Blood Born: Cora's Choice #2 (11 page)

I couldn’t go home, that was for sure.
I could try to find Dorian’s house, but I wasn’t sure of the address, and if my attacker had any friends, surely they’d be staking it out, waiting for me to reappear.

Lisette?
Geoff?

No.
It wasn’t right to put them in danger because of me.

But why was I in danger?
What was that creature, and why did she attack me?

I had no idea, but I knew that Dorian was at the root of it.
He had to be. Which meant he’d changed far more in my life than my blood.

WhatamIgoingtodowhatamIgoingtodowhatamIgoingtodo
—

I saw t
he red traffic signal too late to stop. I barreled into the intersection, slamming on my brakes as I bore down on a white panel van.

Its horn blared, and I
yanked the wheel hard to the right, sliding across the intersection and hitting the highway shoulder in a spray of gravel as my car came to a stop. For a long moment, I just sat there, my body trembling uncontrollably.

Keep g
oing,
I urged myself.
You have to go now. Get moving!

But g
o where? My fuel light was glowing red—and I had no way to refill. My wallet was in the pocket of my winter coat back in the apartment.

The shadows cast by the sinking sun were long on the ground.
Soon, it would be dark. And cold.

I saw the lights
behind me then, blue and red, flashing in my rearview mirror.

The police.
I felt a wave of relief. Of course the police would help. That was their job, wasn’t it?

T
he cruiser stopped on the shoulder twenty feet behind me, and a stocky uniformed man got out of the driver’s side, a taller one with the shoulders of a quarterback getting out of the passenger’s.

I
started to put the car in park and hesitated with a twinge of misgiving. Since when did traffic cops have partners? I tried to read the text on the side of the cruiser, but I couldn’t make it out from my angle.

The stocky one had reached my driver’
s side window already. He rapped on the glass with his knuckle as the big one stood casually at my passenger door.

There was nothing for it.
I rolled down the window.

“Did you see the red light, ma’am?” the man asked in a tone of bored annoyance.

“Y-yes,” I said.

“Then why didn’t you stop?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again.
There was a creature, sir, you see….
That wasn’t going to go over well.

“I was at UMD, going to my dorm.
A stranger just attacked me. I got in my car and used it to escape, but she attacked the car, too. I was still upset, I guess. I didn’t notice it until too late.”

“At UMD, huh?” he said.
The words were casual, but I noticed a slight shift in his posture.

At his nod, his partner began to
circle my car.

“There was a hit-and-run at UMD earlier today,” the cop said conversationally.
“Can I see your license and registration, please?”

My heart sank.
“I don’t have it. I was running away—”

“Mike, we’re got blood here,” the second officer interrupted.

“I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car, ma’am,” the first cop said.

My
hands tightened on the steering wheel. I still hadn’t even put the car in park yet. “I was attacked,” I insisted. “Look at my shirt.”

I
leaned forward so that he could see the back of the shredded hoodie, still soaked with blood.

“You don’t look hurt,” the cop said.
“Is that blood even yours?”

Shit
.
My cuts had already sealed over. “It is. She tried to kill me—”

“Ma’am, turn off the vehicle and
get out
.” He voice was slow and insistent.

Still, I hesitated.
It all seemed a little too neat, too coincidental. Was I supposed to believe that the creature reported the hit-and-run? Or that there was an invisible witness to the accident who called it in, perhaps someone from one of the apartment windows that overlooked the parking lot? And the cops had just happened to find me so quickly?

If Dorian could have such an effect on
my mind, what could another, less scrupulous vampire do to the cops?

I looked in the rearview mirror again.
Behind the hulking figure of the second cop, I could see the cruiser. And inside, I could just make out a silhouette.

My skin prickled with visceral recognition.

“
Get out of the car.
” The cop’s hand rested lightly on his gun.

Cops weren’t
supposed to do that when faced with an unarmed college student. I was sure of it.

“Who’
s that?” I demanded. “Who is that inside your car? Who’s with you?”

The cop cast me a contemptuous look and pulled the gun from his holster, leveling it at me.
“There’s nobody with us, ma’am. Now get out of the car before I have to drag you out.”

The last of my uncertainties fell away.
Cops were most definitely not supposed to do that.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said, leaning to the side as if I were reaching for the automatic transmission knob
to put the car in park. “Just give me one second. I just have to—”

I lunged flat against the passenger seat and hit the gas.
The gun went off above my head, and I thought my ears had burst as the car tore away.

Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit
. Straightening enough to see over the dashboard, I looked in my rearview mirror just in time to see the stocky cop lower his gun coolly, point it at my car, and fire again.

