Hunter by Night (26 page)

A chunk of stone bounced off Lee’s head.

“Okay, I think it’s about to go,” Tyra shouted. “One… two…”

“Shit.” A piece of rock clunked Anton as well, and Lee tugged them both through the portal. They all rolled out into the clearing under a dawning morning.

Lucky the leaves were on the trees this time of year, so they’d have some cover. Not so lucky, they also had trouble. Flay had disappeared from sight, and from up ahead came the grunts and pops of battle.

A fucking ambush. Guardians waited in the woods. Dozens.

Dawn broke through the trees. Lee sliced open the major pulse points on one dead asshole and turned fast to block the hit of a man who appeared human and was coming from behind with a length of rebar, of all fucking things. The pain of metal on flesh already bruised and burnt rang through Lee. He’d run out of ammo. With no other alternative, he’d been forced to drop his shields. With the sun rising and more yet to kill, he needed to conserve power.

He wrapped his raw hands around the metal rod and kicked hard, sending his enemy back into a tree. He followed, running the rebar through the guardian like a spike. The male only laughed, revealing a set of custom fangs. The familiarity hit Lee between the eyes: Anton’s photo. “They call you ‘the Doctor.’”

“I’d offer to shake your hand…” The man laughed and pulled the rebar from his body. The bloody metal dropped to the dirt at their feet with a wet thump. “There we go. And I’m at a loss. You know me, but I don’t know you.”

“You’re not going to know me, you filthy son of a whore.” He scooped the discarded rebar from the forest floor and crunched the man hard enough for him to choke on his balls.

Lee didn’t expect a guy who could take a length of metal through his stomach and keep ticking to go down easily, but he got enough of a knee-jerk crotch grab to gain some leverage. He grabbed for the wizard’s hair and introduced knee to nose. Blood poured. “Rookie mistake, man. Even with your brand-new super-juiced powers, a vampire will beat a wizard any day in a contest of speed. Shouldn’t have left that rebar on the ground.”

He spun, still gripping the Doctor’s hair, and shoved the man down on his knees. “So what’s the deal, Doctor? The fake caps and the nerve toxin? Is your boss having fang envy? What the fuck are you doing helping the guardians? Aren’t you one of Petros’s goons?”

Petros had been the one to call a truce. Deep down, Lee had known better than to trust that such a thing would hold water.

The fucker laughed. “I answer to no master.”

“Yeah, master this.” A swath of sunlight cut across Lee’s arm. He hissed but held firm as he drew his knife ear to ear, shoving the body facedown in the blood-soaked dirt.

The entire thing had to have been a trap. Lee cursed himself up and down, because it had almost worked. Next to him, Tyra handed over her firearm. “Here. Loaded with one in the chamber. I don’t have the silencer, sorry.” Good damn thing they were out in the woods.

“Thank you,” he said. “We only need to make it to where you parked the car. Hopefully we’ll be out of here before any humans show.”

He would not call for backup. The only living things in their enclave who could possibly withstand the sun were already out there fighting.

All except Lee himself. The normally toasted tan of his skin brightened more and more as each minute passed.

Up ahead, Flay took a hit and fell. Poor SOB had been pummeled worse than the rest, thanks to acting as Welcome Wagon before the other vampires.

Lee took aim. His vision blurred. With a whispered “fuck” he tried to clear it and find the front sight. He shot twice, glad that Flay was well out of the line of fire.

Another guardian crumpled into the dirt, and Flay was on him, cutting him up before Lee could get there. Down, but not done.

Could Lee say the same about himself?

He clasped Flay’s hand and pulled the young vampire up. “Good teamwork, buddy.”

“Thank you, sir.”

With the sun beating down, they ran the gauntlet. They couldn’t kill everyone. The goal was to make it to the car and get out alive. Lee’s eyes burned when they reached the edge of the tree line and the full brightness of dawn hit him.

He’d get the others back alive, at any rate. He charged his shields again and turned to Flay. “Get to the car and get back to the estate. Now. Be dead fucking certain you’re not followed. Take the rear entrance.”

“What are you going to do?” But the young vampire’s eyes registered understanding.

“I’m going to hold them.” Even as Lee said the words, he drew the gun from Tyra and fired once, twice, taking down two more guardians.

Another volleyed with a cascade of golden radiance and chanting that sounded ominously like the spell used to conjure that damnable plague. Lee grabbed Flay’s arm to make sure the part-human vampire was protected. “Go. Now.”

