Page 5 of Just Dare Me
“You said if she was here, that would make the odds 99 percent! He’s here! Jay is here!” I don’t wait for a response. There’s no order in the world that could stop me now. I take off, sprinting across the shipping yard, taking as big a stride as the tight wetsuit will allow. There’s screaming in my ear—probably Hillerman and Nora at the same time. I’ve only closed half the distance, but I’m too impatient to wait another second. I stop, raise the gun, and squeeze off three quick shots. My heart soars when Beyona turns, not hit, but at least I got her attention. Her beady black eyes stare right at me, watch me raise the gun and peer straight down the sights at her forehead.
My finger is just beginning to squeeze the trigger when one of the silos explodes, lighting up the entire shipping yard. The shockwave blasts me off my feet. When my senses recover, I’m looking up at the night sky, waiting for my lungs to snap back so I can breathe. All is quiet, not just because my eardrums have been damaged, but because the fight is over.
Sitting up, I suck in a giant gasp of air, then cough it straight out again. The yard is deserted. No more gunfire. That’s good, right? They didn’t come this way, which means they had to go through Hillerman and Russo.
“You got ’em?” I ask between wheezing coughs. “They went for their cars?” I put my fingers to my ear. The earpiece is gone. No matter, here comes Hillerman and Russo now, trotting in full tactical gear.
Russo calls out. “You got ’em? They went for the river?”
“Are you kidding? They didn’t come this way. They went your way.”
“That’s a negative,” he says with a sigh.
With a frustrated growl, Hillerman kicks a piece of rubble. “How can they just be gone? What are they going to do, walk home?”
Nora’s voice rings out from behind a stack of crates. “Over here!”
We find her crouching over a dead thug with an East Side tattoo on his shoulder. The guy’s neck has been opened by a savage vampire bite, spilling every last ounce of his blood onto the cement.
Russo lets out a low whistle. “Windsor ain’t here to feed, that’s for sure.”
Nora closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and places her fingertips on the back of the man’s head. Immediately, her brow creases with concentration as she watches the guy’s final moments from his own point of view. She winces, then opens her eyes and stands up. “Female vamp with short hair. Young, maybe twenty. It’s odd.”
“What?” I ask.
“She bit into him, and then she dropped him and looked up suddenly, like she heard something.”
“Yeah, a big-ass explosion. I’m still hearing it.”
“No, it was in the other direction.” Nora points out into a field beside the shipping yard. “She looked out there, and then she took off running.”
“Nothing out there,” Hillerman says. “Just fields.”
It’s good enough for me. Tearing off the wetsuit, I shift into my fox and with three large strides I’m at a full sprint across that field. Hillerman’s right; there’s jack-shit out here. Unless they entered a secret underground cave like in a James Bond movie, there’s just no way they could have…
Wait. There. On the horizon I see a dark line cutting through the field. I know exactly what that is. I leap over the dark lines of a train track, then double back to step between the rails, to lay my head on them—still warm.
Trains! We’ve been focusing on cars all this time. Following them in and out of East Side, putting trackers on their bumpers, running their plates through the system, tracing ownership through VIN numbers, hitting dead end after dead end. That’s because they’re using freight trains to move around. It’s clever. Detroit is crawling with train tracks. You can move large numbers of people to any part of the city at any time, day and night.
I look up and down the line, but see only darkness. I listen, but hear only my own pitiful whines. They’re gone again.
He’s gone again.
There’s a weight on my legs. I open one bleary eye and glance down to see a giant, black curly-haired labradoodle at my feet. In his usual fashion, Muppet lays his head across my ankles. But he’s not sleeping any more than I am. His ears perk when he sees me eyeing him. He jumps down from the couch, bouncing the cushions.
I groan. My inner clock says it’s still the middle of the night. Even though my body is exhausted, my mind is nowhere near calm enough for any kind of good sleep. Frustrating, but not surprising. Before Jay, I could sleep comfortably anywhere, any time. Now, without him, there’s no such thing as comfort. I haven’t slept through a single night since Nora brought me here to crash on the couch in the safety of Terrance’s underground fortress.
Muppet comes up to my face, sniffing and panting. I push him away, he comes right back, I push him away, and he comes right back. I drag myself up, folding my legs beneath me on the couch. “Let me guess. We’re up for the day, right?”
Excited, Muppet jumps onto the couch, then off again. His enthusiasm is annoying. Plus, he’s giant—he weighs seventy-five pounds—so it hurts when his tail gets wagging and whips me. “Ow! Would you sit? Sit!” He doesn’t sit, of course. He tries to lick me instead. I shove him away. “Would you just…we’ll go, okay, we’ll go for a walk. But food first. Go get your food.”
Foodis the only word he obeys. There’s a comical moment when he’s stuck running in place, his paws slipping across the smooth tile. I push his ass with my foot, and that sets him off. He races across the kitchen to his enormous bowl.
Living at Terrance’s den under the Ambassador Bridge is no picnic for me, but Muppet’s in heaven. The place has plenty of room for running, and there’s always way too much food lying around, since Nora’s men are constantly eating. With so many people under one roof—er, bridge—every meal is a feast, and meat is always on the menu.
I feel like shit. My prescription meds for ADHD ran out two weeks ago, and it shows. In the few seconds it takes me to trudge into the kitchen, I’ve thought of three different things I need to be doing right now—shower, brush my hair and/or my teeth, and put on clean clothes—but doing any one of those seems like a monumental task at the moment. I’d much rather spend my effort ignoring the guilt ofnotdoing them, so I sit on a barstool in my underwear and lay my cheek on the countertop.
If Jay were here, he’d say something snarky about…well, actually, the first thing he’d say is why don’t I just go and get the damn refill on my pills, andthenhe’d say something snarky about walking around somebody else’s house in my underwear. It’s cute when he acts so prudish. Humans will never get past that, I think. They’ll never be comfortable with nudity the way underworlders are. That’s a random thought to have. Why am I even thinking about this? Oh yeah, I was thinking if Jay were here…
