Authors: Jocelynn Drake
“This is one of my favorite spots in the city, but it closes at five. I have no choice,” she hissed.
“I’m not judging you.” And I wasn’t. There were many things that Mira missed out on due to her extreme allergy to sunlight.
“Sounds like it,” she grumbled, releasing the door as she stepped inside. I barely managed to catch the heavy metal door before it could bang closed.
“Why don’t they just give you a key?” I whispered.
Mira looked over her shoulder at me, her brow furrowed in confusion. “Why? My method works just fine.”
I followed behind her, soundlessly closing the door as I inwardly cursed her grouchiness. Her sharp mood shift could be understood, though. The naturi put her on edge. Neither of us knew what we were facing. We could be entering a battle with anything from the five different clans, or even Aurora herself, though I found it doubtful that the queen of the naturi would come after Mira. After the nightwalker nearly carved out her heart, I was willing to bet that Aurora was going to give the Fire Starter a little room for now.
All moonlight was instantly blotted out by the thick overhead foliage. The air was warm and dense with the scent of plants. The faint sound of trickling water tripped from deep in the room. A dozen different floral scents assailed me, mixing with the lilac scent drifting off of the nightwalker standing before me.
Mira stopped just inside the doorway, her tense body and still as a statue. She reached back with her left hand until her fingertips brushed my arm.
Are they close?
She shoved the question within my brain. With those three words came a tumble of emotions, some feelings I struggled to even put names to. But mostly, it was anger. The naturi were not only in her home, but also in the one place she regarded as a private sanctuary.
“No,” I whispered, batting her hand away. I didn’t want her in my head, cluttering up my thoughts. “Feels like at the other end of the building, larger room.”
“How many?”
“Six.”
“Can you see?”
“A little,” I hedged. I blinked my eyes a couple of times, waiting for my night vision to improve. It was better than most humans’, but from what I could tell, I still lagged behind vampires and most lycans.
Ahead of me, trees and large plants began to take shape. A break in the leaves revealed a glimpse of the windows that comprised the opposite wall. The room we were standing in wasn’t more than twenty feet across.
“The path is narrow and wraps around the room. Stick to your right or you’ll fall in the water in the center of the room,” Mira instructed.
“What room is this?” I asked, following behind her as she headed deeper into the darkness.
“Rain forest.”
That explained the overwhelming humidity. I half expected the ceiling to open up in a brief downpour. Ducking my head to miss a low-hanging palm leaf, I stumbled into Mira, who had halted in the middle of the path.
“Do you hear that?” she demanded in a harsh whisper. I paused, straining to hear anything, but there was nothing beyond the high-pitched laughter of running water and the faint brush of leaves.
“What?”
Mira gave her head a hard shake before slowly moving forward. “Nothing.” Yet even as she spoke the word, I felt her send out a wave of energy from her body. The cool pulse passed through me and rippled through the rest of the building. She was searching for something or someone, which was strange because she could not sense the naturi without me. The nightwalker had briefly gained the ability while in Peru, but from what I had gathered during our recent association, she had lost the power. The ability seemed dependent upon her having access to large amounts of energy from the earth.
“Anyone?” I inquired after a couple of seconds.
“No.” She sounded puzzled, which did not fill me with an abundance of confidence. Mira was a vampire with more than six centuries of experience. The only thing she couldn’t sense was the naturi, and the occasional Ancient vampire. I didn’t like that she sounded puzzled.
“But…?”
Mira paused before a set of doors, her hand resting on the pale silver handle. “I thought…I thought I heard a baby crying,” she hesitantly confessed, then shook her head. “But it was extremely faint. It could have been a car or something else.”
“Do you think…?” I started, but the words seemed to die in my throat. The stealing of human babies was one of the few tales that the old mythology actually got right about the naturi. Unfortunately, they weren’t grabbing the infants because they preferred them to their own sickly children. Theories ranged from ingredients for complex spells to attempting to weaken a generation of humans.
“Maybe, but…I don’t know. The sound is gone now. Let’s keep moving,” Mira said, jerking open one of the doors.
