Mile High with a Vampire by Lynsay Sands
Three
It was very strange for Quinn to be carrying the large man as she was. As a mortal, she’d had to give up carrying her son, Parker, around the time he turned four. He’d got too heavy for her to manage after that, and yet now she was carting a much larger male around like he weighed nothing. It got stranger still when his arms suddenly snaked around her hips and he began to nuzzle the back of her leg just below her ass. At least she thought he was nuzzling her . . . or was he kissing her leg? Sucking on the oddly sensitive skin and sending little shock waves of pleasure through her body?
Good Lord! Stumbling to a halt, she started to look over her shoulder to see what the hell the man thought he was doing and then paused and went still, her head lifting and nose and ears straining.
“What is it? Why are you stopping?” Jet asked, his arms dropping away and voice oddly raspy.
“Do you smell water?” Quinn asked, her original reason for stopping forgotten as she sniffed the air.
“Smell water?” Jet sounded bewildered by the question, but then said, “No.”
“I do,” she murmured, turning in a slow circle. “I hear it too.”
“You hear it?” he echoed with bewilderment. “How can you hear water?”
“Rapids,” Quinn said with certainty, and then started moving again, setting out in the direction she was sure the sound and smell were coming from.
Liliya had said to use her mind and new strength to save Jet and anyone else who might be in the path of the injured immortal women. While at first Quinn had just been running willy-nilly in the direction Kira had indicated there was some sort of town or camp, the moment she’d smelled water on the air, her brain had kicked in.
Moving through water was supposed to make it harder to track a person in the woods, wasn’t it? At least she’d read a story once where it had worked to avoid dogs tracking the heroine. Surely it would work for immortals too. At least that’s what Quinn was hoping. She also hoped they were lucky enough that if the women lost their trail they would just wander around the woods until help could get to them, rather than pick up their trail farther along and track them to where other mortals might be.
Quinn was moving a little more slowly than she had before. She was still running, but not full out as she sought the river she believed lay ahead of them. She didn’t want to charge through a bush and right off a cliff into rapids or something, so felt a little caution was necessary. But in the end she needn’t have worried. The trees did fall away rather abruptly, but then she found herself on a rocky cliff or outcropping that extended a good ten feet before dropping off to the rushing river below.
With trees no longer blocking out the moon and stars, it was much brighter along the river. Almost as good as daylight to her eyes. Even Jet should be able to see pretty well here, she thought as she moved to the edge of the outcropping and peered down at the white water rushing by six or seven feet below. Rapids, as she’d thought. They ran for a quite a distance before following the curving river to a calmer section ahead.
“Are you going to put me down?”
Quinn glanced toward the butt next to her face as if it had spoken, and then stepped back from the cliff edge, turned, and bent at the waist to set the big man on the ground. She wasn’t surprised when he immediately swayed on his feet, his face slowly paling as the blood rushed from where it had no doubt been pooling in his hanging head. Expecting that reaction, she’d grasped his arms to help steady him and waited patiently for him to regain his footing, her gaze moving over him as she did.
“Jet” Lassiter was a big man. She’d put him at six and a half feet or so, which made him about a foot and a half taller than her. Quinn and her twin sister, Pet, were both five-foot-two, but that was only when wearing shoes. They both refused to measure their height barefoot. Five-foot-two sounded better than the five-foot-flat she suspected they really were, and both of them loathed being so small.
Smiling faintly at her own thoughts, Quinn took in the man’s short, dark brown hair and then stopped with surprise on his eyes. She’d never seen eyes the shade his were except in medical texts. They were a bright green-blue that was rather stunning, and made more so by the long lashes framing them.
Oh, yeah, those eyes were killer, Quinn thought, and had no doubt women fell at this man’s feet in droves. Realizing she was staring, she forced her gaze to lower, following his straight nose down to a wide mouth with a thinner upper lip, before dropping farther to take in his wide shoulders and what she could see of his muscular chest beneath the dress shirt, tie, and leather aviator jacket he wore. Her gaze had just continued down to his long, long legs encased in black dress pants when Jet sighed and turned to move to the edge of the rocky outcropping and peered down at the water racing past below.
