The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (27 page)

I glanced from James to
Sheila.
 
And then I stared at Magdalena
with wide eyes, my heart racing inside of me.
 

“Unfortunately, my dears, I didn’t
call the both of you here today for my own amusement,” she said, then, her head
to the side again as she grinned back at me too widely and smugly.
 
“I’m afraid it’s taken long enough for this
to happen, what with the idiocy of those beneath me.”
 
Both James and Sheila visibly winced at that, but stood to
attention again, staring forward, their shoulders back as if they were
soldiers, and Magdalena was their general.

Magdalena stalked toward me, her
heels clicking on the floor.
 
I stood my
ground the best that I was able, standing tall, my good leg shaking beneath me
but still holding me up.
 
I didn’t know
what to expect—a blow?
 
I braced myself
waiting for impact, but when Magdalena reached me, she simply stood in front of
me, smiling at me widely.

It was then that I realized that
her teeth were pointed, too.
 
Sharp and
glittering in her mouth like diamonds.

I took a deep breath.
 
My entire body was shaking now, but I still
managed to stand, still managed to glance over Magdalena’s shoulder at Layne,
hanging between the Roman columns like she’d been beaten and hung up.
 
I shuddered, my heart aching, wishing I
could reach her, aching to touch her, comfort her.
 
I stared Magdalena down.

“Is this some kind of sick joke?” I
managed weakly, my words growling in my throat.
 

“No, no joke,” said Magdalena with
a soft chuckle.
 
“Sadly, it isn’t,
dear.
 
Well.
 
Maybe it is a
little
.”
 
She leaned forward, and she searched my eye with her own wide,
unblinking ones that narrowed as she tiled her head back, then, and laughed,
laughed like she’d just been told the funniest one liner in the universe.
 
It was bizarre, and my heart had risen into
my throat.

But her laughter stopped, and her
teeth, right in front of me as I
watched,
grew longer.
 
Sharper.
 

“Hold still,” she said quietly, her
eyes glittering.
 

“Magdalena,” Layne growled out into
the perfect stillness.
 
She choked out
the word, blood dripping over her lips as she shook her head, panting.
 
She leaned toward us, against her
ropes.
 
“Magdalena,
don’t
.
 
There’s no reason for you to.
 
You know that a ransom makes more sense,
it’ll get you exactly what you want anyway without…”

She trailed off as Magdalena paused
at that, paused and turned to look inquisitively at Layne.
 
My heart was pounding so quickly in my chest
and I still half-believed this was a dream, even as I heard the soft drips of
Layne’s blood falling to the marble floor, even as I watched Magdalena’s teeth
glitter in the half-light of the entryway.

But I couldn’t convince myself this
was a dream.
 
I was in too much
pain.
 
All of this was too real, too
hard and horrible.

That would mean, if this was real,
that the only explanation that could possibly exist for Magdalena and her
ridiculous mouth of razor sharp teeth would be…

“Vampire,” I whispered into the
stillness.

Somewhere, far away, I could hear
the general commotion of Sunday afternoon traffic in Boston.
 
Somewhere, a cabbie (probably) laid on his
horn, and the tinny sound of it echoed in the streets.
 
But here in the unnaturally cold, dark
entryway, my breath came out in front of me like a ghost as I sighed out, and
the sound of blood dripping was the loudest thing in the room.
 
The world was bustling far away.
 
The world was safe far away.
 
And it was not safe here and now.

Magdalena turned a little, her eyes
bright as she gazed back at me with her unnaturally wide smile.
 
“Yes,” she said like she was speaking to a
very small child.
 
“
Vampire.
 
What’s so terribly funny about all of
this is that you’d have to hear it from me, dear,” she said, grinning
wickedly.
 
“And not your own father.”

“Magdalena,” said Layne again,
keeping her voice steady and low.
 
“He’ll give it to you if you give Elizabeth back in exchange,
unharmed.
 
You know he will.”
 
