Unholy exultation filled me, and a howl of victorious slaughter erupted from my throat. It shook the remains of the glass in the windows as I prowled swiftly through the bodies to find another one to destroy. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bones, grinning evilly and tearing apart a vamp unlucky enough to be in front of him. An arm sailed across the carnage to land in the pile of body parts, followed by a head.
“Police! Drop your…!”
The voice on the bullhorn abruptly choked off when their spotlight lit upon the scene. Only about six vampires remained and three of them were pierced with multiple blades. Shots began to ring out from the officers’ guns as they fired wildly at everything that moved, not knowing what in the world they were shooting at. This caused the surviving vamps to turn on the police. I stayed down, bullets being much more harmful to me. From this low vantage point I saw Hennessey and Switch, those slime bags, crawling around the ruins of the car. They were almost at the opening in the wall, and from there they could run for the nearby woods.
A seething hatred burst inside me, and I had only one distinct, crystallized thought. Over my dead body. They weren’t going anywhere unless I was cold on the ground.
“Hennessey!” I snarled. “I’m coming for you!”
Hennessey turned his head with a look of disbelief. Switch didn’t. He started to crawl faster. His throat had healed from my earlier run-in with him, and from the way he hustled, he didn’t want a rematch.
I only had one knife left, but it was a big one. My hand closed around it with the grip of the damned. I crouched, channeling all my energy, and sprang at them with complete disregard for the raining bullets. Switch was smaller and he used that to his advantage, ducking under the twisted frame of the car. Hennessey was a large man. A perfect target, and I landed on him with all my rage propelling me. Both of us slammed into the side of the house.
More plaster came down. Hennessey went for my neck, but I shoved him back at the same time. His teeth landed in my collarbone instead. Pain sliced into me at his fangs tearing my flesh. Because we were wedged between the car and the crumbling wall, I couldn’t throw him off. Hennessey shook his head like a shark, opening the wound wider, while one arm was uselessly trapped underneath me. I kicked him brutally, but he didn’t let go. This was the worst position for me to be in with a vampire, which was why I’d trained so hard with my knives to kill at a distance. Oddly enough, Spade’s words rang in my head. That beating pulse in your neck is your greatest weakness…. Hennessey and I both knew that all he had to do was hang on and I’d be finished. Each shake of his mouth brought him closer to my throat.
In a split second, I made my decision. I might go down, but I’m taking you with me. My free arm I’d been holding him back with I used to wrap around him instead. Hennessey lifted his head enough to grin, blood dripping from his jaws, and then he brought his mouth to my unprotected neck.
Even as his fangs pushed against my skin, I rammed the silver knife through his back. His whole body stiffened, but I didn’t pause to see if it was enough. I kept twisting and digging the blade deeper into him, feeling him jerk spasmodically with each plunge, until he stopped moving altogether. The mouth at my throat lost its menace, became slack, and when I pushed him off, he was literally and figuratively dead weight.
There was no time to celebrate. Gunfire concentrated away from the house caused me to whip my head up just in time to see Switch disappearing into the trees. He’d gotten through the police line and was running for his freedom.
I jumped up to chase him, but a bullet whizzing too close for comfort made me duck back down again.
“Bones!” I shrieked. “Switch is getting away! He’s going for the trees!”
Bones punched through the neck of the vampire closest to him, his hand proceeding out the other side. Four bullets landed on him in quick succession, but he barely glanced at the wounds. His face contorted with indecision. If he went for Switch he’d have to leave me behind, because the goal had been to exit before the full cavalry arrived. We hadn’t anticipated the numbers inside. Failing that, Bones would’ve used his body as a shield as we ran. Neither of these options would work now, however. Not if he intended to catch Switch.
All I could think of was my grandmother staring in silent accusation and my grandfather slumped on the kitchen floor.
“Get him now, come back for me later. Get him!”
This last was a roar of unbridled vehemence. I wanted that creature dead. Truly, painfully dead. All else could wait.
