16. Winnie #2
Conrad was at work. Amethyst had taken the children yesterday. No—today? God, my thoughts would not settle properly.
Another crash sounded faintly from inside the house. Fear cut straight through the haze.
What if they were inside? What if Billie woke up and wandered downstairs, because her curious nature wouldn’t allow her not to? What if CJ tried to investigate? What if Bianca thought she could reason with grown men carrying weapons?
“No, no, no…”
I hit the side door hard enough that it slammed open against the wall.
Cool darkness wrapped around me immediately as I entered the mudroom.
Better. Not enough relief, but better. Steam rose from my hands. It burned like hell, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except saving the children. I braced one shaking hand against the wall, desperately trying to force myself awake.
The house felt off. Violated.
Billie’s rain boots sat beside the mat. One of Bianca’s library books sat abandoned on the console table. Evidence of ordinary life.
And inside there were strangers. I listened carefully to their footsteps. The two men were in the kitchen, opening drawers and muttering something about silver.
The kitchen I’d worked all morning to clean was totally fucked up. That was the first coherent thought I had once I reached it.
It was an absolute mess, and not the kind of mess that occurred after children passed through it, hunting for snacks.
This wasn’t the usual Lawrence-family wrong of abandoned socks beneath stools, half-finished homework near the fruit bowl, or Billie’s tiny plastic creatures arranged in a legal protest.
This was violently fucked up.
Drawers had been yanked open. Silverware spilled across the floor. A cabinet hung crooked from one hinge. One of Conrad’s neatly labeled meal containers had fallen from the refrigerator and cracked open, sauce bleeding slowly across the tile.
Two men stood in the middle of it all. I could tell immediately that they were not supernatural beings, which should’ve been comforting after the nightmare I’d had.
They were only human men with masks covering the upper halves of their faces, wearing dark clothes and gloves, carrying greed and poor planning into a house where three children resided.
One of them was broad through the shoulders, thick-necked, breathing hard in a way that made my stomach churn.
The other was leaner, quicker, holding a crowbar in one hand as he rifled through a drawer with the other.
My skin was still smoking. The daylight had burned me far worse than I wanted to admit, exposed patches of skin aching where the sun had reached me during the run from the car.
I could feel the weakness in my limbs and the hunger beneath it, deep and instinctive, demanding blood I had no intention of taking.
Not yet.
First, I needed to get these intruders away from the children.
The thinner man turned first. He saw me in the doorway, his face going blank with confusion.
I understood why. I must have looked unhinged. Hair loose and wild around my face. Dress wrinkled. Skin reddened and faintly steaming. Eyes probably too bright, because stress always dragged the monster closer to the surface no matter how many centuries of manners one layered over it.
“The hell?” he muttered.
The larger man swung around too, gripping a stolen laptop against his chest. “Who are you?”
I took one step into the kitchen. Their confusion sharpened into alarm.
Good.
“I’m the nanny,” I said.
The thin one laughed once, too nervous for it to land properly. “Holy shit, man… rich people are weird.”
The larger one glanced toward the hallway behind me. “Is there anybody else here?”
That question opened something cold inside me.
He was thinking about witnesses. Or maybe not.
I didn’t care. I crossed the kitchen faster than either of them expected.
Not my fastest. Not even close. Daylight had made me clumsy by my own standards, every motion dragged down by the heavy, unnatural wrongness of being awake too early, too abruptly.
But to humans, even weakened, I was quick as a flash.
The larger man barely had time to drop the laptop before I caught him by the front of his jacket and drove him into the wall beside the pantry. The plaster cracked from the impact. His breath left him in a harsh burst, eyes going wide through the holes in the mask.
The thin one shouted and swung his crowbar. I twisted, but not fast enough. The metal clipped my shoulder hard enough to make white-hot pain flash down my arm. I hissed in irritation alone.
The sound made both men freeze.
The thin one stared at me, and I realized my fangs were showing. I usually had excellent control over them, but when I was this emotionally heightened, sometimes they slid out without permission.
His face changed completely. “What the?—”
I ripped the crowbar from his hand and threw it across the kitchen.
It struck the far cabinets with a brutal metallic clang that would absolutely wake the children if they weren’t awake already.
