Dangerous Calling (The Shadowminds)

by AJ Larrieu

  Annette was perhaps a dozen yards away. Her leg was still twisted and broken, but the ruined meat of her shoulder had healed. The skin was not quite smooth. As she dragged herself forward, her flesh expelled a chuck of asphalt like a freakish egg and closed over.

  “Do it.” Shane’s mental voice, pitched wide so Lionel could hear it as well. “Now.”

  I reached for Lionel and found his mind wide open. He didn’t just fail to resist, he offered up everything he had—his life, if need be. It wouldn’t take that much, but it would incapacitate his powers for several hours. I pulled, hating myself and loving the feeling, making myself focus on the task and not on the jolt of ecstasy. I’d worry about that if we made it out of this alive.

  My mental hands grew broad and strong on Lionel’s power. I slid them along the passenger side of the car and lifted. The creak of metal was deafening, and broken glass rained down from the roof. Annette was only feet away, and when she saw the car righting itself, she started sprinting. Her broken leg made her gait lopsided, but instead of looking pathetic, she looked terrifying. No one should be able to function with that level of damage. The chassis bounced as the tires met the road.

  “Everyone okay?”

  Shane racked a round into the shotgun and took off his seatbelt. “Just fine.” He kicked out the rest of the ruined windshield with a burst of telekinesis and unloaded round after round at Annette.

  Some of the slugs found their mark in her body. Some missed. The vampire slowed, knocked back by the impact, but she kept coming.

  “Cass,” he said, still with that remarkable calm, “see if you can get us out of here.”

  “Working on it.” I’d broken my way out of warped car doors before. I could rip the doors off, but that took energy, which took time, which I didn’t have. I was going to have to do this with finesse instead of brute strength, unlocking the crushed metal to make a passageway. I had to pick a door. It would take too long to figure out where the warping was worst. I chose Shane’s.

  Shane abandoned the gun and started throwing knives. I reached slender mental fingers into the warped metal of the door and searched for the pressure points, the places that held the twisted metal in place. I pushed with my arm, feeling for stress in the microscopic structure of the steel. I found one turn in the knot, and then another. The door opened three inches. Shane kept throwing. Annette fell and got up again. We were running low on blades.

  “Good,” he said. “Keep at it.”

  I didn’t look up. I didn’t want to know how close she was. I slid my awareness deeper into the mechanisms that formed the lock.

  The door popped free. “Shane!” I coupled the yell with a mental shout. Annette was on us, bleeding and ragged, but standing. A butcher knife was imbedded in her shoulder, and a filet knife stuck out of her belly. She pulled it out and dropped it. Shane struggled out of the car and turned to help Lionel do the same. Diana got out on her own, cradling her arm. I hoped it wasn’t broken, but it didn’t look good.

  “Run!” I said. “I’ll hold her off—run—get as far away as you—”

  It was too late. Nick barreled into Diana, wrapped her up in a tackle and hauled her, screaming, back to the rental. The car went tearing back the way we’d come, and I didn’t have time to stop them, because in the same moment, Annette launched herself at Shane.

  He barely had time to throw his arms up to protect his head. I fought with the seatbelt, reaching out with my power to shove her off, furious, desperate, and then Lionel threw himself between them.

  Lionel went down beneath her, his bad leg giving way with a snap. Annette snarled and sank her fangs into his jugular.

  Shane roared, actually roared. I had never heard a sound like that come out of another human being. It was fury and undiluted pain. My own mind felt curiously blank. This couldn’t be happening. I couldn’t be seeing what my brain told me was in front of me. I was halfway out of the car, but I wasn’t moving. My body didn’t feel like my own anymore, wouldn’t respond to my demands.

  It only took seconds. Lionel’s mind went dark in what I couldn’t mistake for anything but death. She threw his body aside, and the bleeding wounds covering her healed before my eyes. Her leg straightened with a sick pop of sinew and bone. She turned her gaze to Shane.

