Chapter 18
There was nothing simple about wrap up.
There were Lucian everywhere that needed to be corralled and most of them weren't. They were in Las Vegas, not only in the stolen City Hall, and they'd be spread throughout the world, just like the Vampyren.
They were harder to spot. Tall, pale, deceptively strong, they didn't give off the same vibe as a seven or eight-foot-tall warrior with waist-length black hair.
The world needed the very people the Vampyren had trained.
Mindy knew how to fight now. She wasn't as strong and she wasn't as big as the first wave of invaders, but she could teach.
After three months protected by drunk businessmen, trading the occasional grope for the questionable safety of the condo party, she'd found herself at risk of the Vampyren while stuck directly in their lair.
She'd survived.
It was time to go. Past time. She'd been feeling the drumming restlessness back at the condo party, though anyone would, if stuck with businessmen for three months of drinking.
Now there was more at stake, with more aliens on Earth and those harder for most people to identify. She needed to leave the city and head into the rural parts of the state where grassroots resistance cells were growing up.
It was criminally stupid to go back to Caesars with Alek, because he was one of her captors. Because she needed to leave before anyone could stop her.
But she had the keys and she had the freedom.
She also had the information of where to find Candy. Mindy's best friend wouldn't leave her there and Mindy wouldn't either.
They separated inside the hotel.
The lobby felt wrong. Empty in a way that grand spaces weren't supposed to be empty.
The chandeliers still blazed overhead like nothing had changed, like the world hadn't cracked open and something ancient and hungry hadn't crawled through.
The marble floors reflected the light back cold and perfect.
No guests. No staff visible. Just the two of them and the sound of their footsteps, and somewhere above them, floors and floors of girls who didn't know yet that today was the day.
Alek stopped walking and she stopped with him. His face did something complicated that she didn't have a name for. He wasn't a man who explained himself. He wasn't a man who asked for things. He took them. He commanded them. He stood in a room and the room reorganized itself around him.
He held out the keys.
"Take these."
"I can't — "
"Don't be stupid." The Vampyren weren't concerned with being polite. Alek pressed the keys to the Humvee in her hand, then a second set, and then, "I'll find you in the desert."
She felt the weight of them drop into her palm.
Two sets. He'd planned this. He'd thought about her getting out, about her needing backup access, about every locked door between her and the exit.
He'd thought about it before she had. Something about that cracked her open in a way that no amount of touching had.
"Wait!" She spun, half following him where he was already running, toward his unit, which moved in solid strength toward the rooms where probably the older Vampyren still gathered, hatching their plots and ensuring their hold on the pointless kingdom they'd overthrown.
Thinking they'd sent away the younger males that might challenge their rule of it.
She watched him move. The way he ran was nothing like a human ran.
Too fluid. Too certain. Like the ground was something he allowed to exist beneath him as a courtesy.
His men fell in around him and they were a wall of dark and purpose and she had the wild thought that she was watching something that had never lost a fight.
She had the quieter, uglier thought that there was a first time for everything.
She wondered if they had closed circuit cameras on. She wondered if any of them were watching them and if they saw Alek and his men coming for them.
He turned back when she called. "How?" she asked, her arms out, meaning How will you find me? Thinking, Am I so stupid when I've been given the chance to run?
Not stupid. And not pheromones.
Though maybe it was that. A little. From her to him. Because he answered her by licking his lips long and slow, looking at her with hooded eyes, then opening his mouth just far enough to show her his fangs.
"I've tasted you."
She found herself flushing, one hand halfway to her mouth, as if she wanted to hide. Or not. Maybe instead she wanted to lick and suck and taste.
She stood there with the keys in her hand and her pulse loud in her ears and she thought about the last few weeks.
What he'd done and what she'd let him do and the line between those two things that kept blurring.
She thought about his hands and his mouth and the particular way he said her name when he was angry and when he wasn't. She thought about the fact that he was about to walk into a room full of ancient things that had survived millennia and come out the other side sharper and colder for it.
She thought about the possibility that he wouldn't walk back out.
"I'll find you."
He spun away then and was gone, running through the hotel toward the rooms where the older Vampyren thought they were safe as some new invisible girl served them coffee.
She watched the space where he'd been for exactly two seconds.
Then she turned to go find her friend.
The hotel was largely deserted, or maybe it just seemed that way because usually Mindy was on the harem floors where there were girls and music and movies playing to fill the air and the sound of voices talking.
To give them credit, some of them were plotting and planning and others were — just talking.
The service corridors smelled like industrial cleaner and recycled air.
The carpet out here was thinner, the walls plain.
The hotel without its costume was just walls and doors and the hum of systems keeping everything alive.
She'd never seen this part of it. She hadn't been allowed.
She passed a room where someone had left a cleaning cart, mops and folded linens, somebody's whole workday abandoned mid-task. She kept moving.
Take them all.
That was a stupid idea.
But she started to run when she got to the first of the harem floors. The second set of keys Alek had handed her opened the elevators and stairwell doors for her. All the training meant she ran the flights of stairs up to the floor where the harem sheltered.
