She was twenty paces down the hall before she felt someone catch up to her. She sighed in exasperation. “Will, please, just leave me alone. I can’t talk about this right now, okay? Just go away.”
“Er, what about me?” A decidedly feminine voice asked.
Rene glanced over her shoulder to find it was actually Serena following her. “Oh, sorry.”
“What else happened that you’re not talking about?” Serena followed her out the front doors and across the path to the apartment building adjacent to the headquarters.
Rene had actually been back to her second apartment before meeting her comrades. It was a fib to say she hadn’t eaten in thirty-six hours. She’d had just enough presence of mind to grab the remaining blood packs from her refrigerator before shimmering to Abandon. Apparently the wolves in her apartment hadn’t thought to check the fridge to see if there was anything else they could wreck. Draining one before she went across the street had been a necessity; she’d barely been able to stand upright. Most of that was the shock, but being so hungry certainly hadn’t helped.
“What makes you think something else happened?”
“One threatening note from a werewolf is not enough to shake you this badly.”
Rene climbed the stairs with Serena trotting up them right behind her. Her rooms were on the top floor—four floors up. “They didn’t just leave a note.”
“You didn’t find one there, did you? Oh, God, Rene, did you kill another one?”
“No,” she said. They started up the last set of stairs. “They destroyed the place. Everything in it. I’m definitely not getting my security deposit back.”
“Oh my—what’s left?”
Rene snorted. “See what I’m wearing? This is everything.”
They walked down the hall to the last apartment. Rene pulled out her key and opened the door. Not that a locked door would really keep out one of her kind. They really just operated on the honor system. And high-tech cameras. And the knowledge that they would rip each other’s hearts out if the privacy was disturbed.
“Rene,” Serena caught her arm, “your music?”
Her fists clenched and the lump that had been threatening since seeing the wreckage hardened in her throat. Rene couldn’t respond.
“No . . .” Serena gasped, then flung her arms around Rene’s neck. “No! Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Rene. So, so sorry.”
Just as Serena was the only one who knew about her second apartment, she was also the only one who knew about her collection. A growing library of music since the invention of the sonogram over a hundred years past. It was Rene’s pride and joy, but more than that, it was her refuge. And it was gone. Completely wrecked.
Awkwardly, she patted Serena’s back and pulled away, leading the way into her second apartment and turning on lights as she went. “All is not lost, though.” She picked up a thirty-year-old Walkman from the side table. “I still have this and whatever tape I left inside it last time I was here.” Popping it open revealed a Garth Brooks cassette. “See? It can’t be so bad when you have No Fences, right?”
Serena choked on a laugh. “How you can joke at a time like this is beyond me.” She smiled. “But I’m glad you can.”
Rene shrugged and took the Walkman back to the bedroom. She wasn’t spending another night or day in silence, she didn’t care how many times she had to listen to the tape in a row. Serena still followed her. The dogging of her steps would have been annoying if the blonde didn’t walk so softly.
“Did something . . . happen . . . between you and Will?”
Rene closed her eyes, glad her back was to her friend. She had quickly realized in the headquarters building that Will hadn’t said anything about that, thank you baby Jesus and company, but it just figured that Serena’s Spidey-senses would pick up something.
“Aside from getting trapped in an oversized refrigerator with him for ten hours?”
“Mmm.” Serena leaned her shoulder against the door frame of the bedroom. “Yes, aside from it, or in conjunction with it.”
Rene set the Walkman on the bedside table and clicked on the lamp, carefully avoiding her best friend’s penetrating stare. “Well, I think I threatened his life a number of times. Came close to unmanning him. Slept a little. Why?”
“You let him touch you. And he called you ‘love.’”
Bambi’s nipples, had he really? Had she been so out of it she’d missed that? Missed giving him the verbal set down needed to discourage all further liberties with touching or pet names? “Ugh.” She screwed up her face, no acting required. “No, he didn’t. Tell me you’re lying.”
