Caretaker

by Laken Cane

  Angus looked up, finally, as he neared the huge man, and the giant gave him a nod. “You going to make it, Angus?”

  “Maybe.” Angus’s voice was rusty but so familiar I was once again fighting tears. “We’ll have to buy the vampires a round of blood.” Despite his words, his tone was like darkness itself.

  “A couple of rounds,” the giant agreed.

  They were friends, Angus and the huge man.

  The giant’s laugh turned into a quick wheeze of pain as his handlers shocked him, then shoved him through the doorway.

  Angus and his handlers followed.

  The two prisoners were herded into the back of the truck, the ramp was extracted, and the doors were slammed shut.

  “Take ‘em home, boys,” one of the guards yelled, and slapped the back of the truck.

  It seemed like an eternity since I’d first peered into that room, but in reality, it hadn’t been longer than a few minutes. I no longer heard the helicopter, so likely the judge was already inside the Byrdcage, screaming at the workers.

  The moaning wind wafted past me once more and I shivered. “What is that?” But then the bloodhunter in me rose up and grabbed that sound. And I knew exactly what it was.

  I knew because I hunted them, killed them, and they were part of me. Part of what I did. And one of them called himself my master.

  “Vampires,” I whispered. “They have captive vampires on the island. That’s the sound of despair.” I clutched my stomach and bent forward, trying to breathe through the sudden memory of what the incubus had left inside me after his hideous kiss.

  That’s what the captive vampires were feeling. And though they were only vampires, I wanted to make it stop. No being deserved that feeling. Not even the vampires.

  I wanted to wipe it out. I wanted to chase it from existence. I wanted to not remember that such a thing could touch anybody. It could touch me. Again.

  I shuddered. “We have to save them.”

  Al and Clayton looked at each other, then Clayton reached for me. He withdrew his hand before he actually touched me, frustration and need in his eyes. “We have to save Angus, Trinity.”

  I wiped my sweaty forehead and nodded. “Yes. Angus. Then the vampires.”

  Alejandro cleared his throat. “Can you still track the judge’s wife? You have her scent?”

  “She’s dying,” I told them. “Maybe she’s dead. She’s so…faint.” I lifted my nose and with a few quick inhalations, I had her. “This way.”

  And as we slipped through the shadows, our weapons out, the image of a shattered, cold, damaged Angus Stark hung in my mind, and dread lay like an iron fist in my belly.

  Even when we rescued him, and we would, he would never be the same. He’d been owned by humans. He’d killed other supernaturals. He’d lived in total darkness for months.

  Part of Angus would stay there, in the Byrdcage, and no matter what I did, it would never be enough to free him.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “My God,” I cried. “What’s happening?”

  The night was suddenly full of voices. Guards, the humans who’d ferried over for a weekend of fun, the tortured vampires. The entire island would be scoured until the murderer of the checkpoint guards was found. More guards were called in.

  Overhead, another helicopter sounded.

  “We’re soon to be outnumbered,” Al said. “We’re sort of fucked, my friends.”

  I ran grimly on, following my nose to Madalyn.

  And then I saw the vampires.

  The supernaturals weren’t sensitive to silver—with the rare exception—but vampires were. Therefore it was easy to hold them, once they were captured.

  Almost to the tree line were a dozen cages, and even as I ran toward them, I saw hatches lift. More vampires climbed from the ground inside those cages, and the moans grew louder. They stumbled around, not getting too close to the silvered cage bars, and they cried. They moaned, begged, starved.

  In a cage between them was Madalyn. She lay sprawled on the ground, unmoving, bleeding. The scent of her blood was whipping the starving vampires into a frenzy, and I understood one thing immediately.

  She was being used as a food source for the vampires, who’d likely been starved since the epidemic had begun. There were no infecteds inside those cages. Though the vampires were insanely hungry, they were not sick.

  Perhaps Madalyn had just arrived and they’d not yet been fed, but the vampires were maddened by her scent.

