Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,13
the face.
There was laughing outside the window. Goddamned vampire reflexes. “This is the chick everyone’s afraid of?” said the same voice. He came strolling around the front of the car, as if baiting me to shoot again. I waited.
“She’s not so tough,” agreed the other, a woman this time. She had been behind him, and was now standing by my window. The man continued walking his lazy circle around the Jeep, while the woman hovered next to my window. If Quinn was right, there was a third vampire in the darkness somewhere.
They were surrounding us.
I glanced at Quinn, who raised an eyebrow, asking what I wanted to do. He was the investigator, but I was the soldier. He’d defer to me in this situation, but the problem was that all our options were shitty. If we went out, we’d have to climb awkwardly out of the flipped Jeep. Quinn could do it fast enough to attack, but it would take me a few seconds, and he couldn’t keep all three of them off me while we were cornered like this. Even if they did let me climb out safely, there wasn’t a lot I could do with my magic other than press them, and I couldn’t do that without being able to clearly see their eyes.
The woman leaned down to the hole in the bulletproof glass and took a big whiff through her nose. I’d once seen Quinn do something similar. “I can smell your fear, darlin’. And the death in your blood. Mmmm.”
I raised the sidearm and shot for the same hole in the window, just on general principle, but she danced back, laughing. “Why don’t you come out and play with us?” she called out.
Then it hit me—why hadn’t they already killed us? They could have kicked in the Jeep’s windows and dragged us out by now, or hell, just tossed in a Molotov cocktail and called it a day. But they were keeping their distance. I looked at Quinn again. I could tell he was thinking the same thing, but he seemed as puzzled as I was.
“We’re pretty comfortable right here,” I yelled.
“Oh, we don’t care about your boyfriend,” the woman said through the hole. “We just want you. But if you don’t come out, we’ll have to come in, and then we won’t be nearly so nice to Mr. Quinn.”
Shit. Quinn read my thoughts and shook his head violently. When I shifted my weight, he actually grabbed my arm. “Don’t you dare,” he whispered.
Behind him, the male vampire started to kick the safety glass of the driver’s side window. He was deliberately slow about it, but he’d still get through the glass in a few seconds. There was no time. I leaned forward and kissed Quinn, taking the hand he’d laid on my elbow and moving it down to my forearm, so he could feel what was under the jacket sleeve. “Take the third,” I breathed, hoping the shattering glass would hide the sound.
Quinn’s face was tight, but he nodded, trusting me.
Big hands were reaching into the Jeep, swiping toward Quinn in a blur. “Okay!” I shouted. “Leave him alone, I’m coming out!”
The hands receded. “Throw that pistol out first, darlin’,” drawled the woman near my window. “We don’t want any accidents.”
Damn. There went Plan A. I ejected the clip and tossed the sidearm out the open window, hearing it clatter away. “That’s a good girl,” she purred.
Anger flared inside my head, but I was focused now. I put the clip in my jacket pocket just in case. Then I climbed over Quinn and started to crawl through the open window.
The male vampire was leaning against the Jeep, smirking. I made a show of scraping my back on the window, wincing. I reached up my right hand. “A little help?”
He hesitated for a second, but then gave a tiny shrug. There were three of them, and to him I was one little human. He reached down and took my right hand with his left.
God, I love being left-handed.
I popped up as fast as I’d ever moved in my life, swinging the shredder around to plunge it into his chest. And left it there.
Shredders are spelled to destroy whatever they touch when they’re at rest, basically causing a mini-implosion. The idea is to get to the vampire’s heart, but I hadn’t had the leverage to get it all the way through his breastbone. So instead it destroyed his breastbone. And probably some of the tissue around it.