Somehow, amidst the total collapse of his mental and emotional state, Andres had managed to contact Wesley and Vincent and warn them of Maul’s treachery. Then he’d collected Shane’s insulin in a little freezer bag, and fed his cat, and stood in his apartment like a goldfish out of water, his tears slipping into his mouth for what felt like the hundredth time that night. He barely noticed them anymore.
Do something.
He had to do something.
But what.
He didn’t know anyone but Natalie who he could trust to help him in this, and if he had to share all the details with her—no, that wasn’t even a question. It would be worth a stake through the heart, so long as she helped rescue Shane first. Hands shaking, Andres made a list of all the places he could possibly think for Maul to go: van lots and storage centers and their range of trading locations. He sent it to Natalie with as vague an explanation as he could, saying merely that someone who didn’t want Shane’s article to come out had taken him and there might be vampires involved.
She didn’t ask questions, except which places he’d be hitting first, and quickly divvied up the rest by who was closest.
Hell Creature Extraordinaire
I’ll bring you some of my holy silver. I have a couple pistols too, if you’re comfortable.
Cat Mom
No worries, I’ve got my own stuff.
But thanks.
He bared his fangs in the mirror on his way out.
After a quick stop at his place for the less tooth-based weapons he occasionally brought on more dangerous heists, he systematically set himself to flying through his list. The night wore on. All he could taste was salt—salt that seemed to come from nowhere, because he absolutely refused to think of all the things Maul could be doing to Shane. All the ways he might already have been hurt, or worse.
You’ll know in the morning, had been Maul’s only text.
Andres almost missed the sun’s rising entirely, its first direct rays across his face catching him off guard. It chilled him to the bone. He was down to the second-to-last location on his list, near the north-west outskirts of the city, just finishing another pointless check in with Natalie, when the text finally came through.
Shane
If you want him, come get him.
It was followed by a map location, one that hadn’t been on Andres’s list in the first place. He felt so sick and hollow at the sight of it that he was certain his insides had turned to a black hole, the dread in his gut slowly consuming what little hope and strength remained. He forwarded the whole thing to Natalie, but based on her last check in, by the time she arrived he’d either have rescued Shane or died trying. With the sun streaming through his windshield as he pulled onto the street, he was sure it would eventually lead to the latter. But sun-poisoning hit slowly, and it had always come for him with pain more than shakes. If he was fast enough… if he could free Shane before his suffering truly set in…
The building was an old Spanish-style place on the last wide lot of the rundown residential neighborhood that clung to the edge of the warehouse district like it was dying from infection. It had fallen into the same disarray and ruin that tainted most of Maul’s properties, its foreclosure sign half buried in the dirt and weeds. A single decrepit tree loomed over the south side, leafless and melancholic.
It looked as ominous as it felt.
Andres abandoned his attempts at stealth, strolling through the open front door with all the confidence he’d learned to feign over the years. The burnt-orange ceramic tile cracked under his feet. No one emerged to stop him. He poked from one room to the next, but it took little searching to find the trap Maul had set for him: the building’s courtyard, Shane encaged in the middle.
His head lolled, his lashes fluttering, but he was clearly alive from the way the blood still dripped from the jagged bites that littered his arms, shoulders, and neck, painting streaks of red across his skin and smearing down the front of his torn white outfit. For all the adrenaline and rage that had already ripped through Andres in waves that night, all the terrible fates he’d expected to find his little swan trapped in, the sight still struck him like a physical blow.
“You’ll put your boyfriend in a cage,” Maul had said, “or I will put you in one instead.”
One of them was clearly meant to end up dead within those bars.
“Maul!” Andres shouted his boss’s name into the depths of the house with a growl so deep it rattled. “I know you’re here.”
Frederick Maul emerged in one of the open windows on the far side of the courtyard, his elbows on the ledge and his face in the shadows. Andres burned at the mere sight of him, his rage and terror coalescing into a painful fire.
“Lately,” Maul called, “when one of my subordinates grows too accustomed to pushing their luck with me, I give them fifteen minutes in the cage. Many of them even live through it. But your defiance is… peculiar. I thought this would be more fitting. Save yourself, or risk the sun to save your little pet. It’s your choice.” The satisfaction that dripped from his voice was a horrifying thing all on its own. He pulled away from the window with a final announcement. “The keys are in his lap.”
