Lucky Break (7 page)

Ethan looked at his weeping friend—a vampire being comforted by an honorable shifter—and then back at Niall and Darla.

“I don't pretend to know what was between Nessa and Taran. Their relationship was their business and their concern, and certainly none of yours. You've brought nothing here today that suggests this woman killed her husband. You're eager for a fight—that's clear enough—but you're looking in the wrong place. We're on our way to talk to Sheriff McKenzie. If you've got evidence you think he needs to have, you're welcome to bring it up with him.”

Niall made a dubious sound. “You know where talking gets you? Nowhere fast. We've talked and talked and talked some more”—he made talking motions with a hand—“and we've lost good people along the way.” His eyes hardened. “Talking does nothing. Trials do nothing. Jail does nothing. It's time to put an end to it.”

“I notice Rowan isn't here,” Ethan said. “Does he disagree with your approach?”

“Rowan is kissing Gabriel Keene's ass. Neither one of them has anything to do with this.”

“Oh, I suspect Gabriel would disagree, but we'll let him tell you that.”

“Enough fucking talk.” Niall pulled a handgun, aimed it at Ethan. “You give her over, and the rest of you can go.”

Even that was an obvious lie.
He won't let us go,
I quietly said.
He wants blood on the ground.

Ethan kept his gaze steady on Niall. “I'm afraid we can't do that.”

“Then suffer the fucking consequences.”

Shifters, a dozen more, emerged from the perimeter of trees, filling the air with the buzz of magic and anger. Half were in human form, with very large automatic weapons. AK-47s, if I remembered Luc's weapons training accurately. A single bullet wouldn't kill a vampire, but the sheer firepower in all those magazines would do some pretty serious damage.

The other half dozen shifters were their own weapons—they were in animal form, large, sleek mountain lions, golden ears flat against their heads, fangs bared in warning. They padded forward on feet big enough to knock me down, strong enough to keep me there.

I felt a pulse of magic from Damien as he stared them down. He was a wolf and ready to change, ready to play dog-versus-cat with these war-loving shifters.

But Niall's crew had other ideas. At his signal, they raised their weapons.

“Bullets versus immortality,” he said. “Let's see which wins.”

We opted not to be shot. With blurring speed, even as we heard the first explosions of bullets rushing through barrels, we moved back inside, sought safety behind the stone as shots pummeled the front door, ripping fist-sized holes in the wood and sprinkling bullets across the floor.

Ethan glared at Vincent, who stood across the room, shock clear on his face. But Ethan had no more patience for shock. “Is this what you've sowed over the course of a century here? Hatred and violence?”

“They're shooting at us!”

“Because they were taught loathing and war,” Ethan's voice wavered with fury. “Damn you all for poisoning these children.”

Vincent swallowed hard, the feud's undeniable cost now shredding the door.

And then a new light began to flicker through the gaps in the wood, the narrow windows around it. I risked a glance, sucked in a breath.

The shifters hadn't brought just guns—they'd brought torches, and they were lighting them in a daisy chain that moved from one shifter to another, creating a circle of fire. The shifters in feline form prowled around them impatiently, eager for action. One of them screamed, a high-pitched sound so much like a human's cry it raised goose bumps on my arms.

“Jesus,” Vincent said, taking a step back.

“You want to kill our kind?” Niall called out. “But you're too cowardly to face us? Fine. You can die as you deserve—by fire!”

“Jesus,” Astrid said. “They mean to burn us out.”

“And salt the earth afterward,” I said, glancing at Vincent. “Tell me there's a back door here. A way out.”

Vincent stared at the shifting shadows on the floor, cast by the threatening firelight. “There's—I can't just let them take our home.”

“They aren't here for shits and giggles,” Damien said, looking back at us. “There's a time to fight and a time to retreat. This would be the latter.” He looked at Vincent. “How do we get out?”

Silence for a moment, and then, “The basement. There's access to one of the mine shafts from the basement. We can follow it out and up.”

Astrid's eyes were huge and dark. “You want us to travel through a mine shaft?”

“Have you got a better idea?” Vincent shot back.

“Our options aren't many,” Ethan pointed out.
Sentinel?

I'd rather fight,
I admitted, then glanced through the window, watched shifters lay torches against the circle's wooden exterior, waiting for the spark to take.
But we're outnumbered and outweaponed, and I don't think the Marchands would be much help.

Agreed,
Ethan said, exchanged a nod with Damien, and looked at Vincent. “Let's go to ground and hope the earth lets us out again.”

***

Vincent called out the remaining vampires in the building, and we climbed single file down a narrow staircase to the basement. Vincent hurried to the back of the room. With Damien's help, he pulled furniture and plywood away from the back wall.

