Cadence used her entire body to fling the creature up and over, holding onto it with her knees, one hand on each jaw. It bucked and tried to pound her into the concrete beneath them, but her efforts were enough for Elliott to plunge the knife into its chest cavity. He took the blade out and stabbed again, several times, and Cadence could feel the animal start to weaken. Silver knives had worked better than anything else on the shapeshifting Vampires they’d encountered both in Melbourne and in Butler, Missouri, when they’d gone on a raid there right before Paul was taken prisoner. It was working here as well. After a few more jabs, the Vampire crocodile let out a loud sigh and crumbled into ash all over Cadence.
She lay there stunned for a few seconds, not sure what to make of the entire reptile situation. Eventually, she came to her senses and jumped up, brushing the residue off as Elliott pocketed his weapon. “Never in my life…” she muttered, not even sure how she might finish that sentence.
“You’re telling me. This is some crazy-ass shit.” He shook his head and nudged her along.
Cadence’s feet started moving, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what lie ahead of them. Even if this tunnel was empty, they’d need some sort of an explanation for that last one, and she wasn’t sure who it would come from.
A few minutes later, she could see the first grate they’d gone through, the one that had led to this larger tunnel, which was in the floor of a newer parking garage beneath one of Houston’s tallest buildings. The thought of standing in a stream of hot water in their hotel shower for a good hour or two made her walk a little faster even if she thought she had a few choice words for her fiancé when she saw him.
As Elliott helped her remove the grate more discreetly this time, he asked, “Do you know the difference between an alligator and a crocodile?”
After that last encounter, she was pretty confident neither one of them did, but she decided to play along. She slid the grate over and began to hoist herself up. “No. What is it?”
Standing in the parking garage, she watched as Elliott pulled himself through and they returned the metal covering. “One of them will see you later, and the other one will see you after a while.”
A guffaw escaped her lips despite the fact she was trying to be quiet just in case there were still humans in the parking garage that late at night, or early in the morning, as the case may be. She shook her head. “Did you just think of that?”
“No, I think it’s a meme,” he admitted, walking back toward the SUV they’d parked all of an hour ago.
“Since when are you a social media butterfly?” Cadence asked; as far as she knew his Smartphone was so old it didn’t even support most app updates.
“Since I started raising a teenager,” he replied, producing some keys and starting the Enclave remotely. Cadence hurried across the lot and climbed into the passenger side.
Mention of Brandon had her checking in on him again. He was fine—no rats, no crocs. Nothing but regular ol’ Vampires. She was glad Cassidy was back home in Kansas City with her parents, even though they hadn’t encountered anything too terribly dangerous. She worried about her sister despite the fact that she’d proven herself the last time she’d gone into the field. But that was months ago, and things had changed. Cadence knew she couldn’t protect Cassidy forever, but she’d try, especially in light of what had happened recently in their small town of Shenandoah.
“Hey, you all right?” Elliott asked, steering them out of the parking garage.
Cadence realized she’d gotten lost in her head again, something she needed to be more mindful of. “Yeah, fine,” she assured him as he squeezed her knee. “Just… thinking about Cass.”
Elliott nodded, well-aware of the situation with Cassidy’s friend, Lucy Burk. “She’ll be all right. She’s a tough lil girl.”
“Yep,” Cadence said, but she wasn’t sure she believed it. Her sister had been through so much lately. There were thousands of Hunters under Cadence’s direction now, and many of them were new recruits, like her sister. And Tara—who had almost died recently. And Cadence was responsible for each of them, a job she didn’t take lightly. Sometimes she wondered how Aaron had done it for so long.
Thinking of him made her remember the rats and the gator. Cadence closed her eyes and leaned her head back, ready to be home. “From now on, why don’t we let Texas handle its own shit?” she asked.
“Everything is definitely bigger here,” Elliott said, not answering her question. “Bigger rats. Bigger crocapires. Except the grates. Those seemed smaller.”
She chuckled, thinking of him trapped. “At least you weren’t stuck when the vampigator arrived.”
“True. They say I would live without my head attached to my body, but I don’t wanna find that out for certain.”
“Me neither,” Cadence agreed, slapping him on the shoulder, her eyes still shut. “Me neither.” It was one of the many scenarios she hoped she’d never encounter, and if she lived to be two hundred, she could do without ever seeing another allipire again, too, but she had a feeling Holland wasn’t done throwing them for a loop. The sooner they put an end to the Vampire Queen’s reign, the better.
