The Nightlife San Antonio: (Urban Fantasy Romance) (The Nightlife Series) (15 page)

He returned to
the tree, hoping to catch her and head out the way of the two dead guys, but stopped short. “I knew they’d do that.” He cursed under his breath and watched two figures coming down his side of the apartments, from the opposite direction, about ten feet from San Antonio’s most wanted.

S
he stepped right out of the shadows to meet them, that stupid bitch. He had a mind to punch her. Not only did she step into their path, she kept on rolling straight for them. What the …?

Though good sense would have him slinking off into the shadows to take them out from the side, he couldn’t help but move in
closer to see what the hell she was up to. Adrian strained to see where her pistol was – not in hand, not that he could see. He caught a glint of the black gunmetal on the ground by the tree. The fool woman walked right up to them, unarmed.

As he stepped up to the other side of the tree, on
e of them spoke to her. Adrian couldn’t hear his words, but whatever he said to her had flipped some kind of psycho switch. She moved in the blink of an eye and raked one guy across the face, then latched onto the other guy’s neck. There was an actual crunch noise when she connected with him, and Adrian knew without a doubt she was chomping through bones and cartilage. Girl had a set of teeth.

The other guy whined in pain, his face marred by dark, bloody lines that glistened in the
rippling half-light from the pool. Cursing, the man gathered enough wits to focus his gun on her back. Adrian took aim, and was about to let fly when she hit the man in a blur of speed, knocking him clean off his feet. He landed on his back, and she was on him. Her face went into his neck, and came back up a second later to spit out a juicy chunk of something really disgusting … meaty.

The wet flesh landed near Adrian’s feet, and he almost lost his stomach right there. She made these wet gulpin
g sounds as she sucked from his torn neck. The guy couldn’t do anything but gurgle, his pistol lost in the attack.

This woman was definitely not human and she didn’
t need Adrian, not for protection. The vampire could handle herself just fine.

A light came on across t
he way. The scuffle and gunshots had made enough noise to wake someone. Adrian’s good sense overwhelmed his revulsion, and he snatched the back of the blue shirt he’d loaned her, now splattered with blood. “Come on. We’re going, now. Someone’s probably called the cops.”

She was up and in his face, her chin smea
red with blood, eyes ablaze with some kind of fury. She actually growled like an animal.

Adrian backed away, his gun hand doing its own thing, aiming right at her. “What the fuck?” She
reminded him of the times he’d messed with his friend’s pit bull as the animal was eating from its bowl. It had snapped at him like he was the next meal if he got in the way.

Her eyes flicked, and the nutjob woman who’d been in his apartment for two days returned. She wiped the blood off her mouth with the sleeve of her shirt
–
his shirt
. She watched him warily. “Sorry … I got a little carried away.”

His gun hand lo
wered slowly, but he wasn’t completely comfortable turning his back to her. The girl was dangerous. “Come on.” He grabbed her arm and steered her around the dead men and out the side of the apartments to his truck. The adrenaline dropped off, and his hands jittered with the post-combat shakes, just like Iraq.

Stop it.
He shook it off and managed to slip the key in the passenger side door of his truck. Her hand on his stilled him.

“
It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. I won’t let them hurt you.”

Instant rage flooded him. The fucking audacity. “You! You can’t … that’s just … they’re here for you! Some asshole gave t
hem a tip that I know something. They’re not here to kill me. They don’t give a shit about me!”

“Adrian, calm down, you’re hurting me.” He’d grabbed her by the throat and pushed her against the truck. This stupid … woman, thing, whatever the hell she was.
She knew how to say the wrong fucking thing at the wrong time. He did need to calm down though.

Watching her munch on two men, damn near eating them, he had finally hit the wall. This was more
than he could deal with. Killing men, that was intense, but she was something else. “You killed them with your teeth. Do you even know how wrong that is? With your teeth!”

He grabbed her jaw, and saw the pain register as he squeezed hard. He didn’t want to hurt her
, but he did. “I wanna kick your ass
so
bad. How could you do this? How could you drag me into this sickness? Drugs, mafia, murder, and vampires. I saved your life, and this is the thanks I get?”

Gritting her teeth, she didn’t say a word. There was n
othing to say. He preferred her silence, because if she spoke he’d probably just smack her anyway.

Hands off
, Adrian, you’re better than this. You’re a better man. You’re not a sociopath, you’re a paramedic. You are more than the sum of your actions.

He let
her go and walked around to the driver’s side of his truck, desperate to get hold of some wet wipes and clean the blood off his hands.

* * * *

He drove out to the highway, moving
northeast, letting the radio hum some innocuous crap. He couldn’t focus on where to go, what to do. As long as he had
her
to deal with, his life was a complete shit-job. He should get rid of her now. Call 911, make up some bullshit, ditch the murder weapon, and wash his hands of this whole deal.

Coronado might not believe him, b
ut it wouldn’t matter. They didn’t have any evidence on Adrian. She was the unfixable problem. Get rid of her, and everything else fell into place.

How could he do it?

She sat there on the seat in her blood-soaked shirt, no socks, no shoes, nothing but his ruined shirt and a past that just wouldn’t quit. A murdering drug queen with a set of teeth that could cut a man down. No matter how many times he tried to envision getting rid of her, his mind kept circling back around to the same thing.
I need her
.

He needed this woman. Him, the guy who never needed anyone.

