There was only room for one person to be sassy on the job, and I already filled the quota.
Right now, though, I had to worry about the fact we had at least two more vampires on our plate in addition to the already challenging rogue we’d come for. Not that I was worried or anything, but having a vampire sentry with us might come in handy.
Thanks to the paranoia for my personal safety, my irritatingly modern phone had been outfitted with a panic button that sent a message right to Holden with my GPS coordinates. There really was an app for everything, as it turned out.
I pulled out my phone, hit a button on my home screen, and it made a happy boop noise in return. The sound was a bit too cheerful to be attached to a kidnapping tracker app, but I wasn’t the one who’d designed it.
“Is now the most ideal time to be updating your Facebook status?” Siobhan pulled her weird black baton from a sling on her back. She’d managed to remember that but hadn’t considered the advantages of pants?
“Actually I was—”
Glass crunched near the window, and the three of us turned. Holden dusted bits of glass and wood off his suit jacket and cast a disgusted look around the room. “Cavalry is here. And he’s thrilled.”
Chapter Three
Holden was a fish out of water in the dilapidated interior of the abandoned complex. The former GQ editor was wearing a gray Hugo Boss suit worth about a thousand bucks—he’d narrow down the price range for me if it was damaged somehow—and looked peeved.
His dark brown hair was brushed back from his face, curling slightly behind his ears and long enough to tease his nape. Brown eyes managed to convey his absolute disdain in a way words never could.
But it was the faint turn of a smile on his lips that hooked me. Holden had a way of taking the most terrifying situations and twisting them on their heads to distract me from the danger. Either by annoying me so intensely I wanted to murder him, or making me forget there was any risk by charming the pants off me.
Sometimes literally.
Even when he was being a snob, he made me feel safe.
It was one of the things I loved about him.
There was no shortage of those, unfortunately. It made not loving him almost impossible.
“What have you gotten us into now?” he asked. “And who are these civilian casualties?”
“Dude,” Shane responded, “we’ve met.”
“Ah yes. Secret two-point-oh. And you, tiny Irish?”
“Siobhan,” she said.
“Siobhan’s a druid,” I told him.
Holden wrinkled his nose, trying to keep from outright sneering at her. I admired his version of restraint. “How lovely.” He drew out the word lovely, making it as sarcastic as possible.
“I’m sorry, why is he here?” Shane was clearly exasperated by the way the hunt was spiraling out of his control.
“I called him.”
“For the love of—”
“Now, now, children. If you don’t want me here, I can just take my toy and go home.” With a burst of vampiric speed he was across the room with his hands possessively around my waist, pulling me towards him. I guess in this scenario I was the toy.
“Who’s acting like a kid now?” I smacked his hands away. He might have handled my assets in every conceivable way, but it didn’t mean he had permission to act as if he owned me. “Look, if we’re waltzing into a vampire nest, we’d be much better off having some real strength on our side. No offense to either of you, but you’re both human.”
Siobhan opened her mouth to protest, but I raised a finger. “And even a skilled human can’t face off against Grendel alone.”
Holden was still touching me, running his fingers up and down my spine, and even through the leather jacket I was tingling with awareness from his lingering presence. I didn’t tell him to stop. The last thing I needed to worry about right then was my lover getting handsy with me in front of people.
Just thinking of him in conjunction with the word lover was more of a problem than I was willing to deal with at the moment.
“So what’s the plan?” Holden looked past me to Shane. I could have hugged the vampire for giving the hunter his dues as the leader of this expedition. Maybe the blood veneer made Shane seem more respectable to everyone.“The elevator is out of the question, obviously,” Shane said.
Siobhan raised her bloody hands as evidence. Holden’s nostrils flared as the smell of the girl’s blood fanned through the air. He sucked in a ragged breath, and since breathing wasn’t necessary for vampires, I knew he was taking a good whiff of her.
“Has anyone checked for the stairs?” Holden asked, his voice strained.
“It’s at the back, but a section in the middle is rotted through. Not passable.”
“A few stairs missing? That’s nothing.” Holden stepped clear of us and bounded across the patchwork floor with the ease of an alley cat prowling the city streets. His confidence was contagious because the three of us followed after him, less nimble, but still able to track his route.
Holden was waiting at the top of the emergency stairwell, which must have been constructed in a bygone era before concrete was the norm, and we all assessed the rot damage.
