Page 21 of First Blood
After about twenty yards, a cabin came into sight. The silver SUV was parked in front. The cabin couldn’t have been more than five hundred square feet, with a wraparound porch sporting broken railings and weathered boards.
It was exactly the kind of place you’d choose to murder someone in.
Of course, they’d chosen it in order to lure me out of Fenwick’s territory, where they could maybe reasonably claim it didn’t have anything to do with me being Fenwick’s employee, or anything to do with Fenwick.
They obviously didn’t know my boss very well if they thought that would fly, but that wouldn’t help me if Laurie and I were both dead when Fenwick sent my colleagues to eviscerate them.
I needed a good angle of approach and a plan. There were at least three of them, based on what Esther had told me. That meant I wouldn’t be able to take them all out simultaneously, and Laurie would be vulnerable no matter what, unless I lured one off on his own or took them completely by surprise, or both.
Which would’ve been a great fucking plan, if at that moment Laurie hadn’t screamed, trailing off into an anguished moan.
The sound echoed in my skull and lit my veins on fire, and I lost my grip on calm, planning, and sanity.
A moment later, I was running at the cabin full-tilt. There was a large front window, and then a second later, there wasn’t a large front window. I crushed a rocking chair as I landed, glass flying all around me.
Four people froze and stared: Laurie, barefoot and with his shirt torn to shreds, his hands bound behind him, lying on the floor curled around his belly with blood dripping into his eyes; one man standing over him, his fist raised and his boot too near Laurie’s stomach; another on a sofa directly across from me, his lit cigarette falling to the ground as he dropped it in shock; and a third standing in the doorway to what looked like a kitchen.
They didn’t stay frozen for long, but I moved too fast for any human to match. A gun sat on the coffee table in front of the couch, and the smoker went for it. I lunged for the man by Laurie, a big, balding fucker with more mass than muscle, and managed to catch the smoker on the couch with a quick punch to the side of the head as I passed, knocking him away from the gun. The guy who’d been beating Laurie tried to get his fists up, but it was too late for him. Far too fucking late, the second he’d laid hands on what was mine.
One hand wrapped around his throat and crushed it, while I dealt him a blow to the chest with my other fist that would’ve been hard enough to kill him on its own.
When I let go, he went down hard, the whole cabin shaking as he hit the floorboards with a reverberating thud. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he didn’t move. He wasn’t going to.
Pounding footsteps echoed through from the kitchen, and then the bang of a door. The third one had run out the back. And that was what I fucking got for not doing any recon. I spun at a sound. The one on the couch was wobbling to his feet. Another punch snapped his neck like a twig.
Smoke curled up from the floor where the cigarette had started setting it on fire, and I stamped it out before I dropped down on my knees next to Laurie.
I slid a hand under his head and helped him sit up, more carefully than I’d ever touched anyone in my life.
“Laurie.” It came out too low, too much like a growl. He’d just watched me kill two men without blinking, and he was already hurt and in shock. I must’ve looked like a monster to him…
But he let out a breath that shuddered through him like a sob and slumped against me, burying his face in my chest. My arms wrapped around him and I held him close, close enough that there wasn’t a fraction of an inch of space between us. He was shaking. Maybe I was too, or maybe that was my body vibrating with adrenaline and fury and bloodlust.
I took one arm away to fish in my coat pocket for the knife I always had handy, flipped it open one-handed, and leaned over his head to see his arms. They’d bound his wrists with duct tape, and his fingers were purplish-red.
It took a little bit of maneuvering, but I propped him up against the end of the couch, leaning on his side, and managed to slit the tape without nicking him. He let out a moan as it came loose.
The sound of a car door opening carried through the shattered window.
“Fuck, Laurie, I need to go after him,” I said. “Can you — one minute. I’ll be back in one minute.”
He nodded, or I thought he did, but he still didn’t say a word. Which was worrying, but we had an enemy on our six.
With no better option, I left Laurie on the floor and went out the front door. The third guy was half in the driver’s side of the SUV. I launched myself at him, he spun to meet me, and a gun went off twice.
Two impacts, directly in the chest. One to the heart, it felt like, and one through a lung.
I stumbled back, and he fired again, hitting me in the stomach.
Vampires healed fast, but we still felt pain, and this was agony. Burning, aching, searing, and more than I could think through, let alone fight through.
Five minutes. If I had five minutes, I’d be up on my feet again, my heart repaired enough to beat and the bullets starting to squeeze out of my mangled flesh.
But I didn’t have five minutes. I lay sprawled on my back, staring up at a cloudy sky, with snowflakes powdering down onto my face and swirling like drunken stars.
Asshole number three loomed over me, grinning like a maniac. He had blond hair and a thick nose and heavy jaw. Quite the family resemblance, and just my luck the one I hadn’t killed quickly enough was the brother, the one who had the most reason to stay and fight rather than run and hope I didn’t find him later.
“Vampires are so fucking arrogant,” he said. Yep, same voice from the phone. The same voice that’d told me what he was going to do to the one person I’d met in decades who made my blood sing and my heart beat a little faster. He was right. I had been arrogant. I’d thought he’d run, but instead he went for his backup piece in the car. I should’ve taken the gun from the cabin before I went outside, but I’d gotten so used to not needing one. Fuck, he’d kill me. This fucker was really going to kill me. And then Laurie… I struggled to rise, but I wasn’t there yet. My heart had stopped, and it wouldn’t start again for a couple of minutes. “You think no human can touch you. You kill anyone you want, take whatever you want.” His lips twisted into a sneer, and I tried to spit a retort back: that he’d described his own sadistic brother. All that came out was a few puffs of air, the last bit left in my one undamaged lung. “I’m going to hurt that little bitch, make it last forweeks. He’ll wish you’d let him die.”