Serena raised both brows and smirked.
“Son of a hog-faced hooker.”
“I just wanted to check. Make sure that those ten hours of quality bonding time hadn’t . . . you know . . . bonded you.”
“It would take a whole hell of a lot more than ten hours to do that. Ten years, no decades—centuries.” Was she protesting too much? Best slow down.
“Mmhm,” Serena intoned, a wealth of disbelief contained therein.
Rene rolled her eyes. “Fine, you caught me,” sarcasm dripped from her every word. “We had a really hot, passionate make-out session that utterly changed the very foundations of our relationship.”
A gusty sigh was Serena’s only response as she dropped her folded arms and walked out of the room. From the front door she called back a moment later, “I’m glad you’re all right, Rene. Love you. Even if you are a pain in my ass.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Rene yelled back at her, grinning.
Changing out of her clothes, she laid down on the bed and settled the earphones over her head. Rene pressed the giant play button down firmly and thunder echoed in her ears. “Love you too,” she whispered as the music began, and closed her eyes.
Chapter 15
The first time Rene woke that night was a result of the overpowering hunger tearing her throat open with fire. One bag of blood really hadn’t been enough earlier. She rose and padded across the apartment barefoot, eyes half-closed, one hand still clutching the Walkman. Her other hand opened the fridge, grabbed the bag, and brought it to her mouth, as she used her hip to close the fridge door.
Silently sucking down the contents of the bag, she walked back to her bedroom. The bag was dry by the time she sat down on the edge of her bed. The burning in her throat subsided, even if the blood was cold and stale tasting. It was easy, mindless sustenance. She thought she might actually get used to it. That thought was the last as she slipped back to sleep within seconds.
It was the thumps on the roof that woke her the second time. This was exactly why she hated having an apartment on the top floor. Stupid squirrels were always thumping about during the day and making it difficult to sleep. Rural living did not appeal to her in the slightest. She’d grown used to the thumps of her downstairs and next-door neighbors in Salt Lake City, but here in Abandon all the noises had to do with fauna. Owls hooting, bears digging about for trash, and squirrels . . . God, she hated squirrels.
What had she done to get on the Venor’s radar? The werewolves? She’d just been minding her own business, doing her job, unliving her best undead life. She’d kill to be back in the city now, resting in her real bed, with her nice sheets and a new album.
The other side of her headphones slipped off her ear. With a growl, Rene reached for it and shoved it back on her ear. Stupid vampire hunters. Stupid backup earphones. Stupid squirrels.
It promised to be a long day. Which meant the next night she would be grumpy. Well, grumpier than usual. The thought of meeting her team in the next evening flashed through her mind. What was she going to do with them? How to direct their manpower now that Rene was walking around with a target on her back?
“Enough,” she muttered aloud. She needed to sleep. Rene turned over. The movement caused the other headphone to slide off. “ARGHHH!” Sitting up, Rene made a grab for it.
Another thump on the roof froze her in place.
&n
bsp; That was the biggest damned squirrel she’d ever heard in her life. And now that she was a little more awake she realized it wasn’t even daytime.
Crash.
Breaking drywall, groaning beams. A word escaped her mouth that her father would have boxed her ears for. Hell, even Tanner would have winced.
Rene was out of the bed in point five seconds and across the room. Grabbing her belt, she tied it around her waist haphazardly and holstered not one but three guns. A few extra magazines. More thumping and the sound of a door crashing open. “Motherfu—” She added a few of her knives to the retinue and wrenched her apartment door open.
Cold gray light filled the normally dark hall. The roof had caved in at the end, showcasing the rapidly lightening sky. The doors at the end of the hall were torn off the hinges. Sounds of fighting, cursing, and breaking furniture came from within. Rene ran down the hall. Jumping over a fallen door and into one of the other apartments, she crashed into a chest of drawers.
