Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [137]
This reminded me in turn of Domino and Pepper and the storehouse, and how I didn’t know if any of that was okay, due entirely to asswipes like the ones in that room, dead now, both of them, and me running from the room without knowing where to go next.
Cal hadn’t been there. Ian hadn’t been there.
But there’d been blood before I arrived. Plenty of blood. I didn’t know whose; I hadn’t even had the clarity of thought to notice if it was vampire or mortal blood, and I sure as hell didn’t have the cognitive felicity to consider it as I fled next door. Where else could I check but my own room? Where else might either of them have escaped to?
It didn’t make perfect sense and I knew it, but it was all I could think of so I burst inside, where the lock had also been forced. Brutally, I had to gather, since it fell away under my shoulder as easily as a doggy door.
The room had been trashed with prejudice. All available drawers had been ripped off their rails and emptied onto the floor; the bed had been unmade and the space beneath it violated. Slash marks defaced the cushions of the settee and the love seat, on the off chance I’d been hiding anything good inside them, I supposed.
I knew Adrian’s footsteps, even running. I’d learned the weight of him and the rhythm of his pace. He was coming up fast.
“Raylene!” he gasped, stopping when he saw me standing in the middle of the destroyed room.
I don’t know what kind of look I gave him, but it was enough to send him back out and around the corner. I heard him checking in at Ian and Cal’s room, seeing the carnage, making some assumptions, and exiting—shutting the door behind him, which was something I hadn’t thought to do.
By the time he’d rejoined me, I’d found Cal.
Cal was sprawled out on his face between my bed and the window, half covered by a curtain that had been brought down in what must have been a struggle. I could tell by the way his head was bent, and by the way his arms and legs were all uncomfortably akimbo, never mind the pool of blood that spread beneath him.
I could tell he was dead.
I crouched down beside him and moved his face so I could see it, but it told me nothing. There was no revelation waiting in his eyes, or a clue to what had happened clutched in his fist. He was just … gone. That was all.
“Cal?” Adrian asked. It sounded like a guess, and I thought it was a stupid thing to say except that he was still in the doorway, and could only see Cal’s feet.
So I said, “Yeah. It’s him.”
“Shit,” he said, but I hardly heard it for the sound of men tramping up the stairs, clicking their walkie-talkie buttons and organizing a response to whatever danger the building’s security had diagnosed. Or maybe they were more Trevors, party to whoever had done this.
Either way, Adrian was right when he took my arm and said, “We have to get out of here.”
“No,” I said reflexively. “We have to find Ian.”
“Ian isn’t here,” Adrian pointed out, so infuriatingly reasonable. “So we have to go somewhere else. This is about to get sticky. Come on,” he urged me again, being gentle, almost. But firm.
“Where would he go?” I asked, and I hated myself for how much it sounded like crying.
“We’ll figure it out on the way.”
“Do you think they took him?”
“No,” he said, I assume in order to humor me.
I settled for it. Hell, I clung to it. And I clung to Adrian’s hand as he shoved open the sliding balcony door and pushed me outside, shutting the thing behind us both and beginning the long, cold crawl down over the edge.
15
We were halfway down when I caught a whiff … but that’s the wrong word. Not a “whiff” exactly—it was more