Chapter 18
She came to her senses slowly. The sharp tang of metal and plastic hit her like an old-fashioned dose of smelling salts, forcing her eyes open … to more darkness.
She was confined in a tight space. Panic set in when she couldn’t move her arms. For a horrifying second, Jesse thought she might be trapped in a coffin, and issued a bloodcurdling scream. Then she saw the light sheering off the windshield, and knew it was a windshield. Her panic ebbed. She was in the chopper.
Where was Stan?
Her eyes adjusted to her surroundings. Jesse lifted her head from the seat back. Her confinement was the harness. She moved her fingers across familiar straps, and found the buckles and the release.
The events leading up to this untimely little blackout came hurtling back to her in a cold head rush. Lance had done this to her. With his voice.
Also, there had been a wolf. And an unusual moon.
She held up her hand. No gun.
Turning her head, she took in the eerie glow of the rows of crosses, which all of a sudden seemed twice as ominous as before.
Swallowing the bitter aftertaste of temporary defeat, Jesse pulled at her restraints.
She ran on legs the consistency of lead, with her spare revolver in her hand. Stan had been left with the vampires, out there. She’d never forgive herself if anything happened to her friend.
As she raced on, the dank village smells morphed into an odor of decay so intense, it acted as its own barrier. Mold and mildew odors joined in. Lance had told her these vamps could smell her from a distance, so how did they stand a place that stank of charred wood, the decomposing bodies of former occupants and spores floating in the silent, stagnant air?
Poor Elizabeth. She might be alive, but would she recover from this? Be locked away for years, in a straitjacket, every time she tried to remember?
Jesse’s uncanny radar stopped her in time to keep her from tripping over a lump in the road. Was it a body? Oh, please! Not Stan!
Not … Stan.
But she realized without looking that what lay by her feet wasn’t human. The scent drifting up was of damp fur. The body still gave off heat. This had to be the wolf, dead no more than a few minutes, which meant she couldn’t have been blacked out and in that helicopter for long.
Sidestepping the animal corpse, Jesse hurtled on—between the crosses, into the nest of buildings, with only the moon to light her progress. A faraway part of herself noticed how well she moved in the dark, though the thought was fleeting. She opened her mouth to shout for Stan, then thought better of it.
Rounding a cottage that lay in ruins, its roof sagging and its door hinged open, she paused. The back of her neck prickled. Spinning on her heels, she said to no one immediately visible, “I’ve come to take Elizabeth Jorgensen home.”
Did these walking cadavers know the name of the girl they’d been feasting on?
“Have you, now? Come here for that reason?”
someone asked. A female voice, with a noticeable British accent. And another surprise. Jesse hadn’t ever contemplated the possibility of female vampires. A big mistake, she realized, since she also had that kind of blood in her veins.
Jesse aimed her gun at the shadows beside her. “Where is she?”
“You have come to make ridiculous demands? Offer a trade?” the female returned with a calm that reminded Jesse of just how far up the creek she actually was among conscienceless bloodsuckers.
The word soul floated in the air around her. Lance had told her he had a soul, and she desperately wanted to believe him. What were the odds of finding another misplaced soul among these shadows?
“I’ll trade a round of silver bullets,” she said.
“I’d be there before you squeezed the trigger,” the female threatened.
A cold shiver passed through Jesse’s body, in one side and out the other, in an east-to-west pathway. A directional cue. She leveled the gun toward those distasteful eastern shadows and pulled in a breath of fetid air.
“Try,” she warned.
The darkness blurred, warped. A hand grabbed her by the throat, but not before Jesse squeezed off a round. The explosion was deafening. The fingers on her throat fell away. Whoever the hand belonged to issued a shocked, slow wail, and then came the rain of ashes—the dirty remnants of the vampire.
More hands reached for her. Too many at once. Whipping the gun around, Jesse fired again, at random. Another wail went up. More filthy ash hit her in the face.
She fired a third time, swinging the weapon as she was knocked off her feet. A puff of stinking air arrived. More ash.
