Page 87 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
They made it halfway before Maul clapped. He stood at the edge of the shade, his fangs bared. “I see you’ve made your choice then.”
“I have,” Andres replied and drew his pistol.
As he aimed, the sun-pain flared through his arm, jerking his grip. Maul crashed into him. The weapon slipped from Andres’s grasp, and it was all he could do to let Shane go as he and Maul fell backward through the blinding courtyard in a tussle of limbs and fangs. They punched and clawed, hissing like feral animals, and for the first instant of adrenaline, Andres thrilled at his own strength compared to Maul’s. Then the aching of his body set back in.
Maul shoved him at the cage, one hand buried in the torn sheer fabric of Andres’s shirt. Andres didn’t react with the fear of being grabbed—he was fear already, fear and rage and fermented pain. As Maul threw him past the gate of the cage, Andres wrestled for the chair they’d tied Shane to, swinging it back before Maul could lock him in. It split over Maul’s head and shoulders, wood coming apart in pieces.
Maul snarled. A streak of thick, dark vampire blood oozed down the side of his forehead, but when he grabbed for Andres again, he seemed stronger than ever. He shoved Andres against the front of the cage, his teeth bared, a fresh light in his eyes. “I never sank my fangs into you myself. Maybe that was my mistake.”
Andres flinched from the spittle that flew with his words, struggling against his grip, but his former boss felt unmovable now, Andres’s limbs all but numb from overuse and pain. The brilliant sunlight gleamed off Maul’s fangs as he bared them, a bead of venom already dripping from the tips. For a human, the toxin was made to calm and gratify, but plunged into another vampire…
The horror of it caught Andres in the chest, strung together from the rumors and legends. What was real and what was myth, he didn’t know. But Maul must have. And Maul was going to bite him; invade him the way he’d ordered his goons to so many years ago, a punishment and a subjugation and a death sentence.
Andres gave one last panicked thrash, but the fear could no longer drive his muscles the way it had moments before. Maul rammed him a final time against the cage. Andres was flooded by memories he thought he’d lost—teeth burying into his skin, hands gripping his shirt and hair, a palm over his mouth, the life slowly draining out of him, his whole world turning to days of misery as his body rewrote itself into something new.
Two sharp points touched his neck, bringing a hint of pain.
And then it was gone.
Maul slumped slowly against him, fangs retracted and a look of horror on his face. From the center of his chest poked the tip of something wooden, black blood spreading around it. A stake.
Shane’s shoulders heaved, and he stumbled, dropping the other end of the chair’s broken arm where he’d plunged it through Maul’s back. Andres let the dead vampire fall to the side and staggered to catch Shane—to catch them both on each other’s bodies, holding each other up with sheer force of will.
“Pet,” Andres murmured, and what he meant wasIlove you.
Shane managed the weakest of smiles, but to Andres it was so bright that it almost cast the searing ache now taking over his body in shadow. “We’re going home, love.”
But as they trekked back across the courtyard, Andres could hear Maul’s subordinates circling through the house with shouts and hisses. Shane picked up Andres’s fallen pistol, and Andres let him have it—he couldn’t hold the weapon and support them both at the same time.
As they stepped into the shade, his Cygnus—angry and red and littered with their half-closed bite marks—aimed the weapon with steady hands at the first of the vampires who emerged, but another appeared to their right, and then to their left, fangs bared like they would kill for another bite, perhaps for loyalty to the corpse cooling in the courtyard but more likely because they believed Andres, as his right hand, was the only thing standing between them and taking Maul’s place at the top of the blood trade. They weren’t entirely wrong in that either.
Andres repositioned his hold on Shane.
Maul’s successors lunged toward them only to stumble, cowering. Andres felt the force that had slammed into them moments after, the sharp sun-like searing of holy silver intersecting with his already building agony. He slumpedagainst Shane to keep from crumpling to the floor as Natalie stepped through the door to the building’s front room. She held a pistol in one hand, and a long baton of holy silver in the other, wielding it like a torch against the night.
As her eyes adjusted to the room, her gaze locked on Andres. He could see her taking him in, like each millisecond was a millennium, her focus jumping from his fangs to his poisoned body, his skin already sweltering red in the presence of that much holy silver. The hurt and fury that followed wasn’t unexpected, but that didn’t make it any less agonizing. She aimed her pistol at him.
“Hellbeast.” Andres murmured the words, affectionate even now.
“Vampire,” she stated back.
And he felt his heart seize as she pulled the trigger.
33
SHANE
The shot rang like it was the only sound for miles, blasting through Shane’s head in an unending flurry. Andres swayed against him—his Andres, his Andres who’d come for him, who’d risked everything and more for him, whose suffering Shane would have given anything to stop. Shane screamed as he held to him, and behind them, someone else shrieked too.
Only then did he notice the shift in Natalie’s aim, up and a little to the right—straight across the courtyard behind them to an open window where a rifle lay abandoned in the gap.
Shane didn’t know how to say thank you, except to move, pulling Andres with him as they stumbled toward the house’s front door. After a moment of hesitation, Natalie stepped to the side. Andres hissed at the holy silver weapon still gleaming in her hand, shying away from it, and she tucked it behind her back. She seemed barely able to bring herself to look at him now, her face contorted into shades of disgust and pain, but as the first true enemy bullet rang through the space, she leapt into action, silver waving before her once again as she charged the vampires still lingering in the hallways to either side.
“Nat,” Shane shouted, almost tripping over the front door’s threshold in his haste.
She shook her head. The look on her face was inconsolable. “Don’t—” she snarled. “Don’t let me see him again,understand?” Her expression twisted. The tears that blurred along her lower lashes slipped in angry torrents that reminded Shane so much of Andres he wanted to cry for them both. “Just keep him safe, okay? I love him.”
“So do I,” Shane replied and staggered from the building.
