Night Whispers: ShadowLands, Book 1 (9 page)

It was tempting to let her go. But the girl was young, and Jules knew she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she let a scared, high teenager kill herself by wandering into a Shadow den, or worse. She shut her door and started the chase.

Jules was in good shape, so a run didn’t wind her, but her legs were short and stubby compared to the gazelle in front of her. “Hey,” she called out, no longer so quiet, as they raced across the open quad of the university. “Come back here! I can help you.”

But the girl was, sadly, beyond reason. Jules was about ready to flying tackle her to the ground when the teen suddenly came to a halt, breathing hard. Jules stopped behind her, stumbling at the loss of forward momentum. The girl didn’t speak, didn’t turn to face her. Her body shook like a leaf.

“Listen, girl, I know you’re scared, but whatever you’re terrified of…” Jules followed her gaze and swore viciously. Three figures had crept out from behind a decrepit McD’s sign to their right and across the deserted street. She was too far away to see their faces, but no doubt they were focused straight on the two of them. The dinner gong had rung.

Jules glanced around frantically for some cover for the girl. “Get over behind that tree. If anything happens to me, run for the car, got it?”

The teen didn’t respond. Jules grabbed her arm and shook her, and finally the taller female blinked and looked at her. “Behind. The. Tree. Now.”

The girl blinked, and some of the fog seemed to clear from her gaze. “Tree?”

“Yes. Now. And stay.”

Jules pulled her blade and focused on the attackers after making sure the kid was scrambling away. Jules prayed the girl would be alert enough to understand she should hide.

Three Shadows wasn’t bad. Three Jules could handle.

The sound of collective, raspy breathing filled the air as they came closer—theirs, not hers. Jules counted two males and a female. All but naked, claw marks covered their white skin, blending in with the red tracery of raised veins.

Now that she was back on familiar territory, Jules didn’t waste time. With a flip of her hand, her switchblade extended to a deadly length. Racing toward them, she strategized and launched herself at the male leading the pack. One quick slice and his neck gaped open. He fell to the ground in a heap.

Without missing a beat, she turned and slammed her foot into the other male who was creeping closer. The female was a step behind him. The Shadows stumbled together, but neither lost their balance. The female snarled, tossed the male aside and charged her.

Like all older Shadows, she was strong but clumsy. Jules feinted left, ducked out of the Shadow’s closing arms and slammed her knife into her flesh, just under her collarbone. She staggered back, grasping it as if she was stunned to find it there.

The male came at her with a growl. Since her knife was gone, Jules fell back on hand to hand, slamming her fist into his face. It barely fazed him as he reacted, throwing an uncoordinated but fast punch to her solar plexus. She fell backward with a groan, the air rushing out of her body.

Gun.
Yes. Before the male could rush at her again, she pulled the gun from her holster, aimed and shot him straight in the head. At the close range, the high-powered bullet made his skull explode, showering blood and bone fragments over the female Shadow on her knees still tugging at the blade lodged in her chest. Jules ended the female’s futile struggle by firing a bullet into her brain.

Yeah, three were no problem. Sadly, the party was just getting started.

A scream rang through the night. Jules glanced over at her young charge in time to see a still-pigmented female Shadow lurching toward her, uncaring that her companions were getting slaughtered by Jules.

She jumped to her feet, but her race to the woman was interrupted by the sound of raspy breathing behind her. “Oh, come fucking
on
.”

She ducked, turned and raised her gun to take the newest arrival out. The new guy slapped it away before she could get her sweaty finger to pull the trigger.

Resorting to her fists again, she delivered a powerful right hook to the man’s jaw. While he was blessedly stunned, she scooped up the gun on the ground and shot him, grimacing at the fine mist of pink blood. The Shadow lurched backwards and fell on his back, still.

She didn’t waste time to check and see if the deed had been done. She pivoted and ran to the teenager. Even as she ran, she knew she was too late. The Shadow’s mouth was moving on the girl’s shoulder, sucking away at her blood, and the kid was even paler than before, her eyes vacant and officially checked out of reality.

No way. Jules refused to lose someone in front of her very eyes.

She grabbed the Shadow’s brown hair and threw all of her weight into a solid heave. The thing staggered back and fell to the ground, slow in her glutted state. She blinked as Jules straddled her.

The Shadow went limp, all fight gone. Her face relaxed in blissful acceptance. For a split second, Jules could swear coherence shone out of the female’s silver eyes, replacing the madness that had just been there.

But then it vanished, and she began to struggle like a wildcat, twisting and bucking underneath Jules.

Sending a quick prayer upward, Jules took care of the creature with a single, well-placed shot between the eyes.

The sound of the gun was extremely loud to Jules in the now-silent night. She stood on shaky legs and walked back over to the teen who lay on the ground, her pretty amber eyes staring up at the sky. Her dirty brown hair was wet with sweat and clung to cheeks barely beginning to lose the chubbiness of childhood. Bright red blood stained her shoulder.

Jules knelt next to the teen and easily ripped the neckline of her shirt until the bloody wound high up was visible.

Compromised.

The word was what they used for people who were bitten by the Shadows for blood. If the Shadows were ravenous, they feasted on the human’s flesh long enough to kill them, which Jules privately thought was the better option. Better to be eaten alive than be compromised. Because if a person was compromised, then whatever virus the Shadows carried in their blood and saliva was transmitted to the human. And the human, after the hellish three-to-four-day-long Illness, either turned…or died.

“What do I do?” she murmured, half to herself. She had never come across such a recently compromised individual, let alone one so young.

She had never had to watch anyone actually get bitten.

