Twilight Vendetta (30 page)

He’d left the place that very night. Let the townsfolk believe they’d killed the monster in their midst. Let them sleep peacefully at night. So that when he went back to kill them, they wouldn’t be expecting it.

“And did you?” Emma whispered.

Her eyes were swimming with tears and he realized that he’d left his mind open, that she had experienced the memory, the flashback, right along with him. She’d felt every bit of his pain. And she asked him again, “Did you go back and kill them?”

He met her eyes. “What do you think?”

She held his gaze and nodded slowly. “I think you did. And I think they deserved it.”

He lowered his head. “You’ve been talking to me about diplomacy. You said violence only begets more violence. But I have to tell you, it wouldn’t have done my family one bit of good had I gone to the authorities to let them handle it. There was no justice for a dark skinned man in those times. Even if I hadn’t been a vampire, I would not have been believed. For whites to burn out families of mixed heritage mortals wasn’t even unusual. If humans of color couldn’t expect justice, what were the chances a vampire like me would fare any better?”

Emma shook her head slowly. “You’ve been subjected to ignorant bigotry and outrageous racism all your life. First as a mixed race American. Later as a vampire. I’m starting to understand you a little better now, I think.”

“With the exception of one brief interlude,” he said, “I’ve known nothing but hate and violence all my life. A man like me can’t ever love, do you understand that? I wouldn’t know how.”

She didn’t answer, just slid a hand over his on the shifting knob, and relaxed back in her seat, thinking, but keeping her thoughts to herself.

W
olf and Sheena crawled out of a semi-truck’s trailer while its driver was inside at the truck stop diner, probably getting some of that food they could smell from outside. The aromas made Sheena’s mouth water. This was their third “big rig” and their second truck stop. At the first, they’d thought they sensed vampires nearby, and had run far enough away not to be detected, until the vampires’ energy had moved away. The vamps might not be their enemies. But they would try to stop them from going east, to where they could sense their seven-year-old siblings in some kind of distress.

Sheena was stiff and sore, and she knew her brother was as well. She was more tuned in to Wolf than she was to the other Offspring. She supposed that was because they came from the same parents; who were, the vampires had told them, a pair of The Chosen who’d been treated with a drug designed to create super soldiers in a program doomed to fail. The subjects’ hearts exploded if they got too stressed. Those who hadn’t died that way had been euthanized when the program had been shut down. One or the other of those events had probably been the fate of Sheena and Wolf’s forebears, though they might never know for sure.

All of this had been explained to the two of them by the vampires aboard the
Anemone
, along with many other things about the world beyond the ship, about themselves and the other Offspring
,
and where they’d come from and why they’d been made. They had been told of the true nature of vampires, and that they were not the enemy. And they’d been told about DPI, the evil organization without which, she supposed, she would not exist.

“It’s not much farther,” Wolf said, after closing the trailer’s door and lowering the bar that kept it shut. “I can feel them. They’re not in the same place they were before, but it’s not far, and I think they’re moving.”

Sheena nodded. “I felt the same thing. Do you think they know we’re coming?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if they feel us the way we feel them. But I think it’s the Gammas.”

“Don’t call them that.”

“The Sevens, then.”

“They have names now,” Sheena said. “Nikki, Gareth, Ramses.”

“Names given to them by the vampires,” Wolf said. “I’m glad I, at least, chose my own.”

“You still hate them, don’t you, Wolf?”

“I don’t trust them. Devlin left us behind, let them shoot us and take us prisoner.”

“He came to get us out, though.” Sheena lowered her head. Shame and guilt were not emotions she had experienced before. But she’d felt them when they had left Devlin and the human female Emma to make their own escape. “And then we left him behind. How can the same act be hateful when one does it, and acceptable when another does?”

“We had no choice. Devlin did.” Wolf lowered his head.

“Emma said that Devlin thought we were dead.”

“We don’t die. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone can die. That’s what Rhiannon told us on the ship. Everyone can die, just in different ways. And that must be true, because Nikki’s sister....” She closed her eyes, remembering the time when there had been four of the so called Gammas. Two girls and two boys, just like the Elevens and the Twos. She didn’t know where they had been kept before they were put into the empty cages below decks. But when they came, they were very young. Walking, and using the toilets in their cells. Eating on their own, but not speaking more than a few words. One little girl, though, had been very different from her siblings. Her hair was white, her eyes such a light shade of violet that they sometimes seemed pink. She was smaller, more frail than her mates, and her skin had been very pale. She’d become sick, and one day she didn’t wake up. Her body had been cold. Sheena knew because she’d reached through the bars of her cage to touch the child. And then the keepers came and took her away.

She’d wept. Never before had Sheena felt the sensation of tears filling her eyes and spilling over, but she had that day.

Her brother’s hunger pangs and then his voice broke into her thoughts. “We should get food and then get moving,” she said.

He nodded and walked toward the building where all the delicious smells were coming from. Through the windows, they could see a long counter lined with plates, all of them heaped with food. Men sat on stools, their backs to the window, drinking coffee and eating, talking aloud.

“Let’s go around to the back,” Wolf whispered.

