Archer's Lady: Bloodhounds, Book 3 (17 page)

But the refrain that pounded in time with his mount’s hooves, mocking his assurance as he urged the animal on, whispered his greatest fear.

Too late.

Doc’s home lay dark and silent. With a vampire at her back, Grace had dreaded walking into a house that smelled of sex, but she shouldn’t have worried. Her stomach knotted as the rank scent of death hit her, overpowering even with the cellar door shut.

He spoke, low and vicious, in her ear. “My friends didn’t fare so well during the new moon, either.”

Grace closed her eyes and tried to breathe shallowly through her mouth, for all the good it did. “Yes, he’s capable of incredible brutality.”

“Do you honestly think a few bruises compare?”

The vampire wouldn’t believe any hint of remorse or sympathy, so Grace gave him neither. “I wouldn’t know how to compare. I’ve never been torn apart by a bloodhound, and you’ve never been fucked by one for three days straight.”

He sighed deeply. “You’re beginning to bore me, love.”

Of course she was. He was as inscrutable as Doc’s journals, a vampire with inhuman reactions and monstrous desires, and she didn’t possess the key to the cipher that would unlock his secrets.

She could feel her control of the situation slipping through her fingers, but it didn’t panic her as much as it should have. By now she’d earned enough time for Diana and Archer to make it back to Crystal Springs. With two bloodhounds instead of the one the vampires expected, those monsters left behind would be dead before they realized their mistake.

The survivors in town would be safe. For once in her selfish, cowardly life, she’d done something truly courageous. Something to earn the respect they’d given her from the start.

And perhaps William wouldn’t kill her now, anyway. Not when he could wait and use her pain against Archer. The game was almost over. All she had to do was endure.

Turning, she lifted her chin and met his gaze. “So what would entertain you?”

He pointed her toward the cellar door and pushed her forward. “You said you could open it.”

“I’d wager she can’t.” One of the other vampires, a pale man with strikingly dark hair and eyes, spoke for the first time.

She didn’t want to, but she was losing control. No one stopped her as she crossed the room. The key from the front door turned in the lock, presumably unraveling that magic she couldn’t feel. The knob turned smoothly, and the door creaked as she pulled it open.

The smell was a thousand times worse from the top of the stairs. For a moment she thought her stomach would rebel, but she took a hasty step back and prayed William wouldn’t force her down those steps.

Endure. All you have to do is endure.

William kept his hand firmly between her shoulder blades, but he didn’t urge her into the cellar. “Do you know what the old man had? What he hid down there?” he asked in a whisper. “We found a vial on an outcast out of Eternity.”

They’d barely decoded enough of the journals for Archer to be sure of much beyond the fact that the man had been obsessed with Diana’s creation and the differences in her blood. “I couldn’t begin to guess.”

“A powder.” William slid his hand up into her hair and clenched his fingers tight enough to make her eyes water. “A substitute for blood.”

With his mouth so close to her throat she almost didn’t want to ask the question, but she had to know. “Why would you need such a thing?”

“Besides the convenience of it? They say the dust changes a vampire’s blood chemistry.” He pulled her hair harder, tilting her head to the side. “Makes them more human.”

Was that his secret desire? Grace stared at the wall and fought the animal urge to struggle, to escape the fangs she could already feel, though they had yet to touch her. Fear sped her pulse, turned her breathing ragged, and every breath dragged the scent of decaying flesh into her lungs.

Ghouls. Hell, William might not kill her before Archer arrived, but he could drink enough to bind her. He could turn
her
into a ghoul, a puppet bound to his will, her own mind shredded beyond repair.

The thought made her whimper.

His fangs grazed her skin.

“There were vials in the basement,” she gasped, trying to twist away. “On the shelves and tables. Dozens of them.”

William laughed and shoved her so hard she almost stumbled off the top step. “If you didn’t see the carnage your hound wreaked, what were you doing in the cellar?”

A novice mistake. Grace caught her balance with one hand on the doorframe and turned. William watched her, his eyes sharp with anticipation and amusement. They were playing a game, all right, but he wasn’t swallowing her lies. Maybe he hadn’t believed a single one from the very start, and who could blame him? She’d lost her taste for deception, and probably her skill for it too.

If she was going to die now of her own stupidity, at least she could die as herself. “If you’d been a little bit stupider, this would have worked splendidly.”

“I’m sure it would have, love.” William’s eyes gleamed. They
glowed
. “Do you think he’ll be coming for you, if only you keep me talking long enough?”

She shrugged. “You can’t blame a girl for hoping, can you? We could wait together and see if he does.”

“I almost hope he does, now. Just so he can see.”

He wanted her to ask, and she didn’t want to know. But she
needed
to know. “What will he see?”

William moved—fast, so fast. He jerked her wrist to his mouth, and pain pierced her consciousness along with his teeth in her skin. He held her fast when she slammed her free hand into the side of his head and raked her nails down his cheek, and when he finally lifted his head, her blood painted his lips. “The end.”

The world swam out of focus for a terrifying moment, the silence so complete that she heard a drop of her blood splash to the wooden floor.

Pain wiped away any hint of higher reason, leaving behind instinct and the foggy memory of a broken-down old pugilist who’d run with Clyde Howland’s gang.
They expect a knee to the groin,
he’d growled at her once, loquacious as only liquor made him.
Most bastards have been kneed at least once. But if you slam them hard enough in the nose, it’ll sting like a bitch and make their eyes water. Then you run like hell, sweetheart.

There was nowhere to run, not with his vampires blocking the door. Nowhere but into the basement, where her derringer still sat on an out-of-the-way shelf. A modest two rounds, but maybe one of the other bodies would have a weapon. Such a thin hope…

Thin hopes were all she had. She slammed the heel of her hand up into William’s nose and wrenched free when he stumbled back. As soon as he’d cleared the door she dragged it shut behind her and fumbled for the light switch, her aversion to the overpowering stench of the cellar buried in sheer adrenaline. She groped for the key, but it slipped out of her numb fingers and clinked down the stairs.

