Halfway between the house and the iron gate surrounding the estate, a faint shout sounded inside the mansion.
“Fuck,” Kyle said. “Hold on.”
He broke into a jog. For a pet on the verge of turning, a jog was more like a flat-out run. My grip on Eric slipped, and my heart thudded as I grappled with limp limbs and finally wrangled all of him back into my lap. I thumped into the back of my wheelchair, Eric held tightly against my chest. Thank God Oriana had paved her driveway. If it had been graveled, we wouldn’t have made it ten feet.
The gate normally securing the entrance was wide open. Beyond it, a late model, black Bentley was parked at the curb, its windows tinted beyond the legal limit. Ten to one that was Kyle’s car. And how did I know? Marco had one just like it. Maybe it was a favorite thing. I didn’t know. One thing I was absolutely sure of. When Eric morphed into a full-blown vampire and I became a vampire’s favorite, no way in hell was I getting an old man’s car.
Kyle jerked us to a stop near the Bentley’s rear door. He opened it, then took Eric from me. “Get in as quickly as you can.”
I was already unbuckling the strap around my waist. The half-dozen sets of booted feet pounding toward us were a powerful motivation for me to get my ass in gear. As soon as I was free of the strap, I gripped the edge of the backseat in one hand and the armrest on the door with the other and maneuvered myself inside. Kyle handed Eric in to me, pushed my legs inside, and shut the door on us.
I glanced out the window and my breath sailed out of me. Fen was leading the pack racing toward us, fangs bared, arms pumping with every step. Christ. They were less than twenty feet away. At the speed they were running, they’d be on us in a handful of seconds at the most.
The front passenger’s side door slammed shut and the locks clicked into place. I swiveled around, facing forward.
Kyle wedged himself into the driver’s seat, one hand already on the ignition. “Brace yourself.”
Half a dozen bodies thudded into the car, one against the door on my right. A fist cracked into the rear door’s window and Fen’s contorted mug pressed against the fractured glass. He stabbed a finger at me. “You’re mine.”
I grinned and mouthed, “Fuck you.”
The engine roared to life. Kyle shoved the car into gear and peeled away from the curb, tires squealing. Fen’s upper body disappeared from view, and I settled firmly into the slick leather seat. Miraculously, Eric was still wrapped in his blanket. I released his legs and smoothed my fingers gently over his head. His narrow face was swollen and bruised, blood matted his hair over shallow cuts, and still, he was beautiful to me, precious.
Kyle rounded a corner about fifteen miles per hour too fast, and we skidded along the seat toward the opposite side of the car. I threw out a hand and braced it against the door, and my muscles trembled. Goddamn, I was weak.
“We need nourishment,” I said.
“Have to get out of the city first.” Kyle jerked the steering wheel around. “Buckle in, if you can. Fen won’t be far behind us, and Oriana has most of the local police in her pocket.”
Well, fuck. “How far ‘til we’re out of her territory?”
“Too far.”
Wasn’t that just our luck.
I pulled myself into the middle of the seat and buckled in. It wasn’t easy with Eric on my lap. I managed by resting his back on the seat while I snicked the buckle into place around my waist, praying the whole time that Kyle wouldn’t yank the steering wheel again. If Eric slid off my lap, I’d never be able to get him back on it, not by myself.
As soon as I was secure, I gathered him close again while Kyle sped through the city’s mostly empty streets at a breakneck pace. Eric stirred against my chest, then slumped into unconsciousness. I jabbed the pad of one thumb against a fang and rubbed the sluggish blood flowing out of me across the worst wound on his face. The blood absorbed into the cut, but it didn’t heal. Shit. Hopefully, his body was siphoning it toward an internal injury. Otherwise, he might be in serious trouble.
Food and blood were priorities. Eric needed both before he could heal properly. Water, too, for bathing his wounds, for drinking. He was probably close to dehydration, and I wasn’t much better. Oriana had forbidden us from eating and feeding. She hadn’t said anything about water, so every time Kyle helped me to the bathroom, I’d snuck a handful out of the sink’s faucet.
