Chapter 17 #4
Another root limb flung out and whipped around my shins.
My legs went out from under me. My chin smacked the floor.
My lip split, popping like a grape between my teeth.
Blood filled my mouth. The floor moved, sliding under me as the root arm dragged me toward Jeremy.
Everything was happening too fast, rushing under me, around me.
No time to think, just react. I twisted onto my back and kicked at the root holding my leg.
Jeremy wasn’t even pretending to be human now. Whatever the enormous monster thing was that towered over me, it had spider limbs and hollow eyes, and I was about to be dead in the next three seconds.
A blur of white came from my left, swung up onto the creature’s back, locked an arm around its throat, and buried gleaming fangs into its neck.
Bentley!
I’d never been so happy to see someone I hated in my entire life.
The Jeremy creature screamed. Its limbs unraveled from my legs and lashed toward Bentley.
I rolled over and scrabbled forward on my hands and knees toward the broken piano. Animal sounds filled the room behind me. Growls, snarls, and the sounds of snapping wood. I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to know. An explosion of glass brought an end to the growls.
A root tangled around my leg again.
“Then your living blood will have to do, pool boy!”
Yanked out of my escape attempt again, the floor rushed under me. I grabbed the nearest thing I could use as a weapon—a piano leg—and twisted.
Bentley was gone, thrown through the shattered windows, I assumed.
Jeremy hauled me close, his hideous mouth leering.
I swung the broken piano leg like a bat, putting all my strength behind it, and caught the side of Jeremy’s face. His dislocated jaw hung sideways by a few inches.
Ew.
Salt wasn’t going to cut it this time.
How the heck was I going to survive this? I couldn’t fight monsters. I didn’t even like confrontation.
A splintery limb came at me. I swung for that too, batting it away. My heart raced, body hot and buzzing with adrenalin and fear and anger. “Yeah! C’mon then!” The old, feral part of me was waking up. The part I’d buried deep. I swung the piano bat like a wild man. “You wanna piece of me!?”
Jeremy huffed, grabbed my leg again, and turning, dragged me behind him, across the floor.
Oh, okay. Outside it was.
To the pool . . .
I tried to sit up, to grab at the root around my ankle, but that’s easier said than done when you’re being hauled on your ass across the floor like a trash bag.
Bits of shattered glass dug into my leg and thigh, cutting through my jeans. Jeremy dragged me through the broken window frame, out onto the patio again.
I was getting pretty damn sick of seeing that pool.
“Hey!” Theo yelled.
I swung my gaze around, trying to find him.
“That’s my pool boy!”
He came along the edge of the pool, lit up from below by the rippling lights. His nails glittered, long and deadly. Fangs bared, hair wild, eyes dark but electric. I’d seen him fight Bentley, but he’d been weaker then. Now he looked vicious, half wild, and on the hunt.
Holy heck, he really was a vampire.
Jeremy dropped my leg and grinned. He had the real prize in sight.
“Theo, no! Stay back!”
Theo ignored me, cheek twitching. “I am so goddamned tired of people telling me what to do!”
“There’s the one I want,” Jeremy hissed.
“Now you’ve started something,” Bentley growled, coming from the other side. Like his brother, he’d gotten his vampire on. The pair of them converged on Jeremy, closing in on their prey.
“Vampires,” Jeremy laughed. “So full of their own importance.” His raised his spindly limbs, growing more. A whole mop of them sprouted from his back. They whipped and writhed like the roots in the garden. The limbs grew bigger. He got bigger. Dwarfing the Witherborne brothers now.
Maybe I’d hit my head, or I was in shock, but damn they looked fine—dark and light, two sides of a Witherborne coin, both deadly, both about to throw down, but not with each other. When it mattered, they could fight side by side, and it was glorious.
I still had my piano leg, and used it to prop myself up, onto my feet.
The vampires attacked in a blur, too fast for me to track. They worked like a pack, charging in, slicing with their clawlike nails, backing off, circling, lunging again, opening cuts each time. If the blood bothered Theo, he wasn’t showing it, not yet.
Maybe I really could sit this out? My body ached, cuts stung.
They didn’t need a human getting in the way.
I could probably leave them to it . . .
Jeremy’s blood had dribbled into the pool. A few drops, not much. Drip, drip, over the rolled edge. The water turned black. Instantly. A blink, and it had gone from a calm, inviting blue, to a bottomless nightmare pit.
“That . . .” I gulped and leaned over the edge, to see if there was a bottom. “Cannot be good.”
In the oily waters, my reflection leered back at me. I blinked and it blinked. But something was off about the mirror me. Its smile was too broad, and too many teeth brimmed in its mouth. That reflection definitely was not me.
The dark mirror me reached an inky black hand out of the water and placed it on the side of the pool. Then the next hand came. Then the head, wearing my face, but twisted. Eyes like pools of oil. Mouth filled with jagged teeth.
I knew it, recognized it. I’d seen it before sometimes, in the mirror. Heard its voice in my head.
It was all the bad parts of me made real.
“Uh, guys?”