“There is no way in hell we can cross the river here.”
Quinn dragged her gaze away from the man’s tightly rounded ass and up to the back of his head at those grim words, then moved to his side to peer down at the violent water below.
“No,” she agreed, and then pointed out, “But it calms down some farther along.”
Jet followed her gesture when she pointed downstream, but his expression was troubled as he took it in. Finally, he said, “The water’s moving pretty fast here. It might look calm ahead, but there could be undercurrents.”
Quinn frowned at the suggestion, but then heaved a resigned sigh. “I think we have to take the chance. We need to lose Kira and the others. I can’t run forever without becoming a possible threat to you myself.”
Quinn regretted those words almost at once. She didn’t want the man seeing her as a crazed blood-lusting creature like Annika, Marta, Nika, and possibly even Kira now had become, but it was something she was starting to worry about as she began to experience the mild cramps that warned of a need for blood. Hoping to keep him from thinking too hard on what she’d said, she added, “And I don’t want to lead them straight to other mortals. We need to put some distance between them and us. Enough that help can get here before anyone is hurt.”
Quinn left a whole lot out that time, like her fear that she would fail at this. That they either wouldn’t get away at all, or that she’d get Jet to civilization only to find she’d led the others straight to a bunch of unsuspecting mortals who would be sheep to the slaughter.
“The idea is to escape the she-pires, not drown trying to escape them,” Jet said solemnly.
Quinn’s mouth flattened at the term she-pires. It wasn’t the first time he’d used it, and it didn’t suggest he thought much of immortals, which included her now. But Quinn could hardly blame him. She was struggling with accepting what she was herself. They called themselves, and now her, immortals, but that felt like little more than a nicety to her. To her way of thinking, if it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, it was probably a duck, and much to her distress she now had fangs and needed to take in blood to survive—a vampire.
Blowing out a slow, depressed breath, Quinn turned away from the water to scan the tree line behind them, hope rising within her when she spotted a downed tree just inside the woods some twenty feet farther along. She hurried over to examine the tree. It was big, the trunk so large she couldn’t wrap her arms around it. But it also had its branches still attached. There were none for the lower twelve feet or so, though, and really, they didn’t need more than ten feet to hold their weight, she was sure. The problem was going to be breaking off the rest of the tree from what she needed. It wasn’t like she had an ax.
Grimacing, Quinn moved along the tree trunk. It hadn’t fallen flat when it toppled; the upper end had landed on a rocky outcropping that jutted about four feet out of the ground. The rock’s base was about three feet in diameter, but narrowed to a finer point at the top where it disappeared into the tree trunk.
“What on earth are you doing?” Jet asked with alarm, rushing to stand at the base of the outcropping when she started to climb it to get on the tree trunk.
“Logs float,” Quinn pointed out as she pulled herself up on top of the tree now.
“Yeah. So?” Jet asked, eyeing her with concern as she straightened on the tree trunk and then sidestepped until she was standing on the upper half of the tree that stuck out past the outcropping.
“So,” she said, and then paused to smile at him brilliantly before leaping into the air and coming down hard on the tree. Quinn had never jumped before. Not since she’d been turned at least. It was something else she hadn’t tested yet: how high she could jump, or how hard she would come down. Much to her alarm, it was very high and very hard. She sailed up into the air a good twelve feet, and then plummeted down at an alarming rate.
Judging by Jet’s expression as she descended, Quinn was not the only one dismayed by what was happening. That wasn’t very encouraging, but Quinn had little time to worry over it before she slammed into the top of the tree, heard a loud crack and screech, and then found herself plummeting to the ground with the end of the tree she’d snapped off. Fortunately, it was only four feet off the ground. Unfortunately, she didn’t manage to keep her feet under her and fell to the side into the shattered end of the tree trunk.
“Are you all right?” Jet was at her side at once, helping her up.
“I’m fine,” Quinn said, wincing when straightening sent pain through her stomach. “Let’s get this log down to the water. We can hang on to it and use it to go downriver a ways and then—”
“You’re hurt,” Jet interrupted, his voice grim.
