Darkness Returns (18 page)

He clutched the wheel until his knuckles turned white and his fingers ached. The pickup whined like a sick pig as he gassed it to the max.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Vampire speed was great. Wolf speed seemed pretty sweet as well.

The pair of wolves kept up as Jessie weaved through alleys, dodged around corners, circled back. A couple times she lost sight of them, but they always seemed to find her again. Of course, she realized, they were following her scent.

Jessie had never tested her vampire endurance to its edge. Eventually she would run out of energy. She could already feel the twitch in her throat, that odd signal telling her she needed blood, the vampire equivalent to a growling stomach. She continued to run at full speed, though. They hadn’t worn her out yet.

She ran blind. She didn’t know her way around Vegas, had lost track of where she started, moved entirely on instinct. But her instinct had help. That tug that had drawn her to her dad in the first place continued to pull. It wasn’t until she raced out from between a pair of warehouses cut from the exact same mold that she realized that tug had pulled her around in a byzantine loop, right back to the intersection with the tipped over Hummer and the banged up FedEx truck.

By now, the cops had arrived. Three patrol cars sat parked along either side of the street. A gaggle of onlookers crowded on curb in front of a uniformed officer like groupies out for an autograph, many of them talking at once, anxious to tell their version of what had happened here.

Jessie scraped to a halt, her boots sliding across the concrete like a set of tires with the brakes on. She could sense the wolves closing in behind her, her sensitive ears picking up their panting and the click of their nails on the cement. She could smell the meaty, sour stink of their breath, though part of that might have been her imagination.

Something inside her told her this was the place to be. When she scanned her surroundings, though, she saw no sign of her dad or any kind of safety. Instead, she had stopped dead in the open, a vampire dressed to look like a miniature fetishist, police and civilians in front of her, a pair of pissed off werewolves closing in behind her.

Bad move, genius. So much for having your mojo back.

That’s when she heard the rattle and grind of the white pickup truck as it sailed around a corner three blocks down from the wreckage. The rusty old gas guzzler sped in Jessie’s direction. Through the smeared windshield she saw her dad’s grim face staring back at her.

The cops and some of the bystanders turned their eyes toward the growing noise from the old truck. Jessie wondered if they could yet smell the bitter exhaust like she could. The fact that she could smell anything through her leather mask said a lot about how strong her senses were as a vampire.

Like the dog breath.

Getting closer.

She turned around.

There they came, side-by-side, racing down the alley between the twin warehouses, their eyes flashing, drool flinging from their mouths.

Jessie widened her stance, braced herself.

The truck’s chugging whinny swelled.

The slobbering pants of the wolves echoed down the alley.

Forty yards between her and them.

Thirty yards.

Twenty.

The wolf to Jessie’s right leapt at her as it closed within ten yards, the mere distance of a first down. At the same time, the truck squealed to a halt behind her, a toxic cloud from its tailpipe pluming around her.

Jessie let the vampire in her control her body, reacting with animal instinct and primal reflexes. While the wolf in the air sailed toward her, Jessie crouched, then launched herself into a back flip—

I’m a fucking ninja!

—the world flipped around her and she landed on her feet in the bed of the truck, her boots clopping against the rusty metal.

The wolf that jumped for her plowed head first into the truck’s quarter panel, and while the vehicle had seen better days, it had also been made during better days, when shit was built to last. The wolf bounced off the truck with a yelp. The truck rocked under Jessie’s feet.

Stunned, the wolf backed off, shaking his head as if to rattle his brain back into place.

The second wolf adjusted on the fly. He jumped off the sidewalk and into the truck bed, Jessie side-stepping in time to avoid a collision.

Vaguely, Jessie heard gasps and shouts from the civilians on the street watching this all go down. The bulk of her attention locked on the wolf in front of her. She kicked out and clipped the wolf on the side of the head with the toe of her boot. She had her foot back on the bed floor just in time to adjust her balance as Craig floored it.

She had rubber soles and managed to keep her footing.

The wolf’s paws scrabbled on the metal, the force of the acceleration dragging him backward until his back paws braced against the tailgate. His lips rippled as he growled at Jessie.