  It must have been seconds, because Shane barely had time to lift the machete. He landed a blow that would have severed the arm of any human. It lodged in her shoulder and stuck there. Annette grabbed the blade and pulled it free, throwing it aside.

  No. It wasn’t going to end like this.

  I needed power. A lot of it. I fought my way out of the car and turned back to look at it. Gas dripped from the ruptured tank.

  A few feet away, Annette had Shane by the neck.

  “You must understand, this is nothing personal,” she said. “I simply can’t leave you alive.”

  There was no fear in his eyes, only fury.

  I generated a spark with my power and lit the car on fire.

  The gasoline went up in a satisfying rush, and Annette shrieked and shielded her face from the light, dropping Shane to the ground. The fresh blood might have allowed her to heal, but it didn’t protect her from the fire’s radiation. Her skin reddened, but it didn’t crack or blister as it had from my ball of light.

  She hissed at me, fangs bared, and I knew it had to be now. I sent the flames rushing for the gas tank, a liquid pool of energy just waiting to be released. I felt it catch, felt the oxygen in the trapped air at the top of the tank speed the explosion along, and as the molecules expanded and exploded, I drew every mote of energy into myself.

  It lit me up from the inside. My spine and limbs went rigid with the power of it, my fingers and toes spread wide. It was painful—my skin felt as if it was crackling, my blood was pure fire. I was sure, if I could see my eyes, they would be glowing.

  “Cass, what are you doing?”

  “Trust me.”

  I didn’t know it would work until I did it. I wrapped my mind around her, every bit of Annette, from the tips of her fangs to her toenails. Telekinesis couldn’t hurt her, and I only had seconds. I let the burden of power loose and pushed her through the void.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Annette winked out of existence with a terrible screeching sound, the same one I remembered from my own jumps. I didn’t know where I’d sent her, but I hoped it was somewhere with daylight.

  I waited for three heartbeats, sure she would come sprinting out of the woods to kill us. When she didn’t, I ran for Shane.

  He was struggling on all fours toward Lionel’s body. I went down on my knees beside him. “Are you okay? Are you hurt—”

  Shane fell on top of Lionel’s bloodless body. He bent his head, listened for a heartbeat, then got on his knees and started chest compressions. His breath came out in spurts as he counted. He exhaled into Lionel’s mouth and pressed again. Lionel’s body jerked from the force of Shane’s hands.

  “We have to get him to Bunny. We have to—”

  Lionel’s eyes were open and staring. His mouth was slack.

  Grief caught in my throat and I pushed it away. Later. “Shane.”

  “Help me.” Shane lifted his head and looked at me without seeing me. “Help me.”

  “Shane—he’s gone.” I put my hands on his shoulders. It was too late. We both knew it, but something about his panic helped me handle it sooner. We didn’t need a healer. We needed to get out of sight before the police came.

  “No.” His eyes were blazing. “No—we have to help him—we have to help him—”

  Behind me, flames crackled over the Camaro’s seat cushions. Headlights appeared on the road.

  “Shane, we have to go. We have to get out of sight.”

  We couldn’t afford to get picked up by the police—we couldn’t afford to be questioned or
detained. I had no idea where I’d sent Annette, no idea how long it would take her to get back. The farther away we got from here, the better our chances of surviving.

  “We can’t just leave him here.” Shane focused on me for the first time.

  “We have to.”

  I drew Shane back from the road, into the cover of the trees. He let me do it. We watched as a man in an expensive sedan saw the burning wreckage of the car and pulled to a stop on the opposite shoulder. He got out, ran to Lionel’s body.

  “Hey, are you okay, are you—oh, God. Oh my God.” He covered his face with his hands. “Oh, my God.”

  He paced back and forth in front of the car, shock stealing his wits for several minutes before he pulled himself together and called the police. Shane and I watched while he waited, watched while the police came and took in the scene. Despite everything I’d seen, a thread of white-hot hope snaked through my chest—maybe he really was okay. Maybe they could revive him. I could still hear his voice in my head, a memory of the day he’d told me my powers were real, that he would take me in and teach me. How he’d embraced me when I’d come back from San Francisco in spite of the way I’d left. It wasn’t possible that so much generosity could go out of the world in such an instant.

