Brigit had gone ahead of me, the apartment door swinging open. “We’ll make it fun. Think of all the champagne she has!”
“I’m trying not to.”
“Can you grab my purse?” she called from the foyer. “I want to check the street before you come out.”
She was certainly dedicated to her bodyguard job, I had to give her props for that. “I’m just going to grab a sweater,” I announced to my empty apartment. Brigit was a vampire. She’d probably heard me fine.
It was weird, needing a sweater for something other than keeping up the appearance of being normal. When I’d gone out with Desmond that morning, I’d decided the yellow sundress crammed in the back of my closet was the perfect thing to wear. Now I didn’t want to waste time changing, but I knew I’d freeze half to death if I went outside without something to cover me.
Outside, a car backfired. Brigit must have left both doors wide open if I’d been able to hear it in the bedroom. So much for her awesome bodyguarding skills.
Tugging on a black cardigan, I jogged through the living room and grabbed both our purses from beside the door, locking the apartment before I left and noting the street door was ajar, as I’d expected. Brigit was standing on the sidewalk outside, her back to me.
“Nice job with the doors, sweetie. No one would suspect I’d leave the welcome mat out.”
She didn’t move.
“Bri? Did you hear me?” I closed the street door and jogged up the first two steps.
When I was halfway to the top, she turned towards me, swaying unevenly as if the slight breeze was strong enough to knock her off balance. Her red shirt glittered in the moonlight. How had I not noticed the sequins before? I was about to compliment her on how pretty the effect was until I saw her face.
As a vampire, she was naturally pale, but there was something wrong in her expression. Her mouth was drawn in a grimace, and red-hued tears had swelled in her eyes, giving her a ghastly raccoonlike expression.
Brigit lifted her hand and touched the front of her shirt. When she pulled it away, she stared down at her own chest. That’s when I remembered.
She’d been wearing a pink shirt. With no sequins.
Our purses dropped from my hands as I jumped the top two stairs and reached her the moment she buckled over. I wasn’t in time to keep her from skinning her knees on the pavement, but I managed to keep her from pitching face-first back down the stairs.
When Brigit opened her mouth to speak, there was a burble noise, followed by a stream of blood over her lips. For someone whose body gave off no heat, her blood felt shockingly hot on my chest as she pressed her cheek against my collarbone.
“S-s-sorry,” she managed, her jaw trembling with the effort to form words. “S-so s-sorry.”
“Shhh, shhh.” I stroked her hair, trying to be calm, but my eyes were frantically scanning the street. It had been only seconds since I’d stepped through the door. I still didn’t know what had happened, but I didn’t need to be a detective to figure out a plausible explanation. I knew what a silver-bullet wound looked like on a vampire. Between the bloody chest and what I’d thought had been a backfiring car, the math added up to someone shooting her.
Movement behind a nearby car caught my eye. I dragged Brigit closer to me, angling her body away from the street. I might have been the one in danger, but there was no fucking way I would use my injured friend as a shield.
My purse was a few steps away, gun stashed inside. Too far to get to easily.
I didn’t care.
Brigit gasped for a breath, a weirdly human response considering she didn’t need oxygen to live. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish thrown into a boat, waiting for the club to fall. She continued to gasp in hoarse, ragged breaths, like the air was just out of reach and if she kept trying, she’d be able to catch it finally.
“Show yourself,” I croaked, barely able to get the command out around the fist forming in my own throat. “Show yourself, you fucking coward.”
I expected the shooter to be Hank. Or any one of my mother’s other lackeys. What I didn’t expect was Mercy McQueen herself to step out from behind the car. Any words I might have had for someone else vanished the moment I saw her.
Mercy was still lovely now that she was forty, though I’d never seen anything resembling happiness on my mother’s face. Probably because every time I saw her she was looking at me, and no one alive hated me as much as she did.
“It was supposed to be you,” she seethed, then spit on the concrete. “I waited, I saw the wolf leave. It was supposed to be you coming out.”
“S-s—” Brigit started to apologize again but stopped to cough up more blood.
I hugged her close to me, trying my best to keep her protected should my mother decide to finish the vampire off. I gave Brigit’s shoulder a gentle squeeze and whispered another shushing noise. In response she wrapped her arms limply around my middle.
