by Laken Cane
Dammit. She swallowed, then took another step closer to the blind girl, her palms up as though the girl would see and be calmed. “Hi, baby. We’re not going to hurt you. I just need to make sure you’re okay.”
Before she’d taken two steps, the girl in the bed began to…vibrate.
Rune stopped walking and glanced at Raze, her mouth open. “What the hell?”
He shrugged. “Never seen anything like it.”
“Did you go closer to see what would happen?”
“Nope.”
“I guess I will, then.” When he didn’t argue she took another step toward the girl, who began vibrating so hard the entire bed shook. Two more steps and Rune was at her side.
The girl’s face was flushed, and Rune reached out a hand to feel her forehead—the unthinking and natural check for fever.
But before she lifted her hand, while the thought was still in her head, the girl flinched away. She couldn’t see, but somehow she’d known—even before Rune had moved—that Rune was going to touch her.
Rune frowned, then noticed something else. “She’s an Other.”
Raze stayed where he was but didn’t sound surprised. “She’d pretty much have to be. I’ve never seen a human like her.”
But that wasn’t why Rune realized the girl was an Other. She’d seen some freaky humans in her lifetime and sometimes it was difficult to differentiate. But the twins had bound her with thin silver wire, which they’d threaded through the white strips of fabric to either ease the sting or provide a padding if the girl struggled.
That was strange. Why would they hold an Other and then make sure she didn’t hurt herself on the silver they used to restrain her?
“We should call this in,” she said.
“What about the twins?”
The twins. Little bastards. She should have known she couldn’t trust ex-COS. She swallowed her disappointment. “I’ll call them first.”
Raze grunted in agreement, which surprised her. She should have had the twins picked up, called the paramedics for the girl, and washed her hands of all of them. But she didn’t.
The girl calmed before Rune pulled her cell from her pocket. “What’s your name, honey?” She didn’t expect an answer and was therefore shocked out of her skull when the girl answered.
“Lex.”
Raze stepped closer to the bed. Rune would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so terrible. He was afraid of the little slip of Other on the bed. She’d never seen Raze afraid of anything.
Completely unintentionally, she repeated the girl’s name at the exact moment Denim answered his phone.
She could feel his shock through the cell.
“What did you say?” His voice was just a murmur. A horrified, guilty murmur.
“We’re at your house, dude. Imagine our surprise. What the fuck, Denim?”
“I…just…we’ll be there in five minutes. Please, don’t call anyone. I’ll explain.”
“You come in slow, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
She and Raze were waiting on either side of the front door when the boys arrived. Both Denim and Levi had their hands up, their movements slow and unthreatening. They stopped on the porch.
“Can we come in?” Levi asked.
“Yeah,” she called. “Keep your hands where we can see them. Don’t move suddenly, don’t do anything stupid. You may be special with blades but we will take off your heads before you can clear your sheaths. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Come on then.”
They filed past her and Raze, their anxiety levels so high she could taste it, like metal on the back of her tongue.
“Lex,” Denim said. “Is she okay?”
The girl called from the bedroom, her voice high and thin. “Denim!”
He moved toward the bedroom, but Rune and Raze immediately pushed their guns to his head.
“Don’t even think about it,” Rune told him. “You boys better start explaining.”
“Rune, she’s afraid. Can we talk in her bedroom?”
“No, dude. If this goes bad, I don’t want you anywhere near the Other.”
He flinched. “She’s not…”
“Not an Other?”
“She’s an Other, but she’s not a monster.”
“Why do you have her tied up in there? Who is she?”
“Her name is Alexis Love. Her mother is…” He gestured helplessly, afraid to say the words.
It took Rune a second. “Karin Love’s daughter? No. That woman hated Others. She wasn’t going to fuck one.”
Again, he flinched. “She was raped. Gang raped. Lex was the result.”
Denim looked at her, his eyes full of hatred—not for her in particular but maybe for the world in general. “Karin hated Lex but decided to use her instead of kill her. She tortured the girl. Karin blinded her when she was six to make her power stronger. It worked. Now she sees the world better than we do.”
Rune shuddered, and her heart bled just a little more. So much horror in the world. So much pain. “Why is she tied up in there?”
“She’s…sick,” Levi said. “She has spells of some sort. She gets ill and goes a little insane. When no one is here to watch her she has to be restrained. When she’s out of her head she tends to get hurt.”
“I’ve never heard of an Other and human conceiving, let alone the offspring actually surviving.”
Levi nodded. “It’s rare.”
Rune lowered her gun. Not only did she believe the boys, but her arm felt like it was going to fall off from holding the gun up for so long. She nodded at Raze to do the same.
“Put your hands down,” she told them. “Why didn’t you come to me?”
Denim curled his lip. “We are aware of how much you hate the monsters, Rune. We couldn’t take the chance that you’d let us go if we told you about our attachment to one of them.”
“But this is good,” Levi said, his smile as bright as his brother’s frown was dark. He took Rune’s hands in his.
Her body stiffened, and she fought not to pull away. No need to overreact to a little hand-holding. “What is?”
