Stumbling over a block of concrete, her foot became tangled on the edge of it and she nearly went down. Her twisted ankle throbbed, so she leaned against the wall to take a moment to steady herself.
Looking above her once more, she realized that she stood almost directly beneath the hole now. The smoke cleared away enough for her to spot Chris standing above her, pointing repeatedly at something she couldn’t see. She shoved herself away from the wall and lurched toward where he pointed. There, at the edge of the pile of debris, she saw a hand curling out from beneath a slab of concrete.
Julian! It had to be!
She leaped forward and fell beside the hand. Her knees smacked against the concrete, but she barely felt the pain in them as she grabbed at the debris and threw it aside. Her fingernails broke away with her frantic movements and blood dripped from her fingers to stain the gray chunks beneath her a deep shade of maroon.
Lifting another piece of rubble out of the way, her heart fell into her stomach when she revealed a pair of brown eyes staring blearily up at her. She almost drew back her fist and drove it into the blood-streaked face beneath her as frustration crashed over her. Knocking him out wouldn’t help her though.
“Where is he?” she screamed hoarsely at the man trapped beneath her.
The man blinked up at her and released a moan. Quinn turned away from him to search the rubble. The man had chosen his course when he’d agreed to help The Commission. Her course was to find Julian; that was all that mattered right now.
She tilted her head back to look at the hole above her again, but Chris had been driven away from it by the smoke and flames closing in above her. Rising to her feet again, she balanced herself on the shifting rubble with her hands out at her sides.
“Julian!” She strained to hear any cries for help over the fire closing in on her. The heat licked at her hair, blowing it forward. Tears streaked her face as the acrid smoke thickened and burned her eyes. She doubted her voice carried more than a foot or two beyond her, but she continued to shout for him. “Julian!”
She made her way deeper into the catacombs of the burning building. The flashing red lights cast shadows through the smoke, disorienting her more than helping her find her way.
“Julian!” she screamed again. “Julian!”
A sound to her right had her spinning in that direction. She nearly smacked into the wall beside her. She ran her hand over the smooth concrete, feeling her way forward. Her hand fell away into nothing, and she felt blindly around the open space.
Finally, it sank into her dazed mind that she’d found an opening in what she assumed was the main tunnel beneath the building. She saw only a flash of movement before a hand grabbed her wrist.
Quinn jerked back, flattening herself against the wall when a small whistling sound pierced through the buzzing. Something whizzed past her face, creating a shift in the smoke. Quinn lashed out, bringing her hand down on the arm that had swung at her. She smashed into someone’s forearm with enough force to crack bone. A woman screamed as the coppery tang of her blood filled the air and the stake she’d been clutching clattered against the concrete.
Quinn pulled her arm back and drove her fist into the woman’s face. The woman’s scream abruptly cut off as the punch knocked her teeth out, causing the woman to gag on them. Quinn enclosed her hand around the woman’s neck and dragged her into the tunnel with the flames.
Blood pooled from between the hands the woman covered her mouth with. She moved her hands away only to spit out a few of her teeth. Quinn kept hold of the woman as she dragged her toward the fire. Tentacles of power slithered from Quinn’s palm and into the woman. She gave a subtle tug on the woman’s life force in order to heal the wounds she’d sustained from her fall. Judging by the swell of life within the woman, she was a Hunter.
The woman’s head swung toward her when she felt Quinn taking from her. “What argh ya doon?” her voice was so thick and heavy with blood when she spoke that Quinn struggled to understand her.
Ignoring the question, she drew more from the woman until Quinn was certain the woman wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight or get very far if she tried to escape. The woman’s life fueled her, heightening her senses. Beneath the cloying scent of the fire and smoke, she scented Julian.
The woman’s legs trembled. With a whimper, she jerked against Quinn’s hold when the fire blasted against their skin, but Quinn didn’t relinquish her. They were nearly to where she’d left the trapped man when something crunched behind her.
