“I was fighting a pack of vamps behind Onyx.” Dee’s voice was flat. She crossed her arms over her chest. “My head hit the pavement, and the next thing I knew, I was in some stinking, dark room. Blood was all around me and your victim—”
“Lisa Durant.”
“Was dead.” Her shoulders tensed. “I don’t remember anything that happened in between that alley and that room. I just remember—”
“I was there,” Simon spoke, holding the cop’s gaze and daring him for a challenge. “I saw the vamps kill the woman. They left Dee in her blood. I saw it all.”
“Bullshit.” Tony stepped forward. “I don’t buy that—”
“It’s my story.” A brief pause. “The one I’ll tell everyone I see if you so much as even think about hauling Dee away from here.” Not going to happen. His temples throbbed in a sickening, painful rhythm.
No one could threaten Dee. She was too important.
“Oh, so you’re just gonna fucking out the vampires?” Disgust had Tony’s lips tightening.
“They outed themselves.” Maybe it was time for the whole world to stop pretending. Feeding rooms were cropping up in most cities—and dumb humans were stumbling inside, some quickly getting addicted to vamp bites. Some never making it back out. Lucky for the vamps, they’d perfected the body ditch over the years.
“There’s a Born Master coming to town,” Dee said and she tilted her head. Simon’s eyes narrowed. Yeah, that was his mark on her neck and he knew the cop saw it. No blood drawn, no bite since Dee didn’t like that. But a sweet suck had done the trick. “I’m the best vampire hunter at Night Watch. You take me out of this game, and there’s no telling what hell will come to the city.”
Tony’s eyes widened. Ah, so the dick hadn’t ever come across a Born? Then he didn’t know what hell looked like. “You can’t kill Borns the way you can most vampires.” No, they were so much harder to slay. He’d once heard of a Born who’d survived a stake to the heart and a partial beheading.
Their bodies were tougher. They healed ten times faster than the Taken. When you were changed into a vampire, you brought some of your human weaknesses with you.
But when you were Born a vampire…
There was no weakness for you. Not once the powers kicked in and the bloodlust began.
“Who are you?” Tony demanded again.
“Ease up, Tony. Simon’s not the bad guy here.” She unfolded her arms. “He knows what I’m up against. He can help me.”
“And I can’t?”
“No.”
Tony flinched.
“You’re a cop. You protect innocents.” She shook her head. “But your job isn’t to kill vampires.”
“Some days it is,” he fired back.
Simon’s brows shot up. So the cop had some bite, did he?
“I know things look bad right now,” Dee said.
“You ran, Dee. Innocent people don’t run.”
Okay, his fault. Simon rolled his shoulders. “I didn’t give Dee much choice. When I hauled her out of that pit, she was barely conscious. Sirens were wailing—I just couldn’t risk her.”
“You couldn’t, huh?”
“No.” Nothing more to say on that. “The woman on the floor was dead. Dee wasn’t. My priority was getting her to safety.”
“Yeah, cause getting in her pants had nothing to do with it, right?”
Fuck him. Simon attacked. In a second’s time, he had the cop pinned to the wall as his fist twisted the front of Tony’s shirt. “Don’t…talk about Dee like that.”
A tap on the back of his shoulder. “Ease up. Tony just turns into an asshole when he’s worried.”
“He needs to watch that tendency. It’ll get him into trouble soon.” He held the cop’s stare. “Real soon.” He unknotted his fingers.
“Christ, Dee, where’d you find him?” Tony muttered, straightening his shirt.
“In an alley, one littered with bullets.” She pushed in between the two of them. “Same place I found you a few years back.”
A grunt, then his lips started to curl, just a bit.
“Tony, we were attacked right before dawn. Some guys in ski masks found us at Simon’s house. They shot up the place.” Her hand lifted to her shoulder. To the wound Simon had all but forgotten when he’d had her in that bed. “We were lucky to get out alive.”
“Hell.”
“Yeah, that’s where we are.” She swallowed and Simon heard the soft click. “But I’ll be damned if I stay here. I’m not going to keep hiding out, waiting for the vamps to strike. We needed to rest. We needed to recover—done that.”