And then, she said, low and soft, the world
desperate:
 
“
Please
.”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re
wrong,” said Magdalena, steamrolling right over Layne’s words and smiling
without a single trace of warmth at Layne as she took a step toward me, her
high heel making a smart click against the marble.
 
Magdalena held out her hand to me, her blood-red nails long and
glinting wickedly sharp in the sunshine that drifted down through the wide,
diamond panel windows far above us.
 
“I
don’t want it as a
gift
.
 
I will
take it as it was always meant to be taken.
 
With brutal, violent force.”

I had no idea what they were
talking about.
 
But Layne was standing
there, tied to some columns, bleeding all over the pretty floor, and
Magdalena—a woman I’d known since I was a kid—was sprouting teeth a vampire bat
would be pretty envious of, and I was trying to stand upright and failing,
because the pain from my wound was making it difficult to see straight…and
everything, just then, seemed vastly over my head.

Through the thin fabric of my slip
and skirt, blood began to seep, leaking down my leg.
 
Great.
 
I took a deep,
lightheaded breath, hung on for dear life to the crutches as I drew courage
from…somewhere.

“What about my father?” I asked
then, drawing myself as tall and upright as I possibly could.
 
I held my head up defiantly as Magdalena
took a few steps closer to me with a wide, bright smile.

“It’s because of him,” she said
slowly, carefully, “that I’m going to kill you.”

My heart roared through me as I
glanced past Magdalena at Layne.
 
Layne
hung there, between the columns, but she held herself up, her chin lifted and
her jaw set.
 
Her head was raised in
arrogance, there was a hard glint to her eyes, and even as the blood gently
plinked
off her neck and her forehead and her face against the marble tile below,
she held my gaze unwaveringly with bright, glittering eyes.

Where the silver ropes cut into her
hands and ankles, it looked as if her flesh was burned, blood seeping down from
them.
 
There was so much red in the
sterile black and white of the room.

“Elizabeth,” said Layne slowly,
carefully, gritting her teeth together from the pain.
 
“
Run
.”

“There’s nowhere for her to run
to,
silly girl,” said Magdalena as she glanced with mild interest back at
Layne.
 
“And it’s all your fault she’s
in this predicament anyway, so this should be even more enjoyable, to kill her
in front of you.”

Magdalena reached out between us,
and she brushed her fingertips over my skirted thigh, bringing up her now red
fingers to her mouth and licking them, holding my eyes as she did so with a
wide, wild grin.

“Don’t you
touch
her,” Layne
snarled, and she jerked forward, pulling at her restraints.
 

A few things happened, all at once.
 
Just like yesterday in my kitchen, just like
when we were held up at gunpoint, power and heat seemed to radiate off of Layne
now in a big burst of energy.
 
Sheila
and James both took a step away from her, staring at her with trepidation
before resuming their stony looks forward.

And the ropes creaked ominously,
the Roman columns actually shifting a tiny bit.
 
They were solid marble and
huge.
 
It wasn’t possible…

“I’m afraid I’m too old for your
tricks to work on me, Layne dear,” Magdalena purred, turning back to me and
licking one of her still bloody fingers slowly as she considered me.
 
“And I’m afraid to tell you that this ends
now.
 
I’m tired of waiting.
 
And I’ve been waiting so long…”

Magdalena reached for me.
 
Like a snake, her upper body darted forward,
encircling my waist with one arm, and my shoulders with another, her thin arms
as strong and sinewy as steel cables.
 
She threw back her head, and somehow, impossibly, her sharpened teeth
grew even longer as she licked them, as she breathed out in euphoria, her eyes
rolling back in her head.

And behind Magdalena, there came a
thunderous growl.

It was as if there was an
earthquake.
 
But that’s impossible—there
are never any earthquakes in Boston.
 
