Free Labyrinth (Book 5) by Kat Richardson

shambling around after dark, looking for bums to make a withdrawal from.”
    “Why did they chase you?”
    “I’m not sure what started it. I saw one of them about a week ago take out a regular vampire with a sort of homemade Taser—knocks them out, but if you keep the voltage on, they go up in a fireball. I found another one snooping around where I’d seen the first one a couple of days later. That’s when I found out the zapper doesn’t work on these asetem. A discharge that should have turned one into a smoking pile of ash just knocked this one down for a minute. Then it got back up and came after me. I barely kept ahead of it, and it started calling in buddies to chase me. They tailed me to my hooch. It wasn’t safe to stay there after that, so I bugged out to Harper’s. If those things had been any faster, I’d have stood no chance. As it was, the fact I knew the area and they didn’t was about all that saved my ass.”
    “Ahhhh . . . so they aren’t locals....” Ben murmured, scribbling notes on a napkin with a finger dipped in coffee. Mara clucked her tongue and plucked a yellow legal pad from her pile of junk. She tossed it onto the table with a proper pen, and Ben snatched them and wrote in rapid, spiked shorthand, nodding as he did. “Did they look different from a regular vampire?”
    Quinton sent me a bemused glance. We were all used to Ben’s research obsessions and it was easier to humor him most of the time than try to restrain him to the topic at hand. Unless the topic was at hand, red in tooth and claw. Then things could get intense. But at least this was useful. I now knew what had driven Quinton out of his hidden home and he had a better idea of how bad these creatures we were tangling with truly were.
    “The ones I saw had either white hair or streaked black and white. Their skin was pretty pale, but it’s hard to tell under the street what color ‘pale’ is. From most angles, their eyes glow orange—fiery orange—and there’s something . . . kind of snakelike about them.”
    “Their skin has a faint scale pattern to it,” I put in. “Sekhmet referred to them as having ‘fine, white cobra forms,’ if I am remembering the conversation right, and they do look a little like hooded cobras when they get annoyed.”
    “They hiss,” Quinton added into the silence as Mara and Ben stared at us.
    I stared back. “What? You don’t think they hiss?”
    Ben started, excited. “Sekhmet is the Egypt—”
    I cut him off, not wanting to risk the goddess’s attention. “I know what she is.”
    Mara seemed frightened more than amazed. “You . . . met her? In London?”
    I bit my lip. Time to sound crazy. . . . “Yes. Sort of. Not so much in the flesh . . . in the Grey form, I guess you could say. We had a rather disturbing chat. The asetem aren’t much liked by the other vampires in London, but there’s a sort of truce . . . or there was until Wygan got Alice to kick over that apple cart. That was what caused Edward to send me to London in the first place.”
    “Why ever didn’t y’say something to us if you knew there were asetem involved?”
    “I didn’t know. I didn’t know they existed or what the problem was. I just went where I was told to go and did what I had to do. And I don’t care to repeat that conversation—it wasn’t pleasant—but it did put me onto Wygan and Alice. They were undermining Edward, partially to get to him and partially to get to me, but Alice thought it wasn’t good enough, so she kidnapped Will Novak, too, and that’s when things started to get really strange—but it doesn’t matter! The point is this: Wygan is moving forward with a plan that has something to do with Edward, and with me, and with the Grey itself. Whatever it is, I don’t want to be part of it, but more than that, I don’t want it to go ahead at all. I intend to put a stop to it, but it has to be my way.
    “Wygan has been attacking my home, trying to get at me, wear me down,