A siren ripped through the air in the distance and Kyle cursed under his breath. “Don’t panic.”
“Nasty habit. Gave it up years ago.”
He snorted and whipped the steering wheel into a sharp turn. I swayed in the seat, one arm tight around Eric, the other holding his legs in place. The Bentley’s engine was a muted roar as we swept through St. Paul. I hadn’t felt the first bump yet, and damned if the smooth handling wasn’t growing on me.
“Hey, how fast are we going?” I asked.
Kyle’s eyes flicked up, meeting mine in the rearview mirror. “Sixty. Why?”
“Curious.”
Kyle zoomed through a red traffic light, weaving around a spattering of stopped vehicles. A police cruiser skidded onto the road behind us, lights flashing, sirens blaring.
The first niggle of worry poked at me. “When we get to the edge of the police’s jurisdiction, won’t they just hand us off to another police department?”
“If we were human, yes, but we’re not. We’re headed toward a vampire wilderness outside of Oriana’s control. Police there won’t touch us unless they want to start a supernatural war.”
“A vampire wilderness. With trees and shit?”
“Don’t be so literal.”
Kyle slammed on the brakes and cut the steering wheel hard to the left, then immediately right. The Bentley fishtailed, slamming us back and forth, and my heart leapt into my throat. I choked it back down and tried to ignore the nausea roiling through my hollow stomach.
“Come on, Kyle,” I muttered. “Come on.”
The car straightened out and shot forward, and I exhaled my relief. Eric could keep his fucking Klingon philosophy. Today was not a good day to die.
Another police car fell in behind us. The sirens’ cumulative shrieks pierced my skull, hammering into my brain. Christ. Why couldn’t Oriana just let us go? It’s not like she’d had any reason to hold us in the first place. And she’d be really lucky if Marco didn’t come after her, seriously lucky.
I hadn’t been kidding about that. Eric was possessive of me and Gigi, but Marco could be downright psychotic. I was pretty sure the minute he found out what Oriana had done to Eric, he was gonna go ballistic. Oriana might not survive what he did to her.
Gee. What a shame that’d be.
Kyle flipped the car into a u-turn, then floored the gas.
“What the hell?” I barked. “Don’t take us back to her.”
“Missed the turn,” he gritted out. “Now, shut up and let me drive.”
I snapped my mouth shut and glared at him. Fucking favorites.
“Almost there,” he said. “Almost… Oh, fuck. Roadblock.”
I straightened my spine and stared out the windshield. Sure enough, two police cars were parked across the road ahead of us, noses overlapping. Eight or so cops were crouched down behind the cars, guns pointed at us. Beyond that, the street emptied into a neatly-trimmed subdivision. Cookie cutter houses lined the curbs, their lush yards just so, not a single blade of grass out of place.
Wouldn’t it just suck if that was the vampire wilderness.
Kyle blew out a harsh breath. “We’re running it.”
“Are you serious?”
“As a hand grenade.” He slapped the flat of his hand against the steering wheel. “Goddamn it. I should’ve wedged you into the floorboard.”
“Too late now.”
“Fucking A. Here we go.”
The Bentley gathered speed, heading into the triple digits. I gripped Eric in one arm, stretched the other one out, and curled my fingers around the passenger’s seat, bracing us agai
nst the coming impact.
Chapter Five
The first bullets rang out when we were half a block away from the roadblock. I hunched my shoulders and ducked.
Kyle eased up on the gas and the Bentley slowed to a near-normal speed. “Bulletproof glass.”
“Ain’t completely bulletproof.”
“You’ve been in the South too long.”
“Ain’t is grammatically correct.”
“I can’t believe you’re arguing about grammar in the middle of a car chase.”
A handful of bullets thudded into the windshield, shattering it, but it held. Kyle pointed the Bentley’s nose at the rear blockade car, just to the right of the front one. “Duck. We’re hitting in three…two…”
I buried my face in Eric’s shoulder, cheek to cheek with him. The Bentley slammed into the car, jolting my upper body violently forward, and I lost my grip on the passenger’s seat. Eric’s legs slithered off my lap. I scrambled for them as the Bentley’s nose ground into the side of a police car and acrid smoke billowed out from under the Bentley’s hood.
