Twilight Vendetta (3 page)

“There’s another house, out in those woods,” Devlin said, pointing. “It was once a mansion, but now it’s a falling down ruin. I think that will be our best bet. Let’s–”

He stopped there, because he heard and felt the thing he most detested. Cries of distress from one of The Chosen. Cries he couldn’t ignore even if he wanted to.

And he wanted to. More than anything, right then, he wanted to. Because he knew her. He’d been compelled to rescue her in the past. Repeatedly. He’d sensed her out there, on the water, after the shooting. She’d seemed uninvolved, innocent, but she’d been aware of him as he’d sped past her, after seeing the murders of the two kids.

Dammit, it ate at him that he hadn’t been able to save them. Rhiannon had called out to him mentally, after he and the others had jumped ship to head to the island. She’d warned him that two of the Offspring had gone in after him. They’d been zig zagging the
Anemone
around the Pacific, letting vampires off at various locations. Some of the vamps had taken groups of the mutant children–kids they’d found in cages below decks–with them when they’d headed for shore. They thought they could raise them, give them a home, protect them from their DPI creators. Devlin had no such intention. His goal was to build a resistance and fight back against mankind. There was no room for kids in his plan.

And now she was out there. Emma Benatar, the world’s most irritating BD. And she was in trouble. Of course she was in trouble. She was always getting into trouble with her death defying, thrill seeking ways.

Tavia lunged toward the surf as Emma’s increasing panic filled their senses, but Devlin gripped her shoulders, held her back. “It would be the most clever way to lure us right into a DPI trap, don’t you think?”

“I know it would,” she said. “But you can feel her as well as I can, Devlin. She’s not pretending. She’s in trouble. We must go to her. We have no choice.”

“
I
have no choice. You, and you two,” he added, sending a look at Bellamy and Andrew, “are staying here.”

Emma had steered the boat north at the top speed its motor could manage for a solid hour, hoping the vampires hadn’t gone too far away to sense her. Then she’d sat there, riding the waves up and down over and over, breathing the saltwater air, and working up her courage.

Her mother had told her they would always come when she was in trouble. Always. And they had, dammit, they had.

One, in particular. One, big, beautiful vampire. He’d saved her life twice.

She prayed that one of this crew of fugitives would show the same kindness. She didn’t dare to hope he would be one of them. Oh, maybe one of them might know him, and she’d like that. She’d like that a lot. But that wasn’t the reason for this desperate act. She had to let them know about those two captured kids.

She knew for a fact that one of the vampires had been close enough to see the teenagers shot. But he was long gone before he could have seen what happened afterward. The vampires probably believed those kids were dead. The Offspring. What the hell
was
that?

She closed her eyes, opened them again, and decided there was no more time to waste. She was far enough from shore that swimming to safety would be next to impossible. There was no one around for as far as the eye could see.

She picked up the axe she'd brought along for chopping firewood, in case she needed to spend the night outdoors, and raised it overhead. And then she hesitated. “What if they don’t come?” she asked softly.

The wind picked up a little, lifting her hair, reminding her the water was going to be cold as hell.

But she was twenty-seven. She’d been seventeen when she’d learned the full truth about her future, the fate that awaited those with the Belladonna Antigen. Her father had kept the truth from her for as long as he could. The truth about her mother’s haven, having been torched while she was, in all likelihood, sleeping inside. And the truth about her own nature. The antigen would cause a gradual weakening that hits most in their mid-thirties. It progresses until they just die in their sleep. Most BD’s, those individuals the vampires call The Chosen, don’t live to see forty.

Emma had been living her life to the absolute hilt ever since. She thought of the two kids she’d seen taken prisoner. They had long lives ahead of them. She only had a dozen years, give or take. It wasn’t a hard decision.

She swung the axe. The blade sank easily through the old wooden hull. It cracked and splintered, and water bubbled up around her feet. She wrenched the axe free and swung it again, opening a gaping hole and the sea rushed in faster.

She’d told herself that she had to be scared,
really
scared, or the vampires wouldn’t come. The danger, and her fear, had to be real.

And in a few more minutes, it was.

The water rose fast, and the back of the little boat dipped deep, while the front suddenly bucked upward and threw her off like an unrideable bull. She hit the ocean, and the cold shock of it made her go rigid and sink like a rock.

Loosen up. You have to live long enough for them get here, girl. Come on!

Snapping herself out of her momentary panic, she paddled her way upward, and upward, and wondered where the hell the surface was. Her chest started to burn, then to spasm. And then she broke the surface, sucking in desperate gulps of air. A wave pounded her, driving her back down and she swallowed water.

When she surfaced again, she was choking, gasping, and beginning to wonder what the hell she’d been thinking.

Was this going to be her last grand adventure?

Well, hell, she’d never intended to go out from the side effects of the antigen. Anything was preferable to that. But at the moment, she was thinking there were probably a whole lot of ways preferable to this.

She struggled, she flailed, and then she heard something–a voice, inside her head.
Hold on. I’m coming.

It worked! Hallelujah, it worked! They were coming!

Then the buzzing sound of a motor interrupted her gasping, choking celebration, and a spotlight started dancing around the water between her and shore. A boat was racing toward her from the beach. No!

Humans. Dammit, she had to warn the vampire whose voice she’d heard just now, inside her mind.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, but–”

“I hear you just fine, Emma Louise.”

He’d surfaced right beside her, his arms wrapped tight around her middle, holding her easily. His face was very close to hers, so close she could see the droplets beading along his jawline and trickling down the length of his nose.