  The cops bagged up his body and extinguished the burning car.

  “Drunk,” one of them said.

  “Reckless,” said another. I bit down on my fist and kept my arm around Shane. My teeth pressed hard enough to break the skin, but I barely felt the pain.

  Afterward, we walked.

  We stayed in the cover of the trees along the road. When I closed my eyes, I saw flashes of Annette sinking her teeth into Lionel’s throat, of Shane attempting to revive him. The images filled my body like physical things, clogging up my throat, stealing the strength from my hands. They choked out hunger and sensation and the need to breathe.

  I didn’t know what time it was, or where the nearest town was. I wasn’t sure what we would do when we showed up somewhere covered in blood. My vision constricted to the space where my feet would land, and each footfall made the dull pain in my belly twist. We walked until we started stumbling, and when we couldn’t walk any longer, we curled up together at the base of a pine tree and slept.

  I found I didn’t care if she ripped our throats out in the night.

  * * *

  We woke up alive, to rain.

  “Do you know where we are?” Shane said.

  “No idea.”

  They were the first words we’d spoken to each other since walking away from the crash. Neither one of us had mindspoken yet. I wasn’t sure I could bear to encounter Shane’s grief along with my own, and so I kept my mind firmly locked down. Neither one of us acknowledged how dangerous it was. Anyone could have snuck up on us. It was difficult to care.

  I stood up. Gray sunlight came through the rain clouds, and I could see the road a few yards off through the trees. It was quiet, early morning. No cars yet.

  Shane stood in front of me and rested his head on my shoulder. I wrapped my arms around him, pressing my palms to the soaked fabric of his shirt, and he opened his mouth against my neck, a shock of damp heat in the rain. I tipped my head back against the tree and he raised his head to look at me.

  Rained slicked my hair into my face and I shoved it back. Shane’s eyelashes were beaded with water. I reached out and touched his cheekbone. Something blazing and needful struck between us like lightning.

  Shane slammed into me and covered my mouth with his, all hard angles and raw need. His mind was blank, just like mine, and I didn’t care. I arched against him and ground against his groin while he dug his fingers into the soft flesh where my hips flared.

  “Do it,” I said. “Do it.”

  He grabbed my shirt. It ripped in two and caught my arms when he tried to pull it off. He gave up and yanked at my jeans, shoving them down. My hands were tangled in wet fabric, and I leaned forward, put my forehead on his shoulder and bit down on the taunt muscle at the base of his neck while his searching fingers worked my center. He tipped his head back and roared.

  I freed myself from the remains of my shirt and dragged him against me. He was still wearing wet jeans. They were soaked to his skin and too difficult to take off, so I tore down his fly and freed his rock hard erection from his boxers. I wrapped my hand around him and stroked and he kissed me, furious, consuming. Somehow, we tumbled to the ground. Wet leaves stuck to the bare skin of my back, but I didn’t care. I hooked my ankles around his waist and let him take me.

  He seemed to move on instinct. Rainwater made our bodies slick and cold, but we pulled each other close, chest to chest, arms entwined. When I found Shane’s mouth with mine, I tasted hot salt and knew his tears were mixed with the rain.

  It was only in the instant before orgasm that I finally opened my mind to his. Everything went perfectly, blissfully black, and I was lost in the raw, gaping vulnerability of the moment. There was no hiding from any of it, and the fierceness of our shared climax was as close to pain as pleasure had ever felt. When it was over, he collapsed on top of me, breathing hard.

  We lay like that for a long time, until the rain thinned and subsided and the sun warmed the wet ground. Shane got up and helped me to stand. My shirt was ruined, so he gave me his. We walked together to the road.