Sighing, Quinn stopped trying to distract him and glanced down to see the blood spreading out around a tear in her blouse. Or had been spreading out, she thought. The bleeding had apparently already stopped because the stain was larger than a hand but wasn’t getting any bigger. Turning away from him, she tugged her top out of her dress pants and pulled it up so she could look at what she’d done to herself. It was a nasty scrape, a good six inches wide and deep enough to be painful, but it was already healing . . . and using blood to do it, she thought unhappily.
“How bad is it?”
Quinn let her top drop back into place, but it was too late. Jet had walked around in front of her even as he’d asked the question and got a look before the cloth covered it. Sighing at the concern on his face, she moved around him to the end of the log without branches, saying, “I’m fine. Let’s just get this log in the water and get moving.”
Much to her relief, after the briefest of hesitations, he let the subject go and joined her to examine the log. It had dropped off the outcropping when the trunk had snapped. Quinn walked around it and then gave it a push with one foot. Fortunately, huge as it was, it moved easily enough.
“We’ll have to carry it downstream,” Jet muttered, glancing toward the water and probably judging how far they’d have to carry it to get it to where the water was calmer.
By her guess, it was a good eighty feet and she didn’t think they could manage it. She might be stronger than she had been as a mortal, but Hulk-type strength was needed here, and she was quite sure she wasn’t that strong. “I think we should just roll it to the edge of the cliff and then I’ll run downstream to the calm water and you can roll it in, then I’ll catch it when it reaches me.”
Jet considered the option, but after a moment, he shook his head. “We don’t know how strong the current is. It could hurtle into you at speed and hurt you, or you might miss it and it’ll just sail past you and we’ll be back where we started.”
Quinn scowled, her gaze moving over the tree with concern. She might have hurt herself for nothing if they couldn’t get it to the river.
“My friend Abs can lift the back end of a car,” Jet announced suddenly.
Quinn peered at him blankly.
“We grew up together. She was mortal but is an immortal now,” he explained solemnly. “And she can lift the back of a car a good two feet off the ground. Cars weigh a couple of tons. This log can’t weigh more than seven or eight hundred pounds. Surely we could manage it together.”
Quinn stared at him silently, a dozen questions suddenly rolling through her head, like how close a friend was this Abs, and what kind? And why on earth had she even tried to lift the back end of a car? But when Jet bent to grasp one end of the log and strained to lift it, she let her questions go and moved to the opposite end to help.
Much to her amazement, with the two of them working they managed to get it off the ground. Actually, it wasn’t even all that heavy to Quinn. In fact, she suspected she might have been able to carry it by herself, but she didn’t want to hurt the man’s self-esteem. She knew from her marriage that men had fragile egos that needed constant cosseting, so once they had the log aloft and were moving, with Jet at the front, she shifted closer to the center of the log to take more of the weight, but didn’t suggest he let go.
“This looks like a good spot,” Jet gasped once they’d gone several feet past the last of the rapids. “How do you want to do this?”
Quinn glanced to the water and then toward what she could see of the river ahead. It curved out of sight another sixty feet up shore. Finally, she suggested, “I guess we just set it in the water and hold on to it to ride down the river as far as we can, then steer it to the opposite bank and get out there if we see rapids ahead.”
She supposed Jet agreed with that plan when he grunted and started to wade into the water.
He hadn’t taken more than a handful of steps away from shore before muttering, “This is far enough,” and pushing the log off of his shoulder, forcing her to release her hold as well. Their height difference had forced Quinn to walk with her arms fully extended over her head to hold on to the log, but she hadn’t minded, and almost felt guilty that she hadn’t tried to carry it on her own when Jet released a groan of relief once the weight was off his shoulder.
The log hit the surface of the river with a thwap that sent warmish water splashing over them both. It also sank briefly under the surface before popping right back up. The moment it did, Quinn grabbed the end next to her and began to walk it out to deeper water. Jet followed, rubbing his shoulder as he went, then slung that arm over the front of the log once the water had reached his chest. By that time, the water was up to Quinn’s chin.
