger in your face,” he said, his voice soft, and so dark. “But I don’t give a fuck for your anger. I know it’s the only defense you have.”
He massaged the back of her head, gently. “I need only one thing from you. Your trust. When you trust me, you’ll know I’ll never hurt you again on purpose. When you trust me, you’ll understand that no matter what you do, no matter what you say or where you go or who you fuck, I’m not going anywhere.”
Bloody tears begin to itch their way down her cheeks before he was even close to being finished speaking.
“But if I want to kill a motherfucker for touching you, I’ll kill him. That’s not up to you. Do you understand?”
Yeah, she understood.
She didn’t control the berserker.
“I miss Z,” she said, before she even knew she needed to say it. “I miss him so fucking much.”
He sighed and released her wrists, then wrapped her in his arms. “I know.”
He didn’t ask her what Z had to do with anything.
There was no need. He already knew.
Owen is not Z.
But if Owen weren’t careful, he’d be dead.
Just like Z.
Chapter Twenty-One
She fed.
And she fed the berserker.
When she slept in the warm hardness of his arms, she slept like the dead. Nothing bothered her. Her sleep was dreamless. There were no haunting voices, no accusing eyes, no rotting friends.
But Eugene didn’t allow her peace for long. Before the night was half over, he called her and the crew in. Kelic’s vampires, the ones she had been unable to purge the first time out, were in Spiritgrove.
They weren’t even trying to hide. Simon himself had broken into the hospital and carried out a woman who, even as he spirited her from the building, was in the middle of giving birth.
Simon was not yet sick.
Why some of them remained healthy while some of them rotted within days was a mystery—but the witnesses at the hospital assured her that Simon was not sick.
And those who were sick decided that by feeding on the pure, they’d lose their rot—or at least stay alive until a cure was found for them.
Even if the pure was an infant.
She understood Kelic. Understood his desperation. She didn’t want to kill him…
But she would.
She just had to find the son of a bitch. The first purge had been unsuccessful. The second one couldn’t be.
“Levi,” she said, before they left the house. It would just take a few minutes to feed the twins, and though they wouldn’t ask, she could see the need in their eyes.
He and Denim offered her their wrists obediently. She bit Levi, then Denim, under the somewhat narrow gaze of the berserker.
And once at the Annex, she took ten minutes to stand at Lex’s bedside so the little Other could feed from her energy before she met her crew in the lobby.
“We’ll split up,” she told them. “Berserker, you take Denim. Levi, go with Raze. Jack, Owen. I’ll go alone.” She left the Annex with them, determined that before any of them went home again, the vampires of River County would be finished.
They had two hours before dawn—but it didn’t matter to the crew if the vampires were awake and ready to fight or asleep and helpless. It couldn’t.
“You take Denim,” Strad said, as they walked across the parking lot. “I don’t need backup.”
The twins were as full of energy from the feeding as she was, and Denim waited impatiently to see whose car he’d be getting into.
“And I do?” Rune asked. “Don’t fight me on this. Denim’s with you. I’m not taking a car.”
“Let’s do this,” Levi said, his lean body humming with eagerness.
Rune g
rinned. “Go kick ass, my bloodthirsty crew.” Then she lost her smile and stared at them somberly. “If you see the bloodsuckers, call us in. Don’t take them on until we get there. And don’t any of you die on me.”
As though her order would make them live.
Owen stuck his hands in his pockets. “Don’t worry so much.” He looked at Strad. “No one is dying.”
Strad caught Owen’s stare and they glared at each other for thirty seconds before Rune snapped them out of it. “Fuck both of you. Stop your shit and be my fucking team.”
But she worried about them the entire time she roamed River County, trying to sniff out the vampires.
The first place she searched was Wormwood. She didn’t really expect the vampires to hide in the cemetery—there were too many Others there who’d be willing to turn them in.
But she had to check.
Gunnar was waiting for her. “There are no vampires here.”
“I didn’t really think there would be.” She looked around. “It’s empty here. Quiet.”
“The Others are dying quickly.” He stared at her.
“I’ll go when I can go, Gunnar. I haven’t heard any echoes.”
“Then you’re not listening hard enough,” Dawn said, stepping from the shadows. “If you really want to go, you’ll go.”
“I wish it were that easy,” Rune said. “But from where I stand it’s almost fucking impossible.”
Dawn rolled her eyes. “You’re scared.”
Rune lifted her eyebrow at Dawn’s disdain. “Yeah? Are you going to tell me Damascus doesn’t scare you?” She frowned. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“That,” Gunnar said hurriedly, “is a long story. Go to the clinic in Willowburg, Your Horror. They will direct you to some of the vampires.”
“The clinic? Are they—”
“Go,” he said. “Time is running out. For all of us.”
She stared at him a moment longer. “You’re not sick, are you?”
Dawn answered for him. “He is rotting, Your Dumbness. If you don’t go to Skyll, he will die with the others.”
Rune put a hand to her chest. “Fuck, Gunnar.” Then, “Skyll? That’s what her world is called?”
“Skyll is the rim of horror,” Gunnar said. “Limbus. Limbo. The border between. And I will be fine.”
“Yes,” Dawn agreed. “If Her Creepiness doesn’t hide in a corner sobbing in fear.”
“Listen, ghoul. Gunnar can call me whatever he wants to call me. You can’t. Keep your fucking mouth shut or when I do go, I’m hauling your ass back there with me.”
Dawn paled and took a step back. “You…”
“Yes?”
“Go away.”
Rune went. If Dr. Haas, the Other doctor, could tell her where the vampires were, she had no time to waste.
She called Jack once she was outside Wormwood. “Pick me up at the cemetery. We need to go to the clinic in Willowburg. Gunnar says they’ll have a lead on some of the vampires.”
