Darkness Returns (20 page)

Had the Raptor Skin failed when Teresa shot her in the back?

Wouldn’t she have felt it before now if it had?

Vamp physiology was a strange thing, though. (She was about to figure out just how strange in a matter of seconds.) Pain didn’t always work the same way it did for mortals. She could take a lot more, first of all. And some things that would have hurt her before she turned vamp would have felt more like an itch to her now.

No.

This had nothing to do with bullet wounds.

The acid razors multiplied by thousands.

Then came the ripping sound.

Not just the Raptor Skin—which was supposed to be near impervious to tears—or the leather. Her skin. Ripping open. She could feel hot blood rolling down between her shoulder blades as if something were drooling on her. Something bigger than any werewolf.

Next came the crackling sound. Like a giant stomping through dry tinder. At that point her pain level made her swoon. The edges of her vision turned to black kudzu, growing inward until all she could see was Teresa’s wet, snuffling snout.

Yeah, bitch, I can smell you, too. Even now, through all this agony.

I can smell your fear.

Jessie had no idea what they saw, could only wallow in what she
felt
. Not only pain. Something growing…no…flowering out the center of her back. At first she thought it was flaps of torn leather brushing against the sides of her back. Different consistency, though. More…skin-like.

Finally, she began to suspect—because
suspect
was as far as she could get without exploding her mind—what was happening to her.

Jessie was growing up.

And when you were a vampire, sometimes growing up meant growing—

The tear in her back widened with a sudden push from the things ripping their way loose. Twin sprays of blood like red paint flicked from giant brushes shot to either side of Jessie as the wings—

Fucking wings!

—spread out behind her. They made a whipping sound like how it sounded when her mom used to shake dust off a rug on the back porch. As the wings stretched to their full span, each nearly twice as tall as Jessie herself—Jessie could already feel the wound that had birthed them begin to close. Her vampire healing accelerated to such a degree that mere seconds passed before she felt the blood flow stop. That ticklish sense of her skin knitting together continued for a while after, but not a stitch of pain remained.

Her vision cleared.

Only she wished it hadn’t.

The wolf hunched low, no longer baring teeth, tail tucked up between her legs, nose sniffing triple-time. A wet spot spread out underneath her.

Jessie almost laughed. The Teresa she knew, the human one, would never have wet herself, no matter what crazy shit she saw. Jessie guessed once you went wolf, you got all the natural instincts that came with the breed, both good and bad.

She didn’t care about Teresa’s cowering and whimpering, though.

The way Dad was looking at her. That’s what made Jessie feel like she got the proverbial stake through the heart. Eyes wide, wet, and searching. Face as white as a newly poured section of concrete on the street behind him. She could smell his fear, too. Sour and cloying, as if he’d rolled in something spoiled. A smell she’d expect more from the wolf than him.

Feeling stifled, she ripped off her leather mask. The smells got worse, yet she didn’t feel any less confined for some reason.

At the moment, her wings had a mind of their own. After a long stretch, they began to flap. Nothing fast. Nothing that might lift her off the ground. A lazy
whap-whap-whap
that caused just enough breeze to shift the ends of Jessie’s hair.

The smell of her father’s rotten fear increased.

Teresa whined and scooted back.

Served her right. The woman had no idea who she’d been fucking with.

A demon.

A monster.

A horror.

The darkest of the darker things.

Much like the days where Jessie would get a sudden idea for a movie plot, some piece of a story that she felt she had to write down immediately or lose some of the world’s greatest filmic literature—and usually ended up as just another plain old idea that needed as much work as the last—she felt a flash of insight, a total and perfect understanding of why Teresa had hated her so much.

Out of all of their crew, from Marty to Adam to Kress to her own father, Teresa was the only one who truly knew what Jessie was.

All this time, Jessie had blamed Gabriel for the evil she had accomplished, for the thousands of deaths she orchestrated. But Gabriel had merely been a piece of the larger whole.

I might not be evil
, Jessie thought,
but there ain’t a doubt in the world I’m a beast.

A dangerous one, at that.

Jessie screamed at Teresa and her dad. The scream sounded like the simultaneous death caw of a thousand crows. In order to accommodate such a shriek, Jessie’s mouth opened to twice its natural width. Her jaw popped. Her skin stretched. Her breath smelled of bile.

For fifteen seconds she screeched like this, watching the pair in front of her grow more and more afraid. Then she took control of the beat of her wings, quickening the rhythm, letting her vampire nature guide her. When she felt ready, she jumped into the air.

And flew away.

Chapter Twenty-Six

After all he had just seen, Lockman’s survival instincts still had a voice. And it told him to get up. Get the hell up before Teresa recovers from her shock and finishes what she started. Compartmentalize. Think about Jessie, about her change, about how in the hell—

No.

Pocket the issue.

Survive now.

Questions later.

He scrambled to his feet, glanced around him for some kind of weapon, and not anything so meek as a loose piece of concrete. He needed something to put down three hundred pounds of werewolf.

Down the street.

The town car Teresa had arrived in had the door hanging open and the engine still running. Getting to it meant running past Teresa, putting himself back in her sights. If she shook off her daze quickly enough, she would overtake him easily, drop him like a lion does a gazelle on one of those nature shows.

No other options.

He had to chance it.

Then he took his first steps and the pain in his ankle dropped him to his knees. He grunted. The dry air made his lungs feel as if sand coated the insides. No way he could run on the bad ankle. No other cars nearby, at least not with the keys in the ignition and the engine running, let alone the door wide open.