“That makes three!” she yelled, thrashing on her back in the dirt, smelling not only the presence of the two monsters holding her, but a third vampire as well. This third one was a more powerful bloodsucker, instinct told her. Its feel was weightier, more painful, like metal spikes jammed to her bones. It stank of dank, wet earth.
“Get … off … me!” Jesse barked.
A shoe came down heavily on her chest and pressed in. All Jesse managed to see was a long stretch of fabric; yellow, tinted with a red film from the moon bouncing off the ruined roof over their heads.
This was the female who had addressed her a minute ago. She … it … was the master monster here, the one Lance had tried to warn her about. The creature who had set free the other vampires from their holy, cross-filled prison, and who was behind the kidnapping and torture of a young girl.
“No soul,” Jesse whispered as a gleaming set of razor-sharp teeth came lethally close to her face, and as she feared the end might be near.
Silently, and with all her might, she issued a call to Lance. Perhaps a last message, born of fear and acceptance of the fate at hand. Save the girl. You promised.
She acknowledged the drumming in her neck and the awful ache of her scar coming to life. Felt the prick of teeth scraping across her throat in search of an artery. The predator’s teeth rested momentarily on her scar, as if surprised to find the ridged tissue. Then they moved in a slow drag across her skin that stung like the rake of a primed cutting knife.
The female spoke, her tone vehement, acidic.
“He gave it to you,” she hissed. “That selfish, arrogant bastard.”
And then Jesse’s windpipe took a blow that turned her world pitch-black.
Lance’s head came up. A voice, like a shockwave of dispersed night air, slammed into him. He turned. Jesse’s pilot pivoted alongside.
“Jesse?” Fear was etched on Stan’s hooded face.
“The church,” Lance directed. “Go there. Only one of them holds Elizabeth at present. She’s very near death, hanging on by a thread.”
“I have to get to Jesse,” Stan growled. “The girl is important. But Jesse …”
“You can’t help Jesse here. Not in this instance. I have to face this. It’s partially my fault.”
Stan shook his head adamantly, rocking onto his toes. “Jesse first.”
“No!” Lance said with a restraining hand on Stan’s arm. “It’s for me, because of me.”
Stan had the sense to believe him, as well as the instinct to give in to the powerful alpha immortal, like the rest of the Were clan. Stan had been holding on to his shape longer than he had the strength for. He was shaking all over, his face as gray as the ash on the ground as he fought his true nature.
“Go to it,” Lance urged. “Let the moon take you.”
Without wasting any more time, Lance ran like mad back toward the village center, where the very beat of his heart lay.
He knew her. The village center was wrapped in her smell, and reeked of her immortal presence. The master here was as familiar as his own feet. Although he’d known this villain was female, the slap of familiarity was a surprise.
“Hello, Gwen,” he said through clenched teeth, yank ing her upright, pressing the length of his body tightly against hers from behind before she could react.
The fragrance of flowers, twisted and modified by the centuries of blood she’d ingested and the loss of sunlight to enhance its glow, permeated her waist-length hair—still as fair in color as his own. His old love was skeletal, hardly more than stretched skin over bone, where once she’d had the lush, vital curves of a pampered queen. Her tresses, much envied in the past, were matted, falling over her shoulders like strips of unwashed, tangled rags.
Lance kept her from moving by wrapping his arms around her arms. He whispered, “It would seem you got your wish, after all.”
“No thanks to you,” she said. But the woman he had pushed away for her own sake centuries ago listened without a struggle, her body as cold as the patch of frost at their feet.
“To what do I owe this honor?” Lance asked quietly, eyeing Jesse on the ground, unconscious, but breathing fitfully. Jesse was alive. The scraggly creature he held in his arms had not killed her.
“I heard she was here,” Gwen said, “and that you’d gifted her. I came all this way to meet the woman who had tamed you into submission. Yet she isn’t one of us, after all. Look at her, my love. How pathetic she lies there. White and pathetic and sickeningly human to some degree.”
“I did not bring her over,” he said.
“Nor did you change me,” Gwen snapped dangerously.
“I do not hand out immortality, as well you know. That was not my purpose.”