Maul had timed it too perfectly: the blood seeping down Shane’s skin in awful rivulets, his consciousness too far gone to even notice Andres’s approach. He might last another half hour. Or another ten minutes. Or maybe he’d die in the time it took Andres to gather his courage at the edge of the sunlight as his whole body screamed at him that this wasn’t his natural territory anymore.
Andres plunged forward.
It was so bright, beams of blazing sunshine streaming into him from the mirrors on all sides, but he kept his attention fixed on Shane. He could face whatever came after, so long as he knew his little swan was safe. The chains around the cage’s door were so thickly wound, the locks so many, that Andres had the impulse to rattle the thing first. But if other vampires hadn’t broken out that way, he wasn’t breaking in. Maul had designed this as a taunt and a game—one he’d bet on Andres nearly solving, pushing himself to his limit as each lock came away. Locks, like the very first one of Maul’s he’d broken, the night he’d been turned.
If he had the time, he’d have searched for a way around the obvious trap—kill Maul and whoever he’d surely brought to back him up, break the mirrors, return with a blanket and a pole to fish the keys from between Shane’s thighs. But those thighs were already spotted in the dribbles of red from his bleeding arms.
Andres had no time. He had one thing Maul wouldn’t expect, though. The sun-poisoning would make Andres suffer—kill him quick as any—but unlike most vampires, he wouldn’t shake uncontrollably while it ravaged him. At least, not at first.
He could feel the start of the pain as he slid the lightweight tools he carried on all his cons into the first lock, but it was still a subtle ache, a warning that he’d been in the sun too often since it rose. Whatever toxins were forming in his body now, those would need time to take effect. If his hands were sure enough, he could get Shane out before it fully consumed him.
The first chain fell with a rattle.
Shane blinked, his gaze drifting lazily before fixing on Andres.
“I’m here, my love,” Andres said, soft and sweet as anything he’d ever muttered in the dead of night, his arms wrapped around Shane’s sleeping body.
“No.” Shane’s voice was hoarse, and Andres could make out the raw edges of his mouth, the lines where too-tight fabric had rubbed against his cheeks. Amidst his rage, he barely recognized the word Shane spoke. “No,” he whispered again. “The light…”
“I know.” Andres kept working.
He didn’t think about the sun, or the way Shane’s blood kept spreading, seeping across his white fabric until the streams met and darkened, or the bob of his head as he slipped in and out of consciousness, occasional whispers that sounded like, “Leave.”
Andres was not leaving. He was doing his job, setting his love free one chain after the next, calmly dropping each to the ground until the final lock came away gracefully in his hands. He gritted through the pain that tore along his bones and the spears that had begun shooting through his muscles three or four locks ago, and swung open the cage gate as though its solid form wasn’t holding him up.
He was vaguely aware of Maul watching from the courtyard’s entrance, aware too that he wouldn’t be stepping aside to let them pass. But one way or another, Shane was getting out of here alive.
Andres nearly stumbled into him as he hastily knelt, one eye on the cage’s gate and one foot propping it open. Shane’s blood still pumped, sluggish in his veins. Andres licked what seemed to be the worst of his wounds, barely tasting his blood as he gave Shane the tiniest doses of venom, scared to push so far it might turn him instead of saving him. It was the little sounds that Shane made that wrenched Andres’s heart back open: not cries or moans but something in between, like his body was fighting to flee and his soul to stay.
“I’m here, my love.” In pain, and in pieces, but he was here.
He pulled Shane into his arms the moment he was free, lugging them both out of the cage. Beneath the plastered red, he could sense Shane’s smaller cuts still weeping, and he wrapped him up, kissing his wounds with each grueling step they took toward the shaded entrance. His body urged him to bite, as though it knew the hell that would come for him as the rest of the sun-poisoning set in, but he held back.
They made it halfway before Maul clapped. He stood at the edge of the shade, his fangs bared. “I see you’ve made your choice then.”
“I have,” Andres replied and drew his pistol.
