Rogue (Relentless Book 3) (36 page)

Instead of throwing my power at the vampires circling me, I raised my arms and threw it up into the air, calling to the magic in the water falling from the sky. Fat raindrops froze into thousands of sharp needles of ice that swirled around me to rip through the vampires’ clothes and skin. Screams tore from their throats, and they raised their arms to protect themselves.

“Sara!” Nikolas roared from somewhere in the house. His voice startled me, and I lost my concentration. Ice turned back to water.

The vampires turned their ravaged faces toward me, their mouths twisted into snarls. But turning water to ice was only one of the tricks I’d picked up in the last few months.

I feinted toward one of them, then dropped and kicked the legs out from under another. I landed in a puddle of water, which was exactly where I wanted to be. With one hand I grabbed the ankle of the downed vampire while my other hand flew up to meet the chest of another vampire as it pounced on me.

The blast lit up the lawn like lightning. Screams tore at my eardrums before the two vampires stiffened and collapsed on the grass in smoking heaps.

Above me, a sword flashed through the air and decapitated one of the two remaining vampires. The last one, sensing the battle was lost, turned to run, but Chris cut him down before he reached the edge of the lawn.

I sat up and rolled to my feet, ready to take on the next threat, but Chris and I were alone on the lawn. That was when it struck me that all I could hear was rain and thunder. Turning toward the house, I looked up at the window I’d come through and found Jordan and several of the other warriors staring at me like I was the main attraction at a circus sideshow.

“What the hell just happened?” someone asked.

Before anyone could answer, a furious male bellow came from inside the house. Seconds later, the people in the window parted as Nikolas leapt through it. His eyes swept over the bodies on the lawn as he strode toward me. I couldn’t tell how close he was to a rage, but something told me it wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge.

Ignoring our audience, he pulled me into his arms, and the tremors moving through him told me he was on the verge of losing it. My arms went around his neck, and I pulled his face down to mine. “I love you,” I whispered against his lips before I kissed him.

His body was rigid, and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to respond. But then his mouth moved over mine and he made a sound deep in his chest as he pulled me closer. At first the kiss was urgent, desperate, but it soon became soft and exploring as the rage drained out of him.

He broke the kiss and let out a ragged breath. “You were supposed to stay with me.”

I smiled at him, barely aware of the rain drenching us. “You didn’t need my help, and someone had to save Chris’s ass. Again.”

He looked like he was about to argue, but he groaned and rested his forehead against mine. “Now I know why Nate’s going gray. At this rate, I’ll be white before him.”

“Well, there’s always
Clairol for Men
.”

The exasperated look in his eyes made laughter bubble from me. I hugged him tightly, pressing my face into his neck and breathing in the scent that could only be Nikolas.

“Damn, are they always like that?” I heard Abigail ask.

Jordan snickered. “Pretty much.”

Chris chuckled behind me. “Do you two want us to give you some privacy?”

I started to retort until I realized the reason for his comment. Heat flooded my face, as well as a few other places, when I looked down at my legs wrapped around Nikolas’s waist like a monkey. I lifted my eyes to his and caught him smiling like a man who was very pleased with himself. His hands slid down my back to cradle my bottom, their heat seeping through my wet jeans. My body grew so warm despite my wet clothes that I was sure there had to be steam coming off me.

His chest rumbled. “On second thought, this might be worth a few gray hairs.”

I scowled at him as I dropped my legs and let them dangle until he saw fit to lower me to the ground. He kissed the tip of my nose before he released me, making it impossible to keep a smile from creeping across my face.

Nikolas looked over my head at Geoffrey, who had joined us on the lawn. “How many?”

“Fifteen.” Geoffrey ran a hand over his shaved head. “Jesus! If you and your team hadn’t been here, it would have been a massacre.”

“Or maybe they came
because
we were here,” Chris said meaningfully.

Geoffrey’s gaze fell on me “How did you know? You said fifteen were coming. How could you possibly guess that?”

“I wasn’t guessing.” I broke off as I realized the coldness hadn’t completely disappeared from my chest. “I was wrong. There were sixteen. There’s still one here.”

“The house is clear,” Elijah called from the doorway.

I moved away from them, trying to let my radar do its thing. It was a little out of whack after being hit with so many vampires at one time, and I needed to make sure I wasn’t just being paranoid.

“Chris, can you and Elijah do a sweep out here to be safe?” I heard Nikolas ask as I walked toward the front door. He was right behind me when I stepped into the house.

Water ran off me to pool on the hardwood floor as I stood in the living room, trying to locate the remaining vampire. “There.” I pointed to the basement door.

“There’s no way for anyone to get in down there,” Geoffrey said. “The basement windows are all too small.

“Then one tried to go out that way and got trapped, because there is a vampire in that basement.”

Geoffrey still looked doubtful. “We’ll have to flush him out. Abigail and I will go down, and the rest of you keep an eye on this door in case he comes through it.”

“We need to find out how they found this place and if they knew who was here,” Nikolas said. “Unless you’re in immediate danger, do not kill him.” Everyone nodded, and he turned to me. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to ask you to let the others handle this one.”

“I’ve done enough killing for one night. This one is all yours.” I didn’t add that my shoulder was starting to hurt like hell. I’d covered it with my hair so he wouldn’t get upset, but I had to get it looked at. Something told me there was gunna paste in my immediate future.

I walked to the other side of the living room to stay out of the way while the others faced the door. Geoffrey opened the basement door, and he and Abigail went silently down the stairs. I held my breath along with everyone else in the room as we waited for something to happen.

