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We took turns guarding the helpless and sending strike forces out to fight the Shadowbanes, leaving through a different exit each time to make it harder for our dwindling number of enemies to anticipate where we would attack next.
Most of the passages are locked from the outside—only someone in the stacks can open them—but I’ll find a way in. I’ll rip a door off its hinges if I have to. A door can be replaced; Blaire can’t.
Her face rises in my mind, making my heart pump faster.
Most of the time, vampires can choose when our hearts beat and when they don’t. Like choosing when to breathe, it’s a novelty we enjoy, a way to feel human when we’re in the mood to do so. But at times like these, moments of panic, fear, and helplessness, our hearts can take on a mind of their own, racing the way they did when we were mortal.
I haven’t felt this mortal, this vulnerable, in years.
Nightmarish visions of Blaire’s body—cold and lifeless, her bright eyes flat and empty—float through my mind like poisonous balloons I don’t dare touch for fear they’ll burst and make my worst fears a reality.
She can’t be dead. I can’t lose another person I care for without even getting to say goodbye.
Care for. Pull your head out of your ass, Blackmore. You more than care for her. She’s the one you’ve been waiting for, you bloody idiot. You should have been hanging on to her tight with both hands. Instead, you pushed her away, swore you didn’t return her feelings, and all but delivered her to Janet on a silver platter.
Logically, I know I tried to protect Blaire. I not only invited her to come stay at our home, where she would be safe from the threats in her crumbling mansion, I also made sure Janet couldn’t feed on her.
But I should have done more. I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight until I was certain she understood how to protect herself in a place like Nightfall. In many ways, our town is safer than a human village ever could be for those of supernatural descent, but there are dangers, too, especially when you don’t know the rules.
A human street is perfectly safe for those who know to look both ways before crossing. But if you don’t…
A new fear rises inside of me—what if Blaire escaped Janet, only to run into some other threat she was even less prepared for?
The thought is barely through my head when the outcast campground comes into view through the trees.
I hadn’t realized it was so close to one of the catacombs exits until now. I haven’t been out this way in years. Not all of the creatures who make their homes here are violent or dangerous, but there are enough mad harpies, blood-thirsty pixies, and degenerates of various pedigrees to make it a place best avoided, even for elder vampires.
If Blaire emerged here, the chances that she could have found more trouble waiting for her on the other side of the door are significant.
I search the campground but aside from a couple of harpy children squatting in the dust around what looks like a game of marbles, their thinly feathered wings twitching each time they score a hit, and a bent old woman stirring a pot of something foul-smelling above a campfire nearby, things are quiet.
Too quiet.
The clanless vamps who live here are obviously still locked inside their campers until nightfall, but most of the other occupants aren’t nocturnal. There should be more activity at the camp. Bare minimum, the pixies should be swarming above that pot. They prefer blood, but the pests will literally eat almost anything, and they’re always hungry.
They’re like dogs, that way, with their eyes bigger than their stomachs and not much common sense when it comes to biting off more than they can chew.
Chew…
I tilt my head, wishing the fucking suit had holes for my ears, as well. My usually preternatural hearing has been reduced to a third of its usual keenness. But I would swear I can hear something chewing up there in the forest above the camp.
I turn toward the sound only to come face-to-face with two rangy looking shifters in the midst of sneaking up behind me. They’re in human form, but I know these two. They’re panther shifters who showed up in Nightfall about six months ago. They claimed the right to sanctuary in accordance with the town charter but refused to reveal why they’d been cast out of their pride in New York.
And until innocent, an outcast is assumed to be guilty of…something, though we may never know what. So, they ended up here at the campground, on the fringes of our tightknit society. Even this morning, I would have said this is where they belong and stood behind Nightfall’s long history of accepting any supernatural who needs refuge from the world, no matter how shady they might appear.
But now…
Now, as they advance toward me, their eyes shining with an unhealthy light and their hands clearly itching to inflict some sort of damage, I wish our town was a little less welcoming. I also wish that I had my hands and mouth free. Without this bulky suit and with my fangs out for show and tell, I could make quick work of these two. But as things stand, I’m largely defenseless.
I should make a break for Main Street and call for help, get Lyle and the others to search the area near the camp for Blaire if they haven’t already. Typically, shifters are nearly as fast as vampires, but these two are painfully thin and clearly addicted to something. The needle marks scabbing and bruising their arms could be from a number of drugs, any one of which will make them weaker and slower than a healthy shifter.
I decide I like my chances for outrunning them and getting help, but when I turn to sprint in the other direction, I discover two more skeletal men behind me, so close I nearly crash right into them.
I barely have time to mentally curse this fucking suit before they’re on me, all four of them tackling me to the ground and jerking my arms behind my back.
Chapter Twenty
Blaire