  And then they sniffed the air as they caught the scent of another pure-blooded human. Me.

  They quieted for a heartbeat, and then the rush of their voices swelled anew, even louder. More desperate.

  “Why?” I asked, my voice jerking as I ran.

  “Fun, of course,” Alejandro said. “Fights, money, humans.”

  There were perhaps two dozen vampires, and even if they didn’t realize it, being on the island had saved their lives. They were hungry, but they were not infected.

  I wondered, for a second, how long they’d been there. Decades, likely. No wonder they were full of despair.

  And then Amias darted from the shadows, glanced my way, and began ripping the locks from the cages and flinging open the doors. All of them except Madalyn’s.

  The burns he received had to have been agonizing, but he didn’t make a sound, and he didn’t pause.

  ‘You’ve made him strong enough to do that,” Clayton said.

  “Listen,” Al said.

  “Motorcycles,” I replied.

  Then two of them sped toward us, followed by half a dozen golf carts.

  Men wearing protective vests, holding electroshock guns, batons, and blades swarmed the area.

  We were surrounded by not only humans, but vampires.

  And we had maybe two minutes before they reached us.

  Amias was suddenly beside me, his eyes feverish, his face pale. “I won’t let them hurt you,” he told me. “But I had to release them. They will distract the humans.”

  He didn’t add that he’d been unable to bear their suffering and would have released them anyway, but I knew.

  His burned hands trembled but even as he stood there, he began to heal. “I’ll do what I can to turn them away from you,” he said. “Get the woman.”

  I didn’t hesitate. With Amias defending against the vampires and Clayton and Alejandro taking on the humans, I sprinted toward Madalyn’s cage. Gunfire sounded, but I didn’t stop.

  Yes, I was aware of the futility.

  It would not stop me.

  “Don’t kill her,” a man screamed—I was unsure if it was the warden telling his men to take me alive, or if it was the judge begging for his wife’s life.

  And before I reached Madalyn’s cage, I was tackled from behind, and they took me down.

  The baton flew from my grasp and the men threw themselves on top of me, crushing me, and I could not move. I tasted dirt as my teeth scraped through what felt like a pound of dirt, and it was that dirt that made me remember Silverlight.

  There was power inside me, and there was power inside her.

  And she was mine.

  I couldn’t move as I was crushed into the ground, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need my voice to call her to me. I felt my left arm snap, and my nose crunched, and I had a second to think that the vampires were going to go insane with the scent of my blood heavy in the air.

  Then I fell into darkness, I dove into it, I embraced it.

  And I screamed silently for my Silverlight.

  I reached for her.

  I commanded her.

  And she came.

  She flew up through the ground toward me. She cut through earth and rock and bone—I felt it, just as I felt her.

  She sliced through the ground, and she attached to my arm, and she lit the world on fire.

  The strength of her attachment and the resulting halo exploded the humans from my back, and I found my feet without any conscious thought—one second I was dying ben
eath a pile of brutal men, and the next I was standing with a power those men had never known attached to my body, my mind.

  As I swung her in an arc, killing three vampires who were just a little too close, something on my chest vibrated. I had a moment to think a huge bumblebee had gotten caught in my shirt, and I automatically glanced down.

  Rhys’s pin, shaking and glowing, detached itself from my shirt and fell to the ground, and it began to grow. It began to change.

  And a millisecond later, Rhys crouched where the pin had been. He leapt to his feet, clothed, armed, and so full of death and nightmares that despite myself, I fell back, terrified.

  Silverlight could not hurt him. Her halo was repulsed and he walked through it like a ghost through a wall, and I did not know him at all.

  No wonder he wanted to keep his secrets.

  I would never tell, and no one else would recognize him, surely, because it was as though he were carved from coal—he was the night. He was anything he wanted to be.

