“This asshat won’t get off my bumper.”
I checked out the mirror and winced from the bright lights. “Maybe they’ll take the next exit.”
“Maybe.” Neely accelerated, nudging us a few miles over the posted speed limit as he took an overpass. “Let’s see how he likes that.” Flicking on his blinker, he changed lanes for good measure. “We’ve got two more exits until our next turn. We’ll just chill over here and— Grier.”
Metal screeched, and the car lurched sideways. I was falling, and then the seat belt yanked me back, its edge cutting into my throat. But we kept tumbling, over and over. Glass crunched and scattered, pelting my face and neck. An explosion whited out the corner of my eye—the airbag deploying—and Neely lost his grip as his head shot back.
Blood scented the air, almost indistinguishable from the hot metal smell permeating each breath.
Dipping my fingers in a gash across my cheek, I swiped a protection sigil on Neely’s arm and then mine.
What damage had already been done was beyond help, but it might save us from breaking our necks.
Impact, harder than all the rest, made the frame surrounding us groan, and the car rocked to a stop.
I must have been screaming. My throat hurt like it did when I woke from the dream. Silence descended, a cocoon that wrapped my senses, the utter quiet only punctuated by Neely’s too-sharp breaths. “Neely?”
A low moan was his only response.
With a grunt of effort, I reached out and mashed my thumb against his pulse. Quick but steady. That was all the energy I could scrounge together while my heart raced so fast my legs felt the burn.
Treading the familiar path to the door in my head, my consciousness locked me away from the pain.
“The Master will kill us for this,” a masculine voice hissed from the shadows.
“The Master wants her,” a woman answered. “Well, there she is.”
The crunch of approaching footsteps shocked me back to my senses, and I forced myself to assess the situation.
Neely and I hung upside down, suspended by our seat belts. The car had flipped so many times the doors were bowed out and the glass had shattered in all the windows. Neely was alive, but hurt. I was alive, but so weak I must be losing blood. Or I had a head injury making me sluggish. With the ringing in my ears, I conceded that maybe it was a little bit of both.
“A salt circle won’t keep out that wraith forever,” the man warned. “We need to leave.”
“We will,” the woman soothed, “as soon as we have our prize.”
The familiar tickle down my spine confirmed my worst fear. These were vampires, come to fetch me. Part of me had hoped I’d hallucinated the first part of their conversation, but there was no denying biology.
Fingers trembling from shock and fear, I wet my fingers against my cheek and started drawing.
Cletus might be out of action, but he was still broadcasting to Linus. Help was on the way if I could just hang on.
“Ah. You’re awake,” the woman crooned. “Fear not, mistress, we’ll have you back where you belong in no time at all.” Recognition kicked in a heartbeat later. The elevator. She was one of the siblings who’d panicked upon hearing my name. “The Master has been beside himself since you left. He forgives all your transgressions. He only wishes you to return home where you will be kept safe and cherished.”
Returned to a gilded cage, that’s what she meant. I would rather die than hear a lock turn at my back.
“Fuck.” I dipped my fingertips in the blood running up my jaw and finished my sigil. “You.”
“That’s not very nice,” she gritted from between clenched teeth. “I am here to serve.”
“Linus is coming.” I spoke with absolute conviction. “Leave now or suffer the consequences.”
“We can’t be here when the potentate arrives,” her brother pleaded. “He’ll kill us.”
“We won’t be if you’d get over here and lend a hand,” she snarled. “Give me your knife.”
Metal glinted in her palm as she reached through the busted window, blade aimed at my throat and the seat belt cutting into my neck. Light exploded in a blinding flash from the frame as the wards ignited, and the vampire howled in agony then fell on her butt in the gravel.
I shouldn’t have laughed, goddess knows I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. I kept going until I hurt all over, but I couldn’t stop. The manic relief bubbling up my throat kept spilling over until both vampires took wary steps away from me.
“She’s unhinged,” the sister lamented. “Do you think she was like this before?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” the brother countered. “Come on, Ernestine.” Shuffling ensued, but all I could see were two pairs of black-clad legs tussling. “The wraith is like a beacon. The potentate will come for her.”
“We’ll never get another chance as good as this one,” she argued.
“You’ll never get another chance period,” a new voice, dripping with ice, assured them.