As he aimed, the sun-pain flared through his arm, jerking his grip. Maul crashed into him. The weapon slipped from Andres’s grasp, and it was all he could do to let Shane go as he and Maul fell backward through the blinding courtyard in a tussle of limbs and fangs. They punched and clawed, hissing like feral animals, and for the first instant of adrenaline, Andres thrilled at his own strength compared to Maul’s. Then the aching of his body set back in.
Maul shoved him at the cage, one hand buried in the torn sheer fabric of Andres’s shirt. Andres didn’t react with the fear of being grabbed—he was fear already, fear and rage and fermented pain. As Maul threw him past the gate of the cage, Andres wrestled for the chair they’d tied Shane to, swinging it back before Maul could lock him in. It split over Maul’s head and shoulders, wood coming apart in pieces.
Maul snarled. A streak of thick, dark vampire blood oozed down the side of his forehead, but when he grabbed for Andres again, he seemed stronger than ever. He shoved Andres against the front of the cage, his teeth bared, a fresh light in his eyes. “I never sank my fangs into you myself. Maybe that was my mistake.”
Andres flinched from the spittle that flew with his words, struggling against his grip, but his former boss felt unmovable now, Andres’s limbs all but numb from overuse and pain. The brilliant sunlight gleamed off Maul’s fangs as he bared them, a bead of venom already dripping from the tips. For a human, the toxin was made to calm and gratify, but plunged into another vampire…
The horror of it caught Andres in the chest, strung together from the rumors and legends. What was real and what was myth, he didn’t know. But Maul must have. And Maul was going to bite him; invade him the way he’d ordered his goons to so many years ago, a punishment and a subjugation and a death sentence.
Andres gave one last panicked thrash, but the fear could no longer drive his muscles the way it had moments before. Maul rammed him a final time against the cage. Andres was flooded by memories he thought he’d lost—teeth burying into his skin, hands gripping his shirt and hair, a palm over his mouth, the life slowly draining out of him, his whole world turning to days of misery as his body rewrote itself into something new.
Two sharp points touched his neck, bringing a hint of pain.
And then it was gone.
Maul slumped slowly against him, fangs retracted and a look of horror on his face. From the center of his chest poked the tip of something wooden, black blood spreading around it. A stake.
Shane’s shoulders heaved, and he stumbled, dropping the other end of the chair’s broken arm where he’d plunged it through Maul’s back. Andres let the dead vampire fall to the side and staggered to catch Shane—to catch them both on each other’s bodies, holding each other up with sheer force of will.
“Pet,” Andres murmured, and what he meant was Ilove you.
Shane managed the weakest of smiles, but to Andres it was so bright that it almost cast the searing ache now taking over his body in shadow. “We’re going home, love.”
But as they trekked back across the courtyard, Andres could hear Maul’s subordinates circling through the house with shouts and hisses. Shane picked up Andres’s fallen pistol, and Andres let him have it—he couldn’t hold the weapon and support them both at the same time.
As they stepped into the shade, his Cygnus—angry and red and littered with their half-closed bite marks—aimed the weapon with steady hands at the first of the vampires who emerged, but another appeared to their right, and then to their left, fangs bared like they would kill for another bite, perhaps for loyalty to the corpse cooling in the courtyard but more likely because they believed Andres, as his right hand, was the only thing standing between them and taking Maul’s place at the top of the blood trade. They weren’t entirely wrong in that either.
Andres repositioned his hold on Shane.
Maul’s successors lunged toward them only to stumble, cowering. Andres felt the force that had slammed into them moments after, the sharp sun-like searing of holy silver intersecting with his already building agony. He slumped against Shane to keep from crumpling to the floor as Natalie stepped through the door to the building’s front room. She held a pistol in one hand, and a long baton of holy silver in the other, wielding it like a torch against the night.
As her eyes adjusted to the room, her gaze locked on Andres. He could see her taking him in, like each millisecond was a millennium, her focus jumping from his fangs to his poisoned body, his skin already sweltering red in the presence of that much holy silver. The hurt and fury that followed wasn’t unexpected, but that didn’t make it any less agonizing. She aimed her pistol at him.
“Hellbeast.” Andres murmured the words, affectionate even now.
“Vampire,” she stated back.
And he felt his heart seize as she pulled the trigger.