“Nevertheless, here I am,” Gwen taunted. “Tainted, of course. I could not find the Six, though I searched long and far for your brothers. My immortality is not pure. Not a match for yours. Still, I exist.”
“You’ve let the vampires out,” he said.
“To bring you here.”
“The crosses were for the protection of the mortals.”
“I’m old enough that tricks don’t matter. Neither do your precious mortals.”
Lance took a tighter hold on her. “You did this for me, Gwen? Brought the American girl here for me? Hoping to lure me?”
“A gift from an old flame. Though there’s not much of the girl left. The others in this village, weakened by your restraints, couldn’t be made to wait. You starved them, my love. Your own kind.”
Lance ran a hand along her shoulder, feeling every jagged bone. “You know better,” he admonished. “They are not my kind.”
“Nevertheless, the trick worked.”
“It did,” he agreed, noting the damage Jesse’s gun had dealt, smelling the ash all around that meant she’d taken out more than a few of her monsters before falling prey to this one.
“And now?” he said to the creature he held.
“You will love me again,” Gwen said.
The flavor of her lie was muddied earth. Lance felt the hatred emanating from her that had simmered for centuries. Gwen was a killer now. Psychopathic. An instrument of death whose diluted blood had no doubt sired numerous others, and who had loosed the potential for a reign of terror upon the Slavs in this part of his country. Gwen, once so beautiful and golden in his memory, was an abomination, just as he had feared she might be.
Heat rushed through his veins. Blood pounded in his ears. Gwen couldn’t be allowed to exist. What were the chances she’d go away or repent her sins? After finding Jesse and realizing what existed in Jesse’s veins, Gwen would never allow her a moment’s peace. Jesse would never be safe. She’d have nowhere in the world to hide from this shunned vampire’s grudge.
Still, he’d find killing Gwen difficult. She was the only other woman he had loved, or thought he loved, until the real thing came along to prove the difference. Jesse.
He listened to the sounds of fighting in the distance. Nadia had arrived—a familiar touch of wolf on his sensitive skin.
A half-starved vampire was no match for two were wolves bent on revenge, let alone a wolf pack. Perhaps Stan and Nadia were working together to free the American girl. He sensed Elizabeth Jorgensen, too. Alive. Gwen had at the very least seen to that, whether or not she meant to. A last mistake? A final triumph? Who knew, since truth had no part in Gwen’s existence these days.
Moonlight dripped over him, over his captive and over Jesse’s body on the ground. Tonight, the moon was thirsty. Sacrifices had to be made. The village would be cleaned up, Gwen among its casualties. That ought to satisfy a blood moon. But the ultimate sacrifice? His own sacrifice? He’d let Jesse go. Make her pilot whisk her away to safety, without so much as a last agonizing pressure of his lips on hers.
“A parting gift, Jesse. Your life back,” he whispered.
“No!” Gwen twisted in his grasp. “You cannot have her.”
“I won’t have her,” he said, meaning it.
“Then you will have me.” Gwen’s remark belied the severity of her need for revenge. The odor of that need seeped from every pore of her emaciated body.
A cry went up from the wolves, closer this time; yips and howls of triumph from Nadia’s creatures. Animals trained to trap and rip apart ripe vampire flesh before the monsters dissipated completely.
He heard the padding of running paws and the heavier footsteps of the two werewolves leading them. Dried blood laced through the foul air in the village center as a stocky figure appeared beneath the roof cover, carrying a girl in his arms and trailed by a pack of wolves as black and as feral as the overlapping shadows.
Jesse groaned, slowly regaining consciousness. Lance’s heart went out to her.
“For the sake of what we had,” Gwen pleaded, eyeing the gnashing jaws of the oncoming wolves.
“Yes, for the sake of that,” Lance said. Then he let Gwen go.
He didn’t truly believe she’d run away, predicting how this would play itself out, knowing how it would end.
With the speed of a malicious Reaper, Gwen dropped on top of Jesse, her fangs bared. Before Lance reached for her, the wolves, in a heated wave and with the force of a hurricane, swept Gwen away.
It only took one good bite to the jugular from a well-trained enemy for the woman Lance had left in a long-faded past to become dust.
And he was on his knees, beside Jesse.