Chapter 25
For all the money clearly spent on this place, there were some piss-poor design choices.
Like the fact that the slab Simone was strapped to was fixed in place, so the blond kid who had turned the screaming vital-signs machine off had to teeter on a hastily fetched metal stepstool while attempting to shove a needle into the hollow of her right elbow.
The young man didn’t seem phlebotomy-trained despite his nicely pressed lab coat.
Several more of his brethren had slipped out through that automatic door, but the escapes had halted when Elton Huske turned around to glare at his underlings.
Half froze in place, rabbits under a hawk’s drifting shadow, and the others redoubled their frantic though not very productive activity.
It was bleakly funny—the moment their boss swung back to bark at the kid on the stepstool, at least two more employees scurried for the door. The crowd was noticeably thinner now.
“Should’ve done it while I was sleeping,” Simone said, and watched Huske’s fury rise again. “That’s what rich boys like, right? Date rape drugs.”
A vein in the billionaire’s forehead was throbbing; if he hadn’t had a blood pressure problem before tonight, he certainly did now. It was depressingly easy to enrage this kind of a noxious asshole, and while he was boiling he didn’t notice the slow, subtle twisting of her left arm.
Which hurt like hell, bright scarves of agony twisting up from her palm, her raw-hamburger wrist now weeping pink-tinged trickles as the blisters popped, re-formed, and were torn again. Her arm on that side was similarly slick, rubbing against the metallic weave.
Silver. Gotta be. What Simone was about to do would hurt even more than the blisters, than ripping herself free of handcuffs.
She didn’t care.
The blond youth dug at her inner elbow again, the needle prodding but unable to pierce.
Vamp skin was tougher than its poreless perfection seemed and this wasn’t a tranq dart going at speed; plus the kid looked definitely greenish and the thin trickle of scent from him, working its way into Simone’s clogged but sensitive nose, reeked of juicy, copper-colored fear.
There really was no point in being conciliatory. Especially once it occurred to her that Huske might not be able to load her up with that awful poison again, since tainting the blood he was planning on shooting into his own veins was a bad idea.
Of course, he could get angry enough to try it, which was a risk she was ready to run. Especially since the fluid wrung out of the popped blisters was so very slick, and the strap material that wasn’t silver was saturated. Felt like nylon, not a lot of stretch… but maybe, just maybe enough.
“Sir?” The brunette near the cart had a lovely, clear fluting alto. “There are protocols. Maybe we should—”
“You’re fired!” Huske barely turned his head to yell. Spittle flew in a fine spray, and that regularly twitching vein had turned nearly purple. He lunged for the cart, scooping up the largest scalpel, and Simone had to shove down a thick, braying laugh.
It was goddamn liberating to have absolutely nothing left.
Her mortal life, her RV, her finder, her career as a vampire hunter, pretty much all of her dignity—all gone, lost in a rising tide of dry scratching thirst. The only wonder was that she’d played by the rules so long, doing everything expected of a reasonably good girl, up to and including simply accepting a pittance for alimony because digging in and fighting your ex-husband made you a bitchy old dried-up harridan.
Oh, she’d tried, even when middle age had arrived with perspective and very few fucks left to give. But now she was faced with the knowledge that it had always been a lost battle.
A good girl didn’t drag the vamp who had spent several nights biting and assaulting her into a weak bar of sunlight coming through a filthy daylight basement window, or feel a savage sense of serves you right when the thing began to writhe and bubble-burn, streaks of dust racing through its tissues.
A good girl didn’t at heart like ripping rabid young vamps into ribbons with her bare hands; a good girl wouldn’t deep-down enjoy getting fucked by a cowboy-drawling, nameless tramp of a vampire.
Or maybe the very concept of good girl was complete fuckery in and of itself.
At the moment Simone didn’t care, because Huske jabbed at her with the scalpel, roaring inarticulately, and she suspected the blade was silvered by the way it caught in the strap over her left thigh with a sweet starburst of further pain.
The blond kid on the stepstool let out a blurt ending in “—ly fuck!” as he toppled, and everything slowed down.
One hard straining push, all her remaining, waning strength concentrated in a single burst. Her shoulder popped hard, dislocating with a red flare lost in the general misery, and she barely felt her own skin peeling free as she forced joints in ways they were not intended for, degloving almost her entire arm.
A coyote would gnaw its own paw off to escape a trap; snakes burst and slid out of their hides all the time. The animals were onto something, and what was a divorce really but a painful shedding of the scales over a woman’s eyes?
One thing wasn’t left behind in the tight, unforgiving straps, though.
Her claws. She swiped first at the band over her throat, nylon and thin strands of metal parting like water, and if the triangular razor edges at her fingertips also slashed her own flesh Simone didn’t particularly care.
Freeing her right arm was a flicker. She dragged the finger-knives down her ribs, blood bursting free; the sweet candysick scent shouting of pain and illness stroked the thirst’s dry-dollar spot at the back of her throat, reaching down and yanking at something old, something very nasty living in any woman who had made up her mind to fucking well survive.
It seemed almost leisurely to her, but vamp speed and human reflexes were two very different things. The straps over her torso parted, and the thick band over her hips was sawed through in less than a heartbeat.