He looked into her eyes, his own as earnest and serious as she’d ever seen them. His fingers tightened around hers. “Take her on. Let her into Shiv Crew. She needs it so much. Even more than Denim and I did.”
She began shaking her head before he’d finished speaking. “No, dude. I can’t have Others in the Crew.” She looked at Raze for backup. He looked away.
“One chance,” Levi begged, refusing to release her hands. “One chance. See what she can do, Rune. She’s had the fucking worst life of anyone I’ve ever known. And that’s saying a lot. Please. Please.”
Damn, but it was hard to resist him. “I can’t take on an Other, Levi. And not only is she an Other, but she’s too damaged to work.”
“Just right now,” Denim said. “She gets sick, but it doesn’t last over a few days. She’s getting better.”
Expose that little Other to Jeremy?
“It isn’t possible. If RISC discovered her—”
“Times are changing, Rune. Not all the Others are monsters. Let her in. You can help change things for them.” It was obvious Denim didn’t want to beg. He stared somewhere over her head as he made a case for the little Other.
She hesitated. He sounded so much like Ellis. But they didn’t understand. SCRU and RISC were created to keep the monsters in line and to bring the lawbreakers in. They didn’t hire them. And why would she want to change things for the fucking monsters, anyway?
“We’re the branch of law enforcement that hunts the mo…the Others. We can’t have an Other working with us. Besides, that’d be wrong. Would you really want her to be in on collecting her own people?”
Denim’s laugh was harsh. “Her people? Her people?”
Rune tensed and fingered her gun.
Levi squeezed his twin’s arm. “Denim.” Just that one word and Denim blinked, forcing himself to qui
et.
Levi took up the pleading. “Her people were an auditorium full of Others, captives of Karin’s just like Lex was. Others she grew up with and considered family. Those Others in the world out there doing crimes they have to answer for, those aren’t her people. No more than the human shooting up a school full of children or men who rape women are yours.”
And every man in the house stared her down. Including Raze.
Confused, she looked away from them and tried to think. He was right. If she had any family, it was Shiv Crew. “But that’s the way it is. Jeremy—”
“Shiv Crew is yours, Rune,” Raze said, finally entering the conversation. “If you want to hire that little girl in there, do it. If Cross gives you trouble…”
He didn’t have to finish his sentence. The threat, the promise, was there in his eyes. Funny how none of her men liked Jeremy Cross.
Hire an Other? That she was even considering it was outrageous. What was happening to her? One minute everything was black-and-white and the next…it just wasn’t.
But if SLE discovered she’d added an Other to her team, they would trump up a reason to fire Lex and Rune. Others didn’t become teachers, doctors, or law enforcement. Not unless they could hide what they were, like the shifters.
And me.
“I’ll think about it. Now shut the fuck up before you piss me off.” She herded them all into the bedroom to free Lexi Love.
Rune only had to watch them together for about two seconds before all doubt was erased. Their devotion was obvious. They moved in tandem, releasing her tenderly from the silver, smoothing back her hair, murmuring words of comfort.
And the Other smiled like she’d just been given back her sight.
Raze’s swallow was audible, and she wondered if he had a lump in his throat anywhere near as big as hers.
“What can we do to help her?”
Levi glanced over his shoulder. “Nothing helps. We’ve tried everything. We’ve had an Other doctor look at her, and she could find no reason for the episodes and no way to stop them short of shooting Lex full of drugs.”
“The drugs stopped helping?”
“We stopped using the drugs. They made her a different person. They made her…still. And Lexi can’t be still and be alive.”
“She’s had these spells all her life?”
Levi hesitated. “No. They started about five years ago.”
Rune frowned. Around the time COS was shut down. “So she started when her—”
“Yeah,” Denim interrupted.
Rune could understand the boys not wanting her to mention the hated mother in front of Lex. “What exactly can she do?”
Denim and Levi looked at each other, and some silent communication passed between them. It must have been a twin thing.
“When she’s better,” Denim said, “we’ll bring her in and show you.”
She shrugged. “Fair enough. Come on, Raze, let’s grab some coffee and get back to work.”
Some days it seemed like she had not one single moment free of drama, and this was one of those days. Before she’d climbed into her car, her cell rang.
This time she looked at the display.
“What’s up, Jeremy?”
“Rune, we just learned of a vampire nest in Wormwood. They’re sleeping under the old stone church. I want you to take your crew in and destroy the motherfuckers.”
She sat in silence for a long minute, processing what he’d just told her. They could always find some sort of justification for the cold killing of vampires because the law didn’t see vampires as living creatures. The shifters, the weres, the trolls…every other group was given more rights than the undead.
In her gut, it just didn’t feel right when she was ordered to kill them while they were unaware and defenseless. Dead or not, vampires had emotions. They wanted to roam the earth, so who was she to end them as they slept?
Let her and her crew meet them in a fair fight, and she’d take every single one of them out. If they were killing humans, they had to be destroyed.
“A purge? This fast?”
“Rune.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you explain.”
