Gunnar would do what he could within the limits of the law.
“They might change someday,” I said, “but they aren’t going to change today. And I can’t become a prisoner. I have to go,” I said, and walked past her. I took the stairs again, went to the kitchen.
Reveillon had been here, too. They’d cleaned out most everything that wasn’t nailed down.
I pried up a loose floorboard, pulled out the linen pillowcase that held my emergency stash of rice, beans, onions, and water, checked to make sure nothing had spilled out. I rose, handed it to her.
“What’s this?”
“Food for you and Burke. Go back to your house and stay there. Gunnar or Gavin will look for you, find you.”
“I don’t understand, Claire,” she said, taking the pillowcase and putting it on the counter. “I don’t understand what’s happening. Where’s Liam? He won’t let you go without him. He’ll want to be sure you’re all right.”
“Ezekiel’s magic struck him.”
Tadji pressed a hand to her mouth, horror in her eyes.
My voice sounded far away, tinny. Was I in shock? “He’s alive,” I said. “But . . . the magic changed him. His eyes . . .” I swallowed hard, willed myself to stay strong. “They turned golden.”
“They turned—” she began, stopping as she realized the implication. She lowered her hand. “He has magic.”
“He went with Malachi. He went without me. I think maybe that he thinks he’s a monster. Or, I don’t know . . .”
“No, Claire. He must not have seen you. He’d have known that you’d come back here. He’s probably on his way.”
“He saw me. I watched him leave.” He turned away from me, I wanted to say. I wanted to scream it. But those words were too unbearably sad to voice. So instead, I let silence drop heavily between us.
“He’s gone,” I made myself say. “That has to be okay, or I’m not going to make it.” I swallowed a sob that wanted to choke me. “So I’m going to focus on what’s next. I’m going to run. And then I’m going to get them out. The Sensitives, the Consularis Paras. I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but I’m going to get them out. I can’t do that if I’m in the clinic.”
“Where are you going?”
There was one place I could still go—the place only Liam knew about. And wherever he was right now, whatever future he was facing, he wouldn’t tell. He didn’t want to think about me.
“I can’t tell you. If I don’t tell you,” I added when I could see her preparing to argue, “you won’t have to lie for me.”
I went behind the counter, took the gun and ammo from the safe, put them in my bag.
“What about the store?”
I zipped up the bag, looked around at the remains of Royal Mercantile, of my family’s legacy. My gaze fell on the cuckoo clock at the other end of the counter, its pieces still in organized piles. But it was just a thing, like everything else in the store.
I looked back at Tadji. “Give Lizzie whatever she can use. You take the food—hand it out in the Quarter if you want, or take it home. Make sure Mrs. Proctor has what she needs. Tony, maybe, if he needs something. Board up the rest of it. Just lock it up.”
She looked horrified.
“I’m not worried about the store, Tadji. I’m worried about you, about Gunnar, about Burke and Liam and Eleanor. About Moses and Malachi. Royal Mercantile existed before, and it will exist again. If it can’t exist right now, so be it.”
“How are you so calm about this?”
“I’m not calm. I’m angry and I’m afraid that I’m losing everything that means anything to me. Liam . . .” I looked at her and couldn’t stop the tears that filled my eyes. “I love him, Tadj. I didn’t mean to, not with everything . . . But I do.”
She came to me, put her hands on my arms. “If he has magic, if he is magic, that’s not standing between you anymore.”
“He ran, Tadji. He ran from me, and I don’t know if he’s coming back.”
“And what about you?” she said. “Are you coming back?”
“I don’t know. When I can. If I can.” I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
Tadji lunged forward and embraced me hard enough that I could feel the sobs that racked her as she stroked my hair.
“I thought we’d be done with it, with all of it,” she said. “When the fight was done, when Reveillon was done, we’d rebuild again, and I’d work in the store, and Liam would fall in love with you, and that would be that. We’d make our way, just like we made our way before.”
