Vampire Most Wanted (Argeneau #20)

Vampire Most Wanted (Argeneau #20) Page 7

Chapter Seven

It was hunger that woke Marcus. His stomach was cramping with it. That awareness was followed by the realization that he was lying on a bed, under a blanket. A glance around told him where he was and reminded him what had happened. It also explained why he was so hungry. The one bag of blood hadn't been enough to make up for the blood his body had used healing his balls.

Grimacing at the thought of the injury he'd taken, Marcus reached down to feel gingerly around under the blanket. His jeans were hard and crusty with dry blood around the groin, but there was no longer any pain down there. He'd healed. Great. Now he just had to get up, get out of here without his oh-so-lovely hostess busting his balls again, literally, and get back to the SUV to find some blood. Unless, of course, the blood he'd brought here was still around. From the disgusted look on Divine's face, he doubted she'd consumed it. She'd acted like it was skanky week-old roadkill he'd offered her. Here he'd been trying to do something nice and she'd beaten the crap out of him and sneered at his offering.

"Women," he muttered under his breath, and was about to shift the blanket off himself and get up when a sound in the other room made him pause. He supposed he should have assumed it was Divine. It was her RV after all, but there had been something furtive about the sound. He lay still, ears straining, and then stiffened and closed his eyes to feign sleep as he heard the bedroom door slide open.

It was barely opened when it closed again, but the sound came with a smell that told him the person at the door wasn't Divine. She smelled like wild roses and vanilla, a surprisingly potent combination that made him think of cupcakes in the garden. It made him hungry.

However, the smell that had slid into the room when the door was opened was musk and male sweat. Marcus opened his eyes to find the room empty. Surprised by that, he eased the blankets aside and carefully sat up, relieved when the action didn't add to the pain his lack of blood was causing. He was weak though. He needed blood.

The distinct whoosh of the RV's screen door closing made Marcus get to his feet and head out of the room to investigate. Even if he only caught a glimpse of whoever was walking away from the RV, it was something, he thought.

Marcus was halfway across the lounge area when flames suddenly exploded outside the windows on either side of him. Freezing, he glanced from one window to the other and then continued forward, running now. He pushed through to the curtained-off area with the table where Divine did her fortune-telling, noting that there were flames outside those windows as well.

Muscles tightening, Marcus reached the door and tried to open it, not terribly surprised when the doorknob turned but the door didn't budge. Why set the RV on fire and leave the door open for the person inside to escape? And it had to have been deliberately set on fire. Flames were shooting up at every window. Natural fires did not start that way. Besides, he could smell gas. It must have been used as an accelerant. Put that together with the attack that had left Divine and the RV bloodied last night and it appeared someone was out to get her.

Grinding his teeth together as the doorknob grew hot in his hand, Marcus stepped back and then threw his weight at the solid panel. That would have done it on most doors he'd encountered, but all it did here was crack the solid inner door in a couple spots. The center held fast. They must have jammed something up against it inside the screen door, he realized.

The fire was growing quickly. Judging by the way the fire had erupted, they must have poured the gasoline all the way around the RV and then set it on fire. It was the only explanation for the way the flames had popped up at every window. But the fire was quickly taking hold now, eating into the fiberglass and whatever else the RV was made of, and the heat inside was quickly becoming like an oven on broil. Immortals tended to be highly flammable and Marcus knew he didn't have long.

Giving up on the door, he turned and glanced from one window to another and then hurried back into the lounge area. After a brief pause, he settled for the window above the couch. It was bigger and he could use the couch as a launching pad, he decided, and ran for it. When he hit the couch and leaped up, Marcus raised his legs, drawing them close to his chest even as he curled his head down and wrapped his arms around it, trying to make himself as small as possible as he crashed into and through the window. It was only as the glass cut into him that Marcus considered that he should have thrown one of the kitchen table chairs through it first to clear away the glass, and it was only as the flames licked at him that he thought he should have dampened the blanket on the bed and wrapped it around himself before leaping out. 

Hindsight, however, was as useless as it was perfect, Marcus thought grimly as he felt his skin catch fire on his back and arms as he passed through the flames. He crashed to the ground with a jolting thud what seemed like hours, but must only have been seconds, later. Despite the pain radiating through every part of his body, Marcus began to roll away from the RV as soon as he hit dirt. He rolled once, twice, and then crashed into the cotton candy stand stationed on this side of Divine's home.