He glanced at Teresa.

She had come up from her cowering crouch and now craned her neck back, looking into the sky. When Lockman followed her gaze, he could see the floating speck that was Jessie.

Why had she abandoned him?

Just as he asked himself the question, Teresa turned to look at him. Her yellow and black eyes looked dead in their furry sockets, unreadable.

Lockman’s nature—which Jessie had clearly inherited ten times over—made him want to quip about the puddle under her paws. He bit back the comment and went with a different tact. “Do you really want to kill me, Tree?” He even used his old nickname for her, back when they’d been lovers and he’d called himself a Tree hugger and she had corrected him—
More like a Tree fucker.

Teresa chuffed, curled her lip to show a few sharp canines.

“We can call a truce,” Lockman continued. “You leave the pack, come back with us. There’s a new Agency now. They got shit there that can make a serious difference. And there’s talk of a Return. Somehow sending all the supernaturals back to where they came from.”

She cocked her wolf head, an obvious gesture of disbelief, though Lockman could tell she had more to say. What he was telling her was a hard sell. He hadn’t totally bought it himself, which, if she was paying any attention, would clearly show in his voice. If he didn’t believe it, why should she?

“Come on, Tree. Change back so we can talk about this. It’s not like I’ve never seen you naked before.”

For an instant, he thought he’d convinced her, though he saw her eyes clear, turn a little more human. Wishful thinking, maybe, because she didn’t shift back. She started growling and slinking toward him.

Lockman held out his hands. “I can’t defend myself against you. You kill me, you do it in cold blood. And for what? Because you don’t like my daughter?”

“No,” a voice called from above. The sound of Jessie’s wings sounded like a helicopter rotor going in slow motion. She drifted down and landed beside him. Her wings folded behind her just like a bat’s.

Lockman had seen plenty of vamps with wings. None of them had looked like teenage girls.

Teresa froze with one forepaw up in mid-step.

“It’s not that she doesn’t like me,” Jessie said. “It’s because she’s afraid of me. And she’s right. She should be.” Jessie turned to him. “Just like you should be.”

“I’m not—”

“Don’t you fucking lie to me.”

Lockman saw the sudden movement from the corner of his eye since Jessie had distracted him. Teresa lunging forward, apparently over her initial disturbance over Jessie’s change.

Jessie must have expected the move. She gripped Lockman under the arms and flapped her wings, carrying them both off the ground and out of Teresa’s trajectory. He watched between his dangling feet as Teresa landed then looked up at them hovering over her. Her wolf form grew smaller and smaller as Jessie took them up.

“I thought you’d abandoned me,” Lockman said, his voice shaky. He knew Jessie had vamp strength and could easily carry his weight. Knowing something like that and
believing
in it don’t always jibe.

“I almost did.”

Below them, Teresa shifted into human form. She sat naked with her legs folded under her, gazing up at them with a hate so clear the distance didn’t dilute it.

Jessie shifted her hold on Lockman so she could wrap her arms around his chest as if hugging him, but it was all business and no warmth behind the embrace. “I couldn’t stand you looking at me like that.”

“Jess, I didn’t—”

“Don’t.”

She swung around and soared away from Teresa, though Lockman could still feel her venomous glare. The wind whistled in Lockman’s ears as they flew, making it hard to hear what Jessie said next. All he heard was “done.” He asked her to repeat herself.

She put her lips to his ear. “I said I’m taking you back, and then I’m done.”

“What do you mean,
done
?” he shouted over the wind.

“I’m not staying at that place anymore,” she said. “I’m not participating in this bullshit. And I’m not letting anyone else take a chance at triggering me.”

None of it made sense to Lockman and he said as much.

Until now, Jessie had been watching where she was flying. She took a moment to look him hard in the eyes. “Ask Kress. Make him tell you.”

Dusk had turned to full night by the time they reached the karaoke bar. They were able to drop directly into the alley behind it and sneak in through the back without any civilians noticing the young vampire with the wings. But even the members of their network gave her odd looks. And by odd, Lockman meant mostly fearful.

Except for the door guardian. He didn’t even glance at the wings. He looked Jessie up and down and sighed sadly. “Dude, you lost the sword?”

If he expected an answer, he didn’t seem too put out when they both ignored him and squeezed their way into the broom closet, through the doorway, and back to headquarters.

All along, she’d been right. So very fucking right.

Teresa finally stood, the phosphorescent street lights giving her naked skin an alien orange glow. Her chest was dotted with pink welts from where she’d healed from the shotgun blast. She knew the neighborhood’s residents had returned to peeking out their windows and doors at the lone, nude woman standing in the middle of her street.

Police sirens sounded in the distance. Their slow response time must have meant they didn’t have much of a force in this small town butted next to the warehouse district. That response time was probably slowed further by their trying to figure out what they were dealing with at the other scene.

She couldn’t stay long. But she stayed long enough to watch the demon disappear into the darkness.

Those wings.

Horrifying.

The final touch on the monstrous portrait of what Jessie had become.

What next? What other evolution in her vampire nature would manifest? And while it had appeared the girl had lost much of her magical power with Gabriel exorcised, Teresa wouldn’t fool herself into thinking it couldn’t come back. Stronger. She still had all those souls from the memory artifact inside of her. Perhaps one of those had taught her how to grow the wings.

In any case, one fact remained—Teresa’s mission remained active, and more important than ever.

Destroy the demon.

Protect the world from others like her.

Never let another innocent like her sister fall victim to the wicked creatures lurking in the shadows of every town in America…the whole world.