Chapter 19
River
As someone with the ability to see multiple timelines unfolding before me, I think I can be trusted when I say things could have gone a lot worse. The version we stood in—blood-slicked, battered, and bruised, but still breathing—was one of the better outcomes.
I shifted Laurie in my grasp and the slight movement had her fingers sliding instinctively along the smooth satin of my gown, curling fists in the fabric. Her breath on my neck came in short bursts and her pulse still fluttered at my sternum, fast and frantic and human.
She’d gone quiet. The storm cloud surrounding her had receded inward, subdued for now, but still brewing. I could almost feel the thunder rumbling under her skin.
Guards lay strewn about like discarded toys, some dead, most merely incapacitated. The few still conscious had Hunter to deal with. She picked through the wreck, prying into minds and gathering what she could from their memories before knocking them out cold.
When she finished up with the last one, she met my eyes, striding over and wiping blood from her knuckles. Her crumpled suit was speckled with red, and she wore it like a walking fresco painting.
“Jordan and the rest of the crew are en route—four minutes,” she muttered, clamping one hand over the slash at her ear, and jerked a thumb over her shoulder.
“All those guards? Paid muscle. No reinforcements coming.” A thin smile flickered, but it was gone in a breath.
“The lab directors were tipped off hours ago, though. The people running this place knew not to show up.”
Frustration sparked behind my ribs. “Of course.” We could shut down this facility, but the real architects behind this place were slipping right through cracks we hadn’t sealed yet. But there was no point fretting over that now. We had more pressing issues at hand.
For starters, Laurie had a gun.
By the looks of it, it was no ordinary weapon, either. I glanced down at it, still gripped in one hand and pointed away from the both of us. It wasn’t like any firearm I knew.
The barrel was matte black, etched with tiny, glowing glyphs. Experimental tech. How she got her hands on it I had no idea, but it definitely hadn’t been built by mortals, and it was certainly not designed for a mercy shot aimed at a creature like me. It was a weapon built to wreak havoc.
It would seem this tiny, temperamental woman had a few tricks up her sleeve.
She saved you. The thought barreled through my skull a second time, no easier to swallow on repeat.
Out of everyone in this tomb of concrete and cruelty, this fragile human had yanked me out of the reaper’s jaws.
Still, considering her mortified reaction to taking the shot, it was probably best to keep the weapon far away from Laurie for the time being.
“Uh, here.” I offered the gun to Hunter, grip-first. “Hold on to this for me?”
She pinched it between her fingers and eyed it with the kind of apprehension you’d give a grenade.
Then her gaze raked over Laurie, still a dead weight in my arms. Hunter’s expression was searching and her raised brow told me she expected clarification on exactly what this unassuming human was doing here in the first place.
Yeah, good luck with that. I was wondering the same thing.
“Goddammit, Max! The dress is a lost cause—let it go.”
Both Hunter and I looked to the left, where Maxine was lamenting the loss of another pretty dress while Ethan wrestled to bind her wound.
“This is one of my favorites,” Maxine warbled, still slumped over on the floor, pale as new parchment paper.
“You can live without it if it means not bleeding to death.” Ethan knelt beside her, tearing what remained of her pink glittering skirt and looping strips of fabric tight around the gushing hole in her shoulder. “Leah will have my head if I let you die because of this.”
Blood soaked through in seconds, but Maxine still managed a theatrical eyeroll at the improvised bandage. “Leah understands that real fashion is life and death.”
“Priorities, Maxine.” I turned back to Hunter who had her head in her hands in vexation at her partners’ antics. “You two take her; I’ve got Laurie. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Leyore headquarters had never felt so small.
The bottom floor buzzed with witch healers and every off-duty sentinel Jordan could pull in.
Cots filled the grand hall, each occupied by someone whose life had been cracked in half: blank-eyed humans, half-starved vampire fledglings, and supernatural hybrids the likes of which I’d never seen before.
All of them traumatized, confused, and desperate to go home.
