Authors: Joey W. Hill
Dev likely knew the dangers of this type of route quite well, including how to handle them.
Ah, hell, Danny. Stop it.
He was a human. A meal. But there was no reason she couldn’t divert her mind from a simmering anxiety about the approaching dawn by thinking about every inch of his pure male body in slow, lingering detail. The sculpted muscles and rugged hands, the sun-browned flesh that gave his face such appealing lines. He’d had strands of copper in his unruly red mane. The red suggested an Irish or Scot in his background, but his accent was pure Oz, that brusque Cockney mixed with the laughter of the Irish. The tragic warrior bard, traveling alone, mourning his love. She saw her fingers, passing through the russet strands of his hair, and she curled them on her knee as she remembered. The way he’d gone so still, watching her, his body restrained, but quivering with a power great enough to snap a man’s neck, she was sure.
She hadn’t needed to ask what had become of those men who’d taken his family from him. She’d been around long enough to know the haunted look of a good man who’d stained his soul with murder. It gave him a dangerous edge, because the man who’d done murder once would always be more capable of doing it the second time. And he’d already done it more than once.
“Lady D?” Harry, one of her men, leaned in to her window. They’d stopped to investigate a fallen gum during her musings, and she’d been only absently following their progress. “Getting close to dawn. It’s going to take us a bit to move that tree off the road.
Sand’s too deep to go around it. You want us to rig that canvas over your Rover until we get moving again?”
“That’ll work fine.” She nodded. “You boys holding up well? Do you need to have tea?”
He flashed a grin at her. “No worries. We’ll hold. We’re taking shifts on the driving, and we’ll all rest better when we have you safely at home.”
Home. She hadn’t thought of Thieves’ Station that way for a long time, but she guessed that was what it was going to be now.
“All right. Go ahead and—”
The only warning was an odd whistling, the way the wind sounded when it was being cut by a projectile moving fast enough to slice it. Harry pitched forward. His arms, which had been dangling with casual ease on the sill of her window a moment before, now dropped limply into it with the rest of his upper body, showing the hilt of the knife lodged in his back, severing the spinal cord.
Lunging over him, Danny yanked the blade free and shoved out the opposite door, hitting the ground and rolling beneath the vehicle as a man shouted. The Land Rover up ahead exploded. With her vision, she had the horrifying ability to see the projectile hit the side, a canister that punched into the engine compartment a blink before it detonated the excess petrol. Mal and Pete disappeared in the flame that shot through the interior. The impact lifted the Rover into the air, tossed it up and over, against the troublesome gum tree, breaking it in the middle and catching it on fire as well. Fortunately the Rover had been parked far enough ahead to avoid igniting her cover.
It wasn’t much comfort. Three men, taken out in the first strike. She should have been more vigilant, watching for more than ruts in the road. It had been a niggling worry in the back of her mind since she’d received the letter from the solicitor. But that nagging feeling hadn’t been worth a zack, since she obviously hadn’t anticipated Ian trying something like this. She was a fool.
She cried out despite herself as her remaining two men, John and Roy, went down under a peppering of gunfire, this time coming from the driver’s side. They collapsed some ten feet away from her, Roy’s eyes full of an apology she didn’t deserve as the life died out of them. His rifle had fallen close to his nerveless fingers.
The fire swept down a eucalyptus, fueled by the flammable oil, and had already hopped over to another cluster of bushes. Bloody hell. She pushed away the pain, let fury take her. Fighting the automatic panic caused by so much fire closing in around her, she marshaled her thoughts. Gunfire from the driver’s side. The canister shot immolating the Rover had come from the passenger side.
As she quickly shifted around to the rear of her vehicle, an Essex pulled up behind, skidding to a halt.
Her fingers clutched the knife. Hand-to-hand guerrilla tactics were not her best skill, but she was far stronger and faster than a human and so far she’d sensed no vampire presence.
Letting your minions do your dirty work, Ian? You bloody bastard.
God, why had she come out here? The first frisson of fear, that sense of being a doomed, trapped animal, gripped her, and she pushed it away again, more viciously.
Think.
Did they know she was under here?