Decision made, Bones dashed through the room at speeds a car couldn’t manage. Bullets were too slow to land on him. In a blink he was gone.
One of the remaining vampires took the initiative and hurled one of my knives at me. The silver was buried high into my thigh, missing the artery by inches. Ignoring the pain, I yanked it from my leg and sent it unerringly into his heart, rewarded with a cut-off squeal of agony.
Suddenly a blast sounded in my ears and I was thrown sideways. When I’d sat up to aim my knife, someone else had aimed at me. Hot searing metal tore into my shoulder as the bullet struck home. Gasping, I felt around for the wound and heard voices nearly on top of me.
“Don’t move! Don’t move! Hands in the motherfuckin’ air!”
A trembling cop stood over me flanked by three others, and their scared eyes swept the bloodbath that was the living room. Slowly I raised my hands, wincing at the shards of pain seizing my shoulder.
“You’re under arrest,” a panicked officer wheezed, the whites of his eyes rolling in his head. The stench of his fear overwhelmed me.
“Thank God,” I replied. All things considered, it was a better ending than I’d expected.
Chapter Twenty-four
THEY READ ME MY RIGHTS, SOMETHING I didn’t pay much attention to, because I didn’t need the Miranda warning to know that shutting the hell up was in my best interest. Then, after half an hour of refusing to answer any questions while I was handcuffed to a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, a tall, skinny cop muscled his way through the crowd.
“I’m taking her in with me, Kirkland.”
The officer who’d read me my rights, presumably Kirkland, balked. “Lieutenant Isaac? But—”
“Soon this place will be crawling with media helicopters and we need some answers, don’t ‘Lieutenant’ me!” the man snapped.
“Hey, I’m shot here, guys. You know, bleeding and all that,” I pointed out.
“Shut up,” Isaac said curtly, and uncuffed me from the stretcher. The medical attendants gazed at him in disbelief. Isaac then yanked me by my cuffed hands to follow after him, sending fresh pain through my shoulder. Kirkland gaped, but he didn’t say anything. He looked like he couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Lieutenant Kirkland shoved me none too gently into the back of an unmarked police car. The only thing official about it was the red flashing light on the dashboard. I glanced around, surprised. Was this usual procedure?
“I’m injured, and you clowns have already been at me for thirty minutes. Aren’t I supposed to be taken to a hospital?” I asked as Isaac hit the gas.
“Shut up,” he said again, weaving through the maze of police cars around the demolished property.
“Because any good lawyer would totally call this a violation of my rights,” I went on, ignoring that.
He glared at me in the rearview mirror. “Shut the fuck up,” he replied, drawing out each word.
This didn’t feel normal. Of course, this was my first time being arrested, but still. I sniffed the air questioningly. Isaac had a smell about him, but I couldn’t place what it was. I wasn’t used to diagnosing things by scent.
After several minutes, Isaac was clear of all the activity and on the open road. He grunted as if in satisfaction and then met my eyes in the mirror again.
“What a shame, Catherine. A girl like you, her whole life ahead of her, who throws it all away by getting involved in a white slavery ring. Even killed your grandparents to cover up
what you were doing. It’s tragic.”
“Officer Dickhead,” I said clearly, “go fuck yourself.”
“Ooh, language,” Isaac clucked. “But I’m not surprised, coming from you. You were even going to sell your mother into that kind of slavery, weren’t you?”
“You have got to be the stupidest—” I began furiously, and then stopped, taking in another deep breath. Isaac knew too much, and now I knew what that smell was.
Just as Isaac whipped his hand around, I catapulted into the front of the car. His gun went off, but the bullet tore into the backseat instead of me. The car swerved dangerously as Isaac tried to aim again.
I slammed his head into the steering wheel. We lurched onto the side of the road, thankfully empty due to the early hour, and I grabbed the wheel to keep us from crashing. When Isaac looked up seconds later, dazed and bleeding, I had his gun trained on him.
