Chapter 188

A loud hiss came from above and the jeep rocked. I slipped down in the seat and fumbled for the radio on the corpse’s waist as Vanessa fired her gun. I listened to the battle as I fiddled with the radio.

I had never used a radio like this. Why weren’t we using phones? I didn’t have my phone on me. I’d lost it somewhere in the fight. I tossed the radio and searched the corpse’s pockets as the jeep rocked and rocked again with the fight outside. A vampire’s hand shot through the little window between the bad and the bed of the jeep. I found his phone and I called Candido’s phone.

There was no answer. I growled and threw the phone down before shifting the lever again to R and slamming my foot on the pedal. The jeep lurched backward. I shifted it again and turned, heading away from the path we had just left and in the general direction of Rendezvous Point B based on where the other jeep had been going.

“You’re going the wrong way!” Vanessa cried from the back, shooting at something else.

I didn’t listen to her and eventually, I got onto another road. My heart lightened. How many roads could there have been leading toward where they had been supposed to be going?

“Go the other way!” Vanessa said. “The camp is the other way!”

“But the other point is that way!” I yelled. “You’re not going to fool me. I know you’re just--”

“Don’t be an idiot! You’re just taking us back to—Turn around!” Vanessa yelled.

But it was too late, the line of vampires armed with guns came into view before I could think, I turned sharply. Vanessa screamed as the jeep rocked onto two wheels then back onto four and I drove back into the woods, thinking I could lose them through the trees. Gunshots followed as we careened down another steep incline.

Gunshots followed us. The jeep tilted and skidded before slamming into something and stopping. I smelled something like burning cloth and my heart lurched. If there was fire, there was a good chance that the car would explode. I got out of the jeep as quickly as I could and turned back, realizing that it was just the airbags finally activating. I huffed and growled.

“If you had just told me how to get to the other point, we wouldn’t be here!” Vanessa said nothing. “I’m Pandora! I’ve been Pandora all this time! You trusted me to go after Claire and Francium. You trusted me, but now that Estella is here you’re trying to keep me from Candido! I wonder what his mother would say to you about it!”

She still said nothing. I growled and pulled myself up so she couldn’t ignore me and shouted at her.

“Answer me!”

Her eyes were dead and vacant in her face. Her throat had been torn out, but she wasn’t even bleeding. The vampire who had done it was nowhere to be found.

She was dead.

I swallowed. I went back to the cab of the car and sat in the driver’s seat. My hands shook. Where was Candido? Didn’t he feel how scared I was? How alone? Didn’t he feel that I was in danger, or was he so focused on Estella that he wasn’t paying any attention to the bond we had been forming before she showed up?

I grabbed the phone again and tried to call him, but there was no answer. I grabbed the stupid radio and pushed every button trying to get it to do something, but it didn’t even make a sound. I growled and thumped it.

The screen lit up.

It hadn’t been on? What kind of idiot didn’t have his radio on in an emergency situation?

I fiddled with the dial, but I heard nothing by static. Was it broken? I got out and went to search the other corpse and then finally Vanessa’s. None of their radios got me anything either. Then, I heard rustling in the bushes. I jumped out and considered getting back inside, but the two tires on the driver’s side were flat.

The rustling grew closer. I took a phone and a radio and ran.

I tried pressing buttons as I kept running in the direction I had been planning to drive in. It felt as if I could feel Candido in that direction. I knew he had to be there. I knew he wasn’t far. It couldn’t have been far.

I pressed buttons and kept speaking into the radio. “Is anyone there? Someone help me!”

The rustling vanished as if it had simply gone. I felt the forest shifting and my heart leaped. That had to be a sign that Candido was near. That someone was near and looking out for me. Maybe I was close to Lunae’s Circle and they had already returned there. I kept running.

Then, a large dark opening in stone seemed to appear. The air smelled like the caves. I stopped and shook my head. There was no way I was going that way. I turned, but the ground vanished beneath my feet. I smelled the still water of the caves and the clean, cold stone. My heart raced, knowing that it was probably going to drop me somewhere I didn’t want to be. Was it Ian? Was it Damian?

Maybe it was my mother trying to help me or the Goddess trying to take me to Candido. Maybe whatever had happened at the altar had been more complicated than I thought.

Maybe she had agreed to give me Candido.

I shrieked as I landed hard and rolled. I felt a bone crack as if it was just about to break as I came to a stop on a paved road. It looked like a highway and there were lights coming down the road.

It was almost as if I had been dropped into my past to the first time I’d met Candido.

The lights slowed as they approached me, but I felt the air shifting, I heard thudding feet and other vehicles coming from the other direction. I turned and saw a sea of glowing eyes in the night along with several sets of headlights: vampires.

“Hedy?” Claire asked. I looked up as the jeep came to a stop. Francium leaned out of the driver’s side. “How did you even—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Candido said, jimping down. My eyes filled with tears as I reached for him. I wanted to throw myself into his arms, but before I could, he grabbed me by my arm and pulled. “Where’s Vanessa? Where’s Apollo and Dune?”

“Candido, I was so—”

“Answer me, Hedy,” he said, pulling me to the back of the truck where Estella and several others were wrapping their injuries and reloading their guns.

Estella was shirtless in nothing more than what looked like a leather bra and wrapping her torso with bandages. I pulled away from Candido ignoring how much it hurt.

“Why is she shirtless with you?”

Candido glared at me. “Where is Vanessa?”

“I’m not telling you anything,” I said trying not to think of the way her dead eyes stared out of her face. “Why is she shirtless?”

Candido narrowed his eyes at me.

“They’ll be on us soon!” Someone cried from the front.

He turned to Estella. “Are you sure?”

She scoffed. “I think you’ve got bigger problems than if I can shoot a gun.”

She rolled onto her feet, tying the bandage and binding it there. Se pulled out a vial of something and tossed it back.

“Get ready,” Estella said. “Our best chance out of here is going to be to blast a path of escape. The caves aren’t responding yet.”

I glared over at her. “How do you know that? I just came through the caves!”

Candido turned from me and climbed onto the truck’s bed and stood beside her as she set up a rifle on the hood of the truck’s cab.

“A barrier isn’t going to work?” Candido asked. “Like a battering ram?”

“Not long enough to get through,” she said and reached into her pocket pulling out her mirror. I pulled myself onto the truck bed as she answered the call.

“Did that idiot make it to you?” Raven asked.

Estella just turned the mirror back toward me. Raven pursed her lips and eyed me. She turned.

“She’s there.”

Someone said something, and she turned back, her eyes hard. “Uncle Ian says that next time, you’ll be dead.”

I glared at her. “Is that a threat? I’m not—”

“Estella,” Raven cut in. “Cillian says that he’ll be on his way as soon as he can get through. Can you hold out for half an hour?”

She hissed. “What the hell is taking him so long?”

Estella pulled the mirror back to her. “What’s he doing? Getting pretty?”

Raven laughed. “He and Uncle Ian went out hunting…”

Estella said nothing for a moment.

“What does that mean?” Candido asked.

Estella glanced up at him briefly before dropping her gaze to the mirror.

“We’ll hold out… even if it’s just me.”