Page 106 of House of Crimson Kisses
I grab her hand and haul Keir away from the fighting and back towards the club when I notice Lincoln is missing. I glance back to the edge of the market, but he’s vanished. My gut churns but I can’t leave him. I won’t.
I hold both Keir and Talulla’s hands. “Listen to me, get to the tunnels. There’s a private station beneath the club. Tell it to take you to Octavia’s mansion. Castle Beaumont. You’ll be safe there. Tell Wendell that I sent you and that Octavia and I will be right behind you. He’ll look after you. Tell him not to let anyone but family in.”
“Where are you going?” Keir says, wiping an arm over his mouth and smearing blood across his face.
“I’m not leaving Lincoln.”
“I’ll help,” he says.
But I shake my head. “No. They’re after all of us. The more of us in the market, the worse the chaos will get. We need to get all of us out of the sight of the public eye. The fewer there are of us out there the better. Get to the castle and I’ll be right behind you. Send for the Chief and I guess Cordelia. If they want us to continue in this fucking charade, they need to get a handle on their people. This is getting ridiculous.”
“Be safe,” Keir says and pulls me into a hug. Talulla embraces me next and then together, they lean on each other and hobble back into the club towards the tunnels.
I bend down and pick up a cap from a man groaning and holding his stomach. He attempts to put up a fight, but he can go fuck himself. Human or not, he was trying to kidnap me and the rest of the hunters. I’m taking his hat. I sling it on over my head and pull the peak down to cover as much of my face as I can.
Then I find Amelia in the crowd and a smile washes over my face, a warmth fills my tummy and I decide that for once, I don’t need to protect her from what’s going on.
I don’t need to hide things away, she’s not a child anymore. She’s a grown arse adult... okay vampire, but maybe instead of trying to protect her the entire time, perhaps we can work together.
I sprint into the crowd, calling her name. Her head snaps around. It takes her a second, but I wave from under the hat, and I gesture at the end of the market where I last saw Lincoln.
She nods to indicate she’s understood and finishes grappling with the last vampire, then speeds off the direction I’m heading.
When I reach the spot where I last saw him, we’re set a little way back from what’s left of the brawling crowd.
I think I see Octavia outside the back of her club, but I’m not entirely sure, it’s too far away.
Amelia must grasp what I’m trying to assess as she says, “It’s her. She’s fine, it’s under control.”
I laugh. “You’ll miss those added benefits when you take the cure, huh? I guess not everything is bad about being a vampire.”
I nudge her in the arm, and she gives me a smile that very definitely doesn’t meet her eyes. A brief frown crosses my brow as I try to work out the issue. But she changes the subject and my focus shifts.
“What do you need?” she asks.
“Lincoln has been taken.” Two bleeding men stumble past us, arguing and clutching injuries as we cross out of the market square and head in the direction I last saw Lincoln.
“Whose fucking idea was it to listen to information that came from Castle St Clair,” one man spits. “This was fucking ridiculous! The healer bills are going to eat all our savings, and for what? We didn’t even secure the dhampir.”
“You idiot, we didn’t need to secure her. We needed to make her kill someone. That’s what the commission said.”
My eyes widen, and Amelia steps in front of me to protect me from sight. Her hand slides behind her back to grip mine. Her shoulders rise and fall in the same laboured way mine do.
When they’re out of sight she turns to me. “Someone else knows.”
“How?”
Amelia kneads her brow. “If I’ve been doing research, I can only assume that others have too. This has clearly spread across the city. We can’t assume that anything we know is secret. Which means you really are in danger.”
“As many people hate the cure as want it, it will be fine.”
Amelia pouts and flings her arm out at the chaos behind us. “No part of this is fine, Red.”
The words of the men who stumbled past us flit through my mind again. ‘We need to make her kill someone.’
Amelia interrupts my thoughts. “Didn’t those guys say their directive came from the castle?”
I feel my eyes go wide. “We knew Cordelia was up to something. I guess Octavia was right. Either she’s trying to control the dhampir or force them to transition by making us accidentally slaughter a human.”
