Time slowed into something spiked and thorny, as if each second, each compression to Bruiser’s chest, were a wound stabbed into my soul with a cold iron blade. Again and again. The medic was shouting. Something about getting to the hospital. The driver, also a paramedic, opened the back ambulance doors and jumped inside, black boots landing with twin thumps, two cops behind him. I turned off the ambulance. Opened the door. Threw the keys into the dark. Just before the paramedic body-slammed me.
The world tilted. Smoky air rushed at me as I fell from the ambulance, following the trajectory the driver had taken. The driveway hit my shoulder, hip, one booted foot. Men piled up on me. Pressing me down. Burying me. I couldn’t breathe. Didn’t really want to. I’d lost Rick. Now I was losing Bruiser.
My arms were yanked behind me. My face ground into the pavement. Cuffs ratcheted down on my wrists, cold and metallic. The weight began to shift off me, one body at a time. No one searched me. I was a girl, skinny and hysterical. Why would I have weapons? Or maybe they just didn’t care. Or more likely, they knew I couldn’t get to anything useful, even the gun in the spine holster. When the last man rolled to his knees, I got a breath, painful and short and heavy with smoke. I heard Koun speak. “Get out of my way or I will gut you where you stand. I am here to heal the human.”
I started laughing, coughing, abrading my face on the rough pavement. “He’ll do it too,” I said from the ground. “The blue tattoos are Celtic. Koun’s one of Leo Pellissier’s warriors. He’s about a thousand years old and he’s been fighting since he was in diapers.”
“My father placed my first knife on my belly the very hour I was born.”
“I stand corrected. Or I lie corrected. Let him heal Bruiser. He can save him. It’s why I stopped the ambulance.”
“Bruiser is what she calls the primo. She is in love with him and human women like pet names.”
“I’m not—” I stopped. In love with him? Human? Crap.
I heard Koun enter the ambulance and the doors shut. After that, my world was sounds and flashing lights and smoke and the distant pop of gunfire. There was a battle taking place in the distance. The rhythmic three-cracks of semiautomatic handguns, the overlapping thuts of machine-gun-style, fully automatic and illegal weapons, the boom of shotguns, the guttural shouts of orders and the screams of the wounded. Koun had come from the battle.
I realized that the humans around me didn’t seem concerned about the gunfire I had heard when I arrived. They didn’t even seem aware of the small war in the distance. It was vamp-magic, something new I hadn’t seen before. I smelled vamps on the wind, multiclans of them, only half of them recognizable by scent as Leo’s, the rest the beery scent of his enemy. I smelled vamp-blood and blood-servant blood, a lot of blood-servant blood.
The house, not far from where I lay, burned hot and fast, until the walls started to fall in, loud, roaring crashes, the screech of heated wood. The water from the trucks was now being turned primarily on the trees, the barn, and the outlying buildings to keep the flames from spreading. The house was a total loss, according to the firefighters around me, pulling hoses across me and stepping over me.
Sometime later, the paramedic I had left doing CPR on Bruiser squatted near me. “Sorry, ma’am. I thought you had lost it. Didn’t know you had called a fanghead to help him. I’ll see if I can get you released.” I grunted. Even later, another man straddled me, one boot to either side of my hips, and removed the cuffs from my wrists. My arms slithered down to my sides, boneless and bloodless and tingly, as circulation was restored. He helped me to stand, patted my shoulder, and walked off before I could get a good look at him. But I got a good whiff. I’d know him again.
The paramedic came back, staring at me, studying my face, my body, and only now noticing the array of weapons. His gaze lingered on my ringless left hand. “Are you really his wife?”
“I don’t wear rings when I fight. They can get hung up on things.” Which was a lie of omission and misdirection, but I didn’t care. My voice went breathless. “Is he going to live?”
“We don’t know. He has a sinus rhythm sometimes. A normal heartbeat,” he clarified. “Sometimes not. My partner is bagging him.”
“Bagging him” meant Bruiser wasn’t breathing on his own. I blinked tears away just as Koun stepped from the back of the ambulance, licking his own wrist. I had been healed by vamps a few times, but I didn’t know what it took to be healed from . . . death. Apparently blood, and from Koun’s pale skin, a lot of blood. He was half-naked, dressed in sweat-slick skin, blue and black tattoos and a loincloth, sword at his side. Koun was taller than I was with the shoulders of a Viking and eyes like the North Sea. He was blondish, forever young, and mercy had long burned out of him. He looked and saw me. “I left my master’s fight to heal a human,” he snarled. “You owe me a boon, woman.” He pulled his sword.
I stepped back, going for my Walther. But he was on me in an instant, moving faster than I could see, with a little pop of displaced air. His long blade coming at my throat. Time slid into slow motion. His sword sliced at me, level and lethal, catching the red of embers, wavering in the heat of the burning clan home. Beast slammed power to me. The blade slicked into my throat as I jumped away, still fumbling for the gun even as my feet went out from under me and my muscles went into a shoulder-tucked roll. I landed hard. Heard officers shouting, “Put down the weapon!” And, “Police!” like a chorus of the tone-deaf. Gunshots sounded and Koun stumbled, coming back up upright, the wounds not even slowing him. He stood over me, one foot to either side, much as the cop had stood, his sword held in both hands, blade down, over me. “A boon!” he demanded.
I thought a boon was a favor, but with more connotations, and I wasn’t going to agree to the unknown without a negotiation, even if I sucked at them and I had a sword at my throat. “What boon?”
“I am weakened, and the primo requires yet more blood. You will fight in my place.” With one hand, he pointed to the trees, in the general direction of the gunshots, which were coming closer, more distinct.
“Done,” I said. He stepped back and I rolled to my feet. “How many are there? Who are they?”
“Perhaps three score of the enemy were still alive when I left, unless our attackers have reinforcements. They did not announce themselves by name or clan. We have half that many, fighting against shadows and cowards.” At Koun’s words, the humans nearby should have commented or questioned or at least said, “Huh? What?” They didn’t. More vamp mojo I didn’t understand.
I thought a score meant twenty, so sixty opponents. Crap. It was a small war. I turned my back to him and trotted across the pasture, stopping at Bitsa to pull the M4 and slide into the harness.
Fun, Beast thought at me. Hunt. She poured excitement and power into my bloodstream.
My breath deepened; my heart thumped like a bass drum against my ribs. “Not fun, so much,” I said aloud. No leather and armor, no silver studs, no magical shield to protect me from bullets.
Jane does not have a magical shield. Jane has Beast.
I laughed. “Yeah. I do.” I trotted past the barn, where horses milled, restless and anxious with the smell of blood and smoke. The scent of their fear was like an aphrodisiac to Beast, but the added reek of big-cat sent the horses into full-blown panic. Hooves struck stall walls, screams of terror and challenge bugled on the night air. I sped up to take my scent away from them. Ahead, smoke and lights danced drunkenly in a field, illuminating surrounding pine trees and another horse barn, the central barn doors open to the dark and the stall doors like half-open eyes, staring out over the field. This barn was older, without the telltale scent of fresh manure. By the smell, it was full of hay and diesel-powered machines. The pasture around it had been planted in hay, thigh deep and brown, ready for the final harvest of the long growing year.