*
Trina tipped her head back, all the way back, and looked up at the hammered-pewter sky through the interlacing branches of the tree she was supposed to climb. A stout oak with wonderful thick branches, perfect for hooking her legs around and maintaining her balance while she took her shots.
She let out a wobbly breath. “I’m not a sniper.”
Beside her, Lanny snorted. “Yeah, I knew that.”
“Smartass,” she said without any heat, and turned to look at him. He wore jeans, and a black shirt under a Kevlar vest. Very dressed-down detective on a bust. He carried a shotgun propped on one shoulder, and a .45 at his waist. “You look hot.”
“That’s what I was going for.”
Trina crashed against him; threw her arms around his waist and he caught her hard with his free arm, squeezing her so tight she felt her ribs shift. She pressed her face into the collar of his shirt, tucked her nose over it so she felt warm skin, and took a deep breath of him.
“Don’t get killed,” she said.
“Don’t decide you like sniping so much that you run off and join the Army.”
“I am so serious right now, Roland.”
“I know.” He dropped his face into her hair, breath warm down the back of her neck.
She held him a long moment – as long as she dared; not long enough – and finally pulled back, dashed at her eyes with the back of one gloved hand. “You better go.” It hurt to look at his face, its familiar, comforting array of planes and lines.
“You wanna boost?”
“Yeah, that’d be good.”
He did it wrong, grabbing her by the waist and lifting her, sure to get a double handhold on her ass when he pushed her up to the lowest branch. But it made her chuckle, and she figured that was the point, especially when she looked down and saw his wistful, tight-edged smile.
“Be safe,” he said.
“You too.”
I love you.
With one last glance, he melted off into the underbrush, much quieter and smoother than he’d ever been as a mortal man.
Trina took a deep breath and started climbing, the Mosin-Nagant heavy against her back.
43
“Hold the bars with both hands, like that, yes. I believe all the metal’s connected. Conducive, that way,” Val had said. “And just wait. This might take a moment.” He’d wrapped his own hands around his bars, as well as he could, so his thick cuffs were touching the steel.
“Wait for what?”
“You’ll know it when it happens.”
That had been…how long ago? He didn’t know.
He’d never been electrocuted before.
Fuck.
As awareness returned, he realized that he’d let go of the bars at some point during his fit. Seizure. Whatever it was.
Rooster blinked open blurry eyes and saw that extra lights had been turned on overhead, so bright they hurt – or maybe that was the aftereffects of electrocution.
Voices echoed off the stone walls. Shuffle of feet, clank and creak of his cell door opening.
He lifted his hands and saw they were trembling. Not only that, but the shock seemed to have reversed Red’s pain-suppressing magic. His entire left side was alive with hurt.
Still, it wasn’t the worst off he’d ever been.
His vision finally settled in time to see that three guards had come down; two were headed for the cell on the end, and one had come in to see why he was spasming on the ground.
“Shit,” the guy said, leaning low over Rooster, not protecting his sidearm at all. “Do you think…agh!”
Not his most impressive performance, and it hurt like hell, but the guard ended up unconscious on the floor, and Rooster got shakily to his feet with the man’s gun in his hand. He bent down to retrieve the stun baton from his belt, too. Armed it…and caught the first of the other two guards in the face with it when he turned to see what all the noise was about.
He turned the gun on the other.
“Wait,” Val rasped. He’d pushed himself up to a sitting position from his electrified sprawl on the floor, but he shook like a newborn foal. The crazy fuck was smiling, though. “Leave them alive. P-p- damn it. Please.” He gave a few wheezy coughs. “I need to…to…”
Rooster cracked the man across the temple with the gun instead, and he dropped like a bag of hammers to lay beside his twitching colleagues. “What’s the plan here?” He ached all over, and it felt like his teeth were vibrating, he couldn’t stop shaking, but adrenaline was as powerful a drug as any. And as his head cleared by the second, Rooster knew the urge to move. If they were making a break for it, it had to be now, and it had to be fast.
“Cuffs,” Val panted, with a gesture that was either meant to jangle them, or was just a spasm.
“Keys?”
“Check them.”
Unsteadily, hurrying and clumsy, he did, and hit pay dirt.
“The collar first,” Val instructed when Rooster knelt in front of him. “Watch the electrodes.”
There were electrodes, he saw, more than a dozen, tiny round things trailing green wires, stuck down the back of Val’s neck, across his shoulders, and down his chest. And inside the cuffs and the collar, there were spikes too, he saw, leaving bloody scratches on Val’s pale skin.
“Jesus Christ, what is this?” It was mostly rhetorical. And partly a reaction to the smell. Up close like this, it became readily apparent that no one had allowed Val to bathe in a very long time.
“It’s a shock collar,” Val explained with a weak laugh. “Like for a dog.”
“Yeah. I got that.”
The metal was new, untarnished, and it opened with a quick turn of the key. Val hissed as Rooster drew it away, and they didn’t have time. This was taking too long.
“Here.” Rooster moved one of Val’s trembling hands up to the guy’s own collarbone, and the electrodes there. “Pull those off while I get the cuffs.”
He complied with a soft grunt of effort.
The mass of chains, cuffs, and collar hit the stone floor with a sound that seemed bigger than it ought to be. Val blinked at his bloodied wrists a moment, chest hitching as he breathed.
“Can you stand?” Rooster asked.
“Yes, just…Here. Drag him to me.” He gestured limply to one of the unconscious guards.
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
Rooster was already in deep as it was. And fuck these guys, seriously. Fumbling a little, he managed to move one of the guards close to Val. Close enough for Val to grab the man’s arm and drag him, with much difficulty and cursing, up into his lap. He turned his head with a shaking hand, so the guard’s throat was exposed; Rooster could see the pulse beating just beneath the skin.
“What are you doing?”
Val ran his tongue across his lip, staring down at the man’s neck. He took a few deep breaths, and muttered something in a language Rooster didn’t understand. It sounded reverent, like a prayer.
“We don’t have time–” Rooster started.
And Val ducked his head and bit the man’s throat.
*
Fulk dreamed of vampires. Strange ones, three of them – one in particular who smelled faintly of Sasha.
Then he snapped awake and realized he could smell vamps. Barely. It was more a tingling down the back of his neck. He growled, an automatic reaction, and Annabel stiffened as she came awake against his chest.
“What?”
There had been a dozen things he was probably supposed to do – the least of which was make sure Sasha and the girl hadn’t killed one another. But between the lulling warmth of the bath, and the sticky heat of Annabel’s skin pressed against his, he’d pushed responsibility aside and let the moment turn into the kind of slow, melting sex that left him breathless, panting endearments against her throat. After, they’d pulled down the sheets on the bed and stretched out on the cool silk, limbs intertwined. Fulk hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but he obviously had.
He sat up, now, fuzzy-headed, still very much naked. “Vamps. Close.”