Page 35 of Fanged Embrace
I watched, frozen, as he toppled over, thudding to the ground beside me with a wet slap and staining the concrete a brilliant red.
Fighting to clear the static from my head, I blinked up at the figure that had been standing behind him. The one responsible for the bullet that had ripped straight through his body. The bullet that had saved me from a grisly fate.
My hazy gaze met dark, wild eyes—a chest rising and falling in rapid bursts. A gun gripped tight in trembling hands, the jittering barrel still smoking.
I stared at my unexpected savior, stunned into momentary silence. “...Laurie?”
18
Laurie
I never intended to pull the trigger that night.
The gun was supposed to be my final trump card, not a tool for rescuing a vampire I barely knew or trusted. When I pulled it out of my backpack, I had no intention of actually using it. But when I turned that corner and saw the weapon swinging down toward River, I didn’t think.
It was a one in a million shot and I took it.
Now I’d just killed a man. There he was on the floor, facedown and so impossibly still, blood blooming outward in a macabre red puddle. And there I was, gun still hot in my hands, ears ringing, caught in a vacuum where the next breath wouldn’t come.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. People were streaming around me but their bodies blurred into the background. My vision fractured and my eyes fixated on the end of the gun, still pointed outward, trembling slightly in my hands—the focal point of this dismal picture. All lines led back to that barrel.
That shot was not meant for him.
That shot was intended for my real enemy. The leader of the organization I had sworn to destroy. It was for that evil man at the head of it all. And, after that… it was for myself.
It was my tidy exit strategy, the final curtain call at the end of a long, lonely, miserable life.
I couldn’t remember dropping to one knee, but suddenly the concrete was closer than before, and my vision blurred at the edges. The world faded in and out of focus. Something inside me was splitting open: horror at what I’d done, confusion that I’d done it forherof all people, and—beneath it all—a distant, bitter voice whispering that the final bullet was earmarked for my own skull.
I planted both hands on the concrete, the grit grinding into my palms, branding the moment into my skin. One hand still clutched the gun in a death-grip. I couldn’t stop staring at it—at the dull sheen of the slide, the faint curl of smoke still wobbling from the barrel.
I’d kept that weapon with me since I’d escaped the facility. I knew the damage it could do. But seeing it in action, guided by my own hand, sent me spiraling.
My ears buzzed with white noise, a swarm of angry insects filling my skull. Every limb felt boneless and my body was a foreign object to me. I could not connect the dots from my finger still limp on the trigger to the rest of me. There was a dissonance there, and every distant thought was drowned out by the roaring in my ears.
It took far too long to understand the noise wasn’t only inside my head.
Someone was shouting.
I didn’t move until I felt fingers close around my shoulder, digging through the fabric of my jacket. Then my head snapped up and the room tilted left, then harder to the right. A cavorting carnival ride I couldn’t get off.
River was kneeling in front of me. Her mouth moved, shaping words I couldn’t parse.
I stared at her, at her furrowed brows and the deep ochre of her eyes, the faint glint of fangs and the smooth texture of her skin. She had the kind of ancient beauty you only see in stained glass windows, the kind you find in Catholic churches when you naively go looking for God.
What could a being like that ever want from someone as insignificant as me?
I gave up trying to decipher her speech and looked past her—and caught another glimpse of the guard I’d dropped. The wrong person. A rag-doll heap on the floor. His blood matched the shade of River’s dress, a scarlet sheen spilling outward, creeping closer.
It should have been you, my mind supplied, the only coherent thought floating in the wreckage.
Then River’s arms were under me and the solid contact wrestled my wandering mind back into my body. She gathered me against her chest, and the scent of rain-damp moss and copper wrapped around me like a shroud. It was earthy and familiar, unnervingly comforting when it should have been unbearable. It took me back to a brief point in time when the world looked a little less like an enemy, and I breathed my first real sigh of relief. It anchored me better than gravity.
The world lurched and she lifted me like I weighed nothing at all. My head lolled against the curve of her shoulder, the steady cadence of her heartbeat throbbing right through me.
Grounded by that rhythm, I managed a shuddering breath. A part of me wanted to fight her, but the rest of me was tired. So very tired. If she put me down now I would sink to the floor and probably never get up again.
“This—” It was a struggle to get the words out, difficult to form the syllables on my tongue. “This doesn’t mean that I trust you.” Speaking was an effort and my breath came in shortbursts, but I had to build that wall between us. I could not afford to crumble so completely in her arms. “Saving your hide doesn’t make us friends.”
