“Fuck you!” I screamed at it. An icy hand clamped around my ankle, tugging me off the stack of crates, and I snapped, adrenaline overtaking terror as I slammed my second shot, the last Taser round, into the thing’s core. The blue crackle of lightning arced into a red and purple explosion of flickering color snapping through the shadow, and the monster leaned down to snarl in my face as it turned to smoke. I caught a glimpse of something beneath that made me nearly swallow my tongue.
Cassidy.
His face twisted in the darkness; his mouth stretched in a silent scream. Then the thing vanished, the force of the eruption of smoke and shadow exploding the crates around me in a thousand shards of rotted wood. I curled into a ball, praying to save myself from becoming a pincushion, but everything bounced off an invisible shield, my little fae dragon friend coming to the rescue.
I breathed hard, heart racing, gaze following any movement around me as the dust fluttered, showing the cleared warehouse, every bit of debris having exploded into a battlefield of wood daggers lodged in every surface. I hoped the rest of the team was okay.
“Jude!” Angel’s voice cut through the panic. “Babe?”
A half dozen pairs of boots tromped my way as I wheezed and stared at the scorch mark on the concrete where the thing had been. Hitting anything twice with a Taser should slow it down—it was why our guns had two cartridges. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for a shadow god and his minions.
Ezra skidded into view; real gun drawn. “What the fuck was that? Angel, he’s here.”
“A visit from a shadow god,” I coughed. “Not part of the drill.” I waved away the smoke, eyes stinging from all the dust. Angel owed me a shower and life-affirming sex after this crapshoot.
Angel skidded to a halt behind Ezra, with Wade, and Bobby on his six. He hauled me up, his hands scanning for injuries. “Are you hurt?”
“Shield up,” I said, still coughing on wood dust. “So much for your hellhounds.” I couldn’t sense them anymore. “He scared them off, I think, or maybe took over one of their forms? It morphed.” Not once, but twice. “And I saw Cassidy.”
A beat of silence. Even the ghosts shut up.
“Say again?” Bobby was the first one to ask for clarification.
“There was a shift in the shadows, and I saw Cassidy’s face underneath the darkness before it turned to smoke and blew up everything in the warehouse.”
“How?” Wade asked.
Remi’s voice erupted over our earpiece. “Guys, how immortal are vampires?”
“What?” Ezra snapped into his headset.
“Look up.” Remi crossed the warehouse in hurried strides, gaze pointing toward the ceiling.
Victor swung from the rafters above us, wrapped up in shimmering black tendrils like a shadow spiderweb.
Game over, whispered a ghost, then hummed theMario Bros.end-game theme.Duh duh... duh-duh-duh duuuuhm.
2
Victor hung like a broken puppet,his features slack and his skin too pale even for a vampire. The inky tendrils wrapping around him pulsed faintly, as if savoring their prize by sucking whatever was left of his unnatural life. I studied the web of shadows from below, wondering if it was another supernatural creature I needed to learn about. Shadow spiders, maybe, or a trick from the shadow bastard who seemed to have a hard-on for me? At least the guy was sans wood shards. Could that kill him? Could the shadows?
No. I felt something from him.
“I think he’s alive, or as alive as a vampire gets,” I said. “I feel something.”
“NHV vampires are hard to kill,” Bobby said. “Beheading or total body annihilation.”
I squinted at him.
“I’m the human variant version, and much more breakable.”
“You stick to tech, then,” I said.
“Says the guy who almost got eaten by a shadow god.Again,” Ezra snapped. “Someone get Victor down.”
“You’re just jealous ’cause you can’t climb,” Angel said as he leapt onto the nearest beam with preternatural grace, climbingas though he’d done it a thousand times. Maybe he had. The community center had a room full of all sorts of weird climbing surfaces for the shifters.
Wade frowned at me, his gaze darting from Angel to Victor, then back down. “You sure you saw Cassidy?”
