The Shopgirl's Prophecy (Beasts of Vegas Book 1) (8 page)

Roz swiveled in her seat and aimed a loaded pistol at her. “If you turn this car around I will shoot you. No joke.”

“My purse is back there.” She pressed the brake pedal. She was alone, in a foreign country with no foreseeable path home.

Roz jammed the barrel of her weapon to the side of Ali’s throat, a cold, hard warning. “If we don’t catch up to him, he will die.” She spoke very slowly and calmly, even as she drew back the hammer with a scary click. “We can get your things later. Put your foot on the gas pedal.”

Roz was right. There wasn’t time to double back and still catch Connor before he overtook Olek. Connor was probably going to die. It seemed incomprehensible, and yet people were dropping like flies. Why not him, too?

Though it grated to do what the other girl ordered her to, Ali wouldn’t risk Connor’s life for a vintage Coach bag. “On the way back,” she said. “First thing.”

“You bet.” Roz withdrew the gun.

Jarring her teeth at every pothole in the road, Ali pushed the VW over sixty. They’d catch up to Connor, convince him to re-join them, and collect her purse on the return trip. If it was still there. With her credit card in hand, she’d insist on getting the hell out of the States. She’d take a bus, a train, or a covered wagon. Whatever it took to get to an airport and rejoin civilization.

In London, there were people—her dad’s neighbor Dave, or her roommate CJ—who’d help her. Maybe. She chewed her lip.

Roz leaned forward. “Slow down.”

Ali hit the brakes a little too hard, flinging the other woman against the dashboard.

Up ahead, between two large strip malls, Connor’s rust red F-350 materialized, parked diagonally across an access road. Abandoned.

“Oh, God,” Ali breathed. They’d found him. Though they’d been discussing his suicide mission ever since they’d climbed into the car, she’d never really considered discovering him dead.

Roz opened her door while the car was still rolling and ran toward the truck, handguns locked and loaded.

Alina climbed out more slowly. She carried a pair of Roz’s discarded pistols, one in each hand, though she didn’t even know if they were loaded. They could have been dressed up water pistols for all she knew, but she couldn’t stay in the car. A sort of haze of leftover violence and rage hung in the air. Something was wrong.

She followed, rounding the front bumper. Roz knelt over a body. No big battle, no hissing vampires, just a blood-soaked Connor lying flat on his back on greasy asphalt, his own knife embedded in his chest.

“He’s fine,” Roz said, her voice shaking. “He’s gonna be fine.”

He didn’t look fine. He looked like a science class cadaver. He lay in the dirt like a used-up apple core, his eyes and fingers twitching as if he wanted to wake up, but couldn’t.

“Help me get him in the bed of the truck.”

But moving him would only cause further pain, which he didn’t need. Ali stared at his throat, torn and bleeding. Just like her uncle’s. No, nothing they did could hurt him worse than he already was.

“Ali,” Roz shouted. “Now.”

She leapt forward. There wasn’t time to screw around. He needed help, and she had to get her head in the game.

His muscles and joints had turned to boiled noodles, which made him super heavy and hard to hold. They carried him, though, slung between them, and placed him sloppily in the bed of the Ford.

“Head north at the end of the road,” Roz shouted, settling beside him in the back of the pickup among their arsenal in bags and boxes. “Anton and Natasha fund a medical clinic outside Henderson. It’s not far.”

Ali felt her way around the truck like a blind person. Stefan had had the same gray pallor to his skin as he’d died, a fish out of water, struggling for every heartbeat. Her uncle had twitched too. It didn’t bode well for the big, beautiful hunter who’d only been trying to help her.

Despite her best intentions, everyone she’d come into contact with in the past twenty-four hours had died. Except Roz. She glanced back at the other girl.
Only a matter of time, sweetheart.

It took two attempts to get the truck started and in gear. She turned the wheel and floored it. They shot forward so fast her head whipped back, and Roz screamed obscenities from the rear.

Ali eased off the gas, but clenched the wheel and breathed through a wave of nausea. Connor didn’t deserve to die—drained of life and convulsing in the dirt, his pale face splattered with his own blood. God, Oleksander used people like garbage. He’d used her uncle and Natalie and Ron. And poor Stefan.