“Get a good hold on the log and I’ll push us off,” Jet suggested after glancing back to see her just clasping it with her hand. Once Quinn had put her arm over the log as he was doing and nodded, he pushed off, sending them moving downstream at a desultory pace that made Quinn anxious rather than relieved. They needed to put as much distance between themselves and their pursuers as possible, and their stop to get the log and carry it to the water had already slowed them down.
Glancing back the way they’d come, she eyed the spot where they’d left the woods with concern, but didn’t see anyone. Even so, when her feet brushed over a boulder in the water, she planted them on the rock and pushed off, increasing their speed considerably.
Jet immediately shifted his position so that he was almost in a dead man’s float on the river’s surface, but with his arm holding on to the log he kept his face and a good portion of his chest out of the water. It wasn’t until her knee banged against another boulder under the surface that she realized why. This wasn’t a nice flat-bottomed river. There were obstacles looming under the surface and they were likely to get banged up at this speed if they weren’t careful.
Copying Jet, Quinn let her feet rise behind her and adjusted her hold on the log to keep as much of her upper body out of the river as she could. Fortunately, that seemed to do the trick, or they were just lucky and their log’s path avoided the worst of the underwater obstacles.
The water slowed as the river widened and Quinn alternately kicked her feet at times, or pushed off of passing boulders to keep their speed up as they floated along. At first, Quinn tried to figure out their next move once they were out of the water, but that was relatively simple. They would ride the river as far as they could to save energy, and then make their way to the inhabited area Kira had spotted ahead as quickly as they could. Once there, she’d call for help and hope that rescuers reached them quicker than the Russians could catch up to them. Unfortunately, since she had no idea how long they’d be able to float downriver or where they would get out of the water, that’s the best she could do when it came to planning, and her mind soon drifted to thoughts of her son, Parker, her sister, Pet, and to her life now and what she should do with it if she survived this escapade. Returning to her old life pre-turn was impossible. Everyone thought she’d died in a car crash with her husband, son, and sister. She couldn’t even really return to her old profession for fear of being recognized, which meant she had to start over. Even after four years, Quinn wasn’t sure how to go about that. Which was why she’d been on this flight to Toronto, Canada. She was hoping that a few therapy sessions with Gregory Hewitt, a psychologist there, could help her figure that out.
“Stop kicking.”
Torn from her thoughts by those words, Quinn glanced with surprise to where Jet hung on to the log ahead of her. “I’m not kicking you.”
“No. Stop kicking your feet in the water to propel us forward,” he explained. “We’re picking up too much speed and we don’t know what’s around this next bend.”
His words made her frown. In truth, Quinn had slid so far into her thoughts that she’d forgotten to work at keeping them moving quickly. She hadn’t kicked for—well, judging by how far the moon had moved in the sky overhead, she’d guess it may have been a good hour, maybe a little less. Yet they were moving rather swiftly, extremely quickly, really, she thought, and then realizing that Jet was looking back at her expectantly, she said, “I’m not kicking.”
His eyes widened slightly, and then he cursed and shifted so that his body was perpendicular to the log. “Kick,” he growled now, beginning to kick his legs in the water. “The water’s picked up speed. We must be approaching rapids. We need to get to the opposite bank and get out.”
Quinn shifted around until she was perpendicular to the log like Jet, but she’d barely managed one kick before another curse from Jet made her glance around. They’d reached the bend, and there were rapids ahead. They were too close now to move the log to shore before getting sucked into the rapids.
“Get away from the log! Swim for shore!” Jet yelled, releasing his hold on the tree trunk and striking out for land.
Quinn stared after him with alarm, but couldn’t make herself release her death grip on the log. She wasn’t much of a swimmer. Dog-paddling was the extent of her skills in the water and dog-paddling wasn’t going to get her to shore, so she clung to the log, watching silently as Jet swam. He looked to be a powerful swimmer, but the currents and speeding water were slowing him down. Still, from what Quinn could see in the last glimpse she had of him, it looked like he was going to make it to shore, and then the log shot into the rapids, and her concern turned to herself.
What followed was terrifying chaos. The rush of the water was a roar in her ears as it slammed into and over her, filling her eyes, nose, and mouth and leaving her unsure which way was up or down. Quinn had been told immortals could only die from fire or beheading if the head was kept away from the body too long, but it felt to her like she was drowning as she unintentionally swallowed mouthful after mouthful of water in a desperate bid to get air. And then pain crashed through her panic, radiating from her hand when it was crushed between the log and a boulder.
