Oh crap.
Beast moved slowly through the darkness, back paws into front paw prints,pawpawpaw, overlapping, steps silent.Silent.She leaped into the branches. Approaching the lights and the stealthy sounds, her puma ears picked up.
Scent vampires. More than one. Not more than five.
No way anyone could have found us. They had to track us. Crap. Eli had stopped two vamps at the sweathouse. I bet they evaded the sensors and monitors and put devices on the vehicles. Crap, crap, crap.
Do not smell Eli blood. Littermate is uninjured. Or strangled.
Strang— That’s a big freaking help.
Jane is welcome. Beast sometimes kills prey by holdingneck until deer falls asleep. Then Beast kills. Sometimes prey dies from holding bite.
From thirty feet high, Beast approached the SUV. SUVs. There were two of the vehicles now, ours and a red Range Rover. Lipstick red. Like the one that delivered Shiloh to us. The red vehicle had its lights on.
Four vampires stood in a wedge on the snowy road, facing into the bare trees. Three of them wore jeans, dress shirts, and dark ties. One of them wore a fancy wool coat. Lego, his blond hair whiter than his pale skin. Eli was nowhere in sight. Hidden in the dark. Lego hadn’t been at the Regal with the Flayer of Mithrans. I studied the others and decided they hadn’t been there either. So it was possible, likely even, that we had two groups of vamps in town, both of them threats.Well, isn’t that just ducky.
Is not ducks,Beast thought.Is vampires.
Yeah. And I don’t have time to shift.
Jane is dying. Beast is best hunter.
“You will give us the crystal,” Lego said, speaking into the trees. “The dragon that Joseph Santana wore is mine to ride.”
Joseph—Joses—the elder Son of Darkness, had owned a crystal with an arcenciel trapped in it. The dragon made it possible for Joses to navigate through time, at least to a limited degree. Until a fight took place and the crystal broke, freeing the dragon, and Joses got bitten. Arcenciel bites made vamps nutso-bonkers-crazy, so crazy Joses had hung on a wall in the lowest basement in vamp central in NOLA for a hundred years, raving, his powerful blood Leo’s to drink. These guys wantedthatcrystal. They had inside info, but it was outdated. I had given a spell to the arcenciels that would free them from any crystal, and I had fed Joses to Brute. So far as I knew, the big meal didn’t even cause the werewolf heartburn.
Seconds had passed as all that ran through my mind, with an undercurrent thought and sensory pattern by Beast. She took in the trees, the branches, the tops of the SUVs, the headlights, the position of the vamps, and the likely position of Eli, based on where the vamps were facing.
Eli is in tree, there,Beast looked to our right, about twenty feet off the ground. In Beast’s night vision, I could make out the silver green of my partner. He was wearing his cold suit, probably invisible to the vamps, but they could likely smell him and pick up his heartbeat. Beast gathered herself tight, claws partially protracted, touching the cold bark.
“Oh. Well, you see, Bubbah, there’s a small problem with that,” Eli said, his tone laconic, his voice filling the emptiness of the small clearing. “The crystals are all broken and the dragons are all free. And Joseph Santana, aka Joses Bar-Judas, aka the elder Son of Darkness, aka asshole of the paranormal world, is true-dead.” He chuckled, his battlefield mirth, more death than amusement. “And by the way, as long as we’re on the subject of dragons, the arcenciels are pissed at the vamps for the slavery-in-a-crystal thing. They’re thinking about war.”
As he spoke, the three other vamps spread out, moving into the dark. Beast gathered herself. There was a softsssss, followed by a prolonged thump, as if a vamp had dropped into the snow and banged his head. The smell of vamp blood spread on the air.
Anothersssss, and a second thump, this one a tumble. We placed the sound and Beast gave a cat grin, all teeth and viciousness.Flying claws,she thought. Eli was playing with his new toy and he got off two shots with the bow before the vamps figured out what was happening and moved. I heard apopof vamp movement, displaced air, fangheads faster than the human eye can follow. Yet, Beast’s eyes tracked both by sound, movement of air, smell.
Beast is best hunter.Before I could react, she leaped. Front legs stretching, claws out, back legs shoving hard.
She fell fast in a horizontal-distance-to-fall ratio that spanned the vehicles, the entire clearing, and hid her in night shadows on the other side. I never saw the branch she landed on, just felt gravity jar through our body as she half landed, half shoved off and vectored at a sharp angle that stole nothing from her momentum. She fell again. Fast.
Beast rammed into a softer body. Claws ripping. Grabbing. Teeth sinking in. The crunch of bone and tear of tendons. The taste of acid, hot peppers, and cold blood.My vampire prey. My meat. My blood.
She rode the vampire down. Slinging her head back and forth, dislocating the vertebrae. Cold blood splattered. We bounced on his back. Beast continued working the spine, back and forth. Until she ripped out a chunk of vertebra.
Holy crapoley,I thought.
My meat.
I got that. But you might need to eat later.
In the trees, the sound of gunfire was sharp and nearly painful. Protectively, we tucked our ear tabs. Sniffed. Smelled the stench of guns and blood on the still air. Human blood.
Eli blood?Littermate?Beast thought, raising her head, tracing the sound and the scents. Her tongue slicked her jaw and nose clean of the strange vamp blood. Tasted bad.
Snow started to fall, large, saucer-sized things too big to be called flakes. Heavy and wet, they made a noise when they landed, like tinyplumffsin the silence.
Beast has vampire one. Two vampire, with flying claw in body, is there.She glanced toward something in the snow. I didn’t have time to focus through her eyes. She turned her head.There is three vampire with flying claw in body.She looked up and into the darkness. An enormous snow-pancake landed on her snout. Another between her shoulders.Eli is there.Smell Eli blood.Beast jumped straight up, sank her bloody claws into the trunk, raced high. Into the tree branches. Stretched into a sprint across the limbs toward the blood scent.