“You got it,” he said. “Want me to call the others?”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t quite daylight and the vampires were still awake. The entire crew would need to be there. The vampires might be sick but they were able to fight.
And run.
She didn’t know why she’d called Jack to pick her up instead of Strad or Raze. He pulled up and Owen jumped out, giving her a wink before he got into the backseat.
She’d forgotten Owen was with Jack or she might have called someone else. But then she brushed the thought away. She wasn’t walking on eggshells because of Owen or the berserker.
Once she was inside the car she punched in the clinic number. She’d let them know she was on her way to see the doctor.
No one answered.
“Shit.”
“What is it?” Jack asked.
“Drive faster, baby. There’s no answer at the clinic.”
She caught glimpses of sick Others, some lying dead at the sides of the highways, others walking aimlessly as decaying bodies and splintering minds overtook them.
As they drew closer to Willowburg they spotted a group of Others gathered in a field off the road—they would never have seen them if the headlights hadn’t, for one brief second, glanced off the lifeless body of a human hanging over a low hanging branch of a tree.
“It’s not a group of Others,” Rune told Jack and Owen. “It’s a mob of vampires. Don’t get careless.”
Jack slammed on the brakes and all three of them were out of the car in seconds. Rune smelled the sickness as soon as she left the vehicle.
Some of the vampires were sick, some of them were not. Two healthy bloodsuckers ran to meet the crew, equal parts determination and madness in their pale faces.
Three more followed, blood leaking from stained lips.
A female vampire stood, then listed to the side and lay without moving.
Rune processed it all in seconds, then there was little time for anything but killing.
“Human,” she heard Owen shout, and caught a glimpse of him pulling an unmoving woman from the ground.
He tossed her over his shoulder, wielding his blade with one hand as he backed away from the group of vampires.
The vampires weren’t overly interested in the woman Owen carried, which told Rune they’d already gotten everything they could from her. She was either already dead or would be dead in a matter of minutes.
She didn’t see Simon or Iker. Likely the master had been trying to keep some sort of peace and the band she was facing were rogues who’d split from him.
And they were angry.
A bloodsucker ran at her, his fangs flashing. Before he could reach her, another vampire appeared, shoved him away, and went for Rune himself. Snarling, raging, hungry.
Sick.
They blamed her for the sickness as much as they blamed the humans. Blamed her for not saving them. And they all wanted a piece of her.
She understood.
That didn’t mean she wouldn’t have to kill them.
And the sun was coming.
The vampires were so fucked up they didn’t seem to see or feel or hear dawn breaking—and as Rune readied her claws to dig out her attacker’s heart, the sun did it for her.
Just that suddenly, the bloodsuckers began screaming as they melted and burned in a hideous show of agony, crying out in terror as the reaper came to tote them off after centuries of life.
Rune covered her ears and closed her eyes, unable to bear witness to a kind of suffering that not even she had been forced to endure.
When she was able to look again, the sun was smiling, and the vampires were dead.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“You okay?” Jack asked, adjusting his eye patch.
Owen stood silently at the car, staring off into the distance. The woman he’d carried away had died before he’d gotten her out of the field.
The vampires had ripped her baby from her before she’d died. When Rune forced herself to search the field she’d found the body of the infant. She’d placed it with its mother in the back of Jack’s car.
Then she stood still, numb, cold, and so very tired.
“Rune,” Jack said, gently. “We need to go to the clinic. That wasn’t all of them.”
She nodded. “No sign of Simon or Iker?”
“No.”
Maybe Iker had died early. Maybe Simon had killed him to spare him the horror of rotting, and Simon was hiding where she’d never find him. He’d threatened to go underground, and no matter how sick he might become, he was smart.
She nodded. “Let’s go.” But she didn’t move.
She heard gunshots in the distance, and saw smoke rising into the sky. River County hadn’t even recovered from COS, and they were being hit again.
The county was going to be destroyed. It was destroying itself.
Jack slid under the wheel, then let down his window. “Rune. Get in.”
She didn’t realize Owen was beside her until he to
ok her arm. “Come on.”
Rune shook off the melancholy and got into the car. There were more vampires to put down. More babies to save.
Always.
She couldn’t afford to wallow in her deep and bloody issues.
The house above the clinic was eerily dark and quiet when they arrived, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Though the clinic had lost its secrecy in the preceding months, it still maintained its mystery.
Rune walked with Jack and Owen to the front door, the cover door. Her loud knock was not answered, and she closed her eyes for a long second.
“There’s some bad shit in there,” she said. “Be ready for anything.”
She shot out her claws as the other two filled their hands with silver, and with one kick she destroyed the door.
They took the elevator down. Rune placed herself in front of the two men before the doors opened. The elevator spat them out into a clinic that bore little resemblance to the clean, neat place run by Dr. Haas.
The floors were littered with garbage, and the once pristine walls were covered with graffiti. There were no capable nurses hurrying down the hallways, no quiet chimes notifying staff of patient requests.
“What the hell happened here?” Jack murmured.
“Traffickers,” Rune replied, keeping her voice low.
“They’re using the clinic for headquarters,” Owen agreed.
“Then let’s find the sons of bitches,” Jack said.
They walked quickly but quietly down the hallway, gently nudging open doors to peer into empty rooms. They found no patients.
She cocked her head, almost relieved when the hint of a scream reached her sensitive ears. “I heard a scream, boys. I’m going on ahead. Stay together.”
She didn’t wait to see if they’d argue, just let her monster free and ran. The clinic was bigger than she’d imagined it would be, with areas she’d never seen.
She half expected the prisoners to be held in the basement, if the clinic had one, but she heard one of them seconds later, locked in an operating room.
The screams came again, louder, more desperate, and Rune hit the doors running. They burst inward, crumbling like crackers.
