Chapter 1 #2
Where the hell was her ride? She pulled out her phone and tapped out a quick text to Angela.
Emmaleigh: Where’s David? I’m outside waiting for him.
Angie: Great. He’s on the way. He went down into town to hit the Redbox for our movie night. You wanted to see that new action flick, right?
Emmaleigh: Yeah. I’ll meet him at the corner then. Tell him I’m making my way down Elm.
Her finger glided over the screen and tapped a smiling emoji to follow her last response. She and Angie planned to watch a new movie together, some superhero action flick filled with profanity and smut. The perfect way to end her night.
As she tucked the phone into her handbag, an unusual sense of impending doom came over her in the form of raw, visceral panic. Her heart thumped loud and hard in her chest, pulsing vampiric blood through her veins.
It had only happened one other time in all her life, and that had been three years ago, on the evening Rosenhaven Coven welcomed its new vampire mistress. An hour later, Emma had penned an urgent e-mail to the council, copied to every master in the United States.
Have to get home. Something’s wrong. Maybe something’s wrong at home. No, Angie would have said so.
She picked up speed, moving down the sidewalk with purpose in her stride. Twice, she glanced over a shoulder, unable to shake the sensation of being watched, but as the hotel windows gleamed from the distance, nearly a mile down the road, the terror didn’t fade.
Fear tightened around her chest, a compression band smothering the air from her lungs.
As the post office came into view, the sense of danger intensified.
She hadn’t left it behind, but had walked into it.
While she fumbled the phone from her pocket again to call the Legacy’s security office, a lance of agony tore through her shoulder.
She stumbled forward and caught her weight against a tree with both hands.
Bullets weren’t nearly as loud and booming in real life as they sounded in movies. Gunfire surrounded her, another pop resulting in pain exploding in her abdomen. Excruciating pain exploded throughout Emma’s torso, and her eyes watered with tears.
Men surrounded her from all sides, two armed with rifles appearing from beside the post office and another hidden between parked cars with a shotgun. Two leveled crossbows loaded with flaming stakes from across the street.
Shit! Hunters in South Dartmouth? Of all the places for them to surface, she hadn’t expected their sleepy little resort town to gain their attention.
“Don’t let it escape!” a man shouted.
With preternatural speed and endurance in her favor, she bounded toward the closest attacker.
Before he launched a stake into her chest, she slammed the weapon toward the sky and buried a stiletto in his throat with a sharp kick.
It pierced his windpipe, and then hot blood from a severed artery splashed over her ankle.
Gunfire lit up the night, reports echoing through the peaceful peninsula barely a mile from the resort. They didn’t waste bullets by spraying the area haphazardly but concentrated their fire in short, accurate bursts.
Emma lost her shoe, ripping the heel off her foot while attempting to remove it from his neck.
In the split second afforded to her, she took stock of her assailants.
Tactical vests, boots, and body armor on the entire squad.
A stake whistled past her shoulder and struck the tree.
Despite the death of their comrade, their attack never wavered.
Ex-military maybe, or mercenaries from some sort of black-ops group. They put her on the defensive, requiring Emma to kick off her remaining shoe to take evasive maneuvers.
Another bullet ripped past her through the air, digging a furrow against her left arm. She dodged to the side and zipped across the street toward a nearby churchyard to put distance between them, but her wounds slowed her down.
Where were the police when she needed them? So much for working in a good neighborhood with a rapid response time. The police station was just down the road, barely a mile away!
Relying on supernatural reflexes, Emma doubled back, maneuvered behind the smallest member of the group, and twisted his neck.
Before he hit the ground, she charged her next target.
The man turned on her with his crossbow and fired.
Flames scorched across her hand as she caught the bolt, reversed it in her hand, and slammed it through his ear.
I’m faster than them. They may be trained, but I’m faster than them!
With the two greatest threats—the crossbow-wielding psychos—bleeding out in the snow, she turned her attention to the assholes with the assault rifles.
An AR-15 magazine holds thirty rounds. They’ll have to reload soon, she told herself, while her morbid sense of humor wondered if Adrian would be proud of her for remembering.
Talking her way through it, she cleared the fifteen-yard distance between her and the street corner in a bound, dragged the stop sign from the frozen earth, and hurled it like a javelin at the man with the shotgun mere feet away.
