Page 4 of The Stone Initiation
I couldn’t hold back my smile. “Fuck you, Levi.”
“You wish,” he drawled. But his eyes said,later.
Yes, I was looking forward to later because Levi was mine. Had been for the past eight months. Honestly, I hadn’t expected us to last that long, which is why I’d asked to keep it a secret from the others. He’d started as an itch I’d wanted to scratch but turned into so much more, and now…now I had a choice. I could either let him go or tell him the truth about what I was. Either way, I’d probably lose him. Most humans steered clear of halfbloods like me. My kind were anomalies. Monsters to them, just as a shifter or a vampire might be.
Yeah…coming clean would mean losing him, both as a lover and as a friend. But breaking up with him would mean I might be able to keep him in my life.
But not yet.
I wasn’t ready to let him go just yet.
Levi climbed off his bike and joined us on the sidewalk. He was a big guy. Tall and broad-shouldered, built to deliver and take hits. He’d worked for the guild up north where pockets of magic hovered over certain towns and villages, leaving others mundane and monster free. He’d chosen to come live in the thick of it, helping to keep Old Town clean, and stumbled onto our group.
We’d taken him in, and not long after that, I’d taken him to bed. Our connection was undeniable, and the fact the others didn’t see it was a testament to our acting skills.
“Bothof you need to work on your time keeping,” Teri said, clearly irritated.
“I was catching some z’s,” Levi said. “Had a long night last night.” He shot me a sidelong glance, and heat pooled low in my belly.
Yes, last night had been…something. Levi was the only guy I’d been with who could keep up with me in bed. His stamina almost matched mine, and that was saying something. We worked. We fit, and I couldn’t wait to do it again.
“Are we going to do this or what?” Fred asked, looking from me to Levi.
Shit. I was staring at Levi. My gaze flicked to Teri to find her watching us with a frown.
Dammit. I reached for the pack in the back of the van and grabbed a wooden stake. “Let’s just go and get this over with. If we’re lucky we’ll catch them sleeping.” I strode off toward the graffiti-covered block of flats down the street.
Our intel told us that the suckers had the basement level flats on this building. The rest was derelict and empty. Any poor unsuspecting soul who wandered inside looking for shelter was in for a nasty surprise.
These kinds of issues never made it to the guardians’ logs. They were allocated to whichever hunter party was responsible for the area. In this case, it was our ragtag motley crew.
After we finished with this nest, the flats would be cleaned up and used by people who needed them, and in Old Town, there were plenty of humans in need of shelter.
Teri led the charge, wooden stake in her leather-clad hand.
There were two kinds of vampire, the ones who adhered to the old novels, living in coffins and shunning sunlight. They quoted old poetry and made out that they were doomed to drink blood, blah, blah, blah. Then you had the modern breed who liked to blend in, using their human visages to live and work among us. They usually emerged in the late afternoon when the sun was going down. They took night shifts, or worked from home, mimicking the human life best they could. This latter kind were the worst. Hard to track and kill, because unless you could get close to check out their fangs and touch their skin, you’d never know they were monsters.
Holy water didn’t work on this breed, and I was pretty sure it only worked on the old-style vamps because they believed it would.
The state of this building made me confident we were dealing with coffins and woe.
We entered through the busted door and made our way silently through the hallway to the basement access at the back of the ground floor.
This door was tightly closed, but the bloody handprint on the wall and the discarded shoe on the ground, told me we had the right spot.
Teri reached for the door and looked to Levi. He nodded. I braced myself, wooden stake held tightly, ready to get in between them and the vamp’s fangs if need be. I couldn’t morph to full stone skin like a regular gargoyle, but my body reacted to attack by instinctively turning the body part under threat to stone.
My ability had saved several lives over the past two years without the others ever realizing.
Teri yanked open the door, and the loud groan of hinges had us all wincing.
Fred set to work on those hinges, undoing them to take off the door completely. It would save us from getting trapped in the basement.
He stretched two iron wires across the opening, placing them at neck level, one slightly higher than the other, to account for height differences and catch any runners. We’d all have to remember to crouch and scramble when exiting.
Levi went first, his blade glinting in the gloom. He preferred decapitation to staking. I wasn’t sure which was harder to be honest. Being stronger than an average human meant both required equal effort for me.
Bone was bone.