The night came alive around us, shadows roiling, darkness rippling. A bone-deep cold pervaded the car until my teeth chattered from the sudden temperature drop. The hem of a wraithlike cloak swept into view, black tendrils whipping out, striking at the fractured light from the streetlamps overhead.
“We meant no harm, Potentate.” The brother was quick to drop to his knees. “Have mercy.”
There was no hesitation, no deliberation. “No.”
Moonlight glinted off a wide blade as it completed its arc, and the man’s head rolled to a stop against the car door. His disintegration was a slow, pathetic thing. He was new. Still juicy. Only the cast-iron stomach that came standard on necromancers kept me from spewing my hot chocolate.
“Frederick,” Ernestine wailed. “You killed him.”
“You almost killed one of mine,” Linus snapped. “You would have returned her to her cage.”
“The Master wouldn’t have harmed her.” She protested the second charge, knowing there was no wiggling out of the first. “She is his. We were doing as we were told.”
“Grier belongs to no one.”
Metal sang, and a second head joined the first. This one crumbled until the vampire was dust.
A distant part of my brain noted I had been wrong about them being siblings. Their deaths proved that much. Whatever game they had played with each other had been set into motion centuries apart, and it was done.
A familiar apparition peeled from the hem of the roiling cloak, and Cletus drifted over to me, running his skeletal knuckles across the wound on my cheek. Linus trailed him, the blanket of night sky unraveling as he approached, and knelt at my window, ducking until his forearms mashed into gravel, and we made eye contact.
“Thank Hecate,” he breathed. “I got here as fast as I could, but I thought for certain I would be too late.”
“Linus,” I murmured, giving my eyes permission to close. “What are you?”
All the blood had rushed to my head, drumming in my ears. That’s the only reason why I thought he replied yours.
Eleven
Suffocating pressure on my chest forced my eyes open, and I woke gasping for breath. “Meiko?” The hand I swatted the cat with weighed five hundred pounds. “Get off me. I can’t breathe.”
A heartbeat later, a nude woman stretched out beside me, her cheek propped on her fist. “My bad.”
“Why are you always naked?” I sucked down gulps of sweet oxygen. “Don’t you own any clothes?”
“I am how you imagine me to be.” She walked her fingers up my arm, and I noticed I had been stripped down to my underwear. “At least give me lingerie. Something pink and lacy.” She popped my bra strap. “I can Google it on your phone if you’ve never seen sexy underwear. Clearly, you’ve never worn any.”
The snap radiated pain throughout my tender shoulder. For a second, I wondered why it hurt, but then I recalled the seat belt clenching taut. Quick as a blink, the wreck exploded with crystalline clarity in my mind.
“Neely.” I shoved upright, wincing. “Where’s Neely?”
“Relax.” She pushed me back down then slapped me in the face with Boaz’s oversized T-shirt. “And put this on.”
“Where is my friend?” I shouted at her smug face. “I have to see him.”
“He’s at the human hospital where humans belong.” Her rounded ears twitched like they wanted to flatten but couldn’t in this form. None too gently, she yanked the shirt over my head. “He’s got a broken nose, a fractured rib, and bruising, but that’s it.” She bared her teeth. “What does it matter if he dies today or in, what, five years? Humans are short-lived and—”
Body screaming from the strain, I fisted a clump of her hair and flung her off the bed. The expected thump of impact took longer than I anticipated, and that’s when I grasped the situation.
This was Linus’s bed, up in the loft, and I had tossed her down into the living room.
“Meiko?” I eased onto the floor then crawled to the edge and peered over. “Are you okay?”
A cat stood where the woman must have hit, fur standing upright over every inch of her, but she had landed on her feet. Ears pinned back, she slinked off, tails whipping through the air.
A wash of tingles over my skin had me eyeballing the door before it opened, and Linus entered with a stout vampire beside him. She wore scrubs a size too small, and a crossbody bag bumped against her hip when she walked. Her nostrils flared, scenting blood, and her gaze swung up to meet mine.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Linus strode forward, hand outstretched as if I were in danger of falling and he planned on catching me. “Are you hurt?”
“I, uh—” I raked my frizzy hair from my eyes, “—accidentally tossed your cat out of the loft.”
Meiko chose that moment to yowl piteously, and he glanced between us. “I see.”