Or were they at school? The adrenaline mixed with the confusing haze of being awoken so suddenly made the timeline of the day fuzzy.
That only made me angrier.
“You broke into the wrong house,” I said.
The larger man recovered enough to shove at me, which was admirable in the same way jumping into a frozen lake for no reason was admirable. Cold plunge my ass. Briefly impressive. Deeply stupid.
He hit me in the ribs. I looked down at his fist, then slowly met his wide eyes.
I grabbed his wrist, turned him hard enough to send him stumbling, then slammed him face-first into the refrigerator door. Magnets scattered. A drawing of a goose wearing a crown fluttered to the floor. One of Billie’s spelling tests drifted after it, marked with a purple Excellent work! sticker.
My fury spiked so fast my vision narrowed.
They had walked into the children’s home. Their safe place. They had put filthy hands on the walls where Bianca read, the kitchen where CJ told his stories, the floor where Billie staged diplomatic negotiations between plastic dinosaurs.
The thin man bolted toward the doorway. I caught him before he made it out. He screamed when my hand closed around the back of his jacket and yanked him backward. I spun him into the kitchen island, hard enough that the marble rattled and a stack of lunch containers toppled sideways.
“Please,” he gasped. “Please, we didn’t know?—”
“No,” I said, my throat rough with pain and hunger. “You didn’t.”
Unfortunately, the larger man was still conscious. He came at me from the side with a knife he must have pulled from the block by the stove.
For one dreadful second, I imagined that knife upstairs. Near the children.
I moved without thinking. I caught his arm mid-swing, drove my elbow into his stomach, then used his own momentum to toss him into the wall. He hit hard, head snapping back with a sickening thud. The knife clattered across the floor.
He slid down the wall, unconscious.
The thin man stared at him, then at me, shaking. “Lady,” he whispered, “what the fuck are you?”
I was too tired to answer. I drew my fist back and landed a precise punch. Enough to end the fight, not the man.
He dropped beside the island.
Silence rushed in afterward.
For a few seconds, all I could hear was the faint sizzle of my skin where daylight exposure had done its work. The overcast afternoon light coming through the kitchen windows was muted, but not harmless. Not to me. Not after running through it half-awake and terrified.
The robbers were down. The children were safe. The danger had been mitigated. Which meant my body finally allowed me to feel everything. Pain tore through me from head to toe.
I gripped the counter, bowing my head as heat pulsed through my hands, my throat, the exposed skin near my collar. Smoke still curled in thin wisps from the worst patches, carrying that scorched smell I had not endured this strongly in years.
My knees trembled. I hated that. I hated weakness more than pain.
The thin man groaned softly from the floor. My head snapped toward him.
Blood.
Warm blood beneath skin. Human blood. Fresh enough to heal quickly. Strong enough to soothe the burning, restore the strength daylight had stripped from me, clear the fog still clinging to the edges of my mind.
Only a sip.
The thought arrived before I could stop it.
I had not drunk directly from a human in over a century. I drank from blood bags. I had a system designed specifically so I never needed to hover over an unconscious human and negotiate with the ancient, ugly part of myself that didn’t care about consent when the pain was severe enough.
I swallowed hard.
The man groaned again.
My gums ached as my fangs descended again.
I hated the relief of it. Hated how natural it felt.
I leaned closer, mouth parting and breath catching from the hunger. My hands still trembled, and everything in me narrowed to the beat of blood under his skin.
Then I felt them. Three little heartbeats in the foyer.
I froze.
Slowly, I turned my head.
The children stood in the wide opening between the foyer and the kitchen. All three of them with their backpacks slung over their shoulders. They’d just returned from school.
CJ was in front, one arm stretched slightly in front of his sisters as though his eleven-year-old body could stop anything terrible from reaching them.
Beside him, Bianca was pale and rigid, eyes moving rapidly over the scene, cataloging every detail with terrifying precision, including my exposed fangs.
Billie clutched a stuffed bear against her chest, her curls wild around her face, her mouth slightly open.
They stared at me.
At the unconscious men.
At the smoke rising from my skin.
At my fangs.
My heart, traitorous and undead and useless, lurched. “I can explain,” I blurted.
It was perhaps the stupidest sentence I had ever spoken, and I had once told a customs officer that the bag of blood in my luggage was for amateur theater.
The children didn’t move.