Pausing then on his back, Marcus raised his head to peer along his body, relieved to see that he didn't appear to be on fire anymore. Sighing, he let his head drop briefly, took a deep breath, and then started to get up, only to groan and fall back as his body complained strenuously. He might not be on fire now, but he'd obviously not got away unburned. His skin was tight and painful in several places, his back, legs, and arms bearing the worst of it. Immortals were very flammable, human kindling. He was lucky that rolling had put out the flames.

Sighing, Marcus closed his eyes, but immediately blinked them open again as the sound of voices calling out in alarm told him that the fire had been noticed and the carnies were coming to investigate. He suspected that since he was a newcomer and no one had seen him crash through the window, he'd be suspect number one for who had set the fire. The thought was enough to make Marcus move, pain or no pain. He was in no shape to control the minds and thoughts of a large crowd of people. Hell, at peak health, he couldn't do it.

Pushing himself to his feet, he leaned against the cotton candy stall and stumbled forward along it, wincing as his shoulder and upper arm rubbed against the wooden surface. After a couple of feet, Marcus gave that up. He was moving too slowly and his legs were wobbling, threatening to collapse under him with every move. There was no way he was going to make it back to his SUV and the blood waiting there.

Marcus swallowed and took a deep breath, trying to clear his mind and figure out what to do. His brain was presently a chaotic mass of pain and confusion and his thinking was definitely less than optimal or it wouldn't have taken him as long as it did to notice the door next to him. Once he did notice it, however, hiding inside the cotton candy stand he was leaning against seemed the best option. If he'd had the energy, Marcus would have cursed at himself for being so slow. Instead, he merely turned to the door, closed his hand around the padlock, and pulled once, hard.

He was rather amazed when it jerked open. Marcus hadn't really thought he'd had the strength in him. But perhaps adrenaline was making the difference. There was definitely a ton of adrenaline coursing through him as he listened to the sounds of people rushing this way. Pushing the door open, Marcus slid inside the stall, closed the door, and then dropped to the floor like a stone, the last of his energy spent.

"What the hell," Divine breathed into her motorcycle helmet, automatically letting up on the motorcycle's throttle as she spotted the huge bonfire that had once been her RV at the end of the midway. She noted the silhouettes of people against it next, and at first wasn't sure what they were doing, but then realized several were rushing around throwing pails of water at the conflagration while others shot fire extinguishers at it. Still others were frantically screaming her name. They thought she was inside, Divine realized, and then remembered that while she wasn't, Marcus was.

Cursing, she sent the motorcycle racing forward, quickly crossing the distance to what had once been her home. At the edge of the group she didn't so much stop and dismount as step off as she let the motorcycle fall. The tires were still moving as it crashed onto its side. Divine undid and tugged her helmet off, dropping it by the bike as she hurried forward.

"Oh Divine! Thank God!" Madge cried, spotting her and rushing to her side.

"What happened?" she asked grimly, moving along the RV, checking the windows for movement and a way in.

"Nobody knows. It just went up like tinder," Madge said anxiously, following along behind her. "We've called the fire department, but weren't sure if you were inside. The men have been trying to beat the fire back from the door so someone could run in and try to get you out if you were in there."

"Tell them not to bother with the RV, but to start watering down or moving the nearby stalls and trailers," Divine said quietly, and then turned to peer at the woman, giving her a little mental nudge to ensure she did that, before turning and continuing around the RV.

She walked around the front of the vehicle. There was a door behind the driver and passenger's door that led into the closet in her bedroom, and she'd hoped she might get through to the living area that way, but the fire was worse here than anywhere else. Divine continued around the RV, pausing when she spotted the smashed window in the lounge area. The smell of burnt flesh surrounded her there. Divine ground her teeth together and started toward the window with some vague intention of jumping through it and inside. But the moment she moved toward the RV the scent began to fade.

Pausing, she turned slowly, following her nose as the smell grew stronger. Firelight gleaming off of blood and burnt skin on the side of the cotton candy trailer caught her eye, and then she noticed that the padlock was broken. She was just stepping toward it when three men hurried around the burning RV toward her.

"The fire trucks just started up the midway."

"We're moving the cotton candy stand further away."