The woman’s feet flew off the ground as Quinn whipped around to face whatever was behind her. She jerked to the side when a man with a massive bruise on the side of his face, a swollen black eye, and his clothes hanging in tatters on him lunged at her with a stake in hand. The stake sliced down her arm, digging into the bone and bouncing off it.
Biting back a scream, Quinn released the woman and drove her elbow into the man’s Adam’s apple. He choked, and his eyes bugged out as his hand flew to his throat. Using Quinn’s distraction to her advantage, the woman jumped at her. Her fingers hooked into Quinn’s necklace, and with an abrupt tug, her locket gave way. Dismay swelled within Quinn as that piece of her family fell away from her. She punched the woman in the face again, sending her reeling into the wall.
With the woman temporarily out of the way, Quinn lunged to finish off the man before he could completely recover. Before she could grab him, a blast of something hit her in the chest, flinging her back. Her spine screamed in agony when she crashed onto the jagged pile of debris and bounced across it. A broken piece of rebar pierced through her side, impaling her and stopping her from falling into the fire.
This time, she was unable to hold back a cry of pain as agony burst through her body. The man had telekinesis, she realized as she grasped at the rebar and tried to lift herself off of it. Pinned like this, she wouldn’t be able to fight against the two Hunters stalking her. Blackness swarmed before her eyes as unconsciousness threatened to drag her under. If she passed out now, they’d kill her.
Muscle and skin gripped at the foreign object piercing her. Her hands slipped in the blood coating the broken metal, and she fell back down it. Despite the heat of the fire blazing against her back, an icy sheen of sweat coated her. Through the thick smoke, the battered man steadily approached her, but this time he had a crossbow in hand.
“We saw what you did to the others outside,” he said, his voice raspy from smoke. “They want me to capture you, but I think that’s a very bad idea.”
“You won’t make it out of here alive,” Quinn choked out.
The man smiled maliciously as he lifted the crossbow and aimed it at her heart. “Maybe not, but neither will you.”
A roar rent the air. It reverberated off the walls and caused the rebar to vibrate within her flesh. Something charged out of the thick smoke, materializing from another side tunnel she hadn’t seen before.
She got only a glimpse of Julian, bloody with his pants hanging in tatters around him, before he crashed into the man. The impact caused a bone to snap in the man’s body with a loud crack and the crossbow to fly out of his grasp. The weapon skittered away, coming up against the woman’s feet. She lurched toward it and snatched it from the ground before swinging it toward Quinn.
They were no longer touching, but Quinn could still feel her tendrils of power interwoven within the woman. Quinn clamped down on the woman’s life force as she fired the bolt.
CHAPTER 26
Julian lifted the man up and drove him onto the pile of debris. The release of the crossbow broke through the buzzing and fire roaring around him. His head snapped up. The woman stood unmoving before him, her legs shaking before she sank onto her knees. Her head bowed, her shoulders heaving as she gasped for air.
Quinn jerked to the side in time to take the bolt from the crossbow to her shoulder. She rolled and yanked at the rebar until the metal gave way. Reaching up, Quinn yanked the bolt from her shoulder, but the rebar remained embedded in he
r side as she rose. She braced her legs apart and grasped the end of the rebar. Sweat coated her forehead and slid down her cheeks as she gradually pulled the piece of metal from her. Blood coated the side of her shirt as the rebar clattered onto the concrete beneath her.
Her red eyes flickered to their beautiful honeyed color when they met his. A smile curved her full mouth. She took a step toward him just as he felt a flash of power beneath him. Julian’s hand tightened on the man when an invisible hand seemed to hit Quinn in the chest and shot her backward.
“No!” Julian roared when she was flung into the fire.
She’d been right there! Quinn! Right there!
His thoughts tumbled riotously over top of each other as sorrow tore at his heart. He kept expecting her to rise from the flames, to rush back out of them, but at fifty feet away, he could feel the blistering heat of the inferno against his skin. No matter how badly he wanted to deny it, he knew one truth: vampires didn’t survive fire.