Her thighs didn't burn the way they used to.
Three months ago climbing two flights of stairs fast would have had her winded.
Now she took them three at a time and her breathing barely changed.
She hated that she had the Vampyren to thank for that.
She hated a lot of things she had them to thank for.
Keys in hand, gripped like a weapon, she made her way down hallways toward the breeding chambers where Candy was being held.
The hallways up here were different. Quieter but not empty.
She could hear sounds behind doors. Music, low.
Voices. Someone crying, muffled. The ordinary sounds of captivity that she'd stopped hearing weeks ago because the brain was good at normalizing things it had no power to change. She heard them now.
She moved faster.
Halfway there she rounded a hallway and came face to face with Cindie Gee. Mindy pulled up short and avoided the girl, jogging to one side, starting past her.
Cindie didn't move, just said over her shoulder, "I know what you're doing."
Ice ran through Mindy's veins and she heard Shauna in memory telling her not to trust that one, she was on her own team and no one else's.
She turned back unwillingly. So close. There was still the finding of Candy and then the convincing of everyone it seemed safe to approach but it felt close. The keys in her hand felt like freedom.
Cindie had always been pretty in the way that expensive things were pretty — high maintenance, deliberately presented, worth less on second look. She stood in the hallway like she owned it. Like she'd bought stock in this place and expected a return.
"What am I doing?" Mindy asked.
Cindie's eyes half lidded. She looked pleased. "You're going to run. You're looking for that stupid girl you call a friend. You were out of the hotel. How stupid are you?"
"I haven't been caught yet." And then, the thing she most didn't want to say, "Come with us."
She'd meant to leave without Cindie. Without a handful of girls who'd be at no more risk than they had been, but who weren't completely on the side of — humans? Or maybe just not enough on the side of anyone but themselves.
Cindie cocked one anorexic hip. "Oh, I don't think so. Look at everything we have here and you're going to risk it." She pointed around them.
It was a prison. It was beautiful, sumptuously appointed, full of amenities, and never in her life had Mindy expected to get tired of being pampered or the flip side, be in such stellar physical condition.
But it was a prison nonetheless.
And Alek waited beyond it.
"It's a trap. It's a prison. And the Vampyren are not your friends."
That just made Cindie smile harder, her chestnut hair gleaming in the hallway lights.
She looked comfortable. She looked like a woman who had calculated all available futures and picked the one that cost her the least. Mindy could almost understand it.
If you were willing to stop thinking of the other girls, to stop thinking about what came next, to stop asking what happened when the Vampyren no longer needed their soft little human collaborators.
If you could turn all of that off, then sure. The hotel was nice.
"They will be," Cindie said. "When I bring them the prize of the human girl who fucked up their plans for today."
"Cindie, please."
That just got a smile as Cindie started to turn away. And then there was movement from one of the rooms, someone coming up quick behind Cindie before she could turn. Before she could react.
It wasn't a lamp, whatever it was, but it was something hard that didn't break when Candy brought it down on Cindie's head.
Cindie went down like a question that had been answered. Mindy stared at her on the hallway carpet and then looked up at Candy.
Candy. Still in the thin hotel-issued clothes, her dark hair loose and tangled at the ends, barefoot, holding whatever she'd grabbed in both hands and breathing hard through her nose.
She looked like she'd lost weight she couldn't afford to lose and there were shadows under her eyes that hadn't been there before Pan took her.
Mindy, inappropriately, and badly timed, began to giggle.
"Where the hell have you been?" Candy asked. "I thought you'd never get here."
"Weeks," Mindy said, because that was the entire word for it.
The weeks of not knowing. Of asking and not being answered and of lying awake calculating odds she didn't like.
Her throat was doing something inconvenient.
She crossed the distance between them and grabbed Candy's arm, just to confirm she was solid and present and standing upright on her own two feet.
Candy grabbed her back, quick and hard, and then they were holding on for exactly the amount of time they'd earned, which was about three seconds, because the hall was filling around them.
Shauna was there, and Gina and Jennifer, and everyone else she knew. They carried little but each carried the things they thought they'd need; the things they didn't want to leave without. Mindy didn't ask how they knew or if anyone — Alek? — had contacted them.
She just rattled the keys and said, "Come on."
They moved fast and they moved together and behind them the hotel fell away — the chandeliers and the carpets and the rooms and the years of someone else's plan for their lives.
Ahead was the parking structure and the Humvee and the hot dry dark of the Nevada desert, which was enormous and indifferent and full of the kind of silence that had no one listening in it.
The night air hit her face and she kept running.
They all kept running. The desert stretched out ahead of them past the edge of the city's light, dark and wide and theirs.
Somewhere behind them, deep in the hotel, Alek was walking toward something old and dangerous and she held that thought for one stride and then let it go, because she was running and the keys were in her hand and the Humvee was right where it was supposed to be.
They'd been sold to the Vampyren but they were taking their future back.
The desert didn't care what they'd survived. It just waited. That was enough.