And then she met his eyes, and she knew him. She knew him even dripping wet in the dark. “You,” she whispered. Her heart sped up. He was holding her so close, her entire body was pressed against his. Everything in her wanted to touch, to explore, to feel him. Her hands splayed across his soaking wet shirt, a couple of fingers on the skin of his chest, where the top few buttons had come open. His arms around her were as powerful as she remembered. And his face—seeing his face again filled her with an emotion too big to name, or even to explore just then.

“Yes, me,” he said it at length. For a few heartbeats, he’d been looking at her just the same way she’d been looking at him. She could almost believe he felt the same heady combination of relief and joy at seeing her again.

A sound broke into her thoughts, or rather, the cessation of the sound. The approaching boat’s motor had been shut down, and now there were oars slicing through the water.

“Someone’s coming,” she told him softly.

“I know that. And they’re not DPI. Just a couple of fishermen. I’m only holding you up until they get close enough to save you.”

“No. No, you have to take me with you.”

His brows bent, thick and dark over eyes like melted chocolate. “Why would I want to do that?”

Because it’s not my imagination,
Emma thought, staring into those eyes and feeling as if she could drown in them more easily than in the sea.
Because I’ve been telling myself it was, this whole love at first sight thing, just a teenager’s dramatic fantasy. But I still feel it, and I’m not a little girl anymore. That’s why.

She closed her eyes, reminded herself that according to her lifetime of research, vampires could read human thoughts if they cared to try. So she cast around inside her brain and found the reason she’d had for taking such drastic measures before she’d seen him again and forgotten everything else. The kids. “They’re alive. The two teenagers, the boy and the girl who were shot in the water. They’re not dead. I know what it looked like. Even those goops thought they were dead, but they...revived or something. In the boat. They revived, and there were screams, and there was blood. They killed two of the guys who shot them, but then they were drugged or something and taken–”

“Can you hear us?” someone shouted from the boat that was heading her way at an alarming pace.

“We have to go,” Emma insisted. “I’ll tell you everything else later.”

“Yes, you will. Are you all right for now, Emma?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. You saved me. Again.” She pushed her hair back with one hand, staring up at him. “Third time.”

“Fourth,” he said. “You were too young to remember the first. You’re a very troublesome Chosen.” And then he let go, just like that, and vanished beneath the waves.

“No! No, wait, don’t go.” She whisper-shouted her plea, because the humans intent on helping her were almost on top of her now. She turned in the water, searching for him.
I still don’t even know your name.

And then four hands, human hands, gripped her and hauled her out of the water and into a small motorboat. She had taken in water, was still choking on it, and was shivering with cold. But she’d forgotten all of that while her vampire had held her in his strong arms.

She lay there, half draped over a padded seat, seething. It occurred to her that she might be in trouble, that they might be DPI posing as innocent fishermen to sweep the area for possible witnesses to the crimes their comrades had just committed. But no, if they’d been intending her harm, the vampire would have known. He wouldn’t have left her in their hands. And a quick inspection of their boat showed an open cooler full of beer cans, a tackle box overflowing with lures and tangled line, and a couple of rods and reels. There were dried bits of once live bait clinging to some of the hooks. They were genuine fishermen, and they’d ruined everything.
She’d been so close!

Of all the vampires who could’ve come to her aid, it was him.
Her
vampire. The first time she’d seen him, the first time she remembered, at least, came rushing back to her as the meddling do-gooders wrapped her in one of their own jackets and turned their boat toward shore. One of them was asking her questions, but she couldn’t be bothered. She was back there, living it again.

She’d been seventeen. In hindsight, she knew she’d been at the very beginning of her thrill-seeking lifestyle. She had no fear of death, almost felt she was taunting it, daring it to come and get her. She knew things other teens didn’t know back then. She knew about vampires. She knew about evil government plots to abduct and experiment on them, though she hadn’t yet been aware it was genocide they intended. She knew about the darkness of the human soul in ways no seventeen-year-old should. But she knew other things too. She knew about love at first sight, and that it was real, because her parents had lived it. And no one in the world had loved each other as powerfully and truly as her mom and dad.

That night she had a freshly-minted driver’s license, and a dangerous boyfriend she was mainly dating because of the adrenaline rush she got while riding beside him in his souped up Mustang during the illegal midnight drag races he loved to take part in. Leo always won. The muscle car boys didn’t race for pink slips or anything, just cash. There was always a few hundred in the pot. For weeks she’d been begging him to let her drive, just once. And finally she’d got him to agree by promising they’d go all the way if she lost.

She didn’t lose. She won, and her time was faster than Leo’s best. And then just past the finish line, a blowout. The car skidded sideways, then flipped and rolled. She didn’t know it was flipping or rolling, of course. She was aware of it moving fast and out of her control. She was conscious of gripping the wheel so hard her hands hurt, and that there was shattering glass exploding inward, showering her in sharp pebble-sized pieces. Not much else.

When she opened her eyes, there was rain falling in her face, and everyone had left but Leo. He was pacing upside down–no, wait,
she
was upside down. Leo was talking on his cellphone. Emma seemed to be lying on her back, half in and half out of the car. She could see a tire above her, turning slowly, around and around. She opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t. She wondered if she was bleeding. Bleeding was very dangerous to her. Leo didn’t even know that. She’d never told him.

She tried to listen to what he was saying. “Everyone took off, Dad. I don’t know what to do. The car’s trashed.” Then a pause, and then, “I don’t know. I think she’s dead.”