The inferno surged further upward as her body fueled it. The flames rolled over each other to cover the place where Quinn had vanished into them. Fury and anguish tore through him, shaking his muscles and shredding his heart as a hollow pit of despair opened within him. His fingers dug into the man beneath him, tearing into his flesh.
The man howled and placed his hands against Julian’s chest, shoving with his mind and body in an attempt to dislodge Julian from him. Julian’s grip on the man’s flesh made it so he wasn’t thrown off him, but realization pierced through the rage turning everything before him a blood-red hue. This man had shoved Quinn into the fire with his ability; he’d been the one to push her in there.
Dead. Quinn is dead.
Julian didn’t look at the man again as he gripped the top of his head and his chin. The man’s neck cracked loudly when Julian yanked it to the side and tore it from his body. The man’s body fell limply beneath him as Julian rose to stare at the place where Quinn had vanished into the fire. The head fell from his limp fingers.
Dead.
It was all he could think as he ran toward the flames. The fire blasted against him, blistering his skin. He tried to grab the flames as if he could open them like curtains in order to reveal her. They closed over his arms, searing his flesh to the muscle, and blocking anything he may have been able to see beyond.
He’d plunge into the fire after her and pull her body free; maybe he could somehow figure out a way to funnel his life into her. He just had to find her first.
“Quinn!” he shouted through the smoke burning his throat. The lights and buzzing sound abruptly cut off. He didn’t know if someone had shut the alarms off or if the fire had destroyed them. “Quinn!”
A flash of movement on his right spun him in that direction as something fell from the flames. He blinked against the smoke as he tried to comprehend if what he saw was real, or if his mind had snapped and he’d started to hallucinate. When he looked again, he realized the vision wasn’t vanishing.
Rubble shifted beneath his feet as he covered the ten feet between him and Quinn in a single bound. Flames engulfed her body as she managed to lift herself up from the debris and fling herself forward. He had no idea what she was trying to get to until he heard a scream.
Tearing the remains of his pants off, Julian fell beside her. He didn’t acknowledge the man trapped by the rubble as he worked to smother the flames enveloping Quinn’s blackened flesh. His clothes went up in flames almost instantly. Nearly all the bones in his hands and all the way up to his forearm were visible as he beat at the flames with his bare hands. The man beneath the rubble shrank further, and his gray skin flaked away from him.
Quinn was working to replenish her body, but if Julian couldn’t get the flames out, it wouldn’t matter as she would rebuild flesh only to have it burn away again.
A blast of something white burst over them, burying them within its cool depths and pushing back the fire encroaching on them. Julian turned his head away from it as the white spray momentarily blinded him. Lifting his hands, he wiped the substance away from his lashes.
Whatever the white coating was, it had smothered most of the flames on Quinn. He rapidly smothered the rest of them. The man beneath the rubble took on the withered appearance of a mummified corpse before his body crumpled into ash.
“Quinn,” Julian grasped her shoulders.
The scream she released made it sound as if she’d been chewing on hot coals. He jerked his hands away from her, but he couldn’t leave her face down on the concrete. Ever so tenderly, he carefully rolled her over. He didn’t know if she saw him through the haze of pain in her honeyed eyes. Blisters and white foam covered the reddened areas of the skin she’d managed to heal, while other parts of her remained charred and muscle peeked through. Bits of her blackened flesh broke off in his hand to reveal the pink muscle beneath.
“Quinn,” he moaned, afraid to touch her again and bring her more pain. He rested his fingers against her forehead, one of the few places on her that had a patch of nearly pristine skin. “I’m here. You’re going to be okay. Stay with me.”
“Julian! Julian, we have to go!” He barely heard the shouts above the crackling of the flames encroaching on them again. “Julian!”