“Here, kitty, kitty . . .” Two sets of feet stopped on the left side, another on the right. “Why don’t you come out from under there, and we’ll make sure you don’t get a bad sunburn? Only a few minutes to sunrise, you know. Somebody wants to see you.”
With a snarl, she dropped the knife, rolled, caught both ankles of that one set of boots and yanked. It knocked the man off his feet, and she hauled him beneath, hand over hand, jeans to belt to shirt front, and had his throat beneath her palm before his scream of terror could split the air. She tore out his larynx and shoved, sending him twisting and spinning out the other side, ramming the legs of the man there, sending him stumbling back with a surprised oath. Seizing the knife again, she began to scramble forth and screamed as a flood of flame met her. She rolled back up toward the front wheels, knowing it was futile.
Christ, not burning.
“Bloody hell, Rogers! You want to blow it up with us standing right here? Shoot the bitch. It won’t kill her, but—”
“Cripes, look at Tim. I’ll show her.” A succession of gunfire.
Thunk, thunk
. Though she flinched, anticipating the engine block igniting, she realized quickly they weren’t shooting for her. Air whistled out of the tires. The vessel lurched, the punctured tires rapidly deflating. Gasping, she shoved against the undercarriage as it pressed toward the earth, sinking lower into the sand. Jesus, this was heavy. She hated the feeling of being closed in. Could she toss it toward one of them, use the distraction?
The sunrise was coming. She could feel it, the heat rising in her skin. If she rolled the vehicle and fire destroyed it, she had no cover, no protection from the sun’s rays, because the coated canvases had been in the other vehicle. Another stupid decision. She’d been in the city too long.
“He wanted her alive.”
“He said if we couldn’t make her come, to kill her. You hear that, love? You’ve left us no choice, unless you’re willing to let us stick this tranquilizer into your bum.”
“Try it,” she hissed, baring her fangs. “You’ll look like your mate.”
“Have it your way, then,” he responded shortly, but she had the brief satisfaction of hearing a faint quaver in the unnamed man’s voice. “Step back and juice up the flamethrower, Rogers. Reconsider, darling. We’ve got a nice canvas in the ute, so the sun doesn’t fry you like an egg. Otherwise, we fry you here.”
“Go to hell.”
As her arm muscles strained, she realized her quick plan wouldn’t work. She’d never actually lifted anything this heavy, and while she could hold it off her for a while, tossing it like a soccer ball was out of the question. She heard the roar of the flamethrower, saw the flash of light as it was triggered. The men had split, one to each side, back-pedaling, apparently prepared to detonate the vehicle with the combination of flamethrower and gunfire. While she didn’t need to breathe, she was gasping, and she recognized it as fear catching up with her racing mind. Her skin was already crawling, anticipating the suffocating inescapable burn of the fire or the sun, the predawn light starting to show in the scrap of sky she could see.
No. She wouldn’t die this way. She wouldn’t surrender, but they sure as hell wouldn’t outlive her. Twisting her body, she shot out from beneath the Land Rover, darting under the spout of fire. Ignoring the crackle of flames that could easily spark in her hair, she channeled her terror into a predator’s rage. She swerved, leaped behind Rogers. His neck cracked beneath her hands, but then, with a deafening roar, she was tossed as the vehicle exploded. Twenty feet she sailed, thudding down in a patch of sharp barbed grass that stabbed through her clothes. Bloody perfect. At least it served as somewhat of a buffer to the fall, though her bones did not easily break.
Scrambling, she turned and saw the other man thought too damn fast on his feet. He’d seized up the abandoned flamethrower and now redirected it toward her, a wild arc that caught the brush as she dropped to the ground beneath the wave of it. It surrounded her, licking greedily toward her legs as the man advanced, yelling.
He’d panicked, though. Misdirection of his weapon and the flame of the second Rover had caught the tires of his vehicle. It would be going up in a matter of minutes. As she crouched, she had the satisfaction of seeing the fear as he met her gaze.
Yeah, you
worthless bastard. You’re dead, no matter what happens. This far out, no supplies, on foot, you’ ll cook as good as me.
You’ d beg me to kill you.
