Chapter 34
Evie watched Cyrus, Flic and Jamieson climb the wall into the adjacent garden. For several endless seconds fear completely paralysed her. She couldn’t seem to move or breathe or even hold a thought in her head. She just kept staring at the wall.
Behind her she could hear Selena and RJ bickering. She tried to block them out so that she could focus and think. All her senses were screaming. Her nerves felt raw and exposed as though the skin had been stripped clean off her body. She glanced up the street. Everything was so quiet but there was an undercurrent, a low-level humming that felt like someone strumming chords on her bloodied nerves.
Cyrus had told her to stay put, but she couldn’t just stand here and wait, not knowing what was going on. Should she ditch these two and follow him? What if he needed her help?
‘Goddamn it, shut up. I’m trying to think,’ she hissed.
RJ and Selena stared at her as if she’d slapped them.
‘What are you even doing here?’ Evie asked them, exasperation causing her to snap. If they couldn’t feel the gnawing buzz in the pit of their stomachs that signalled trouble, if they couldn’t sense the danger that was so thick in the air it was making it hard to breathe, then they were going to be picked off as easily as cherries from an overhanging branch.
‘We’re here to fight,’ Selena answered back coolly.
‘We’re Hunters,’ RJ said quietly. ‘Same as you. We read the papers, you know. We can see what’s coming. Someone’s got to try to stop them.’
When Evie didn’t respond he carried on. ‘You think I’m just going to walk away, hang out with my buddies, order a pizza and get baked, now I know what’s really going on out here?’
Evie clenched her jaw. She didn’t know what to say. Yes? Yes, do that. Pretend its not happening. Hide. Get baked. But she couldn’t because she knew he was right. At some point this had become a fight that she too had no choice but to get involved in because, just as RJ said, the alternative – doing nothing – was even more terrifying to contemplate.
‘What’s your beef with Victor anyway?’
Evie pondered her answer but RJ was clearly oblivious to the look she was giving him because he carried on. ‘He seems like a cool guy.’
‘What’s my beef with him?’ she spat. ‘Try he killed my parents and my boyfriend.’
RJ’s mouth flapped open and then shut.
‘And you’re like partners with him now?’ Selena asked, incredulous.
Heat rushed up Evie’s neck and bloomed across her cheeks. ‘It’s none of your business,’ she growled, turning away.
‘Someone did that to my man, to my family, you best believe I’d be putting a bullet in him. What you waiting for?’
Evie took a deep breath, bristling dangerously, trying to rein in her anger and guilt and self-loathing before she took it out on Selena, when a loud shot shattered the heavy silence on the street.
‘What the hell was that?’ asked RJ, alarmed, spinning around.
‘It was Ash,’ said Evie, fully focused now. ‘That’s the diversion.’
‘I think we should follow Cyrus. What if he’s in trouble?’ Selena piped up.
‘I think we should do what the guy said and stay put,’ RJ said, looking to Evie for backup.
‘He’s not in charge. Victor didn’t tell us to stay put,’ Selena argued. ‘So I’m going to find out what’s going on.’ And before Evie could stop her she was off, jogging up the street.
By the time Evie caught up with her, Selena was standing in front of the wall Cyrus, Flic and Jamieson had just climbed.
‘Give me a boost,’ Selena said without even looking in Evie’s direction.
Evie swore under her breath, glancing back at RJ who was still standing on the sidewalk looking terrified. The wailing rise and fall of sirens could be heard in the distance.
‘If you don’t, we’re gonna get arrested,’ Selena taunted, dangling her gun in Evie’s face.
Evie frowned at the weapon. Victor had armed them with guns? Oh, dear god. She glanced once more over her shoulder. RJ was now jogging towards them. The sirens were getting closer, and Selena was right. The police would take one look at the three of them and pull them over for questioning, and then they’d find the guns and Evie would be screwed.
Swearing some more, she put her hands together and boosted Selena up and over the wall. Then she pushed RJ to the ground and stood on his knee to pull herself up and over.
‘Hide in those bushes,’ she hissed down to RJ, pointing to some rhododendron bushes further down the street, ‘and if you see an unhuman, run and don’t look back.’
RJ nodded, looking only too pleased to obey.
Evie dropped to a crouch on the other side of the wall beside Selena. They were in the grounds of some mega-mansion that seemed abandoned judging by the toppled garden furniture, overgrown grass and dirty windows. Could be the recession had forced the owners into foreclosure. Could be they’d been eaten. She didn’t want to think about it.
‘Stay behind me,’ she ordered Selena as they began skirting the perimeter wall. Her pulse was racing, every sound amplified, including her own breathing. She felt dizzy and nauseous. The fresh injection of adrenaline pounding through her bloodstream was making her body shake.
There were unhumans – lots of them – close by. She could feel them. That’s what her body was reacting to.
She wiped the sweat from her palms as she ducked through undergrowth and came up on the side wall that divided the property from the house where the Originals were hiding out. Footprints in the soil showed her where Cyrus and Flic had stopped to climb the wall.
Selena took hold of a thick low-hanging branch and hoisted herself up into a tree that brushed against the wall. Evie followed behind, not wanting Selena to get too far ahead. She was just swinging her way onto a second, higher branch when she heard Selena draw in a breath and gasp ‘Carajo!’