Con got that.
“Well, Sin,” Con said loudly, “best of luck. E, I’m heading out on a run.” He caught Eidolon’s dark gaze for just a second, long enough to deliver his unspoken message. I’ll get Sin out.
He headed for the sliding-glass doors, where Wraith was waiting, big body propped casually against the frame, hands tucked in his jeans pockets as he watched. Anticipation glittered in his blue eyes. Con had no idea when the demon had arrived, but he was glad for the extra muscle. Wraith loved a good fight.
Con brushed past Wraith with a nod, climbed into the newest of three black ambulances, and started it up. As if turning the key was a signal, Sin burst out of the hospital. Wraith stepped out as well, his leather duster kicking up around his ankles, and then the Carceris officers were there, Eidolon on their heels. He wouldn’t have been able to do much to stop them inside the hospital, but the parking lot wasn’t protected by the Haven spell.
Sin dashed toward the ambulance while Wraith effortlessly laid the Carceris vamp out with a fist to the throat. Eidolon grabbed the wither drakeby the arm, but not in time to prevent him from launching a lock-dart—a weapon that, once it pierced its target, paralyzed the victim until he arrived at a Carceris prison.
Lightning quick, Wraith knocked the dart askew with his hand, but it struck a glancing blow to Sin’s thigh as it corkscrewed downward. Blood sprayed, and though she yelped, she didn’t slow. As Eidolon decked the demon, Wraith pinned the vamp before he could rise, and Sin leaped into the rig’s passenger seat.
“Go!” she shouted, as she slammed the door shut.
Con hit a button on the dash, and the rear wall of the parking lot shimmered, revealing a human parking garage on the other side.
The rig’s tires squealed as they spun out of the stall. Once they were through the portal, it closed again, turning into a solid, concrete wall. No humans, if they were ever to trespass, would see the door for what it really was.
He turned to Sin, who was looking back to make sure the Carceris guys weren’t somehow breaking through the barrier. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You’re bleeding.”
She clapped a hand over the wound. “I’ve had worse.”
Heart still pounding, he peeled out into the early-morning Manhattan traffic, his aggressive move causing more than a few honking horns. “Keep pressure on it. We’ll pull over in a minute and patch it up.”
“I said I’m okay.”
“Don’t be a stubborn idiot.” He slammed on the brakes to avoid crushing a taxi that pulled out in front of him, though Con intentionally let the ambulance trade paint with the other vehicle, just to make the driver piss his pants. “You can’t afford an infection right now.” Besides, the scent was going to trip his crazy switch if they didn’t get her wound covered.
She rolled her eyes. “How much trouble are E and Wraith in?”
“Interfering with Carceris officers and their duty?” He wondered if he should lie, then decided she could handle it. “A lot.” He didn’t bother telling her he was in for a good time with whips, canes, and waterwheels at the hands of torturers, too, because he doubted she cared.
“Damn,” she breathed.
“They’ll be okay. E’s got experience with the system, and Wraith is… Wraith.”
“I don’t want to owe them. They’re into my shit enough as it is.”
“Ah.”
“Ah, what?” She turned away from looking out the passenger window to glare at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She must have let up on the pressure on her cut, because a particularly strong whiff of blood made his fangs pulse. He breathed through it the way he always did when he’d failed to feed and was treating a bleeding patient. But he’d fed—from Sin—only hours ago, and he shouldn’t be having this reaction.
A chill ripped into his marrow as an ugly thought came to him. What if addiction was already starting to set in? It shouldn’t start until around the sixth feeding, but he was rapidly learning that, with Sin, very little was predictable.
“Earth to Con.” Sin waved her hand in front of his face, breaking him out of both autopilot and the thoughts he didn’t want to be thinking. “What does ‘ah’ mean?”
“Just wondering what makes you tick.” He eased to a stop at a light and watched the first rays of the morning sun peek between two office buildings. “You didn’t ask out of concern if they would be in trouble. You asked because you don’t want to oweyour brothers. Why is that?”
Surprisingly, she didn’t fire off a shot at him. Instead, she went still and silent, and the tantalizing aroma of her blood—and her—thickened in the cab. He glanced at her leg, where a crimson flow seeped between her fingers, and his grip on the steering wheel became white-knuckled as the medical side of him that wanted to fix her battled with the dhampire side that wanted to taste her. Maybe there was a bag of O-pos in the back.
She shifted, throwing her head back against the seat, which had the unfortunate effect of making her small breasts jut forward, testing the elasticity of the black tank top she wore beneath her leather jacket.
The steering wheel groaned under the force of his grip, as the male in him leaped into the fray with the medical and dhampire sides. Damned succubi. He yanked the wheel, and with a squeal of tires, the ambulance whipped into a parking lot.
“What are you doing?” she snapped. “Oh, my God, do you even know how to drive?”
He popped a ticket from the machine, found a parking spot, and shut down the engine, unconcerned that humans would notice them. The ensorcelled ambulance wasn’t invisible to human eyes, but it registered only in their subconscious. Humans would avoid the rig, react to it on the road, but they wouldn’t think of it or its passengers as anything odd or interesting.
No, his concern right now was demons.
And his own desire, which was another kind of demon entirely.
“Climb in the back,” he said tightly. “I’m going to treat your wound.”
“I told you—”
“I don’t care.” His voice was cold, his body hot, and the mix was wreaking havoc with his patience. “You’re on myturf, in myrig, so you follow myrules.”
She glared. “What if the Carceris finds us?”
“They won’t.” He reached between the two seats and shoved open the small door to the box section of the rig. “They’ll be looking for you in the obvious places first. Not city parking lots.”
“And after you’re done patching me up?”
Good question, and he hadn’t thought that far ahead. Probably because his brain was swamped with her scent. “I’m taking you home,” he said finally. “You’re coming home with me.”
Six
“I’m not going home with you.”
“We’ll talk about it while I’m patching you up.” Con jerked his thumb toward the back. “Go.”
Grudgingly, Sin climbed between the front seats and ducked through the hatchlike door separating the cab from the box section of the ambulance. A dull red light illuminated the space, and the same Haven spell symbols from UG were scrawled on the walls, but other than that, it could have been a human ambulance.
Her leg throbbed as she worked her way down the narrow aisle between the bench seat and the stretcher, but that wound wasn’t nearly as bad as the pain spreading through her arm. She didn’t have to look to know a large gash had split her dermoireacross her biceps. The pain had struck suddenly, but she’d borne it in silence, the way she always did. As an assassin, she never gave her victims the luxury of a scream, so she figured she didn’t deserve one any more than they did.