The Nightlife San Antonio: (Urban Fantasy Romance) (The Nightlife Series) (21 page)

He snagged the baseball cap from the dead white-trash and headed in the direction they had gone, deeper into the darkness of his soul and the warehouse.

* * * *

She smelled fear in their sweat and the scent lured her closer. They circled around the shelves and back again, trying to keep each other in sight as much as possible. One man seemed unperturbed. He walked ahead alone, bold, stupid.

She bided her time until
he came around the corner of a stack of boxes, momentarily out of sight from the others. She pounced and drove his face to the floor. He got off one shot but it didn’t hit anything. She didn’t have the luxury of playing with this one, so she snapped his neck quickly and retreated.

“Hey! She’s over here!” One of them came around the corner just as she leapt away. He sent several shots in her direction, hitting only boxes. More of them milled around the site of her kill, but she kept moving. They were slow and weak. She’d been spoiled by Adrian, his sleek, powerful body and his animalistic urges. Compared to her chosen, these men looked like
food – nothing more.

They stuck close together as they adv
anced, slow, cautious. The tang of their sweaty fear reeked worse than ever. She wouldn’t be able to pick them off so easily anymore.

Then another joined them,
trailing up from behind. She did a double-take and her heart thumped loud in her chest. Him,
her man
. She’d know him anywhere. She’d been so focused on hunting, she had ignored the sense that he was coming for her. Now, she felt him in her bones, felt every step he made as he walked casually into their midst. He moved differently than these men, a quiet confidence. The baseball cap obscured his face, but she knew it was him.

Crenshaw called out to her chosen
, Adrian, “What the fuck is up with the lights?”

Adrian
kept walking right into the center of five men. He was the most fearless man she’d ever seen, or too stupid to know any better. Either way, she couldn’t just sit there and watch him die.

Shrieking a ferocious battle-cry, she launched into the air above the men and came down with teeth bared and claws ready.

* * * *

Adrian heard his cue. She
couldn’t have timed it better if he’d planned it. With her scream he pointed in the air. “She’s over there!”

They all looked up, guns held high, except for Adrian. He had
both pistols out firing in two directions. He dropped two of them before anyone knew what he was doing.

Crenshaw recognized the danger
and dived for the floor, scrambling to get out of the line of fire. He didn’t get far. A hundred pounds of shimmering cocktail-dressed fury landed on him and tore through his throat in ravenous abandon.

Adrian couldn’t afford to focus on what she was doing, and
, truthfully, he’d rather not see it. He kept firing at the downed men and sighting on the running Mexicans, shooting at anything that moved. One guy got behind some boxes and then popped back up with an automatic weapon in hand. Bullets peppered the air around Adrian.

Adrian dived and rolled, not the easiest thing to do in a jacket and
bulletproof vest. A second later she was shrieking again, a god-awful noise that had never come from the throat of a human being. He followed the sound of her fury as she leapt high in the air, right over the boxes, and landed on the man with the automatic rifle. His shots ended abruptly, replaced with meaty-crunchy noises and the short but poignant scream of a man dying in agony.

He had no more
time to consider La Reina. The last Mexican was running off into the warehouse. Adrian couldn’t risk the man getting on his cell phone and calling his buddies. This man could not escape, not if Adrian and Samantha wanted to get out of the country alive. Adrian gave chase, wishing he had night-vision goggles like his military days. Hunting people was so much more fun with expensive military toys.

He skated around boxes, jumped over loose pallets, and then stopped to listen. Ahead were sounds of scuffles and cursing in Spanish. He headed for the noise, trying to be quiet and stay low. The area the man had been in evidenced
nothing. Several paths led off between the boxes in three directions.

Adrian strained to hear
or see something, anything, the slightest movement. He was out in the open, vulnerable, but he didn’t know which way to go. A noise high up on the top shelf drew his attention, but then a click sounded behind him. A gun being cocked.

“Adrian, down!” She screamed as sh
e descended from on high.

A
gunshot hammered into his back and slammed him face-first to the floor as another shot blew past the hairs on his neck, a slight stinging burn across the skin. Barely missed him.

Adrian fought through the throbbing pain, tears in his eyes as he rolled over. He tried to focus in the darkness to aim his pistol, but all he could see was a ferocious blur of shimmery black cocktail dress.
She landed on the man with a thud and wrestled with his gun hand. Adrian couldn’t see enough to shoot without hitting her, so he lay there on his back, gun sighted, waiting for an open shot.

She was strong, so much stronger than a
woman should be. She tossed the gang-banger around like a rag doll, slamming him back and forth between two pallets of boxes. The man lost his pistol in the frenzy, but Adrian held his gun on them, watching in horrified awe as the man was lucky enough to get in one solid punch to her nose.

That’s gonna piss her off real good.

Her head rocked back, and from the gristly sound, Adrian suspected her nose was probably broken. A growl of rage escaped her as she snapped back at the man with a handful of claw and came away with half the skin of his face.

T
hat’s so gross
. But he couldn’t look away as she sunk her teeth into his throat and finished the gory job. The creature enjoyed her work, maybe a little too much.

She turned on him, face covered in other men’s blood
, and some of her own. She reached for him anxiously. “Were you hit?” Her monstrous toothy visage was the picture of concern, if you overlooked all the blood.

What the hell had he gotten
himself into with this wicked woman?

“I … I’m good.
The vest stopped one round. I’ll probably have a killer bruise, but it’s okay.” He slowly dropped the pistol away from her as she took his hand and pulled him up off the floor.