We entered the main lobby of the conservatory, with its ceiling now standing a good two stories above us. Moonlight poured down, glinting off the polished marble floors. In one closed-off room to our right stood a gift shop, while a small office rested on the opposite side of the lobby. The doors to both rooms were closed and they were dark.
Laying a hand on her shoulder, I dipped into Mira’s thoughts.
The naturi are close. Do you know the layout?
Yes. Exactly across from us is the exhibit room, which leads to the bonsai exhibit and desert garden. To the left is another rain forest exhibit. There’s a set of stairs leading down to it.
They’re in the other rain forest.
Beneath my hand, I felt Mira reach in her jacket pocket where she had her gun hidden. I pulled my own gun from its hiding place in the small of my back.
There are two entrances into the room. If we split up—
Her words were suddenly lost under a surge of fear that threatened to swallow us both. My hand tightened on her shoulder as I sucked in a sharp breath between my clenched teeth. Her fear started to pump through my veins, winding a sinuous course through my body until its claws dug into my muscles.
I lowered my head so that my lips were right next to her ear. “What?” I whispered. Her mind was still open to me, but I had no desire to dip into her thoughts just yet. I was still struggling to surface from the last tidal wave.
“Can’t you hear it?” Her words escaped her in a fractured breath. “The crying…”
“A baby? No.” This wasn’t good. My hearing was good, very good. In fact, I was willing to bet that I could give most lycans a run for their money, but I couldn’t hear anything beyond the sound of falling water. Was Mira’s hearing that much sharper than my own?
“It’s across the lobby. In the exhibit room or maybe the desert.”
“I don’t sense any naturi in that direction,” I whispered after another quick scan of the conservatory. Of course, the only other creatures that I could sense in the conservatory besides the naturi were Mira and I. I didn’t sense a human in the area. “You go check it out. I’ll take care of the naturi.”
Mira nodded and darted forward, slipping out of my grasp. I watched her for a moment, moving like she was just another shadow within a house of shadows. Silently, she pulled open a set of doors and disappeared into another room.
I remained in the thick shadows by the door, staring toward the deep, black pit in which the naturi were hiding. Trees stretched up to the ceiling, their leaves brushing against the windows, but all their color and detail was lost to the night. The only sound breaking the perfect silence was a torrent of rushing water coming from deep within the blackness. This was no little fountain. The water roared out of the darkness like a set of rapids in a narrow gully. I could only hope I would be able to use it to mask any sounds I made as I moved closer, because heaven knew I wouldn’t be able to see where I was going.
With my Browning cradled in both hands before me, I edged away from the door to the entrance into the open rain forest room on my left. My heart had begun to thud faster in my ears and a bead of sweat trickled down my spine. I needed this—to violently lash out at the world, proclaiming to all who could hear me that I lived and I would take back my soul. Even if it meant saving humanity by destroying one monster at a time.
In a rare stroke of luck, the left-hand entrance was a gently sloping ramp for wheelchairs. I easily sidled down it, my back pressed against the metal railing while I faced the center of the room. I kept the gun pointed up toward the tops of the trees. The naturi were up in the thick foliage somewhere deeper in the room. Shafts of moonlight intermittently broke through the leaves, giving the darkness shape and depth.
Reaching the path at the bottom of the ramp, I caught a flash of moonlight glinting off a shimmer of water. The center of the room contained a narrow pool that ran the length from the lobby to the source of the roaring water. Around me, trees and bushes rose up, hugging the little path in a warm, humid embrace. I edged down the smooth track, my back brushing against the rough rocks that comprised the wall, which hemmed in the man-made rain forest.
I paused when I was just a dozen feet away from where the naturi were hiding above me. Nothing moved. The sound of rushing water had grown louder and a cool breeze drifted toward me from the rear of the room. The leaves were still, refusing to reveal my prey. The six naturi were clustered tightly together at the top of a couple of large palm trees. I ransacked my brain for anything that could have been able to huddle tightly together at such a height.
With Mira hidden somewhere else within the conservatory, I was on my own and wasting moonlight. I had to get these things taken care of before my nightwalker escort needed to find sanctuary from the rising sun, or worse, feed.
