crossed the driver. Disgust, maybe. “Only you could come up with such a ridiculous comparison. You. Human. Do you know how to use a jian?”
I shook my head. “I have never found any occasion.”
Eve spoke up. “Have you ever used a katana?”
I grimaced. “Only once. I found it too heavy to use one handed.”
“Van, will you lend her one of your swords?” asked Eve.
His lips thinned. “Do I have a choice?”
“Give her a good one,” said Ryder. “Or it’s your head on the line.”
Van’s lips curled in arrogance. “I do not possess second-rate blades.”
“Hear that?” asked Ryder with a smile and a pat on my hand. “He gets a hard on whenever he gets a new sword. It’s a little creepy.”
I was about to reply when my nose twitched.
“Stop the car.”
The car screeched to a sudden halt, almost propelling me headfirst into the back of Van’s seat.
Silence reigned in the car as everyone looked out their window at the large, imposing dark edifice that seemed, for all intents and purposes, abandoned.
Ryder took a deep breath. “Oh. Shit.”
“Where are we?”
Eve opened her door and stepped out slowly while Van did the same thing.
Ryder would have done the same had I not grabbed hold of his wrist.
“Where. Are. We.”
He swallowed audibly in the darkness.
“At the home of a friend.”
I didn’t understand. Not initially. “They’re holding Jason at a…friend’s?”
“Not just any home,” he said quietly, his eyes impossibly wide, impossibly bright, impossibly blue. “Fenrir. They’re holding the Sanguinate at Fenrir’s home.”
I still didn’t understand. “I don’t…”
“Don’t you?” he asked, voice harsh, low. “We do. Annabelle’s not the only one who’s betrayed us. Three against one, that’s possible. She’s vicious. But two against two?”
Noir and Vincent. Fenrir and Annabelle.
And Jason stood in between them all.
“Things are bad now, aren’t they?”
Ryder’s hand wrapped around mine and I welcomed the contact.
“You have no idea.”
He was right.
I didn’t.
But I would find out very soon.
Whether I wanted to or not.
19
I wanted my hwan-geom badly.
In actuality, I wanted a lot of things very badly. For example, a flashlight would have come in handy, but Ryder smacked my hand as I reached for a light switch out of habit.
“Are you insane?” he hissed as Van and Eve took point.
Eve held a pistol in both hands, the barrel pointed to the ground. She looked like she knew how to use it as did Van with the polished katana that he wielded in one hand.
Perhaps he wasn’t a vampire, but he was something else, something otherworldly, because that sword weighed twenty pounds, not something you could swing around with any sort of accuracy with one hand.
But he proved to be more than up to the task when he dispatched the two vampires standing sentinel at the double doors with the peeling paint.
“Don’t touch the damn lights,” said Ryder as he looked back at the secured doors, the handles jammed by a propped up chair. I had no idea how long they would stand in the face of a vampire’s wrath, but I hoped there would be enough noise to warn us in time. “Do you need everyone to know we’re here?”
“They probably already know we’re here,” hissed Eve. “It’s not like the car stopped in the middle of the street isn’t a dead giveaway.”
“Then I can turn on the lights?”
She gaped at me. “Are you fucking kidding me? Abso-fucking-lutely not!”
I sighed and wished I had my sword back as the unfamiliar hilt slipped in my sweaty palms. “Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking. Because it’s not like I’m the only human who can’t see a damn thing. Wait. I am.”
I was convinced.
Eve Faulkner, Vincent’s emissary, couldn’t possibly be a human. A human being couldn’t grab a running vampire around the neck and let their momentum carry their body completely around.
The separation of the vertebrae from the head was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat and even Ryder winced.
“I’m human,” she replied.
I felt a laugh tickling my throat. “And I’m a movie star. Try convincing someone else. I’m not buying it.”
Ryder grinned. “Looks like she’s got your number.”
“I keep telling you to shut up, Ryder, but you never listen,” she muttered and drew in a deep breath. “Let’s get your lover boy out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
The inside of Fenrir’s mansion seemed like a collection of movie sets from various historical films, replete with anachronisms such as an MP3 player lying atop a Queen Anne chair that looked like it still had