Nightwalker (8 page)

That's when the scream pierced her ears.

T
akala took off running, but Striker pulled her back. “Could be a trap. Let me go first.”

“I'm not a fluff ball that will fall apart at the first gust of danger.” She met his gaze. They were close, nose to nose. His rapid breaths brushed her cheeks, glided across her neck. Her nipples hardened instantly. She cursed her body and said, “Stop worrying about my safety.

“You are under my care. Therefore, I am your protector.”

Another blood-curdling scream split the air.

“Are we going to argue about this all day?” Takala asked.

He turned and did his disappearing routine. One minute there, the next warping through space and time.

Takala ran down the tunnel, but she knew he'd reach the screamer way before she could. Didn't seem fair.

The tunnel forked, and Takala followed the constant screaming to the right. The passage opened up, getting taller and wider and more cavernous. The metallic scent of fresh blood mingled with the fetid odor of rotting flesh. She put her hand over her nose to keep from gagging.

She spotted Striker, crouched behind a huge wall of rubble, probably debris left there by the tunnel builders. He peered around it and waved her forward. She crept up behind him and glanced past his shoulder. Then her jaw dropped.

Charnel house could not describe the ghastly sight before her. Naked humans of all sizes and descriptions were bound throughout the cavern, fang marks in every conceivable place on their bodies. Blood splatter all over them and the walls. Some were still alive, their eyes empty, begging for death. Others had been drained of blood, their rotting bodies left to hang by chains and rope. She quickly counted twelve alive and forty dead.

She had seen death and violence in her lifetime. When your grandmother was the Guardian, and she had raised you, you saw every type of carnage and bloodshed in the fight against darkness. Usually Meikoda would take care to draw evil away from home and dispatch it, but there were always unpredicted surprise attacks on Takala and her sisters, or on Meikoda herself. So Takala was no stranger to the manifestations of evil. Yet the helplessness of these victims tore at her and angered her. She looked at Striker, and his face was blank, solid granite. He had probably seen this all before.

She spotted the serpent shifter. He stood in front of a
girl who looked about fifteen. She was screaming, her eyes frantic with madness.

“Don't worry, I won't torture you like the others did,” he said, his voice a hiss.

This only made the girl scream louder.

“Shut up, shut up!”

Then it happened. The guy morphed. His eyes narrowed to slits. Pupils turned bright yellow and vertical. His skin elongated and stretched, leaving his clothes in a heap. His face flattened as the thick boa-constrictor body took shape, at least forty-five feet long. He slithered up the girl's leg, his forked tongue shooting out, tasting her skin.

Fear gripped every part of her body now. Her mouth opened wide, but she couldn't form a sound.

Takala and Striker both ran out at the same time. Striker went instinctively for the boa's head, locking onto the back of it. Takala grabbed its tail.

Fortified by magic, the creature was stronger than a normal snake, and Takala felt its body curling in on itself, twining around her legs and waist. Takala couldn't imagine how people could own pet boas. They needed to tangle with a serpent shifter.

She glanced at Striker. The snake had twined around his neck and chest, picking him up and slamming him onto the cave floor like a rag doll. He wasn't faring any better than she was.

The snake's body curled around her neck, squeezing until she thought her esophagus would be crushed. Takala looked over at the chained girl, saw the fear and death in her eyes, and that was all the impetus she needed. She channeled her anger into her hands and
yanked them loose from the muscular clenches of the snake's body. Instinctively she curved her fingers, forced power into the tips, then speared them into the snake. She drove them up to her wrists. Bone cracked. Flesh crunched. Pain flared through her raw hands.

The creature growled, a monstrous reptilian sound. Then it rolled over and over, dragging Striker and Takala with it. Takala felt her head pound the rocky floor again and again, but she kept her hands buried in the snake's writhing flesh.

Striker managed to grab the creature's head, and the thrashing stopped for a moment.

With one quick trust, Takala ripped open the snake's underbelly. Surprisingly there was little blood, mostly writhing and twitching muscle. She managed to wiggle free and ran to help Striker.

