forget. Two thousand years from now, I’ll still remember what Sebastian looks like.
And Sebastian must have known how far off my expectations were. After all, how often had he told me that Roberto was older even than he? That Roberto had been in this part of the world since the early days of the Aztec empire. Surely, he must have
So Sebastian deliberately misled me. He didn’t send me in here to kill Roberto. He sent me in to fail. I am not an assassin. I’m a distraction.
After all these months, I thought I knew him. I thought I understood him. I knew I couldn’t trust him, precisely, but I thought I knew his endgame. And I thought he respected me and what I could do. I was wrong. About everything.
I am flummoxed. And when Roberto pounces on me, I am floored. I go down hard and together, we slide a couple of feet across the gleaming polished wood. I swing my arms up to hit him, but he neatly captures both my hands in his. No matter how I buck, I can’t force him off. He chuckles. Despite being whippet thin, he’s wickedly strong and he manages to hold me down with one hand. His other hand fumbles for the stake I dropped. I see what’s coming and my terror picks up. I’d thought I was ready. I’d thought I was willing to die to accomplish this. To avenge not just my sister but all of humanity. But now, in this instant, with my enemy reaching for a stake, panic claws through me. I don’t want to die. Not now. Not like this.
I buck and flail. My heels find purchase and I twist around, but he’s seated too firmly on top of me. And then the stake is in his hands. There’s a maniacal gleam in his gaze as he slams the stake down to my heart.
The impact is crushing. I feel ribs crack and break and a horrible, searing pain in my lungs that makes it impossible to catch my breath. But the stake doesn’t go through.
It doesn’t go through!
The wood splinters against the bulletproof vest I have under the guard’s uniform. I look from the shards of wood up to Roberto’s face. I don’t know who’s more surprised, him or me. He growls in frustration at the same time I let out a crazed laugh.
I’m harder to kill than I used to be.
“Wow. Guess you shouldn’t have bought that body armor for your guards.”
He snarls, his hand ripping at the collar of the vest. The tightly woven fabric of the vest bites into the flesh on the back of my neck and arms. He gives it a hard yank and I feel the fabric slice my skin before the fabric gives and the seams rip open. The buttons on the camo shirt pop as he rips the front of the vest clean off, leaving my chest bare.
He stands, pulling me up along with him. I stumble a few steps behind while I struggle to get my feet under me. He drags me over to the body of his valet. He bends down to grab the stake from Rodrigo’s heart.
I won’t get another chance to break free, so I duck my head and plow into him. I knock him over, and he lets go of my hands.
But he’s as experienced a fighter as Sebastian and he recovers quickly, rolling with the action and popping back up onto his feet. I stumble, but before I can straighten, he swings his leg out in a roundhouse kick. I grab his ankle, but he twists in midair, forcing me off balance. He recovers before I can and he kicks me in the chest. I go down again. I roll out from under him before he can slam the stake through my heart. I scramble across the floor toward a chair by the wall. He’s almost on top of me, when I grab it and swing it at him. It smashes to pieces on his head, but he’s barely dazed. That’s okay. I didn’t expect to knock him out or anything. All I wanted was one of those spindly legs. And I’m betting the hard, polished wood of furniture will be more effective than a quickly whittled branch anyway. I grab the chair leg in both hands and bring it up between me and him just as he slams the stake in my direction. The chair leg collides with his chest, stopping his momentum, but his reach is longer than mine and I can feel the tip of the wood digging into my skin. For a second, we lay there, him poised over my body, me fighting to keep that stake out of my heart.
Roberto knows my strength is failing and that gleam is back in his gaze. He’s enjoying this. Like this is the most fun he’s had all day. Hell, probably all century.
I’m not going to make it. I am struggling with everything I’ve got, and it’s not enough. This crazy damn vampire is going to kill me. Any second now.
Except it doesn’t happen.
He tenses above me. Freezes completely. He’s no longer looking at me, and his gaze has shifted up to the left, like he can hear something in the distance that I can’t.
And then I can hear it: a piercing howl. Not the howl of a Tick, but a mechanical howl of a jet coming in too fast. It roars overhead before whining away with a Doppler effect. An instant later, there’s the stupefying boom of something huge crashing to the ground.
The whole house shakes. The chandelier above me trembles and dust filters down through the air. Then the lights flicker and go out.
Roberto looks back down at me. The haze of vampire crazy-berserker clears from his eyes. He flashes me another demonic smile. “Well, now. Isn’t this interesting?” He hops to his feet, pulling me with him. Again, he has my wrists in one of his hands. He plucks the chair leg neatly out of my hands. “I’ll just take that, if you don’t mind.”
He opens the top drawer in the desk. Inside is a creepy array of instruments, the purpose for which I don’t even want to consider. There are knives and picks and saws. It’s like a full surgical supply cart. Along with a bundle of zip ties. He has my hands cuffed in front of me before I can even think past my horror at what I’ve seen in the drawer.
Then, he’s dragging me out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
“Let’s just go see what your friend is up to, shall we?”
I stumble after him, down the grand, curving staircase, my footsteps clattering across the marble of the entrance hall. He doesn’t stop until we’re out on the sweeping, wide front porch. We both look out over the town. Guards are scrambling in front of the courthouse. A pair of Hummers rumble by from the direction of the barracks. Other people, civilians, are pouring out onto the street to see what has happened. And then I see it.
On the other side of town, opposite from the gatehouse, a plume of inky smoke spirals into the sky. Only then do I realize that all the lights in town are out. There are streetlights all down Main Street. It was dusk when I went into Roberto’s house and the lights were just starting to come on. Now the sun has fully set and all of the lights are dark.
Whatever crashed must have gone right into the fence and knocked out the entire electrical grid. In the distance, far beyond the edge of town, I can hear the Ticks howling at the fence. Ticks that I led here. How long will it take for them to figure out that the fences are down? How long before the innocent people of this town are overrun by monsters that I let in? But I have no time to think about that.
Roberto hooks his fingers through the zip tie and drags me along behind him down the stairs and out into the street. His presence doesn’t go unnoticed. The people milling about stop to watch him with equal parts fear and awe. In this crowd, no one will come to my rescue. I am on my own.
He moves quickly down the street but I can’t keep up. I stumble and hit the ground hard on one knee. I cry out, but even that doesn’t stop him. He just drags me along behind him, my knees scraping the concrete. Finally he stops in the middle of the road and turns in place.
“Come out, come out wherever you are!”
He turns full circle. He’s waiting. For Sebastian.
He’s figured out Sebastian’s plan before I did. Of course Sebastian never intended for me to kill Roberto. How was I ever stupid enough to believe that he’d be content to let me kill his nemesis? He had hunted him for hundreds of years. He’s probably planned this for decades. He wasn’t going to just hand this over to me. As badly as I want Roberto dead, as badly as I want this all to end, it’s nothing compared to how Sebastian feels.
So of course I was nothing more than a decoy. A distraction. All this talk about how I was the only one who could do this, how I was the only one who could kill Roberto; that had all been lies. He even misled me about the vampire spidey sense, because clearly that is what I felt inside the house. That gut-deep need to kill Roberto. Or if I cannot kill him to flee his territory. That wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Certainly not so soon or so powerfully. Why had it come on so suddenly?
