Page 19 of Twice Bitten
He needed me to deal with Brent. He’d told me he needed me to deal with Brent. I’d promised to help, and I had to trust him the way he’d chosen to trust me.
I squeezed Brent’s arms painfully hard and leaned in, letting my fangs prick at the side of his neck. “Last chance, asshole.”
“Jack, come on—eep! Okay, don’t bite me, fuck, it’s in the cabin. Sam hid it. It’s in a safe, you won’t be able to open it without him giving you the combination! And he won’t do it if you bite me!”
I froze, my fangs still barely pricking Brent’s skin, so pissed-off and disgusted that I couldn’t even react for a second.
In the cabin. “Hidden”—in acombination safe. In a safe that a garden-variety human would’ve been able to figure out, in all likelihood. The fucking thing had just been sitting there while Jack and I fucked around hiking through the woods and waiting and avoiding the goddamn security cameras like morons.
A faint whooshing sound echoed in my ears. Probably my blood pressure spiking into the stratosphere, but I chose to imagine it as the very last shred of my patience shooting off for parts unknown, never to be seen again.
Well, I’d already threatened Brent with my fangs, so I might as well lean into my vampirism all the way. If I didn’t, I’d end up leaning into my desire to throw him across the clearing into a tree, and Jack might not be so happy with that.
I pulled away enough to spin Brent around, slamming him back into the car. I finally got a good look at his face.
Ugh. Like I’d expected, gorgeous.
My fangs gritted against my lower teeth.
I stared Brent in his pretty dark eyes, watching them go wide and glazed, letting the necromantic magic in my blood seep out into my gaze.
“Go the fuck to sleep, asshole,” I snarled.
Brent’s eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled, sliding down the side of the car. I took a step back and let him flop to the ground. I could’ve caught him. I didn’t want to.
Jack made a quick, aborted movement, as if the impulse to catch Brent himself had almost overwhelmed him.
“Well, that went well,” I said.
Jack let out a sharp crack of laughter that ended on a hitch, as if he were trying not to cry.
Yep, that about summed it up.
Chapter 7
Off the Clock
Jack went to retrieve my car, a task he’d assigned himself with a low-voiced mutter about my boots and tree branches. I let it pass, because I suspected he simply needed to get the hell away from Brent and their proximity-strengthened mate bond and clear his head a bit.
We’d grabbed a roll of duct tape from the trunk of Hendler’s car—one of several creepy tools and objects we’d found in there—and Jack had checked him for weapons and then trussed him up like a mummy. I didn’t know how that tape would ever come off, but hey, not my problem. He could probably still breathe. I took care of Brent, taping him up a bit less thoroughly and dragging him into the front room of the cabin while Jack brought Hendler. Neither of us were particularly gentle as we deposited our respective burdens on the floor.
They lay at opposite ends of the small room, too far from one another to attempt to collude and also far enough from any furniture to give them nothing to maneuver with. Anyway, they were both still out cold.
I eyed the ragged, mysteriously stained blue couch and chose to stand while I called Esther. I’d taken a moment of my own to clear my head, helping myself to one of the cigarettes I’d found in Brent’s jacket pocket and smoking it moodily while gazing out at the bleak driveway.
That had given me time to think about what the next steps needed to be. For my own sanity, I needed to get Brent and Hendler dealt with as quickly as possible and get Jack on his way. One way to handle that would be to simply bundle them all up in Jack’s truck and tell Jack to get out of town.
But my conscience wouldn’t quite let me wash my hands of the situation that way.
Or at least…my conscience was part of the reason.
I didn’t want to admit to myself that my sanity might be taking a back seat to my less-rational feelings.
So once I’d filled Esther in on the bare bones of the situation, I took a risk that any sensible person usually didn’t: I asked her advice.
“You seem invested in this,” she said, too thoughtfully for my peace of mind. A thoughtful Esther was a dangerous Esther.
I squeezed my eyes shut, counted to three, and took a plunge. “I used to have a mate,” I said. “The bond never got broken.”