The room was pitch black but for the light coming in from the hall. Even so, her eyes picked up the large hairy form bent over the bed. With a snarl, the wolf looked back at her, emerald green eyes shining in the dim light. “Son of a—” It lunged at her and without hesitation Rene let off a few rounds into its chest.
Dropping to the carpet, the wolf shuddered as the bullet fractured and spilled liquid silver into its bloodstream.
“Yeah, Scooby. How’s that feel?” She considered giving him another tasty treat to the head, but more sounds of fighting down the hall distracted her. Rene sighed and looked at the body on the bed. Dead vampire. Kyle. Damn.
She shook it off and turned to jog back out into the hall. Two doors down, she came across another vampire in a similar predicament. Cornered and cut off from her weapon, Lucy feinted right but the wolf was tight on her. Rene spared a bullet as she passed the door, hitting the wolf right in his furry rear.
Continuing down the hall, she heard Lucy call, “Thanks!”
The thumping on the roof was growing louder, as if there was an entire pack of one-hundred-eighty pound squirrels up there. Except, they weren’t squirrels. The building was shaking. Rene had only experienced one earthquake in her life, and it was high on the list of reasons she’d chosen not to live in San Francisco. More pieces of roof were cracking and caving in. As she reached the opposite end of the hall, the wall on her left cracked and swayed toward her. Chunks of ceiling rained down, like snowflakes in her hair.
“Hey! This is not hair-washing week, you four legged, flea-ridden sons of bitches!” The door to the stairs was jammed shut. She ripped on it harder but only succeeded in removing the door handle. It hung limp in her hands. Voicing more of her irritation, she rammed her shoulder into the door. Before she could give it the full force of her anger, the wall crashed down on her with all the weight of a two full-sized men.
Good thing she didn’t need to breathe. Her lungs were compressed against her spine as her ribs protested the treatment. One of them snapped. She heard it. Her curses grew stronger and she raised her knees and elbows to kick the nine-foot-tall piece of drywall and framing off of her. The wall flew off and hit the door to the stairs, taking it down, down, down . . . it echoed down five flights of stairs cracking into pieces as it went. Yells came from the floors below. Apparently they were finally waking up to the fact that they were under attack.
A snarl to her left brought Rene swiftly back to herself. She was still laying on the hall floor as the wolf lunged for her. One of her arm knives slid into her hand and she barely got it up in time to bar the wolf’s gaping maw from taking a bite out of her neck. Her elbow jammed into the wolf’s throat, the knife glinting against his mouth and eyes. His cruelly pointed claws struggled against her grip. She wouldn’t let him go, knowing the return attack would come faster than she could fend off while on her back.
More growls were coming from down the hall and down the stairwell. She had to do something soon, or he would have backup. Avoiding his dark brown, human eyes, she noticed that the colors of his fur were easily discernible. Golden brown mixed with an undercoat of white and flecks of black. She shouldn’t be able to see so well.
Glancing up quickly, Rene was faced with the sky. The light gray, dawn sky. Her stomach dropped. She hadn’t seen a sky so light in over two hundred years.
The werewolf pinning her snarled again and brought her attention back to the problem at hand.
Someone shouted her name. She ignored it.
With difficulty, she managed to slip her other arm knife out of its sheath. No hesitation, she slammed it home between two ribs and slid it as far through the beast as she could before removing it again. The silver blade did its price-tag justice. The wolf howled miserably and fell away from her, limping into a pool of its own blood to slip and fall to the floor.
“Rene!” A hand grabbed her arm and wrenched her up.
She was still coughing as she tore her arm away and faced the other vampire. Will’s short brown hair was littered with flakes of ceiling as he raked his gaze over her to make sure she was in one piece.
“Are you all right?”
Raising her lip in a snarl she wiped her knife off on her pants. “Peachy.” Her broken rib was smarting as the bone straightened and began to knit back together. Luckily it hadn’t pierced her side, or she’d be really pissed.
“Come on, we need to get out of here.”