She’d give anything to be home in London. She wished to be in her flat, safe and sound, as if the whole trip to the States had been a nightmare brought on by spicy food, and she wasn’t really cursed to watch everyone around her suffer and die.

Roz pounded on the roof, Ali turned the steering wheel hard, and they came to a shuttering stop in front of a strip mall. She jumped out and stood on tiptoe to see into the truck bed. Connor had stopped twitching. Roz did six chest compressions and still had the energy to yell at her.

“Get the doctor!”

He’s dying
. Because, despite Connor’s iron resolve, the odds of him coming back from this were infinitesimal. But Roz wasn’t giving up and neither would Ali. A small chance was still a chance. She pulled the only walking lab coat in the building outside.

“What do we have?” the doctor asked, climbing into the pickup’s bed.

“Vampires. He stopped breathing a couple minutes ago.” Roz bent and blew two quick puffs into his open mouth, and then continued chest compressions. “Can you help him?”

The clinic wasn’t set up for emergency triage, only minor wounds and broken bones. A modern hospital, it was not. More like a frontier doctor’s office in an American western. They squeezed by two women flanking a boy with an icepack pressed to his head. The doctor directed them into an exam room furnished with a sink, a cupboard, and a hospital bed.

Connor sank into the mattress, his arm cranked unnaturally, and his feet splayed outward. To reassure herself he was warm and alive, Ali grasped his blood-speckled forearm.

The doctor shoved an Ambu bag at Roz, who looked like she knew what she was doing. “Blondie will do thirty fast compressions, and then you hit him with two breaths from that.”

Blondie? Was that supposed to be her? “Do what?”

“Straddle him.” The doc gave Ali a leg up onto the gurney and for a moment she was airborne before settling on top of Connor’s hips. Her left hand grasped his shoulder to steady herself, and she smelled his wound, an organic and coppery twang in the air. And then her gaze fell upon his throat. They’d bitten him, what appeared to be more than once, and it felt like a worse invasion than the stabbing.

“What are you waiting for?” The doc grasped her hand and demonstrated the right place to pump his chest. “Don’t stop. I’ve got to charge the defibrillator.” She ran in and out of the room, starting an IV, hanging a sack of donor blood over him, and shooting him up with three different drugs.

Ali did as she was told. She focused on counting her compressions and not jostling the blade protruding from his diaphragm, pressing her palms harder and harder against his ribs as seconds ticked by.

“Keep going. You’re both doing great.” Working around Ali, the doctor cut his blood-soaked T-shirt and jeans off, leaving him in nothing but a pair of blue boxer shorts. He looked young and thin, not at all like he’d been that afternoon in the hotel suite.

She hadn’t saved her uncle. She’d been too late. She hadn’t saved Stefan. She’d been too afraid. But here was her chance, finally, to do something.

There was still hope. Connor wasn’t dead yet.

I’ll save you. I’ll bring you back.

She leaned into her thirty on, two off rhythm, compressing his chest nearly to the point of fracturing ribs. Blood coated both her palms as sweat beaded on her brow and ran down her face.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen.

The doc tapped Ali on the arm. “You can get down now.”

“I’m not done,” she panted.
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen
.

“Okay, but this might sting a little.”

The doctor slapped on a couple chest leads and activated the defibrillator.

Oh. Ali hopped off the table as the heart monitor beeped.

Flat line.

She couldn’t watch one more person die. She might lie down and fade away forever. Her stomach fluttering in sympathy, she backed into the doorframe, inhaling through her nose, but it didn’t help steady her nerves. She smelled blood and death.

She meant to keep it inside, but her prayer slipped out in a whisper. “Please.” The paddles went off once, twice. The lines on the machine leapt wildly. The doctor shocked him again.

#

Volk had christened the former chapel inside St. Peter’s Hospital the cathedral, and it was his favorite meeting room. It had a definite air of the supernatural. The crumbling plaster, the charred walls, the birds nesting overhead. It was a beautiful cliché, and Maks adored it.

The only furnishings were a large table—currently covered in colored maps of the area—one chair, and Volk’s sofa. He stretched out on it and waited for Olek to speak.

There hadn’t been words exchanged on the tense drive back from Paradise. Not only had they lost Anya, but that uppity human had wasted their time and killed Dawn. Someone would pay for the waste of time and the waste of a good soldier, and Maks only hoped it wouldn’t be him.

