Page 78 of Red Rooster

Harvey chuckled. “Lanny Webb the vampire. Shit. That’s kinda hot.”

Trina laughed, and it was the lightest she’d felt in days. Their mission might fail, but she wouldn’t allow herself to think it. Not now, and not in the days to come.

She left the coffeeshop with a clear conscious and the thought that maybe, just maybe, they could take on the world. Her crazy band of boys and her.

Nikita waited a half a block down, parked along the curb. They’d picked up the car between stops at her place and his, an old black Barracuda that, for all its time sitting in a parking garage, gleamed like new, painstakingly waxed and buffed, lovingly preserved.

He stood leaning against the passenger window, ankles crossed, sunglasses shading his eyes. If she hadn’t known better, she would have said he looked like your typical sulky young man in his denim and combats, arms folded, expression daring anyone to speak to him. But Trina could read the tension in his stance, the way he held his shoulders pulled in close; could decipher the downward curve of his mouth for what it was: fear. Worry. He was a barely-held-together mess of nerves and guilt and grief.

They had to get Sasha back.Had to.

“Ready?” she asked when she reached him.

He nodded and opened her door. “Areyou?”

A loaded question, one for which she didn’t have a true answer. So she flashed him a smile, and slid in.

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