Free Burning (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #1) by Eve Paludan Page A

the vampire spiraled over the edge, there was a split-second expression of horror on his face as he grabbed his nuts in astonishment—and then he gave us a smug smirk as he assumed that this big fall was survivable for him.
    But I had a surprise for him. He would not live to see another day. I snatched my homemade, pre-loaded blowgun out of my smallest jeans pocket and blew a puff of air as hard as I could in his direction. I saw a flash of silver go out the end, and then there was a splatter, almost in slow motion, of blackish-red blood, as the slender, needle-fine dart hit the vampire right in the heart. Or, at least, I thought I hit the mark. He vanished from sight.
    “That one couldn’t fly,” Ambra said.
    He either disappeared into thin air when he died, or he was taking a cold, painful swim after bouncing off sharp rocks that were over the edge of the cliff. I probably knew better than anyone that there were only two things that killed vampires: sunlight and silver. Silver had won tonight. My wife’s genuine silver sewing needles, with a fletching added, made a deadly pocket-sized dart for a vampire’s heart.
    “Good crotch kick,” I said to Ambra.
    “ Nice blowgun,” she said, grinning. “I did the set-up and you finished him off. That famous sense of smell of yours is true. You saved us.”
    “ You equally saved us. But Rudolph should not have told your group about my acute sense of smell. It’s top secret that I can smell a vampire at close range.”
    “ I’ll keep it secret.”
    “ I saw that vampire on the ship at Gabrielle’s kidnapping and now I saw him again, near my wife’s murder.”
    “ I recognized him, too.”
    “ Our two kidnappings are related.”
    “ It seems so.”
    “ I have probably killed the best lead we had to where Kristen is being held and finding out who killed my wife, too. And maybe who has Gabby.”
    “ Rand, we still did the right thing by fighting him. We would’ve died.”
    “ Agreed. I’ve learned something from shooting first, asking questions later.”
    “ And what’s that?”
    “ The best defense is to take the best offense.”
    “ Indeed,” she said.
    “ Was that my kill or yours?” I asked.
    “ Yours. What does it matter?”
    “ Eleven,” I said.
    “ Eleven kills?”
    “ Yes.”
    I wasn’t sure if I was proud of that number or horrified. Shortly, we found the vampire’s car parked down the highway on the edge of the cliff. We ransacked the vehicle, and shoved everything loose that we could find into our car’s litterbags.
    And that’s when I lifted up the floor mat and held up a plastic bag of Roman coins. “Bingo,” I said.
    Ambra lifted up the other floor mats and found a notebook with strange writing in it.
    “What do you think it is?” I asked.
    “ The writing looks Cyrillic,” Ambra said, and shoved it in with the other stuff.
    We next popped the trunk and found other items, mostly written things and a couple of empty plastic bottles from blood, and hurriedly bagged them up.
    And then we got the hell off the Palos Verdes Peninsula, just as a cavalcade of fire trucks and police cars swept past us.
     
     
     
    Chapter Sixteen
     
     
    Two hours later, we were settled in on a private jet to Switzerland, surrounded by the stuff from the vampire’s car. And my wife’s hand was stashed in a plastic bag in a small red-and-white Playmate cooler. The jet’s one steward calmly exchanged out the ice with gloved hands and put the hand on dry ice. Not a question passed his lips.
    When he went back to the galley, I asked Ambra, “How did we not have to run the gauntlet of Customs?”
    “ Privilege. We are riding in the private jet of Gabrielle Dubois, the world-famous singer.”
    “ Damn, it shouldn’t be like that.”
    “ Nevertheless, it is that way. The company, which is us, takes care of all the Customs things. They did have to show Rudolph’s passport for you, and my passport, but there was no standing in line for bag checks, that