"Everyone else is watering down the Tilter to make sure it doesn't catch fire."

Divine blinked as each man contributed a comment, but they weren't done.

"We were going to back Roch's truck up to the cotton candy trailer, hook it up and pull it further away, but can't get it through the back lot."

"We'd have to move about a dozen other vehicles to get it here."

"No time for that, so the three of us are going to haul it. If we can."

The last man, a wiry little guy who was somewhat lacking in muscle, sounded pretty dubious about achieving that feat and Divine didn't blame him. While the stand was on wheels and Bevy was one of the men and a big brute, Mac and the thin kid she didn't know were the other two. She didn't think they'd be able to move it either.

"I'll help," she announced, moving up to the end where the trailer hitch was. "You guys push and I'll steer."

The men nodded and rushed around to the other end of the small trailer.

"Ready?" she asked, bending to slip one hand under the hitch to lift it off the bricks it rested on.

Grunts and groans answered her as the men put their backs into moving the trailer. She wasn't terribly surprised when it barely inched forward, in fact she was prepared for it and simply lifted the hitch upward and moved away from the RV, pulling the trailer behind her. Divine tugged it past the RV, weaved between a couple of other vehicles and into the center of the back lot before stopping and setting it down.

Walking back around the trailer, she grimaced to herself when she saw the three men standing a good twenty feet back, gaping at her and the trailer. Sighing, she moved toward them, quickly slipping into first one man's mind and then each of the other's and rearranging their memories a bit so that they recalled the hard, gut-wrenching, grunting work of pushing the trailer away from the RV.

"Good work," Divine praised them quietly when she was done. "Perhaps you should go see if they need help with the Tilt-A-Whirl."

The words were accompanied by a mental nudge that had them nodding, turning toward the RV, and heading away to find the others.

Shaking her head, Divine turned back to the trailer. The door was stuck, or appeared to be at first. After a moment, though, she got it open enough to realize that Marcus was lying in front of it. She called his name, but when he didn't respond, she forced the door open, pushing his body across the metal floor inside as she did. Once she could slip in, she did, and then let the door slide closed and bent to examine Marcus.

The smell of burnt flesh was overwhelming in the small space and Divine had to hold her breath as she examined him. Fire was one of the few things that could kill one of their kind, although it took special circumstances to succeed with it. Trapping someone inside a burning building or vehicle was special enough . . . so long as that someone didn't manage to escape before combusting. Marcus had managed to escape, badly burned but before the temperature had got so hot that he combusted.

Divine shook him gently, not really wanting to wake him to the pain he was no doubt in, but needing to know how bad he was. When he didn't rouse at all, she shifted him away from the door, straightened, and peered out. The night sky was lit up not just by the fire, but by both red flashing lights and bright white ones, and she could see water arcing into the air around her RV. The firemen were hard at work.

"Blood."

Divine glanced down at that word as Marcus suddenly caught her ankle in a hard grip. Easing the door closed, she knelt next to him again. "How bad is it?"

"Blood," Marcus repeated.

Divine sighed, but nodded. "I'll find someone."

"No." His hand tightened on her ankle. "My SUV."

"What about it?" she asked with confusion.

"Blood . . . there," he gasped.

Divine frowned, her confusion only deepening, and then she recalled the bags he'd carried into her RV and that he had even slapped one to his mouth and drained it. She asked with amazement, "You mean that bagged stuff?"

He grunted and Divine shook her head.

"We can't survive on that, Marco. The nutrients die the moment it leaves the body. You need—"

"No," he hissed. "Bagged."

"Your bagged blood is in the refrigerator in my RV," she said, and then added dryly, "And I am not going in there to get it."

"More," he gasped. "SUV."

Divine clucked impatiently. Bagged blood would not help him through this. He needed live blood to give him strength and help him heal. However, she knew without question that the man was stubborn enough to refuse to feed from a mortal if she brought him one of the carnies. Besides, the trailer was tiny and hot and stank of burnt flesh. Getting him out of there and to his SUV was rather attractive just then. And once she had him in the SUV she could take him elsewhere to find donors to feed from. It was never a good idea to feed where you lived. Divine avoided that as a rule.

Decision made, she bent and scooped him up.

"What . . . doing?" he almost moaned the unfinished question, but Divine got his drift.

