Bloodline (12 page)

Even the horses wanted to run, though. I could feel it. They were sensing exactly what I was. Picking up on my fears? I wondered. Or was something more substantial about to take place?

And then I felt it. And I knew he felt it, too. Something was coming, and it was coming from above. Ethan shot
me an alarmed look just as the warning bells rang in my mind. And then he clenched his knees on his stallion's sides and shouted, “Run!”

We took off, the horses, magnificent beasts that they were, nearly flying through the night, their hoofbeats pounding so loudly that at first, I didn't recognize the sound of the helicopter blades slicing the very fabric of the night sky. But then the spotlights poured down from above and there was no more mistaking them. Even in the darkness, I could see the logo on the sides of the three black insectlike helicopters. A white-hot lightning bolt piercing a bloodred crescent moon. And suddenly something flashed through my mind, and I realized I knew that symbol well. I'd seen it often enough on The Farm. It was stamped on everything, from the labels of the clothes they gave us to wear to the boxes, cans and wrappers that held our food and drink, to the furnishings, the bedding, even the lightbulbs. Everything bore that same symbol. One I now equated with captivity and pursuit and danger.

How could the idiots still living on The Farm not see the things that Ethan and I had seen? How could they be content to live a life imprisoned?

Gunshots shocked me from my thoughts. They were firing at us from the choppers! Ethan gripped Scylla's halter and veered Charybdis toward the sheltering trees. As if I wasn't going to follow at a full gallop! I smacked his hand away and took control of my mare as we raced in a zigzag pattern across the small patch of open ground toward the trees and the mountains beyond them.

We galloped as if competing in a race—and maybe we were, a race for our lives—and we crouched low over the horses' necks as they ran. I held on to Scylla's mane for
dear life and hoped I wasn't tugging too hard as her powerful stride jostled me from one side to the other. All the while I clung as hard as I could with my legs.

Finally we pierced the forest wall and dove into its embrace. Deeper and deeper into the forest we went, while the three choppers circled overhead. But not
right
overhead. After only a few moments, they were buzzing this way and that, and I realized they couldn't see us anymore. But soon enough they would. They would cordon off the forest and send in searchers. Somewhere their fearless leaders might very well be organizing that already.

“We've got to make for the mountains,” Ethan called to me. “It's our best chance.”

Maybe, I thought, our
only
chance.

E
than began leading the way through the woods and toward the rugged mountains beyond. The sight of them frightened Lilith. He knew that. She had no idea how they would survive in the wilderness—much less how she would, if something should happen to him.

He felt her eyes on him as she tried to read his thoughts, a skill he knew she hadn't yet perfected. If she had, she would realize that he wasn't thinking about their situation at all, nor about those in pursuit of them, the ones they had temporarily left behind. His mind was indeed working overtime. But it was focused on something else, something that hurt to think about.

“You're so quiet,” Lilith said to him at length. “But I can feel the darkness coming off you in waves, Ethan. What is it? What's wrong?”

He looked at her and could barely force the words, but knew he had to. “We're going to have to leave the horses,” he said at last.

“Leave them? We can't just—”

“We have to,” he said. “It's the only logical thing to do. In this terrain, we can move faster without them. We
need to get beyond the boundaries of this forest before it's completely surrounded, if that hasn't already happened. When we do, we need to keep our options open, take a car if one becomes available. We couldn't do that with them depending on us. This is the best possible place to turn them loose. We have no other choice.”

Lilith was still for a moment as she seemed to scan the woods, her senses sharp. She was learning fast how to use them, he thought with no small amount of admiration. And yet he knew she felt responsible for this—for all of it. Intended or not.

“It's my fault, isn't it?” she asked at length. “It's my fault you no longer have a safe place to live, my fault you've got to give up your beloved horses.” She lowered her head, her body moving in a gentle rocking motion in time with Scylla's careful plodding gait. “I'm sorry I brought all this down on you. Maybe you should just take the horses and go your own way. It's me they're somehow tracking. If I go off alone, I'm the one they'll follow.”

He looked her up and down, and he knew she was terrified of being on her own. Not that Lilith was a needy, dependent, clinging female. She wasn't. Never had been. But she barely understood her own nature, and there were unimaginable forces hunting her down. In those circumstances, anyone would feel better in the company of someone else.

“I have a better idea,” he said softly. “If there's a tracking device on you, let's find it and get rid of it. Otherwise, it's not going to matter where we go. They'll follow us to the ends of the earth.”