From the corner of her goggled eye, Jessie glimpsed the slack-jawed expressions of the bystanders as Lockman drove around the wreck and through the intersection. One of the cops had to dance backward to avoid getting hit, one hand going to the butt of his gun on his belt, the other slapped against his chest as if to keep his heart from bursting out.

Jessie never saw if the cop drew his weapon or not. She had crouched to lower her center of gravity and make it easier to balance while the truck roared down the road. The wolf already had the advantage of standing low, but lacked the traction to get at Jessie—as long as her dad kept the pedal to the metal. If he had to brake, this wolf would come charging at her like a furry freight train.

She liked her odds better now. One-on-one, she felt she had a chance. Some kind of weapon would have been nice, though.

As if reading her thoughts, Craig slid open the back window on the truck cab and flung her sword out into the bed.

He couldn’t have tossed her something with a trigger instead?

Work with what you had. She had learned that lesson from her dad almost from the second she met him. She snatched up the sword and gripped the hilt with both hands, pointing its blood-rusted tip at the wolf.

The wolf snarled, his bared teeth like a grin that said,
That all you got?

But she’d killed one of his friends with it already. Despite her wicked cool back flip into the truck bed, she wasn’t really a ninja, but she was a
vampire
for Christ’s sake.

She knocked on the truck cab with the heel of her boot. “Hit the brakes,” she shouted.

Dad came back with something. Jessie couldn’t make out exact words, but the sentiment was obvious from his tone—he thought she was nuts.

“Just do it.”

While he made up his mind to trust her, Jessie crouched as low as she could, like a linebacker waiting to crash shoulder pads with an opponent. She braced the sword in her hands with one elbow against the truck cab, the blade sticking straight out in front of her.

The wolf’s rippling lips fell over his teeth and his blank eyes widened as he guessed what was coming.

Then Dad slammed the brakes.

Jessie’s back slammed against the cab, but she kept her feet. The wolf’s lack of traction worked both ways. Now, instead of skating backward from centrifugal force, he skied forward, momentum carrying him forward, straight at Jessie like she had worried about before.

Before she had the sword.

The blade pierced straight through the wolf’s throat and rammed all the way to the hilt, about three hundred pounds of doggy shish kebab crushing Jessie into the truck cab hard enough to crumple the metal like an aluminum shell. The back window gave as the metal bent and shattered.

The fun did not stop there.

The truck began to list to one side, tires smoking and screaming against the pavement. One side lifted slightly. Any second, the whole vehicle would tip. Along with the vibrations from the out-of-control truck, Jessie could feel the wolf’s last quivers of life through the sword as if it were a divining rod of death.

She let go of the sword and jumped out of the truck right before it rolled off its wheels. She hit the ground rolling herself, everything spinning until she thumped to a halt against the curb. She glanced up and saw the truck tumble, the wolf already a dead lump of fur on a sun-burnt patch of lawn in front of a single story home. At some point, they had left the warehouse district and ended up in a suburb.

The truck continued its metal-thrashing somersault until it smashed into the bay window of the same house with the wolf corpse in the yard. Glass exploded with an ear-splitting ring. The house’s plaster facade cracked and spewed dust. The truck’s body groaned and creaked at the torture.

Then everything stopped moving.

The following silence pressed into Jessie’s ears as if she’d plunged a hundred leagues under water. She rose up on her elbow and waited for Craig to climb out of the truck. She couldn’t see him. The truck sat on its side, like the Hummer, the undercarriage facing Jessie.

How many seconds passed?

Still no sign of her dad.

She got to her feet, ready to cross the street and check on him, when the sound of an approaching vehicle drew her attention. She expected another cop car. Instead, a town car with tinted windows pulled to a stop. The driver’s door flung open.

That fucking bitch, Teresa, climbed out of the car.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Outside of the leather-clad figure’s petite shape, nothing visual indicated who—or what—they were. But Teresa could smell the little vamp cunt, recognized right away that it was Jessie. The center of the storm. The world’s greatest threat. Standing there before Teresa, unarmed.

