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Ignoring everything except the singular task of getting to the woman he loved, and getting there as fast as he could despite the shackles on his body.
He moved through traffic like a wild man, running lights, cutting off the late-night, barhopping crowd crawling along the road at a fucking snail’s pace. He was exiting I-10 for Wilshire Boulevard when Sara ripped into his head once again, her terror and pain enough to stab a thousand holes in his heart, the pain counterbalanced only by his relief in finding her once again.
He punched the redial button on his cell phone to connect with Doyle and focused on locating her, on pulling thoughts from her head. Thoughts that would give him help. A clue. Anything.
Fear.
Fear, and death.
Death all around her.
But no scent of it. Only the trappings.
Stone.
Bars.
And something familiar. Not to her—her thoughts were confused, ragged. But to him. He knew this place. The small flashes in her mind adding up to a picture of—
Luke!
I’m coming, he said uselessly. She wasn’t like him. She couldn’t hear him. Even so, he had to call out to her. Had to let her know.I’m coming,he repeated.I swear that I am coming.
“Where?” Doyle demanded, his voice sounding hard and fast over the speaker.
“Hollywood,” Luke said. “My crypt. He took her to my own fucking crypt.”
“Steady,” Doyle said, his gruff voice surprisingly gentle. “We’ll get her back. I promise you. We’re going to get her back.”
* * *
“Please, no.” Sara knew it wouldn’t matter. Knew he couldn’t be reasoned with, yet she begged anyway. Begged for the life he was about to steal from her. A life she now desperately wanted to share with Luke. “Please. Don’t do this.”
“But I have to,” he said, looking at her with glassy eyes. “You were very naughty.”
“I was. Absolutely.” Her head pounded, and she wanted to reach up and clutch her skull in her hands, but her wrists were bound. She was naked, her pants and shirt in tatters on the ground.
As if in a dream, she realized where she was. A crypt, cold and dank. And she herself strapped down to the lid of a hard stone coffin.
“The blood is the light,” he said. “And my Dark Angel feeds on the light.”
In her mind, she screamed for Luke and prayed that he would hear. But there was nothing there. Nothing but the pounding in her head and the shivers that wouldn’t stop. Bone-deep trembling that shook her so much her teeth were chattering.
“You’ll be warm soon,” Stemmons said. “The dead don’t feel the cold.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t at first,” he said, and then he actually smiled at her. “First you have to give the light. To me and to my Angel. The light nurtures. The light heals. I have drunk my Angel’s light, and it has healed. Soon, it will make me divine.”
He’d fed off Tasha, Sara realized, and the gunshot wound now looked like nothing more than a scratch. All her fantasies about blowing him away, only to learn that it wasn’t a gun she needed. Because he was truly a monster.
He stepped closer, and for the first time she saw the knife in his hand, glinting in the hint of moonlight that crept in through the bars of the crypt.
“I would say that this will only hurt a little, but I’m afraid that would be a lie.” He smiled wide. “And I don’t lie. That’s very, very naughty.”
She wanted to cry, wanted to scream, but no sound came out.
No sound that is until he dragged the tip of the knife across her belly.
