The light went red, and she sat in the left-turn lane, thinking. That’s when she did a double take at the sight of Carl, her own personal sage, standing on the sidewalk with about a million others.

  She rolled her window down to look more closely. The light turned green, so she inched up to wait for a spot in traffic. Rowan waved at Carl, and he looked straight at her and mouthed, watch out.

  Then the sound seemed to slow and speed up just a second later and that’s when she saw the big armored SUV in oncoming traffic, veering into her lane. Too fast. It was going to blow through the red light.

  Rowan looked in multiple directions to find herself an avenue to get out of the way without hitting anyone else and that’s when she noted a similar SUV coming from the opposite direction—her passenger side—speeding toward the intersection.

  No. Not the intersection. At her.

  She hadn’t even noticed the one that hit her first, against the driver’s side door, but then in rapid succession, she was hit on her passenger side and head-on. The airbag blew with a strange sound, pinning Rowan to her seat as the contents of the car flew in the air. Pens, a lipstick from her handbag, the Mike & Ike’s she’d been eating pelted multicolored missiles against her arm and the side of her face.

  Though it felt as if ten minutes had passed, it had only been seconds and Rowan knew if she was going to survive, she had to move.

  Ears ringing as the seconds ticked by and she tried to get her limbs to move, Brigid rose to the surface hard and fast enough to bring a gasp to her lips. Get moving. Live. The panic ebbed, adrenaline pumping into her system with the heat of the Goddess’s magic.

  “Okay,” she managed to say when she got herself turned enough to squeeze between the driver’s seat and the ruined passenger side where David might have been sitting.

  Rowan dropped into the footwell of the back seat, panting with the pain that threatened to steal her consciousness. Brigid beat at her ears, ordering her to stay awake. To fight back.

  “Okay,” she told herself as she managed to make her fingers work and dug her miraculously unbroken phone from her back pocket. She hit redial on whoever she’d called last, which was thankfully Genevieve.

  “Rowan?”

  “Help,” she said and gave the cross streets. Then the bullets began to hit the car. Thank goddess for the extra armor plating. Most of what Rowan thought of as a hail of bullets pinged off, but that would only last so long.

  Genevieve told her to leave the line open so she could listen along and help if needed so Rowan tucked the phone in her bra and got herself over the second bench of seating and into the trunk space. There was a weapons locker back there but her keys had flown through the car along with everything else and the thumbprint scanner had been damaged.

  She gave a look around the area, trying to find something to use to break it open, and a bullet pierced through the back where she’d been crouched, tearing through her calf. It had gone through but no doubt it would slow her down.

  It was broad daylight on the fucking Las Vegas Strip! Cameras everywhere! Who the fuck was taking such a bold chance?

  Another bullet broke through, this one lodging in her left shoulder and the pain got her moving.

  The rear liftgate was stuck so she managed to shift herself around, bleeding all over the damned place to kick it open with her right—unwounded—leg.

  All the while the sound of weapons being discharged and bullets hitting metal, asphalt, and glass rendered her nearly deaf and the stench of cordite stung her lungs.

  They could have killed David.

  That was the thought that gave her strength to push past the pain and continue until the damned liftgate finally released, dropping her to the ground at the rear of her SUV. The fall jolted all her aches, but it also spurred her forward as the battle took over her entire focus.

  The sounds and the smell all faded as she crouched and duckwalked around the backs of the other vehicles to sneak up on the two massive dudes wearing ski masks and shooting high-caliber ammo from weapons on full auto.

  She paused to take in as much of the scene as she could. It looked like three armored SUVs had crashed into hers and none of them would be driving away from the scene.

  But she did see similarly dressed figures running toward a waiting car that barely paused long enough for them to get in before tearing off. Rowan didn’t see anyone else but the two shooting so she needed to focus and take them out.

  Complicating matters—meaning she couldn’t just walk up and shoot these dudes in the back of the head—was the public nature of the situation because it would be on camera and the sidewalks all around were full of onlookers filming with their cameras.

  Rowan took a deep breath and it hurt so bad her vision went gray a moment. Too late for crying over it, she had a duty to protect the secrets of the paranormal world from discovery and so instead of shooting them in the head with the rifle she’d take from one of them, she grabbed the tire iron in a baseball bat hold and used all her strength to hit a triple against the back of the first one’s head. When he crumpled into a boneless heap she snarled and felt the wound on her split lip open again.

  The other shooter spun, his weapon still discharging and hitting her at least two more times. It was now or never. This dude would kill her first if she wasn’t smart. He tried to knock her down, punching her in the face, sending her stumbling, jostling new hurts to the surface.

  It just made her angrier.

  He tried to knock her down again, but she was slick with blood and glass and he wasn’t full of rage like she was. She bared her teeth, screaming at him as she jumped up onto his chest and used her weight to topple him to the road. She ignored the screaming pain in her leg as she clamped her thighs around him to hold her position as she then set to pummeling his face.

  The sound came rushing back as he finally lost consciousness and she sagged off his body, trying to breathe around daggers of pain in her chest.

