Gore coated his mouth and chin and spilled down his clothes. Fancy clothes. A tuxedo. A second step. He laughed. The laughter splashed over me like warm honey. Congealing over me. Stop. . . . Blackness took me. Momentum still had me in its grip. His mind . . . closed over me.
But Beast had my soul. With a scream that tore through my brain and out my throat, Beast ripped me free of his control. I crashed into the rogue. The Benelli and my body slid between his and Katie’s. She started to fall. The stake rose up on its arc from near my thigh. Lifting to slash up between us. Aimed into his belly and up, under his ribs. I caught a glimpse of his face. A man. Hawkish nose and chin. Lips pulled back from fangs on both upper and lower jaw. Not something I had ever seen before.
The air shivered. Cold. Icy. And the vamp was gone.
I fell forward, stumbling, catching myself with Beast’s reflexes. Bent-kneed, body in a half crouch, I caught Katie across my thigh. I eased her to the floor. Whirled. Whipped my head, following the rogue’s scent. His complex, compound scent changing. Beast sucked it in, over her/my tongue. Changing . . . liver-eater rot. Something else . . . rogue/not-rogue.
Troll’s breath like a bellows, ragged and hoarse as he knelt beside me. “Katie,” he said, his voice rising on the last syllable. He stopped, his hands hovering just above her, uncertain. Her dress had been ripped away, exposing small breasts with tiny pink nipples. A scar, brown and uniform, marked her upper arm. A fleur-de-lis. A brand, I realized. What the heck?
A hideous wound in her belly started at her rib cage and ended at the juts of her hip bones. Fangs had scored across her skin. A large portion of her torso on the right side was gone. Over the liver. It oozed. Katie had been eaten. “Katie,” Troll whispered. Shock and horror froze him immobile, as he had been when the rogue held him at bay. Beast’s hearing detected a faint thump.
“Her heart’s still beating,” I said, blood pumping once in her throat, up her carotid artery to her brain. “She’s still . . . with us.” Not quite alive. But not gone.
He gathered Katie in his arms, cradling her, pressing a hand over the gruesome hole in her stomach. Her blood covered him to the wrist. I handed him a pillow to press over her instead. He looked up from her, tears drying on his face. Visibly, he pulled himself together, the poise and self-control of an old soldier. “He busted all the phones. Disabled the security system. Get Leo.” Then he looked at me. “You’re naked.”
“I noticed. Did you see him? Did you get a look at his face?”
“No. All I could see was a blur. Vamp mind games.”
Get Leo, he had said. Not yet. I ran from the room, chasing the evolving scents of the rogue. Trying to understand. I had assumed the rogue’s compound scent was like a human’s, changing due to emotional stress, exercise, spices—or in this case, blood—eaten. But this was different. Its scent signature was actually changing, new scents evolving, wiping out others.
Nothing can change its basic, individual, singular, one-in-six-billion scent. We can wash until it’s faint, cover it with chemicals so it’s hard to distinguish, alter it with fear, illness, or age. But the basic, underlying scent, in its most elemental state, is unique, the distinct chemical reactions in the cells of one person, no matter how layered, masked, or compounded. But this guy’s scent wasn’t just compounding. It was altering. I followed it down the hall.
The crying, gurgling, and odor of fresh blood I had noted when I entered the house came strongly from the dining room. I put my back against the hall wall and checked behind me, swinging the weapon back and forth, up the hall and down. A sconce was broken. I stepped over shattered glass. My heart had stabilized with activity into a fast, hard rate, my breath deep and steady. The smell of my sweat was free from fear, marked by concentration and adrenaline.
The dining room was a shambles. The huge carved table was overturned, chairs tossed and broken. Blood was splattered across Katie’s paintings. But the rogue had come and gone. I said softly, “Who’s here? It’s Jane Yellowrock.”
A blond head came out from behind the table, hair streaked with gore. It was Indigo, blue eyes so wide that white showed all around. When she saw me, she scrambled to her feet, around the table, and into my side, bumping me hard. Trembling so forcefully even her skin quaked. She stank of fear.
“Help Miz A,” she whispered, pointing. “She’s bleeding bad.” A stocking-clad foot stuck out from the overturned table, a house shoe hanging from gnarled toes.
“Is your room upstairs?” I asked, my voice dropping low. She nodded yes, her teeth chattering with reaction. “Go up. Lock yourself in.” I pushed her gently toward the hallway. “Find a phone. Call Leo and tell him to get his ass over here. Then call 911. We need cops and ambulances.” Maybe a SWAT team. Or the military.
Indigo looked from me to the hallway. Her breath stopped.