scared, too.
I was looking up at the sunroof when someone looked down at me. I had time to register that there was no mask. It was just dark eyes in a pale face: vampire. I was firing up into the face before I had time to really “see” everything. The face slipped away, but I didn’t think I’d hit it.
Newman fired up into the roof after I did, but he kept his finger on the trigger so that the car was an echo chamber for the bullets, and the hot casings spilled on me. Most of them hit my jacket, but one found the back of my hand and there was nothing to shoot at now.
I grabbed his hand, yelling because I was too deaf to know how loud to talk to be heard. “Stop! You’re wasting ammo!”
He looked at me, eyes wild, showing too much white, like a horse about to bolt. I aimed his gun a little down. I could feel air through the holes he’d punched in the roof. “Ease down. Save your ammo.” I was probably still yelling, but he stared at me as if either he couldn’t hear me over the ringing in his own ears, or he couldn’t understand me through the fear. Sometimes when you’re afraid enough, the sound of your own blood in your ears is all you can hear. I remembered those days.
I got him to nod at me, and then I turned to look at the front seat. Edward and Tilford were driving like a team. We went through the smoking remains of the roadblock so fast I had only the barest glimpse of the charred remnants.
I saw the flashing lights in the distance, down the road, before I realized I’d been hearing sirens for a while. My hearing was not happy with all the shooting in the car. I wondered if everyone else was as deafened as I was.
I probably yelled, because I had no way to gauge my own voice, “Who called backup?”
Newman yelled back, “I did.”
It wouldn’t have occurred to Edward and me to call for help. We’d been lone wolves too damn long. For once I was very glad the rookie had done a rookie thing; he’d followed procedure and called for backup. The Harlequin were invested in remaining secret. We were safe, for now.
We began to slow down. Edward’s voice echoed thin and distant in my head, as he yelled, “Tilford, Tilford!”
Shit! I slipped my seatbelt as the car slowed to a stop and reached around the seat to Tilford’s shoulder with the sword still sticking out of him. I knew better than to try to take the sword out; that was a job for a doctor, but the bleeding, I could do something about that. I took off the Windbreaker and it was only as I slipped it over my arm that I remembered I was hurt, too. The jacket scraped over the wound, and the pain let me know I was hurt. The fact that I’d started to feel the pain let me know that the adrenaline and endorphins from the emergency were beginning to fade.
Edward brought us safely to a stop. He put the SUV in park. The cars and sirens barreled down on us, the sirens still not as loud as they should have been.
I realized that my blood was all over the jacket, though. I turned to Newman and pantomimed him giving me his jacket. I looked at my hands and they had my blood on them, too. I carried lycanthropy in my blood. I didn’t change shape, but that didn’t mean that if my blood got in Tilford’s bloodstream that he wouldn’t. I couldn’t risk it if there were other blood-free hands to hold the wound.
I changed places with Newman and managed to direct him how to hold his jacket and hands around the sword. He moved the blade by accident and Tilford passed out.
Newman mumbled/yelled apologies. I waved them away. The first cars were parked, and marshals, uniforms, detectives, emergency personnel of all kinds were spilling out toward us. There’d be an ambulance in there somewhere.
22
TILFORD CAME TO as the EMTs were trying to shift him from the car to the stretcher. He grabbed Edward’s arm. “Warrant, my warrant, it’s yours. It’s yours, Forrester.”
Edward nodded and patted his hand. “I’ll get the bastards for you, Tilford.”
“I know you will,” he said. He kept hold of Edward as they got him on the stretcher, and Edward didn’t fight it, he just stayed at his side on the way to the ambulance. Newman came to join me beside the SUV as I blinked out at the swirl of lights and police. Raborn was suddenly in front of us. “What the hell happened, Blake?”
I blinked at him. An EMT pushed between us. “Back up, can’t you see they’re both hurt?” I blinked into her pale eyes. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She started shining a light into Newman’s eyes. His thin face was a mask of blood. Apparently some of the gravel had cut his forehead so the blood had just rained down from there.
Raborn pushed into my face, trying to use his height to intimidate me. He should have known better by now. “Talk to me, Blake.”
“The serial killers that we’ve been chasing across the country were here and tried to ambush us. We were better armed than they planned for, so we got away.”
“Why would they ambush you?” This was Detective Lorenzo, who was in the group of cops. I hadn’t seen him in the dark with the flashing lights. It was like looking at strobes, or maybe I was shockier than I realized.
“When we catch them, we’ll ask,” I said.
Another EMT reached around Raborn. “You’re bleeding.”
I looked down at the arm he was looking at, but it didn’t seem very important. I knew it was my arm, and when he touched the wound it hurt. The little sharp spark of pain helped clear my head a little. That let me know that with the adrenaline leaving, the soft edge of shock and relief had set in; now that the emergency was over, my body was trying to shut down a little.
Raborn backed up enough so the medic could look at it, but he hovered over the guy’s shoulder. “Are they still out there?”
“Far as I know,” I said.
The EMT reached for my arm. I pulled out of reach. “Let me at least look at it, that’s a lot of blood.”
“I’m a carrier for lycanthropy.”
He hesitated. “I need to double-glove then.”
“That’s why I said something.”
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and went at a half-run toward the ambulance.
“If they’re still out there, we need to get them,” Raborn said.
I nodded. “Yep, we do.” In my head I thought,
“Are you saying we shouldn’t go after them?” Raborn asked.
“No, I just want everyone who goes into those woods to know what we’re up against, that’s all.”
“If that was a pep talk, you suck at it,” Lorenzo said, and he was smiling.
I didn’t smile back. I don’t know what my face looked like, but it wasn’t a smile, and whatever he saw in my eyes made his wilt around the edges.
“Marshal Forrester and I wounded two of them. One bad enough that he’s being carried by the other. There’s another one that was on fire, but I don’t know if he’s dead.”
“On fire, how’d he get on fire?” Raborn asked.
“Backwash,” I said.
“What?”
Newman was batting the female EMT away from his face. “Forrester used a rocket launcher.”
“What?” Raborn asked.
“He used a LAW,” I said, “Forrester did.”
“Is that what scorched the back of the car?” A woman’s voice, and I got a vague impression of her in the back of the group, tall, dark-haired, thin-faced.
“Yeah,” I said.