Her hands fluttered around him, checking to see that he was indeed unharmed.
He could do nothing but stare at her. She was so fucking strange, fascinating and attractive, even covered in bloody gore.

“What?” She began to look irritated, realized he was staring at all the blood on her face, and lifted up
the hem of her sparkly dress to wipe it away. He caught a flash of the silky black thong panties he’d bought her as she tried to clean herself, but only succeeded in smearing blood around her face in swirl patterns.

“You ruined the dress.” He fought the urge to laugh hysterically, a sense of madness
bubbling just around the corner. Hard to tell who were the bad guys, them or her. Perhaps both.

Despite everything, he still felt this powerful draw, a
yearning in his bones to be near her. His need for her cancelled out his revulsion at watching her dispose of a man with her teeth. He wanted this woman, and nothing he had witnessed changed that. He didn’t know who was more sick, the flesh-rending vampire, or the fool who couldn’t quit her.

She
gave up trying to clean herself. “So, buy me another one. This is all your fault anyway.” Suddenly she was in his face, snarling. “I trusted you! I can’t believe you handed me off to these assholes.”

At a loss for words,
“Sorry,” was all that came out of his mouth. Sounded kinda lame.

She looked at him, cocked
her head sideways, and bored into his soul with that searching stare. After a moment, she laughed. “Adrian, please just listen to me from now on. We have to trust each other.”

She hugged him, and all the strangeness drifted away with her in his arms. This felt right, them togethe
r. This was how it should be, and to deny that anymore would probably cost him his life, and maybe hers too.

He almost wanted to kiss her, but … no.

“Come on, let’s get the hell out of here. I’ve had enough of people trying to kill me for one night.” She pulled him along, her arm around him, leading him back out the way they came in.

Yeah. Shit, cops. “Um … we might have another problem.”

She stopped. “Adrian, what did you do this time?”

She faced him, a growl on her lips. The woman actually scared him. Him. He’d never been afraid of any woman bef
ore. It was kinda sexy and creepy, all at the same time.

“I called the cops
.”

“Oh, no
.”

“Well, there were Mexican Mafia
and redneck Aryan Brotherhood all over the damn place. What was I supposed to do?”

She shook her head and grabbed his hand. “
Let’s go see what new pile of shit you created for us.”

He followed her
. They weaved through the stacks and made their way back to the front entrance of the warehouse. No one in sight, nothing moved. He whispered to her. “Can you see anything?”

Her hand on his shoulder stilled him. She was alert, turning her head left and right, sniffing at the air. The woman was a straight up pre
dator. Dead sexy. He caught a hard-on thinking about it.

“They’re coming from there.” She pointed, and seconds later Coronado emerged from the lit office into the warehouse
. Someone tall and lanky walked beside him.

This sure didn’t look like the cavalry, which was a good thing. The less people they had to take down, the better. Without a doubt, Adrian understood that he would have to get pas
t Coronado to make a run for it. The detective had to be out of the picture long enough to let them get to the coastline without a police chopper overhead.

“Follow my lead.” Adrian stepped up to meet Coronado, wishing he didn’t have to do this.

Samantha fell back, making some kind of hissing noise, like a cat preparing to maul somebody.

“Hey, Coronado.” Adrian casually slipped his h
and over the curved metal of the tire iron hanging from his belt loop. “You’re late. I thought I told you to bring lots of backup?”

The detective glanced at the two bodies on the ground by the van. “Looks like you brought a li
ttle backup of your own.” He drew his gun and leveled it at Adrian.

The man standing beside Coronado
ignored Adrian completely, focused solely on Samantha. Watching the detective and his pistol, Adrian couldn’t ignore the sense of wrongness he caught from the other man.

Adrian
held his hands up in surrender. “Hey, I’m not the bad guy here. I’m just a survivor. Put the gun down. I’m not your enemy.”

The
other man laughed, a sound filled with Latin petulance. Adrian finally took a moment to study him. He’d assumed the guy must be a cop, but when he really looked closely, this guy most definitely was
not
a cop. Real cops don’t wear custom tailored suits and grease their hair back like a bad rerun of Miami Vice.

“Adri
an, get away from him. NOW!” Samantha sounded panicky. She snagged Adrian’s coat, trying to pull him back. The rumble of her menacing growl was almost in his ear, like a dog warning against an intruder.

The horrible truth sank into Adrian’s
stomach. This was
him
. This was the man she had spoken of, her
master
. This was the guy who had a price tag on Samantha’s head.

Adrian speared Coronado with his best look of pure hatred.
“Is that the going rate to corrupt a San Antonio police detective – a half million?”

The slick Hispanic addressed Samantha as if Adrian and Coronad
o didn’t exist. “Aye que bonita! La Reina wears her feast like a trophy.”

Sam
yanked hard and pulled Adrian away from her former master who smirked at them with a look of pure malice. This was the kind of malice that delighted in mayhem and chaos, the kind of malice that drove a drug cartel to the top of the bloody heap in Colombia and Mexico.

“The power I held in that name,
La Reina
, was simply a convenient arrangement for this bastard, the creature I called
master.
” She jabbed her clawed finger at the man who could not stop smiling at her. “He didn’t want the world to know his identity, so he hid behind me, operated through me. He’s the true
La Reina
. All that I did in that name was in service to him. I was never the Queen. I was a tool, a chess piece on his playing board.”