“This is all my fault,” Nessa murmured, wrapping arms around herself. “This is all my fault.” She looked at Ethan. “I could turn myself in. Confess. Stop this.”

“Did you kill Taran?”

“No!” her answer was quick, sharp. “Of course not.”

“If you didn't kill him, this isn't your fault. Turning yourself in wouldn't assuage their hatred; it would likely get you killed, and it would preclude the sheriff from finding the real killer. I cannot imagine the pain you're going through, but do not waste emotion that should be spent on Taran”—he pointed toward the stairs—“on assholes like that.”

I'm mentally applauding you,
I told him.

I'm glad someone is. This may get worse before it gets better.

I'd been a vampire long enough to know that was nearly inevitable. The feeling didn't diminish when Damien and Vincent revealed a dark hole that sloped downward into darkness, a cannula into the bowels of the earth.

I didn't care for the metaphor or the reality.

“Flashlight,” Astrid said, and I glanced over, took the flashlight she'd extended.

“Thanks,” I said, flicking it on and off to ensure it worked and I wouldn't be stuck in the ground without light.

Damien peered into the hole. “You got a map?”

“Just memory,” Vincent said, a flush rising on his pale cheeks. “I was fascinated by mining when I was human and found—as a vampire—I enjoyed the peacefulness. I used to walk through them for the darkness, the quiet.”

Something large and heavy boomed above us, shaking the basement and sending a puff of smoke down through the stairwell.

“Let's go,” Ethan said.

One by one, the beams of our flashlights bobbing in front of us, we moved into darkness.

The passageway was roughly square, beams pressed into the ceilings and walls at intervals to keep the tunnel—made variously of stone, packed earth, and loose rock—from caving in and burying us all. The air was cool and smelled of moist and metallic earth. It sloped gently downward and occasionally split off into other directions. It was just high enough to walk in, but we all had to duck to avoid striking our heads on the overhead beams.

It was unnerving enough that we were descending farther and farther into the earth, that each step layered more rock and dirt above us; I shouldn't have considered the consequences of Vincent making even a single wrong turn, of our becoming lost and hopeless together in an eternal darkness. But we couldn't go back, so we had to hope he'd find the proper way forward.

I brushed dangling spiderwebs away from my face, became fairly certain I could feel all the tunnel's spiders running across my shoulders, had to consciously force myself not to obsess about the possibility.

Think of it this way, Sentinel. You're getting a very unique tour of Colorado.

I'm going to need a vacation from my vacation. Don't you have a place in Scotland? I'm going there. For a week. Alone.

He touched my back in solidarity.
Forward progress, Sentinel. That's all you have to do.

Sometimes, even that felt overwhelming.

***

We walked for nearly an hour, following Vincent down one passage, then another. We stopped descending, had begun to move slightly uphill, which gave me hope we'd eventually find the surface of the earth again.

The darkness, the similarity, of each yard of tunnel was discombobulating. I'd lost my sense of direction five minutes into the trip and, but for the slope in the floor, would have had no idea of our bearing. Our nervous magic accumulated in the damp darkness, so it felt as if we traveled in a cloud of anxiety.

There was a low rumble above us, around us, behind us. Dirt fell from the ceiling like confetti, and Damien held up a hand to halt our progress. We froze, just as we had the first two times bits of the tunnel's roof had sprinkled down like rain.

But this time, the rumbling didn't stop. It seemed to grow louder, gathering momentum like a ghost train bearing down upon us.

I caught sight of Damien, looking up, then back.
“Move!”
he boomed, and we all surged forward.

“Go!” I said, gently pushing the vampires ahead. “Run! Keep moving!”

Behind me, Nessa screamed, and I turned back just in time to see her go down, clutching her ankle.

“Nessa!” Ethan called, and dodged back to help her, dropping to one knee to get her onto her feet again.

And then the ceiling simply
opened
.

A monsoon of dirt and stone poured through as though the planet itself was collapsing inward. The force of it knocked me back and away, and filled the air with dust and rock. I covered my face with the hem of my shirt to filter out some of the debris, but still coughed in long, racking spasms.

It took an eternity for the air to clear again. And when the beams of our flashlights finally penetrated the darkness, they illuminated a passage blocked by an enormous spill of rocks and dirt.

Ethan and Nessa were gone.

Panic twisted in my gut, and I scrambled over pillow-sized rocks and hillocks of dirt toward the barrier, toward them. “Ethan! Ethan! Answer me!”

I called his name aloud, screamed it over and over again, repeated it in my mind.

But for all that, he didn't answer.

He's a vampire,
I reminded myself, trying to keep terror from shutting down my body, my mind.
He's immortal.

Until he isn't,
said the competing voice with the mocking tone of a mean-tempered child.