Don’t you dare break, I told myself. She needs you, so before you walk away, you damn well better not break here and now.
I pulled back, brushed the tears from her cheeks. “We’ll make our way, Tadji. We did before, and we will again. But it will have to be a new way. If you need me, if there’s some emergency, get a message to Malachi. He may be able to find me.” If anyone could find a cache of magical objects, it would be him.
Gunnar stepped into the store. He looked a little banged up, but he was on his feet and moving. Relief flooded me. And then fear and regret.
“Thank God,” he said. “I couldn’t find you—”
“How’s Gavin?” I asked. “And Burke, Moses, Lizzie, Tony—is everyone all right? I came back fast, and I didn’t see . . .”
I knew only about Malachi. About Malachi . . . and Liam.
“Tony took a hit from a machete, but he’ll be fine. Moses is still eating soup, I think. Gavin and Burke are helping Containment gather up the rest of the Reveillon members. Lizzie’s at the clinic. A battalion from Birmingham made it through, and they’re on their way.” He nearly smiled, but that hope faded when he looked at my face, then down at the bag in my hands. “Where are you going? And where’s Liam?”
I couldn’t stop the tears that welled again. “He’s alive. Tadji can tell you the rest. I have to go. You know I do. I go, or you stay and arrest me.”
“I won’t arrest you.” His voice was fierce.
“If not you, then Broussard, or Reece, or the Commandant, or someone else. It doesn’t matter who. Someone will be here to take me in. After Ezekiel, Gunnar, you know they have to. It might be a nicer, kinder Devil’s Isle, but it will still be Devil’s Isle.”
I could see he wanted to argue but knew there was no argument to make. “Where will you go?”
“I can’t tell you. There’s a place I can go, and I’ll be safe there. But I can’t tell you where it is.”
Rage, fear, and understanding seemed to cross his face in turns.
“Plausible deniability, Gunnar. You know it’s better that way.”
His lips tightened, but he nodded. “How will we know you’re safe?”
“I’ll get in touch when I can. Keep Tadji safe. And yourself.”
Gunnar nodded, his own eyes reddening. “I love you, Claire. Please be careful.”
I could only nod, and made myself put on a brave face for both of us. “I love you, too, Gunn. Maybe this will only be temporary,” I said, thinking of what Moses had said, the irony of our positions. He’d come willingly back into Devil’s Isle; I was running away from it.
Gunnar walked me to the door, leaving Tadji in front of the counter. I glanced back at her, offered a small wave. She nodded, brought fingers to her lips as her eyes filled with tears.
Everything was changing. The life I’d built for myself, dragged for myself out of war and misery, even if it was a small life, had been mine. I’d had my place, my friends, my routine, my preconceptions of who I was, who my father had been, who Paranormals were. And now that was all gone. Every bit of it dashed.
The rose-colored glasses had been knocked away and trampled underfoot.
But I’m alive, I reminded myself. I was alive and outside Devil’s Isle, where I could change things. For now, that was what mattered. That was
what had to matter.
The sun was setting as we walked outside.
And to our left, still a block away, three Containment agents walked down Royal, heading for what remained of Royal Mercantile. Captain John Reece led the charge, and they all had weapons strapped to their sides.
Gunnar’s gaze sharpened, and he turned toward them, shielding my body with his. “Go, Claire. Now. Out the back.”
I slipped into the alley as he called out, “Captain Reece. What can I do for you?”
—
It was three miles to the Apollo. I walked slowly, stayed in the shadows and stopped every few blocks, waiting for a car to pass, or a spotlight to swing by, scanning for Reveillon members still on the loose, or for the Sensitive who’d shown her magic.
When I reached the station, I waited behind the fence of the empty house next door for fifteen minutes, figuring anyone who’d tracked me that far would have shown themselves. But the silence was broken only by the hum of crickets, the breeze through palm leaves.