Lifting my gun, I aimed at the spot where it felt like the little buggers were clustered and squeezed off a single round. Leaves fluttered as the bullet ripped through a thick layer of foliage and eventually buried itself in a tree trunk. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound but the roar of water.
Moving the sight slightly to the left, I squeezed off another around. The bullet tore through a clump of leaves at the top of a tree before pinging off the metal window frame. There was a single, high-pitched scream, like a mouse might make if it were run over by a steamroller. Something larger and denser than a palm leaf fell from the top of the tree and splashed into the water below.
I couldn’t identify the little corpse as it fell, but I didn’t need to. Its companions had taken to the air and I could clearly identify them. The naturi were from the wind clan, similar to the ones we had seen in the forest outside of London, with their butterfly-like wings and small, lithe bodies. Sure, they weren’t a pack of angry air guardians with talons ready to disembowel me, but their poison-tipped darts were painful and frequently deadly. It also didn’t help that they had me outnumbered by five to one. Where the hell was Mira?
As they zipped through the air above my head, the wind naturi took on a slight glow in the overwhelming darkness like little balls of Christmas lights. Three were a brilliant blue while the other two were a bright orange. Two different families within the wind clan, I wondered. What the devil were they doing here in the conservatory? Hiding? Or nesting?
“Be gone from here,” ordered one of the naturi as it hovered overhead. “You’ve no business here.”
“And you’re not welcome in the Fire Starter’s domain,” I called back, lining up the gun’s sight with the creature’s heart.
“The Fire Starter does not know we are here. She does not need to know. We’ve killed none of her humans,” the naturi countered.
“She knows now.”
Another naturi zipped over to the one that was speaking to me, laying a hand on her slim shoulder. “He’s that hunter that travels with the Fire Starter,” she proclaimed. “He would have brought the Fire Starter here. She knows.” At once, the wind clan naturi started darting around the area, searching the immediate area for the nightwalker, causing me to lose my shot as they moved in and out of the trees.
“Where is she?” one demanded, pausing on the side of a tree. I took the opportunity to bury a bullet deep in the chest of a naturi with an orange glow.
“She’s busy looking into what other mischief you’ve been up to within her domain,” I said over the scream of the naturi as it plummeted from the tree to the hard cement sidewalk.
A dart whizzed by my head and thunked into a tree just behind me. It was a warning shot. “Why are you killing us? We’ve done nothing to you. We’ve harmed no one within the Fire Starter’s domain. We simply wish to exist here.”
“Coexist peacefully with humans? I doubt that,” I said, moving slightly to my left down the sidewalk, trying to get a better shot at the naturi that also had a wrist crossbow trained on me.
“True,” she admitted with a wide, evil grin. “It’s only a temporary arrangement, but for now we are willing to coexist in harmony with the earth killers. Can you not leave us in peace as well?”
“No,” I replied just before firing off two shots. The naturi dodged the bullets, dipping low as she also fired off another poison-tipped dart.
“So be it. We’ll kill you off first and then go looking for the nightwalker,” the naturi murmured as she flew back up into the thick, black foliage near the ceiling of the hothouse. I fired off another blind round, hoping to at least clip her wing, but I heard only the unmistakable sound of breaking glass. I cringed as a bullet broke through the window, shattering it. The large plate of glass flashed and almost seemed to chime as it crashed to the floor. I was trying to avoid creating any damage that might be difficult for the authorities to later explain. The broken window also provided the remaining four wind naturi with a quick exit. However, they seemed content to fire their little arrows at me for the time being.
I continued down the path toward the sound of the raging water as the three blue naturi darted in and out of the heavy swath of trees. Thick leaves made it difficult to get off another shot. The breeze intensified so that I could now feel it like a cool hand brushing against my face. Sweeping the gun around, scanning for my missing prey, I found that I was standing a few feet away from a two-story waterfall. The rushing water reflected the moonlight that poured down through a break in the trees, revealing a small, wooden bridge that crossed over the stream in the middle of the room.