He’d moved out of his parents’ house at seventeen and did two tours in the military. He had been his own man, doing exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, with no one to answer to since his discharge from the military three years ago. Women were always a problem, rarely worth the trouble to get in their pants, definitely not worth the live-in headaches.

And this vampire
… oh man. He picked the
wrong
girl to help.

He hated what she had
done, because it forced him to kill again. He now faced the unpleasant truth, he had missed the thrill of combat, the rush of killing the enemy. She had shoved him back into a mode of thinking that he had tried so hard to change.

On his discharge, h
e’d debated for weeks whether or not to take a mercenary contract. Paid $70,000 starting wage with raises and per diem for on-site expenses. That was a lot of money to go right back where he had been, in the Middle East desert, doing the same thing he’d been doing for the U.S., killing people. Mercs didn’t have the greatest equipment, but they sure knew how to have a good time, and none of them had any illusions about their job. Those boys cut through anyone who got in the way, and the rules of engagement were damn near non-existent. The company recruiter made it clear. “If it’s a potential problem, kill it.”

He could have had that life. H
e still had the contract in his dresser drawer, buried beneath his paramedic uniforms. But, he had wanted so bad to do something different, to be someone different. Somehow, this life found him anyway.

To go with
Her Highness
and follow this path was to become the thing he had hoped to avoid. But he couldn’t deny the rush, the feeling was … incomparable. The fact that he enjoyed this shit so damn much really scared him.

As though she’d been reading his mind, she chimed in.
“If there was any other way, if you could just drop me off at the bus stop, I would tell you to take me there now. I think you know that won’t work. We have to run, Adrian. There’s no other choice. And we have to do it together.”

She spoke
out the cracked pickup window, not even looking at him.

Shaking his head, hating the fact that he was boxed into this corner, he snapped. “And when we are running to wherever, what
happens when the money runs out? I only have a couple thousand in my account, about two hundred bucks on me.”

“Get me to Corpus Christi and we will have money. Money’s not the issue.”

“It will be when you have to start paying bribes.”

She turned to him sharply, scrutinizing him, as though seeing him for the first time. “There is enough money to bribe our way out.”

Arabs in a mountain village will gladly take a handful of bills that don’t amount to more than fifty dollars, but the U.S. was a different place. Customs officials, hotel attendants, travel agents, all those people you come into contact with … dammit. He could see it coming and he didn’t like it. They’d have to go to ground, like fucking hobos.

If that was the case, then he
was going to have some
me
time before the rest of his life turned to complete shit. He pulled into the parking lot of Walmart. “Wait here. Stay low. Don’t let anyone see you.”

“What are you doing?” She tried to grab at his arm, but he moved too fast sliding off the seat.

“Just do what I tell you, for once.”

Her eyes squinted
in suspicion and she glanced around the parking lot. “You better hurry!” She lay down on the seat, still looking up at him as he stared at her through his driver’s side window.

He took his sweet fucking time shopping.

* * * *

She watched him get in the truck
and throw a couple Walmart bags behind the seat as if the fifty minutes he spent in there was no big deal.
Bastard.

It was her fault. She had pushed him to the edge. He’d been so … accommodating. She had let down her guard, stopped
trying to hide her true nature.

She grit
ted her teeth and swallowed all the things she wanted to say. Now was not a good time for words. They were both too high strung. She sat up in the seat, shivering a little with the cool night air. Her shirt was wet and cold, and she had nothing else to wear. And he didn’t say a word, just drove, to where she had no idea.

The man could be maddening.

He pulled into a hotel off the Riverwalk, right in the middle of downtown. San Antonio River was a mecca of shopping and restaurants, and the Riverwalk nightlife teemed with parties, dance and music over the weekends. How could Adrian expect to fly under the radar in a place like this?

She could no longer remain
silent. “We can’t stay. We have to go now. Right now. I just need clothes. This is way too high profile. We’re supposed to be hiding!”

“Shut up. Get low and wait here. I’ll be back in
a minute with a hotel key. I brought you some clothes.”

She moved to dig into his W
almart bag and he grabbed her hand like a kid reaching in the cookie jar. “Wait until you’ve had a bath.”

H
is eyes glanced at the sticky blood on her chin, and he shuddered slightly. The clean freak was always so worried about germs. She just wanted to get out of this shirt, so large it could have fit two of her, and get something on that didn’t let the cool air up her crotch every time she moved.

Again she held
back her words. She did need to clean up and change, and this place was good as any.

“Stay down. I’ll be right back.”

This time he was true to his word, he popped back in the truck after five minutes and drove around to the backside of the Hotel Valencia. Three stories high, art deco stucco in three matching color tones, with palm plants on every corner of every floor and samba dance music blaring from the packed lounge, the place looked expensive. She couldn’t help but smile that he’d brought her to somewhere this nice, instead of a dive motel.

“When w
e get to the coast, you owe me three hundred bucks for this suite.”

She bit her tongue, literally, and the taste of her own blood kept her from saying something she wo
uld probably regret. She’d rather not strain the tenuous civility they had.

She sa
t brooding with memories she wished had happened to someone else while he dashed up to their room and came back down with a blanket. Smart. She wasn’t exactly fit to be seen.

“K
eep this around you. We don’t want to scare anyone.” He wrapped the blanket over her head and shoulders, hiding the lower half of her face.