Tyra hesitated but for once followed an order. All but Lee made their retreat.

Sweat rolled down Lee’s back. Deep inside, a ripping sensation tore through him. Alexia. Hurt. Something. Worse than before. And he might not make it back to her. All because of this shit. This fight he’d been part for so long. He didn’t know who else he was.

Lee dodged the punch of another coming at him. They’d gotten all but a dozen or so, but shit. Daylight. Exhaustion. Power drain. He couldn’t take this many in his current state, not alone.

Fuck, Alexia, I’m sorry.

Exhausted, he sank to his knees, remembering Lexi and how fearlessly she’d launched herself at that guardian in the woods not so long ago. He scrambled and tried to stand. Another guardian tried to kick him in the teeth and he caught the foot, but barely. He held it, struggling to push. Still, that muddy rubber print came closer.

Then a crack and a strangled cry. Like that, the boot was out of Lee’s hand, away from his face. Its owner falling to the ground by Lee’s side. What the fuck? Adrenaline rattled Lee’s body. He blinked, desperate for focus.

The hardened face of the Lee’s long-standing enemy appeared in his blurry field of vision with a shaking head. “Things have fallen so far from balance, Commander Goram, one wonders what is true and what is madness, yes?”

Lee accepted the wizard leader’s outstretched hand with no small dose of hesitation. “I don’t wonder a damn thing. It’s all fucking madness.” Lee scanned the forest. The sight of Petros’s wizard minions fighting against the guardians through the trees convinced him that hallucinations from sun sickness had set in. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“We had a bargain.” He gestured through the trees. “You know as well as I do that the guardians’ magic cannot return to power. Nor can the evil my father practiced.” He looked down, kicking at the dead Doctor, whose throat Lee had cut. “And it would appear some of my followers have turned on me and sold themselves to the highest bidder, which I cannot abide. I feel it’s time to reevaluate my course and that of my kind.”

Nausea twisted in Lee’s gut. “It does not sit well, owing my enemy a favor.” Dizziness swamped his senses as his body heat rose.

Petros met Lee’s stare. “I would suggest that perhaps our kind could form a new understanding, but I doubt you’ll live long enough to suffer the pain of such a thing.”

A deafening crash came through the trees. An engine. The boom of a rifle shot. Lightning sparks. In daylight? One of the guardians turned from its advance through the trees and retreated in the opposite direction.

A large form in a ski mask and head-to-toe body armor emerged from the back of the vehicle. On a late August morning. A statuesque human woman with flowing red hair charged through the woods, wielding an old Polish rifle. “Yeah, you better run, you limp-dicked motherfuckers.” She loaded and fired again, letting out a whoop of victory.

“Commander.” The masked man revealed himself as Lee took aim against the shade of a tree.

“Number Twelve.” The young male Lee had kicked out of training.

The young male wore a concerned smile. “Sir, sorry for not getting here quicker. We thought we picked up on signs of a fight, but Sarah had trouble starting the van. Had a feeling we’d need wheels.”

Sarah herself tromped back. “Needs a new alternator. I’ve got one on order.” She pointed. “Let’s get him in the van, baby. No offense, sir, but you look like shit.”

She popped the doors. Lee turned to Petros, searching for deception.

“Go before you incinerate, Commander. My wizards will take care of this,” Petros said. “For now, I’d say we’re even, wouldn’t you?”

Fair enough.

Lee and Number Twelve—Joshua?—got in the back of the still-running van and took off.

“I need to get to County. The human hospital. My…” Lee hesitated. “My mate.” He hadn’t said it aloud before. He hadn’t officially made that declaration to Alexia. With hope, there would still be a chance.

“I’m on it,” the redhead called from the captain’s chair up front.

Lee checked out the washed-out newbie fighter through blurry, gritty eyes. He examined the girlfriend, her exposed arm covered with pale, freckled skin as she drove. “I remember you mentioned a girlfriend,” he said to Joshua. “You didn’t say she was human.”

Sarah piped up from the front seat. “Hey, don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.”

“I—” Lee’s heart hammered. He
had
tried, and look where it had gotten him. In the back of a windowless van, almost dead.
And
you’d be fucked if they hadn’t shown up when they did.

Twelve had his ski mask off. “It’s not that I’m ashamed, sir. I just don’t like to invite conflict. You were already pissed at me when we last spoke, sir.”