“Pull over nice and slow or I’ll splatter your brains all over both of us.”
He tried to snatch the gun, but I whipped it across his jaw before his fingers even grazed it. “Do that again, Renfield. See what it gets you.”
His eyes widened. I gave a nasty laugh. “Yeah, I know what you are. Pick a name—Renfield, vampire’s familiar, bat bitch, whatever. You stink like vampires, and not just the dead ones. When they’re shriveled, they have a different smell, who’d have thought? So whose little errand boy are you? Whose pale cold ass were you kissing in the hopes you’d get turned one day?”
Isaac stopped the car. We were already on the side of the road. “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.”
I’d jerked the gearshift into park and grabbed his balls before he could even scream. He did, though, as soon as I gave them a hard squeeze.
“Who was it? Who sent you to finish me off?”
“Fuck you.”
I squeezed his nuts like they were stress-relieving orbs. Isaac let out a high-pitched shriek that gave me an instant headache.
“Now, I’m going to ask you again, and don’t make me angrier. Who sent you?”
“Oliver,” came the pained reply. “It was Oliver!”
That wasn’t the mayor’s name. In fact, it wasn’t anyone on our list of human or vampire suspects.
“You’d better make me a believer. Oliver who?”
“Ethan Oliver!”
I froze, stunned. Isaac let out a gasping snicker. “You didn’t know? Hennessey was sure Francesca had told Bones.”
“Ethan Oliver,” I whispered. “Governor Ethan Oliver? He’s a vampire?”
“No, he’s human. He’s just in business with them.”
It clicked into place. “He’s Hennessey’s shadow partner! My God, I voted for him! Why did he do it?”
“Let go of my balls!” Isaac rasped.
I got a firmer grip on them instead. “I’ll let go when you make sense, and the clock’s ticking. Every minute that goes by, I squeeze harder. You won’t have any left inside of five.”
“He wants to run for president, and he’s using Ohio as his podium,” Isaac rushed out in one breath. “Oliver stumbled across Hennessey a few years ago. Think it was when he was buying pussy on the side. Hennessey came up with the idea to harvest people for feedings, like he had in Mexico, and Oliver loved it. Problem is, it’s the pretty young girls who sell most easily, but things get messy when a bunch of them go missing. So they make a deal. Hennessey cleans the streets of the homeless, drug dealers, prostitutes, and degenerates as his end of the bargain, and Oliver makes sure the paperwork disappears on any of the high-end tail Hennessey needs to keep his clients happy. But that got to be a lot of work, so Hennessey began getting the girls’ addresses and stopping the reports before they started. Made my job a lot easier, not having to listen to all those sniveling families. It was perfect. Crime rate goes down, economy goes up, voters are happy, Oliver looks like Ohio’s savior…and Hennessey makes a bundle.”
I was shaking my head in disbelief at the sheer callousness of it all. Frankly, I didn’t know who was worse—Hennessey, for doing it, or Oliver, for making himself out as a hero on the bones of hundreds of victims.
“Oliver sent you to kill me, clearly, but what about my mother and the other girls who were at that house? What were you going to do with them, and I dare you to lie to me.”
My new clench got a squeak from him, but it also made my point. What he told me next was no candy-coated fabrication.
“Oliver freaked when he heard about the police all over that house and how some girls were recovered alive. He wants any traces to him erased, so I was supposed to shoot you, and then plant a bomb at the hospital where they’re taking the girls. Oliver was going to pin it on Muslim extremists. He saw how Bush’s numbers spiked right after 9/11, so he thought it would push him over the top as the next presidential candidate.”
“You fucker,” I growled. “Where’s the bomb?”
“In the trunk.”
I thought rapidly. Oliver would be expecting a ka-boom within the next couple hours, and when it didn’t happen, he’d send someone else to finish the job.
“Isaac,” I said in a pleasant tone, “you’re coming with me. I’m revoking my vote.”
