But I could breathe, the oppressive feel of the air under the table washed away. “Thanks, David!” I panted, then froze, the mystics pressed against my middle. It hadn’t been David.
“You!” I said, scrambling up and backing away from that same vampire I’d seen on the bridge. My pulse pounded at the absolute confidence and anger in his blue eyes. The room had gone silent, and my first impulse to blast him choked into dismay as he shook his head and held up a little lantern that was anything but, seeing as Jenks was in it, the pixy as mad as a wet banshee, the tip of his sword pressed into the corners as he looked for a way out. Shit, he’d caught Jenks.
I kept backing up as the dark-haired vampire crawled out from under the table, his lips pressed tight and eyes black as he dusted himself off. Mark was hiding behind the counter, and David had the blond one pinned to the floor, rifle at his chest.
“That belongs to me,” the Kisten look-alike said, soft with threat and promise. My heart pounded. His voice was higher than Kisten’s, and his face narrower. His hair, though, looked naturally fair, not dyed, and he smiled as he saw me look at it.
“Who are you?” I said, not expecting an answer as I backed up until a survivable eight feet separated us. I knew for a fact that Kisten didn’t have a brother, but vampires played with their children’s bloodlines as if they were Thoroughbreds. The man before me had probably once belonged to Piscary, discarded or traded like a duplicate card when Kisten showed the proper balance of domination and submission the master vampire preferred. No wonder they hated them, even as they were conditioned to love and die for them.
“Give me the mystics,” he said, hand shaking slightly and pupils slowly widening.
I shook my head, imagining Jenks among the broken shards, his dust slowly fading.
“Give me the mystics!” he screamed, and I jumped, startled into pulling on the line and making my hair float.
“Back off,” I whispered to David. “Give him back his man.”
In a sliding sound of fabric, David pulled back from the man on the floor. I’d made the newly arrived vampire lose his temper, and clearly that bothered him as he flipped his hair out of his eyes. Shoulders back, he took several cleansing breaths. Maybe it was his temper that had made him unsuitable, because by God, he looked perfect. Perfect and untouchable.
“I’m Ayer,” he said, voice creeping over my skin and raising goose bumps. “If you want this back alive, give me my mystics.” He gave Jenks a shake to make sure there was no question.
“Okay.” I stood up straight, looking to buy some time. David was limping as he joined me, wiping the blood from his cut lip and scowling. “Tell me why you want them,” I said, and a hint of bitterness stained Ayer’s perfect beauty.
Motions slow, he went to help the blond vampire up, setting Jenks on the table before extending a thin hand to his friend. “I hear you almost lost your life trying to save Ivy,” he said as he tugged the vampire’s shirt.
I nodded, glancing at the empty parking lot. Edden, where in hell are you?
“Then you know why. The masters use us like things. It has to end.”
“By killing them?” I said, looking past him to the streets emptied by fear and the vampire and Were graffiti mixed like continuous acts of aggression. “We can’t survive a second Turn.”
“We can’t survive without it,” he said, and my eyes flicked to his arm, only now noticing the long burn visible in glimpses through a tear in his shirt. His clothes, too, were dirty, making me wonder if he’d been involved with the mob at the arena. “Give them to me. I’m not going to ask again.”
“I agree the current system sucks,” I said, wondering if I could break the lantern without cutting Jenks to shreds. “Putting them to sleep isn’t helping. Or haven’t you bothered to take a look past your carefully constructed blinders?”
“Blinders!” I jerked when Ayer shouted, and David warned him off with the rifle. “You saw what they did to Ivy. How can you talk about blinders when I know she’s ripped them from you? Look at me!” he bellowed, shocking me with his shift from calm to furious. “I was bred like an animal to someone’s specifications, abandoned when another pleased him more!”
And jealousy will make him more dangerous. “This isn’t about Ivy. This is about you murdering the undead!”