  The sex—if that was what it had been—broke down the wall grief had put between us, and our minds were open again. The denial he’d been mired in the night before had shifted to white-hot fury. He was focused completely on Annette and how we were going to find her, then kill her. I couldn’t disagree.

  “We have to take her down,” he said when we reached the shoulder of the road. The sunlight was the most comforting thing I’d ever felt. “We have to find a way.”

  “We will.” I gripped his hand. “I promise you.”

  We hitchhiked to a motel on the Mississippi border. It was a depressing place, thin walls and scratchy sheets, but it was cheap. I had enough cash in my savings account to cover a few weeks, at least. I paid for two nights in advance, and we locked the doors and drew the blinds.

  We needed a plan.

  If I’d had more time to think, I would have intentionally sent Annette farther off, maybe to another continent, certainly to daylight. As it was, I’d only been thinking away. She could be in the Arctic Circle or a few miles down the road. I had no way of knowing how soon she’d be back. I could only hope I’d bought us some time.

  And we needed that time to get Ian out of jail.

  He was risking exposure spending even one night locked up. He could hardly keep his wings hidden for the time it took to walk down the hall at the B&B—there was no way he could maintain the glamour for hours, days. What would happen if he showed his wings in the middle of a crowded jail, I had no idea. I was betting nothing good.

  And without him, we didn’t stand a chance.

  The long, silent walk had given me time to think, and I thought I knew how to beat her. It might be too hard to find her and drag her into the sun, but I didn’t need sunlight. I already knew I could produce enough radiation to affect her. I just needed a way to produce more. That took energy, and energy took Ian.

  I could pull from him without limits. I could draw in enough energy to create my own sun, to burn Annette alive. I didn’t think about what that would do to me—I only thought of how it would feel.

  Drawing in the explosion had been incredible, like bottling a house fire and swallowing it, all that raging energy waiting for a channel. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but going back in my memory, I recognized the euphoria for what it was. Even then. Even with Lionel dead at my feet.

  My hands shook.

  If it had been any other time, Shane would have seen it. But we were both so wrapped up in our grief, I knew he didn’t recognize the way that terror was
mixed with the pain we shared.

  Pulling from Ian would be better than pulling from a single car fire. Hundreds of thousands of people. Hundreds of square miles of city. He was a conduit for all of it, and all of it could be mine. I wasn’t worried about getting enough—a fraction of the city would be plenty. I was worried about making myself stop.

  “We don’t even know where he is,” I said to Shane. I leaned over the hotel sink and stared at the translucent complimentary toothbrush we’d gotten from the front desk. Some of the bristles had fallen out and littered the inside of the crackly plastic wrapper.

  “We’ll figure it out. He had that friend—the one he called when we got arrested. We could go to him.”

  “You know who he is?”

  “Lionel told me.”

  It was the first time either of us had said his name out loud. It was more painful than I’d thought it would be. I looked away until I could control my tears. “So you think he’d help us?”

  “I think it’s our best option.”

  I nodded. “We’re going to have to call—”

  “I know,” he said. “Later.” Mina, Bruce, Bunny. Everyone in the New Orleans shadowmind community would have to be told, if they hadn’t found out already. I didn’t know how we would explain. It was easy enough to ignore those questions when all we cared about was killing Annette.

  “So we find this guy, he helps us find Ian—then what? He’s probably still in jail.”

  “If anyone can get him out,” Shane said, “you can.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ian’s friend in the NOPD was named Lance Carter. He lived in a one bedroom condo in Bucktown, no wife, no kids. If his apartment number was anything to go by, his place was on the seventh floor.

  I drove by his complex in the afternoon in a rented car. It was a pragmatic kind of place, no landscaping, no unnecessary architectural flourishes. Just a block of square apartments stacked on top of each other. If I’d known what he looked like, I would’ve staked the place out until he got home. As it was, I watched half a dozen thirty-something guys who might’ve been cops or car salesmen walk through the bare-bones foyer and into the elevator. I was just going to have to hope.