by Anna Abner
“Can you dig a mass grave?” Roz asked sarcastically.
Ali blanched. “Of course not.”
“Listen, princess. We’ve done this before. A funeral pyre is always your best bet. Bodies burn to ash, and you leave no doubt about a new vampire waking up and coming after you.”
Ali turned away, but she didn’t want to see inside the house. She’d need lithium and a straitjacket after that. What if the vampires had ripped her family apart? What if they’d abused her aunt? What if Roz had decapitated them in case they’d been infected? She imagined the cruelest most deranged acts one person could commit against another.
“Ali!”
She jumped.
Roz was right. She was the only Rusenko left. She lit a match, and it sputtered out. The front door, now empty of her cousin’s body, seemed a million miles away. She shuffled closer and lit another.
At the threshold she hesitated, terrified to raise her gaze. But she couldn’t not look. She caught sight of the remains of her family. She recognized fingers, strands of hair, and bare toes, but everything else was covered neatly by the paisley comforter that had once lain on her aunt and uncle’s bed. Roz had covered them, for her, and Ali would never be able to hate the girl the same way again.
The match scalded her fingers, and she blew it out. She lit another. She could do this. They deserved this.
“Be at peace,” she told them, flicking the match toward the quilt. A wave of heat and stinky accelerant blasted her in the face. For a split second, she considered throwing herself on top of the quilt, on top of Natalie, Sully, and Ron, and being done with the grief.
One big belly flop…
Roz grasped her by the wrist and led her away. “Do you have any weapons? Guns?”
She was numb, inside and out. She couldn’t focus.
Roz shoved her into the driver seat of a tiny, sky blue Volkswagen Bug before rooting around in the garage for weapons and ammo. “Get the car running. We don’t have time to stare into space.”
Her hands shaking, Ali fumbled the keys. Twice.
“We’re going to a gas station?” She’d never slept inside a gas station before. She didn’t want to. But she needed time to breathe and form a plan. She had to get herself together or fall apart completely.
“No. We’re going to stop Connor before he gets himself killed.” Roz rolled down the window. “And you owe me.”
Yeah, she did. And Connor, too. They’d both been kind to her when they didn’t have to be. She’d do this, and then she’d say good-bye to the States, to them, to the worst week of her life—for good.
On the third try, the car sputtered to life, spewing black smoke from the exhaust. Roz hopped in, and they eased onto the eerily quiet road.
Connor must have driven off at top speed because there was no sign of him.
“How are we supposed to find him?” Ali asked. In a city of over half a million, it would be impossible locating one hot-headed vampire hunter. With no idea where to go, she slowly headed toward the skyline of Vegas.
“The Ford has a GPS tracker installed.” She tapped on her phone. “Turn right at the next corner.” Then, under her breath, she hissed, “God, he’s driving fast.”
Ali followed her directions, turning here and there.
“Keep your eyes open,” Roz barked. With one eye on the tracker app, she balanced her phone on her knee and loaded weapons, clicking ammo into their slots, but Ali caught the quiver in both her hands. Maybe the lady wasn’t as tough as she pretended to be.
She was guessing Roz didn’t have much of a family back home or she wouldn’t be in the Southwest battling vampires with Connor. So, how did a seemingly normal girl hook up with a guy like Connor? He had an obsession, but what was her deal?
Weapons loaded, Roz made a quick phone call. “Natasha? It’s me. Connor went after Olek alone in the Ford. Text me the minute anything pops up.” She murmured something incoherent and then disconnected.
Ali swallowed, her voice returning, along with coherent thought. “Connor wants to challenge Oleksander? By himself?”
Roz nodded, keeping busy with her guns, checking all their mechanisms twice.
“How does he expect to survive?”
Roz looked up. “Doesn’t this thing go any faster? We’re kind of in a hurry.”
Chapter Five
Connor eased off the accelerator, his breath stalling in his chest. Olek, his right hand man Maksim Volk, and two women stood beside a shitty, yellow Jeep parked on an access road behind a grocery store. They watched him, their gazes chewing up the hundred feet between them, waiting for him.
