to unlock your cuffs before I knew you didn’t need a key to get free should win me some brownie points with you, no?” Approaching vamps or not, I was unable to hold back my next words. “Just how did you release yourself?”
He stared at me a moment longer and then lowered the stake with a quick, smooth movement, as if he’d come to a decision he wasn’t thrilled about. “This fell out of your hair while you were giving me a free lap dance.” I recognized the small object he tossed aside as one of the bobby pins that had held my now ruined chignon. “And this fell out of the heel of my workboot,” he added without cracking a smile. One-handedly, he closed the gleaming steel of a switchblade and shoved it into his jeans’ pocket. “I used it to cut the ropes around my ankles. Catch.”
He tossed Megan’s loaner stake to me as carelessly as he’d thrown down the bobby pin. I grabbed at it but missed, although that turned out to be a good thing because as I bent to retrieve it I saw one of my Manolos under the MINI. I slipped it on, spied the other lying on its side a few feet away, and speed-hobbled toward it.
I can hear some of you now—God, girl, why waste time over shoes, even if they are Manolos? All I can tell you is that as soon as my heels were elevated to their accustomed four inches above the ground I felt like Wonder Woman with her bulletproof bracelets on. I was even able to face the approaching vamps with something like resigned bravado.
My surface calm vanished as Rawls took his place at my side, cradling the nail gun like an M-16. Before I could ask him what the merde he thought he was doing, he aimed it at the ground.
Thunk-whap!
“It’s not broken,” I said unnecessarily.
“These things are built tough,” he said without looking at me. “I’ll take out the brunette and the blonde, you concentrate on the redhead.”
I hadn’t disabled his weapon. He’d managed to pick the lock of the cuffs I’d secured him with and access a wicked-looking switchblade I hadn’t even known about. Under the circumstances, the three vamps whose unexpected fly-in had interrupted Rawls’s and my personal tussle might be the nearest thing I had to Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers.
If Flora, Fauna and Merry weather had recently had an extreme makeover and now looked like Linda, Claudia and Naomi, that is.
All three were clad in leather. The redhead in the middle wore a bondage-tight pink leather catsuit with pink Christian Louboutin stilettos. The brunette had the whole decadent-schoolgirl thing going on, complete with teensy black leather kilt and thigh-high black stockings. But it was the blonde’s outfit I immediately coveted. Her white leather dress was deliciously do-me, plunging outrageously in front to show off her creamy cleavage, and diamond-encrusted spaghetti straps glittered over the milky skin of her shoulders.
I was suddenly all too aware that my own look was less do-me than been-done, consisting as it did of blood-flecked undies, rat’s-nest hair and a recently nailed right hand. With the I-don’t-get-out-of-bed-for-less-than-$10,000-a-day arrogance of supermodels, the three of them came to a dead stop ten feet in front of Rawls and me just as Rawls aimed his nail gun at the blonde and pulled the trigger.
She shimmered sideways. That’s what it looked like, anyway—as if her image faded and then took form again a few inches to the left of where she’d been. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a vampire move so fast that she seemed to blur, and I knew it was a bad sign. That ability only came with practice or by being turned by a powerful vampyr, and it meant Claudia and her girlfriends weren’t going to be easy to dust.
“You missed, Chack.” Her purr was thickly Teutonic. “You are losing your touch, nein?”
“Either that or we caught him at a bad time,” the stunning redhead beside her said, flaring perfect nostrils. “Who’s your Frederick’s of Hollywood hottie, Jack?”
“Who bloody cares?” The English-accented brunette curled her top lip, her canines dazzlingly white against flawless mocha skin. “Let’s fucking rip them apart and get this over—”
A stuttering stream of nails flew from Rawls’s weapon, cross-stitching its deadly way across the three vamps at chest height—or at what would have been chest height if they’d still been standing in front of us. But they’d levitated upward before the first silver missile could reach them, and as I jerked my gaze up I got a momentary glimpse of their faces, no longer supermodel-perfect, but ugly with fury.
Although Rawls hadn’t seemed to recognize them, from their expressions they obviously knew and hated him. I felt justified in taking that as a second bad sign.
They swooped down at the exact moment that the stuttering of the nail gun coughed and died. I saw Rawls trying to clear the jammed weapon before he was hidden from my view by three leather-clad bodies, and I stood there for a split second, paralysed with horror. Then I turned to run.
The memory of my turning from Rawls and the vamps swarming him has robbed me of more nights than I care to admit. All I can say in my own defence is that I only took two steps before I forced myself to turn back.
I saw leather and flying hair and yanked hard on a long black strand that whipped me across the face, pulling the Naomi clone off balance, but before I could shove my stake at her, the swatch of hair I was clutching parted from its owner. She glanced over her shoulder at me, her gaze a fiery red.
“Extensions, love,” she hissed malevolently. “When we’re finished with the fucking bounty hunter, I’ll strangle you with one of them.”
She turned her attention back to Rawls, who was on his knees now, the useless nail gun still in his hands. Bounty hunter? I thought, grabbing at the nearest piece of leather. It was pink and ended in a clawing hand that had just raked Rawls across his face. Blood dripped from the polished nails of the redhead as she whirled to face me.
“You picked the wrong man to go parking with tonight, honey,” she snarled. “Now you’re going to pay for it.”
Her words were a definite cue to use the stake I was holding. I began to drive it toward her with all my strength and then the very thing I’d feared might happen, did happen.
My grip suddenly went weak and my arm felt nerveless, the way it had once when I’d been partnered with Tashya at doubles tennis and she’d whacked my elbow with her racket. As I saw the redhead’s fangs rushing at me I tried desperately to hold onto the stake, but instead I watched it detach from my hand, falling end over end to the pavement in what seemed to be dreamy slow motion. It bounced once and came to rest by the toe of one of my Manolos.
Time stopped. Or maybe just my heart did. Then it started up again, and as I snapped my gaze to the two razorlike canines slicing toward my neck, my numb-with-terror brain came up with the three words that saved my life.
“Galliano for Dior?”
As abruptly as if she’d run into an invisible wall, the redhead halted. Her glance flicked from me to her outfit and back again. “You know your designers,” she said, surprise edging out the snarl in her tone.
“Oh, please, sweetie,” I demurred, “the man’s a master at cut and detail. He might as well scrawl his signature across everything he creates, no?”
I sounded calm. I even sounded languidly bored. Somewhere deep inside me the real Kat Crosse was gibbering with fear, but the primitive will to survive that exists in everyone
