vampires in america 7 - Aden (37 page)

“You mean the vampire.”

One of the younger women, a girl really, chimed in, nodding. “The pretty one,” she said, “with the cruel eyes.”

Carl Pinto had meant to move these women with the others, Sid realized, the ones Aden had freed with his raid on the house Sid had discovered. But Pinto had been forced to change his plans. And now he sat here in this house with his few captives, probably afraid to move them for fear of getting caught, but not willing to lose the profit by freeing them either. Maybe he thought whoever won the challenge would let him return to his slave running. It was definitely profitable, if one didn’t mind where the profit came from.

Sid, on the other hand, was convinced that Aden would be the ultimate victor. And that meant Carl Pinto’s days were numbered.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t wait that long. She stood and continued stretching, running through various escape scenarios in her head as she did so. On the one hand, she felt confident that Aden would look for her. He wouldn’t believe that she’d left him. She hadn’t been thinking straight before. There had to have been some evidence of her capture. Earl Hamilton and his entire security team had been on duty only one floor below. She frowned, wondering what had happened to Hamilton and his men. Were they all dead? God, she hoped not.

She shook away the thought. There was nothing she could do about it, and she didn’t need the negative energy draining her resolve. She needed to focus on one thing and one thing only, and that was getting the fuck out of here. So, points in her favor
 . . .
first, Aden would be looking for her, and second, she still had her gun. She’d learned from Dresner, that traitorous bitch, that you didn’t need an actual stake to kill a vamp. That was the traditional method, but the key was not the stake itself, but the damage it caused. Do enough damage to a vamp’s heart, no matter how you did it, and you could kill him. If she could somehow get close enough to Carl Pinto to shoot the gun point blank at his heart, that should do the trick.

Or rather, the trick would be getting the gun close enough and then pulling the trigger. She’d never killed anyone before, never even shot a gun at anything living, much less a person. But Pinto had not only killed Janey, he’d enslaved uncounted numbers of women, sending them to a horrible fate and sometimes death. Could she kill him, if it came down to it? She thought she could.

But what she
knew
was that she couldn’t sit around and wait for Aden to show up. This wasn’t a fairy tale, and she was no princess. She couldn’t count on her hero riding in on a white horse, or in this case rolling up in a black SUV. Even if he showed up, he might be too late.

The heavy tread of booted feet pounded down the hallway and stopped outside the bedroom door. Some of the women cried out, hugging each other and eyeing the door as if expecting a monster to enter, which wasn’t far from the truth. Sid didn’t join the terrified huddle—she wasn’t sure they’d have accepted her if she tried—but she played it safe, dropping into the corner and tucking her knees up against her chest, not wanting to take the slightest chance that her gun would be discovered.

There was a scrape of metal, and then what sounded like a heavy padlock falling against the doorjamb, before the door swung open. Sid had expected it to be the guards bringing food and water, but instead it was Pinto himself who stood there, his eyes gleaming red fire as he stared at her in the dim light.

“Get up, bitch,” he growled.

Sid didn’t move, just stared at him defiantly. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him.

Pinto gave her a cruel smile, and, moving faster than her human eyes could follow, he zipped across the room and grabbed the youngest of the women, the same one who’d called him pretty. She cried out, hanging from his hard grip and whimpering softly.

“Get up,” he repeated to Sid. “Or I’ll drink her dry and leave the husk.”

Sid tried to put all the hatred she felt into her stare as she stood, keeping her back against the wall. “Leave her alone,” she demanded. “You want me. I’m here.”

“How touching,” Pinto sneered. But he opened his fingers, releasing the teenager. She dropped to the floor with a clatter of chains, then crawled over to rejoin the knot of terrified captives.

“Come then, Sidonie Reid. Let’s find out why a cold bastard like Aden would find you so irresistible.”

Sidonie walked slowly, steeling herself to make a break for it when she hit the doorway. But she never got there. A deafening noise suddenly rocked the house, a loud crack of wood followed by a hard slam of something heavy and flat crashing to the floor. Like the heavy front door. Her heart soared as she realized Aden must have found her, that rescue was at hand, not just for her but for the other women. She opened her mouth to scream, to let Aden know where she was, but before she could so much as draw a breath, Pinto was on her. One of his hands gripped her waist, pinning her to his side, the other covered her mouth as he dragged her away from the living room to the opposite end of the hallway which opened to the kitchen.

It sounded like war had broken out behind them, with the steady sound of gunfire and men shouting coming from the living room. Sid knew a moment of fear for Aden before she was jerked back to her own danger as Pinto slammed her against the hallway wall hard enough to knock her breath away. He flattened himself against her, his hand over her mouth, and they hung there a long moment as Pinto seemed to listen intently to something in the kitchen. And then just as abruptly, they were moving again.

Sid fought as much as she could, but Pinto was a vampire. His strength far exceeded hers, and he didn’t mind hurting her. She strained to hear what was going on in the living room. With one exception, Pinto’s henchmen were human. If that was Aden out there, and her gut told her it was, Pinto’s human gangbangers didn’t stand a chance.

He wrenched her to a stop one more time, holding her just short of the doorless opening between the kitchen and living room. He froze, filthy fingers over her mouth, his arm around her ribs so tightly that she could barely breathe. She thought she knew why he was waiting. The door to the driveway was on the other side of the kitchen, and Pinto would have to pass right in front of the living room opening to get there. Even at vampire speeds, they would be in full view of the living room for a few precious seconds.

