the cabin door clicking open made the hunters freeze in place.
“Fuck,” Jackson mouthed, envisioning one of the addled and brawny crewmen seconds away from trapping them in a bathroom with nowhere to hide. Was nothing going to go right for them?
Garrett pivoted to the door. His hand reached for the Glock, but he kept the weapon in its holster as he stepped back into the cabin.
“Mister Garrett?” a surprised female voice said. “You still here?”
“It looks that way,” Garrett said amiably. Jackson stood and looked over his uncle’s shoulder.
The maid gawked, confused but not alarmed. She smiled when she noticed him, apple cheeks coloring, and Jackson stifled a groan as he remembered how recklessly his compelled ass had flirted with this girl. Her hands clutched before her. “I sorry I so late today. They say you check out.”
“That’s alright, Carmen,” Jackson said as he pushed past Garrett, who was wearing a terrifying caricature of a dopey smile. “We just stopped in to check on Cassidy. Do you know where she is?”
“Oh, Miss Cassidy gone for the day with Miss Monica.”
“So she’ll be back?” Jackson asked, forcing a buoyant tone. Garrett shot him a warning glare over the death grimace.
The maid frowned. “I think so?”
“Okay, thank you, Carmen. We’ll check back later,” Garrett sang and dragged Jackson out of the cabin by an elbow. “For the love of God, don’t waste a stroke of luck with small talk,” he hissed under his breath. In the lobby, he headed for the stairway.
Jackson grabbed his shoulder. “She won’t be down there. They must have moved her to the house.”
“Or she could be dead,” Garrett snapped. “That maid only knows what she’s told to know.”
“We can’t risk getting trapped down there until we’ve searched everywhere else.”
Garrett’s mouth pinched with banked anger. “Down there” was Kambyses along with about ten or twelve armed crew who were likely compelled to kill them on sight. But Kambyses was not their first priority. Getting Cassidy medical care was. Jackson had insisted, and Garrett had grudgingly agreed. Once that was done, there would be plenty of time to separate Kambyses from his head and bring the apocalypse down on every bloodsucker in existence.
“I’m going to the house,” Jackson said and turned to the exit. They had also agreed that they wouldn’t split up this time, and he counted on his uncle not to risk both their lives by arguing about it now. He didn’t.
The plan had been to secure Cassidy on the Sea Ray and get her to an ambulance before dealing with Kambyses. Instead, they walked down the dock, fully exposed in the middle of the day, on their way to break into a mansion. They walked as quickly as they dared while also looking like they belonged there, gambling—again—that at a distance, their black clothing could be mistaken for crew uniforms. If someone aboard saw them go and thought otherwise, the jammers they had left made it impossible to notify anyone else.
Once on the property, they veered off the paved path and hugged the shadows of the box-trimmed hedges up to the main house. With soft pops from his silenced Glock, Garrett knocked out every camera they spotted—just in case—reminding Jackson of his own less-than-stellar marksmanship skills. With his right hand crippled, and training with his left lagging, he was far from sharp shooter material.
He followed his uncle across the spongy green lawn to a side door. Beside it, hidden in more manicured greenery, was a large Briggs and Stratton generator. While Garrett picked the lock, Jackson located the generator’s propane line and twisted the handle to the closed position.
Once inside the garage, they broke open the circuit breaker panel and threw the master power switch. The generator outside sputtered briefly before falling silent again, starved of fuel. For good measure, Garrett fired a round into the panel and the transfer switch. The house would be powerless for the foreseeable future—and all surveillance equipment along with it, hacked or not.
Most of it, anyway.
A human surveillance system was already tromping down the hall the moment they cracked open the door to the house itself, a beefy brute in jeans and a shirt tight enough to show off enormous pecs. Probably coming to see why the generator had failed. Coordinating with quick gestures, the hunters flattened against the wall to either side of the door and waited for their prey to step through.
Before Pecs realized he wasn’t alone, Jackson landed a right hook with devastating force. Garrett took it from there with a chokehold. Two minutes after that, Mr. Security lay in the trunk of a BMW, hogtied with FlexiCuffs and gagged with duct tape. One eye looked puffy. The other blazed fury.
Jackson swiped the radio from the guy’s belt, set it to low, and clipped it to his own vest. “So, Uncle Garrett. You do know how to play well with others, after all.”
Garrett slammed the trunk on their catch. “Let’s keep these incidents to a minimum, shall we?”
Jackson took point as they advanced into the house. His nose caught the scent of food cooking before he heard dishes clattering through an arched doorway up ahead. Risking a peek around the corner, he spotted two unfamiliar men and a woman eating wordlessly at a table. Mr. Security’s cohorts, judging by their prime physical conditioning and sidearms. Probably Bijou’s enslaved daytime security detail.
Other noises came from areas of the kitchen not visible from his vantage point. Impossible to say who was there or even how many. Before he could over-think it, he soft-footed past the entry. Garrett followed.
They encountered no one else all the way through the grandiose foyer and up the pompous staircase. The dead eyes of the security cameras did not see them, and the radio remained silent. On the second floor, a single small window at the far end cast a gray gloom over a hallway, lined by four doors on each side. With Garrett covering his back, Jackson, gun back in his hand, moved quickly and silently from door to door. Each room featured a different decorative style, catering to a variety of sensual proclivities. All were empty.