She shook her head as if she couldn't care less about
that. “What about the horses?” She leaned down over the mare, stroking the velveteen neck. “What will they do on their own?”

“They'll be fine, Lilith,” he told her, and he hoped it was true. He honestly thought it was. “They'll wander, they'll graze, they'll drink. Maybe they'll even find their way back home. They could, you know. We're not more than twenty miles away.”

She pulled Scylla to a halt. Charybdis, sensing it, stopped, as well, several paces ahead on the trail. “That's the answer, then,” she said.

Ethan turned to look at her. “What is?” But she was already jumping down and, to his utter astonishment, peeling off her T-shirt. “What the hell are you
doing?
”

“We need to find it, Ethan. The tracking device.
Now.
”

“We don't have time.”

“We don't have time not to. Listen, we find it, you cut it out—”

He grimaced at the very thought of it, at the same time remembering that he'd found a knife at the house and taken it. Though he'd never had an inkling he might have to use it on Lilith. An icy chill shot up his spine.

“And then we attach it to one of the horses. They wander to wherever, and the bastards chasing us think they're still on track. Until they catch up, that is. And by then we'll be long gone.”

Ethan sighed, because she was right. He couldn't have come up with a better evasion technique if he'd tried for a month. “That's a very good plan, Lilith,” he told her with a firm nod. “If we can find it. If a tracking device even exists.”

“If it doesn't, then how do they keep finding us?”

“I…don't know,” he admitted.

She nodded hard. “Come on, Ethan. Let's get on with this.” Already she was running her own hands over her body, the nape of her neck, the front of her chest.

He dismounted and walked to where she was. When he stood right in front of her, she met his eyes, and her hands went still. For a long moment they just stood like that, only a few inches between them. She, naked from the waist up in the middle of the forest. He, more aroused than he'd ever been in his life. And he couldn't stop his eyes from exploring her, moving up and down her magnificent body.

“Ethan? As flattering as the fire in your eyes is right now, we're in a hurry. Remember?”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat, gave his head a shake. “Yeah. Uh, I already checked the front of you fairly, um, thoroughly. Here, turn around.”

“All right,” she said, matching her action to the words. The horses stood nearby, not impatient, not pawing, just nibbling on the plants that grew alongside the game trail they'd been following, and blowing gently now and then.

Night in the forest was fragrant. He could smell every plant that grew, along with the scent of warm horseflesh and the stream nearby. And he could smell her—the feminine, unique scent of woman.

Again he stared. His eyes traced the gentle line of her shoulders, the length of her back. Girding himself, he moved closer and pressed his fingertips to her spine, following the line of it down to the base.

And then he halted, because that was when he felt something. A hard little knot beneath her supple skin. A bump that didn't belong.

“Ethan?” She craned her neck to look over her shoulder at him.

“There's…something here,” he said. “I…think.”

“Got a blade on you?” She said this without a single tremor in her voice, without hesitation. Without even a tremble of fear as far as he could sense.

“I found one back at the house.” He went to Charybdis and undid the makeshift pack he'd put together, digging around until he found the jackknife he'd tossed inside. And the entire time, he was feeling more and more physically ill at the thought of what he had to do to this woman. A vampire's senses were heightened. All of them.

She would feel ten times the pain a mortal would feel in the same situation. More than that, perhaps. It could be debilitating. So debilitating that he could lose her.

“If you don't do it, you'll lose me anyway—and die along with me, more likely than not,” she said softly.

He looked at her in surprise. “You're eavesdropping. Reading my thoughts.”

“Just practicing my skills,” she told him.

“Hmm.” He swallowed hard and opened the blade. Then, bending low, he picked up the blanket she'd been wearing as a cloak and draped it over a gently rounded boulder. “Lie here, facedown. It's curved, so it'll arch your back toward me. Should make this a little easier. Faster, at least.”

She nodded, her expression one of stoic resolution, even as she complied. She unfastened the jeans, lowering them just a little, then bent over the boulder, and he wished to God it were for another reason.

He moved to one side of her and knelt to get the best
angle. “In a vampire,” he told her, “pain is magnified. So this is going hurt a lot more than you can possibly expect.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

He thought he detected sarcasm in her tone. “I just thought you should be forewarned.”

“Just do it, Ethan.”