Oleksander the Destroyer, the first vampire, patient zero, stood within striking distance. Again.
Connor’s blood sang in his veins. Three months of regret, of searching, of killing the vampire’s henchmen, and now was his time. He didn’t know how he’d kill him, but for starters, he’d shoot the son-of-a-bitch. A .44 with a full clip, a loaded rifle, two .38s, and a grenade ought to get things started.
Connor turned off the truck and hopped out shooting. No sense wasting his tiny advantage. Three rounds ground through Olek’s torso. They didn’t kill him, though. Didn’t even faze him. Connor widened his aim, and one of the females went down hard in a spray of blood. Three to go.
He zeroed in on Olek’s pet. Volk, oddly elegant in dark slacks and a well-made V-neck, leaned casually against the side of the Jeep, totally unperturbed by the gunfire. The only signs he’d come close to having his head blown off by Connor’s rifle was a dried blood stain covering the entire right side of his shirt from collar to hem.
Barely seventeen when he’d been infected, he’d look like a pretty, half-man the rest of his unnatural life. A forty-year-old soul in a teenager’s body. And no matter how nice his clothes were or how suave he behaved, he’d always be a gangly kid, a little tall for his age, who got carded at bars.
Volk smiled. The little fucker actually smiled. Connor wanted to blow a hole in his smug face. That split second hesitation gave the remaining female the drop on him.
She sprinted, and then leapt like a cat onto a scratching post, fingers and toes digging in. Connor stumbled, but didn’t fall, thank God. He wouldn’t last a minute on his back. She ripped the pistol from his hand and sent it sailing through the air.
Fuck, fuck.
Connor was gonna die before he got his second chance at the Destroyer.
No room to raise the shotgun. Connor’s .38s sat on the seat behind him. He stretched, but the infected wouldn’t allow him enough leeway to reach it.
The vamp chewed into his neck and sucked like some juiced up Hoover. His stomach threatened to heave.
Moments. He had only moments left.
Connor dropped the shotgun and drew his only grenade, pulled the pin, and lobbed it in Olek’s direction. He heard a lovely boom, but it sounded very far away. He slid a knife from his ankle holster, his up-close-and-personal weapon of last resort, and then forgot what to do with it. He lost all sense of time and space. The blade dangled from his right hand as his pulse stuttered.
The infected slammed him against the driver’s side door, closing it. His knees buckled.
A low rumble broke through the fog. “My liberator.” It was a warlord’s voice, icy and deep. “Are you the one keeping Anya from me?”
Anya. He should know that name. He’d heard it before. It meant something.
“How inconsiderate.” Derisive chuckle. Volk. Must be.
His vision failed as the infected’s sucking mouth came wetly away. She passed him, like a glass of warm milk, into Olek’s hands.
If Connor didn’t focus, he was going to black out. Blindly, he thrust the knife blade toward his enemy. It stabbed through flesh and cartilage but near the vampire’s collarbone, not his heart.
He’d failed.
Olek freed the knife from its fleshy sheath, and slowly—inch by inch—slid it under Connor’s ribcage and up into his chest. Flames of pain swept through him. He coughed an
d tasted blood.
The Destroyer released him, and Connor dropped to his knees. He coughed again, spastically, the blood crawling up his throat and choking him. He crumpled onto the road and lay there stunned, unable to move, unable to even breathe.
#
Alina was alone. Completely, utterly, terrifyingly alone.
How was she going to get home? Her ID, passport, and credit cards—
“My purse!” It was still lying in her uncle’s front yard. Swearing under her breath, she lifted her foot from the gas.
Roz swiveled in her seat and aimed a loaded pistol at her. “If you turn this car around I will shoot you. No joke.”
“My purse is back there.” She pressed the brake pedal. She was alone, in a foreign country with no foreseeable path home.
Roz jammed the barrel of her weapon to the side of Ali’s throat, a cold, hard warning. “If we don’t catch up to him, he will die.” She spoke very slowly and calmly, even as she drew back the hammer with a scary click. “We can get your things later. Put your foot on the gas pedal.”
Roz was right. There wasn’t time to double back and still catch Connor before he overtook Olek. Connor was probably going to die. It seemed incomprehensible, and yet people were dropping like flies. Why not him, too?