  People from the sidewalk began to run at them, dragging the bad guys away from where she’d gotten to her knees.

  Bystanders tried to talk to her, holding out their hands to help, and she shook her head, shrinking back.

  An ambulance arrived and she managed to get herself into a position to lean against it so she wouldn’t collapse or take a nap right there in the street.

  Carl hurried in her direction, Star at his side.

  Star?

  Rowan looked down at herself and realized she’d been shot more than those two or three times. Blood rushed from her with each beat of her heart, leaving her faint.

  “Oh. I’ve been shot a lot. That rhymes,” she mumbled.

  “Rowan, you’re safe now,” Carl said and then she passed out.

  * * *

  Clive came to consciousness quickly, sitting up on a gasp. The buzzer connected to the automatic locks on the door and windows to his bedchamber droned on until he managed to stumble to his feet to check the camera.

  He unlocked immediately when he saw it was Genevieve.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “It’s Rowan,” she said.

  He grabbed her upper arms, and the Dust Devil must have been in the connecting room between his and Rowan’s bedchambers because he heard a snarl. Clive’s incisors lengthened as his consciousness rose and he realized something was very wrong with Rowan. She was alive. He could tell that much through the bond. But unconscious.

  Genevieve said, “Stop this. Both of you. Darius, please wait in the living room. Your presence is only going to make things worse.” Then to Clive again, gently. “You have twenty-eight more minutes until sundown. Betchamp is organizing things now so we can move once that happens.”

  “Where is my fucking wife?” Why was she unconscious?

  “I’ll allow that loss of composure because you’re afraid. She’s alive. There was an accident. No. An ambush. Rowan was driving back here to pick something up. Three cars from different directions slammed into her at once from multiple sides. There’s video, that’s part of what Betchamp is doing. Getting that handled so you can see it and know what to do. She is alive,” Genevieve repeated.

  “Scion, I have your portable computer with the traffic video queued up,” Betchamp said as he entered the room. He’d closed off the sitting room as well so they moved out there because even though it was an emergency, anyone being in a Vampire’s bedchamber while the sun was up sent that Vampire into fight or flight and they didn’t need any more complications than they already had.

  Clive’s head spun. He needed to know so much more. Needed to go to his wife but until the sun finally went down, he was stuck.

  Betchamp led him to a chair and then before he hit start, he looked Clive in the eyes. “As Ms. Aubert said, Ms. Rowan is alive. This video is upsetting. Hold yourself together. She needs that.”

  On the screen Clive watched the traffic feed. Rowan at the wheel of her car, waiting to make a left turn. Because he knew what was coming based on what Genevieve had said, he caught sight of the three oncoming vehicles, big, beefy SUVs that appeared to have been armored. They struck Rowan’s—thankfully also armored—SUV from the front and two sides.

  Rowan’s airbag went off so he couldn’t see much more than the mass of the bag itself. Steam rose from the wreck as one of the SUVs opened up at the back and two people in ski masks carrying weapons got out and began shooting at the front driver’s side of Rowan’s vehicle.

  People had begun to stop and gather on the roadway, pointing. Phones to ears as they hopefully were calling an ambulance instead of the media. A few people tried to run toward Rowan’s wreck but had to retreat as the bullets peppered the whole area.

  Clive held his breath the whole time he watched the ski-masked people continuing to shoot Rowan’s SUV. The other two attackers burst from their wrecked vehicles and headed in opposite directions.

  That’s when the back doors of Rowan’s SUV opened and his wife, covered in blood, tumbled out to the pavement with a thunk he felt to his bones. Then, out of the view of her shooters, she skirted the wreck and ended up behind them.

  She glanced up at the traffic camera and instead of shooting the attackers in the face like he could see she really wanted to, she had tested the weight of the tire iron in her hand before she wound up like she was playing baseball and hit one in the back of the head so hard he immediately hit the pavement. The other turned and tried to beat her into submission but clearly the man had no real idea who Rowan Summerwaite was because she’d writhed and spun as they rolled around on the roadway, the tire iron clattering away.

  Clive held his breath, watching his wife scramble atop her attacker’s chest, gripping with her thighs like she was riding a horse without a saddle. Her face was a mask of vicious concentration as she used her fists until her opponent’s head flopped to the side in a way to indicate he was unconscious.

  When that happened, some of the crowd rushed in to help.

  There was a fracas but shortly, Rowan was hauled from the fray.

  She pulled herself to stand, nearly fell again, and then shifted her weight. Broken leg most likely. An ambulance showed up and Clive could tell at a glance given the way the EMTs moved, they weren’t human. Which was good because it meant their people had shown up to help before human authorities could take her to one of their hospitals.

  Before the EMTs could reach her though, Rowan took two steps toward...fuck, Carl? And then crumpled into the sage’s arms before she could hit the ground.

  Everyone went into hyper speed then and before long, she’d been loaded into the back of the ambulance and it had sped away but Clive couldn’t see the point where Carl appeared or disappeared. He was there and then not. Chances were though, he’d stepped in somehow to save Rowan. The next time that crazy old sage kidnapped them for a prophetic taxi drive, Clive planned to thank him.

