Right before I ducked under the threshold, I pressed a button on my watch. Countdown, thirty minutes exactly, had just begun.
Both my hands held wicked-looking silver daggers in them, and I was weighted down with my throwing knives. I’d even brought a gun and tucked it inside my pants, the clip filled with silver bullets. Being prepared to kill cost a small fortune.
My eyes adjusted to the almost nonexistent lighting. From tiny openings in the rock, the cave wasn’t completely black. So far the initial entryway was clear. There were noises deeper inside, and the question I’d refused to consider now loomed in front of me. Could I kill Bones? Would I be able to look in his brown eyes, or his green ones, and wield that blow? I didn’t know, hence my backup plans of the missile. If I faltered, they wouldn’t. They’d be strong should I prove to be weak. Or prove to be dead, whichever came first.
“Come closer,” a voice beckoned.
It reverberated with echoes. Was that an English accent? I couldn’t be sure. My pulse sped up, and I went farther inside the cave.
There had been some changes since I’d last seen it. The area that once doubled as a living room was trashed. The sofa was in sections, and it hadn’t been a sectional. Stuffing from the cushions settled like snow on the floor, the television was smashed in, and the lamps had long since seen their last light. The dressing screen that had guarded my short-lived modesty was in pieces throughout the area. Someone had obviously torn the place apart in a fit of rage. Frankly I was afraid to look in the bedroom, but I peeked inside anyway, and my heart constricted.
The bed was reduced to bits of foam. Wood and springs littered the space and stood inches deep on the ground. Stones in the wall were chipped here and there from a fist or other hard object pummeling them. Anguish welled up in me. This was my doing, as surely as if I’d used my own hands.
A cool current parted the atmosphere behind me. I whirled around with knives at the ready. Staring at me with glowing green eyes was a vampire. Behind him were six more. Their energy thickened the air in the close space, but they were evenly distributed, if you could call it that. Only one of them crackled with an abundance of power, but his face was entirely foreign to me.
“Who in the fuck are you guys?”
“You came. Your old boyfriend wasn’t lying. We weren’t sure whether to believe him.”
This statement was from the vamp in front, the one with the curling brown hair. He looked to be about twenty-five, in human years. From the clout oozing off his body, I judged him to be roughly five hundred or a young Master. Out of the seven, he was the most dangerous, and his previous sentence scared the shit out of me. Your old boyfriend. That was how they knew about me. Mother of God, it wasn’t Bones who killed those people, but these vampires instead! What they would have done to him to make him talk both sickened and infuriated me.
“Where is he?”
The only question that mattered. If they’d killed Bones, I was going to turn them all into exact replicas of the mattress behind me. Indistinguishable from one particle to the next.
“He’s here. Alive still. If you want him to remain that way, you’ll do what I tell you.”
The other minions began to fan out, trapping me with the bedroom as my only exit. Since it was a closed area, there was no help there.
“Let me see him.”
Curly Hair smiled smugly. “No demands, girl. Do you think those knives will really protect you?”
When my grandparents were murdered and I’d rammed a car through a house to rescue my mother, I thought I couldn’t get any angrier. How wrong I was. The unadulterated bloodlust pouring through me made me tremble. They took my shaking for fear, and their smiles broadened. Curly stepped forward.
Two of the daggers flew out of my hand before I even articulated the order to my brain. They buried past their hilts in the heart of a vamp to my left, who had been licking his lips. He pitched forward before his tongue finished its insinuating path. More knives replaced those, and once again both my hands were full.
“Now I’m going to ask again, and don’t piss me off. I have spent the morning up to my ass in guts and I am low on patience. The next one’s aimed for you, Brownielocks, unless you show me what I want to see. Your boys might get me in a rush, but you’ll be too dead to care.”
My eyes bored into his, and I let him see that I meant every single word. Unless they showed me Bones, I was going to assume the worst and go down in flames, and by God, I’d see they went with me.