  He whirled and became a long, black sword, slicing in half three humans who came at us with guns blazing. He absorbed the bullets and spat them back at another group of humans, and then he was lost to me as Silverlight demanded her own share of blood.

  The vampires fell as they tried to reach me, and with my sword leading the way, I raced toward Madalyn.

  And that time, no one could stop me.

  The judge was crouched at her side, his face a mask of agony, unable to break the chains that held her. I ran Silverlight through them and they parted like butter.

  She smelled like death, filth, disease.

  But I also caught another scent, stronger than the others, which wafted from her body and slid into my nostrils.

  That scent belonged to Amias.

  I drew back in horror, unsure, but there was no time to linger on the meaning behind that scent. Later. Later I would linger.

  “Pick her up,” I told Bennett, “and stay behind me. I’ll get you to safety.”

  I thought I saw Amias lying on the ground a few yards away, but I couldn’t stop to see. Vampires, long starved and driven mad, ripped through the night. They took on the humans who’d enslaved them, but still, their need for food was larger than their rage, and they swarmed toward me and the freed Madalyn, hoping for a taste. Desperate for a taste.

  They had no chance. Silverlight wouldn’t let them near us.

  And with the moon still strong in the sky and the vampire-killing sun hours away, Silverlight and I rushed Judge Bennett and his beloved wife to the safest place on the island.

  The Byrdcage.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Red Valley police arrived on the heels of the Correctional Emergency Response Team, and I caught sight of the captain, his expression cold and forbidding as he shouted orders and tried to figure out who the enemy was.

  It wasn’t just the vampires.

  The guards were shooting anyone not dressed in prison uniform, or so it seemed. When the alarm had sounded, backup guards had been alerted, and they’d rushed from their beds to ferry across the lake to help. They’d probably believed the supernaturals had gotten free.

  They were about to be proven right about that.

  Clayton was suddenly in front of me. He wrestled Madalyn from the judge—who resisted even though was about to drop the woman—and slung her over his shoulder. “Follow me,” he shouted.

  We didn’t need to go back to the front entrance—it was too far and they wouldn’t have admitted us no matter how hard we rang the bell—for Clayton had a keycard to the side. He’d filched it from one of the guards, or the warden, maybe.

  In a few short minutes, we were inside the prison.

  And we had work to do.

  Silverlight went dark, but she didn’t shrink, and I knew that with all the different beings inside the prison, she’d likely burst into life again soon. “Clayton, take the judge and Madalyn to medical. I’m going after Angus.”

  “No.” The judge grabbed my left arm and I cried out, nearly certain it was broken. “You will take us to safety.”

  Maybe I should have been flattered, but I was just annoyed. I wanted to see to Angus before my adrenaline faded and my injured body slowed me down.

  “Let go of her arm,” Clayton ordered.

  The judge looked at him, and then he dropped my arm quickly. “You both will take us to medical,” he insisted.

  “We need to hurry,” I said. The fight outside would soon end, and then it’d be too late. They wouldn’t free Angus with all the shit going on—no matter what deal the judge had made. “We also need someone who works here to show us where Angus is.”

  “He’s still outside,” someone said, and Jamie Stone stuck his head around the corner. He withdrew it quickly when he saw Clayton. “I’ll take you there.”

  “We won’t hurt you,” I said. “Join us.”

  There was a female guard with him—a blonde woman with wide blue eyes and a gun in each hand. Fear lurked in her stare, but so did determination.

  “Judge,” I said, turning to look at him. “This guard is going to take you and your wife to medical. Clayton will protect you. I’m going to get Angus.” He opened his mouth to argue and I pointed Silverlight at him. “I did what you asked. I found Madalyn. You don’t want to forget that.”

  He swallowed, then nodded. “She’s dying, isn’t she?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Clayton, find me when you can.”

  He nodded, but it was a reluctant nod. Still, he knew the judge couldn’t carry his wife. He’d do what he needed to do.

  The female guard shook her head. “I’m not—”

  “Melinda,” Jamie told her, squeezing her arm. “Help us out.”

