Chapter Forty-Five: Full Moon Rising

Evan

One more fucking night of not finding Helaine.

Snarling, I threw open the el camino’s bed cover, squinting under the light of the full moon. It was the closest I could get to the sun without burning to a crisp, and it was still a little too bright for my sensitive eyes.

But it was just one more reason to be pissed off tonight.

When I looked around, I could see that we were on a very rural stretch of the highway, moving west according to the rusty old road signs. There wasn’t another car around for miles as far as I could hear. Not even the kind of old truck I’d expect to hear out in these parts.

Helaine wasn’t here either.

My boots crunched against the abandoned gas station parking lot’s gravel as I stalked toward the driver’s side door, I slammed my hand down on the hood in a fit of frustration as Frank stepped out of my ride, lighting up a cigarette.

I snatched it from his fingers, taking a long drag, hoping it would do something to take off the edge . . . but it didn’t. One of the many fucking side effects of being undead.

“Jesus Christ,” Frank swore, taking back the lit cigarette before I had a chance to crush it. “I don’t have many left.”

Exhaling the smoke in his face, I scoffed.

“You’re a shitty fucking knight, you know that?” I bared my teeth at him in a vicious snarl. “I thought you people were supposed to be pious.”

“I was pious, once,” he huffed. “Look at where it got me. Smoking with a vampire, risking my own hide in a suicide mission to rescue the anti-christ. So forgive the fuck out of me for not living up to your idea of a holyman.”

My eyes burned into him as he took a drag, envious as he exhaled. No doubt the nicotine was hitting his system, giving him at least some kind of relief from this shitty situation.

A situation we were only in because he was a pathetic excuse for a father.

“Speaking of the anti-christ, isn’t that device of yours supposed to find her?” I lashed out, staring him down. “Or did I practically disembowel myself for nothing?”

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” he snapped back, throwing the butt of his cigarette on the ground and grinding it with his shoe into the filthy old gravel. “The device is working just fine—it’s just that wherever the monster who made you took her, it wasn’t close.”

“Of course it wasn’t.”

It was only then that I remembered that I never told Frank about the vision Valek gave me—I didn’t want to.

For all I knew, he’d hear that Valek gave me a vision and he’d think I was under her control. And I couldn’t even blame him for thinking it. Everyone who knew about the supernatural knew that a vampire shared a connection with their sire, and Valek was not the kind of creature to mess around with.

Granted, Valek had that kind of control over all vampires as far as I was aware. I wasn’t a special case in that regard.

Maybe I should’ve felt honored, but I didn’t. Especially now.

It’d be easy for Frank to just open up the el camino’s bed cover in the middle of the day and roast me alive before I had the chance to take cover. Hell, it’d probably be instinct for him.

Killing vampires was like riding a bike, once you learned, you never forgot how.

I’d lived too long to die in such a stupid way. Besides, Helaine needed me. I couldn’t die on her now.

It wasn’t fair of me to lose my shit on Frank. I saw for myself how remote the place was that Valek had taken Helaine. The plants around here didn’t quite match up, and there definitely weren’t any natural hot springs in the area.

We still had quite a ways to go before we’d find Helaine based on that alone, and it killed me.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on it. There was a scent on the air—an unmistakable one. “Get back in the el camino, now!”

“Hold your damn horses,” he protested, not making any move to listen to me. “Gotta stretch my legs—”

He yelped in shock when I yanked open the driver side door and manhandled him into the seat. I only just barely got the door shut before the stinking beast launched itself at me.

“Holy mother!” Frank’s muffled shout came through the window, just now realizing why I shoved him into the cab.

The werewolf’s drooling maw gnashed in my face as I held it back with my forearm alone. If I were an average vampire, it would’ve ripped out my throat by now, but I supposed I could thank Valek for that.

“You’re strong, for a bloodsucker,” it snarled in that strange half-human voice the beasts tended to speak in, trying to force more of its body weight on me, but it didn’t notice me reaching my free hand into my boot to grab my knife.

“Thanks, you’re chatty for a werewolf,” I forced through gritted teeth as I slashed the knife across is abdomen, spilling his tainted blood all over my boots.

The creature howled with pain as I shoved the knife into his exposed guts, slashing around for good measure to make sure he wouldn’t recover.

Contrary to what Hollywood tended to say, werewolves and vampires usually got along pretty well—or at least we knew how to leave each other the hell alone. Both being cursed with a level of brutality we could barely keep under wraps fostered a strange sort of bonding.

So for this bastard to attack me out of nowhere, he was either damn near feral, or he was hunting us specifically.

The fact that he bothered to speak to me made me assume it was the latter.

He was powerless to stay on his feet when I shoved him off of me, collapsing back against the gravel as he desperately tried to hold his organs inside.

It wouldn’t matter, I had cut him so deep he wouldn’t recover without eating living flesh—and even then it was a toss up.

Frank knew enough about the supernatural to know that, which was probably why he actually listened to me and stayed in the el camino.

“Who sent you?” I snarled, standing over the dying beast, asserting my dominance.

“I—I can’t—” he panted, digging his claws into the blood-soaked gravel in a pitiful attempt to crawl away from me.

A swift boot to the stomach made a splash of blood spew from his maw. I needed answers, and I needed them fast, or he was going to die on me before he could talk. “You can.”

“You won’t—stop her.” He coughed, his own blood dripping from his teeth. “The . . . mother.”

When the fur began to recede I knew it was too late. As the creature died, the body beneath me returned to its human state, and I wasn’t going to get any more information than that.

“Fuck!” I shouted, kicking the corpse in the head so hard that the neck cracked at a sickening angle.

I barely heard the car door open, but then Frank was standing next to me, looking down at the body with an utterly broken expression. “No fucking kidding.”

“What, do you know him?” I scoffed.

“Actually, I do.” Frank shoved the body over onto its front with his boot, revealing a tell-tale tattoo on the back of his shoulder. “This man was a knight.”

“What do you mean, he was a knight?” I turned to face him, my brow furrowed in confusion. “I thought your guys took measures to prevent curses from taking hold.”

“We do, but the tattoo doesn’t lie.” Frank grimaced, walking toward the el camino’s passenger seat. “Something about this fucking reeks, and it’s not just wolf blood.”

“I know.”

Stooping to grab the corpse by the ankle, I dragged him to the wood-line before whipping him into the brush. The longer it took for the body to be found, the less likely we’d be to run into any problems.

The blood could be explained away, or diluted by the rain. A whole damn body couldn’t.

“Whoever this ‘mother’ is that’s having us tracked . . . ” I settled into the driver’s seat, checking the rear view mirror suspiciously, noting the nauseated grimace on Frank’s face. “She’s looking for Helaine too.”