Breathing Fire (Heretic Daughters #1)(53)
That was it, I was done. I braced myself to give the bastard the beating he deserved, but Dom beat me to it. His back was to me as he backhanded his cousin, hard. “I said enough. You do not question me in the midst of battle! I’ve heard your argument. We will settle this after the fight. The longer we stand here, the more of them we’re allowing to escape.”
Cam sent me a scathing look as he stood, touching his bloodied lip as though I’d done it. I only wished. “Asshole,” I mouthed at him. Both of his hands clenched. Yes, I kind of enjoyed baiting enraged bears. It was one of my hobbies, and clearly I excelled at it… Just ask anybody.
“Nice crown,” Christian said quietly as he came up beside me. “But why nab it? You have the urge to play dress up? You like to pretend to be Queen Jillian?”
I bit my lip, embarrassed. “It was shiny.” He stifled a loud laugh that got us some dirty looks. “It has rubies on it. It’s hard to pass up rubies.” He laughed harder and I elbowed him in the ribs.
Dom sent us a stormy look. “Back to battle!” he roared at any soldiers still milling.
“We’re running low on explosives,” Christian told me as we set off.
“I’m sure we’ll have no trouble improvising,” I told him with a grin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Badass Supermodels
Our ragtag crew was advancing carefully into the next bank of houses, when a voice from the back of the ranks spoke up. “Far be it from me to slow down two badass supermodels on a mission, but we have a problem,” a male voice said wryly.
I could see Christian out of the corner of my eye as we turned, his stance and movements almost synchronized to my own. We shared a look, our expressions almost identically similar, with arched brows and half-smiles. “What’s the problem?” I called out, scanning the faces to see who had spoken.
“You’re a badass supermodel,” Christian muttered under his breath at the same time, taking the mature approach, as usual.
A tall, thin man stepped forward. He wore a long, high-collared trench coat over the standard body armor. He looked more like a scholar than a fighter, with unkempt, long dark hair, and thick glasses, a keen intelligence clear in his eyes. His appearance was deceptive, though, as I saw that his hands on his impressively modified crossbow were steady and sure. In fact, just about everything about him that I could see was a contradiction. His shoulders were slumped, but his body was tensed and alert. His smile was sheepish, but his tone when he spoke was clearly wry and sarcastic, his look sardonic as he met my eyes steadily. “You’re really pretty and all-”
I shot Christian a look. “He’s talking to you,” I told him.
He spoke at the same time, smirking, “He’s talking to you.” Christian stifled a laugh. “Jinx,” he said, under his breath, just like a ten year old. I turned my attention back to the strange man as he continued, as though we hadn’t rudely interrupted him.
“And I’ve seen that you have a particular talent for finding and killing things, but you might want to let me take point for this next bit.” He tipped an imaginary hat at us. “Corbin, vampire hunter, at your service.”
“Fuck,” I said succinctly.
“Shit on bloody shingles,” Christian swore.
We weren’t the only ones cursing. Soft and not so soft cursing could be heard from our strange little crew for several moments while we processed the information. If a vampire hunter wanted to take point, that could only mean one thing. He sensed vampires. I hated vampires. Everyone did. Everybody hated necros, too, but necros were easy, clean kills, for the most part. Vampire kills were never easy, and never clean. They rested in nests, and swarmed like insects the second any of the others in their Kiss were threatened. If it was a small Kiss, and you had a hunter with you, it was still usually a messy business, but larger groups of them just sucked, no matter how you planned it. Yes, I used the word sucked to describe vampires. So?
What was almost worse than the messy kills was the fact that you couldn’t just kill them on sight, like necros. The damned fair-minded druids, always wanting to give everyone a shot before they named them rogue, actually required the hunters to have a warrant that justified killing any of the monsters. Innocent until proven guilty, blah, blah, blah. Of course, that meant that humans died, usually a lot of them, before a vampire got the stake it deserved.
Vampires were a lot like witch-hags, in my mind, when it came to going rogue. It was always only a matter of time.
Corbin ignored all of the cursing, used to it, I was sure. He spoke into the tiny radio clipped to his chest. The radios had been issued to all of us, back at the meet-up point. They’d been silent since before the battle started, which was a good sign. You only used the radio during a fight like this when the shit hit the fan.
“We’ve got a vampire Kiss. Need permission to take it out.”
The response was quick and succinct. “You are cleared to take out any damned thing you find in there.”
Corbin’s eyebrows shot up into his messy bangs. “Is it my birthday or something?” he asked the crowd at large.
Christian shot me a smirk. “I like this one. He speaks our language.”
I had to agree. “He does seem like our kind of people.”
Corbin heard us. “Now, now, I’m not pretty enough for all that, but I’ll do my best to keep up.”