Chapter 66
The trip to Belogradchik was a long one. Lucas, Adrian, and their associates took their own vehicle, and since Elliott insisted on driving theirs, Jo sat in the back this time. Waking up with a bit of drool at the corner of her mouth, finding out she’d made herself comfortable on Zane’s shoulder was slightly embarrassing, but not as bad as it would’ve been if she’d been sitting by Scott and fallen asleep on his shoulder, but he was sitting in the passenger seat in front of her, thank goodness. She didn’t even remember unbuckling her seatbelt and scooting this close to Zane, but here she was.
She wiped her mouth, gave Zane a wide-eyed apologetic look, which he brushed off, and looked out the window to see it was dark and snowing. Hard. “Where are we?”
“Middle of a snowstorm,” Elliott said quickly. “If you’da been awake earlier, you’da seen the middle of a different snowstorm.”
“Before that, you missed the beginning of a snowstorm,” Brandon said from the seat behind her.
“Did that look any different than the middle of the snowstorm?” Jo wasn’t sure why she was playing along with their ridiculous banter. She usually didn’t, but for some reason, she felt compelled to do so this time.
“Nope, exactly the same,” Brandon said.
Cassidy groaned. “Why are we talking about this?”
“Why not?” Elliott asked her. “You got something better to talk about?”
“No, but we could be quiet. We could try playing the quiet game.” The Hybrid had been lying down, stretched across the back seat of the black SUV they were riding in so that Jo couldn’t even see her until she abruptly sat up.
“Nah, I don’t like the quiet game,” Elliott said, concentrating harder than it would appear with all the talking he was doing in the flurry of snow.
“That’s because you always lose,” Cassidy reminded him.
“Exactly. Shutting up is not my strong suit.”
Cassidy snickered, which brought a smile to Jo’s face. It was clear everyone had missed Elliott, even Scott who hadn’t said a word. Jo felt more like one of her parents was around when he was there. Even though Cassidy was actually related to her and was only a few years younger than her mother, Jo never really saw her as an adult the way she did Elliott, probably because he was so old. Despite the fact that he acted like he was a little kid, he was almost a hundred, and there was a lot of wisdom hidden behind the ridiculous comments and silly jokes he made. She had vague memories of her parents and Elliott and his wife Amanda, who had been a human, hanging out and doing fun things together from when she was a kid, and those memories always brought a smile to her face. Back then, there hadn’t been much to do on the Vampire hunting front. They liked to tell stories about “the good ol’ days,” though, and even though she’d pretended not to be paying attention, she appreciated those stories then and now more than she realized until she’d been gone from all of those people for so long. Now, Elliott was the only one readily accessible. Amanda had passed away. Jo was pretty sure her mom had, too, though now she wasn’t sure. And her dad was lost in a portal somewhere looking for his wife….
She had to stop thinking about it or else she’d get tears in her eyes, and she didn’t want to have to explain those to anyone. Zane had her hand, though, as if he could somehow tell her mood had shifted from sleepy, to amused, to bothered. He gave it a squeeze, and she silently thanked him with a look that only the two of them would’ve been able to decipher.
“Where’s Lucas?” Jo asked, after a moment to get herself together.
“Somewhere ahead of us in that patch of white, flying snow,” Elliott replied. “I’m not following him anymore. Cassidy got a map from him, and I’m following that. Hopefully, we won’t drive off of the road or slam into someone going the other direction. Not that it would kill any of us, but it probably wouldn’t feel like a nice, warm hug.”
Jo didn’t say anything. She trusted Elliott to get them there safely more than anyone else in the vehicle. Who knew what was going on with the Souled Vampires in the other SUV? She had no idea if being undead made a person a good driver or not.
“How much further do you think it’ll be?” she asked, not because she really cared that much but because it seemed like the sort of question a person should ask.
“Probably another four hours since I can’t see a damn thing. I’m having to drive about fifty miles an hour.”
That was slow for him. In this sort of weather, a person probably couldn’t see the road at five or ten miles an hour. If the road were clear, they’d be going at least a hundred and fifty, depending upon how fast the vehicle could go.