The driver’s side airbag popped out of the steering wheel. Kyle batted it away with one hand while steering blindly through wreckage into Suburbia. The Bentley slowed and eventually limped to a clunking standstill.
I peeked out the cracked window to my right into a perfectly manicured yard. Jesus God, we’d made it.
Kyle unbuckled his seatbelt and fought his way out of the car through the passenger’s side door. He opened the rear door and ducked inside. His nose was bleeding, a red scrape marred the left side of his face, and his left arm hung at an odd angle.
“Give Eric to me,” he said. “Try to get out while I take him to safety.”
I didn’t argue. The radiator was hissing steam and God only knew what else was wrong with the car. We maneuvered Eric out, Kyle disappeared into Grassland. I fumbled with the fastening for my seatbelt and pulled myself out of the car onto the pavement.
Kyle dumped Eric onto a yard at a safe distance away from the car and ran back for me in an awkward gait. He threaded an arm around my chest under my arms and heaved me backward across the street and a concrete sidewalk onto somebody’s sloped lawn, dragging my feet behind us. He dropped me next to Eric on my back and collapsed, panting.
I wiggled my head around. “Get up, Kyle. Sun’s coming up. We need to get out of it.”
“Help’s coming.” He coughed and threw his right forearm over his eyes. “Fuck, that hurt.”
Yeah, it looked like it. I was no doctor, but even I could tell his left arm was hurt in a bad way, probably broken, and that was just what I could see.
I glanced at the Bentley. This side didn’t look so bad. Blown out tires, cracked windows, crumpled nose. The driver’s side must be for shit, though. I vaguely recalled one of the blockade cars hitting that side when we’d gone through.
Which should’ve killed us. I’d seen test crashes. At the speed we’d been going, the Bentley should be a pile of scrap metal and we shouldn’t be up and walking around.
Or in my case, crawling.
I’d ask Kyle about it later. We had bigger problems right then, like why the police officers had formed a line on this side of the blockade and were staring at us.
I nudged Kyle. “What gives with the cops?”
He rolled his head along the ground in that direction and grimaced. “They’re waiting for permission to enter. Or maybe they’re waiting for the sun to take us. Who knows.”
I searched the crowd gathering there. No Fen, no pets I recognized. They’d probably already scrambled back to the relative safety of Oriana’s mansion.
We were still in the shadows, but the sun had already topped the horizon. It wouldn’t be long until its rays swept over us. I glanced around as far as I could, searching for help in any form, and spotted a young woman walking down the sidewalk.
I did a double take. She held a black, lace parasol in both hands. It rested on her pale, bare shoulder, protecting her skin from the muted sunlight at her back. She was wearing a black and white, vertically striped bustier over baggy, cutoff jeans hitting her at mid-thigh. Her slender legs were encased in tattered, sheer black hose and she wore spike-heeled ankle boots decorated with enough silver buckles to float a third world country’s economy.
Her Raggedy Ann red hair was piled in stiff curls on top of her head, but her face was absolutely bizarre. There, her skin was pasty white under a layer of powder. Her vacant eyes were outlined in red and black, two round dots of color decorated her cheeks, and her lips were painted into a black pucker.
She turned that dead stare on me, and I shuddered. Holy shit. It was like looking into the face of an animated doll. Nothing was there behind her eyes, nothing at all. Goose pimples crawled over my skin. Creepiest fucking thing I’d ever seen.
She stopped on the sidewalk, facing us. “Kyle, dearest, what have I told you about bringing friends over?”
He grunted and propped himself up on his uninjured elbow. “These are the pets the queen asked us to protect, Mistress.”
Oh, God. This windup mannequin was Kyle’s mistress? I groaned and scrubbed trembling hands over my face, wincing as they hit a bruise I hadn’t known was there. We were in deep shit if this was the help Kyle was relying on.
