Day Reaper. Melody Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ secret for your scrutiny, to give you the ultimate power over him, and this is how you repay him, caging him like an animal?” By the end of my sentence, my words were all growls, but I didn’t care. Now that I’d started, I couldn’t seem to stop. “Where did you even get a silver cage on such short notice? I doubt you had one in storage next to the spare test tubes and eyedroppers.”

      Greta sighed. “The cage is just a precaution.”

      “An unnecessary precaution. An insulting precaution, considering he came here of his own volition. I let him go with you because I trusted you.” I pointed at the cage. “This is a betrayal, Greta, and you know it.”

      “What I know is that I don’t know. I don’t know shit about the creatures we’re up against, and that ignorance got hundreds of people killed.” Greta swallowed, and for the first time since she had entered the room, her rock-solid aim slipped slightly. “My raid failed, just like you said it would, because we didn’t have adequate weapons to use against them.”

      I glanced at the cage. “Well, it looks like you’re well on your way.”

      Greta pursed her lips and with one last, long hard look, she put up her gun. “Look, Nathan is safe here. The cage aside, we’re caring for him, feeding him, and guarding him.”

      Dominic made a strange noise behind me. “Even lambs are cared for, guarded, and fed before the slaughter.”

      Greta blushed. “It’s just a precaution.”

      “Just a precaution,” I muttered. “Hitler’s Jewish ghettos were just a precaution, and look how that ended. Next, you’ll have me in there, but unlike with Nathan, you won’t have the excuse of science to back you.”

      “Don’t be ridiculous,” Greta scoffed.

      “We could probably learn a great deal from you too,” Dr. Chunn chimed in, only listening enough to know when a scientific opportunity might be presenting itself.

      Dominic growled.

      “Sounds like an excellent idea to me,” a male voice drawled, deep and lazy. Ian Walker stepped out from behind the swinging door. He was tall and lanky, his height all in his legs, and his head was topped by commas of golden curls. His brown, velvet eyes—a gaze that had once looked at me with the heat and devastation of molten lava—now spread chills down my spine. Everything had spiraled so out of control so quickly the last time we’d been together. We’d gone from friends—near-lovers—to enemies in less than thirty-six hours. Meredith thought he was the man who had attacked and nearly killed her last week in her apartment, and considering how we’d left off, I honestly wouldn’t put it past him to maim or kill anyone in his path if it meant subsequently hurting me.

      We’d parted on horrendous terms, at the end of his crossbow, and I didn’t know what slayed me more: the things we’d said to each other or the things I’d allowed to go unsaid. And all of that would remain unsaid, since it seemed we were picking up almost exactly where we’d left off, with a gun aimed between my eyes.

      “How many more people do you think Greta has stowed away back there?” Dominic muttered.

      “Hello, Walker,” I said, ignoring Dominic. My voice sounded as flat and dead as Walker’s gaze. He smelled like mint, as always, but beneath the mint, I could smell the heat and spice and everything Dominic and every vampire I’d ever met had said smelled so damn nice. The smell of his night blood was intoxicating. I swallowed, and the walls of my throat scraped like sandpaper. “Nice to see that, even after all this time, we can pick up right where we left off.”

      Greta’s gaze never left mine, but she wasn’t talking to me when she said, “We’re just talking here. Stand down.”

      “We don’t talk to vampires,” Walker said. “We kill them.”

      “That’s not just any vampire. That’s DiRocco.”

      Walker shook his head. “That was DiRocco.”

      “I can attest that I’m still me,” I said, warily. “Not that anything I could do or say would convince you otherwise.”

      “He turned you against me long before he turned you into a vampire. I should have killed you then.”

      “As if leaving me for dead wasn’t the same damn thing,” I snapped.

      “And yet, here you are, mission unaccomplished.” Walker’s expression twisted painfully. “We were friends once. More than friends. We were—” His voice broke, and whatever he’d been about to say, he dismissed it with a quick shake of his head. “I was wrong about you. And I was wrong to let you live.”

      I heard the strain of his trigger finger contracting, and I realized that dodging a single bullet as a vampire would be as easy as avoiding oncoming traffic while crossing the street as a human—I simply needed to keep my eyes open for danger and side-step accordingly. I felt a sudden sorrow for Walker. He’d been fighting this battle his entire adult life since losing his fiancé and blaming Bex for her death. He’d sacrificed a great deal in his personal war against Bex: a normal life and our friendship. He’d even killed other humans in the effort to kill vampires, all because he thought no sacrifice was too great in the effort to win his personal war against Bex. But what Walker didn’t realize, what his passion and vengeance would never allow him to truly grasp, was that his efforts were futile and self-destructive, tantamount to a fly waging war against the hand swatting at it.

      Walker’s finger muscles were still contracting on his trigger and I was still debating my next move in our conversation after I dodged his bullet when someone slammed into me, knocking me back a step into Dominic and shielding the two of us from Walker, as if we needed shielding.

      Walker’s finger muscles froze and every other muscle in his body began to tremble.

      “Ian,” Ronnie whispered, her voice a soft plea. “Please, don’t shoot.”

      Chapter 6

      A few strands of what was left of Ronnie’s tinsel-thin hair fell from her emaciated scalp in her haste to shield my body with her own. I winced at both the sick straggles of her hair and at her misguided attempt to protect me. I could dodge Walker’s bullet, and if I was wrong about the power and capabilities of my new body or overconfident against Walker’s weaponry, I could probably survive being shot. Dominic most definitely could survive a bullet. I’d witnessed dozens of bullets turn his body to Swiss cheese, and the injuries, which would have killed a man on impact, had only pissed him off. But somehow, we’d ended up in the opposite order—me in front of Dominic and Ronnie in front of me—so the weakest person was the front-row target of Walker’s shot.

      But he didn’t shoot.

      Walker’s jaw clenched, his hands physically shook, and I’d never smelled a more aromatic scent than the cinnamon-mint effervescence wafting from his pores—unadulterated horror, I realized. A little part of me hated that I salivated at the scent of his suffering.

      Considering he was still aiming a gun at me, a very little part.

      A rattling growl swelled the room. I opened my mouth to admonish Dominic; the growl became louder, and I realized the noise was coming from me. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Ronnie, stand down.”

      Ronnie didn’t move. Walker’s trembling worsened as he studied her, from the dead strands of her СКАЧАТЬ