Doubt nudged Jackson. Could she still be on the yacht after all? Had she died? Or…? No, he refused to entertain that possibility. He would not find her in a dark corner somewhere in a vampire’s daytime coma, never to wake again because she, too, would die when Kambyses met his end.
He opened the second to last door. Heavy brocade drapes, wide open, revealing a bed and—
“In here!” he called softly.
Garrett, who had been moving down the hall backward, keeping an eye out for pursuers, turned and slipped through the door with Jackson. While his uncle canvased the room and the adjoining bathroom, Jackson holstered his gun and leaned over the gaunt body on the bed.
His relief at finding her drained away at the sight of her bloodless face. He probed her neck. Found only a thready pulse.
Behind him, Garrett muttered a curse. “For the love of God, Jack. The only place she’s going is the morgue. There’s nothing you can do for her.”
The pulse ticked harder against his fingers as her eyes fluttered open deep in their sockets. Those eyes. Glazed with exhaustion, but clear blue as the sky. Her spirit was still in this shell of a body, still alive and fighting.
“Hey, Cass,” he said, taking one of her flaccid, fever-hot hands in his. “We’re getting you out of here. Hang on just a little longer, okay?”
Her cracked lips barely moved. “Jack?”
“Yes, babe. It’s me. The real me.” He nodded at Garrett. “Him, too.”
“About…fuuugin time.”
Jackson grinned. “That’s my girl.”
The radio clipped to his vest crackled quietly. “Status check.”
He held his breath. No reply. No follow up.
“That’s our cue, Jack. Time to go.”
Jackson pulled back the covers and paused in shock. She was skin and bones, dressed in nothing but a slip, her movements feeble as a newborn kitten. “Garrett, grab that blanket over there. Help me get her wrapped up.”
“Jack—”
“Just do it!”
Garrett cursed under his breath, but complied. Together, they bundled her emaciated body into Jackson’s arms, her head lolling against his shoulder. Gun muzzle leading the way, Garrett carefully opened the door…and stopped.
“Well, if it isn’t the special one,” he drawled and let the door swing wide.
Monica stood in the hall, hands clasped. “You can’t take her. Don’t you understand? She’ll die if you take her away.” Heedless of the silencer pointed at her sternum, she stepped toward them. “Please don’t do this. If you care for her at all, let this process conclude. There is no other hope for her.”
Jackson hated himself for the renewed doubt bubbling in his belly. Cassidy, a boneless weight in his arms, gave no sign she even heard the conversation. He tightened his hold on her.
“Why don’t you explain it to us some more?” Garrett gestured “come in” with the Glock.
Monica, dressed in a fluttering white tunic over a pair of blue jeans, advanced, her anxious eyes locked to Garrett’s. “The process can’t be reversed now. She should have received the blood last night, but she wanted to witness one more sunrise.”
“Stop right there,” Garrett warned.
She didn’t seem to hear him. “I pray that won’t cost Cassidy her life. I pray she survives to sunset.”
“She’ll be fine if we get her out of here now,” Jackson said to convince himself more than anyone else.
“No! You’re killing her.” Tears now. Wild gesticulation. The tip of the silencer almost touched her sternum.
“We don’t have time for this.” In one fluid motion, Garrett holstered the Glock, grabbed Monica’s wrist, pulled her around against himself and clamped a hand over her mouth. She didn’t protest, though Jackson realized a moment too late that her quiet had nothing to do with surprise and everything with intention.
Her free hand flashed beneath the drapes of her shirt. Then the unmistakable electric snapping of a stun gun filled the air before it went silent against its target.
Teeth clenching, eyes bugging, hands flailing, Garrett jerked from head to foot in a violent, uncoordinated dance. Finally, he crashed to the floor, curled into a fetal position, and lay still.
“What the fuck,” Jackson said before he could stop himself.
Monica retrieved Garrett’s firearm and tossed it aside. Then she studied her handiwork. Gone was the desperate woman of moments ago. A fire-haired warrior savoring victory stood in her place. “What a pity that fancy vest of yours doesn’t cover those tender bits.”
Jackson’s mind reeled. Just like that, he was on his own and up to his eyeballs in alligators. Again. He spun on a heel to put Cassidy back on the bed, but by the time he reached for his gun, it was already pointing at his forehead.
“No sudden moves,” said the man holding it, one of the two he had just seen eating downstairs.
Jackson slowly raised his hands and tried to think. He’d have to lull them, bide his time until he saw an opportunity to act. Until Garrett got over his fried balls. He glanced at his uncle and ground his back teeth in frustration. The second male guard was there, too. He had pocketed the Glock, retrieved a pair of FlexiCuffs, and reached for Garrett’s wrists. When Garrett tried to struggle, Monica stuck him with the stun gun again, this time in the neck. He collapsed, moaning, perhaps unconscious, judging by how limp his arms were as they were secured behind his back.
Jackson bit back a blue curse. How the fuck was he going to overpower one cunning chick, two trained guards, and two loaded guns all by himself?
Without getting anyone he cared about killed?
Before sunset?
“Don’t blame yourself,” Monica said, advancing on him. “I’ve had my master’s blood. I heard the two of you breathing like bears shambling past the kitchen.” She cocked her head at him, her smile as empty as her eyes. “And since you’re so obsessed with helping Cassidy, I think I know just what to do with you.”