The stairwell wrapped around the wall, with a broken railing along the outer edge. Where the railings gave way there was a central column open all the way to the ground floor. Since we were ten flights up, I didn’t think jumping to the main level would be feasible for anyone but Holden, and even he couldn’t guarantee making it without a broken ankle. He was still a man, not a cat.
Each section was missing six or seven steps—about half of the stairs—and the remaining bits looked worse for wear. I wouldn’t have trusted Siobhan’s lithe figure on the steps, let alone Shane or Holden. The weight of a full-grown man would fracture the threadbare wood.
“So, genius, you were saying?” I turned my attention from the stairs up to Holden.
He sneered at me and jumped to the next riser. Holden landed smoothly, avoiding the center section of the steps, and gave me a haughty I told you so look.
“Throw me the tiny one,” he said.
Shane and I stared at Siobhan, who was shaking her head emphatically and backing away from us. “No. Nope. I have no intention of being tossed into the waiting arms of a vampire.”
“It’s okay, he won’t bite you,” I told her.
“It doesn’t escape my notice you said he won’t bite me instead of he doesn’t bite.”
“He’s still a vampire,” I reminded her, rolling my eyes.
“Yeah, and we came here to kill vampires.”
“Vampires pay your boyfriend’s rent. I’m a vampire.” My tone clearly conveyed I wasn’t in the mood to argue about the shades of gray when it came to the badness of vampires.
I grabbed Siobhan, and before she could wriggle free I shoved her off the top step. I was careful not to just knock her off the edge, but instead gave my push a little oomph so she went flying into Holden’s arms. He, in turn, carried the momentum a step further and tossed her down to the next riser.
Siobhan was flustered but still a warrior at heart. She landed in a crouch, her back to the wall, and scowled up at us.
We continued the system, ensuring there was never more than one person standing on any riser longer than a few seconds, lest we push the wood’s limits and send us on the express route to the ground floor.
After a few tense moments we were all on solid ground, regrouping behind Shane. I took my gun out, as did Shane, and Siobhan retrieved her baton. Only it wasn’t a baton anymore. I didn’t see if she squeezed it, twisted it or whispered some weird druid incantation, but the baton had extended and grown in length, transforming into a bow.
She unstrung the tiered silver necklace she was wearing, and as she looped it around the ends of the bow I realized it wasn’t a necklace at all. The crazy woman was wearing a bowstring as a necklace. She must have noticed my slack-jawed expression because she gave me an uneasy smile. “I wasn’t a Boy Scout, but I do like to be prepared.”
“Hey, who am I to judge? I brought a gun to my own wedding. I’d just be worried about an accidental garroting.” A bow was one thing, but where the hell was she hiding the arrow—
She slipped a small silver blade out of her belt and squeezed, and I watched in amazement as it unfolded into a full-sized arrow. Apparently the druids had come into the twenty-first century with open arms. Cool.
Holden was the only one of us to remain unarmed, and it made sense because he didn’t need a weapon. With no further need to worry about falling to our deaths, Holden led us down the nearest hallway just in time for the whimpering girl’s voice to escalate to screaming.
This time her screams were those of pain, and my heart hammered. Adrenaline pumped through me, and I restrained myself from running headlong into danger. I had a bad habit of being impulsive and putting myself at unnecessary risk, and though I’d started to control those urges better, I still had them.
Holden must have known what I wanted to do because he raised a hand as if he could use invisible force to keep me back. “Hold on.”
The screaming petered out into a pain-filled mewling noise like an injured animal. My pulse pounded in my ears, and I glared at Holden, silently insisting he get this show on the road.
Shane was getting anxious too because he edged past Holden and moved to stand outside the room where Grendel would be waiting. His large gun was trembling slightly in his hands, and I wasn’t sure if it was from fear, rage or both.
“Let’s just fucking do this,” Shane growled, and kicked the door open.
Standing inside the room was one of the largest men I’d ever seen, undead or otherwise. He towered over seven feet, and his hair was a scraggly, grease-coated mane falling beyond his shoulders. Like Shane, he had a layer of blood over his bare chest and forearms, but in one meaty fist he was holding a skinny girl—no older than twelve—around her neck. It was hard to tell if the blood on her was from his skin or a fresh wound.