James had maneuvered the yacht as near the rocky cliff face as possible, but he couldn’t get it any closer than twenty-five feet from the shore. The water was too shallow, the rocks too dangerous. Then he’d filled the attached dinghy with every blanket he could find on board and rowed to shore, leaving Lucy aboard the yacht to keep a lookout.
It was still daylight. This was a dangerous mission, moving the undead beneath the blazing sun. But none of them dared wait. If the police arrived…if they found the vampires—or her, Lucy realized—it would be over.
Lucy gave her head a shake in an effort to free it of such dire thoughts and gazed up the shoreline toward the sandy beach beyond. She couldn’t see the smoldering wet remains of Will and Sarafina’s beautiful home from here, and that was just as well.
A few yards away, in the mouth of that hidden passage, James and Will carefully wrapped each of the bodies—and that was what the sleeping vampires were, really. Just bodies. Dead weight. Conscious of utterly nothing. Defenseless. And Lucy couldn’t help but wonder, as she watched the men load the first three mummylike bundles into the dinghy, what the other vampires in the world were doing to stay alive. With humans trying to burn them while they slept, how could they protect themselves by day? Not all of them had a mortal lover like Will, or mixed-blood relations like Brigit and James.
And where the hell was Brigit, anyway?
Lucy lowered her eyes and realized that she was genuinely worried about the hot-tempered but courageous blonde. And about the vampires she hadn’t even met. She was beginning to care about these people. And it surprised her. And yet, at the same time, it didn’t. She’d always been one to root for the underdog; she just never would have imagined she would see a group of powerful immortals with supercharged strength and speed, and enhanced senses and telepathic abilities, as the underdog in a war with humans.
She should have. Humans were by far the most dangerous creatures Planet Earth had ever evolved.
James rowed the dinghy closer to the yacht. It rocked precariously on the waves as he anchored the first bundled body over one shoulder, holding it there as best he could while climbing a rope ladder up to the deck. Lucy leaned over to try to help him, holding the ladder as steady as she could. As he came level with the rail, he eased the body off his back and it fell heavily onto the deck.
Lucy jumped, emitting a squeak of alarm, and quickly bent to tighten a loose fold in the blanket. “Try not to break their skulls,” she told him.
“They can’t feel a thing,” he reminded her.
“But when they wake—”
“The day sleep heals and regenerates. Any injuries they receive by night are completely mended while they rest, so long as they make it past sunrise alive. An injury received during the day sleep would heal instantly. As long as it wasn’t fatal.”
“Like the fire would have been.”
He nodded. “Now you’re getting it.” Then he vanished back down the ladder. Lucy gripped the body and dragged it across the deck to the open hatch that led below, and then down the steps, wincing every time the legs and feet banged a stair, and they banged every one of them, all the way down.
Before long all three women, Rhiannon, Sarafina and Shannon, were loaded onto the yacht and tucked away in the cabins below, where they would be safe. When that was done, James went back for the men, Roland and Gilgamesh, and also Will, who was waiting in the tunnel with them.
In a few minutes Will came up the ladder with one body, James with the other. And then James climbed back down the rope ladder one last time to retrieve a final body. Pandora.
The cat was limp, lifeless, as James laid her body on the deck of the boat.
“Oh, no. Oh, no no no,” Lucy said. She knelt beside the cat, stroking her silken, blue-black fur, but feeling by the coolness of her body that there was no life left in the animal.
Lifting her head, she met James’s eyes. And then suddenly, she realized… “James? Can you…?”
He was kneeling opposite her before she finished the question, placing his palms on the innocent animal, closing his eyes. Lucy sat there, keeping her own hands on the cat, as well, and in