Dark Horizons (The Red Sector Chronicles) (9 page)

Setting the gun down, I raised my arms and slowly turned around, coming eye to eye with the barrel of a revolver. The last guard’s helmet was off. He looked young, maybe in his twenties, and the look he gave me could have melted flesh.

“You think you’re above the law, hunter,” he hissed. “But you’re wrong. You’re more worthy of death than any of us.”

I wondered if he would feel that way if he knew I had saved him from a slow, excruciatin
g death at the hands of a super-
virus that would have turned his lungs into soup. His eyes flicked to my right wrist; the sleeve of my sweater had come down, revealing the tattoo of a black cross etched into my skin, the symbol that marked me as a member of the vigilante vampire hunting group known as the Black Cross Guild.

Behind me
Rook froze, his faces perfectly composed and his eyes blank, though I could sense the nervousness rolling off him.
He
m
ust still be going with the “glamour” act.

The wheels of my mind spun,
frantically
t
rying to come up with a p
lan
,
when something thumped the
guard in th
e back of the head and he slumped
forward.
A tall, dark-skinned girl stood there, her
dark brown
hair hanging in perfect ringlets around her
delicately featured face. A smirk
worked its way onto
her lips as she watched the guard go down, one hand on the hip of her white lab coat, the other still holding the pistol she’d used to knock him out.
Beneath the coat,
she wore a tight-fitting, black cocktail dress.

While relieved to not have a gun pointed at my head, I mentally groaned at seeing her.
Can’t it be anyone but her?
“Dezyre, what are you doing here?” I really wasn’t in the mood to deal with her drama right now.

She ignored my bitter words and holstered the
pistol
. “I
was in the next hall when the alarm went off, and I
saw Orion’s empty cell. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I want in
if it involves bringing that bastard to justice for unleashing
that horrible disease
.”

“How do you know about that?” Paris snapped.

Dezyre didn’t show any fe
ar. “When I saw Aden was admitted
, I went over to his room to check on him. That’s when I overheard you and Sloane talking about it.”

My stomach lurched. Dezyre was the one who had exposed me for being a vampire hunter, and because of that, I had been tortured by Frost. To say I didn’t trust her would be an understatement. “
Sorry, bu
t this superhero club’s all full.”

Dezyre’s lip-glossed mouth rolled up in a sneer. “I could be of use to you. What if you get hurt? Who’s going to help heal you?”

“I’ll take my chances,” I mumbled.
I’d almost be willing to deal with Paris if it meant not putting up with Dezyre.
“Knowing you, you’d try to
poison
me.” I was, of course, referring to the Holiday Ball, where she’d brought me a glass of punch that had been laced with acid. Later on, we’d found out she’d been glamoured by my brother, but that was beside the point.

“Oh, please,” Dezyre said. “That was so not my fault. I can’t help it your family is seriously dysfunctional.”

I’m about to make you
r face seriously dysfunctional
.
I growled, growing more irritated just by listening to her voice.

“Enough!” Rook bellowed, coming up between us. “Stop acting like two-year-olds! We don’t have time for it. We have to get out of here.”

“I know a way,”
Paris
said
, a mischievous smile on her lips. “Follow me.”

CHAPTER
6

Thanks to Rook
’s misdirection
, we didn’t run into anyone else as we made our way to an adjoining hallway, thought I didn’t expect that to last for long. Though Dezyre and I were taking out cameras left and right, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching us.

We spilled into a small, narrow hall I’d never been
in
before
.
It
didn’t appear to have any exits or doors. “What are you doing?” I asked Paris when she walked right up to the wall.

“Getting
us
out of here.” It looked like she waved her
badge in front of
the
wall, but then the outline of a door appeared as a chunk of the wall opened up and she pulled it open. Curious, I fo
llowed her inside the dark, cool space. The moment we set foot inside the room, lights flicked on overhead, illuminating several things I took to be cars.

“How do you get all these down here?” I asked, looking around
the parking garage
. There had to be at least fifty vehicles, and because of it, the room seemed to stretch on forever.

“They
’re taken apart and reassembled down here,
”
Paris said.

I eyed one as we walked by. It looked like a weird hybrid between a Mustang, a Ford Ranger, and a Dodge Viper. “Couldn’t you, um, have put them back together correctly?”

Rook chuckled softly. “It’s the end of the world, and you’re worried about the s
tyle of car you’re driving?
Even Dezyre would admit that’s vain.”

Dezyre made a face at him
but didn’t comment.

My face flamed. “I guess I was just expecting you guys to drive fancy sports cars or limos.”

“You’ve been around modern ideals of vampires for too long,” Paris said, stoppi
ng at a slender
“car”.
It
s doors were brown, with a mostly black body, and it had thin wheels that looked like they
’d been snagged from a racecar.
“Being a vampire, as you’ve noticed, is hardly as romantic as literature and movies paint it out to be.”

“And they run on gasoline?” I asked. Gas prices had shot through the roof since the Eclipse, becoming more of a pleasure than a necessity for common folk who didn’t have a small fortune available to pay for it. Generally
,
only government officials and the imm
inently wealthy could afford it,
which was probably why gasoline was one of the top items pilfered from cars and gas stations.