His teeth clenched, but with a visible effort he calmed himself, leaning back against the table and crossing his ankles to look relaxed. I knew he wasn’t; I could almost see the pheromones rising from him and prickling along my skin. Behind him, the two vampires were exchanging worried looks. “It isn’t murder if what you kill has no soul,” he said softly, his hand going atop Jenks’s prison to block the pixy’s view, and suddenly the container was full of a black dust. “Give me the mystics.”
He picked up Jenks, and David grabbed my arm, keeping me where I was. “Look, those waves you’re pulling out of my line aren’t simply powering your lullaby,” I said as I shook David off. “You’ve divided a communal mind, and she’s looking for them!”
“Energy isn’t alive!” he barked, but I’d clearly hit a sore spot. He knew, damn it. He knew! And he didn’t care.
“She’s not energy, she’s sentient,” I said. “And you’ve made her psychotic. You’re in over your head and lost control. Let them go, and maybe she’ll go away.”
Ayer looked me up and down, and from behind the glass, Jenks’s wings were a blur. “You know a lot more than you should.”
“That’s because it’s my line you’re pulling them from. The wave is following me around like a puppy.” Ayer’s soft fidgeting ceased, and I squinted at him. “You didn’t know that, did you?” I said, and his eyes went entirely dark. “My God, you didn’t even know why the wave patterns were shifting.”
Table creaking, he stood, turning to look pointedly at the two men nursing their hurts behind him. Beside me, David leveled his shotgun. Ayer hadn’t said a word, but he’d just told them to be ready to act. “We do now,” Ayer said, and I stiffened when he held Jenks at his middle, long fingers caressing the glass. “Interesting that they like you, Morgan.”
“Let go of my partner,” I demanded, setting the device on a nearby table in a show of exchange. It made David cringe, but Ayer didn’t even look at it.
“You’ve talked to her, haven’t you?” he said, his voice low with the holding of secrets. “They follow you like puppies, you said. You can control her.”
“No,” I said, fear sliding through me as I remembered Bancroft, driven mad by them.
But he only smiled, chilling me. “Either you’re lying to me, or elven magic is more powerful than demon—as he said.” He leaned in until my skin tingled. “Which is it?”“Elven magic isn’t more powerful than demon,” I said, affronted. “She’s nuts, and she’ll drive me nuts too!”
“I can live with that,” he said, a slight eye twitch giving me bare warning.
“Rachel!” David shouted, but I flung myself backward, gasping as I tried to stay out of Ayer’s reach. Hitting the floor, I rolled and kept rolling. Again the shotgun blasted, and the scent of gunpowder overtook the stench of angry vampire.
“Rachel! Here!” David cried, and I sat up, eyes widening as he threw the mystics at me. I caught the device almost in self-defense and held it close.
“Get her!” Ayer shoved David’s head into the counter and the Were slid to the floor. Fire and darkness in his eyes, Ayer strode toward me, but I was already moving, slamming my palm into the nose of the first man to touch me, then grabbing the arm of the next to pull myself up. My knee hit his chin, pulled down within easy reach, and he groaned and fell away.
Panting, I spun in my cleared space, the mystics making a tingling in my hand. I was alone, ringed by three vampires, two bloodied by me, the other just pissed. Mark had pulled David to safety, and I felt a twinge of relief when the witch invoked the circle he had back there. They were safe.
Me, on the other hand . . .
Ayer paced before me, knowing better than to try to take me by force while I could tap a line. “You will talk to the splinter or die,” he said, his face ugly as he held the lantern as if to drop it.
“You want them, you can have them,” I said, then threw the mystics at him.
Snarling in rage, he flung Jenks at the wall.
It was too far away. Heart breaking, I leaped for the lantern. Desperate, I made a circle to catch Jenks for the half an instant I’d need. Eyes widening, I held my breath as my feet left the tile, watching as Jenks crashed into the inside of my circle, rolling down it end over end until my outstretched hand hit the edge of the bubble. With a surge of tingles, the circle fell.
But I had him, and I pulled him to me even as my back slammed into the floor, knocking the air out of me. I couldn’t breathe, but I almost cried as my shaky fingers gripped the lantern and held it close. It hadn’t broken, and the small prison was thick with a gray dust. Two little hands pressed the glass, and a faint swearing filtered out.