"Taking you to your SUV," she said grimly, turning to the door and cracking it open with the fingers of the hand at his shoulders so that she could peer out.

"Bring . . . here," he gasped.

Divine snorted at the very suggestion. "I'm not bringing anything here. You need blood to heal, but once you get it, you're going to scream your head off and thrash like a landed fish. I'm getting you the hell out of here and somewhere you can't alert the whole town to the agony you're going through."

Marcus groaned but didn't protest further so she supposed he thought that was the right decision. It didn't matter if he did or not, though; it was what she was doing, Divine thought grimly and slipped out of the trailer once she saw that the way was clear.

The first problem Divine encountered was that she had no idea where his SUV was. It took some hunting to find it and then she only knew she had the right vehicle because it had Canadian plates. That should have raised a lot of questions with the carnies. The only way it couldn't have was if Marcus had controlled some minds and such, she thought as she finally paused beside the vehicle.

"Keys?" she asked, glancing to the man in her arms.

"Pocket," he said, or at least she thought that was what he mumbled. Using the back of the SUV to help hold him up, she quickly patted him down until she found the keys in his pocket, his jeans pocket of course. Rolling her eyes, she slid her hand into the tight space to snatch the keys out, doing her best not to feel anything but the contents of his pockets. Dear God, she was an old woman, she shouldn't be shy about digging around inside a man's pocket . . . should she?

Shaking that worry away, Divine eyed the key fob on the chain with other keys and then pressed the broken lock symbol twice and heard the clicking as the locks were released. She then immediately slid the keys into her pocket, debated how to open the door she had leaned the man against, and then sighed to herself. There was nothing else she could do; she hefted him over her shoulder, wincing at his cry of pain, and then used her free hand to open the back door. She leaned forward then, easing him off her shoulder and onto the SUV floor, then shifted his legs inside and followed to close the door behind them.

There was a small refrigerator built into one corner of the back of the SUV. It was locked and she searched briefly through his keys until she found the right one and opened it, but then simply stared at the contents. Six bags of blood, almost ice-cold. Divine grimaced at the sight. Junk food for immortals. It held little in the way of nutrients, but it was what he wanted and she supposed at this point, even a small amount of nutrients were better than none.

Shaking her head, she grabbed a bag and turned to Marcus. He was still conscious and his fangs slid out as soon as he spotted the bag in her hand so Divine popped it to his mouth, waited for it to empty, and then replaced it with another. There were six bags in the refrigerator and Marcus went through them in maybe a little more than six minutes. He began to thrash and groan even before he finished the last bag. The healing was starting and it was obviously going to be nasty.

Divine peered at him with concern for a moment and then cursed under her breath and began to shift over the backseats to the driver's seat, his keys still clutched in her hand. They couldn't stay here. She had to get him the hell away from the carnies and anybody else if she didn't want him drawing attention to them. 

That thought uppermost in her mind, she started the engine and managed to maneuver them out of the back lot and onto the road. Marcus began thrashing and shrieking in the back almost the moment she got the tires on blacktop.

Divine ground her teeth and did her best to ignore the tortured sounds, as well as the way the vehicle rocked with his wild thrashing. She needed to concentrate. She needed to find someplace secluded enough that his screams wouldn't be overheard.

Marcus was suffering. His entire body felt like it was on fire, from the tips of his toes to the ends of the hairs on his head. Everything seemed to be screaming in agony. He'd taken enough damage that the six bags in the truck hadn't been enough. He needed more.

"Divine," he croaked, writhing on whatever it was he lay on. He really had no idea, and didn't care. All he cared about in this world was making the pain stop. He'd give her Bastien's number and have her order more blood brought at once. He needed it. That was the only thing that would end this agony.

"Divine," he gasped, rolling his head back and around looking for her. He was in the SUV, he saw. Alone. Groaning, he curled into a ball on the vehicle floor and wept helplessly, overwhelmed by the pain thrashing him. But then he forced himself to drag himself closer to the door and reach for it. He needed blood.

Before he could even try to open it himself, the door was pulled open from outside, revealing Divine and a young mortal woman in a nightgown. He stared blankly for a moment, overwhelmed once again, this time by the smells and sounds coming from the blank-faced mortal woman. He could actually smell and hear the blood pumping through her body, and it was beautiful, he thought briefly and then lunged at the mortal, his fangs sliding ou