Sure, the restraints all looked good, very aesthetic.
But none of this guy’s shit actually worked, except for maybe the tranquilizer and that was questionable at best. Still, Simone was pretty sure that cocktail of bullshit had nearly killed her, and maybe if she hadn’t been sucking at old-vamp blood for a couple days the helicopter ride might have gone a lot worse.
Her temples throbbed, the band over her forehead slipping, and she managed to cut her legs free on the way down, a swift stripe of bright spangled sensation up her ribcage as the scalpel was torn from Huske’s trembling, sweating paw.
Simone hit the ground, arms and legs not responding as they should for a long, taffy-stretching moment; the thought that maybe she’d expended her final burst of energy on simply thrashing like a landed fish was bleakly funny as well.
All of this was so fucking dismal. Even the floor, which was indifferently mopped for a place with so many pretensions to scientific or medical cleanliness.
Simone realized she could see as much because her only slightly injured right hand was rubbing the crust from her eyes, and she blinked furiously as the first cries rose.
Human screams, accompanied by a general rush for that automatic door. And somewhere nearby a red light began flashing, an electronic warble pouring from porthole-shaped speakers.
A shattering metallic crash was the blond kid, knocked from his perch to land on the stainless-steel not-dessert cart.
The brunette froze—at least, for a very brief span of time before the wheeled contraption, obeying the dictates of physics, hit her amidships and sent her ass-over-teakettle.
The stepstool skidded sideways, its indifferently padded feet losing their grip on featureless metal, and headed for a slice of blank, smooth concrete wall.
Simone’s left leg pistoned out, a completely instinctive movement.
Once more, her body knew what to do and she was just along for the ride; her boot kissed Elton Huske just between floating ribs and hip, sending him careening across the floor in loose tumbledoll fashion before he tangled with the still-moving cart.
The maneuver produced a terrible cascade of bonesnapping sounds, audible over the hideous, continuous blatting.
Someone pulled the fire alarm, she realized. Which made some kind of strange sideways sense, even if she wasn’t sure this place would have adequate, OSHA-approved exit routes. Motherfucker didn’t even take my boots off.
Then again, Huske had to be really excited.
A real live vampire after years of effort, strolling right into his rented ballroom; he probably had never, ever considered that she might be able to wriggle free of the trap.
It really was a curse to get everything you wanted, Simone thought. Made you sloppy, slipshod.
All the money in the world couldn’t buy class or experience.
Her wet, bleeding left palm smacked the floor. Simone found herself flickered up into a crouch, fangs out, a deep rumbling hiss rattling from her ribcage. Growling like any of the vamps she’d put down—had they felt like this, a wildfire inside their skull, nothing but red glow and smoke?
No wonder they’d chased her.
Another instinct lifted her head, peering through strings of brown hair writhing like snake-coils.
A quick hard huff cleared her nose, then the smells poured in, wonderfully vivid.
Even the foul odors were a blessing, because she was no longer tied down.
Her eyes, tender and throbbing, blinked rapidly as she shifted, knees wide, crouching with turnout a ballerina might sell a soul for, a faint ripping lost in the hubbub as her jeans tore along the inseam.
The crowd at the automatic door, milling desperately, had hit a snag. It wasn’t just that both glass halves had frozen instead of whooshing neatly along their tracks; the bigger problem was a half-dozen men in tactical gear, rifles pointed up as they hammered through the press, trying to get in.
The elevator to the observation gallery dinged, its steel doors reluctantly spreading, and there was another clutch of big black-clad male figures.
One wore sunglasses despite the hour, and every throat gleamed dully—blackened chainmail gorgets, all the fashion among vamp hunters lately.
She’d seen instructional videos on a few forums, a real do-it-yourself project if a hunter had the time, available for a fee if not, and even thought of maybe getting one herself.
But in the end there was no point. She didn’t need body armor, fancy toys, crucifixes, rifles; she was what they fought.
Did they have a tranq gun laden with that poison shit?
Be careful, Simone.
Which was a laugh and a half; did she really want to live after all?
Why else had she ripped her arm out of the restraints?
It stung, rags of flesh left on saturated straps shredding into gleaming grit, the tiny particles falling with crystalline tinkles buried in the racket though clearly discernible to vamp hearing.
But the pain was retreating, akin to the remembered sensation of a deep sunburn as tissues plumped in fast-forward, rebuilding. She stretched the limb, shrugging the dislocated shoulder hard, a quick flick of bones pop-crackling back into place.
The hunters burst out of the elevator, clumsy-clunky humans shouting at each other over the din, and her fangs were so far extended she couldn’t speak if she wanted to.
Because along with the scent of her own spilled-free blood, delicious and wicked, was a thinner though far more enticing note.
Salt-hot, deadly sweet crimson, not the cold ersatz from the bags but pumped from living veins—not the taste-shifting gorge-delight from an old vamp either, but good and necessary.
Her body knew what it needed, what it craved, and the screaming crowd packed against the far wall was no longer a collection of unique individuals.
Now the crush was simply a mass of bleating, milling, juicy prey.
Simone uncoiled, blurring through air gone tight, hard, and straining against her skin.