Read Online At Grave's End by Jeaniene Frost - Free Book Online

you move, you little shite.”
    “You’ve got him?” Bones asked in a truly chilling voice.
    Annette sounded as fierce as I’d ever heard her. “I’ve got him, Crispin.”
    My mother reached me. She was hugging me and trying to pull me from Bones’s arms even as she kept feeling my neck.
    “Did he fix it? Are you all right, Catherine?”
    That’s when I noticed the rest of the blood. It wasn’t only splattered on Bones, but all over me, around me, even on the nearby wall.
    “What happened?” I asked, torn between dizziness, numbing gratitude that we were alive, and being aghast at all the blood surrounding us.
    “Max ripped your throat out,” Bones replied. There was the weirdest mixture of relief and rage in his blazing green gaze. “And he’s going to dearly wish I’d kill him before I’m through with him.”

S IX
    D ON ARRIVED AT MY MOTHER’S WITH THE full team less than fifteen minutes after I called him. They must have broken every traffic law known to man, not that any local cops could give them speeding tickets.
    Bones and Annette strapped Max into the capsule. Don was taking him—for now. Bones curtly said he’d send someone by later to collect Max, and the tone he used made me glad my uncle didn’t argue. Of course, I didn’t think Don wanted Max on his hands very long. The look the brothers had exchanged while Max was being strapped into that capsule was filled with so much history, Don glanced away even before Max started to curse him.
    I had to be given several pints of blood to replace what I’d lost. Bones’s blood had healed my multiple injuries, but my pulse had been dangerously weak.
    “That was close,” I said to Bones with a shaky smile after my final transfusion. I was sitting in his car. He’dused a towel to wipe off as much blood from me as possible. We were leaving soon. Bones didn’t want to stay longer than necessary here, since we couldn’t be sure who else Max and Calibos might have told about their ambush plans.
    Bones met my eyes with an unfathomable look. “I’d have brought you back one way or another, Kitten. Either as a vampire or a ghoul, even if you hated me for it afterward.”
    “Not if Max had his way,” I muttered. “He was going to cut me into pieces.”
    Bones let out a hiss that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Then he seemed to get himself under control.
    “I’ll remember that,” he said, each word bitten off.
    So many emotions were surging in me. Relief, delayed panic, anger, exhilaration, and the urge to clutch Bones and babble about how thrilled I was to even see him again. But there wasn’t time for a meltdown, so I stuffed those feelings back. Get it together, Cat. Can’t have you turn into a mass of psychological goo, there’s too much to do.
    My mother was in the backseat. She’d refused to go to the compound, even though she wouldn’t have been there long. Don was moving everyone out. Max had found my mother’s house, so it was an easy guess to make that he knew where the compound was, too. Don wasn’t taking any chances that Max had told other vampires where to find it. Don’s operation had killed enough of them that some might decide to pay it a visit.
    So my mother was leaving with Bones and me now, and Don would get her set up with another place to live later. Once he finished relocating our entire team.
    “I’m sorry, Catherine,” she mumbled, not meeting my eyes. “I didn’t want to call you. I heard myself saying the words, but I couldn’t seem to stop.”
    I sighed. “It’s not your fault. Max used mind control. You couldn’t help what you were saying.”
    “Demon power,” she whispered.
    “No,” Bones said firmly. “Max is the one who told you all vampires were demons, right? You think he’s capable of telling the truth, even after this?”
    “Whatever Max told you back then,” I added, “you would have been compelled to believe, just like you were compelled to call me before. Vampires