  She swallowed hard, then nodded. “Be careful, Jamie.”

  Jamie shot me a grin, but pain lurked in his eyes. I was sure he had quite the headache from Al’s punch to the temple, but he didn’t appear to have a grudge.

  “I’m sorry for what happened,” I told him, as we jogged down the hall. “We couldn’t trust you.”

  “I know,” he replied, strangely hesitant. “That dude who hit me.”

  “What about him?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll take you to Stark if you give me his information.”

  I frowned and tightened my grip on Silverlight’s cold hilt. “You said you’d take me to him, and you will take me to him.”

  “For your friend’s information.” His voice was mild, but a thread of steel ran through it.

  “What information, exactly? I don’t know where he lives, or—”

  “His name and phone number. That’s all I want. Give me that, and I’ll give you Stark.”

  “His name is Alejandro, and you don’t want to take him on. He’s a dangerous man. He will destroy you.”

  “I don’t want to take him on. At least not the way you think. I’m a little twisted inside, Trinity. I saw something in that man’s eyes. I want to make a deal with him.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “That was clear as mud.”

  “Look. I don’t plan on hurting him. I couldn’t if I tried.”

  I nodded, then sighed. “I’ll pass on the request. That’s all I can do.” I would have given him Al’s left nut if I’d had to, but I knew I wouldn’t have to. “I have your number.”

  “Tell him I live on Bethany Street in the city. I’m not hard to find. Tell him to find me.”

  “I can do that,” I promised. The strident buzzing and shrieking of the siren had ceased earlier—but suddenly, it began again.

  “That’s painfully loud,” I muttered.

  “They’re coming in, Trinity. They’ll lock down the prison and no one will be going in or out. You need to get off the island as soon as I give you Stark.”

  “What’s your story, Jamie?” I was genuinely curious.

  “You want to know my motivations.”

  I didn’t trust him, not even a little bit. Whatever he was doing, I had a feeling it was only partly to mess with his father. T
here was something else going on. Maybe I’d never know. Maybe it didn’t even matter.

  “It’s a long tale of abuse and childhood trauma and bad fucking people, Sinclair. Maybe someday I’ll tell you my story. But right now, I can tell you that my father deserves every bad thing that’s about to happen to him.” He stopped at a door, ran a keycard, punched in a code, then shoved open the door. “I took Melinda’s card since mine was stolen.”

  “What are you planning?”

  He hurried me across a dark courtyard. “Best you don’t worry about that. You’re here to save Stark—nothing more. You’ve helped me tonight—distractions and all—and I’m going to repay the favor by letting you get your friends the hell out of here. Especially Alejandro.”

  They hadn’t taken Angus or the giant out of the trailer. I imagined they were baking inside. The sun was long gone, but the night was hot and sticky.

  I doubted they’d been given water after the grueling fights. I could not wait to get Angus out of there. I could not wait.

  “Trinity,” Jamie said, as he stood with his hand on the door. “Do not waste time. Gather your friends and get off the island. There are sleeping ferry operators on the docks. Hold a gun to their heads if you have to but do not linger. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I nodded. If I lingered, they would recapture Angus and take all of us into custody. Yeah, I understood. “Thanks, Jamie.”

  My hands trembled as I darted my stare around the area, keeping watch while Jamie threw back the lock. He flung open the doors and jumped aside, and Silverlight screamed to life.

  Jamie must have known the prisoners inside the trailer were likely to come out swinging, but I hadn’t been thinking of anything other than seeing Angus. He and the giant leapt through the doorway, roaring, preparing to stomp some guards into the ground.

  They landed so hard the ground seemed to shake, then stood there, confused, at the lack of electricity-shooting, sadistic guards. There was only one lone woman holding a glowing sword.

  Jamie disappeared, and I didn’t care.

  “Angus,” I cried.

  The giant looked from me to Angus. He said nothing.