Pinto held her in place, muttering almost silently, trying to persuade himself to make a break for it, insisting no one would notice and cursing Aden in the same breath. Sid twisted and turned, trying to make noise, to knock something over and give away their position, but Pinto had her crushed face first up against the open shelves of a pantry cabinet, the edges digging into her cheek, her breasts, her thighs. Cold air from the wide-open door to the outside brushed over her face, and if she rolled her eyes sideways she could see the opening.

Pinto’s muscles tightened. His muttering became more urgent, and Sid knew he was steeling himself for the final dash to freedom. This was her moment of truth. She either acted now, or she surrendered her freedom and maybe her life.

Her left arm was trapped awkwardly by the steel band of Pinto’s grip and the shelf that was jammed against her chest. But her right arm was free from her elbow down. Gritting her teeth, praying Pinto was too busy with his own worries to pay attention to what she was doing, Sidonie slid her right hand down over her belly. She moved slowly, curling her fingers into claws and gathering up the double layer of her hoodie and T-shirt, sliding beneath it until she met the tight edge of her bellyband. She paused then, testing his reaction. But he seemed so focused on the dangerous invaders in his living room that he’d already disregarded his human hostage as a threat.

Leaving her hand flattened over her belly, she waited until he made his move, until he dragged her past the cracked porcelain sink, moving vampire-fast as they popped into full view of the living room and then past it. He hesitated once more, just long enough to lean forward and sniff the air outside the driveway door, and Sid made a move of her own.

Shoving her hand under the bellyband, she curled shaking fingers around the grip of the small 9mm. It felt solid in her hand, heavy, as she inched it out of the holster, as she sucked in a deep breath of courage. And then with an effort that was more awkward than graceful, she bent her elbow, twisted the gun until it was jammed it against Pinto’s chest, and pulled the trigger over and over until the slide locked back and there was nothing left to fire.

ADEN DIDN’T WASTE any time on elaborate strategies. According to Elias, whom they’d met up with as scheduled, Pinto had only one vampire left from the crew that Aden had decimated only days before. The rest were human, mostly gangbangers who were happy to act as guards and enforcers. The pay was good and the risk was low. Or it had been before tonight. Tonight, hell itself was going to descend on them in the form of one pissed-off vampire lord.

The target house was in a far worse neighborhood than the previous one. Pinto probably felt safer here. The authorities rarely ventured down these streets, usually only in response to overt violence, and there was nothing about
this
house to draw unwanted attention.

Aden’s vamps had parked their SUVs halfway down the block, flashing their fangs blatantly as they climbed out, so there’d be no question of whom potential thieves were dealing with. And just to be sure, Aden had sent out a very clear don’t-fuck-with-me message on a wave of power that even the dullest human would understand. They’d brought three vehicles in case there were captives who needed transport, and he didn’t want to come back to find all of them stripped for parts.

They walked the short distance to the house, pausing while Aden sent out a tight thread of power, scanning the house and its occupants. Sidonie was definitely inside, definitely still alive, though he couldn’t tell if she was hurt. He needed to get in there.

“One outside guard,” he observed tightly to Bastien, who stood next to him. “Human, right side of the house.”

Bastien nodded. “There’s a side door there. Probably means no back door.”

“I expected more,” Aden commented, searching the dark spaces on either side of the house, using his power to scan the house and yard, looking for more guards.

“Pinto might be short on people. They lost a lot of manpower at the slave house,” Bastien suggested.

Aden didn’t trust possibilities, but he trusted what his own senses could tell him.

“All right. Kage, you go ahead and take out that guard. When you hear us come through the front door, you join us.”

“Sire,” Kage acknowledged and took off, gliding across the street like a shadow over the moon. He didn’t bother asking how he’d know when Aden and the others got inside. He knew as well as any of them that there would be nothing subtle about Aden’s entry.

“The rest of us go in the front, quick and dirty,” Aden said, stating the obvious. “The door goes down, we go in. There’s Pinto and one other vamp, but a dozen or more humans. Some of those might be slaves, so kill everything that moves unless it’s female. We’ll sort out the rest later.”

“And Pinto, my lord?” That was Freddy. Always up for a fight, and the real fight here tonight would be Carl Pinto.

“Pinto is mine,” Aden said, one side of his mouth lifting in a half grin. “You can have the other one. Let’s do this.”

Aden crossed the street without waiting for the others, striding up the broken concrete walkway, taking the three steps to the porch in a single bound. As his foot hit the wide porch, he gathered his power into a battering ram of pure energy and shoved it front of him. The heavy door with its metal sheeting and reinforced hinges cracked down the middle like a piece of rotted wood. Freddy stepped in front of Aden and, turning sideways, kicked the shattered door inward where it fell with a loud, booming, slap of noise.

Gunfire erupted from the human guards clustered in the front room, increasing as those who’d been knocked off their feet by the original entry found their wits and their weapons and began fighting for their lives. Freddy went down under a spray of bullets from a submachine gun. Aden caught the rich scent of his blood and sent a shaft of healing energy to his vampire child, pausing to grip his shoulder as he went past. Lifting his gaze to the human who’d fired the weapon, Aden grabbed him by the throat with one hand, cupped his other hand under the man’s chin, and twisted, breaking his neck with a speed and strength no human could hope to match.