Page 13 of Toxic Vengeance

Eden stepped into the hallway and shrugged into the straps of her backpack just as Chris’s bike started up outside. The pitch changed as it began driving away.

Pop, pop.

Eden tensed and reached back to draw her weapon, then two more shots sounded, followed by a loud impact.

No.

She raced for the back door, intent on protecting Chris. She burst out onto the back steps, holding her pistol in a double-handed grip as she scanned for the shooter. Chris’s bike was lying on its side just up the alley.

Eden ran down the steps, paused at the end of the short driveway behind a brick light post and whipped her upper body around the corner, weapon up. There was no sign of a shooter.

Chris lay pinned beneath her bike in a crumpled heap two-hundred-feet away where she’d crashed into a garage three houses down. She wasn’t moving. Eden ran for her, heart in her throat as she kept watch for the shooter.

Motion to her left made her pivot and take aim. Bits of brick exploded from the low wall next to her, the bullets missing her by inches. Eden leapt behind it for cover, waited a beat, then popped up to return fire. Another shot slammed into the brick just as a man jumped over a trashcan and ran for a low garden wall beyond it.

Eden fired a heartbeat before he rounded the corner. Her bullet hit him in the back of the shoulder. He grunted and stumbled but stayed on his feet as he disappeared from view a split second later.

She couldn’t chase him. She had to help Chris.

Leaping over the wall, she raced for her friend. Blood was already forming a pool beneath her on the pavement.

“Chris,” Eden said in an urgent voice as she dragged the bike off the older woman and dropped to her knees beside her. “Chris, can you hear me?” She pulled the helmet off, doing a visual sweep to assess the damage.

It was bad.

Two shots had hit Chris in the left upper chest, but they weren’t bleeding. The holes in her belly were, however. Her friend’s eyes were barely open, her skin already turning a ghastly grayish tinge from shock and blood loss. She was breathing in shallow, raspy draws, blood bubbling out of the holes in her stomach, coming out her nose and mouth with each breath.

Shit, shit, shit.

Eden ripped open Chris’s leather jacket and found a ballistic vest with two holes in it. Damn. Chris had been concerned enough to armor up before coming here, but it hadn’t protected her belly, and from the amount of blood spurting from one wound, it had hit a major artery—possibly the aorta.

Eden whipped out her cell phone and called 911 while watching for the shooter, then applied pressure to the wounds with both hands to try and stem the bleeding. Someone moved off to the right. She snatched up her weapon, froze when a dark-haired woman stepped out from behind the next garage, a pistol held at her side.

“Stand down, I’m here to help,” the thirty-something woman said in a calm voice as she glanced around. “The shooter’s gone.” She wore black cargo pants and a long-sleeved shirt over full curves, her grip on the weapon as rock-steady as the deep blue gaze pinning Eden.

“Freeze right there. You’ve got one second to drop your weapon, or I dropyou,” Eden warned.

Surprising her, the curvy woman calmly holstered her weapon and angled the left side of her body toward Eden. “Like I said, I’m here to help.” Moving slowly, palms facing outward, the woman reached down to pull down the waistband of her pants to expose her left hip—

Revealing the Valkyrie tat on the side of it.

Stunned, Eden wrenched her gaze up to the woman’s face, fighting to cover her shock. Another Valkyrie? Here? The timing and circumstances were way too suspicious. “Who are you?” She still had one hand on Chris’s belly, her palm and fingers sticky with warm blood. Too much blood, pooling around them. Her knees were soaked with it now.

“Trinity Durant.” The woman approached them, looking at Chris now. “Is she alive?”

The gurgling sounds had stopped. Eden put two fingers to Chris’s carotid pulse. It felt like a giant fist reached up to crush Eden’s windpipe. “No.”Oh, God, no, this can’t be happening. She immediately started chest compressions.

Trinity knelt beside her. “You called for an ambulance?”

“Yes.” Little good it would do Chris now, but Eden still didn’t stop. “How do you know the shooter’s gone?”

“He got into a car and drove south.”

Eden kept up with the chest compressions, struggling to fight back the rising tide of emotion and not trusting anything about this situation but unable to ignore the significance of having another Valkyrie standing before her. The woman could easily have shot Eden while she’d been attending to Chris, but hadn’t. Maybe she was telling the truth.

After a minute Trinity placed a hand on top of Eden’s. “She’s gone,” she said softly.

Eden threw Trinity’s hand off and kept going, choking back the sob that wanted to rip free. Her brain knew Chris was dead. Her heart refused to accept it.

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