“What happened in Africa?” Jo asked him. She got some groans from other people in the vehicle and imagined they’d talked about that before she’d woken up. She’d stopped by the bar downstairs in the hotel to welcome the newcomers who’d been out searching for Heather on the southern continent but hadn’t had a chance to actually talk to any of them. All she knew was the information Elliott had given her over the IAC while he was there.
“Not a lot, except for a bunch of Vampires shooting at us and the government trying to arrest us every five minutes,” he said with a shrug. “Obviously, we did not find Heather.”
Jo turned to look at Cassidy who was sitting up now, her arms folded. “Why do you think she’s shielding herself?”
“I think it’s more from the Vampires than from us,” she said, “but I don’t know for sure, and I won’t know until I can find her.”
“But we can’t just leave her now and go and do that, so that might have to wait,” Brandon clarified.
“And it might not even be necessary if we can find Holland,” Jo reminded them.
“I’ll still want to find her,” Cassidy said, “but if we can find Holland and bring her in without Heather, that works, too.”
Jo knew that Cassidy and Heather shared a bond since they were the only two known Hybrids in existence. Heather had spent over a hundred years wandering in the Blood Moon Portal, one of the portals Jo’s dad was currently searching for her mom. Since Heather had come out, along with all of the other LIGHTS team members Holland had thrown in there, many other portals had been discovered. It could take Aaron a lifetime to explore them all as he searched for Cadence.
The vehicle fell silent again, and Jo got lost in her head. Thinking about her dad searching the portals for her mom reminded her of the day her mom had disappeared, a day she didn’t like to think about. She adjusted in her seat and tried to think about something else.
Her thoughts went to Holland. None of them knew what kind of powers the Vampire Queen had now that she had apparently come back from the portals. Jo was assuming her powers would be stronger than they had been before, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. Being inside of the portals hadn’t changed Christian or Aaron’s powers any, and they’d spent a great deal of time in there over the last ten years. It could be that Holland would be exactly the same strength now as she was when she came back the first time, through the Blue Moon Portal.
“What could Holland do? When she came back as Asteria?” she asked, turning to look at Cassidy, though Brandon and Elliott had firsthand knowledge as well.
Cassidy raised her eyebrows at her for a moment. “Just about anything,” she said. “She could shield her entire forces from me. She could shift into anything she wanted to, including a fire-breathing, flying dragon. She could cause her Vampires to be able to shift, too.”
“She created all kinds of other monsters,” Brandon added. “Wolves, zombie things, these ghost creatures that just sort of hung in the mist.”
“She’d throw fireballs at us,” Cassidy continued. “And she gave birth to that damn demon baby.”
“That thing was creepy,” Elliott said. “She’s bad news, Lil Jo. That’s about all there is to it.”
Jo nodded. She figured as much. “How do we kill her then?”
“We don’t,” Cassidy reminded her. “We take her hostage.”
“That sounds even harder,” Jo noted.
“It will be. We have some of the silver cuffs Christian created. They’ve held some pretty badass Vampires over the years, but I have no idea if they’ll hold Holland.”
“I hope we have more than a couple of pairs,” Elliott said quietly.
“I think we have four. But we’ve got to figure in that the Vampires guarding her are going to be almost as strong as she is. She wouldn’t surround herself with a bunch of amateurs.” Cassidy shook her head as she spoke. “This mission is going to be by far the most dangerous any of us have ever been on.”
Jo knew that, too. She looked around the SUV. Elliott and Cassidy couldn’t die. Scott could heal himself pretty quickly, but he could die with scandium bullets, as could Zane and Brandon. She was the only Hunter, the only one vulnerable to Vampire attacks from any source, scandium or not. She’d done that on purpose, left all the other Hunters behind, but now, she was nervous. Not for herself. She didn’t care about dying. She didn’t fear death. But she was afraid of living--of being the only one to walk away.
Reminding herself that this was a scouting mission, she concentrated her attention outside at the hypnotic blowing snow and took a few deep breaths. The task ahead of them would be nearly impossible, but if anyone could do it, it was the people in that SUV. It would’ve been great if her dad, Jamie, and a few others with a buttload of experience could be with them, but since they couldn’t, this was the best she could do, and she really did think they’d do just fine. One way or another.