Chapter 361: The Hunt.

The town filled with people running in every direction at once, every one of them pouring out of that small building and going wherever their legs pointed—some barefoot, some still holding drinks, some with blood on their clothes. Screams overlapped. Bodies collided and kept moving.

Daphne’s car sat where she’d parked it, opposite the restaurant. Door hanging open, interior light still on, keys in the ignition.

She’d tried it. The engine had turned over once, coughed, and died. Not once more. Not at the worst possible moment in her life. She’d left it standing there with the door open and run straight into the road, arms out, and been lucky enough to find a black SUV that actually stopped.

Vince arrived beside the abandoned car in a burst of black smoke that spread low across the asphalt from the point where he landed. The smoke curled around the open door and the rear bumper before thinning.

He lifted his head and pulled the air in through his nose, slow and deep.

The town screamed and ran around him and he paid none of it any attention at all.

He’d asked her for one thing. She’d given him the opposite.

She lied to me and then she ran.

Either one of those is enough.

He reached out and closed the car door with a soft, final click.

"I can still smell you," he said, and smiled at nothing. "One minute."

And went out into the air, the black smoke folding in on itself until the space beside the car was empty again.

***

"Faster. Please. Faster."

Daphne was in the back of the SUV with both hands locked on the seat in front of her, fingers digging into the leather hard enough to leave marks.

"Relax, lady." The man at the wheel had the look of somebody being pressured by a stranger he’d picked up out of guilt—jaw tight, eyes flicking to the mirror. "I’m going as fast as I’m going."

There was a cardboard box in the passenger seat beside him. His seatbelt was on. So was hers. The buckle sat cold against her hip.

"We can’t take this road at this speed." The headlights beat out ahead of them, white cones cutting the dark.

The houses had run out. The route went into the trees now—tall, close, forest on both sides, nothing but the narrow road and the black between the trunks.

"Please."

She felt it go through her, warm and sudden, flooding down both legs, soaking the fabric of her trousers in seconds. The heat turned cold almost immediately against her skin. She didn’t have anything left in her to care.

He turned his head to argue with her one more time. One second, maybe less. Eyes off the road.

When he came back to it he wrenched the wheel hard right and missed a small car by nothing at all—the other vehicle’s headlights flashing past close enough that the wind of it rocked the SUV.

Then he stood on the brakes. Tyres locked. The whole vehicle shuddered and they came to a stop on the verge with the trees close on both sides, branches almost touching the windows.

"Get out."

He was breathing like he’d run there, chest rising fast.

The box had come off the passenger seat and hit the dashboard hard enough to split one corner.

"You can’t leave me out here." Daphne looked down at herself—at the dark wet spreading across her trousers, the way the fabric clung to her thighs—and then back up. "Please. You can’t."

"I said get the fuck out of my car."

"Fine." Her fingers went to the buckle and couldn’t find it in the dark, then found it and couldn’t work the mechanism. The plastic clicked uselessly under her thumb. "Fine. Fine—"

She looked up into the mirror.

Black smoke was coming out of the trees behind them, low and fast, spreading across the road like water, swallowing the white lines and the verge.

"Get—"

He didn’t finish it.

Something hit the car from the side with the force of a truck. Metal screamed. The world went sideways.

They came off the road in the air, the SUV flipping end over end. Once. Twice. Three times—glass exploding outward in sheets, the roof crumpling, the box and everything loose inside slamming against every surface. They stopped in the trees upside down, the chassis settling into the undergrowth with a final heavy groan.

Both of them still in their belts. Both of them hanging, hair and blood dripping toward the roof.

Daphne watched the shoes come through the leaves toward her, everything the wrong way up—black shoes, deliberate steps, crushing the dry foliage underfoot.

Vince took the door off her side with one hand. Metal tore. Hinges gave. He dropped the entire door into the leaves like it weighed nothing.

His fingernail went through the seatbelt webbing in a single clean slice. The belt parted. She came down hard onto the roof of the car, shoulder and hip taking the impact, glass grinding under her.

"Please." She was crying now and couldn’t stop—breath hitching, tears running sideways across her face into her hair. "Please—"

He pulled her out of the car by the arm and stood her up in the leaves. His hand on her shoulder was cold enough to feel through the fabric, cold enough that the skin beneath it tightened.

She looked at him.

The fangs were out—long, white, fully extended. The skin had gone pale and wrong, almost grey under the thin moonlight that reached through the canopy. The thing that had been sitting at her table was looking back at her with eyes that no longer pretended to be human.

His hand closed on her throat and lifted her off the ground. Feet leaving the leaves. Air cut off. The pressure precise, controlled, just enough to make the edges of her vision darken.

And then let go.

She came down without force, landing in the leaves on her side, and she stayed there because there was nothing else in her—legs useless, lungs dragging air back in, the wet fabric of her trousers cold against her skin.

Vince didn’t look down at her.

He lifted his face and sniffed the air above her, slow and deliberate, and whatever he was reading, it wasn’t the girl on the ground.

"I can smell your pussy," he said to the trees.

Celestine came down out of them and landed on the leaves without a sound, boots settling into the soft earth.

"Why are you following me?"

"Because I don’t want you doing anything stupid."

Carrise came out of the dark behind her, silent as the first.

Vince looked at the two of them and smiled, fangs still fully out, and then his eyes went back down to Daphne for a long second.

"Where is she?"

"I don’t know."

He turned and started walking toward the two women, steps unhurried, leaves barely shifting under his weight.

In the wreck behind them, the driver hung in his belt upside down and watched all of it through the shattered window. His breathing grew thinner, shallower, until it simply stopped.

"Do you honestly think the two of you can stop me?"

Celestine smiled.

"I don’t need another hand to break you into pieces."

"Then we’ll find out."

He went out into the air in a hard burst of black smoke.

And both of them went with him—two more trails of darkness folding upward into the canopy until the space between the trees was empty again.

Daphne lay in the leaves alone with a car upside down beside her and a man in it not making any sound.

She looked up.

The black had gone off the sky, all of it, and the night above the trees was just a night again.