boost,’ Selena said without even looking in Evie’s direction.
Evie swore under her breath, glancing back at RJ who was still standing on the sidewalk looking terrified. The wailing rise and fall of sirens could be heard in the distance.
‘If you don’t, we’re gonna get arrested,’ Selena taunted, dangling her gun in Evie’s face.
Evie frowned at the weapon. Victor had armed them with guns? Oh, dear god. She glanced once more over her shoulder. RJ was now jogging towards them. The sirens were getting closer, and Selena was right. The police would take one look at the three of them and pull them over for questioning, and then they’d find the guns and Evie would be screwed.
Swearing some more, she put her hands together and boosted Selena up and over the wall. Then she pushed RJ to the ground and stood on his knee to pull herself up and over.
‘Hide in those bushes,’ she hissed down to RJ, pointing to some rhododendron bushes further down the street, ‘and if you see an unhuman, run and don’t look back.’
RJ nodded, looking only too pleased to obey.
Evie dropped to a crouch on the other side of the wall beside Selena. They were in the grounds of some mega-mansion that seemed abandoned judging by the toppled garden furniture, overgrown grass and dirty windows. Could be the recession had forced the owners into foreclosure. Could be they’d been eaten. She didn’t want to think about it.
‘Stay behind me,’ she ordered Selena as they began skirting the perimeter wall. Her pulse was racing, every sound amplified, including her own breathing. She felt dizzy and nauseous. The fresh injection of adrenaline pounding through her bloodstream was making her body shake.
There were unhumans – lots of them – close by. She could feel them. That’s what her body was reacting to.
She wiped the sweat from her palms as she ducked through undergrowth and came up on the side wall that divided the property from the house where the Originals were hiding out. Footprints in the soil showed her where Cyrus and Flic had stopped to climb the wall.
Selena took hold of a thick low-hanging branch and hoisted herself up into a tree that brushed against the wall. Evie followed behind, not wanting Selena to get too far ahead. She was just swinging her way onto a second, higher branch when she heard Selena draw in a breath and gasp ‘Carajo!’
Chapter 35
White noise roared in Lucas’s ears. Static shocks needled his skin. He swayed on the edge of the gateway beneath a shower of light. One step was all it had taken to walk from one realm into the next but it felt like he’d just taken a plunge off a thousand-foot cliff.
He blinked, squinting against the light, registering two things simultaneously: that he was standing in a garden and that a wolf was baring its teeth not fifty metres away from where he stood.
Behind the wolf he saw Flic, blade out, in a fighting stance. The wolf was Jamieson, no doubt about it. He was slunk low to the ground in a defensive posture, ears flat to his head and teeth bared, growling at three figures standing unmoving as statues before them. They had their backs to him, but Lucas knew what they were.
From behind they looked like humans. Two men and a girl. All tall, powerfully built, wearing clothes that wouldn’t have been out of place on any street in LA – the girl in a pair of cut-off denim shorts and a cropped T-shirt, the one on her left wearing jeans and a shirt, and the one on her right looking only slightly strange in a suit. The three of them were unnaturally still, not even the breeze seemed to ruffle a hair on their heads. They seemed to be waiting for some kind of signal to move.
Lucas took a silent step forward. Flic hadn’t seen him. Her focus was locked on the Originals, her hand shaking slightly as she readied her blade and raised it to chest height. Lucas could see the fierce determination on her face barely masking the fear. He forced himself to bite his tongue, keep quiet, when all he wanted to do was yell at her to get the hell out of there. What was she thinking trying to fight these things? He felt suddenly furious at her for being there. For putting herself in so much danger.
Just then the girl in the shorts – the Original in the shorts –