Though it grated to do what the other girl ordered her to, Ali wouldn’t risk Connor’s life for a vintage Coach bag. “On the way back,” she said. “First thing.”
“You bet.” Roz withdrew the gun.
Jarring her teeth at every pothole in the road, Ali pushed the VW over sixty. They’d catch up to Connor, convince him to re-join them, and collect her purse on the return trip. If it was still there. With her credit card in hand, she’d insist on getting the hell out of the States. She’d take a bus, a train, or a covered wagon. Whatever it took to get to an airport and rejoin civilization.
In London, there were people—her dad’s neighbor Dave, or her roommate CJ—who’d help her. Maybe. She chewed her lip.
Roz leaned forward. “Slow down.”
Ali hit the brakes a little too hard, flinging the other woman against the dashboard.
Up ahead, between two large strip malls, Connor’s rust red F-350 materialized, parked diagonally across an access road. Abandoned.
“Oh, God,” Ali breathed. They’d found him. Though they’d been discussing his suicide mission ever since they’d climbed into the car, she’d never really considered discovering him dead.
Roz opened her door while the car was still rolling and ran toward the truck, handguns locked and loaded.
Alina climbed out more slowly. She carried a pair of Roz’s discarded pistols, one in each hand, though she didn’t even know if they were loaded. They could have been dressed up water pistols for all she knew, but she couldn’t stay in the car. A sort of haze of leftover violence and rage hung in the air. Something was wrong.
She followed, rounding the front bumper. Roz knelt over a body. No big battle, no hissing vampires, just a blood-soaked Connor lying flat on his back on greasy asphalt, his own knife embedded in his chest.
“He’s fine,” Roz said, her voice shaking. “He’s gonna be fine.”
He didn’t look fine. He looked like a science class cadaver. He lay in the dirt like a used-up apple core, his eyes and fingers twitching as if he wanted to wake up, but couldn’t.
“Help me get him in the bed of the truck.”
But moving him would only cause further pain, which he didn’t need. Ali stared at his throat, torn and bleeding. Just like her uncle’s. No, nothing they did could hurt him worse than he already was.
“Ali,” Roz shouted. “Now.”
She leapt forward. There wasn’t time to screw around. He needed help, and she had to get her head in the game.
His muscles and joints had turned to boiled noodles, which made him super heavy and hard to hold. They carried him, though, slung between them, and placed him sloppily in the bed of the Ford.
“Head north at the end of the road,” Roz shouted, settling beside him in the back of the pickup among their arsenal in bags and boxes. “Anton and Natasha fund a medical clinic outside Henderson. It’s not far.”
Ali felt her way around the truck like a blind person. Stefan had had the same gray pallor to his skin as he’d died, a fish out of water, struggling for every heartbeat. Her uncle had twitched too. It didn’t bode well for the big, beautiful hunter who’d only been trying to help her.
Despite her best intentions, everyone she’d come into contact with in the past twenty-four hours had died. Except Roz. She glanced back at the other girl. Only a matter of time, sweetheart.
It took two attempts to get the truck started and in gear. She turned the wheel and floored it. They shot forward so fast her head whipped back, and Roz screamed obscenities from the rear.
Ali eased off the gas, but clenched the wheel and breathed through a wave of nausea. Connor didn’t deserve to die—drained of life and convulsing in the dirt, his pale face splattered with his own blood. God, Oleksander used people like garbage. He’d used her uncle and Natalie and Ron. And poor Stefan.
She’d give anything to be home in London. She wished to be in her flat, safe and sound, as if the whole trip to the States had been a nightmare brought on by spicy food, and she wasn’t really cursed to watch everyone around her suffer and die.
Roz pounded on the roof, Ali turned the steering wheel hard, and they came to a shuttering stop in front of a strip mall. She jumped out and stood on tiptoe to see into the truck bed. Connor had stopped twitching. Roz did six chest compressions and still had the energy to yell at her.
“Get the doctor!”