“Pets, pets. The queen and her pets.” Her eyes rolled toward the sky and she cocked her head. “I have my own pets, thank you. Be a good boy and run these back home now.”
“We have to keep these pets. The queen insisted.”
Her body stiffened. “You’re using that tone again. Why are you using that tone?”
He sighed and eased all the way upright, one hand around his left ribcage. “I’m not using a tone, Trillium. Come help me up so we can take Eric and Jason home.”
She gasped. “Eric and Jason?”
“Yes, Eric and Jason. Do you remember now?”
“No, but they look delicious. Can we keep them?”
“If you help me. Sun’s almost up.”
Her eyes widened and she curled red tipped fingers against her mouth. “The sun? I hate the sun. Why didn’t you tell me it was here?”
She pivoted and teetered down the sidewalk back the way she’d come, her heels tapping rapidly against the concrete sidewalk. Kyle flopped onto the grass.
I turned my head toward him. “What the hell, Kyle. Where’s she going?”
“It’s ok. When she gets to the house, the servants will know something’s wrong and come looking for us. Trust me. They’ll be here soon.”
“So this happens a lot.”
“More and more lately.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “She’s not supposed to leave the house without me, probably wouldn’t have if we were at home instead of in the wilderness. Had to leave her in another pet’s care while they travelled here.”
“And she slipped by the pet and, what?”
“She was looking for me. It’s instinctive. You’ll learn.”
His voice tapered off, and I was pretty sure he passed out. I turned my face to the baby blue sky above me and laughed. Fuck me. I was lying between two unconscious men in the middle of a vampire wilderness that looked like a modern version of the Cleaver’s neighborhood. Maybe there was irony in there somewhere, but all I was getting was that we were screwed unless Trillium’s servants cottoned on to us being out here.
About fifteen minutes after Trillium left, a sleek, brand new Jaguar XJ pulled up to the curb and parked. In that time, I’d managed to inch the three of us closer to the shrubbery planted next to the house belonging to the yard we were squatting on. Hadn’t been easy, but desperation is the mother of got-to, right?
A matchstick thin, gangly man in his late twenties got out of the car. His dark hair was slicked back, capping a gaunt, rectangular face, and he was dressed in a perfectly tailored, three-piece suit. He clucked his tongue as he walked up the lawn toward us. “The mistress said Kyle had been kidnapped by two of Oriana’s rogue pets.”
I snorted out a l
augh. “Yeah, we’re so rogue we blew up a car trying to escape her.”
“Oriana has been known to have that effect on people.” The man crouched beside Kyle in the dew-damp grass and pressed long fingers against the prone favorite’s throat. “I’m Donald, Mistress Trillium’s majordomo.”
“Jason Bellmont. Kyle said your mistress was supposed to protect us until we could get out of the city.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.” Donald slid his arms under Kyle, tucked the unconscious pet against a lean chest, and stood. “Can you get your friend into the car?”
I patted one thigh. “Legs don’t work.”
Donald’s impassive gaze raked down my useless legs. “Shame. I’ll be back for you.”
Like I could do anything about it if he wasn’t, but I wished like hell he’d hurry. The sun had already crept up the yard and was now inches away from Eric’s bare feet. His breathing was so slow and irregular, I’d wrapped a hand around his wrist, just to make sure he was still alive.
Of course he was. He had to be. I was damn well not going to lose him and Gianna, too, so any scenario that ended with him dying was one I flat out refused to consider.
Donald situated Kyle in the front passenger’s seat, then came back and half carried, half dragged me to the car and into the backseat. He went back for Eric and finally handed him gently in to me.
I cradled Eric and eyed the cops still standing right where they’d been since we’d crashed through the barricade. “No car chases.”
Donald slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the car door shut. “On that, you have my word.”
He executed a perfect k-turn and drove down the street at a sedate speed. A few minutes later, he pulled into the concrete-lined driveway of one of the subdivision’s cookie cutter houses and into one bay of a two-car garage. The garage door slid shut behind us, slipping us into a welcoming darkness, and I relaxed for the first time in days.
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