Page 30 of Queen Takes Sunfires 2
“You’re alive. My Blood are alive.”
Then she leaned down and sank her fangs into my throat.
13
Eivind
The seedy hotel where I’d tried to find temporary refuge for the woman I’d rescued in Chicago was a burned-out, still smoldering, shell. One whole wing had burned down to the concrete foundation with just a few blackened studs and cross supports still intact. Likely where the fire had started. The other wing was badly damaged, though the walls were mostly still intact.
Had the meth lab blown up like I suspected? Or had something else ignited those dangerous chemicals as a diversion? I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to tell. Maybe it didn’t matter in the end.
Something in my gut told me I needed to search. For what, I didn’t know. But it was important.
One thing I’d learned in my lonely existence was to always trust my wolf sense. If Detective Harris wasn’t with me, I’d simply shift into the wolf and explore. Not for the first time, I considered shoving the human out of the car at top speed to see how many times he’d bounce.
His damned cop eyes took one look at the destruction, and he laughed. “Let me guess. You spent a lovely night here with our mysterious lady?”
I grunted, hoping he’d take my response as disgust. “Not a night. A day. Remember? She’s scared of the daylight. And no, we were probably only here an hour or so. We were attacked.”
“Tell me.”
I told him about the room with no windows that she’d requested. How I’d returned to the room and found her sleeping. His eyes narrowed when I mentioned the scars that had healed so quickly while she slept. But his suspicion quickly turned to outright skepticism when I told him about the Soldiers of Light.
“I shot the one trying to come in the side door, and it didn’t even slow it down. Nothing seemed to hurt it, except for a shard of mirror that she flashed at it. Even then, it chased us back down the hallway, and I lost her temporarily in the smoke. She called their leader Aurelian.”
“What did these walking skeletons look like exactly?”
“Fucking dried old bones with nothing on them but armor.”
He rolled his eyes. “What kind of armor? Like what knights wore?”
I flashed back to the skeletons, kneeling as Karmen approached each one. “Roman, I think, though they were hard to see.”
Harris shook his head slowly. “Because of the smoke?”
“No, they’re super bright. My eyes kept watering. That shit hurt, man. It was nearly impossible to look straight at them. But I remember a shining silver chest plate with some kind of insignia on it, and a helmet with a fringe, but I couldn’t tell you what color it was. They all had swords, and some of them held large shields, but they were even brighter than the others. The metal was polished and so damned shiny it blinded me.”
I pulled back around behind the building and parked in the same spot I’d left the car before, though we faced the building this time. The broken window seemed to mock me. I’d tried to protect her, but in the end, she had protected herself way better than me. She didn’t need me to fight those fucking soldiers.
I tried to tell myself that she didn’t need me at all. I certainly didn’t need her.
My wolf howled mournfully. Alone. Always alone.
Shoving the door open harder than I needed to, I climbed out of the Mustang chomping for a fight. I’d been the same as worthless in her stand against the skeletons. But I could sure handle the human cop who was hot on her trail. If need be, I’d toss what remained of his carcass after my wolf was done with him onto the freeway in rush-hour traffic. Wouldn’t be anything left of him but a smear on the pavement.
“Huh.” Bent over to examine something on the ground, Harris straightened, lifting a twisted piece of metal with the tip of an ink pen. “Could be some armor, I guess, but it’s not shiny. I’ll see if forensics can tell me how old it is.”
I walked around the car to join him on the sidewalk. “That dust pile was one of the skeletons.”
Dropping the piece of metal into an evidence bag, Harris gave me a doubtful look. “Even if the bones were from a recently-murdered person, it’d take a shit-ton of heat to pulverize them.”
“No heat. Karmen sort of… uh… sucked them dry, I guess.”
“Say again?”
I hadn’t gotten to the vampire quirk of being Aima. I hesitated a moment, trying to decide if I could scare him away with the truth, or if I should lie and hide our true nature. If he got out of hand and threatened Karmen in any way, I’d kill him. So would it hurt anything to be straight with him? He likely wouldn’t believe me anyway. It’d be easier to convince him we really were aliens rather than the undead cross-fearing creatures movies made us out to be.
“She fed on the energy sustaining the soldiers. She drained them dry. All that’s left of them is a pile of dust.”