The governor’s residence in Bexley was decorated festively for the holidays. A large evergreen was in the front, complete with lights, garland, and ornaments. More lights were strewn around the exterior, and the gardens were filled with poinsettias in addition to their usual seasonal blossoms. Isaac parked by the wrought-iron fence about a block from the entrance.
“What do you think you’re going to do, ring the bell?” he asked caustically.
I sat behind him in the backseat, his own gun poking him in the side. Otherworldly energy permeated from the property. Oh, here there be monsters, all right.
“How many are there? And you know what I mean.”
He didn’t play dumb. “Three, maybe four vamps, plus the usual guys.”
Judging from the heartbeats, there were about six human guards. Maybe they were just innocent schmucks doing their job. Maybe not. The vampires I suffered no conscience qualms about, and not for my usual reasons. If they were here guarding Oliver, they knew damn well what was going on.
“They know you? The guards? You’ve come here before, right?”
“All the time,” he sneered. “You fucked with the wrong john, bitch. I’m in his pocket nice and tight.”
“Uh-huh.” I took my shirt and bra off one-handed, not taking the gun off Isaac for a second. Then I pulled my hair over the bullet wound in my shoulder, hiding it. As for the rest of the blood on me…well, there was nothing I could do about that.
Isaac’s eyes widened in the rearview mirror.
“Drive right on up and tell them you’ve brought some Yuletide joy,” I said evenly, sitting back. “I’m sure it won’t be the first time. And remember, I’ve got this trained at your head, so if you say anything else, I’ll blow you to hell.”
Isaac smirked. I knew he’d pull something, but I was hoping he’d be arrogant enough to wait until we were inside to do it.
“Nice tits.”
“Go.”
He pulled up the driveway without any more prompting. As he neared the guard station, I moved the gun to where my hip shielded it from view.
Isaac rolled down the window when he came to a halt at the gate. One of the guards poked his head out from his post.
“Hi, Frankie,” Isaac said. “Back again.”
“Twice in one day, Jay?” the man asked. “Who you got back there?”
Isaac rolled down my window as well. The glass had been tinted. When the guard saw me, he gave a leer at my breasts and then laughed.
“Never mind. I guess it’s better if I don’t know. Good timing. The missus just left ’bout an hour ago.”
“That is good timing,” Isaac drawled, sounding much more confident. “See you later, Frankie.”
We went through the gates and pulled up the one-lane drive to the house. I was about to put my shir
t back on when someone without a heartbeat stepped out of the front door to announce him.
“Help!” Isaac shouted—and ducked.
The vampire lunged at the car just as I pulled the trigger. If I’d have been merely human, Isaac would have made it, but I was half vampire topped off with two pints of Bones, and he didn’t stand a chance. Isaac’s head exploded. Blood splattered everywhere, coating the windows and me in a layer of gore.
My door was ripped off its frame in the next second, but that was long enough for me to aim again. In lightning succession I fired into the vampire’s open mouth, knocking him backward, pulling the trigger over and over until there was nothing but clicks, and then I jumped him.
His face was a mess. He was healing, but with pieces of his skull mimicking Isaac’s current state, it took him too long. I snatched a knife from his belt with relief, ramming it through his heart just in time to whirl and face the other two running vampires.
One went airborne. I ducked to let him sail over me. He landed on the car instead, giving me those needed moments to sprint forward and launch myself on his partner. Swipe, swipe, and he went down, an expression of disbelief on his face. Being underestimated was the greatest thing ever.
The other vampire regained his bearings and circled me, fangs gleaming. There were screams from inside the house and the guard station. I heard Frankie calling for backup, and then the sound of him running. Dammit. Soon this place would be swarming with cops. Or worse.
I backed away and pretended to trip. Fang Face bought it, springing forward. His momentum made the knife I flung sink that much deeper into his chest. He was still snarling when he landed on me, and I rolled backward in a somersault and kicked him through the front window, jumping up immediately to follow him. Better him getting cut up making a doorway than me.