Striker still had a death lock on the head, but the snake's coiled body trapped him.

She caught his shoulder for leverage, then drop-kicked the snake in the head, driving the tip of her boot into its eyeball.

The snake growled and thrashed again.

She rolled down onto her feet and wheeled around to attack again, but Striker ripped off the jaw of the snake…and half its head.

It flipped one last time, then lay there, muscles still jerking in the throes of contracting. Striker crawled out from beneath the heavy body.

Takala helped him stand and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Of course.” He wore the expression of a vampire who had just felt his own mortality and couldn't believe it.

She heard the slight waver in his voice and saw that he'd torn his tie in the fight. It was the first time she'd seen him a little rattled, and he kept staring at her bloody hands. “Aren't you glad I came along?” she asked.

In one slick move, he extracted the handkerchief from his breast pocket, shook it out, and handed it to her. He kept his gaze from her hands. “We just killed the only lead I had to Raithe. Glad doesn't describe how I feel at the moment.”

“It was either kill him or he'd kill us.” Takala wiped her hands and flinched as the material met the gouges on her fingers. “Thanks.” She held out the kerchief.

“Keep it.” He waved it away. His eyes took on a frantic, ravenous appearance. The pupils dilated, the whites quickly overtaken. They were wide black holes, swallowing everything in sight. The humans. The bloodbath in the cave. His gaze landed on her.

He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple working in his throat. “I have to get some air.”

Before Takala could answer him, he fast-forwarded and disappeared.

She had found the chink in his armor. Blood. She tossed the handkerchief to the floor, then moved toward the chained humans, who called for help.

“Don't worry, I'll untie all of you,” Takala said. “Please, someone tell me who did this to you?”

“Don't move.” An elderly man with a thick gray mustache and salt-and-pepper hair spoke in broken English. “There's a trap. On the floor.”

Takala froze, holding up her right foot. She saw it now. An area four-by-four feet. At first glance it looked like the rest of the floor, but on closer inspection she
noticed the rock had been cut and replaced. Directly above it, she saw four AK-47s mounted to the ceiling, aimed at the spot. One step on the floor and she was Swiss cheese.

“These guys are real humanitarians,” she said snidely. She gingerly backed up and called to the elderly Frenchman, “Thank you for saving my life, sir.”

“Please, just get us out.”

Takala kept her distance from the booby trap and approached the elderly man. “Who did this to you?”

“Vampires. Never believed in that stuff before being forced here. Oh my God, we're all going to die! They'll kill us all!” Hysteria clutched him, and he rocked his head from side to side, as if the motion helped him cope with all he'd experienced. “You have to get us out before they wake up. Please, please let me out of here!”

“Do you know where they're sleeping? Did they mention it?” Takala asked as she broke the ropes with her bare hands, aware of the stinging rawness of her skin.

“No. They just leave.” The man staggered, then gained his legs and ran out of the cavern, still naked and shaking his head. Takala was certain Striker would intercept him.

She moved to the girl next. She fell into Takala's arms. Takala gently set her down and propped her against the rocks.

“Did anyone hear the names of the vampires?”

“Laeyar was one,” a young man bound next to the girl said, his accent so thick Takala had to really concentrate to understand him. “He's the leader.”

Takala kept her eyes on his face, for she didn't want
to embarrass him by looking at his naked body. “Did this Laeyar let the serpent shifter come here to feed?”

“Yes. Laeyar let him. He's killed one of us every three days. Laeyar goes out hunting and brings more of us.”

“Please, let me out,” a woman of about fifty pleaded. She was a bleached blonde and spoke perfect English. Her eyes were swollen and encrusted from crying. Takala counted five bites on her neck alone.

After freeing the young man, she worked on the ropes of the blonde and asked, “Have you heard the name Raithe mentioned among them?”

The woman looked too beaten and frayed to do more than nod.

The young man was supporting the girl, probably his girlfriend, as he said, “Laeyar brags that he dines with this Raithe person.”