Maybe the rocks were just too thick for psychic communication to travel through,
said the nicer voice.
Maybe they're heavy in iron or something and it interferes with the transmission.

“It doesn't matter,” I murmured to myself, probably sounding as hysterical as I felt. “It doesn't matter.”

The only thing that mattered was getting him out. I moved to the pile, began kicking away rocks on the ground to make a clear place to stand. And a clear place to dig.

“We should come back for him,” Cyril said, gesturing to the open end of the shaft. “The entire tunnel could collapse, and then where would we be? Nessa's a killer anyway.”

I froze, slowly lifted my gaze to him. That, I decided, was the last straw. The final insult in a trip that had become an unmitigated disaster. How many times had we been threatened because we'd offered to help these people, and they didn't have the courage to do the same?

“Oh,
fuck
that,” I spat out.

All heads turned to me, and I had a slender moment of enjoyment when Damien's eyes widened like dinner plates with pleasure. “You have quite a mouth on you,” he murmured.

“Just wait,” I muttered, and leveled my gaze at Cyril.

“You wanna know where I'd like to be right now? Enjoying a glass of wine with my boyfriend on a terrace. But I'm not, am I? No. I'm down here in a goddamned den of spiders big enough to have college degrees and pensions because your community can't grow the fuck up.”

When Cyril opened his mouth to object, I leaned in, stuck a pointed finger in his face. “No. You don't get to talk. You're an immortal who'd leave a man behind. Nothing you have to say is valid. Now, shut up and get to work, or get the fuck out of the way.”

For a moment, magic and tension joined the dust and dirt in the air. And then, wordlessly, Vincent moved beside me, looked over the rock fall, pointed.

“Smaller rocks on this side, boulders there. I say we work on the smaller, leave the larger; they'll add stability, reduce the chance of another fall.”

I nodded, my relief so sharp I nearly burst into tears. “That sounds reasonable to me.”

We formed a bucket line. Vincent and I pulled rocks from the pile, passed them off to vampires from his crew. Cyril stood some feet away, an arm around ribs that may very well have been hurting, and looked at me with anger layered over insult.

His feelings didn't much matter to me. But the fact that he was more than willing to accuse Nessa, one of his Clan members, of being the killer and leave her festering underground for the rest of eternity moved him right up my suspect list.

If she was dead, the blame could be easily tossed her way, and who'd be the wiser?

Vincent, on the other hand, I hadn't given enough credit. We moved rocks for an hour, and he worked without so much as an irritated grunt despite air that was far from fresh, disconcerting rumbling above and around us, and fingers raw and bleeding from digging through jagged rocks.

“You love her,” I quietly said, breaking companionable silence.

Vincent's smile was melancholy given form. “She loves another. That's my particular cross to bear.”

Had it been? I wondered. Or had it been Taran McKenzie's?

“Perhaps,” he said after a moment, “you're thinking that would give me ample motivation to kill Taran.”

I looked back at him with surprise. “Actually, yeah.”

Vincent lifted a rock flat as a pancake and half as big as a microwave, handed it to the vampire behind him. His burden lifted, he put one hand on his waist, wiped the sleeve of his other across his forehead. “I think you'd be right about that. But you'd be missing the crucial part.”

“Which is?”

“This,” he said, gesturing at the rocks and dirt. “The fact that we're running from Taran's people. We are in the midst of a feud. Suspicion for Taran's death would fall immediately on us, including Nessa. Especially Nessa, since she was closest to him. I'm a vampire, Merit. I am capable of murder. But killing Taran would hurt her, so I wouldn't do it.”

“And it's that simple.”

Vincent nodded. “For me, it is.” He leaned forward, plucked out a rock, then another, tossed them away. “For me, it is,” he repeated, quieter now.

I moved one more rock, and a shaft of light and dirt shone through a slit in the cave-in. Fingers—amazingly, miraculously—forced their way through.

“Ethan!” I said, reaching out, touching them, squeezing them. “You're all right? Is Nessa okay?”

The half second it took him to answer felt like an eternity.

I am here, Sentinel. A bit worse for wear, but here. And I'm going to Scotland with you.

I hiccupped a half sob, half laugh, that was one hundred percent relieved.

***

We dug through the rest of the rock, careful to create an opening only just wide enough for Nessa and Ethan to squeeze through. The more stone that remained, the more stable the structure would be. Or so we told ourselves.

Ethan helped Nessa through the tunnel, then followed her through. He was filthy when he emerged into the beams of our flashlights. Blood dripped from a cut at his temple, and he held his left arm carefully. But he was whole, and he was alive.

“A mild concussion,” Damien diagnosed as he looked Ethan over. “Broken arm. Two broken ribs. Plenty of contusions. You'll heal soon enough; faster if I could make you shift.”