The Destroyer paced, brows drawn. Not a happy face. Maks schooled his features. It was second nature at this point, reading Olek’s moods and reacting appropriately. Maks’ skill at lying had reached master levels. His boyish face put everyone at ease. They underestimated him, always had. They saw a teenager when they should see a man, full grown. A dangerous man.

“You promised me,” Olek said, growling, “that Anya would be there.”

He sat up. Time to soothe the savage beast. “We received bad information.” Keeping his gaze averted, he added a hint of deference to his voice as he remembered Olek had been shot today. “It won’t happen again.”

Olek paused in his pacing across the faded, torn carpeting. “You have failed me twice.”

“Forgive me, my lord.” He bowed his head. “But she is within our grasp.”

Maks had been keeping tabs on Anya since his release from his American prison. For the past twenty-two years, she’d been in the UK, out of reach, ensconced in a metropolis built upon an island. Uri Rusenko had planned his disappearance perfectly. But, over time, he’d grown sloppy. Over confident. The fool had died and left her all alone.

And Maks wasn’t the only person watching. Almost the moment Anya stepped foot on American soil, Olek knew it. He was far trickier than even Maks gave him credit for. He’d taken a few days to plan, and then five of them had gone to Paradise. Except they’d missed her by minutes. She was on a bus, her uncle admitted under threat of torture. Olek sent Maks along to investigate. But a clueless humanitarian had nearly shot his head off. Fearing he’d pass out and be imprisoned again, Volk had fled.

Infuriated, sensing a never-ending rabbit chase, Olek killed her family and retreated to form a new plan. A better one.

“You won’t fail me again.” The threat in Olek’s tone was unmistakable.
Lose the girl a third time and forfeit your life
. Volk’s youthful appearance went a long way in easing tensions, but there were limits.

If it would’ve helped smooth things over he’d have fallen to his knees in supplication. But that might have been overdoing it.

The Destroyer sent him a disgusted look. “Choose your punishment.”

Maks stopped breathing for a split second. He hadn’t been punished in years. Not since the manifesto debacle, during which major news outlets in the West had laughed at them. No one mocked the Destroyer.
No one
.

The public ridicule had been Maks’ fault because he’d encouraged publishing it. Releasing it was supposed to humiliate Olek. Maks had known the consequences of making the Destroyer into a joke. It had seemed worth it at the time, but lots and lots of burning flesh had since tempered Maks’ sense of humor.

Maks stood immediately. To show an instant of hesitation or fear would degrade the position of power he’d worked so hard to gain. And keep.

“As you wish, my lord.”

The wall opposite his couch was covered with a myriad of medieval weapons. A sword, a mace, a club, daggers, and for the truly damned a large double-bladed axe. Most of the weapons caused copious bleeding, and Maks didn’t need to draw the attention of any of his less-evolved brethren scattered throughout the abandoned hospital.

Bones were a bitch to heal, but with no other choice, he lifted the club from its place on the wall. It was a thick, gnarled chunk of wood with one end wrapped in black tape. He offered it to Olek, who accepted it, his face expressionless.

“Turn around.”

Maks showed Olek his back. He tried to loosen up and breathe. Taking a hit all tensed up only made it hurt worse.

Crack. His left knee crumpled, and he collapsed onto his side, his fingers scrabbling for purchase in the frayed carpet.

Son of a bitch. It would be days before he could walk properly again, he knew from experience. The Destroyer swung his caveman club again and again, bashing up and down Maks’ right side. Bones crackled and popped. His shoulder joint separated.

Maks locked his jaws together, despite the explosion of pain, and never made a sound. Not a whimper, not a moan, not so much as a peep. It was one of his greatest strengths. It was what had kept him on Olek’s good side all these years.

Three of the four sons, not to mention Maks’ eleven original comrades, had been weaker men, and now they were all dead or entombed. Nothing disgusted Olek more than hearing a grown man scream in agony.

Black spots appeared before Maks’ eyes. The pain escalated from intense to almost unbearable. That’s when the club returned to its place on the wall. Maks managed to stand with one smashed knee and a dead right arm. A small victory.

He’d love to crawl off and tend his wounds in private, but he had to suck it up and stay until dismissed. Another test of both strength and deference.