Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
BEING SO USELESS
How many days had we been here? Long enough for me to lose track.
I kind of had a routine going where I sat on the couch with my feet up on it and a blanket covering me while I read or watched TV until the sun finished setting.
So that was where I was when the sun set, my ebook forgotten, and feeling all kinds of twitchy.
I wanted to do something. I wanted to know why the hell Quillan wasn’t telling us everything was cool now, mission accomplished.
Hamilton walked into the room looking all crisp in his dark trousers and pale blue dress shirt, shoes snapping on the tiles. “We need to talk about something.”
“Yeah, we do.” He looked as fired up as I suddenly felt. “Where the hell is Quillan? It’s been days. Shouldn’t he have the lab destroyed and stuff by now? Dude like him should be able to run through a few walls and take the whole place down, you know?”
He blinked at me. Several times.
I made an oops face. “Is that not what you wanted to talk about?”
He huffed a laugh. “Well, no, but I did just get off the phone with one of his people downstairs who wouldn’t say more than that he wasn’t back yet.” He crossed his arms, looking grouchy. “They’ve decided the case is need-to-know, and I don’t.”
I huffed in disgust. “Uh, yuh-huh, we do too need to know.”
He made a noise very near a growl, and I took that to be him agreeing with me.
I didn’t want to be on the outside looking in.
I wanted to know what was going on. As nice as this penthouse suite was, it was also starting to feel a little like a jail cell since we couldn’t leave.
I wanted fresh air. I kind of wanted sunshine, though I was a bit worried that he was turning me into a vampire.
But, oh well, looked like we were still trapped in time-out.
“So what was the other thing?” I asked him.
“Other thing?”
“I’m sure you were going to tell me about all that at some point…” I raised an eyebrow until he nodded. “But you came in wanting to talk about…”
“Yes. Right.” He cleared his throat. “Hammy is not an appropriate nickname.”
Now I was blinking at him. That was his important discussion? “Hammy is a pet name.”
“Hammy is not happening.” He smiled with a lot of fang showing.
“Oh, really?” I said, accepting that challenge.
Suddenly, a bright as hell light shone in from right outside the window at the end of the couch. Like right there! What the fuck would have a light like that glaring in here? And then the light got bigger, like it was coming closer, and I could hear the distinct thump-thump-thump of a helicopter.
Police? News? Who just rode up to a building like that and looked in?
In one of his vampire speed moves, Hamilton was across the room and looking all around like the light wasn’t making him blind. Then he turned around as the light moved away, rose like the helicopter might be flying over the building, and I realized he’d had his eyes closed.
“Wiley, get up. We have to get out of here.”
“What?” As I said that, there came a huge bang like someone was using a battering ram on…the ceiling? In the bedroom? “What’s happening?”
Hamilton hunkered down beside the couch and took my hand. “Something’s gone terribly wrong,” he said in a frighteningly calm voice. “The building is surrounded by police and other vehicles. That banging is the people from the helicopter trying to break in from the roof.”
It was a very steady banging. My heartbeat was not at all steady, but it was definitely banging.
“We need to leave.”
I nodded. Hamilton helped me up, my knees absolutely wobbling, and I stood there clutching my blanket and trembling.
I’d been planning to order the lobster for dinner tonight.
I’d never had lobster before. I was going to crack claws and dip bits in melted butter and do everything else they did in the movies when they ate lobster.
“Stay behind me,” Hamilton ordered. “Once I’ve dealt with them, I’ll signal you to come up. Alright?”
I tried to keep breathing, visions of close-quarter gunshots dancing in my brain. I was vamped-up on my man’s very regular deposits inside my person, but was that enough to heal a headshot? Because I had a feeling this bunch of trigger-happy nut jobs weren’t going to miss.
“Wiley?”
I pointed at the window, suddenly inspired. “What if we go through the window instead? It can’t be thicker than at the lab, right?”
They broke through. I didn’t have to see what they’d done to know they were coming in—that last bang had been different.
Hamilton looked up there again, snarled, and shifted into his bat form.
He busted through every button and seam of his clothing with an explosion of muscles until he stood there completely naked and all batted-up.
It was not the time to drool, but goddamn, he was so hot.
A second later, he grabbed me with one arm and doubled back to also pick up…the stone statue by the front door? I didn’t know if it was special somehow—the thing was some kind of abstract art, which I never understood—so I had to wonder why the hell he wanted to take it with us.
Oh, fuck me, he didn’t want to take it with us!
He used it to break the window as he ran at it, and then we were out into the night like a bullet from a gun.
I watched the statue fall seventeen stories to spear into a big black SUV as Hamilton held my back to his front with both arms and took us soaring over the city.
As if in slow motion a real live tranquilizer dart flew by.
At least they didn’t want us dead? I should probably hook my legs back and over Hamilton’s or something.
Make myself a little more aerodynamic and less dangling with this bright red blanket flapping in the wind.
I’d drop it but it was caught between me and Hamilton’s arms. I wasn’t about to wiggle around and—
I grunted as something sharp bit into my left ass cheek.
Motherfuckers.
“I’m hit.” And I was woozy before I finished speaking.
“As am I.”
“Uh-oh. That’s bad.” Because if I felt drunk and I was just hanging here, but he was in charge of flying us around… “Don’t crash, okay?”
“Just stay with me.”
I snorted. “Wild horse shifters couldn’t drag me away.”
“Horse shifters?”
I giggled, but then I had a very sobering thought about whether the mates of horse shifters had to come to terms with getting fucked by, you know, a horse. Or maybe they didn’t do stuff in horse form. I gasped. Were there sheep shifters out there somewhere?
