Harper Allen - Vampaholic

But right now I had Rawls on the ropes, and I had to convince him he’d been wrong about me. The last thing I needed was a vamp hunter hanging around Maplesburg while I continued to go increasingly fang girl.

“Vamps lie like we breathe, Jack. Whoever your informant was, he fed you a line of merde about me and you know it. If you thought otherwise you’d have used that nailer on me by now, so why don’t you give up this wait-until-dawn farce?”

“Because the waiting’s over,” he replied matter-of-factly, looking past me and over the top of his car. “The sun’s coming up over the horizon right now.”

I stared at him in disconcertion. Then I wrenched my gaze away and glanced around, seeing dark gray where a moment ago all had been black. For no good reason my heart seemed to squeeze in my chest, and I scrambled unsteadily to my feet, barely feeling the metal bite around my wrist as I pulled too far from the cuff holding me. As soon as I looked over the roof of Rawls’s vampmobile, I saw he was right.

I’d been sitting in the shadow of the car. Beyond it, the parking lot’s few lights had begun to look sickly and washed-out and beyond that, the dark horizon was rimmed with a pale line. Looking at it, I was suddenly filled with dread.

In a moment that pale line would brim over and spill forth. In a moment it would become the day’s first ray of sunlight, shooting from the edge of the world straight toward me. And judging from my response to Claudia before Jack had staked her, wasn’t there a chance I’d progressed far enough along the path to full vamphood tonight that I might just flash fry as soon as that first ray of sun hit me?

My initial reaction was to duck back down behind the car in panic. I forced myself not to give in to it and went with my second reaction, which was to toss back my hair, moisten my lips and stand up straight. If I was going to die in the next few seconds, I damn well wasn’t going to die cringing in the shadows like a vamp, I decided, I was going to die like the fabulous Kat Crosse.

I just hoped I could pull it off.

“Goodness, I feel all butterflies inside, Rawls.” My hands were shaking, the left one so badly that the gauze I’d wound around it had unravelled and the right one clattering its cuff in a catchy bongo beat against the car door. I gripped the vampmobile’s handle to muffle the noise. “I mean, sweetie, could it be more Romeo and Juliet? Here we are, just you and me and the dawn. Is this what they call sparking out in Nebras—”

“Just you and me and that maniac in the pickup with the smoked windows driving hell-for-leather into the parking lot,” Rawls said, bringing the nail gun into firing position and aiming it at me. “You almost had me fooled the past few minutes, but I might have guessed there was a reason why you weren’t too worried about sunrise. Too bad for you the vamp rescue squad left it so late, though.”

“Vamp rescue squad?” With an effort I shifted my gaze from the sight of the glowing line on the horizon and saw twin headlights cutting through the rapidly dissipating predawn gloom. The red pickup jounced over a bump in the parking lot as it sped toward us and a dark shape flew from the bed of the truck. The shape rolled once when it hit the ground, but instead of continuing to roll it seemed to gather itself and then race alongside the pickup that had just ejected it. As I watched I saw the shape begin to outstrip the vehicle.

“As if I didn’t have enough to worry about right now,” I exhaled. “Rawls, lower your weapon! If he doesn’t think you’re a threat he won’t attack—”

The rest of my warning was drowned out by the stacatto coughing of the nail gun as he opened fire. The gray shape abruptly swerved, but it didn’t change course and when it got to within leaping distance of Jack it launched itself into the air.

“ No, Mikhail!” I screamed out the command but like my warning, it was ignored. The huge wolf crashed into Jack and the two of them went down. The pickup truck screeched to a halt. Its door burst open and Megan flew out, dressed in de rigueur Daughter of Lilith black. All that was needed to complete this French farce of a scene was a scantily clad blonde, I thought before remembering that I was playing that particular role.

“Megan, call off Mikhail—” I began, but like everything else I’d said in the past minute my words had no effect. Megan shot one appalled look at me and then brought her stake into throwing position. “ Don’t! ” I yelled.

She froze. I felt a moment’s gratified relief that someone had finally listened to me before I realized that my command hadn’t been what had stopped her.

Mikhail, still in wolf form, stood over Rawls, his bared teeth inches from his neck. Rawls, his face a grim mask, held his finger on the trigger of the nail gun that was jammed into Mikhail’s thick ruff. It was the classic standoff, but how long it would remain that way I didn’t want to guess.

A pale shaft of light had fallen upon Rawls’s upturned face, intensifying the green of his eyes so they looked like blazing emeralds. Megan drew in a harsh breath and slowly lowered her stake.

“Stand down, Mikey baby,” she said hoarsely. The wolf immediately went to her side. Just as swiftly, Rawls got to his feet and Megan spoke again, her voice cold and hard. “You’ve got five seconds to explain why my sister’s cuffed to your car and why you were holding a weapon on her when we drove in. Make it good, because this stake works just as well on human creeps as it does on its usual customers.”

I was beginning to feel invisible. I opened my mouth to tell Megan I was perfectly capable of telling her myself what had happened to me, but the words died in my throat. Slowly I raised my uncuffed right hand and stared at it, horror rising in me like bile.

Where the morning light fell across it my skin was smoking. Even as I watched, a couple of heat blisters bubbled and popped…and the gory rip that had been between my fingers only moments ago was now perfectly healed.

I raised my eyes and saw Jack Rawls looking past Megan at me. “If you need an explanation, just look at your sister, slayer,” he said thinly. “Your vamp sister.”

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