Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Plus the fucker moved fast. With a lithe surge, Rhamp dismounted, grabbed Shuli, and somehow managed to get them both back on the Harley. Which clearly had been “borrowed.”
“You good?” the guy demanded at L.W.
“Yeah. I’m good.”
“So dematerialize.”
“Go!”
When Rhamp just shook his head, L.W. started cursing, and then realized that was not going to calm his ass down. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and ordered his heart rate to slow—
Someone was talking on a bullhorn. A cop-bot, for certain.
Even more sirens now. Some shouting—
He tried to focus himself inward. But instead, the sweet smell of the gas-powered engine on the bike got louder in his nose. And so did the scent of lesser blood—and the vampire variety, too.
He took another deep breath. His ass was cold, his leg thumping, and there was a bad-news sense of wetness under his thigh.
Come on, he ordered himself. After all the tattooing he’d had done on his skin, he was good with pain. He liked it, actually. So that wasn’t the problem. Something else was—
His eyes popped open. “Goddamn you, Shuli.”
The guy, who was at half-mast over the bike’s gas tank, lifted his head enough so they could meet eyes. “What…?”
L.W. glared at Rhamp. “Until that aristocratic fuckboy is out of here, I’m not going to be able to go ghost.”
“Jesus Christ, you two,” Rhamp muttered. “Will you please decide whether you hate each other or not—”
“You want to save us both? Then get him the hell out of this alley.”
There was a moment of indecision on the other fighter’s part. Except then, on the far side of the dumpster and the Toyota, a patrol car stopped. Reversed a little. And turned into the alley, its headlights streaming all the way down the chute.
To the point where if it hadn’t been for the dumpster’s bulk, they would have been spotlit like a bunch of criminals.
“Go,” he spat.
Rhamp cursed and hit the gas, kicking up a shower of ice that sparkled in the beams of the patrol car. In the aftermath of the departure, L.W. slumped against the wedge of dirty, bloody snow under him. Turning his head, he looked down at where the cop-bot was advancing through the alley toward the busted-out Toyota.
He glanced in the other direction and saw the slayer in the doorway was still moving. Fuck. The bastards could be pumped full of lead, but unless you stabbed them in the heart, they stuck around in whatever shape you left them in. They could literally be on the verge of a leaked-out “death” for a century.
L.W. knew what had to be done. But he didn’t have the energy.
He’d lost a lot of blood himself—
Summoning the very last dregs of his strength, he dragged his body up off the icy ground—and as he lurched toward the lesser, he made sure he stuck to the center shadow cut by that hulking trash bin. Just as the cop-bots swarmed over the Toyota, he came to that doorway.
What a waste, he thought as the undead’s head moved so it could look up at him.
He could have interrogated it.
Under other circumstances.
Falling to his knees, he took a deep breath. And another. While he drew out his steel dagger.
“You’re… going… to… die…” it said.
The words were a hushed curse that wafted up at him along with the stench of that rancid oil in the slayer’s veins. And the laughter that came next was nasty and self-satisfied, like it had called for help.
“No shit, Sherlock,” L.W. muttered as he lifted his weapon over his shoulder. “I’m mortal—”
Three more lessers appeared at the end of the alley, about twenty yards from him, forty yards from the dumpster, and nearly fifty from the cops and the Toyota.
“And fuck you,” he snarled to everybody in the whole city.
As a vicious anger overtook him, something strange happened: A sudden tunnel vision shrank the world to just himself—which he supposed a lot of people would say was his S.O.P. And then he pictured his sire in that Audience Room, the two of them yelling at each other.
He took one last breath.
And stabbed the slayer.
The blast of illumination and the pop! drew the attention he knew they would. The cops instantly started clambering over the dumpster, ordering all kinds of weapons-down, hands-up, in their automated voices. The good news? The lessers at the end of the alley took one look at those uniforms and melted into the shadows.
Which just left him, his puddle of blood, and some of the many guns that had been used to shoot at the fine, electric members of the Caldwell Police Department.
Except before they could get to him, he shut his lids, exhaled… and pictured the one thing that could give him any peace.
Just as the police came barreling down at him, he disappeared into thin air.