gets stuck. I keep seeing that growing red stain over his head,
the locks of dark hair peeking out from the top of the sheet.
Dammit, go!
I shove his shoulders, scooting him
out little by little. Dear God, what if we have to cut him up? I left my
bone saw in my other nurse’s costume. That joke isn’t even funny. I’ve seen a
lot of gruesomeness in the past year, but I’m not sure I could handle hacking
off limbs and spilling out intestines. With one final, brutal shove, the
vampire clears the window and drops like a stone. I almost feel bad for the
police who are going to have to investigate this crazy mess of a crime scene.
In one smooth motion, I grasp the window’s
edge and slide my body through the narrow opening. I let go of the ledge and
drop two stories into the bushes below. My landing is soft, but the impact jars
my elbow and the other sore places where I took a beating curtesy of Tucker’s
telekinesis. I’ll see what pretty bruise art I have as soon as we get clear of
this place.
Just as I pull my soggy vampire
from a flattened bush, the jeep pulls up, headlights off. Gabe jumps out and
opens the back. He grabs Tucker.
“Screen was still in the window,” Gabe
says to me as if I hadn’t noticed that one part of our trio is conspicuously
absent. The bodies land heavily in the back, wump, wump, one after the
other.
“Maybe Tarren took another way
out,” I say without conviction.
“He never deviates unless there’s a
problem,” Gabe says. He unmutes his phone. “Batman, check, nurse check. Wings
are clipped. Cargo loaded. What’s your status, Sheriff?”
We wait for Tarren’s check-in.
Nothing.
“If he doesn’t check in, he’d want
us to wait ten minutes and then go,” I say with no conviction. Gabe and I look
at each other. We are of one mind.
“You climb back up through the
window,” Gabe says. “I’ll get back in through the front and meet you upstairs.”
Just as I nod, something hurdles
out of the window and lands with a SMACK on the ground. Tarren! My
heart nearly explodes. I stumble forward, staring at the unmoving object.
“Watch out, another one coming,”
Gabe says, touching my arm. His aura stings, snapping me through the cloud of
my fear just as another dark shape plummets to the ground. I look up at the
window just as two boots slide out, followed by legs and Tarren’s big body. It’s
amazing he can even squeeze his wide shoulders through that tiny opening. He
drops hard and rolls, his hat speeding away from him. When he stands up, Tarren
favors an ankle. A single trickle of sweat rolls down his temple.
“Everything okay?”
I pick up his hat and hand it to him.
“Are you injured?” Tarren’s eyes are planted on the bloody smears on my costume
as he takes his hat.
“It wasn’t pretty, but I got it
done.” I lean down and pick up one of the sheet-wrapped bodies.
Tarren bends to collect the other
body, but Gabe steps up, blocking him. “Next time, check in,” he says. His gaze
holds Tarren, and all of Gabe’s smiles and jokes are buried beneath the red
fear that streaks through his aura.
Tarren nods, and I wonder as I so
often do how the one could possibly survive if the other were lost. I got a
glimpse of that chaotic ruin last year when Gabe almost died…because of what I
did…what I became. I push those thoughts away. The mission isn’t over yet.
“We need to go,” Tarren says, and
Gabe moves out of his way. Tarren and I drop the final two bodies into the back
of the jeep. His aura hugs low to his body, almost as gray as his eyes. Craptastic. His eyes only shift from blue to gray when he’s angry. Is he still mad
about the fact that I didn’t have a tranq gun, or is this entire mission just
giving him the heebie jeebies, like me? He’s holding his aura down with all the
control he possesses, and I can’t read anything off it.
Tarren closes the back door on our
silent cargo. I let out my breath, feeling like I was just released from