And Teresa, facing off with one of the Uzis from the warehouse team, a fresh mag full of silver death locked home.

She smiled.

“Nice getup.”

Jessie dusted herself off, held her hands out at her sides as if to show off her wares. “I call it my Ninja Gimp uniform.” Her voice came out muffled through the zipper across her mouth, but she took care to project and annunciate so Teresa could understand. “I’m thinking about going into crime fighting.”

“Only crime here is you.” Teresa’s mouth filled with a bitter taste. “All the trouble you’ve caused. The death.”

The girl glanced at the overturned truck that had smashed into the front of a small house. Screams from inside the house. A barrage of angry Spanish. Lookie-loos in neighboring homes peered between curtains or dared to prop their doors open a couple inches to peek out.

Time to end this. Once and for all.

Jessie tilted her leather-masked head. While she couldn’t see them through the tint, Teresa could sense the vamp’s eyes appraising her.

“You just thought in a cliché, didn’t you?” Jessie asked.

Gritting her teeth, Teresa raised the Uzi. “Smart mouth little…” She didn’t bother to finish. She opened fire. The Uzi chattered. The palms of her hands buzzed against the vibrations.

Despite her teenage snark, Jessie was all vamp. She reacted with blurring speed, turning her black-clad self into a daylight shadow that whizzed to the right.

Teresa tried to follow along with her line of fire, but quickly quit before emptying her magazine, knowing the vamp had slipped the first barrage. She caught sight of her careening toward the truck. Only then did it occur to her that Craig had probably been at the wheel and might have—

She closed out the first whiff of emotion. Agency training and wolf instinct both took over. She was not here to mourn a man who had made the choices that put him in danger, the man so blinded by his own emotions he’d been willing to gamble the fate of the mortal plane.

Teresa had her chance to kill the demon that threatened to destroy the world. And after all she’d put herself through to get here, she wouldn’t let a little sentimentality fuck it up.

With Jessie’s back to Teresa and the vamp traveling in a straight line away, Teresa had a much better shot. She turned, took time for one steadying breath, then squeezed the trigger.

The Uzi sounded like a metallic rattle snake. Silver rounds spat forth and drew a dotted line up the center of Jessie’s back. Her leathers split and shred. As the impact of the bullets sent the vamp staggering forward, arms flailing for balance, the Uzi clicked dry.

Somehow, Jessie managed to keep her feet. She didn’t bother turning around. She picked up her pace and crossed the rest of the way to the truck.

Teresa tossed aside her weapon and gaped. Flaps of torn leather waved like chicken feathers up the center of Jessie’s back, but no blood, no melting or blistering flesh. Some kind of metallic sheen showed where the leather had ripped away.

Jessie landed on top of the truck’s side in a single leap. She bent down and tore the driver’s side door clean from the hinges. She looked ready to toss it idly aside, then she turned toward Teresa.

A second passed.

Long enough for Teresa to see it coming and yet when the little vamp tossed the door at her like a giant, misshapen Frisbee, Teresa remained rooted to her spot in the middle of the street. Lucky for her, her inner wolf took control. Her shift from human to wolf came so swiftly, it felt as though every bone in her body had been stomped to pieces and twisted apart at the joints. But her change was complete by the time the truck’s heavy metal door struck her.

She took it in the flank, flying clean off her paws and into a sideways roll, street dust coating her pelt.

The door clanged and flipped out of sight.

Teresa got to all fours and shook herself off. She reeled on Jessie. The growl in her own throat made her feel like she’d swallowed a chainsaw. She could feel the edges of her sharp set of teeth against the sides of her tongue, still something to get used to. But those teeth sent a comforting thrill through her wolf’s body. She would so enjoy sinking those teeth into the little vamp’s throat. Teresa didn’t need silver or a wooden stake. She could rip Jessie’s head clean from her shoulders and be done with the whole thing.

Jessie didn’t seem to recognize the threat facing her. Once she’d tossed the door, she ignored Teresa, choosing to reach down into the truck. “Come on. Wake up. Grab my hand.”