“All of them,” Paris said. “Though we try not to use these cars except wh
en necessary, since gasoline
isn’t easy to obtain.”

Gripping the handle,
she
pulled the door open. The interior was just as sloppy, wi
th upholstery that didn’t match. The seats
had enough questionable stains and holes to make me wonder if I’d catch something by sitting on them. Rook went over to the driver’s side and got in, ploppin
g
down on the seat without pause.

Dezyre seemed to have the same concerns
that
I did. Her petite nose was wrinkled up, and she was eyeing the car with something akin to loathing.

“Sorry it’s not a Porsche, P
rincess,” Paris said, giving Dezyre a tight smile. “But it’s all we have, if you want to escape and not face execution for aiding criminals of the empire.”

Dezyre swallowed hard. “I didn’t say it had to be a Porsche.” She smoothed down the imag
inary wrinkles in her lab coat. “I’ve just learned to question things that look… questionable.”

I snorted.

“I mean, look at it,” she sneered. “It looks like it will barely run, let alone
be
fast enough to actually allow us to escape.”

“Oh, it’ll run,” Rook said, pushing a button on the dash. A mean growl ripped through the air as the engine roared to life. He patted the steering wheel lik
e it was a puppy. “It’s got a V12
engine from a
Lamborghini
.”

Shouts drifted up the hallway, muffled through the wall.

“Get in,” Paris said, her features tightening with anxiety.

Without arguing, Dezyre slipped into the back while I plopped down in front. The door slammed closed and my eyes snapped up as Paris leaned down toward the window. Brows furrowing, I found the
window controls
and the
glass pane
scrolled down with a
screech. “What are you doing?”

Paris’
s
eyes glittered. “Someone has to make sure those idiots don’t cause anymore
unnecessary
deaths.”

“But –”

She gripped my hand, squeezing hard and dropping her voice. “And by that, I mean someone who actually knows about the virus needs to be around in case Aden needs help.”

I went cold all over at the mention of his name.
“But the Council already said you couldn’t treat him.”

She smirked. “Since when has the breaking the law ever stopped me?”

Good point.
Throat tight, I nodded once.

On the far side of the
garage
, the door burst open
and several soldiers poured into the room, guns ready. Paris held up her arms in surrender. “Go!” she shouted.

“What about you?”

She smiled, though I c
ould read the fear in her eyes.
“I’ll be fine. Now go.”

“Stop, or we’ll shoot!” the guards yelled behind her.

Rook didn’t take their warning to heart. Without preamble, he floored it and the car shot off with a squeal of tires that left a trail of smoke and strewn dirt behind. I wasn’t ready for the sudden burst of speed, which near
ly threw me into the windshield. I yelped as shots rang out, pelting the back of the car while I frantically groped around for my seat
belt.

Above the chaos came Paris’
s voice. “You only have a few days
!” she screamed, cupping her hands around her mouth from her spot on the floor, where she’d apparently thrown herself the moment they opened fire.

Rook pressed another button on the dash, which was a labyrinth of exposed wires and multicolored buttons, and an exit appeared on the opposite end
of the garage
. We barreled toward it as the door slid open, scraping the side of the car in a shower of sparks as we flew through the narrow rectangle and onto the open dirt road.

My heart beat wildly in my chest as I pressed myself against the seat, the roar of the engine drowning out my shaky breaths.

“What’s going to happen to her?” I said, sounding a little breathless. The sound of gunshots still rang in my
ears as we zoomed
farther away from the base.

“Probably nothing,” Dezyre said, flipping a ringlet over her shoulder and sounding bored. “They need her too badly, especially now that I’m gone.”

I found her eyes in the rearview mirror and glared at her. “You think very highly of yourself.”

“What can I say?” Dezyre shrugged. “I’m indispensable.”

Though she said it so flippantly, there was a guarded look to her eyes that made me pause.

Rook turned a knob and the stereo system hissed to life, filling the car with static and sketchy voices.
He thumbed in a numbered button and the radio switched frequencies. One of the guards was rattling off instructions. “Captain
Rook and Sloane McAllister
are
missing.
Security reported them leaving t
he facility in a
brown and black Chimera. Security footage
suggest
s
they are heading toward the city.”

“‘Chimera
?
’
” I said, looking at Rook. “That’s the best name you could come up with for this thing?”

Rook shrugged. “It seemed appropriate. It wasn’
t like we could call it a Dodge
Flamethrower, since it’s made up of different car brands.”

He wheeled the car around a sharp turn, slowing
our velocity
and grindin
g the brakes against the tires. I glanced out the window. We were all the way on the opposite side of the dome, as far away from the base as we could possibly be. The view dipped sideways as we ran up a ramp and burst into a separate, larger dome.

“Wow,” I said, leaning forward so I could get a better view.

We were on another dirt road, but this one actually had lanes spray-painted off. Tall buildings of
a variety of architectures from different
time
periods
rose all around us. There were ancient Greek columns next to Chinese temples; log cabins sprouted up in the tiny cracks between bloated structures of glass and metal. It looked, literally, like someone had scooped up a handful of things from different parts of the
globe
at
varying
points in
Earth’s
history
,
and had slopped them all together.
There didn’t appea
r to be any stop
lights; only stop signs.