from Royce was his primary goal. Once he was on the West Coast again he could focus on getting the collar off and figuring out how to return to the pack.
As the sun blazed toward noon, he headed south for one more block before turning at the corner and running west.
* * *
Christoph got up after a while and wandered downstairs, yawning and scratching. He went into Mouse’s apartment and found Analie blearily eating cornflakes in the kitchen. Wordlessly, he joined her and they sat in amiable silence that was broken only by the crunching of cereal.
“I think Ashi escaped,” Christoph commented.
Analie choked on her cornflakes and spent the next minute coughing. When she could speak again, she gasped, “Are you kidding me? How’d he get out?”
“I don’t know. But I haven’t seen him since he said he was leaving early this morning.”
Analie wiped the bits of cornflake she’d coughed up off the table. “Where’s he gonna go? It’s not like the pack will welcome him with open arms.”
Christoph shrugged, making a little whirlpool with his spoon for the last cornflake in his bowl. “He wanted me to go, but I refused.”
“Wow. You think Royce is going to care?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Think Gregory is going to care?”
“Oh, definitely.”
While they were discussing the probable outcome of the day’s events, Mouse came stumbling wearily back into the apartment from the impromptu meeting. She was dead-tired (pun intended) and didn’t seem to notice or care that Christoph was in the kitchen, tromping into her bedroom to get some uninterrupted rest for what remained of the day.
* * *
Ashi remembered taking a taxi over one of the bridges, but—damn. He’d forgotten just how big the river was. There wasn’t anything like this in Los Angeles.
After asking a hotdog vendor where the nearest bridge was (earning a few odd looks for his clothes and his ignorance about the subway system), he started jogging north again. He was making piss-poor time now. It was taking him way too long to get off this God-damned island. He needed to move faster. He started pushing himself harder, a bad move for someone trying to run the most epic marathon of their lifetime.
Christoph could have told him that jogging the entire time would have gotten him farther, but he was in his bed reading one of Freddy’s Shifter Quarterly magazines.
He could have told him that stopping to rest was an exceedingly bad idea and that moving at a slower jog or a fast walk was the better option.
And so, when Ashi finally did make it to one of the bridges, he realized that it was late afternoon and that the shadows were rather long. He wasn’t even that far from the apartment building. He looked back the way he’d come, paused for a few minutes, and started running back.
With luck he could make it before it got dark, before something started hunting him.
* * *
Reece was extremely unhappy about having to work before work. Worse yet, with Angus, the great lummox, who seemed to enjoy the fact that he was waking Reece for the second time today while daylight still shone.
“Up an’ at ‘em, laddie!” he bellowed, startling Reece into sliding right off his silk sheets and onto the floor. A couple other vampires shouted epithets and orders through the wall to pipe down. Ken just pulled a pillow over his head and burrowed deeper into the covers, ignoring them both.
Reece glared at the grinning highlander, whose beard bristled about his face like a wiry mane.
“Daylight’s wastin’. Ye need tae know how tae hunt proper-like before we go.”
“For God’s sake,” Reece snarled, “you could have let me sleep in until sunset!”
“Nae, boy, ye donnae know how tae hunt. Ye know how tae seduce, how tae mince abou’ like the great poofter ye are, but ye donnae know how tae hunt.”
“Nice, Angus. Real tolerant of you. Very progressive."
“Alec wants ye tae bring the boy in, with me supervising, so ye best do it right.”
* * *
'Crap-crap-crap-crap-crap-crap!'
Ashi ran as fast as he could, his legs feeling like blocks of wood. His lungs must have been partially solidified and his heart felt like it was jumping around his chest like a caged chimp. He had to stop a couple times, gasping for breath, which caused his legs to seize up. He couldn’t get back fast enough. He had no money for a bus or a cab and no way of resting long enough to get a second wind.
Christoph, unfortunately, had been right