But still, the two Roman columns that were currently holding Layne
seemed to start to waver, back and forth, back and forth as Layne lunged
against them and the constraints that bound her to them, the silver ropes—
metal
ropes, I was beginning to realize—screaming in protest as the columns
shifted back and forth.
 
Layne lunged
forward again and again, blood dripping from her wrists, from her ankles, but
Magdalena ignored her utterly, held me tightly, and breathed out again.
 

Magdalena lowered her head down as
sensually as if she was about to kiss me, but she went past my face, past my
mouth and brushed her lips against the skin of my neck, her cold mouth making a
violent shiver move through me as fear, cold and insistent, filled me entirely.

There was a bright blossom of pain
so intense and piercing against my neck.
 
I felt myself falling backward into darkness.

And somewhere, as if far away,
there came a…howl?

I fell hard against the floor, my
body thudding against the cold marble like I’d fallen from stories above, not a
few feet, and I saw stars, but, somehow and miraculously, I didn’t black
out.
 
Confused, and with the planet
seeming to spin beneath me like it was trying to rid itself of me, I pushed
myself up to my hands and knees, even as my leg buckled beneath me in a riot of
exquisite pain.
 
I lifted my head,
blinked about a hundred times and tried desperately to understand what I was
seeing.

Because this is what I thought I
was seeing:

Magdalena was pinned to the floor
on her back, thrashing and snapping her too-sharp mouth up at what was pinning
her.
 

Which was a wolf.

The wolf on top of Magdalena was
massive, with a shaggy silver-gray pelt and a beautiful lupine face that
tapered down to intensely long, sharp white fangs that were now very much
exposed and snapping at Magdalena’s face, just as Magdalena was comically
snapping at her.
 
The wolf’s large paws
were pinned against Magdalena’s shoulders, claws digging into the exposed skin
there, and the wolf’s bushy white tail curved over them both at attention.

The wolf’s eyes flicked to me.
 
I stared at the scene in horror, my heart
roaring through me.

But everything seemed to stop when
the wolf gazed my way.

Her eyes shifted from blue to green
to gray.

I looked to the Roman columns.

The silver ropes swung from them,
limp and torn at the ends and empty.

Layne was gone.

I pieced everything together, even
as the wolf put her attentions back on Magdalena.
 
Magdalena, despite the fact that she was small and lithe,
screeched in protest, and managed to throw the wolf off of her, using her thin
arms to push against the shaggy beast’s chest like the wolf weighed nothing
more than a tiny dog would.
 
The wolf
leapt backwards and landed from that shove upright, still snapping her teeth,
and when Magdalena rose to her feet, the wolf and the woman squared off, the
wolf growling savagely, all of the hackles on her back risen, and Magdalena
crouching, snarling herself, teeth comically long and wickedly sharp flashing
in the light.

James and Sheila were nowhere to be
seen.

Pure adrenaline pumped through me
as I backed away from the wolf and Magdalena.
 
I lifted up my crutch, realizing I was close enough to hit the woman in
the back of the head.
 
I’d often
wondered, before this moment, if circumstances were terrible enough, if I could
harm another living being.
 
But as
Magdalena snarled an inhuman sound at the wolf, an inhuman sound that made
every single hair I possessed stand to attention, and a violent shiver move
through me, I didn’t even think about what I was doing.
 
I hefted up the crutch and let it swing
through the air with all my strength.

After all, I’d never thought to
consider what I might do against an opponent who
wasn’t
necessarily
human.

The crutch connected with that
woman like she was a brick wall and bounced off her, the impact roaring through
my arms and making me drop the crutch as I fell to one knee, crying out as my
wound twisted and opened more.
 
Magdalena remained standing in front of me as solidly as if I’d brushed
a feather against her, and hadn’t battered her with a crutch as strongly as I
could.
 
So instead of falling to the
side unconscious like I’d hoped she would, Magdalena turned her attentions on
me, deepening her smile, which looked freakishly terrible with her long
fangs.
 
She raised an arm with sharp
nails as if to backhand me.