Page 66 of Bent Out of Shade
Harley pitched orb after orb, alternating between the bloodsucker and the wolf with increasing desperateness, but Sabrina barely spared the new predator a second glance. She stalked the Track Suits.
I was forced to stop and look away or be blinded, but the sizzle of flesh and the thud of two more bodies were more than enough clues to the state of things.
Don’t let it be Laurent. I dug my nails into my palms. Normally, the wolf would make short work of a new vamp, but Sabrina was unhinged. Clearly in need of blood, she’d been abandoned by her sire and left to go rogue instead of being brought in for care at Blood Alley. Now she was a marauding loose cannon.
Harley’s magic abruptly stopped, and I blinked away the final traces of dazzling light.
A swathe of fur along Laurent’s right flank was scorched but otherwise he was unhurt. My gaze jumped from body to body, sifting through the carnage, and I gave a strangled wheeze, my magic falling away.
Harley’s head had been flung aside like a discarded soccer ball, leaving Sabrina to feast on the stumpy neck still attached to his torso. She clutched his chest, his ribs cracking like dry twigs.
Harley had been the wild card I was most concerned about tonight. He had magic, he knew I was there, and he could have done serious damage to everyone on my team, but Sabrina disarmed him in a flash because she was peckish.
I gagged, muscling down bile, while she squeezed his body like it was a cheese tube and she had the munchies.
Dark crimson was smeared along her mouth and up one cheek, a chilling accompaniment to her closed eyes, flushed cheeks, and slight sway.
The wolf knocked into the vampire, dislodging her. He bared his fangs and she bared hers, growling with such ferocity that it turned raspy before she blurred off down the service road with Harley’s desiccated corpse.
Laurent was in hot pursuit.
I should have been as well, except I couldn’t make myself go into the dark night with the smell of hot copper clogging my nostrils.
Staying firmly in the light, I inched closer on wobbly legs to the dead men, hypnotized by the blood sprayed over the dirty cracked concrete like graffiti.
Distant traffic, voices, a wolf’s growl, all sound blended into a buzzing noise that made as little sense as the four bodies, three of whom had no heads.
My stomach lurched and I spun, vomiting into a rain gutter.
The syringe fell from my grasp and rolled away, mercifully intact.
Rock-hard clay hands clomped down on my shoulders and I screamed.
“Get hold of yourself.” Emmett was wild-eyed. In all the chaos, I’d completely forgotten about my partner.
I clutched his biceps, resting my forehead to his.
“It all happened so fast,” he whispered.
I nodded. All these lives extinguished in an instant, the world already moving on. Violence begetting more violence; was fighting the good fight as deluded as trying to slap a Band-Aid on a bullet wound?
Emmett scooped up the syringe, and we made our way back to my car on the service road in silence. I couldn’t stay with those bodies, and not just because any Sapien cops or Lonestars might show up.
We sat on the hood, waiting for Laurent’s return. Guilt at leaving Sabrina to him when she was my responsibility was buried under a layer of numbness so profound that I kept flexing my fingers and toes to make sure they still worked.
Sapien, Ohrist, vampire—there was no winner tonight. Sabrina, in particular, had lost so much: her career. Her marriage? Her sanity?
Emmett paced up and down the road, peering intently into the gloom for any sign of the shifter and vampire, while I tried to put the pieces together in a way that made sense.
Whoever was behind this had miscalculated badly. Was I back to an attack against Vincenzo using his human lover to weaken him, or was this truly a strike at Zev by turning the lawyer and abandoning her, leaving the master vampire to deal with the fallout?
I stared up at the dark clouds, wishing for pinpoints of starlight to break up the heavy gloom. Anyone loyal to Zev knew better than to abandon a Sapien after siring them. A coldly logical part of my brain wondered if alerting him about tonight’s events could get Sadie out of her bargain, but without concrete answers I had no leverage.
Snarling and the patter of claws alerted me to the wolf’s return. He had one of the vampire’s sleeves grasped none too gently between his teeth, prodding her forward.
Sabrina hobbled along with a funny bent-over limp. She passed under one of the few streetlights, showing the twisted bloody foot that she dragged.
The wolf bore bloody gashes down his front and under one eye, and he was breathing hard, but his gait appeared normal.
