Free Blood Guilt by Marie Treanor Page B

to the living room.
    Robbie sat poised with his first card dealt and his hand hovering over the second. Laughing, Mihaela hurried over, put the active detector in her other pocket, and dropped down opposite Robbie.
    “Go!” she commanded, and Robbie began to deal. Mihaela did him the courtesy of concentrating this time and duly won back a handful of cards. “Always liked dogs,” she said, and Robbie laughed.
    She laid down her next card, just as the detector in her pocket vibrated.
    Jolted, she delved for it. The bastard hasn’t gone after all. What the hell is he up to? Why bring Robbie to me and then hang around?
    “That’s a funny phone,” Robbie commented as she stared at the LED. Yards away, probably in the street, and closing.
    Leaping to her feet, she ran to the front door, locking it and fixing the chain she knew Elizabeth never bothered with. Then she grabbed both stakes from her coat pocket and put them in her cardigan pockets instead.
    The directional needle was going haywire, and every time it moved, the distance indicator changed too. More than one vampire.
    Mihaela spun around and found Robbie staring at her from the living room doorway. “Can you feel them too?” he asked.
    “My funny phone can,” she admitted and took his hand to lead him back to the living room. “Is it Maximilian? Is he calling you?”
    “Not him. The others.”
    Maximilian had said the others couldn’t find him, that he’d masked Robbie from them. The lie shouldn’t have felt like a knife twisting in her gut. It was what she expected of vampires.
    “You mustn’t go to them, Robbie,” she warned, edging along the wall to the window, still holding his hand.
    “I don’t want to. I’ll stay here with you. But they’re not calling me.”
    Mihaela spared him a frowning glance. “They’re not?”
    “Nah. I just feel them, ken?”
    Mihaela peered outside, trying to avoid being seen by watching eyes. She couldn’t see anyone in the street below. But the distance indicator, when it stayed still for long enough to read, was displaying smaller and smaller numbers.
    “Do you know how many?” she asked calmly.
    Robbie counted on his fingers. “Four,” he said, with a grin, though whether his pleasure was with the vampire presence or his powers of calculation wasn’t clear.
    “I don’t suppose you know where?” she asked, turning to face the living room door, from where she could see the front door of the flat.
    Robbie shook his head.
    Four. She’d need a hell of a lot of luck to deal with four vampires on her own, especially when she needed to protect Robbie at the same time.
    She said, “I think there might be another fight.” Reaching over to the table, she grabbed her phone to do what she should have done at the beginning: call the British hunters. Rules were there for a reason. She could almost hear Miklόs and Konrad saying it. It was almost the only thing they agreed on. Her overdeveloped sense of this one vengeance had put Robbie in danger. There was no one to protect him if she died.
    But as she scrolled down, a thud from across the hall distracted her.
    Shit! “They’re coming through the kitchen window,” she said calmly. “You have to stay behind me, keep as far away from the fight as you can get.” She crammed the phone into his hand. “If anything happens to me, you call this number. You can trust the voice that answers.”
    There was no time for more. She grabbed the arm of the sofa, pushing it around a hundred and eighty degrees so that its seat faced her and it stood between her and whoever entered the room—a poor defense but all she had. The vampire Gavril strolled in.
    “ Bunã seara ,” he said, and held out one inviting hand. It might have been for herself or Robbie, but since another vampire pushed past him, and a crash against the front door told her a third was breaking in from that direction, she didn’t pause to find out.
    As the second vampire ran at her, she leapt at the back of