Basic puncture wounds, those she knew how to treat. Clumsily, she pulled her own shirt over her head, leaving her wearing only her tank top. She was amped up enough that the cold didn’t bother her.

She pressed the cloth to the teen’s wound. The shirt was hardly sterile, not with her sweat and dirt covering it, but it was better than nothing. And really, infection was the least of their concerns, not when the mother of all blood-borne diseases was coursing through the girl’s system.

So focused was she on the girl, she didn’t hear the footsteps. The displaced air behind her was her first sign they weren’t alone.

“Fuck,” she muttered in a whisper. Not more Shadows. She was wiped.

Her body turned fast enough that the blow meant for her temple glanced off the back of her head. She fell to her butt, stars temporarily bursting in front of her eyes. Despite her incapacitation, she fumbled for her gun, unsurprised when a boot slammed down on her hand, forcing her to drop her weapon. Tears sprang to her eyes. Not Shadows. Human.

She tried to gasp out an introduction. “I’m here to help. Don’t—”

A hard hand grasped her by the hair and arched her neck backwards before smacking her head into the tree. The sound of more footsteps had her lashing her arms out at the knowledge that she would have to fight two or more people shortly.

Who was crowing about being such a tough chick yesterday?
Pride goeth before the fall.

No, no way was she going out like this. She’d fought Shadows. She could take a couple of humans.

Unless, of course, she thought as an all-too-familiar prick on her neck gave her a slight warning before she became dizzy, they came armed with tranqs.
Chingado.

Jules woke up to the harsh glare of lights trained into her eyes. Her retinas winced from the abuse. There was a dull murmur of noise around her, hands touching her arms and legs, her clothes being shoved aside or unbuttoned and removed.

She couldn’t push her vocal cords, her arms or her legs into motion. Drugged, her sluggish mind told her.

Fingers were on her neck, on her collar. Her earpiece had already been taken from her ear. The murmurs grew louder. One face, a female with stringy brown hair and big black glasses, came into focus above her. Her lips formed words, but they sounded like that old vintage Peanuts cartoon to Jules’s ears.
Wah wah wah.

The chick kept tugging at her collar.
Good luck getting it off
like that.
The latch was fairly well hidden.

The woman tugged at it again. Bitch was cutting off Jules’s oxygen with her tugs. Sadly, she wasn’t hitting the button on the left which would ring James up.

Yeah, she should totally give her lover man the heads up. He should know that she’d been kidnapped, drugged and pummeled. That was probably important. But she was so damn tired. Later, later, she would ring him up later. Maybe she could engage in a little more of that verbal foreplay with him then too.

The roaring in her ears cleared long enough for her to hear the woman speak. “Stop yelling at me, you moron.”

A man responded. “You’ve had this woman drugged on this table all fucking day, and no one thought to question what this collar was?”

“I assumed it was an electro.”

“You assumed wrong. It’s clearly some sort of high-functioning technological device.”

“I’ve been alone here with Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, while you’ve been off—”

“Taking care of the male.” The man’s voice was icy. “Not to mention trying to contain our adventure from this morning. Do you have any idea what would have happened if word got back to—?”

“Yes, yes. You’ve given me the lecture before.”

“If you care about our continued good health, you would listen.” A man came into her field of vision. His hands slipped over her throat, rough and uncaring. “Do we have anything to cut this thing off?”

“I don’t think so. We could send one of the guards out for a power tool.”

Wait, what? Cut off her collar? Fear made her heart beat faster. Forget the fact that they were going to try to cut off her collar when her neck was right freakin’ under it. If they cut off her collar, she couldn’t get a hold of James.

That was untenable. Her heart clenched. Over a year of partnership, friendship, camaraderie and, hell, yes, even caring…they were all tied to that simple, lightweight collar.

“She’s awake.”

Bug-eyed lady regarded her dispassionately. “So? I’ll shoot her up with some more of the sedative.” She turned away.

The man tugged on the collar, his tone of voice conversational. “That must have been you who took out those Shadows yesterday, eh? We wondered. Had we not been dealing with our own problems, we would have come looking for you then.”

Fuck you.

The woman came back into Jules’s field of vision. “Stop talking to her like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re going to make her into another one of your pets.”

“She will be another pet,” the man said comfortably. “She owes me, since she killed one of our other ones. Hell, two of our other ones, if the girl doesn’t survive the bite.”

“Our failures. Who wouldn’t have escaped had you not been so lenient with the hybrid.” The woman slammed the needle she held into Jules’s arm. That little whore.

She’d be no one’s pet, especially not these people.

“Don’t worry about sending for a saw. I found the latch here. Let’s get it off and hammer it.”

Jules made no effort to control her pulse. Panic and anger mingled until she was sure her heart would beat right out of her chest. James. James!

Time flew when an emergency was at hand.

James stretched and rubbed the small of his back as he entered his office. It ached from being hunched over a cot for the past few hours. A full dozen of the soldiers who had returned from the aborted Cheyenne mission that afternoon had become even more sick during their journey back. After a couple of the medical staff fell ill too, it had been all available hands on deck in the sickbay.

Thankfully, it was looking like a particularly virulent strain of flu, and not anything related to the Illness. James made a mental note to read up on medical care. There was nothing he hated more than caring for the sick—it brought back too many memories—but sometimes necessity trumped his desires.

He sank into his chair at the same moment his handheld uttered a warning beep alerting him to a change in one of his agent’s vitals. He docked the device, his own heartbeat stuttering when he recognized Jules’s icon pulsing.

A quick glance at the time showed him she should be close to, if not in California by now. Had he not been tied up, he probably would have checked in an hour or so ago.