She pulled the trigger and shot at the trunk.
Nothing.
“Damnit,” she hissed, shooting again.
Nothing took.
She steeled herself and aimed again, the wave of panic rising through her chest. She could see the lights now, and she pulled the trigger one more time, hoping-
Boom.
She staggered back, and jumped into the car, screeching out of the scene doing over a hundred on the rural Texas highway, transporting her near-dead travel partner with a mess of unregistered weapons, in a stolen SUV.
Chapter 8: Evasion
Lucidia
They’d stopped for a moment. She wasn’t sure why, but something was wrong. In the muffled van, she could hear them talking about losing men, and a series of suspicious explosions.
They were discussing a derail.
That might work for her. Based on the noise outside, there wasn’t a lot of traffic around them, which meant they’d pulled off somewhere private and isolated to update on progress.
The only thing was, she didn’t have the slightest idea how to get free. She’d anticipated a detail of four or five. They’d brought on twelve total to bag Lucidia.
It was a smart thing to do; Darian knew better than anybody not to underestimate her.
As each minute ticked by, she felt the hopelessness creeping in. At first, she was able to push it back, to fight it off, but mile after mile with no epiphany for an escape that would allow her to get free and tackle all eleven of them hadn’t come.
Not to mention, Adonis.
He was better than all these strongbloods combined. He’d taught her everything she knew. How could she hope to pull one over on him?
Since they’d pulled off the road, all of the strongbloods had piled out closed the doors behind them, leaving her alone in the dimly lit space.
She could hear them all milling about outside. It was almost a dig that they hadn’t left someone to guard her; it meant that they knew she had no possible way to get free.
Her ears pricked up when someone shouted.
A chorus of bullets colliding with bodies thudded from outside of the van. Lucidia stiffened, her pulse ramming in her chest.
Normally, an attack wouldn’t be alarming in the slightest. Sometimes, on long transports like this, it was nice to have a little skirmish. Broke up the monotony.
But now, she was completely restrained. Helpless would have been an understatement.
The noises outside stopped, and she took in a sharp breath, pulling at the thick, reinforced restraints even though it would do nothing.
This is what her targets felt like, the moment before Lucidia offed them.
Karma, she thought bitterly.
Footsteps crunched across gravel, and then the doors ripped open, letting afternoon light flood in. Lucidia squinted, turning her head away from the sharp sky.
After the immediate shock, her eyes focused on a single figure, shorter than she’d expected. The person was holding a rifle and had long hair that had been pulled into a ponytail. Lucidia vaguely remembered the jacket, with sheep’s fur.
Lucidia squinted against the blinding light. “Megan?” she asked in disbelief.
Another set of footsteps jogged over, dodging dead bodies. A moment later, a head poked into the van.
It was Clay, holding another rifle, wearing a flannel and cargo pants. He had a coy smile on his face. “I’m starting to think you’re avoiding me. You’re not answering your cell phone.”
Robin
She’d been driving for three hours now. They laced through the back roads, moving slowly for I-35. Once they hit it, they’d have an hour-long jaunt down to Austin.
Reykon probably wouldn’t have wanted her to use the main road, but she’d developed a theory about their journey, and was putting it into practice.
Reykon had been trained by strongbloods. The other strongbloods had been trained by more strongbloods. They all thought the same way, and they all acted the same way in certain situations.
If no strongblood would take the main road down to a main city while in pursuit, there was a slim chance that nobody would think to look on a main road. They still thought Reykon was the pilot of this ship.
Which meant they were still trying to derail the U.S.S. Reykon. But this was the U.S.S Robin, and they did things differently.
As she raced down road after road, keeping one eye on the cars and the other on the map, she couldn’t help but feel her gaze pulling to Reykon. Like a reflex, she was checking for the rise and fall of his lungs. She was watching his wound, which had stopped bleeding after about an hour.
She hoped that was good.
He was now a sickly gray color, not the charming light-tan he always was. His lips were darker, not quite blue, but verging on it.
In short: Reykon’s situation was dire.
But stopping at the hospital wasn’t an option, and she didn’t know the first thing about triage.
He’d given her an address; she had no clue what she’d find there, or where they were going. The more she thought about it, the more a horrible thought crept into her head.
What if the place they were going to didn’t have any resources to help him?
It wasn’t a far leap. Reykon would undoubtedly put her own safety over his. She knew it; it was the truest thing she’d ever felt. And it was reciprocal.
She’d march into House Xander right now if she thought it could save Reykon.
She figured that was what love felt like. It sounded so stupid in her mind, but her mother used to tell her that you couldn’t pick who you loved, that you had no control over it whatsoever. This seemed like an exaggerated example. The man sent to abduct her and deliver her to a vampire, and she’d somehow fallen for him. She didn’t know when it had happened, but it had happened, and there was no taking it back now.
How pathetic is that? she thought. But even as the words crossed her mind, she knew she didn’t believe them. Whatever she was feeling wasn’t pathetic, it was something else.
Strong.
Her and Reykon had become a team. They’d grown closer, they’d changed each other and
