Chapter 20 – Luna
Chapter Twenty
Luna
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed, the second I saw Jack coming through the door. “Whoever thought I’d be this fucking happy to see you?”
I teetered up to stand inside my cage.
I’d listened to the sounds of a fight over the generic rattle of the truck and road noise, and been scared half to death, with no idea what was going on.
But I should’ve known that Jack would make it through all right.
I didn’t know whether Jack was a bad penny, or a lucky one—all that mattered was he kept turning up for me.
“What the fuck is Hellraiser shit?” he asked, walking up and taking in the jail I was confined in.
“I don’t know, but I can’t get out.” I put my hands up to the barrier and leaned into them, feeling like the worst’s worst mime.
“Is that . . . Camila?” he asked, leaning over and lifting his lips a little to breathe her in.
He seemed a little fascinated with the blood coming out of her—and I could tell he’d lost more since I’d seen him last, in the crash.
“She could be the pope for all I care—get me out of here!” I said, bashing my hands against the barrier, before groaning.
Whoever was driving the truck hadn’t slowed down, and they had to know Jack was back here—there was something ominous about that.
“Please, Jack,” I begged, slowly crouching.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” he begged off, considering the mechanism the woman was still tied to. “I don’t want this to be like a magical bomb, you know? Where if I cut the wrong wire, one of us dies.”
Then I heard a police-style bullhorn saying, “Pull over!” from outside, and felt the truck obeying, apparently jumping a curb.
“The cops?” I asked, my voice going high.
“No. The Faithful,” he answered, and before I could say anything else, Jack raised his hand. “I didn’t have any other clues, okay? Other than Paco, who’s probably halfway home already.” He stood up and looked to me. “Get back.”
I took a step back, as far as I could go with the magic surrounding me—and Jack stomped a booted foot on the blood-accordion.
Even more blood inside the mechanism itself spattered out when he did so, it looked like he’d stepped on a full fist-sized leech and burst it.
And some of the blood got on me—because the barrier had disappeared.
“What happened to it ‘might be a bomb’?” I asked, hopping quickly over the blood moat.
“It’s been a long day. Even if it was, I just wanted it to be over.” He pitched a ring of keys at me and I caught it against my chest. “Let the woman in the other room out, will you?”
I nodded, and ran to do as I was told—as a fleet of Men-in-Black-looking-motherfuckers flooded into the truck bed wearing respirators, kicking up dead-vampire-dust. I squealed as a flashlight blinded me. “Turn that off! We’re on the same team!”
“A non-combatant and the target—” one of them announced, as another stormed up and ripped the keys away from me.
A woman in a white suit that I regretfully recognized stepped forward and gave me a disparaging look. “Do you know how much trouble you’ve caused lately?” Sam asked me, her voice muffled by the mask she had on.
“What? No!” I protested. “And also? Fuck you,” I snarled. The Faithful who’d taken the keys away from me was working them through the caged woman’s locks like a low-rent Houdini. “Where are we? Who took me—and why?”
“We were hoping you’d be able to answer that,” she said.
Jack was far too comfortable with dealing with the Faithful for my liking, probably because he wasn’t actually all that bad, something I knew about him by now, after living at his place the past week.
Then again, he had done all . . . this. There was enough vampire dust here for an entire elementary school’s sandbox. “Is vampire dust bad for you?” I asked aloud, crossing my arms to hold myself.
“No. I just don’t want dead vampire hanging out in my lungs,” Sam said, popping her mask off, striding into the other room with Jack. “What did I tell you?” She accosted him. “You look rough—even for the undead.”
“Is that shit safe to drink?” he asked. “And she was dead by the time I got here,” he added. “Bled to death to feed this thing.”
The Faithful beside me finally managed to free the woman off the table—the same girl who I’d seen earlier, now naked and blindfolded.
I would’ve liked to think that Jack was so eager so save me he couldn’t be bothered with her, but looking at him from afar, I thought I knew the truth—he didn’t trust himself around her.
Which was why he was contemplating guzzling the blood on the floor in the other chamber right now, like a drunk searching through bottles in the trash outside a liquor store.
“Don’t!” I shouted up to him. “They mentioned something about me being a sacrifice—and—” I began as both Sam and Jack turned to look at me—and it was as if what Jack had said earlier about bombs became true, summoned into being by his words.
I saw an engulfing ball of impossibly bright light working its way up the truck behind them, immolating everything in its path.
I saw Camila go up in flames and started shrieking Jack’s name, even I turned and ran for the back of the truck, shoving out Faithful in suits and gas masks wholesale out the door. “Jack-Jack-Jack—RUN!”