“Out of here?” She looked up at him in disgusted surprise. “There are werewolves in Abandon, and you want to leave?”
He pointed to the sky. “Rather than French fry in the next ten minutes? Yes. I’d rather leave.”
“Coward,” Rene muttered. “Leave then, this isn’t your fight.”
“Rene—”
She threw another snarl over her shoulder as she entered the stairwell, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge him.
“Lord have mercy,” Will growled and followed her.
As she made to enter the hall below, the thumping came again, this time from the floor they had just left. William shouted at her, but she could barely hear him above the building’s painful groan. An arm wrapped around her waist at the last second and hauled her back out of the hall. The ceiling crashed in and with it all the rooms, furniture, and bodies from the floor above.
“We need to go!”
“Then go!” She turned her back on him again and slid down the banister to the next floor. Two wolves caught sight of her and lunged just as she reached the landing. Her guns were already out. The first shot went just a hair wide, the second grazed the ear of one wolf. He howled his misery as the chamber cracked and poured the liquid silver into the cut. His compatriot swiped at the other wolf’s ear, tearing it off with his razor sharp claws.
The first wolf yelped, then turned livid blue eyes on Rene. They feinted left, then right, cautious of her remaining bullets but not ready to give up on her. A familiar ring of steel sounded from above and the wolves looked up at once. Rene took her opportunity, shooting one as William landed on the other, sword point buried between its shoulder blades.
She didn’t wait for him as she darted down the hall. Every room she entered was empty of wolves, but the bodies of her clan mates littered every surface. Rene buried that deep inside. Later. She would think of their faces and names later. Now was not the time. Will met her halfway down the hall but she brushed past him. The stairwell was too bright, it made her eyes burn.
“Rene, wait—”
She didn’t wait. The second floor was the same as the third. On the first, she caught sight of wolf tail exiting the front door. She charged after it blindly.
“Rene!”
She was through the front door before Will could make the first floor. Her eyes burned, stomach heaved, skin heated. Heated skin. That was an interesting reaction. She’d been cold for so long even the slight warming felt like standing too close to a furnace. She blinked against the light and tried to find where the wolf had gone.
Rene didn’t need to look
long. She was surrounded. The dawn light made her head spin and she couldn’t get her vision to clear. Something hit her hard in the back of the head. It would have crushed a human skull. Even alive she had been remarkably thick-skulled. She tasted dirt and saw only blackness, but she was still conscious. Something was shoved over her head, over her entire body. It seemed to take away the burn of the rising sun, and she knew she shouldn’t resist. Still, nothing good could possibly come of werewolves.
Agony ripped her side open, just below her heart. It cut into the previously broken rib and shattered two more. Blood, precious, vital blood, streamed out of her side. She screamed. And the sound ripped her back . . .
Part 2
Autumn
(to be honest, I don’t really remember this)
Chapter 16
She was being hunted. It hadn’t taken long, but she was intimately acquainted with the feeling now. Her back pressed into the wood floor, a splinter worked its way into her stocking and poked at her leg. It was painful, but a much worse pain awaited her if she alerted him to her presence.
“Sarah . . .” His voice called from down the hall.
Her blood ran cold and sweat beads began to prick her skin. She tried not to breathe. Don’t breathe, Sarah. Don’t breathe. It was too quiet in the house. He would hear.
Mother was at market, would be for at least another hour.
She suppressed a whimper and tucked herself farther back under the bed. A spider’s web tickled her nose, but it didn’t scare her. Nothing scared her anymore.
That wasn’t true. One thing scared her. Only one.
“Saaaaaraaahhh. Why are you hiding, sweetheart?”
Her lip trembled and she could swear the sound of her heartbeat filled the room, the house.
“Come out and play with me.” Footsteps stopped at the door of the room. Her heart skipped a beat then started again even faster. Two steps into the room.
Weaken the Knees (The Immortal World Book 6) Page 14
