Page 84 of Hunted

Ellie: I’m going to send you a picture of my eyes. No laughing. I just need you to tell me if you’re noticing any changes. Pretty sure it’s just my anxiety. But I’d feel better if you confirmed there’s nothing weird about my eye color close to my pupils.

I sent the pic. Still nothing.

Ellie: Okay, you both promised me no cage fighting.

Hayden still didn’t answer. A kernel of uncertainty formed in my stomach. It was nothing. This was my brain playing tricks. Imagining monsters. Nothing was wrong. She was distracted. Arguing with River. And still I stared at the screen, paralyzed, waiting, begging for her to type back so I would know she was okay.

She didn’t.

My heart beat faster.

I threw my paper towel away, reached for the door. A scream shattered the quiet shush of rain against the roof.

I froze, hand outstretched. The rapid pop of gunfire exploded out in the hallway.

My vision blurred. Blood roared in my ears. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. I stumbled towards the row of bathroom stalls, slipping on the freshly mopped floor. My phone fell from my hand, skittering across the tile and coming to rest beneath the row of sinks. More gunshots rang out, this time right outside the door. I couldn’t draw in air when every breath felt like I was being punched in the chest. I coughed, eyes watering. I scrambled for my phone, managing to kick it further away. I slipped on the wet floor and banged my elbow hard. All the air was knocked from my lungs. I was going to die. Tears blurred my vision. I crawled for the nearest stall. On the screen, I saw my latest texts to Hayden, still unanswered. And one from River.

River: We’re at red. Jori will get you to a secure location—

That was all I had time to read before two vampires burst into the bathroom. Jori and a thin male vampire only a few inches taller than me fought at a speed I could barely follow. Silver knives flashed, blood spraying across the freshly mopped tile.

Jori kicked the male vamp hard in the stomach, knocking him back long enough to insert herself between us. I reached out towards her, but she didn’t take my hand.

“Solar Flare,” she shouted. “I can’t dematerialize.”

The gunfire continued outside in the hall, which meant Quinn was still alive. We just had to hold on until River could get to us. I pulled Sofia’s silver knife from my cardigan pocket. But it was no use. They were moving too fast.

The male vampire lunged for Jori, slashing at her viciously enough that she was forced to stagger back.

A second later, he vanished.

“No!” Jori shouted, lunging for me. “Ellie, don’t let him touch you. They broke the wards somehow. There’s no protection keeping him from ghosting you out of here and I can’t stop him.” She practically tackled me, fierce arms closing around me—

—just as the male vampire rematerialized behind me. Wrapping his arm around my throat, he dragged us both into the darkness.

A silent scream tore from my body. The air was sucked violently from my lungs, blackness pressing in all around me. Red hot pain tore through my stomach, a vicious burn that made me vomit into the blackness. I screamed until my lungs burned, the sound swallowed by the empty void. I would die here in the vampire nothingness between time and space, where no one would ever find me.

We twisted in a vortex of cold and pain. I lost track of time, must have blacked out.

The next thing I knew, Jori and I were through the void, having been spit out onto some sort of cold steel platform. It was a maintenance walkway by the looks of it, narrow, barely four feet wide with heavy iron guard rails on both sides. Jori lay next to me, groaning. Thunder roared around us loud enough to make the walkway we were balanced on shudder. As I dug my fingers into the diamond-shaped holes in the grating, the clouds cleared overhead, the storm blowing through in typical Texas fashion as quickly as it had come.

The full moon illuminated the night sky, causing the hair at the back of my neck to stand on end. The scar River had left at my throat tingled. The grating was wet. Water thundered below us. I looked down and immediately wished I hadn’t. We were trapped on the suspension system over the floodgates of a dam.

“Jori,” I called, voice raspy. “Are you okay?”

“I’m cut up, but I’ll live. Where are we?”

I looked out at the black waters of the Colorado River, at the red and white candy striped radio towers rising above the hills west of Austin and suddenly knew.

“The Tom Miller Dam. West of town.” A series of dams connected the Highland Lakes where the Colorado River snaked through Central Texas. At over one hundred feet high, the Tom Miller Dam had been built in the 1940’s to replace the dam that had collapsed at the turn of the century during a historic flood. The remnants of the destroyed dam now formed the island beneath the Emmett Shelton Bridge where Austinites brought their dogs on the weekends to play, and kayakers paddled, exploring waters which were usually calm. The water was anything but calm today. Five of the six floodgates were open, water pouring from Lake Austin over the spillway downstream into Lady Bird Lake below. The water level was so high much of Red Bud Isle was submerged, the trees with their lovely red and gold fall colors halfway underwater. I could see headlights out in the darkness where evening commuters were still passing over the bridge from Austin back into West Lake Hills, but the floodwater was moving fast, the water level nearly up to the bottom of the concrete safety barrier.

The male vampire who’d dematerialized us here had reformed partway on the platform, and half over the steep precipice past the edge of one of the guardrails. Three bullet holes riddled the center of his chest. I lunged for him as he started to fall, but I wasn’t fast enough. As Jori and I watched, he began to slide through a gap in the bars, eyes unfocused and unseeing.

“Ellie, don’t.” Jori grabbed my arm, stopping me. “He’s already gone.”

We watched him slip over the edge, crashing into the steel girders supporting the massive floodgates before falling one hundred feet down into the churning white floodwaters below.

“He never should have tried to jump,” Jori said. “He stabbed me with one of the Solar Flare X-1 syringes and I nicked him with one, too. I’m not sure how much of a dose he got.”