Abruptly, a blinding light appeared and B.O.S.P. cleaners materialized. Striker must have called them. She noticed that one of them held the hand of the elderly man who had tried to leave. The agony and fear had vanished from his face. He looked only content and dazed. He was fully clothed now, too.

The victims cowered, frightened.

Takala said, “Please, they won't hurt you. They're only here to help.” She left out that they wouldn't have a memory of this horrible event in their lives. Definitely a good thing.

When all the humans were untied, one of the cleaners, a man with buckteeth and chubby cheeks, who looked an awful lot like a beaver shifter, approached her. “We can take care of that for you.” He nodded to her injured hands.

“Any aftereffects from those crystals?”

He grinned. “Only that you'll feel great. Pure crystal energy does that. No ill effects.”

“In that case, knock yourself out.”

He held up a small clear tubular apparatus that looked like a wide wand. Weird glowing pink gel and tiny pyramid-shaped crystals bubbled inside. He hit a button on the end, and a lilac-colored light sprayed over her hands. It felt like a scrub brush going over her skin, uncomfortable but not unbearable. She grimaced; then it was over. No pain. The wounds cauterized in seconds. Her skin miraculously healed right before her eyes.

“Wow, I want one of those.” She pointed to the wand. “Can you put me on the B.O.S.P. Christmas list?”

His grin widened and he checked her out. “No, but you can be on my own special list.” His lips twitched with a rodent tic.

She didn't think she had led the guy on, but obviously he thought otherwise. Male testosterone, be it Supe or human! Who could figure it out? Not her; she stayed lost.

“Thanks, I gotta go.” She hurried away and saw one of the cleaners zap the booby trap.

The molecular structure of the AKs shifted, blurred, then disappeared. Just like that. Booby trap annihilated. Too bad cleaners weren't available to fix her love life.

She went in search of Striker and found him in the subway tunnel. He was talking on the phone, his form all in shadows. His phone light cast an eerie yellow radiance over his pale face and neck, making him look like a handsome ghoul.

When he noticed her, he closed the phone with a
quick snap and stood there, a motionless monolith in the shadows.

“State-secret stuff?” she teased, staring at his shadowy face.

“Something like that.”

The gloomy darkness seemed to amplify the tension between them, and she could actually feel his presence prickling the nerve endings of her skin. She stopped a safe four feet from him and said, “So, what happened back there?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, right. Know what I think? I've found your one true weakness.”

“Really? Enlighten me.”

“Human blood.”

One moment there was plenty of distance between them; the next he was up in her face, his cool breath brushing her lips. “Not
any
human blood, just yours.” He bent, picked up one hand and sniffed it. “I can still smell it,
bonne bouche,
ambrosia, nectar of the gods.” His lips brushed the back of her hand, sending tingles up her arm, into her breasts.

Takala wanted to pull back, step away, but she just stood there, entranced by his nearness, caught in the vibration of his voice.

He stroked her hand with his thumb while he used his other hand to capture her chin and raise it. He stood staring into her eyes while he gently traced her jawline, her lips. Hot yearning poured down her throat, into her belly, and settled between her thighs. God, she wanted him to touch her all over.

He stroked her lips for a moment and heaved a loud sigh. Then he whispered, “You are so lethal.”

A second ticked by, her heart pounding. Any moment he'd close that two inches and kiss her. She could feel the sexual longing between them draining the oxygen from the air. Abruptly, he dropped his hand and stepped back.

Why hadn't he kissed her? Sad thing was, she had wanted him to, dammit! When her heart settled down and she had her resolve to stay away from men squarely in place, she said, “That's right, and don't forget it. And the blood in my body, I like to keep there. Got it?”

“I promise you, Takala, I will never drink your blood.” His voice held that dangerous facile edge that hid all his emotion—if he felt any to hide.

She couldn't tell if he was being serious or not, or if this was one of the ways he captivated and charmed female victims. She heard the nervous catch in her own voice as she said, “And I can promise to never let you.”

“Good. Then we are in agreement.”