This time her voice shook. He knew he needed to get this over with. “All right.” Positioning the blade over the bump in her lower back, he used his other hand to pinch the hard little knot and force it up. Then, clenching his jaw, he swept the blade through that stretched bit of skin, slicing it off cleanly and knowing the sound of her anguished scream would haunt him for the rest of his days.

Her head rose, neck tipped back, eyes wide, mouth even wider as her cry filled the forest, echoing endlessly through the night and the mists. It could have been the cry of a tortured animal. But it wasn't. It was the cry of a beautiful woman. A woman who had never harmed anyone, as far as he knew, and certainly didn't deserve this kind of pain. He felt that he was as guilty as her tormentors back at The Farm.

The echoes of her scream faded, and then, as her head fell forward upon her hands, the sounds died completely.

Ethan sliced a bit of cloth from the blanket and pressed it to the wound. Then he took her hand, pulled it behind her and held it there. “Keep pressure on it, Lilith,” he told her.

She didn't reply, but she did keep her hand there, even when he folded one side of the blanket over her body, so she wouldn't be quite so exposed.

Rising, Ethan looked at the bloody bit of flesh he held
between his thumb and forefinger. He turned it over and carefully peeled the tiny electronic gadget from the underside of her skin. Then he took the device toward the horses, moving quickly now that the deed was done. This ruse would only work if they could get out of this patch of woodland before they were boxed in.

The horses were drinking from a stream, so Ethan knelt and rinsed his hands and his knife in the water. Then he rose and used the blade to slice a tiny hole in the double-layered leather of Scylla's halter. He slid the tracking unit into the hole, then pushed it deeper with the tip of the blade until he was sure it would stay put.

Then, after patting the horse he loved, he moved on to the stallion's side, removing the bridle and patting him, as well. He looked into the horses' eyes, trying hard to make them understand. It seemed as if they did. He hoped to God it was true.

“I want you to go home. All right? Go home. Go on.”

They grew very alert, no longer drinking, but lifting their heads, watching him with their paintbrush-fringed eyes. Their ears flicked as if they were listening hard.

“Go home. Go on!” Ethan clicked his tongue at them, and as they turned, he slapped their hindquarters just hard enough to really get them moving. The pair took off into the woods at a happy trot in the general direction of his place. He wondered if they would make it, or if they would even try to return to their own familiar stable.

Finally he turned his attention back to Lilith. She was still lying there, exactly as she'd been before. Almost exactly. Her hand was no longer pressed to the small of her back. Instead it hung limply over the boulder. The bloody scrap of cloth had fallen to the ground.

His nerve endings tingled with alarm, and he moved rapidly to her side, lifting the blanket that covered her back. Apparently she'd passed out from the pain, and she was still bleeding. Badly.

He ran back to his sparse cache of supplies. Bandages. Medical tape. Items he'd been glad to find. Vampires bled. It was a fact, one he'd learned early, and he should have thought about that sooner, instead of worrying about losing his precious horses.

Kneeling beside her again, he pressed gauze to the tiny wound, pressed hard, as he added layers and layers of it. Then he began wrapping her in tape, all the way around her waist, and he wrapped her
tight.

When he finished, he returned to the stream, dipping a cloth from the pack into the water. He carried the soaked, icy-cold rag back to her and carefully washed the excess blood away, watching the entire time for any sign that the bleeding might be starting up again and seeping from beneath the bandages.

So far, so good.

Dammit, though. She needed the day-sleep. It would heal the wound completely, but until then, she could easily bleed out. He would have to watch her. And more than that. He was going to have to get her some blood. Powerful blood. Or she just might not make it to the dawn.

He put the T-shirt back on her, lifting and turning her body so he could ease her arms through the sleeves, wincing every time he had to move her. He was so afraid of making the bleeding start again. But he managed to dress her, and the gauze covering her wound remained white and unstained. He wrapped the now-bloodstained
blanket around her, too. And then he lifted her into his arms and carried her. They had to get out of this forest.

If only he had some idea where they were going.

* * *

“Where…where are we?” I opened my eyes briefly, but only because Ethan had been telling me to open them for several minutes. He kept shaking me, saying my name over and over, patting my cheeks. Why couldn't the man just let me sleep?

“Lilith? Thank God you're awake.”

“Not by choice.” Slowly, I opened my eyes again, and for a bit longer this time. I narrowed them, willing them to clear as I looked at our surroundings and blinked my vision into focus. I appeared to be lying on a hard wooden bench, with my head and shoulders cradled in Ethan's lap.