“Wiley? Alright?”
“Are there sheep shifters?”
“Sheep?” Oh, no, he sounded so confused. The drugs must’ve been kicking in for him, too.
It was getting a little difficult to keep my head up, which was why I noticed that the trees beneath us were getting a lot closer. “Are we crashing?”
“Landing, not crashing.”
He did a sort of tilt-flip that had us vertical before we dropped to the ground. “Wuh-hah!” That sound out of me wasn’t at all voluntary as I nearly snapped my own neck coming to a stop like that. Then I was just mildly grunting as he ran us into the darkness of the forest.
I had no idea where we were. I knew, like, four different metro parks in the area, but though I’d looked around, I hadn’t seen anything that let me know which one this was. Flying over everything made it way harder to see where I was going.
Eventually, Hamilton set me on my feet, but that didn’t work because my knees buckled and my whole spinal column was like nope, and he had to catch me before I fully collapsed.
He shifted while he had me under my arms—which was maybe why he’d tried to set me down—and now he was all major Hottie McTottie in his naked man form.
He did lay me down then, right there on the forest floor, and though I hadn’t done outdoor sex before, I wasn’t against giving it a try. Odd timing, but here we were.
“May I have this?”
“Yeah, you can have me.” I wanted to spread my legs, but I wasn’t entirely sure either moved just then.
He smiled down at me. “Thank you, but I meant the blanket.”
I couldn’t get a single muscle to move properly, but I had a death grip on the blanket from the suite? Still? Good grief. I watched him peel my fingers free of it before he stood straight and wrapped it around himself.
“Oh, lookitchoo! You made a toga.” So smart and resourceful. And showing those gorgeous, long legs.
“Come here, darling,” he said and scooped me into his arms, “we’re going to look for a place to hide.”
“I don’t wanna hide.”
“No?”
“No, I’m shit at hide and seek. I always get found.”
“Too talkative?”
“Who’s too talkative?”
He chuckled and said, “Why don’t we try to be very quiet for a few minutes?”
“Mm-kay.”
Made sense to be quiet. He might’ve killed one government SUV with that statue, but there had been plenty more to take up the chase. Could probably get, like, six guys in each car. That could be a lot of guys driving around looking for us. Not to mention the helicopter!
I realized he was carrying me in his arms like I weighed nothing. “You are so strong.”
“Hush, love.”
“Right.” Yeah, he’d said we should be quiet. Somebody could be nearby. I realized my head was on his shoulder and managed to, like, flick it back and look over to see behind us. I could have his six even when I was messed up. “All clear back here.”
Hamilton sighed heavily, and then he walked us into someplace that got a lot darker. And rounder. Literally, as he walked away from it, the entrance to this place turned out to be a Hobbit-hole.
“Are we going to Middle Earth?” It seemed like a fair question, what with everything I knew about supernatural creatures and all.
“Middle— No, we’re in a storm drain. It’s a bit obvious, I know, but it’ll keep us out of sight until you’re feeling better. And if we’re still here when the sun comes up, it’ll help with that as well.”
“A storm drain? Like a sewer?” I screwed my nose up in anticipation of a stinky smell, but honestly, it was like a damp basement, if anything.
“No, not a sewer, though it might connect to the storm drains under the roads, if we need to go deeper to escape pursuit.”
It was really dark now. Hamilton did one of his echolocation scream squeaks, so he could probably see just fine, but I couldn’t see anything anymore. I closed my eyes, hoping that choosing the darkness would feel less scary. I wanted to grab onto him, but my hand only sort of flopped around.
“This drug wore off a lot faster last time,” I complained as Hamilton kept walking.
“I sucked it out of you, and it wasn’t enough to affect me much.”
I groaned. Yep, he sure had. Right there in his cage, he’d pinned me to the wall and had at me for the first time.
“Feel like a snack?”
“In a moment.” He kissed my forehead.
He walked forever. We must’ve gone miles into this place, and I still wasn’t sure what it was for.
Like a biblical flood? Because it was huge inside.
Hamilton wasn’t ducking or squeezing through passageways.
Every little noise was amplified to the point I could hear his bare feet padding along and the scurry of a few critters.
There better not be spiders. Swear to god.
“Here we are then.” And Hamilton seemed to open a door but, like, with his hip and probably popping a lock. “And, look, there’s a cot.”
As he set me down, I was having a very hard time connecting a storm drain with a room that had a cot. “Where are we?”
“Oh. One moment.”
I heard him walk away, and then a fluorescent light flickered to life. I had to squint after all that darkness, but then I could make out that we were in a very barebones office with nothing more than a gray metal table, a single chair, and this cot. “Is this place abandoned or something?”
Hamilton shrugged, standing there bare legged in his red blanket toga. “It might only be used when there’s a bad storm. But it has a phone,” he said, gesturing to the desk, “so we can communicate with The Coalition at some point.”
He didn’t sound eager to do that, and I couldn’t lift my head enough to see anything on top of the desk. “Dammit, Hammy, please get this drug out of me. I hate being so useless.”
He clicked his tongue and came over to crouch beside me. “You’re never useless.” He petted my hair off my forehead, his smile soft and loving. “Your mere presence saved several lives tonight.”
It took me a moment to understand his meaning, and then I wasn’t so sure I wanted those government goons to survive. “I’m hoping that SUV the statue hit was full.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “My blood-thirsty little mate…”
“Any chance you’re blood thirsty?”
“Yes, dear.”
Hamilton leaned in and nuzzled my neck for a second before his fangs sank in.