I could stand and get my gun. There was a chance I might even make it before Mercy showed where she was hiding hers and took a shot. But I couldn’t do it. Brigit held me, and any resolve I had to get up and kill my mother faded into a secondary concern. A nuclear explosion wouldn’t make me come to my feet right then.
Sirens howled nearby.
Mercy had been stupid enough to fire in a residential neighborhood without a silencer. It might have been Hell’s Kitchen, but I also lived a few blocks from a school where a student had been brutally murdered. People took violence seriously in my area.
She looked hesitant, like she was debating whether or not she should try to take the shot or get out while she still had a chance.
“She looks just like you,” Mercy said, stepping away from the sidewalk. “It was supposed to be you.”
I held Brigit close, my fingers tangled in the blood-soaked strands of her blonde hair. I watched my mother carefully until she made up her mind. Mercy lifted the weapon and pulled the trigger. I winced when it clicked, but soon realized the sound I heard was the familiar one of a bullet jamming in the slide. Mercy mustn’t have been accustomed to using silver bullets, because she swore and pulled the slide back to eject the round. If her gun wasn’t designed for use with silver ammunition, and most weren’t, the only way she’d fire a shot now was if she reloaded with standard rounds.
She didn’t have time and she knew it. Giving me one last look, she snarled and bolted into the night. I waited until the sound of her heels was gone before I tried moving again.
“It was supposed to be me,” I whispered.
Tears burned my eyes, streaming down my cheeks in a hot, unstoppable torrent.
One of the things I’d most longed for when I’d dealt with being half-vampire was the desire to cry without seeing blood. My pink-hued tears had been the bane of my existence, and I’d wished sometimes I could cry like a normal person.
Now I would trade it all to give the clean tears back.
I’d do anything to have the strength to easily carry a hundred-and-thirty-pound girl a few blocks. Instead, I was left with only the upper-body strength I’d cultivated and none of the supernatural ability. I dragged Brigit’s body, limp and unresponsive, with agonizing slowness towards Calliope’s Starbucks. I had it in my head if I could get her to the gateway on time, I could undo the damage of a silver bullet straight through the heart.
Bargaining.
I shook my head, chasing away the thought. I wasn’t going through the stages of grief.
Denial.
The dead weight of her body made me stumble and pause to get my balance against a laundromat wall. I tugged her closer. Her arm was wrapped around my neck, and her head lolled forward like a rag doll whose stuffing had come out. Her feet were dragging limply with every step I took, not even giving the impression she was trying to help move herself along.
Of course she’s not helping, the mean voice in the back of my head said. She’s dead.
“No,” I said out loud, angrily and with so much force I wondered if I could make it true just by insisting on it. “Come on, Bri, hang on.” I choked on the last words, my bottom lip quivering hard as I tried to keep my composure.
The police couldn’t be far. They’d been close enough to scare off Mercy. But human support couldn’t do anything for Brigit. If there was a hope in hell of her pulling through, I needed to get her to Calliope.
The bright green Starbucks sign bathed the sidewalk ahead in a beautiful glow. I cried harder, both from relief and the desperate ache building in my shoulders. A block had never seemed so far. I hobbled forward, dragging Brigit along with me. Each square of the sidewalk felt like a mile unto itself.
When we finally stood outside the door, I thought I might collapse. My knees were shaking, and each breath burned my lungs. I was crying so hard I couldn’t see anything clearly through the veil of tears clouding my vision. I balanced Brigit against me and pushed the door open. Her weight shifted, and we both teetered forward.
It didn’t matter. We’d made it. Falling through the gateway would work just as well as walking through it on two feet, and Brigit was a vampire so there should be no issues with her passing through.
Except we didn’t.
Brigit’s weight toppled into me, and we crashed through the door where I landed hard on my back in the middle of a brightly lit Starbucks. I was covered in blood, and there was a dead body on top of me.
I lay dumbfounded under her, staring at the ceiling fan. What had happened? The gate should open for those in genuine need. What need was more genuine than this?
A woman’s scream pierced my thoughts and brought me reeling back to the present. To the bulky presence pressing down on my chest. I struggled to come up to my elbows and pushed a curtain of Brigit’s long blonde hair out of her face. Her vacant eyes stared back at me, but they saw nothing. Her lips were slightly parted and red with her own dried blood. She wasn’t trying to apologize anymore.
She wasn’t going to do anything anymore.
A huge sob bubbled from my lips with an ugly-sounding hiccup.
I’d had one last chance, one final hope, and I had failed.