I jogged to the door, magicked the lock, and slipped inside, locking it again behind me.
I stood in the silence for minutes—five or ten—sure that Liam would walk out of the darkness and find me, that we’d comfort each other, that he’d realize we could finally be together.
That we were the same kind of monster.
But the building was utterly and completely silent. There’d be no homecoming. Not now.
I dropped my bag to the floor and followed it there, sliding down to the concrete. I cried until my eyes burned and my chest ached. I cried for the souls we’d lost that day, for the humans who’d sought salvation in hate and violence, and who’d paid the price for their choice.
I cried until I was exhausted of tears and emotions. And then I scrubbed my face with my hands, pushed my hair from my face, and took a deep breath.
There was no point in wasting the energy on regret.
Liam would come around. He had to.
I lifted my head, glanced at the space and the objects that filled it. There was so much magic, so much potential here. And plenty of irony, I thought, that not only had Containment failed to grab me, but they’d managed to send me into the largest surviving cache of magic in New Orleans, maybe even in the Zone.
I walked to the closest table, picked up a book of voodoo and hoodoo rituals.
I could organize these things. I could catalog them. And I could learn to use them.
I just needed a plan.
Love Liam and Claire? Then meet Ethan and Merit!
Read on for a look at the first book in Chloe Neill’s New York Times bestselling Chicagoland Vampires series,
SOME GIRLS BITE
Available now wherever books and e-books are sold
Early April
Chicago, Illinois
At first, I wondered if it was karmic punishment. I’d sneered at the fancy vampires, and as some kind of cosmic retribution, I’d been made one. Vampire. Predator. Initiate into one of the oldest of the twelve vampire Houses in the United States.
And I wasn’t just one of them.
I was one of the best.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me begin by telling you how I became a vampire, a story that starts weeks before my twenty-eighth birthday, the night I completed the transition. The night I awoke in the back of a limousine, three days after I’d been attacked walking across the University of Chicago campus.
I didn’t remember all the details of the attack. But I remembered enough to be thrilled to be alive. To be shocked to be alive.
In the back of the limousine, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to unpack the memory of the attack. I’d heard footsteps, the sound muffled by dewy grass, before he grabbed me. I’d screamed and kicked, tried to fight my way out, but he pushed me down. He was preternaturally strong—supernaturally strong—and he bit my neck with a predatory ferocity that left little doubt about who he was. What he was.
Vampire.
But while he tore into skin and muscle, he didn’t drink; he didn’t have time. Without warning, he’d stopped and jumped away, running between buildings at the edge of the main quad.
My attacker temporarily vanquished, I’d raised a hand to the crux of my neck and shoulder, felt the sticky warmth. My vision was dimming, but I could see the wine-colored stain across my fingers clearly enough.
Then there was movement around me. Two men.
The men my attacker had been afraid of.
The first of them had sounded anxious. “He was fast. You’ll need to hurry, Liege.”
The second had been unerringly confident. “I’ll get it done.”
He pulled me up to my knees, and knelt behind me, a supportive arm around my waist. He wore cologne—soapy and clean.
I tried to move, to give some struggle, but I was fading.
“Be still.”
“She’s lovely.”
“Yes,” he agreed. He suckled the wound at my neck. I twitched again, and he stroked my hair. “Be still.”
—
I recalled very little of the next three days, of the genetic restructuring that transformed me into a vampire. Even now, I only carry a handful of memories. Deep-seated, dull pain—shocks of it that bowed my body. Numbing cold. Darkness. A pair of intensely green eyes.
In the limo, I felt for the scars that should have marred my neck and shoulders. The vampire that attacked me hadn’t taken a clean bite—he’d torn at the skin at my neck like a starved animal. But the skin was smooth. No scars. No bumps. No bandages. I pulled my hand away and stared at the clean pale skin—and the short nails, perfectly painted cherry red.
The blood was gone—and I’d been manicured.