“Oh God! Jenks!” I wheezed, trembling as I undid the latch and he came boiling out, a beautiful flow of pixy swearing rising up with him.
“About time!” the pixy snarled. “What were you waiting for? God to say go?”
Shaking in relief, I sat on the floor as Jenks’s dust wreathed me in sparkling tingles. But it wasn’t over yet, and I slowly got up to reassess the odds. Three vampires against a demon, a pixy, and a Were. Sure, two of the vampires weren’t going to do much—one unable to see due to his broken nose, the other because I think I’d fractured his jaw—but David was out and I was a wreck. Besides, they had the mystics. All they had to do was run.
But they didn’t, and I watched, numb when Ayer tossed a zip strip at me. It slid to a halt at my feet, and I ignored it. “You’re going to have to kill me first,” I said, not having any right to be so cocky—except I could see something he couldn’t.
News vans, three of them, were pulling into the parking lot. Ayer didn’t turn at the sudden sound of the engines, but the others did, their moods becoming hesitant when men and women began getting out. Mark stood up from behind the counter, sweat stained and shaken, but his relieved expression told me David was okay.
Trent got out of the largest van, and something in me twisted when he extended a hand to help a woman to the pavement. His eyes met mine through the glass, and my heart gave a thump at the relief he hid behind a cheerful, half-heard banter.
“You have the luck of the damned,” Ayer swore, turning on his heel and heading for the back door.
“I guess you’ll get me next time,” I muttered, and Ayer hesitated, giving Mark a dark look before running his gaze over me once—and then following his men out the back as the front door opened with a cheerful jingle. They had the mystics, and I didn’t care.
Head down, I limped to David, not believing that I was glad to see reporters as they poured in with their cords, cameras, lights, and noise—all of them waving their hands before their faces and commenting loudly on the vamp pheromones and fallen tables. “You okay, Jenks?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I must be getting old. He caught me in a net. Like a three-year-old.”
I gave Mark a thankful look and got a trembling thumbs-up before he shuffled to the counter to take an order. He was shaky, but he looked okay. He’d know to keep his mouth shut, too. Smiling in relief, I helped David to his feet, the blinking Were looking decidedly sheepish. “How about you?” I asked. “You hit the counter pretty hard.”
“I have a thick head,” he said, rubbing it as he turned his back on the cameras. “You mind if I . . .”
“Go,” I said, knowing he wanted to check on his pack—our pack—at the arena riot. “But will you call me tonight?”
“Call?” He touched my arm, very aware of the watching people. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t sleep on your doorstep. That vampire is crazier than Goldilocks on bane.”
Smiling, I gave him a quick hug. David headed for the door, righting a table before he slipped unnoticed out the front door, now propped open to air the place out. Unnoticed that is, except by Trent, and a weird feeling slipped through me at the silent look they exchanged before he limped away. I’d saved his life, eh?
“There she is!” Trent said brightly, as if he’d discovered the Mona Lisa in a scavenger hunt, his mask already back in place. “Rachel, I promised them an exclusive with you about what it’s like to be my security. Over lunch, perhaps? Now that you got your coffee?”
“Sure. Coffee,” I said as I limped to my shoulder bag. He was here—not for lunch and an interview, but to save my ass. My smile wasn’t faked, but the distance between us felt larger than the four feet he stopped at, his hands behind his back and a false lightheartedness to him. The ending would have been different if he’d been with me, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Not when he was finally doing the right thing for his girls and himself.
“I thought perhaps Carew Tower?” Trent eased up beside me, noting my slight tremor. “We can have a quiet interview there. Unless you want to do it here?”
“Carew Tower is great.” I was tired. Tired and hungry. Crap on toast, I hadn’t eaten yet.
“Capital!” His hand slipped behind me as he pulled me close, playing to the cameras but supporting me in a way that looked like he wasn’t. “They’re closed due to the curfew, but I know one of the cooks and she said she’d come in.” He brightened as he led me to the door. “Shelly, perhaps we could simply carpool over there in your vehicle?”