He sighed, as though disappointed that she couldn’t just do as she was told and stop with the pesky questions.
But Rune Alexander had never been one to go on blind faith, and she wasn’t about to start now.
“The vampire you captured. He talked.”
“And?”
“He told us everything we need to know to legally take out the vampires. They are abducting and killing the humans. And according to our friend, they don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. He said they were all losing their minds.”
“But—”
“No buts, Rune. You know how vampires tend to go crazy eventually. Nick Llodra has charged his vampires with killing humans. Now get the fuck over there and take the fuckers out. Do you understand me?”
“You know how vampires tend to go crazy eventually…”
“Do you have the order signed?” It was nothing more than a court order signed by two people. One was a judge who couldn’t have cared less. The other was the director of River County Vampire Rights and Protection, a woman who’d been voted into her position seven years ago. She did seem to care a little and often retracted orders to kill a vampire when there was insufficient evidence to charge him with death.
But really, was the probably forced confession of a captured Other enough to kill every vampire in River County? Sure, she’d caught him right there on the scene, so obviously he was guilty, but…
She could hear Jeremy grinding his teeth. “I got the go-ahead from the director, and of course I got the judge and Karla to sign the fucking order, Rune. Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“It’d be better if you let me talk to Llodra first. Bring him in. Question him.”
“Rune, your job is to recover humans and kill monsters. I will worry about the legal shit. Now go before it gets dark.” His voice was completely flat, the way it got when he was too full of rage to risk losing control.
“Yeah.” She clicked off, motioning Raze to her.
“What’s going on?”
“That was Jeremy. We have orders to take out a nest of vampires in Wormwood.”
His gaze sharpened. “While they’re sleeping.” He curled his lip in derision. “Llodra?”
“I don’t know if he’s there or not. I guess we’re about to find out.” The vampires of a city never gathered in the same place to sleep, at least not if they were being hunted. It wasn’t safe. That way if one nest was found and destroyed it would give the other vampires a warning, and they could go so far underground no one would find them. At least that was their plan. It rarely worked for long. They had to eat.
If Nicolas Llodra was indeed going insane, then his vampires would follow—and he’d signed their death warrants. It would take a while, but they would all be hunted down and destroyed. And the city of Spiritgrove would be vampire free.
She had two vampire kill kits in her car, so she was ready to go. All Shiv Crew carried kill kits. They never knew when one would be needed.
As she pulled away from the twins’ house she punched in Levi’s cell number. “We’re about to take out a nest of vampires. Meet me at Wormwood cemetery…and don’t forget your kill kits.”
He didn’t ask a single question, just quietly acknowledged her orders and broke the connection. Next she called Z, then Jack, and hoped like hell the six of them would be enough.
Because sometimes, the vampires woke up.
Chapter Six
She rethought the numbers before she reached the cemetery and called in Sherry, one of SCRU’s floaters. Just in case. When dealing with the vampires, it never hurt to have an extra killer along.
Wormwood was Spiritgrove’s largest cemetery—actually it was the largest cemetery in Ohio. It was almost a town. A town of Others. They would have been happy to exist there if only the humans would have stayed out.
Most humans did stay out of Wormwood. The graveyard wasn’t safe. But Spiritgrove law enforcement could go wherever they pleased in the city, and Wormwood was most definitely not off-limits.
Humans had stopped burying their dead in the ancient graveyard decades ago and the Others had taken it over, using it to lay their own dead to rest.
Rune only ever went there to kill or capture.
Needless to say, most of the residents of Wormwood didn’t love Shiv Crew.
The huge gates at the entrance of the cemetery were closed but not locked. The Others had been warned after they’d locked up once that to do so again would ensure their forced departure from the graveyard.
Rune and Raze were the first to arrive, and they took the time to unload their kill kits and arm themselves appropriately for a vampire purge.
They still would carry one gun as there were more than just vampires in Wormwood, but they replaced most of their blades with wood.
Thin and sharp, the wood stakes were loaded into special shooters called vguns. Each vgun would hold six stakes. Each Shiv Crew member would push a minimum of twenty-four extra stakes into belts they’d wind around and buckle to their waists.
If they went through that many stakes and found themselves lacking, most likely they were dead anyway.
Also contained in kill kits were small night-vision goggles for when the dead slept in places too dark for humans to see, and a knife for taking heads—although each Shiv Crew member had his or her own preferred blade for that, therefore the kill kit knives were usually left behind.
There were vials of holy water, cloves of garlic, and silver crosses attached to silver chains. Rune had never used those little items and had no idea if they would even work for her.
Silver was deadly to Others but didn’t really bother her. Her monster, though. It bothered her monster.
Ignoring Raze as he armed himself, she took in the sights. It was a beautiful place. November in Spiritgrove meant dead grass and leafless trees, but Wormwood was green. Deep, dark greens, vivid colors, sweet-smelling scents.
Still, the facade of warmth and peace was just that—a facade. Death lived in the graveyard, and fear. A few humans had told her Wormwood possessed such an overpowering sense of Otherness it was often difficult to slog through the graveyard.
