SOMEONE KNOCKED ON HER door and Amber woke immediately and went to spring out of bed. As she was moving, she realised two things. The first was that she had shifted during the night and was now in full demon mode. The second was that she was about to put her full weight on to her left hand, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
The pain hit her like an electric shock. She pulled her hands into her chest, rolled off the bed, and landed on her feet in a crouch, gritting her teeth to keep from crying out.
That knock again. It was calm. Unhurried. No urgency to it.
Amber waited for the worst of the pain to pass, then straightened, and moved slowly to the door. “Who is it?” she called.
“Me,” said Milo.
“Anyone else with you?”
“No.”
She gripped the key between her palms and turned it, and the lock clicked and she stepped back as Milo opened the door.
He saw the look on her face and frowned. “Hurting?”
“A little. I’ll take the painkillers.”
“You shift when you were sleeping?”
“Yeah. You?”
He nodded. He was clean-shaven and his eyes were calm – the benefits of a good night’s rest. “I’m going to head out to the edge of town,” he said, “keep watch for the Hounds.”
“Let me get dressed.”
“No need. I’m just going to be sitting there. You take a look around, see what’s what. If we can hide out here, it’d be nice to know what the town has to offer.”
Amber frowned. “You mean … we’re going to be apart? During the daytime?”
“Is that okay with you?”
“Sure. It’s just … I haven’t been alone in the daytime for … a while.”
“You’ll adjust.”
“What do I do?”
“Whatever you want. Go for a walk. Have some breakfast. Relax. It’ll come back to you. Oh, and …” He pointed to her face.
“What?”
“You can’t go out horned up.”
“Oh yeah. Sure.”
He nodded, and walked off, and Amber closed the door behind him and locked it again. Then she looked around and wondered what the hell she was going to do.
She swallowed some painkillers and brushed her teeth and peed, and as she was peeing she looked at the tub and tried to remember the last time she’d had a real bath. She filled the tub and added in all kinds of crazy liquids until the bubbles nearly spilled out on to the floor. Then she took off her clothes and climbed in, one long red leg at a time. Bracing her bandaged palms on the tub’s edge, she lowered herself into the water, gasping, until her ass touched the bottom. She laughed, then, and sank further, until the hot water was up to her chin.
“Oh, this is nice,” she muttered to the room.
She closed her eyes, breathing in the steam, letting it clear her head of any residual sleepiness. It had been so long since she’d been able to relax, to think of anything other than the chase. Even now, there was a part of her that was still on edge – but it was a small part, and she could have easily drowned it out if she’d been so inclined.
But of course she didn’t. Just because Gregory Buxton had vanished from the Hounds’ radar when he was in this town didn’t mean she would, too. And even if she did, so what? The Hounds would still be able to ride on in here and search. They didn’t need supernatural powers to find her – they just needed eyes.
So she kept that edge, the part of herself that remained wary, and she let it bite at her thoughts and burrow into her head. That edge had helped keep her alive after Imelda had died. After Glen. After her parents.
She wondered about them, where they were, what they were doing. How they were doing. She felt a curious mix of satisfaction that she’d fouled up her parents’ plans, that she’d forced them to go on the run with Grant and Kirsty Van der Valk, that Astaroth was almost as pissed with them as he was with her … but also concern. That part puzzled Amber. She didn’t care about them. They had bred her to be killed and eaten, just like they had her brother and sister whom she had never known. She was not concerned for their well-being.
She was definitely, definitely not. She was almost sure of that.
Thoughts of her parents irritated her, but there was only one other person she could think about that would banish them to the back of her mind, and that was Glen. She only thought about him when she was in demon form. Her heart was harder when she was like this, better able to cope with what had happened to him. With who he was now. What he’d turned into.
She’d been aware of him following her. Some nights she’d look in the side mirror and glimpse something moving behind them. Some nights, when the Charger was quiet, she could hear him above her, his clothes fluttering in the wind.
Why he was following her, she didn’t know. She’d been told that most breeds of vampire were pack animals – they stuck close to the one who’d turned them. But the vampire that had killed Glen had vanished, and his undead family back in Cascade Falls were in disarray – certainly the patriarch was no longer around to guide them. Amber had seen to that personally.
That might be it, of course. Glen could be following her to kill her, to exact revenge for Varga’s death. She doubted it, though. Revenge didn’t seem to be Glen’s style, soulless monster or not. No, what was infinitely more likely was that Glen’s preoccupation with Amber – especially in her current form – had stayed with him even after his death. Maybe it was the one thing he was clinging on to. Maybe he had designs on a coffin built for two.
Amber closed her eyes and held her breath, and submerged so that only her knees and her hands and her horns were above the water line. Down here, in the muted world of the bathtub, she opened her eyes again and looked at herself. She couldn’t blame Glen for his preoccupations, of course. Was she not as magnificent as everyone said? Was her figure not astonishing? Were her features not flawless?
She loved being this way. She loved being tall and red and horned and beautiful. She loved being sexy. She’d never been sexy, not as an ordinary human. Sexiness was for other girls, not for her. Never for her.
She broke the surface of the water, and smiled.
Until now.
After her bath, Amber went for a walk. The people seemed friendly enough, even if she did catch them staring at her from time to time. On three occasions she actually glanced at her bandaged hands to make sure she wasn’t in demon mode, then she put it down to the fact that visitors were probably a rarity around here.
It was a pretty town, surrounded as it was by trees and snow-covered mountains and looking up into a huge blazingly blue
