The Undead Pool

I backed up into Trent. Six excited vampires. My neck was tingling. “Where’s David?”

A muscular vampire I remembered as being one of Piscary’s bouncers pushed everyone back and told them to shut up and make a hole for us. Scott, I think. “He thought it was too crowded and is running with his pack,” Scott said, the lines about his eyes telling me he was worried about his second life as well. I couldn’t tell them to go home and wait.

“Get in the van, Rache!” Jenks prompted from the rearview mirror, but I balked at the muscular bodies and the quick reactions that living a life on the edge of death engendered. It might sound good on paper, but sure as pixy dust, by sunrise there’d be yelling and screaming and blood in someone’s mouth.

Trent’s hand touched the small of my back, and my scar tingled. “They know the risks,” he said, ushering me forward when Ivy yelled at us to hurry up. “It’s their masters’ lives in the balance.” Accepting Scott’s help, Trent stepped inside. Turning, he held out his hand for me. This was a bad idea, but I reached out and let them both pull me up and in.

“Finally!” Ivy muttered, accelerating before the door was even shut.

“Slide down!” someone said, and there were more happy complaints about squishing the ammo and “who took my detonators?”

Jenks’s dust was a contented gold as he sat on my shoulder. “I like these people,” he said as I took the seat right behind Ivy where I could see out the front.

I looked worriedly at Nina, remembering how she’d harbored Felix without anyone knowing. Sure, he had told the Free Vampires to take a hike, but he’d also agreed to give the mystics to the I.S. in exchange for her. Grimacing, I leaned forward to Ivy, lips barely moving. “Is she clean?”

Her grip on the wheel tightened, and I backed up. “Yes,” she said, eyes flicking to Nina then back to the road. “Rachel, she wants to help. To prove that she can.”

I eased back, knowing the importance of that. “Then she should help,” I said to make Ivy’s brow ease a little, but inside, I was worried.

Someone screamed in fun as we took a corner fast to avoid a roadblock, and I was jostled into Trent. He sat me back upright, and I tried to quell a growing feeling of disaster. Everyone was having so much fun. Through the window, I watched the Hollows pass in the darkness. Most of the streetlights were shot out, and an eerie red sheen reminiscent of the ever-after glowed on the abandoned cars and occasional burnt-out shop front. Dark shapes darted from shadow to shadow like surface demons. It didn’t help that it felt as if I’d gotten into a van of Brimstone heads on their way to a concert. “Ivy, crack the windows,” I asked, but I didn’t think the side windows opened any farther. This might be an issue.

Scott quit fiddling with his ammo and leaned across the open space between us. His face held a wide smile, and he rocked from side to side with the van’s motion, his feet solidly planted on the bare floorboards. “Unless you tell us different, we’ll handle the outside. Keep your escape route open. Hold anyone you might flush out.”

I nodded, thinking he looked too eager, but if he was outside, he couldn’t get himself killed inside. My jaw was clenched, and I blinked when one mystic talking about lights at the mortuary suddenly became six or seven yammering at me. Trent surreptitiously took my elbow to keep me from looking too spaced out. It’d gone wrong already, and we hadn’t even arrived yet.

“What is it?” he breathed in my ear, but the vampires in back heard and took an interest, their eyes dilating at the shiver that passed through me.

Damn vampire pheromones, I thought, grimacing. “I’m seeing lights at the mortuary.”

“They moved the run up!” Jenks shouted. “Tink’s a Disney whore!”

Ivy met my eyes through the rearview mirror. “I’m more concerned about the lights behind us.”

“Behind us?” Scott said, and I jumped when a sledgehammer busted the back window right out of the frame.

“Let me!” Scott demanded, but Ivy took a corner too hard. Vampires sloshed and collided, and in the mess, Scott stuck his head out the window as the guy with the hammer busted out another window. It got windy fast, and I took a grateful breath of the fresher air as four vampires hung halfway out the van and shouted at the three beater cars behind us.

“Weres!” Scott said as he came back inside, the narrow bands of blue around his irises concerning me. “We got our rabbits.”

Ivy tapped the brakes, and everyone else pulled their heads back in. Beside me, Trent was looking ill and a little amazed. I knew how he felt. Ivy was careening about as if she sweated Dramamine, but I was beginning to feel sick. “All of you shut up and look civilized!” she shouted, brown eyes almost entirely black. “We’ve got a roadblock I can’t find a way around.”