A girl’s scream cut through the silence, followed by a few thumps and what sounded like a computer monitor hitting the floor. I thought I heard the rattle of chains before a screech of pain came from below. What the hell were they doing down there?

“We have her,” Geoffrey called.

Everyone relaxed and a few warriors looked in my direction. They were wondering how I’d known there was a vampire in the basement, but no one voiced the question.

“What will they do with her?” I asked Nikolas, who had come to stand beside me.

“They’ll confine her and wait until she gets hungry to see if she’ll talk.”

I thought about Nate’s short time as a vampire. Tristan had planned to do the same to him to get him to talk. Other techniques didn’t work on vampires. Hunger drove them insane.

An SUV pulled into the driveway, its lights splashing across the carnage on the lawn. The other Vegas team had gone out on patrol before the attack, and it looked like someone had called them back. The four warriors filed into the house and surveyed the damage to their place.

“Goddamn!” said a burly brunette with short cropped hair. “We missed all the action.”

A blond warrior pushed past him and headed for the stairs. “Fuck the action,” he growled. “If my
Martin
has a scratch on it, I’m going to find some vampire ass to kick.”

I looked at one of the others. “His
Martin
?”

The brunette chuckled. “His guitar. Elvis gave it to him. Jackson loves that thing.”

“He knew Elvis? For real?”

“Yep. Even used to jam with him.”

As I was trying to wrap my mind around that tidbit, the warriors started cleaning up and securing the place. Nikolas told me they’d pack up and move to a new location tomorrow because this place was compromised.

Jordan stood in the middle of the living room looking at the vampire bodies. “Shouldn’t we call for a cleanup crew?”

Jackson bounded down the stairs. “We
are
the cleanup crew. The van’s out back.”

I grimaced at the grisly task ahead of us. “What will you do with all the bodies?”

“We’ll take them out to the desert and burn them.” He looked at the bodies in the living room. “With this many it’s going to take at least two trips.”

Someone brought the van around to the front of the house, and the warriors quickly loaded bodies into it. They got rid of the bodies on the lawn first and then the ones in the living room. Jackson had been right. It was definitely going to take two trips.

After that, some of the warriors pinned a tarp over the living room window to keep out the wind and rain. Not that it would help much. The room was pretty much trashed. And cold. I went over to one of the warriors who lived in the house. “Hey, do you guys have something dry Jordan and I can borrow?” Not that their clothes would fit me, but anything was better than being wet and cold.

“We had a female warrior staying here two months ago, and she left some stuff behind. Upstairs, first door on the right. Bottom drawer in the dresser.”

“Thanks.”

We found two pairs of jeans and several tank tops. They were a good fit for Jordan, but I had to roll up the bottoms of the jeans. I also grabbed a sweater and a pair of the guy’s socks to replace my damp ones. My boots weren’t too bad, so I pulled them on again.

Jordan found a first aid kit and cleaned and bandaged the scratches on my shoulder. They weren’t too deep and the bleeding had already stopped. Of course, no Mohiri first aid kit is complete without gunna paste. This time, I didn’t complain as I took the awful stuff.

Nikolas found us a few minutes later. “The storm is letting up, and the pilot says we can take off in an hour or so. I’m going to call Tristan, and then we’ll head over to the airport.”

“Okay.” I rubbed my chest where a small knot of ice lingered despite my warm clothes. I was so ready to put some distance between me and that vampire.

The vampire had other ideas.

I was in the kitchen grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge when a girl’s scream came from the basement. Seconds later, something small and fast sped up the stairs, coming to a halt when it saw the warriors blocking its way.

The vampire, who had been a teenage girl before she was changed, stared in panic before she darted for the nearest opening. Warriors shouted as they moved to intercept her. She wasn’t as fast as some of them, but her size and agility made up for that. And like most people I’d encountered, she went for what looked like the easiest target in the room. Me.

There was no time to think. I grabbed a dagger that one of the warriors had left on the island, and threw it as the vampire flew through the kitchen doorway. She screamed, clawing at the silver hilt protruding from her abdomen as she staggered toward me.

In that moment, I was struck by how young she looked, and I felt a pang of sadness for the girl whose life had been stolen from her. She could have been any one of the girls from my old school. Her speed before I’d stopped her told me she’d been a vampire for at least a few decades. Did she have a family who missed her and still grieved the loss of their daughter or sister? She was going to die here and they would never know what had become of her.

She ripped out the dagger and leapt at me, her fangs and claws bared.

I twisted to one side and brought my fist up against her throat in a strike that might have crushed her windpipe had she been human. It was enough to surprise her, and that was all I needed. I wrapped one arm around her throat in a choke hold and pulled her back against me with my other hand squarely over her heart. Her body twitched as I gave her just enough of a jolt to incapacitate her.

Every instinct in me screamed for me to end her, but I stopped myself before I could do that. We needed her alive so we could find out how the vampires had found this place. The Mohiri were very good at keeping their safe house locations a secret, but somehow the vampires had found us tonight. If our warriors were going to remain safe, we had to know how we had been compromised.

The vampire sagged against me as one very aggravated Mohiri male pushed past the warriors crowding the wide kitchen doorway. “Damn it, Sara. There are a dozen warriors here. You couldn’t let one of them handle this?”

I scowled at him over her head. “Look at her, Nikolas. She’s even smaller than I am. Do you think I can’t handle one little vampire?”

“Don’t answer that, my man,” Jackson said, shaking his head. “It’s a trap.”

Nikolas glowered at the blond warrior who seemed totally unfazed. He must have been the first person I hadn’t seen shrink from one of Nikolas’s scowls.