Getting them out had been the simple part. Putting them back together again would take every faction in Jordan’s coalition working double shifts for weeks.
I left the hum of triage behind and stepped into Jordan’s office, where the core group was waiting.
Hunter was already leaning against the shutters, arms folded and brows cinched. Dylan and Amara occupied the corner. Sky and Addison were pacing circles around the desk and Ethan perched on the edge of a filing cabinet, worry etching lines too old for his face.
The only ones missing were Leah and Maxine, the latter of whom was getting patched up and the former committed to hovering around her beloved and bickering with the healer about the best way to lay the stitches.
Jordan looked up as I entered, fingers steepled beneath her chin. “How’s our shooter?”
“Quiet.” I shrugged, though the word barely covered it. White-gray, like frostbitten glass. That was the color of Laurie’s aura bleeding through the wall behind me—tense, splinter-thin. “She’s waiting outside. I think she’s still in shock.”
I knew she was still in shock.
I had no doubt that, had Laurie been in her right mind, she would have made her escape out of one of the windows by now.
Instead, she’d sat quiet in my arms throughout the drive, and when I propped her up on a bench outside Jordan’s office and promised to be back soon, she’d simply stared off into the middle distance and offered a vague nod to show that she’d heard me.
Jordan sighed and gestured at a mess of papers spread out on the desk. “We’ve confirmed the numbers: twenty-seven humans, eleven newly turned vampires, and six hybrids.”
Addison made a small sound of distress, shaking her head at the madness that had been going on right under our noses. No doubt there were more facilities like the one we’d cleared out. Which meant we’d all have our hands full tracking down the rest of them.
Ethan cleared his throat. “From what we’ve gathered, most were lured—scholarships, fake clinical trials, debt relief. And of course, Mr. Mysterious coercing barflies.”
I stared at the scrawled list of names. “The hybrids…”
“Purposely built.” Jordan’s tone was grim. “Selkie blood mixed with ours, Lycan marrow, the list goes on. The facility’s notes are harrowing. They’ve been splicing traits and mashing them together again. Frankenstein reads like a fairytale compared to what they’ve been up to.”
“They’re engineering living weapons,” Hunter muttered from the window.
“Looks that way.” Jordan drummed her fingers on the desk, wild red hair tumbling over her shoulders.
I swallowed the bile building in the back of my throat and planted my palms down on the desk. “So what do we do with them? We can’t turn a bunch of hybrids out into the city. We don’t even know what they’re capable of.”
“They’ll need supervision.” Jordan rubbed her temples. “Healers on rotation, psychic monitoring—for the hybrids and the freshly-turned. As much as I’d like to let them go home, we cannot let this leak to the public.”
Her gaze knifed over to me. “Which brings us to the human who saved your life. You said her name was Laurie—how does she fit into all of this?”
Laurie’s aura flared suddenly, sharp red spikes punching through the wall. The force of it left me winded and I tried not to let it show on my face. I should have given her more credit.
She was listening through the goddamn door.
Even in a state of lingering shock, she still had the awareness (and the spine) to keep tabs on a room full of vampires. Fragile, yes, but definitely not spent.
I forced myself to answer. “She’s seen things first hand. She knows this organization better than we do. But she’s… she’s brittle. Push her now and she’ll shut down completely.”
Dylan raised a brow. “You trust her?”
“She shot my attacker at point-blank.” I folded my arms. “Trust isn’t the question. Duty is. She’s ours to protect until her enemies are dead.”
“Uh, yeah—about that gun,” Hunter piped up, tightening her grip on her forearms. “That thing is designed to take out vampires and she’s been carrying it around this whole time. What else could she be hiding?”
“She’s on our side,” I insisted, raising my voice slightly to get the point across to Laurie herself. I trust you. You’re safe here. “And she has information. She can help us root out these people and take them down for good.”
