“Black in Back” (conclusion)

She was only out for a few seconds. When she came to, dogs were baying in the distance and someone was hauling her arm from its socket. She staggered onto her feet and lashed out, but her fist whistled harmlessly through the night. A breathless, “Tess, it’s me,” took a second to register. She dug in her heels despite the danger.

“Black?”

“Shut up and run. That way.”

She swung wildly in whatever direction and took off at full speed. A thousand panicked thoughts raced with her, including the sharp concern that she had wrenched something when she fell and she was slowing up because of it.

Black urged her from behind. “Keep going.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” He gave her a shove for encouragement. “Keep going!”

She wanted to ask about Grace, but questions and whatever she had wrenched would have to wait. Black herded her through the dark, cutting her left or right when he wasn’t on her heels, and she ran blindly, barely one step ahead of freaking out. She thought of rabbits and foxes and deer bolting through the woods with hunters hot on their trail. If she stopped, the fear would drop her before her pursuers could. So she pushed her pounding heart and straining sinews that little bit further, wondering if the speck of light in her vision was a real light or a sign that she was about to faint. She heard nothing beyond the roar in her ears, but the hunt hadn’t stopped. Why were they bothering to run when Raymond owned the whole damned hill and recruited more psychotics than a terrorist cell? He probably had a helicopter stashed somewhere, its rotors warming as the pilot ran a pre-flight safety check and the snipers loaded their long range weapons. The motorcycles and ATVs would swarm out of nowhere next, converging from all directions—just like the headlights looming in front of her, blazing halogen at eye level. Jesus, what the hell kind of military muscle did Raymond have on retainer?

Tess stopped running. She stopped dead in the supernova glare and waited, sobbing, for the impact.

It didn’t come. The vehicle, whatever it was, veered to one side and braked hard. Tess was still waiting to be hit when the rear door opened and, impossibly, Grace was hollering, “Get in!” through the driver’s window.

Stupidly, Tess blurted, “A Hummer?”

Black nailed her square between the shoulders. She pitched forward, caught herself on the running board, and clambered into the backseat when he shoved her in the butt. “Go!” he shouted, and Grace hit the gas before he was all the way inside. They got some extra momentum from an explosion at their backs; the Hummer bucked and roared and the back window disappeared with a crackling smash, but it kept going.

It kept going until it had careened down the winding driveway and blasted through the gates at the bottom of the hill, leaving twisted metal, a flaming estate, and a furious vampire in its wake.

………

Even for the filthy rich lord of preternatural darkness, intelligent help was hard to find. The goons guarding Grace’s room had been the ones to answer Raymond’s summons, thus leaving their post untended and enabling their charges to escape. Between them, Black and Grace had known enough of the mansion’s layout to make a straightforward getaway. She had run for the garage; he had crossed his fingers and hoped that Tess was being held in Raymond’s suite. He hadn’t expected her to leave through the window, but her impulse had made his job easier. While pondering the quickest climb to the second floor, he had been startled by the crash and seen her catapult through the showering glass like a stunt double for Angelina Jolie.

The action movie reference made the Hummer an appropriate getaway vehicle, though Grace claimed it had been the only one in the garage with keys in the ignition. The explosion, she added, had been helped along by spilled gasoline and the heavy crystal lighter she had grabbed on her way out the door. “Black thought I was nuts to take it, but I’ve been to Raymond’s collectible car museum. He is gonna be so pissed,” she said, cheerfully.

The Hummer barrelled merrily toward the sunrise, past the city limits and heading for open highway.

“Does he have a helicopter?” Tess asked, unable to shake the terror of being pursued.

“Not on the premises. There’s probably a GPS on this thing, though, so we’ll have to ditch it before dark.”

“Why wait until dark? He has daytime thugs.”

“Relax, Tessie. He can’t do anything until the police and fire departments are finished with him.” They had passed squad cars and fire engines racing the other way, lights and sirens screaming in the sleepy pre-dawn silence. Smashing through the gates had barely dented the Hummer’s front end, but the vehicle itself was bound to draw attention, so the looks they got from early morning commuters were mostly disgusted. Grace was happy to flip everyone the finger until Tess told her to quit making them more memorable than they already were for riding in a pimped-up war machine.

She had never seen her sister so giddy. She wanted to throw up and pass out, but she couldn’t stop trembling long enough to do either. By comparison, Grace was almost high.

No, she was high—on adrenaline, on defying death, on the powerful motor vibrating through the steering wheel, on living the adventures of Thelma and Louise with a vampire in the backseat. In short, Grace was crazy.

“What if he owns the cops?”

“Tessie,” Grace reproached, though the more Tess thought about it, the likelier it was.

“Listen, Black told me that Raymond is the godfather of monsters, that the cops couldn’t handle it if the monsters got loose. Doesn’t that suggest the cops know about the monsters, and that some kind of arrangement is in place? Trav’s murder was dismissed so quickly—”

“Will you let Travis go, Tess? He looked like a suicide, so they wrote him up as one. Jesus, girl, you sound crazier than I do. Let me be better than you at one thing, okay?”

“I’m sorry. I’m just scared.”

“Yeah, well, you started it.”

“I did not! You did, by taking him to a party and—”

“Will you two shut up?”

The sisters fell silent. After a minute, Tess said, “We thought you were asleep.”

“Who can sleep with the ugly stepsisters snarking at each other?”

“We’re not step—”

“I said, shut up,” Black repeated, weakly. He sounded more than exhausted; he spoke as if every word took strength he couldn’t spare, but he pushed to get his point across. “Tess is right. There’s an arrangement, but not the way she thinks. Raymond’ll be tied up for a couple of days. We have to disappear before he gets free of the legal red tape. Take us back to the city, Grace. We’ll dump the truck and hide in plain sight until we can get out of town for good.”

“ ‘We’?” Grace echoed, dubiously.

“Yup,” he groused. “Thanks to the ties that bind, now we are three.”

“You’re a vampire,” she reminded him. “Why do you care about us?”

Tess answered for him. “It’s his neck as well as ours. Raymond didn’t starve him for random kicks. He’s never killed a human. Raymond wanted him hungry enough to kill you, Grace. Then he was going to kill me.”

“Yeah, but Black didn’t kill me. He didn’t take a drop.”

“He couldn’t trust himself—could you, Black?”

He said nothing. Tess looked into the backseat. He lay lower than the windows, trying to stay beyond reach of daylight’s creeping fingers. He was worse than pale. He was almost grey, and he looked as if … no, that wasn’t possible. He couldn’t be shrivelling. She had never seen him in daylight, was all. She had learned that vampires didn’t change between dawn and dusk; they could even function if they stayed in shadow, but Black looked thinner than he looked at night. His face looked bonier and his fingers curled as if the muscles in his hands were atrophying. Were his eyes closed? She couldn’t tell their lids from the film that covered them until she saw his lashes spread against his cheek. And he was breathing in a tightly measured rhythm that indicated a losing battle of will over instinct.

The Hummer wobbled as Grace took her eyes from the road. “Tessie, what are you doing?”

She had climbed between the front bucket seats. “Take us back to town, sis.”

“Tess, you can drive this thing. Let me do that.”

“Keep driving, Grace.”

“Kid, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

She did. She absolutely did know. It didn’t mean she wasn’t scared, but she had been scared from the beginning and she had gone forward anyway—because of him, because he trusted her. She was a pain in his ass, but he trusted her. It was only fair that she trust him in return.

She squeezed onto the floor behind her empty seat and whispered his name.

THE END

January 9, 2015