Would it have made him like the young vampire less or more, had he known? Given the way Lee had struggled with his attraction to Alexia, it was hard to say. “You’re not burned.” Lee noted that Joshua’s skin remained unaffected, even after removing his mask.

The young male smiled proudly. “I’ve been building my tolerance.”

Tolerance? “Excuse me?”

Twelve scooted along the floor toward the space between the seats and grabbed his mate’s hand. “I want to spend my life with her. Her life. However long we have. I want to be able to be in the daylight with her sometimes. So I work on my tolerance. I started with a few seconds, a minute. Two. Your skin toughens up. You don’t burn as easily after awhile. I can go out for a good few minutes now. Longer, if the sun is low or if it’s overcast.”

Lee propped his head against his fingertips. “I’ve never heard of any vampire desensitizing to sunlight.” Tyra, maybe, but she was a half-breed. She was, in many ways, an exception.

“With all due respect, sir, I doubt many have tried. Nobody gives a shit. Most full-blooded vampires are elitist assholes. We don’t mix much with the humans. Plus, you gotta want it bad. Burns like a motherfucker, you know? It’s like you’re drowning in fire at first. I won’t lie. Took weeks before it didn’t. I had to feed a lot, so the strain was on both of us. Why would anybody go through that, if not for love?”

The young male asked an excellent question. Lee leaned his head back against the cool metal wall of the van, humbled by this young vampire he’d initially pegged as nothing more than a worthless punk. “Thank you for picking me up,” he managed to say through all the rocks and sand in his throat. “I’m grateful. To both of you.”

Joshua ducked his head. “I’m glad we were nearby, sir. Sorry I was a piece of shit before.”

“We’re all stupid sometimes.” Himself in particular.

Lee focused on the redhead’s pale fingers clasped in the other vampire’s gloved hand. They were young, of course, but he sat in amazement at this kid, so openly willing to love a human, even though their time together could be short. Lee and Alexia had both resisted so hard.

He rested his head on his arm to hide the moisture leaking from his eyes. As the van bumped and thumped him toward downtown, Lee wondered whether maybe he and Alexia might actually have a shot at a real future.

***

Alexia didn’t like to think rude things about people, but the lady in the next bed had some truly horrifying shit going on. In the “whatever you’ve got, don’t breathe on me” kind of way. They’d pulled the curtain across the windowed wall for privacy, but Lexi had gotten a gander at the gangrenous fingertips and the body sores while faking sleep. Guilty relief stole through her that her door had been closed when they brought the lady down the hall. Who knew if whatever that lady had was contagious. The symptoms reminded her too creepily of that dead kid from the side of Route 9.

Then again, Alexia still didn’t feel so hot, either. Her stomach still churned, but less than before. She’d wanted to try some crackers or something, only the hospital staff wouldn’t give her anything but clear liquids and Jell-O. Jerks. The bigger trouble lay with Lee, wherever he was. Her blood rippled with darkness, pain, and anxiety. Every once in awhile, some invisible knife would jab somewhere on her body. She’d bet her favorite coffee mug that somewhere he was in a fight.

Was he okay? Would he make it to cover before the sun came up? The questions, the not knowing, turned her stomach inside out.

The door to her room opened. “Mrs. Blackburn. I’m Dr. V. How are you feeling?” He paused to pick up some syringes from a tray just outside the door, slipping them in his pocket before he entered.

Alexia prayed that whatever those were, they weren’t for her. Needles gave her the freak-outs.

“I’m… fine.” She opted not to correct him on his assumption that she was married. She still didn’t have a solid handle regarding how that stuff worked with vampires, let alone how it worked with Lee. There was supposed to be an official ceremony. Still, this physical connection they shared certainly made it very difficult to feel any other way than bonded to Lee at the moment. “Great, actually.” She sat up straighter to make her point. “Ready to go.”

Dr. Whatever-his-name-was had a handsome face. Young, tanned skin. Dark hair. Nice smile. Dimples. “Good, good. Glad you’re feeling better. It’s important you’re feeling well cared for here.”

Uh-oh. She didn’t trust people who gave her the sunny kiss-ass treatment. Usually that shit came right before something that made her want to set them on fire. “Absolutely. Best hospital ever. Thanks for all the great broth. Still, how soon can I leave? I gotta go.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to keep you a little longer for observation.” He reached for something in the pocket of his lab coat, and Alexia stiffened, remembering those syringes. She relaxed when it turned out to be a pen, probably to write “bitch be crazy” in her chart.