  “Where is she?” he managed to ask, surprised he didn’t sound as worried as he felt.

  “At a local private hospital. There’s a wing we control,” Genevieve said. “She’s under guard. There were some broken bones. She’s been shot fourteen times. There was a great deal of blood loss. That’s why she collapsed. They operated and she’s in recovery.”

  Hearing it all listed filled him with dread and an intense need to see Rowan, know she was still in the world.

  Genevieve touched his wrist, just a light, reassuring brush of her fingertips. “There’s no question she’ll recover, Clive. I’ll take you directly there now the sun’s down.”

  “Sir,” Betchamp said once Genevieve had left to speak with Darius. “Please feed from me and Elisabeth before you go. You’ll need to give Rowan your blood at some point and you might need to fight or otherwise burn through a great deal of power.”

  Though most Vampire families—the Stewarts included—fed from their closest household staff to create bonds and give their human staff the extra protections that came with it, Clive had a select group of humans he employed to give him their blood. All male now as he knew Rowan was uncomfortable enough as it was, with the intimacy of sharing blood. All a certain type of human many of his brethren—the asshole ones—referred to as blood servants. Essentially they had genetic markers that made them into the creators of blood that was the best possible for a Vampire.

  They could easily survive with the blood from humans who didn’t have those markers. But it was a difference in how much one needed to take and how many benefits came to the Vampire who fed from them.

  All that aside though, his usual donors were roughly a ten-minute flight from the house, and it was still daylight for another twenty-one minutes. And, Elisabeth and Betchamp both were among those he paid to take blood from when necessary.

  “Thank you. I’m going to get dressed. Give me ten minutes and I’ll meet you back here.”

  * * *

  Everything hurt.

  Rowan tried to open her eyes, but it was hard. She might have dropped back into that safe, dark space a few times but finally she caught the scent of book leather and expensive whiskey with a whisper of peat.

  Clive was nearby and he’d be worried, so she needed to reassure him. And maybe she needed some reassurance too.

  “Rowan, I really must protest. Wake up this instant or I shall be very cross,” he said. Even her muddled brain heard the anxiety in his tone.

  “Trying,” she mumbled. The tightness as she tried to move told Rowan she’d been stitched up in several places. She managed to wiggle her toes and twitched her fingers slightly. Not all of them, she realized. There was a splint on her left hand and three of her fingers were bound.

  “There you are,” he said, his voice right up against her ear. “Open your eyes, darling.”

  Nothing happened when she tried to reach up to pry her eyelids open with her right hand. Her limbs were heavy and numb.

  “She’s regaining consciousness. Please get someone,” Clive said to someone on the other side of her closed eyes.

  David answered and relief coursed through Rowan that he was all right.

  Rowan managed to get one eye open. “Can’t work the other one yet,” she said.

  “It’s swollen shut. I’m going to give you my blood.”

  “Wait,” Genevieve said as she came into the room. “The police are here. They want to talk to Rowan. Right now, she looks like she was hit by three giant SUVs and shot fourteen times. If you give her blood, she’ll start healing far faster.”

  Rowan managed to squeeze his hand a little. “Gonna be fine. Let’s do this part. Want to leave soon as possible.” It took far longer than she’d expected to finish those three sentences, but her brain was working a little better every minute she was awake. Cops had to be dealt with after that scene in the middle of the street. And Genevieve was right. Let them see her all mangled up and then she could take Clive’s blood.

  “I’m not leaving the room,” he said in a tone that threatened violence if anyone argued.

  Someone new spoke, “You don’t have to. You’re her spouse. Rowan, I’m Dr. Jenkins. I’m going to be here when they speak to you as well. First, let’s look you over. They’re not coming in until I know you’re up to very gentle questions.”

  Rowan managed to focus her eye enough to take the doctor in. Basic white coat thing. Slate gray sweater beneath that did something for her light brown eyes and skin. Threads of silver shot through her short curls. Rowan liked the way Dr. Jenkins stood. Ready to punch someone if they caused trouble.

  “Love scary women,” she said and blamed the damned drugs.

  Thank the Goddess there’d been drugs that worked. Being a Vessel meant most drugs used for sedation didn’t fit with her metabolism. She burned through them too fast. A great feature when it came to things like poison. Fortunately, there were a few medications that managed to do the job, which meant they’d known who—and what—she was.

  Dr. Jenkins smiled. “Good to hear. Eight of the fourteen bullets remained lodged in your body so we needed to get you into surgery to repair the damage to your left kidney and lung. Your eye should be fine once the swelling goes down. You’ve got a broken tibia, three broken fingers, severe bruising, and some muscle tearing in your chest, but your ribs are miraculously unbroken.”

  At Rowan’s other side, Clive had gone into that silent, still place Vampires went when they were murderous.

  “After some Vampire blood you’ll be more comfortable. Your husband is correct,” Dr. Jenkins said as an appeal to Clive. “I think you’re up to a ten-minute maximum interview with the police. The sooner that happens, the sooner you can get on up out of here and at home where everyone will feel safer.”