Free The Shopgirl's Prophecy (Beasts of Vegas Book 1) by Anna Abner

them, and placed him sloppily in the bed of the Ford.
    “Head north at the end of the road,” Roz shouted, settling beside him in the back of the pickup among their arsenal in bags and boxes. “Anton and Natasha fund a medical clinic outside Henderson. It’s not far.”
    Ali felt her way around the truck like a blind person. Stefan had had the same gray pallor to his skin as he’d died, a fish out of water, struggling for every heartbeat. Her uncle had twitched too. It didn’t bode well for the big, beautiful hunter who’d only been trying to help her.
    Despite her best intentions, everyone she’d come into contact with in the past twenty-four hours had died. Except Roz. She glanced back at the other girl. Only a matter of time, sweetheart.
    It took two attempts to get the truck started and in gear. She turned the wheel and floored it. They shot forward so fast her head whipped back, and Roz screamed obscenities from the rear.
    Ali eased off the gas, but clenched the wheel and breathed through a wave of nausea. Connor didn’t deserve to die—drained of life and convulsing in the dirt, his pale face splattered with his own blood. God, Oleksander used people like garbage. He’d used her uncle and Natalie and Ron. And poor Stefan.
    She’d give anything to be home in London. She wished to be in her flat, safe and sound, as if the whole trip to the States had been a nightmare brought on by spicy food, and she wasn’t really cursed to watch everyone around her suffer and die.
    Roz pounded on the roof, Ali turned the steering wheel hard, and they came to a shuttering stop in front of a strip mall. She jumped out and stood on tiptoe to see into the truck bed. Connor had stopped twitching. Roz did six chest compressions and still had the energy to yell at her.
    “Get the doctor!”
    He’s dying . Because, despite Connor’s iron resolve, the odds of him coming back from this were infinitesimal. But Roz wasn’t giving up and neither would Ali. A small chance was still a chance. She pulled the only walking lab coat in the building outside.
    “What do we have?” the doctor asked, climbing into the pickup’s bed.
    “Vampires. He stopped breathing a couple minutes ago.” Roz bent and blew two quick puffs into his open mouth, and then continued chest compressions. “Can you help him?”
    The clinic wasn’t set up for emergency triage, only minor wounds and broken bones. A modern hospital, it was not. More like a frontier doctor’s office in an American western. They squeezed by two women flanking a boy with an icepack pressed to his head. The doctor directed them into an exam room furnished with a sink, a cupboard, and a hospital bed.
    Connor sank into the mattress, his arm cranked unnaturally, and his feet splayed outward. To reassure herself he was warm and alive, Ali grasped his blood-speckled forearm.
    The doctor shoved an Ambu bag at Roz, who looked like she knew what she was doing. “Blondie will do thirty fast compressions, and then you hit him with two breaths from that.”
    Blondie? Was that supposed to be her? “Do what?”
    “Straddle him.” The doc gave Ali a leg up onto the gurney and for a moment she was airborne before settling on top of Connor’s hips. Her left hand grasped his shoulder to steady herself, and she smelled his wound, an organic and coppery twang in the air. And then her gaze fell upon his throat. They’d bitten him, what appeared to be more than once, and it felt like a worse invasion than the stabbing.
    “What are you waiting for?” The doc grasped her hand and demonstrated the right place to pump his chest. “Don’t stop. I’ve got to charge the defibrillator.” She ran in and out of the room, starting an IV, hanging a sack of donor blood over him, and shooting him up with three different drugs.
    Ali did as she was told. She focused on counting her compressions and not jostling the blade protruding from his diaphragm, pressing her palms harder and harder against his ribs as