Page 25 of Cuddling Sucks in Coffins
“Ronick!” I shouted. “Sometime today!”
He rubbed the scruff shadowing his chin. “Fine.”
With one arm wrapped around me, he dragged me close and then thrust Night’s Fall at the boiling black sky. Then...I didn’t know what happened. It was as if we were clinging to the night on a bird’s wings, but without any sense of movement or sight or sound. We were gone from the Killing Belle party and removed from Jacek—those were the most important things.
Ronick, whom I could no longer feel next to me in this strange state, touched his whiskered chin to my ear. I jumped but not too much because I didn’t want to fall off this nothingness I was currently riding.
“What happened to this godawful town?” he asked.
“I’ll fill you in on the all the glorious details later when we’re not floating in nothingness,” I snapped.
“And where will that be? Where am I taking you?”
Someplace safe where no one would find me. Not my apartment. Not my vamps’ house with Ronick in tow. Not anywhere Paul could send someone after me.
The mausoleum in the graveyard. That had been the only quiet place where Paul’s static noise and melted nightmare world couldn’t penetrate. He hadn’t come inside either.
“Take me to the cemetery,” I said.
Half a heartbeat later, we were there, right smack in its center. The graveyard statues swung toward me on their pedestals, their jaws sagging open to reveal mouthfuls of razor-sharp fangs. Some bent to offer me staffs I could poke through my own eye again. I screwed the wadded up T-shirt tighter into my ears and ignored them.
Jerking my head for Ronick to follow, I marched toward the Appelt mausoleum and skated my gaze over the cemetery grounds out of habit for more vampires. But beyond the surrounding gate, I spotted something far worse. A whole pack of humans headed straight to the graveyard.
I picked up the pace. Once inside the mausoleum, the static noise muted. Huffing my relief, I unplugged my ears with the T-shirt and pushed the door shut. It creaked open again and bumped against my boots. I tried again, this time with more force, and the same thing happened. Shit. We needed it shut.
Outside, voices murmured. They were getting close.
“Doors are going to be my downfall,” I growled. “Before when I was in here, I couldn’t open any of them, and now—”
Ronick came up behind me, his narrowed amber eyes the only source of light. Palms flat against it, he pushed, all the while glaring down at me. “Doors? And here I thought you were the slayer.”
Yeah, not anymore, but now was not the time to panic about that. Even with my powers gone, Paul’s city murder spree had still been directed toward me. I was still the slayer, but maybe those golden flecks of light rising off of me hadn’t been a dream. Maybe it had been my cell, peeling my powers away like paint. No more strength or speed or healing. Without my powers, I was beyond screwed.
I gave myself permission to panic later.
“How are you not dead yet?” Ronick released the door, and it opened, mocking him so much better than I ever could.
But I would sure as hell try. “And here I thought you were a big, bad vampire. If I find this Jacek character for you, you sure you have it in you to kill him?”
“Mm.” He backed off down the stairs and came back a second later with a large rock that he wedged at the base of the door to keep it closed. “Thoroughly but slowly.”
My stomach spun at the thought. So it was going to be torture, even after all that Jacek had already endured.
I followed Ronick down the stairs, thinking about all the ways I could kill him, when the door burst open behind me. The rock skipped past my feet and came to rest between Ronick’s black boots at the bottom.
His eyes snapped to mine. “Magic must be keeping it open.”
“Then the whole town can come right in,” I hissed.
The voices outside pressed closer, enough that I could hear individual words.Tear. Belle. Kill. Pieces.
Tension bunched my muscles. I might have to kill them in self-defense.
“Maybe they won’t come in if they can’t see us.” Ronick crossed the stone floor to where the coffin rested in its original spot. The last time I’d been in here, it had been halfway up the stairs. With barely any effort, he tore the lid off of it and nodded toward it. “Get in.”
I’d already been inside it once with Mr. Appelt. We’d shared a special moment just before I’d flung myself out the stained-glass window his wife had made.
“What about you? It’s almost sunrise.” I had no idea if I was right, but I couldn’t let him die yet, not without transferring the power inside Night’s Fall to me, or let him out of my sight to go find Jacek. Ronick had seemed much too interested in the police department. Uncomfortably interested.
