I laughed, the sound a register lower than my human voice. It carried menace, fury, and delight, and it was all Beast. From behind me, PP leaped into the room, straight to the woman still on the bed. The huge dog lay down next to her, protecting. Ignoring the man and his hostage, Eli secured the room.
Behind me, Sarge walked in, the grizzled man taking in everything. He closed the door behind him, the sound soft and final. “Son,” Sarge said to Elvis, “I can’t allow you to get away with this. You let the lady go and I’ll let you die easy. You keep her, and I’ll make sure you die slow.” Which sounded pretty generous to me.
But Elvis disagreed. A door I hadn’t noticed opened behind him and before I could react, he was gone. Sarge leaped across the room, a distance a human couldn’t have covered. Sarge rammed into the door as it closed, splintering wood and revealing a steel core. He bellowed.
I ran out of the room and down the stairs, catching a glimpse of Eli dragging John-Roy by the hair. There was no way off the island tonight, in the fog, except by boat. There hadn’t been a land-based boathouse on the sat map—which could have been sadly out of date—but I was trusting that it was up to date and that the men had arrived in the boats that been tied to the docks. I raced that way, out of the house into the black fog of night. Beast, still close to the front of my mind, guided me, her balance assisting mine, her vision lighting the night world. I let her take over.
Can smell nothing new, no female-prisoner smell, no man-predator stink, she thought.
As I reached shore, the lights in the house went out. All of them. “That’s because we got out in front of him,” I murmured, certain. “We’re between him and his getaway boat.” I dropped to a crouch and faced the house.
He came from my right, the woman silent, stumbling, her breath shaking. I heard her take a breath and start to scream, the faint hiss followed by a thump and the sound of a falling body. The reek of fresh blood was strong on the air. One pair of running footsteps came toward me. He’d hurt her to keep her quiet, and then had to leave her when he’d been too harsh. Which just made my job easier. When he appeared out of the fog, I rose fast. And let him rush onto my blade. It caught him low in the abdomen, and I yanked the blade up, severing everything in its path. Hot blood gushed over my hand, and still I lifted the blade, tilting it to the right so it would miss his aorta and his heart. He went limp and I let him fall, taking my blade with him.
Around me the heavens opened and a deluge fell. The lights came back on in the house, showing me not much of anything but shadows and a dying man at my feet. Sarge strode up, picked up my prisoner, and flipped the body into his own airboat. PP jumped up beside him, tongue lolling. “Keys,” Sarge demanded.
I tossed them to him and moments later, the airboat vanished into the mist, the powerful prop roaring. Eli came from my left, through the rain, carrying the woman Elvis had dropped.. “I need to get her inside, into a safe place. She doesn’t need to wake up with a man near her,” he said. “Call this in. Get medic and the law.”
“Yeah,” I said, trudging back to the hell-house. “Sarge took Elvis. What happened to John-Roy?”
“He ran off into the night,” Eli said. “I heard a splash. I think he fell into the moat.”
I thought about that for a moment. A gut-shot man accidently falling into a moat full of gators. Maybe they’d eat him. Maybe he’d drown first. Maybe not. “Good,” I said.
***
The rest of the night was chaos. Nadine and a sheriff from the parish to the north vied for jurisdictional control of the scene, and the FBI showed, kicking them both out because of the human trafficking. Eli and I were allowed to leave at ten the next morning, free to go after long interrogations. Sarge met us at the shore in his airboat. Together we went back to Chauvin. The media circus onshore was unimaginable, but they ignored us, looking like locals with nothing to say, the reporters too busy trying to hire, bribe, or buy a way to the island in the middle of the black water.
***
A month later, I got a package in the mail. It was my vamp-killer, smelling of cleansers and oil, the blade freshly honed. There was no note. No explanation. I didn’t need one. The blade was explanation enough.
Snafu
Author’s Note: Fans are always asking me about Jane’s early life and training, about how she went from the children’s home to rogue-vamp hunter. Well, here’s a small insight into how.