Movement beside him had him lashing out at whoever had dared to approach them. Julian snarled and snapped his fangs at the intruder as he swung a skeletal hand out. Chris yelped and stumbled away from him when Julian caught hold of something hard. A fire extinguisher flew from Chris’s hands to bounce off the wall.
Rage and anguish clouded Julian’s mind. Before he could launch at Chris and ease his need for death, another fire extinguisher swung out and cracked him in the shoulder, knocking him back. He bared his fangs as he turned to find Melissa standing there.
She held the fire extinguisher as if she were going to bash him in the skull with it. “We just saved your lives, asshole!” she spat. “Now, let’s go!”
Julian shook his head to try to clear it of the bloodlust pulsing through him. He had to get it together, or he’d end up killing his friends.
Feeling in control enough to risk going near his friends, he went to pick Quinn up, but her hands clasped his before he could slide them under her. He felt the jolt of her power as she latched onto him, but she didn’t pull anything away from him.
“Take what you need from me, Dewdrop,” he murmured.
“No. Help me stand.” The words croaked from her throat.
“I’ll carry you.”
“No. Someone else could be lurking nearby. We have to be prepared and… I can’t take that much touch. Not now.”
Fighting against every one of his instincts to lift her and take her from there, he wrapped his arm tenderly around her bare waist and lifted her to her feet. She stood on top of the pile, wobbling like a newborn colt as she surveyed the wreckage around her. Julian wanted to draw her closer against him, but he didn’t dare with her brutalized skin.
When she took a tremulous step forward, flakes of white fell away to expose more of her ruined skin. She had no hair left anywhere on her body, and parts of her ears and lips had burnt away, but steely resolve shone through the agony in her eyes.
“We have to go,” Chris said, his eyes wide and full of disbelief as he stared at Quinn. “This way.”
He turned and hurried forward with Melissa close behind him. Julian kept his arm loosely around her as they walked by the woman who had fired the crossbow at her. All that remained of the woman was a necklace beside a pile of ash. A necklace Julian knew well. He snatched it off the ground before rising to help Quinn forward again.
“You had a hold on her life force before you went into the fire,” he realized. “That’s how you survived.”
“Yes,” Quinn rasped.
Her legs gave out when they stepped off the pile of rubble and into the debris-free area of the tunnel. A whimper escaped her when he caught her before she could hit the ground. “Quinn,” he groaned, his heart tearing in two at the sight of her pain. H
e’d never felt so helpless before in his life. “Take from me.”
“No. Won’t stop,” she grated from between her teeth, and her tear-filled eyes met his before darting away from him toward something else. “And they’re watching us.”
Turning his head, he realized all of the vampires who had entered the building with them were gathered within the tunnel ahead of them. Their eyes were saucers and their mouths gaped while they watched Quinn unsteadily make her way toward them. There was no denying they’d witnessed her rising from the fire.
Julian moved to try to protect her from their view, but she tilted her chin up and gazed at all of them with a look that caused pride to swell in his chest. Blistered, red and blackened, with skin still missing in some areas, hairless and naked, she still looked every inch the fierce warrior she was. He had no idea how she was walking right now, but she continued to take one unsteady step after another.
He didn’t know what to expect from the vampires, what they would do after seeing her rising from a fire that would have killed any other. His fangs lengthened as he prepared to have to destroy every one of them if it became necessary.
Instead, almost as one, they went to one knee around her, bowing as a servant would bow to their queen.
Vern rested his hand over his heart. “Savior,” he murmured.
Quinn’s eyes darted to him, and her hand trembled within his. The sight of them kneeling around her unnerved him almost as much as it seemed to have her. But it also meant they would do everything they could to protect her.
“Savior,” the others murmured.
“Get up,” Quinn choked out, and they rose around her.
“We have to get out of here,” Julian said brusquely.
Chris gazed at all of the vampires, then at him. He looked tempted to bolt out of here. Instead, he lifted his arm and pointed down the tunnel. Julian couldn’t see the end of it from here. “This way,” Chris said.