Sheena nodded, and they moved away from the window unseen, keeping to the shadows and circling around to the rear of the building. There were fewer windows there, smaller ones, and one of them was open, but there was a screen inside it.

“Ready?” Wolf asked.

Sheena nodded. They had been practicing their skills, skills they had intuitively kept secret from their captors, and even from their rescuers, the vampires. But since being on their own, they’d been free to wield their powers in private and to test their limits, which they had yet to find.

Wolf focused on the building, closed his eyes. His arms were at his sides, but his palms were open wide. Within a second or two, the building began to shake.

“Not too much,” Sheena warned.

She was watching to see what happened. Soon people were streaming out the front door and into the parking area. Some were shouting, “earthquake!” while others were pulling out their phones.

Sheena went to the back window, climbed up on a box and removed the screen. Then she looked inside at the kitchen, where several plates of food had been fixed, but not yet served. She focused on those, and as she moved her hands to mimic picking them up, the plates rose from the counter and came floating her way. It took extreme concentration to keep them from tipping to one side or the other, so the plates moved rather slowly and wobbled as she kept correcting by the twist of her wrists, but still, it was working.

As the plates hovered near the window, she grabbed the two that looked the most tasty, and turned away. The remaining plates crashed to the floor as soon as she took her attention away from them. “Got them, Wolf.”

He opened his eyes, relaxed his hands, and the shaking stopped. Then he inclined his head toward the brush lot behind the place, and the two of them ran into the foliage so they could eat in private.

Just at the edge, Sheena turned back and said, “I forgot. Silverware!” She opened her hand, and several utensils flew like missiles through the open window, knives and forks, speeding toward her, blades and tines leading the way.

“Sheena, look out!” Wolf stepped in front of her just as she realized the danger. She released her power on the utensils in the nick of time. They fell to the ground before reaching her brother, clattering right at his feet.

He closed his eyes slowly, then turned to her, angry. “You have to be more careful. Those things could’ve stabbed you or gouged out your eyes.”

She shrugged. “Like you said, we don’t die.”

“Like
you
said,” he snapped, “everybody can die of something. We just don’t know what can kill us yet.”

She bent to pick up two forks and brushed them off. “Somehow, I don’t think it will turn out to be silverware.”

Then she smiled, realizing she had just used what Rhiannon had called sarcasm. She hadn’t understood it when the ancient vampiress had explained it to her, but she thought she did now.

She handed a fork to Wolf. “Let’s eat so we can get to the Sevens and see what’s got them so upset.”

Wolf took the fork and repeated her earlier words back to her. “They have names, you know.”

Apparently Wolf understood sarcasm too.

Devlin and Emma crouched in the tall grasses and weeds outside the DPI building, far enough from its fence to go undetected. They had avoided every camera and motion sensor so far thanks to Emma’s keen eyes and remembered research. He didn’t think it was necessary, but she pointed out that they couldn’t be sure DPI hadn’t developed some way to detect vampires with those cameras. She was smart, Devlin thought, looking at her there in the darkness. The night wind stroked her hair as if it couldn’t get enough of its silky softness. She was smart and sexy and beautiful. Stubborn and persistent.

As he watched her, unable to take his eyes away, he asked the question he’d kept himself from asking ever since witnessing her furious attack on their captive DPI thug. “Would you have chosen the Dark Gift, Emma? If you’d been given a choice?”

She was quiet for a moment. Crickets chirped and insects buzzed. Far in the distance, an owl hooted twice. Then she whispered, “I honestly don’t know. But I know this. If I hadn’t, it would have been a mistake.” She shrugged. “My father used to tell me that things have a way of working out in our favor, if we just get out of the way and let them. I have to believe this new life is my destiny. And since I was hemming and hawing about choosing it, the choice was taken from me.”

“That’s an interesting theory.” He was studying her face. Her beautiful face, and almost on its own, his hand moved to push her hair off her forehead and tuck it behind her ear. “They still hurt you. And that’s not going to be allowed to stand.”

“Hobbs will pay. But right now, we have other goals to see to. We’ve got to get inside, find my father and get him out.”

He nodded and returned his attention to The Sentinel. There was very little in the way of shrubbery to use as cover within the perimeter of the tall fence surrounding the place. However, there were cars in the parking lot.

He looked at her, nodded once, and they took off at top speed, jumped the fence, and flashed from one vehicle to the next fast enough to avoid detection.

Then they moved closer, right up to the stone block wall on the building’s left side. So close no one could see them, even if they happened to look out one of the tinted windows. The two of them pressed themselves up against the cool, rough stone.

The only open door, according to their surveillance of the building from all sides, was a loading dock in the rear where trucks routinely came and went, maybe to bring prisoners, or take away bodies. They headed that way, moving again in a flash of motion, slowing only when they neared a motion sensor or camera, and then belly crawling below the range of its eye, just in case.

As they neared the end of the building’s left outer wall, Devlin felt something and held up a hand. They both halted and stared at each other.
There’s another vampire here. Close.
As he spoke to her mentally, he looked around the rear corner, ducking back quickly.
Do you feel it
?