Then he stopped, the flamethrower stuttering to a halt, dropping out of limp fingers. Fear became confusion and then vacancy as he fell to his knees, a knife protruding between his shoulder blades, the same fate as Harry. Dev charged around the petrol bonfire that was her remaining Land Rover, snatched his blade out of the man’s back and came toward her. Danny didn’t give herself time to think, just focused on a clear spot and leaped out of the flame. Fire grabbed at her calves, licking up toward her hips. As she landed, she stumbled, her usual vampire balance abandoning her such that she almost dove into the flames of the Rover.
Dev caught her, rolling her to the ground to douse the small licks of flame before he hauled them both outside the range of the rapidly spreading fire. Her startled cry was muffled when he twisted her beneath him, sheltering her with his back as her attacker’s vehicle went up in another wave of blasting heat and noise.
“Christ, just what we need.” He was up and pulling her forward again, even as he swore and muttered. “Come on, I have a bike over here.”
“Dev, sunrise. Everything to protect me—”
“Is gone. I know. Come on.” He got her to the motorbike, about a hundred yards away. Yanking his swag out, he removed the pack of belongings it held and then tossed the swag across the ground, unrolling it in a deft, practiced move. “Lie down on this.”
“It won’t be enough—”
“It’s what we have. It’s thick. Come on,” he snapped.
Behind him there was a dramatic backdrop of flames. Men’s bodies littered the ground. Not only the bastards who’d attacked her, but two innocent guides and three men she’d known for several years. Men who’d let her into their minds, who’d protected her when her strengths could not. Who’d tried to do that, even to this end. And now here was another man, risking himself for her.
Pressing her lips together, knowing now was not the time for regrets, she lay down.
Without another word, Dev rolled her in the swag, tucking the ends around her, working the ties with fast fingers, handling her as impersonally as a bundle of stones. The heat of the flames was being encompassed by the building light in the sky, which she could feel to the marrow of her bones. The sun was about to crest, turn the world around her into a hell on earth.
“You don’t need to breathe, right?” She nodded, a quick jerk. Before he brought down the full hood he’d fashioned, he nodded toward a cluster of rock formations in the distance, a series of pillars and hillocks. “It’s going to take me about an hour to get us there, long as we don’t have any problems. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a cave or at least an overhang with a shadow. I assume that would get you through until night.”
She didn’t have to agree or disagree. There weren’t any other options. Still, at his light shake, she managed another nod. “And this cloth? Will it protect you enough to get you there?”
It was all they had. He didn’t have to say that, either. “I’ll be a bit uncomfortable, but I’ll manage.”
Perhaps it was because they both knew the Aussie gift for understatement, or maybe there was a shameful quaver in her voice.
Regardless, Dev studied her with serious green eyes, a momentary assessment, and she saw the man whose bush craft was the only thing between her and a very painful death. “All right, then. You hang in there, you hear me? I didn’t drive my arse off through the night and miss out on a piece of Joe’s birthday cake so you can die on me.” Then he cinched down the hood, shutting out light, most of the air and any sense of direction. She was giving herself completely into his hands.
He lifted and set her on the bike sidesaddle. Another precious few moments passed as he used some type of cords to secure her to both him and the bike. Finally, as he kicked the bike back to life, his hand squeezed her leg. “She’ll be right, love. I’ll take care of you, I promise.”
She couldn’t hold on to him, clutch at another living thing, her arms pressed against her body as if she were in a coffin. But she was tied to him so that her body leaned into his. She held on to that, the sense of his heartbeat through his back, against her shoulder, her hip pressed against his buttock.
She should have told him to stake her. That was far preferable to being slowly burned alive.
He didn’t want to think about it, but it kept intruding. The wet blood on his knife. Explosions. Leaving fire and mayhem at his back.
He’d been there before, reveled in it like a savage, even as he’d been tempted countless times to let the flames consume him.
After Tina and Rob, he’d taken himself off to war, finding a place for the rage he told himself God would overlook. There was plenty of death to go around on the Kokoda Track, as he and his mates did their best to keep the Nips from making Australia part of the bloody Japanese empire.
Then, after the war, back to the Outback. There were no accusations here. Just emptiness, blessed silence. Well, with some exceptions, like the past few minutes.