“Hurry, Sam!”
I was about to dash forward, into the adjoining cavern, when I saw a sight I wouldn’t soon forget: Kingsley, in wolf form, was engaged in mortal combat with the vampire, the very old and very powerful vampire. As I watched, Kingsley went for the vampire’s throat, hurling his long, muscular body through the air, only to absorb a devastating blow by the vampire that sent the wolf reeling, flipping head over tail, to crash into a nearby wall. The vampire, I saw, was covered with deep wounds, skin flapping at his scalp and neck. Yes, Kingsley had done some damage.
In the next room, I heard my sister scream.
I moved faster than I ever had in my entire existence.
Chapter Forty-four
I knew Hanner was waiting for me.
In fact, she might have organized the others—the old vampire presently ensnared with Kingsley, and the two hunters waiting just inside the entrance—just to occupy my friends.
Yes, Hanner wanted me.
And only me.
Well, she was going to get me.
I doubted she would be waiting on the other side with a crossbow, nor would Fang. That didn’t seem like her style. So, I took my chances and plunged through the opening, and into the second cavern.
* * *
Yes, there was my sister.
Fang stood next to her, too, holding a long knife...a knife that was presently pressed against her fabric-covered throat, no doubt the reason why my sister had screamed in the first place.
Detective Rachel Hanner bent down next to my seated ex-husband, Danny, her ear pressed to his bloody lips, making a show of listening to him.
Hanner leaned in a little closer, and almost lovingly caressed the handle of the dagger that protruded from the center of his chest. I was too dumbfounded by the scene to act. I just stood there, absorbing the craziness, absorbing the fact that my life had so radically spun out of control that my jerk of an ex-husband was sitting with a dagger in his chest, and that my sister had a bag over her head, with another dagger pressed against her throat, held there by my one-time best friend, Fang.
I took another step into the room, and my sister screamed again, as Fang pressed the blade harder against her throat. I stopped. Hanner straightened and gave me a small smile, although her eyes did anything but smile.
“He keeps calling for you, Sam. I wonder why?” She moved around him as I saw Danny’s body jerk a little. His eyelids fluttered. Blood bubbled up around the blade handle, which meant she had punctured a lung, but not his heart. At least, I didn’t think she had. “Now, why would he be calling your name when he, in fact, called me?”
“Why would he call you?” I asked, and took another step into the room.
“Sam?” screamed Mary Lou, “Oh, my God, Sam, what’s happening?”
“It’s going to be okay, Mary Lou,” I said. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
“It’s very much not going to be okay, Samantha,” said Hanner, now facing me. “Just ask your ex-husband. Oh, and there might have been a small chance that I came across your husband at his sleazy little strip club a few months ago, and told him to call me when his little vampire problem got out of hand.”
Danny jerked his head; a small sound escaped from his bloody lips.
“There he goes again,” said Hanner, shaking her pretty head, but not taking her eyes off me, eyes that burned with an inner flame. “Calling your name like you give a damn.”
“I do give a damn,” I said.
“And that’s your problem, Samantha,” said Hanner. “You give too much of a damn over these humans.”
“You’re not Hanner,” I said, stepping forward again, and this time, Fang didn’t press the knife any harder against my sister’s throat. I noted that Fang looked nothing like the man I had once known. Fang and I had never had a physical relationship, and the truth was, we hadn’t seen too much of each other outside of the bar where he’d worked, Hero’s. Still, the man—or thing—in front of me, holding a knife to my sister’s throat, looked dead and lost.
“No,” said the female detective in front of me. She spoke in a slow, calculating, slightly lilting way, an accent I could not detect. “Hanner has taken, to use a modern idiom, a back seat. But rest assured, she’s watching with interest from the shadows where she belongs. Where all of you belong.”
“He needs help,” I said. “Let him go. Let my sister go. You want me. I’m here.”
“Oh, we want you all, Samantha Moon.”
I looked at Fang, and decided to address him by his real name, “Aaron,” I said. “What have you done? What have they done to you?”
“He can’t talk, Sam,” said Hanner.
I snapped my head around and looked at her. “Why the hell not?”
“He’s been compelled not to, as you might have guessed. Just as he’s being compelled to hold the knife to your sister. Just as he’s being compelled to watch you die.”
“Compelled by whom?” I asked, but knew the answer immediately. “Dominique.”
“But of course, Samantha Moon. Only the most powerful vampires can compel another vampire. And Aaron here, or Eli, or Fang, as he still prefers to be called, has been such a good little boy. And quite the killer, too. Truly vicious. You should see him in action. He makes Mommy so very proud.”
“You’re sick.”
“We’re all sick, Sam.”
“No,” I said. “You’re different. You’re evil.”
“We are mavericks, Samantha, nothing more, nothing less.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means we have seen how the world works, how the Universe works, and we have decided there is a better way.”
“What way?”
“Our way, Samantha Moon. But to do that, you see, we need our sister to be free. You have bottled her up, so to speak, for far too long.”
“You want to give her a new host.”
“Yesss,” Hanner hissed, although it was not Hanner who spoke to me. She looked over at my sister. “Yesss, and we found another, Sssamantha Moon. And she carries, of course, your bloodline.”
“What about my bloodline?” I asked.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“Never mind that, Samantha. You’ll be dead soon.”
Hanner reached behind her back and pulled out an old-fashioned .38 revolver. “Not just any gun, Sam. This one happens to be equipped with silver bullets.”