He’s dying. Because, despite Connor’s iron resolve, the odds of him coming back from this were infinitesimal. But Roz wasn’t giving up and neither would Ali. A small chance was still a chance. She pulled the only walking lab coat in the building outside.
“What do we have?” the doctor asked, climbing into the pickup’s bed.
“Vampires. He stopped breathing a couple minutes ago.” Roz bent and blew two quick puffs into his open mouth, and then continued chest compressions. “Can you help him?”
The clinic wasn’t set up for emergency triage, only minor wounds and broken bones. A modern hospital, it was not. More like a frontier doctor’s office in an American western. They squeezed by two women flanking a boy with an icepack pressed to his head. The doctor directed them into an exam room furnished with a sink, a cupboard, and a hospital bed.
Connor sank into the mattress, his arm cranked unnaturally, and his feet splayed outward. To reassure herself he was warm and alive, Ali grasped his blood-speckled forearm.
The doctor shoved an Ambu bag at Roz, who looked like she knew what she was doing. “Blondie will do thirty fast compressions, and then you hit him with two breaths from that.”
Blondie? Was that supposed to be her? “Do what?”
“Straddle him.” The doc gave Ali a leg up onto the gurney and for a moment she was airborne before settling on top of Connor’s hips. Her left hand grasped his shoulder to steady herself, and she smelled his wound, an organic and coppery twang in the air. And then her gaze fell upon his throat. They’d bitten him, what appeared to be more than once, and it felt like a worse invasion than the stabbing.
“What are you waiting for?” The doc grasped her hand and demonstrated the right place to pump his chest. “Don’t stop. I’ve got to charge the defibrillator.” She ran in and out of the room, starting an IV, hanging a sack of donor blood over him, and shooting him up with three different drugs.
Ali did as she was told. She focused on counting her compressions and not jostling the blade protruding from his diaphragm, pressing her palms harder and harder against his ribs as seconds ticked by.
“Keep going. You’re both doing great.” Working around Ali, the doctor cut his blood-soaked T-shirt and jeans off, leaving him in nothing but a pair of blue boxer shorts. He looked young and thin, not at all like he’d been that aftern
oon in the hotel suite.
She hadn’t saved her uncle. She’d been too late. She hadn’t saved Stefan. She’d been too afraid. But here was her chance, finally, to do something.
There was still hope. Connor wasn’t dead yet.
I’ll save you. I’ll bring you back.
She leaned into her thirty on, two off rhythm, compressing his chest nearly to the point of fracturing ribs. Blood coated both her palms as sweat beaded on her brow and ran down her face.
Eleven, twelve, thirteen.
The doc tapped Ali on the arm. “You can get down now.”
“I’m not done,” she panted. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
“Okay, but this might sting a little.”
The doctor slapped on a couple chest leads and activated the defibrillator.
Oh. Ali hopped off the table as the heart monitor beeped.
Flat line.
She couldn’t watch one more person die. She might lie down and fade away forever. Her stomach fluttering in sympathy, she backed into the doorframe, inhaling through her nose, but it didn’t help steady her nerves. She smelled blood and death.
She meant to keep it inside, but her prayer slipped out in a whisper. “Please.” The paddles went off once, twice. The lines on the machine leapt wildly. The doctor shocked him again.
#
Volk had christened the former chapel inside St. Peter’s Hospital the cathedral, and it was his favorite meeting room. It had a definite air of the supernatural. The crumbling plaster, the charred walls, the birds nesting overhead. It was a beautiful cliché, and Maks adored it.
The only furnishings were a large table—currently covered in colored maps of the area—one chair, and Volk’s sofa. He stretched out on it and waited for Olek to speak.
There hadn’t been words exchanged on the tense drive back from Paradise. Not only had they lost Anya, but that uppity human had wasted their time and killed Dawn. Someone would pay for the waste of time and the waste of a good soldier, and Maks only hoped it wouldn’t be him.
The Destroyer paced, brows drawn. Not a happy face. Maks schooled his features. It was second nature at this point, reading Olek’s moods and reacting appropriately. Maks’ skill at lying had reached master levels. His boyish face put everyone at ease. They underestimated him, always had. They saw a teenager when they should see a man, full grown. A dangerous man.
