He glanced at her as he began driving, and the hint of tension between his eyes reminded her she’d never responded, that maybe he thought she was annoyed with the door he’d kept closed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Totally fair.”
“Thanks.”
They talked sporadically on the way home, were nearly to their highway exit when all lanes of traffic hit a complete stop in front of them.
“What…?” Tai muttered, craning his neck to see past their lane.
“Probably a fender bender,” Claire said.
“Yeah. Sorry for the delay getting you home.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I don’t have to sleep tonight. You?”
“I sleep on Mondays.”
“Hey, me too! Mondays are quietest at work, easiest to disengage my brain and save anything complicated for tomorrow.”
“That makes sense,” he said, and her lack of tension at mentioning the bar… Well, maybe she was moving on. Maybe a grudge ought to die after three years.
Their car hadn’t moved a single foot, but odors reached them now, oily and wrong and…
BLOOD.
Whoa. Something was bad ahead. Claire rolled her window down and sniffed, trying to get a better sense of potential danger or harm to nearby humans. A siren approached, and farther ahead, at least one emergency vehicle had already stopped, lights washing the night in rotating red. Her heart gave a hard thump as voices reached her from several cars ahead.
“Oh my gosh, it’s at least four cars.”
“I hope everybody’s alive.”
They might need help. As a vampire, she might be able to do something the humans couldn’t. No idea what exactly, but she threw open her door, kicked off her pumps, and ran down the gravel shoulder in her bare feet, hitching up her gown as she darted toward the awful odors and voices—cries, shouts that hit her like an assault.
“My daughter’s inside!”
“They can’t get out!”
“We’ll get them out just as soon as possible, sir.”
Without yet being able to see the scene, Claire’s senses knew a hundred things at once. This wasn’t a fender bender. It was a pileup, oil and gasoline spilled, a whole lot of torn metal. The damage to the vehicles was total. She begged the universe or God or whomever might be listening and able to do something—Don’t let the humans be hurt as badly as the cars.But she knew from the scent and the sound that people were hurt. People were bleeding. The blood was so thick in the air—to a vampire, at least—she could taste it in the back of her throat, and it tasted all wrong. Not chilled for sustenance but fresh, warm. Everything within Claire recoiled from that taste. It was morally wrong. Repulsive. Predatory. She wouldneverwant this taste in her mouth for as long as she lived.
Her senses knew something else too. Tai ran beside her toward the fray.
Darting at full speed, they reached the scene in less than a minute. Claire lurched to a stop. Where to begin…?
The accident must have occurred in moments, vehicles moving at the full legal speed. Four cars were flipped, roofs smashed inward. One was half-crushed by the wheel of the sixth vehicle, a massive pickup truck with tires that could easily have rolled over the entire car but had managed only to pin the people inside. A baby wailed. A few humans wandered around the cars, dazed, bleeding from superficial cuts on their faces and arms.
Two ambulances had arrived from the other side of the highway and were parked on the median, lights flashing so bright Claire couldn’t look in that direction. A few gurneys held people, but several more were empty.
“Oh, Tai,” she said.
“Come on,” he said.
Together they approached one of the cars, where a paramedic knelt holding the hand of a woman inside.
“Just stay calm. You’re doing great. You’re doing so great. Jaws of Life is on its way, just stay with me until they get here, okay?”
The woman was sobbing too hard to respond.
