“One bite and I could tear your head off,” he snarled, his body quivering with barely suppressed anger.
I snorted. “I let you tackle me, Ivan. You’re good at what you do, but with your blood coursing through me, there are very few who could match me.” I turned my head, pressing it against him until he got off me. He slumped in the corner, acting as if I’d whipped him soundly.
“Why, why would you say that?”
The truck hit a particularly bad bump, sending us both sprawling and opening one of the boxes.
The glittering silver stakes that spilled across the rolled-out rug cut short any answer I might have given them.
“Fuck. Maybe Rachel isn’t your friend after all,” he said, picking up a stake and rolling it across his knuckles. He looked over his shoulder at me, just the corner of one eye visible.
Damn him for being so fucking sexy when I needed to distance myself from him.
I made myself sit. Act like nothing bothered me—neither what I’d done to him nor Rachel’s failure to mention she’d acquired more vamp-killing equipment. It made sense, we were going after vampires and the surest way to kill them was a silver stake. Yet I felt...betrayed. She should have told me.
The night faded around us, and the canvas covering of the truck slowly lightened up. Neither of us moved or spoke.
God, what a mess. A Cazador who wanted me dead in the worst way, and was threatening to tell Rachel about the bond I’d forced on her before she was ready. A lovesick werewolf who had played on my sympathies and long-buried desires while he sought to revenge his dead wife. Then there was Rachel and our tenuous friendship. Add to that the fact we were driving into enemy territory filled with rotting werewolves, shadow men, and vampires old enough to make me look like a child.
The day didn’t feel like it could get any worse.
I put a hand to my forehead. “What day is it, Ivan?”
“What?”
“The day of the week. Which one?”
He was quiet a moment. “Monday.”
I laughed, unable to contain it. Why was I not surprised? I lay down on the floor and closed my eyes. Might as well sleep it away and hope that Tuesday would be a little bit better.
One could hope.
CHAPTER 26
RACHEL
After Lea and Ivan climbed into the back, Antonio gave me a strange look, and I suddenly felt like a specimen under a microscope. But I could tell Lea had whipped him good. That thought filled me with more smug satisfaction than I cared to admit as I walked past him and around the front of the truck.
“You’re driving, so why are you still standing there?” I climbed into the cab and pulled my bag strap over my head.
Without a word, he got in and turned the engine over and waited.
I put my bag in the middle between us to set up some boundaries. When I realized he hadn’t started driving yet, I started to get snippy. Then I realized I hadn’t told him where to go.
What if Ivan was right? What if my anger over Antonio was distracting me enough to put us in danger? I reminded myself I’d fought off werewolves with him at my back. I might not like him, but I knew I could count on him in a fight. Like it or not.
I dug Hades’s coordinates out of my bag and plugged them into the GPS. “We need to head out of the village, then northwest.”
He nodded and started to drive, keeping his attention on the road.
I narrowed my eyes. Why was he being so uncharacteristically quiet? I set the GPS next to him so I could focus on the problem of transferring files over from my salvaged hard drive.
After I hooked up my phone to the charger Baran had included, I pulled out the new laptop first, “new” being a relative term. It was refurbished but functional.
Next came what was left of my laptop. I used one of Baran’s screwdrivers to open the pieces. Unbelievably, the hard drive looked intact. That boded well.
I opened the new laptop, replaced its hard drive with my old one, and held my breath as I rebooted the computer and opened the drive.
“Thank God,” I muttered under my breath when I saw everything was intact. I grabbed one of the thumb drives from Baran’s bag, inserted it into the USB port and transferred the files.
“You seem to know what you’re doing.”
It was a statement, not a question, and my gaze jerked up in surprise. “My first two months in war-torn desert country taught me if I had computer issues, there was no Geek Squad around the corner to take care of things for me. So I learned to do it myself.”
He didn’t respond to that, but snuck glances at me as I finished the transfer and swapped the old hard drive for the clean one. Once I had it all together, I went through my messenger bag to make sure everything else was in there.