Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 121008 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 605(@200wpm)___ 484(@250wpm)___ 403(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121008 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 605(@200wpm)___ 484(@250wpm)___ 403(@300wpm)
“I might shoot you myself,” I promise as I pull the hood up, covering my head.
“What are you going to shoot me with?” Dante zips up his own jacket. “And what was that cool-looking toy you hid in your jacket?”
I stop and stare at the vampire, trying to figure out if he’s joking. “You don’t know what a gun is?”
“No.” Dante pulls the hood of his jacket over his red-gold hair. “What does it do?”
If the vampires don’t have guns, then there’s no way Liadan will know what’s coming.
“They kill people, my friend.” A deep satisfaction settles inside my soul. Finally, I have the upper hand. “And here’s something even better. I’ll make you a deal. If you manage to survive, I’ve got a present for you. I brought back three bottles of the strongest sunscreen from the Earth plane. I’m sure that one of those brilliant vampire scientists will be able to reverse engineer something from them.”
Dante’s eyes light up. “Oh, yeah, they can, and I’ll be the one who brought it to them. This is going to get me out of refurb hell. Nice. I’m totally going to live. Profits are on the line. No vampire goes down when profit is on the line.”
“I thought you might say something like that,” I reply, heading for the door to the tent. “But, Dante, I’m going to need a cut.”
I let the flap close behind me as I hear the vampire curse.
I look through Dante’s binoculars. The enhanced glasses give me an up-close view of Beck and Cian’s small fortress, even through the rain. Dante eases down and nudges me. He points to a figure standing mere feet from the green sanctuary. A black cat twitches anxiously around the woman’s ankles. Kitty doesn’t like the storm, it seems.
It’s Liadan, all right, but she doesn’t look the way she did before. She stands on the ground with her hands at her sides. Her previously pristine dress is soaked and caked with mud. There’s a deer walking toward her as though she called it. In an instant, Liadan attacks the gentle creature, slitting its throat from ear to ear.
“She uses the blood to strengthen her spells.” Dante leans close. “I wish she would use a spell to make her not look like that.”
Liadan shed the vestiges of her public persona. Gone was the lovely Fae woman, and in her place stands the hag. Her face is withered and cracked. Her hair, though still blonde, is gnarled, as though rats nest in it. She has long fingernails, and she uses them to extract the blood she needs.
The hag begins chanting something in a language I don’t understand. After a long moment, some of the vines protecting the sanctuary retreat. I can begin to see the walls of the structure. The minute Liadan manages to unveil the door, she’ll be able to attack my husbands.
“She’s been doing it for days,” Dante explains. “She’s getting close.”
If only I could stop the driving rain. It pours down in sheets, making visibility a real problem. While I can see Liadan’s body, the downpour makes it a hazy thing. I’m not sure I can properly aim. Weeks of practice sharpened my skills, but I don’t want to risk it in this drenching downpour. I might only get one real shot.
I can’t stop the storm, but I know someone who can. I have to hope my husbands aren’t so far gone that they can’t respond. Silently, I put the binoculars down and open the connection I share with my husbands. I close my eyes and seek them with my mind. A tendril of psychic energy brushes against my brain. Cian. It’s a soft touch so I know it’s my intellectual husband. That wave of psychic energy reaches out toward me. He’s weak, so weak, but I send the message anyway. I let my mind wrap around his energy for a moment, pleading with him to be okay.
After a long moment, the rain recedes.
Dante tenses beside me. He looks up as though he can figure out why the rain stopped. “Is that a bad sign? Does that mean something’s wrong with Beck?”
I reach up and tug on Dante’s jacket until he kneels back down. I don’t want to give up our position because now the hag is trying to figure out what happened, too. Liadan is paying attention to the forest around her. The hag turns, those black eyes of hers flashing back and forth, taking in everything.
“Beck is fine. I made contact with Cian and asked him to shut off the waterworks,” I whisper. The jacket Dante provided is set to camouflage mode. So far, the hag hasn’t seen us. It won’t take her long, though. Already the black cat stares in our general direction, her triangular head tilting in a curious manner.