Quinn instinctively screamed in pain, or tried to. Water immediately filled her mouth, cutting off the scream as she tumbled away from the log and was swept off by the rapids. Still, she struggled to keep her head above water and regain some control of her whirligig ride . . . until her head slammed into a boulder and she lost consciousness.
With her immortal strength and speed, Jet expected Quinn to reach shore first and be waiting there to help him from the water. But when his feet touched bottom and he began to wade wearily to safety, a glance along the shoreline didn’t reveal Quinn there, and he thought she must have swum behind him to be sure he made it. He didn’t look around right away to see if that was the case. Fighting the fast-flowing water to swim to shore had left him exhausted both physically and mentally and he merely stumbled the last several feet out of the water and onto shore before thinking to turn and look at the madly coursing water he’d just left.
Confusion covered his face when he didn’t see Quinn swimming toward him, or at all, really. The log was bobbing wildly in the rapids, the back end rising as the front end dropped into an eddy, and then slamming back down and the front rising as it rode out of the eddy. It was then he saw the small figure flailing in the white water. She hadn’t made it out and was off the log, being tossed about and beaten by the rushing water.
His exhaustion forgotten, Jet cursed and straightened to run along the shore, his attention half on the rocky shoreline he was traversing and half on Quinn’s travails in the water. It was immediately obvious she had no idea what she should be doing. She made no effort to keep her toes out of the water and her feet headed downstream first. She wasn’t even managing to keep her face above water, and if she were mortal, he knew she wouldn’t have survived her wild trip down the rapids. But she wasn’t mortal, so he followed grimly and then ran out ahead when he saw that the rapids ended in a calmer section there.
Jet didn’t stop the moment he reached the calm water, but ran a good twenty feet beyond it, and then cut into the water and dove in to swim out a third of the way across this wider section of river, managing to position himself in front of Quinn when she came out of the rapids. He was just far enough out and just in time to snag her foot as she floated past. Dragging her to him in the water, he took one look at her bruised and battered face and then began to drag her toward shore.
Once he reached shallow water, he scooped Quinn into his arms and carried her the rest of the way. She was a little thing, and shouldn’t have been heavy, but her clothes were waterlogged and Jet’s muscles were spent after his own battle with the swiftly running water. He only managed to carry her a couple of feet up the rocky shore before his legs collapsed.
Dropping to his knees, he eased Quinn to the ground and then sat on his haunches to look her over. Her one hand looked like someone had dropped a boulder on it and there was a huge bump and bruise on the side of her forehead, but the other bruises he’d noted on her face were already fading away like water drying under the sun. The head wound and her hand would take longer to heal, he knew, and all of it would use up blood she could ill afford losing just now.
Jet didn’t think she’d be loco like the women who had been torn from the plane during the crash, but he wasn’t sure, and briefly considered leaving her and continuing on his own, but he just couldn’t do it. Jet didn’t question why; he just knew he couldn’t leave her alone here in the woods. He’d let her feed off of him if necessary, but they were walking out of those woods together or not at all.
Sighing, he glanced around. The log had made it out of the rapids and was now floating placidly downstream, looking none the worse for wear. Other than that, everything looked quiet and peaceful. He didn’t see anyone in the water or on either shore of the river. That didn’t mean they weren’t nearby, though, and he knew he needed to get Quinn out of the open. Or, at least, he needed to get out of the open. He was the walking blood bag to the women hunting them.
Straightening his shoulders, Jet scooped up Quinn and staggered to his feet to stumble into the trees until he found a pine or spruce tree—he couldn’t tell in the dark—with branches low enough to provide cover. He then set Quinn down and crawled under the low-lying branches, pulling her behind him. Once he had her close to the trunk, he released her and flopped down on his side. The night was cooler than the water had been—he’d guess around seventy degrees—and their both being soaking wet made the night air feel cooler still. The last thing Jet did before exhaustion claimed him was spoon her and wrap his arms around her when Quinn began to shiver in her wet clothes.