Staving off a wash of dizziness, I sat up. I was wearing different clothes. I’d been in jeans and a T-shirt. Now I wore a black cocktail dress, a sheath that fell to just below my knees, and three-inch-high black heels.
That made me a twenty-seven-year-old attack victim, clean and absurdly scar-free, wearing a cocktail dress that wasn’t mine. I knew, then and there, that they’d made me one of them.
The Chicagoland Vampires.
It had started eight months ago with a letter, a kind of vampire manifesto first published in the Sun-Times and Trib, then picked up by papers across the country. It was a coming-out, an announcement to the world of their existence. Some humans believed it a hoax, at least until the press conference that followed, in which three of them displayed their fangs. Human panic led to four days of riots in the Windy City and a run on water and canned goods sparked by public fear of a vampire apocalypse. The feds finally stepped in, ordering Congressional investigations, the hearings obsessively filmed and televised in order to pluck out every detail of the vampires’ existence. And even though they’d been the ones to step forward, the vamps were tight-lipped about those details—the fang bearing, blood drinking, and night walking the only facts the public could be sure about.
Eight months later, some humans were still afraid. Others were obsessed. With the lifestyle, with the lure of immortality, with the vampires themselves. In particular, with Celina Desaulniers, the glamorous Windy City she-vamp who’d apparently orchestrated the comingout, and who’d made her debut during the first day of the Congressional hearings.
Celina was tall and slim and sable-haired, and that day she wore a black suit snug enough to give the illusion that it had been poured onto her body. Looks aside, she was obviously smart and savvy, and she knew how to twist humans around her fingers. To wit: The senior senator from Idaho had asked her what she planned to do now that vampires had come out of the closet.
She’d famously replied in dulcet tones, “I’ll be making the most of the dark.”
The twenty-year Congressional veteran had smiled with such dopey-eyed lust that a picture of him made the front page of the New York Times.
No such reaction from me. I’d rolled my eyes and flipped off the television.
I’d made fun of them, of her, of their pretensions.
And in return, they’d made me like them.
Wasn’t karma a bitch?
Now they were sending me back home, but returning me different. Notwithstanding the changes my body had endured, they’d glammed me up, cleaned me of blood, stripped me of clothing, and repackaged me in their image.
They killed me. They healed me. They changed me.
The tiny seed, that kernel of distrust of the ones who’d made me, rooted.
—
I was still dizzy when the limousine stopped in front of the Wicker Park brownstone I shared with my roommate, Mallory. I wasn’t sleepy, but groggy, mired in a haze across my consciousness that felt thick enough to wade through. Drugs, maybe, or a residual effect of the transition from human to vampire.
Mallory stood on the stoop, her shoulder-length ice blue hair shining beneath the bare bulb of the overhead light. She looked anxious, but seemed to be expecting me. She wore flannel pajamas patterned with sock monkeys. I realized it was late.
The limousine door opened, and I looked toward the house and then into the face of a man in a black uniform and cap who’d peeked into the backseat.
“Ma’am?” He held out a hand expectantly.
My fingers in his palm, I stepped onto the asphalt, my ankles wobbly in the stilettos. I rarely wore heels, jeans being my preferred uniform. Grad school didn’t require much else.
I heard a door shut. Seconds later, a hand gripped my elbow. My gaze traveled down the pale, slender arm to the bespectacled face it belonged to. She smiled at me, the woman who held my arm, the woman who must have emerged from the limo’s front seat.
“Hello, dear. We’re home now. I’ll help you inside, and we’ll get you settled.”
Grogginess making me acquiescent, and not really having a good reason to argue anyway, I nodded to the woman, who looked to be in her late fifties. She had a short, sensible bob of steel gray hair and wore a tidy suit on her trim figure, carrying herself with a professional confidence. As we progressed down the sidewalk, Mallory moved cautiously down the first step, then the second, toward us.