She had to hike her skirts to her knees to get to the bottom of the steps without tumbling down and breaking her neck. The carnage was even worse than she’d recalled, the floor sticky with gore and blood. Finding the key was an impossibility, but she spotted a revolver on the floor next to an open hand and swooped to pick it up before she realized the arm wasn’t attached to a body.

Part of her brain recoiled in shock. She pushed that part away and retrieved the weapon. Darting to put her back against the wall, she slid under the stairs as the door rattled and creaked open.

Moving as silently as she could, she checked the weapon. Four rounds. Four rounds for five vampires, and that was assuming they lined up and waited patiently for her to kill them, and assuming that one plain lead bullet could kill a vampire to begin with.

Not a very wise assumption.

“Find her.” William’s voice, tight with anger. “Alive. I’ll use them to break one another, or I’ll die trying.”

Dust rained down from above as footsteps fell heavily on the stairs, the silent lackeys following William into battle. Grace readied the revolver and marveled at how steady her hands were. That inner, broken part of herself raged at the futile hopelessness of her situation, at how
stupid
it was to be ready to die for a building full of people with no claim on her.

Maybe this was how Archer felt, risking his life for people he barely knew. Again and again, and she’d be damned if anyone used her as a weapon against him.

So when William rounded the corner, his attention fixed on the vials lining the shelf on the opposite wall, she cocked the hammer and put the first bullet in the back of his head.

For one tense moment, the cellar seemed frozen. Grace stared at the hole in the back of the vampire’s skull as she groped for the hammer again, her heart plummeting toward her feet as William turned his glowing, inhuman glare on her. “Ouch.”

She put the second bullet in his left eye, and the cellar exploded in light.

He saw the explosion from the crest of the last rise, felt the concussive force in his bones.

In his gut.

Archer urged his horse faster, then slid down to the ground as the front door of the house flew open, askew on broken hinges.

Jake staggered into the chill night air, face twisted with guilt. “It wasn’t supposed to explode,” the boy shouted, undoubtedly trying to raise his voice over the ringing in his ears. “It looked like the other one. The sunlight—”

No.
The boy still had the pin from the grenade clutched in one hand. Archer slapped it away and grabbed his shoulders. “Where’s Grace?”

He crumpled. “In—in the cellar. The vampires chased her down the stairs.”

“You threw it down there? With her?”

“I thought it was just sunlight. That it couldn’t hurt her.”

He’d only brought one grenade that was pure manufactured light. All the rest included other nasty surprises—razor-sharp shrapnel, metal buckshot that would rip through anything. “Wait with the horse,” he ground out, pulling free one of his revolvers. “Take this. Shoot anything that comes out of there that isn’t me or Grace. Got it?”

“I’m sorry.” His hand shook as he took the revolver. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

They could trade apologies later, when Archer’s skin wasn’t itching from the inside out. “Keep your eyes open.”

The interior of the house was dark, utterly destroyed. Floorboards had been raked up, and a ceiling beam covered the door to the cellar. Archer holstered his gun, gripped it with both hands and shoved as hard as he could. His muscles strained under the stress,
burned
, but the goddamn thing didn’t budge.

Fuck it.

He dropped to his knees beside the beam and clawed at one of the floorboards that had been dislodged. Digging through the dirt beneath the floor could bring the whole place down, but he didn’t care anymore. Grace was under that dirt, trapped in the cellar just as surely as if she’d been buried, and it didn’t matter if she was dead. He wouldn’t let her—

Dead. A pained cry wrenched free, a hoarse scream he couldn’t remember giving voice to. Dirt wedged under his bloodied nails as he scrabbled through the hard-packed earth, but he ignored it. Ignored everything but the fire in his chest.

She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be, because he’d feel it. He’d know.

The house’s frame shifted with a groan, and the fallen beam almost crushed Archer as it tumbled to the ground. He vaulted over it and yanked open the door. “Grace!”

In the darkness below, someone coughed. “Archer?”

The bottom half of the stairs lay broken in the rubble on the cellar floor. Archer jumped down on a clear spot and began to dig again. “Grace?”

Wood scraped against stone a few feet away. Grace coughed again. “The table kept the worst of it off me, but my leg is pinned under something.”

He reached for it, but a steely hand closed around his arm and a vampire lunged over him, fingernails driving for Archer’s eyes. He swung instinctively, blocking the blow, and converted his momentum into a turning kick that sent the vampire sprawling.

The bloodsucker scrabbled to its feet, eyes crazed. “William was going to make us more human. He was going to give us the best of all worlds. You and your lying whore ruined
everything
—” The last word vanished under a snarl as he flung himself at Archer in a blind fury.

Archer snatched up a piece of the stair railing, broken and splintered, sharp on one end, and drove it into the vampire’s chest. Its mouth opened wide, flashing fangs as an unholy screech echoed through the cellar.

It stumbled back, flesh melting as magic flared. Within moments clothing hung too large on an emaciated corpse that collapsed into a heap of fabric, bones and dust.

Grace was pale, her cheek smeared with blood. Archer grabbed her hand, his other already tugging at the heavy wood and detritus covering her body. “Does anything hurt?”

She laughed and winced, pain filling her eyes as she clung to his hand and finally shifted free of the weight pinning her. “Everything hurts a little, but nothing hurts too much. Except my wrist. He—he bit me.”

Rage built to a roar again. “That bastard I just ashed?”

“No, the other one. William. I shot him and then…” Her brow furrowed as her eyes unfocused. “What happened? There was an explosion.”