Ahead of him in the darkened room, the ferret leapt straight up into the air, chittering and twisting, before she hit the ground on all fours and shot off across the rubble-strewn floor. Quinton had to dive and grab her before she made it into an unseen hole in the wall of the abandoned underground. Even wearing a harness and leash, Chaos was hard to catch. The ferret squirmed in his grip, determined to get to whatever was holding her attention. Quinton tightened up the harness, ignoring the little animal’s tiny claws and teeth.
“Give it up, tube rat,” he muttered. “You are not breaking for freedom on my watch. Harper would skin me if I lost you.” Normally, she was a well-behaved little pocket pest, but since the first vampire incident, Chaos had been pretty spooky, suddenly taking off with no visible provocation to zoom along baseboards and floors with determined concentration, chuckling like a lunatic.
Huh. No visible provocation, he thought. With his free hand, Quinton pulled the newest version of the paranormal activity detector out of one of his roomy pockets and flicked it on. It wouldn’t work very long since he’d had to trade battery bulk for portability, but it might pick up something while it lasted. He placed the ferret back on the floor, keeping a tight grip on her leash.
Chaos danced around in an angry circle of hops, baring her teeth, as if taunting some unseen foe to take its best shot. The detector chirped.
The chirping accelerated. Then the pitch changed and the detector began wailing. “Uh-oh,” Quinton muttered, sweeping side to side with the device, trying to pinpoint a source direction—so he could avoid it. Fascinating as hunting ghosts might sound, he was sure that whatever was causing the aberrant response was not something he wanted to tangle with. The signal was strong enough to push the detector into a near-overload state and that couldn’t be good.
He snatched Chaos up and stepped around the garbage fall with the wriggling ferret in one hand and the detector in the other. He didn’t know what he was getting, but it was putting out a lot of paranormal energy.
In the gloom behind the scree of trash, a pale woman with black-and-white-striped hair and embers for eyes turned toward him and hissed like a snake. Whoa. He stopped cold. OK, hypothesis confirmed: The detector picked up more than remnant spirits because this was no ghost. His instincts screamed “Vampire!” while his mind tried to argue; she wasn’t quite like the vampires he’d seen before. There was something ineffably horrifying about her and she looked . . . vaguely like a cobra spreading its hood with the way her hair fanned around her head.
Quinton twitched to the side as she charged at him.
The vampire woman passed him, then whipped around. Quinton had already shoved the detector into a pocket and snatched one of the vampire stunners as she recoiled to lunge at him again. The detector continued screeching.
She shot forward like an unloaded spring. The sound from the detector pierced upward like a needle through Quinton’s spine and debilitating terror rooted him to the spot.
The ferret shrieked and bit Quinton’s thumb, clawing his hand in pure panic. The pain cut through Quinton’s daze, and he jerked the stunner upward at the last second.
The vampiress was on him, driving stiletto claws into his back and shoulders as he squeezed the switch, shoving the lightning-spitting head of the stunner into the monster’s belly.
She fell back into the garbage. Quinton let out his breath and started turning away.
The vampiress stood up, spitting. Quinton blinked and almost let go of the ferret. The shock should have dropped the vampire in her tracks, knocked her out completely for an hour or more. He’d even adjusted the voltages up after his last encounter, not caring if he sent a few of the bloodsuckers to final oblivion in piles of ash, like the one who’d been zapped by its fellow bloodsucker.
Quinton swore and spun back to meet the vampire’s next leap at him, shoving the stunner up under her chin and holding the switch down as hard and long as the sweep of uncanny fear that rattled his bones would allow. This time she fell down and stayed on her knees, quivering and making a high-pitched keen that sounded less like pain than fury. But not dead. Not reduced to smoke and a greasy spot as she should have been.
Quinton whirled and ran. Chaos approved by letting go of his thumb and burrowing into his nearest pocket with a frightened yelp.
They were a room length away when Quinton heard the vampire get back up. The pile of detritus exploded as she forced her way through it, taking the shortest route toward him regardless of obstacles.
Quinton dodged and jumped, pelting through the underground toward his bunker under the Seneca Street off-ramp. The white vampiress was slower than she had been—at least he’d hurt her—but she wasn’t actually slow. And he could hear more bloodsuckers falling in behind her as he ran. Where were they coming from? He didn’t look back to find out. He couldn’t afford to waste the energy, and the fear that drove him wouldn’t let him anyhow.
Except for the scraping tattoo of their steps on the uneven, gritty floors of the underground, the vampires made no sounds as they pursued Quinton. They just came on.
He shoved through his back door barely ahead of a flock of grasping hands and cutting claws. He slammed the bars and bolts home, feeling the battering of bodies against the wood.
Silence fell for only a moment before something hissed on the outside, “Next time, solo boy.”
“Says you,” he spat back. It was a lame response but all he could manage between his panting and shaking. They frightened him bone-deep and he wasn’t used to that sensation at all.
Then something laughed and the sound made Quinton’s knees buckle until the amusement faded into the distance and darkness of the underground.
He moved out of his bunker and into Harper’s condo the next morning and waited for her to return from England. He didn’t consider the move cowardice; it was self-preservation. Whatever those things were, they weren’t your average vampires, and he didn’t want to tussle with them again anytime soon.
ONE
I would like to blame jet lag for what happened when I got back, but to be honest, I just wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t sure of the time or how out of it I really was when my plane landed at Sea-Tac, or I might have put things off for a day, but the sense of urgency and my exhaustion worked together to convince me that getting to Edward immediately was imperative.
Bone tired is a very bad mental state for a fight. I had tried to sleep on the flight from London, but the ghost of my drowned cousin and my own thoughts about who and what I was and what I was returning home to do kept me awake. Beyond that, sleeplessness had become the norm in the past two weeks so I wasn’t at my brainy best on arrival. I tried to fill Quinton in as he drove us home, but I didn’t even get to the really bizarre parts before I saw that the late May sun was setting and I felt I had no choice but to drop my bags and Quinton at the condo and head for downtown at once.
I called ahead since it was after business hours. I wasn’t able to reach Edward, of course, so I called Bryson Goodall, his personal head of security. Goodall had been my contact during the London trip, but I couldn’t say I was thrilled about talking to anyone other than Edward himself. There was a raw tingling in my fingertips and a muttering of the Grey’s ghost song in my ears that masked my true exhaustion with a foreign irritation that seemed like attention.