When the others looked unconvinced, I lowered my head. “Look, just give me some time to talk with her. I don’t know how or why, but she’s important somehow—all right? Take a chance on my woo woo bullshit and just trust me on this. We need her.”
Jordan’s gaze bore into mine and she drummed her fingers once. I held my breath, pleading with my eyes while Laurie’s heavy aura layered weight down on my back.
Eventually, Jordan relented and blew out a long breath, sinking back in her seat. “All right. Keep her close. But I’ll want a full brief when she’s ready.”
At that, the simmering tension behind the door ballooned in size and it hit me like a punch to the gut. “Great—good.” I staggered back a step and inched my way toward the door under the critical eye of everyone else in the room, “I, uh… One sec. I’ll be right back.”
I dipped out without an explanation and shut the door behind me. “Going somewhere?”
Laurie had one knee braced on the windowsill, fingers clutching the frame, streetlight washing her skin a feverish white. She flinched at my sudden arrival, knuckles whitening on the sill.
Up close her aura jittered wildly—bright shards of fear shooting off in every direction. “I-I have to go. This is too much. I didn’t sign up to be some vampire’s lackey.”
I moved a step closer, palms open. “That’s not what you are.”
She eyed the distance to the ground floor, then her gaze slid me. Tension crackled; one wrong word and she’d jump just to prove that she could.
“You heard them in there.” I jerked my chin over my shoulder. “They’re wary, sure—but they trust me. And I trust you. So how about we work together instead of bolting in opposite directions?”
“Work together?” Bitter laughter bubbled from her lips, and she wrenched her gaze away. “I killed a man tonight, dude. That’s where working together got me. And I still don’t even know why I did it.”
“Because he was about to put a barbed blade through my heart! So—you know—thank you for the save.” The words came out with a squawk of nervous laughter and I hurried to lower my voice. “And because you’re braver than you give yourself credit for.”
Her lips settled into a grim line and she huffed out a wry exhale. But she wasn’t hurling herself out the window just yet.
“Look.” I ran my fingers through my hair, reaching for the words to put her at ease. “You have intel we don’t. We have resources and teeth. Together? We might actually shut these labs down before they can mess with anybody else.”
Laurie’s fingers loosened on the frame. The violent ripples in her aura dulled to a shaky static and I did my best to soothe out the creases.
“Think of it as… mutually assured babysitting,” I added. “You watch my back, I watch yours.”
I waited with bated breath while Laurie kept her eyes on the city outside—so long I started mapping the skyline in the reflection of her pupils. But eventually, her shoulders sagged, and she swung one leg, then the other, back onto the floor.
I drifted to the bench and dropped onto it sideways, elbows propped on the back. “Great, that’s settled, then.” I patted the space beside me. “Also: you should crash at my place for a bit.”
Her head whipped around. “I’m not staying with you!” The words rasped out, halfway between outrage and downright panic.
“Why not? I’ve got square footage to spare, no roommates, and a very decent blood-free fridge stocked to the brim.” I shrugged. “More to the point, whoever funded that lab now knows you were inside. Targets tend to be easier to hit when they’re alone.”
Laurie crossed her arms, jaw working overtime. Her aura rumbled around us like a brewing storm—stubbornness edging into fear. “I can’t just… move into a vampire den because you say so.”
“Sure you can. One night.” I held up a single finger. “After that, if you hate the décor—or the company—you’re free to bolt. But until sunrise, you’ll be under my roof, my wards, and my admittedly overprotective eye.”
Laurie opened her mouth, then shut it again, looking like she’d bitten down on a nail. Finally she huffed and slid onto the bench beside me, a cautious arm’s length away.
When she met my eye, that spark was back. The defiant flicker I’d seen in her before. It was small, little more than a candle flame that could snuff out at any moment, but it was there.
She bared her teeth in a disgruntled grimace, blunt human canines so different to my own, and lifted her index finger in front of my nose. “One night.”
And that was that. The beginning of a brand new timeline, treading toward a future I couldn’t possibly predict.