Jarred walks over as I flick the safety on and ease the gun’s hammer down. “You all right, Miss Hayley?” he asks.
I watch as the wolf gets in his Jeep and leaves. “Yes. If that man ever tries to set foot on this property again, do not let him, even if you have to shoot him.” This is fuckingAlaska. All the hands openly wear sidearms, because of bears, for starters.
He laughs, until he realizes I’m serious. “Um, yes, ma’am.”
“Anyone else show up today you haven’t seen before?”
“Just a couple of tourists. Same as always. Got ’em pointed the right way.”
“Okay. Thanks.” I get the Land Rover turned around and speed back to the house as fast as I dare, bouncing over ruts in the track. Once the overhead door is shut, the inside door opens and Chaldis blurs over.
He’s armed, another nine on his hip. “Well?”
“Same fucking wolf. He was definitely the second tourist who buzzed at the gate. Get all the heavy storm shutters closed.Now. I don’t know what’s going on, but we might need to move you down into the crypt.” The storm shutter system can handle bears and hurricanes.
I just hope it can handle werewolves.
“I’mnotleaving you upstairs alone,” he says.
“Yeah, well, you don’t pay me to let someone set a trap for you, either, and it’s daylight.” There’s an emergency exit, a small tunnel leading from the deep, rock-lined basement where his original crypt is, to a spider hole about a hundred yards down-slope from the house, just at the edge of thick, hilly woods with plenty of small, dark rocky nooks and crannies he could safely hole up in during sunlight, if forced to.
The escape tunnel has three branches off it, leading to sealed but easily opened exits, just in case the main exit is ever discovered and blocked. There’s an old windowless ammunition storage bunker from World War II farther out on the property. They keep the roof and walls maintained, a secure door, and an emergency crypt with some supplies there in case he ever needs to use it.
He takes the container of blood into the kitchen, where we open the box to examine it. It doesn’t look like it’s been tampered with. The inner foam cooler’s seals are also intact, as are the inner wrappers for the blood bags, which are, obviously, disguised as liquid nutritional supplements.
Chaldis leans in, his nose almost touching it as he sniffs. “You’re right—I can smell the wolf on the outer box, but I believe the contents are all right. I smell nothing on or inside the cooler or on the blood bags, except the usual techs who pack the shipment. You didn’t recognize him?”
“No. If I did, I wouldn’t be so damned freaked out right now. I’d just be irritated that they’d managed to track me. If it was a Tucson wolf I knew, I could call Garrett and ask him to pull him off me. This is too much coincidence, though. I know you don’t travel much anymore, but there are alotof shifters out there who hate vampires. We’ll need to get you down below.”
“I’mnotleaving you up here alone to face a potential threat.”
Stubborn vamp!“You might not have achoice, boss. It’s stilldaylight.”
“Perhaps you should call your friend in Tucson and see if they sent him?”
“No. If Garrett did, then this wolf’s not a threat, and he won’t attack. If he didn’t send him, that’ll just reveal my location to him, and he’ll tell Dexter.”
Although I really want to call Tucson, for alotof reasons.
The main one being that, right now, I’m scared, but I have a job to do.
I always could fight hard for others.
For myself? Not so much.
We get the house’s storm shutters closed tight and I nervously pace inside, checking windows. As soon as twilight gets dark enough around 10:30, I go upstairs and use a pair of night-vision binoculars to scan the surrounding property.
I’ve just completed one lap around the upstairs, to sweep the grounds around the house, when I spot a blur of movement too fast to be a bio-bear or a werewolf, coming from the direction of the front gate. Before I can yell a warning to Chaldis, the doorbell rings.
I race downstairs, taking them two at a time. Bullets will usuallynotstop a fucking vampire, but a bow or crossbow can. I grab the crossbow Corbin gave me to use—complete with silver-tipped wooden bolts in case of werewolves—that I’d readied earlier and left leaning against the wall in the foyer.
“Go,” I whisper to Chaldis as I shove past him, where he’s standing near the kitchen doorway. I point toward the door to the cellar.
“No. I won’t—”
I turn on him. “Dammit!Go!”
He glares at me. “A shifter would’ve already tried to burst through the shutters. It would’ve jumped on the roof and tried to rip a hole in it, not give warning by ringing the doorbell like a civilized person. You grabbed the crossbow, meaning you saw a blur. A vampirecannotenter without permission.” He takes the crossbow from me and aims it at the door. “Go ahead and see who it is.”