I floored it,
pushing as fast as my little car would go. The cops ran over to their cruiser. I tore around a curve, and they were lost from sight—for the moment. An intersection appeared ahead, a small side road winding off into the countryside. I took it, driving blindly, not caring where I went as long as it was away.

The cop had tried to shoot me.
He’d tried to kill me. I tightened my hands on the steering wheel to keep them from trembling. Whether they’d been under vampiric influence or not, I knew what that meant.

I was now a fugitive.

And I had nowhere to run.

I had been so stupid, believing that I could just go back to my old life.
Believing that I could strike some kind deal with Dorian.

Believing that he was the only thing that had changed in it.

I wouldn’t be left alone. Not by him, and not by whoever it was who had come after me. Even if I survived, there was no going back now.

Not as long as there was a bond between us that made me a part of his world.

I heard sirens in the distance, but they quickly fell away into silence as the night closed in around me. I pulled off my sunglasses. I recognized nothing, and without my phone, I had no GPS.

I
took turn after turn, the roads getting steeper and narrower. There was nothing out here, not even a house. Occasionally, I caught the glimmer of lights in the distance, but the road never led close to them. Finally, I turned down the nearest dirt road to one of those distant beacons, hoping it was a long driveway that would lead me to the building from which it came.

It didn’t.

When the gas ran out, the car didn’t sputter. It simply rolled to a stop halfway up a hill between two barren cornfields, and I threw it in park before it could roll back down again. The fan of the heater still blew warm air across me, but that would only last until the engine cooled.

Just how
tough was the not-quite-human that I’d become? I wondered bleakly. Tough enough to survive a winter night in a car without a rear windshield, wearing a torn, wet shirt?

I might need the
car battery later. I vaguely remembered seeing a survival show where the host used a battery to start a fire. I wondered how he did that. I had no idea.

I twisted the key in the ignition to kill the power and leaned the seat back in the sudden darkness.
The winter air was sharp and thin in my lungs. My headlight-flooded vision cleared, and the cold, clear sky slowly bristled with hard points of light, many thousands more than I had ever been able to see with my merely human sight.

I
started to shiver. That was good. It would be bad when I stopped.

It was, quite literally, the end of the road for me.
I didn’t know why, but I didn’t cry. There didn’t seem to be a point. I just sat with my hands jammed into my hoodie pockets and watched the galaxy spin slowly overhead.

I thought about Lisette and the chaotic Christmas dinner she
must be having with her exuberant family. I thought about Geoff and the promise that I might never keep. I thought about Gramma.

I’m sorry,
I told her.
I tried. I really, really tried.

And then I thought about him.
Dorian. And some part of me that I couldn’t name ached at the thought that I’d never see him again.

He was the reason I was out here.
He had to be. He’d promised to save my life, and instead, he’d destroyed it. And I hardly knew him, and I hated the hold he claimed to have over me.

But I mourned him no less keenly for all that.

The winter silence was so complete that the chattering of my teeth and the shaking breaths seemed to be the only sounds in the world.

Until I heard the car
s.

The wheels ground along the dirt road I was on slowly, the crunch of them as loud as a shout.
A look in the rearview mirror revealed three distinct pairs of headlights moving up the hill, spaced close, one after another.

I considered running, but I had nowhere to go
, and I was shivering so uncontrollably I knew I couldn’t make my muscles obey. Whether the cars brought the police, the creature I hit, or another vampire, they’d have little trouble catching me in this state.

I didn’t even consider
the possibility that they hadn’t come for me.

I unbuckled and opened the door, standing to face the approach
ing vehicles. The slope on which the car had finally rolled to a halt meant that I could see for nearly a quarter mile back where I had come, so the bouncing headlights of the vehicles were visible for half a minute before they stopped a dozen yards behind my car.

I
tried not to flinch in the light even though it blinded me. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. If I’d had anything to use as a weapon, I would have grabbed it.

I tried to form a fist around the keys, leaving the sharp ends sticking out
, but with my student ID and keycard on my lanyard, the best that I could do was to grip them so tightly that the edges of the plastic cards cut into my palms.

A figure stepped from t
he driver’s side door of the middle vehicle. I squared my shoulders, determined to go down fighting.

“Hello, Cora
. Merry Christmas.”

The story continues in…

Bad Blood

Cora’s Choice –
Book 3

Aethereal
Bonds

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find out what happens next?  Check the
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C
ora Shaw bonded to the vampire Dorian Thorne to save her life, but now she’s in more danger than ever. Dorian has enemies as powerful as he is, and they want Cora dead.

Cora finds herself thrust into the midst of a terrifying new world. But the greatest danger of all may still be Dorian, for she learns that her duties as his consort are more terrible than she ever imagined….

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