I turned my attention back to the kid-slash-fucking-freak-of-nature and yelped when she smiled at me with dainty little fangs peeking out from her top lip. She was a vampire? It was an assumption, given that Faline also had fangs, but come on! What were the chances that she wasn’t a vampire?
“Sawyer,” I called desperately, shoving my forearm against her throat and pushing, hoping to dislodge her. On anyone else, the move would’ve cut off the windpipe and air supply. It was too bad for me vamps didn’t breathe.
She snapped her teeth at me, her fetid, dead-for-a-couple-of-days breath feathering over me. I shoved her back again, barely gaining an inch. As we grappled for advantage on the floor, I heard Sawyer herding everyone out of the diner, making sure no humans got caught in the crossfire. What was it about me that made me a vampire magnet?
My arm began to shake as my muscles, still weak from my jaunt into Wonderland, began to fail.
“Sawyer,” I breathed. “I can’t hold her much longer.”
A heart beat later, the weight of the small child was lifted from me, and I blinked at Sawyer standing above me, his front to the back of the baby vamp, his arm wrapped around her throat, holding her. The bitch was still struggling to break free. A strange hissing sound escaped the vamp’s infant throat, and I shivered at how wrong that was.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice strained with the effort.
Standing up, I brushed myself off and stared at the vampire, being careful not to look in her eyes. They could control someone like that, right?
“Where did she come from?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, but we need to get some answers. We’ll take her back to PD and put her in the holding cell—Fuck!”
I was suddenly on my back again, the vamp on top of me with her mouth open over my throat. It had been barely a second, then Sawyer was there, heaving her off me.
“Do you have those cuffs?” he asked as he wrestled the girl back into a standing position. I breathed heavily through my mouth, then slapped a hand to the sting on the side of my neck. It came back red.
“She bit me,” I told Sawyer indignantly. I glared at the girl-vampire-whatever. “Bad vampire!”
“You’ll live,” he barked back. “Open the diner door. We’ll cuff her at the car.”
With a slight tremor in my hand, I picked up my sword, which shouldn’t have been here, then did as Sawyer asked and opened the door, following him out into the pre-dawn.
“We only have maybe thirty minutes to get her back to the station before she poofs into ash.”
“You’re cleaning my backseat if we don’t make it in time,” I grumbled, touching my ravaged throat again. I glanced around then and saw all the staff and customers of the diner standing in the parking lot, staring at us with wide eyes.
I held out my badge and said, “Buxton PIG. Go about your business.”
I wasn’t sure whether they would listen to me, since I looked like an extra from The Walking Dead, but I was relieved to see them all walk away. Jogging to catch up to my partner, I opened up the rear door of my truck for him first, then dropped Reaver onto the passenger seat. Snagging the cuffs from the center console, I snapped them onto the vamp’s wrists. She immediately stopped snarling and hissing. Sawyer eased her onto the back seat, where she sat calmly and stared ahead.
“I like these cuffs,” I told Sawyer. He grunted and shut the door.
“Are you alright?”
I touched my neck. “How bad does it look?”
“Let me see.” He slid his fingers onto either side of my jaw, tipping my head this way and that. “You’ll live. It’ll be sore for a while though.”
I shrugged. “Pain. My old friend.”
He looked up at the sky. “We need to go.”
I let him drive on account of the stiffness already setting in to the muscles around my neck and shoulders. Vampire bites were a bitch. I took the twenty-minute drive to replay the whole fight, as well as the whole fucking night. How my sword had appeared in my hand with a thought, I didn’t know.
“How did the sword come to me? I locked it back into the arms room when I left last night.”
He glanced over at me, the instruments casting a soft glow across his sharp cheekbones, but the darkness hid the other half of his features. “It’s magic. And like I said, it likes you.”
I stroked the steel. “Are you telling me it’s sentient? It has thoughts and feelings?”
He shook his head, flipping on the directional signal like he was driving at noon rather than six a.m. “Sentient isn’t the right word.”
“Well, what is the right word? If I have a magical object following me around, I want to know the details of why.”
He shrugged and said helpfully, “It’s magic. Magic doesn’t play to the rules of the world as we know it. It has its own. All I know is to respect the hell out of it because if you don’t, it’ll screw you over.”
“So, it just likes me?”
His mouth flexed into a soft smile. “Something like that.”
I stroked the hilt again. Well, as far as friends went, having a bloodthirsty blade at my disposal wasn’t so bad. “Will it ever leave me?”
“If it does, it won’t be something you can change. Magic is like the wind. It’s in flux, and its more mercurial than most women I know.”
“You’re hanging out with the wrong women,” I muttered.
“And how would you know—”
Sawyer’s words were cut off suddenly as we went from driving in a straight line to flipping through the air. I tried