His next shot went wide as the metal pierced his torso below the ribs, emerged from his back, and stuck in the snowy ground.
She scrambled by to grasp the fallen shotgun, and through a feat of acrobatic excellence, flipped across the intersection.
Emma finally understood why some of the other vampires preferred to carry concealed weapons.
While they weren’t needed, a little firepower had its convenience.
Two remained. She stole a glance left and saw them closing in.
While she had supernatural speed in her favor, they appeared to be trained to anticipate her movement.
She ran, ignoring the pain and pushing it aside to become a vampiric blur hurtling barefoot across the icy street. One well-placed shotgun blast to the face removed one threat and spent the last shell in the weapon.
A round penetrated her waist and passed through, followed by a second. Down to the last of them, a man who kept her pinned with the precise bursts from his rifle, she took cover by a bare-limbed tree in the church yard and scrambled behind its wide trunk to regain her wits.
Pressing two fingers into the bloody hole in her abdomen, she found the bullet that had thankfully struck a rib instead of bouncing into a troublesome place in her gut. With strength she hadn’t known she possessed, she pulled the shard of disfigured metal from her body.
As she sagged against the tree, the dulled sound of bullets chipping wood announced her assailant was still at large. The bleeding had stopped, but she’d lost enough to play it cautious.
Her remaining attacker stopped to reload, and that critical pause in the onslaught was all the time she needed.
Preparing for the pain, she sucked in a breath, tensed her muscles, and then launched herself in a tight horizontal line toward the man sighting her with his assault rifle.
To his credit, he didn’t run screaming. A round tore through her shoulder. A second created a groove in her arm.
Then she was on him, her fangs in his neck and hot blood flooding her mouth with the taste of tobacco and ash. She grimaced. Vegans always had the most delightful taste, but this guy must have lived on a diet of bacon and unfiltered Marlboros.
He pushed feebly with one hand and swung a combat knife at Emma’s chest. It didn’t come anywhere close to reaching her heart. After she snapped his forearm, he became a foul-tasting and harmless blood bag.
A black BMW tore down the road and swerved around the corner onto the church driveway like the driver had experience on the Tokyo drift circuit. As it came screeching to a halt, the door flew open while it was still technically in motion. Adrian Kennedy hurled himself from the opening.
Too bad there was no one left for him to fight.
Emma and Adrian locked gazes across the distance, the master’s hard features contorted into an enraged mask.
“Fuck,” he swore.
She must have looked quite the sight to him, blood soaking her bone-white sweater while she crouched on the snow-dusted ground with a lifeless corpse in her arms. He was at the curb one moment and beside her in the next.
“Are you injured?”
“No.” She dropped the merc onto the hard ground.
“The hell you aren’t. You’re still bleeding.”
“Barely,” Emma told him. “They’re closing up.”
How dare he charge in like Galahad to the rescue?
Adrian had been her first, last, and only crush since reaching Massachusetts a couple years back, and all it had gotten her was a flimsy one-night stand.
Conflicting emotions wrought a sense of undeniable turmoil; she wanted to punch him in his absurdly handsome face for thinking she needed to be rescued, and she wanted to kiss him for caring enough to do it.
“Get in the car.”
Not taking well to orders, Emma rolled her eyes and straightened, defiant to the very end. “I’m fine, and I can make it home on my own.”
“Let me have a look at you.” Adrian opened her coat and raised her sweater until she slapped his hands away.
“I’m fine,” she snarled. At least, she would be after sucking down blood that didn’t taste like heart disease and poison. “Half of this blood isn’t even mine.”
Adrian’s hands dropped away this time without rising again.
As much as Emma wanted him to fuss and fret, she didn’t want his attention to be attributed to an attack; she wanted it to come because he was ready to pick up where they’d left off.
He didn’t force her to get in the car, but he didn’t leave her side either. Instead, he followed a few feet behind her on foot, leaving his car on the road.
“I need a team north of the manor,” Adrian barked into his phone. “Hunters attacked Whittaker on her way back from the resort. Contact the authorities with the necessary information and dispose of the bodies—after you’ve identified them. I want to know who the fuck they are.”