Read Online Jack Templar and the Lord of the Demons (The Jack Templar Chronicles Book 5) by Jeff Gunhus - Free Book Online Page B

even bothering to turn around. All I could see was a brown old-fashioned hat.
    “Anywhere. Just drive,” I pleaded.
    “Ahh … you American?” the driver said. “NFL football. Washington DC. Good, yes?”
    “Here they come,” Eva said.
    The doors of the train station burst open and the punk vampire ran outside. Her creach henchmen fanned out, looking through the crowd.
    “Drive, per favore,” I said.
    “Where go you?” the driver asked. “Is correct? English not good.”
    “Anywhere. The Coliseum,” I blurted out.
    The punk vampire spotted us. She ran at the taxi.
    “Coliseum?” the driver asked. “Good. See, not hard. Easy.”
    “Can we go now? Please?” I begged.
    The driver shifted the car’s automatic transmission into drive. “Americans,” he mumbled. “Always in big hurry.”
    The taxi lurched forward, darting into a space barely big enough in the flow of traffic. Drivers bleated their horns in anger, and our driver made some violent hand gestures back at them in response.
    Eva and I looked out the back window. The punk vampire ran after the car but fell quickly behind us as we sped away. Only then did I notice Eva wincing in pain. She held up her arm. The forearm was bent at a weird angle, broken in at least two places.
    “Do you mind?” she asked, holding her hand out to me.
    I took her hand, still feeling a little jolt of excitement from feeling her skin on mine. Just another reminder that I still had a crush on her. That feeling disappeared once she yanked back on her arm, snapping the broken bones into place. She stifled a scream. Her vampire body may have been able to heal itself miraculously, but it didn’t mean her injuries didn’t hurt.
    “You all right, miss?” the taxi driver asked.
    “I’m fine,” Eva said through clenched teeth.
    “You were very lucky back there,” he said. “Both of you.”
    A pit formed in my stomach. The driver’s accent had fallen away, replaced by smooth, unaccented English.
    “How do you figure?” I asked.
    The driver took off his hat and revealed spiky white hair. He glanced back at us, a young face of pale skin, blood red lips, and pale blue eyes. The vampire from the train station.
    “You’re lucky because my sister never loses a fight.”

10
    I reached for the taxi door but Eva grabbed my forearm.
    “The others,” she said before speaking to the taxi driver. “Do you have them?”
    “Of course we do,” he said. “Do you think we would have let you escape the train station so easily if we didn’t have the trap in place?”
    I pulled my sword and held it to the back of the driver’s neck.
    “Where are they?” I said. “Tell me or I’ll run you through.”
    The driver laughed. “That wouldn’t be very smart, now would it? First, if you did that, we’d crash and the two of you would be killed. Well, at least you would be, Templar. Second, kill me and your friends would die for sure.”
    “He’s right,” Eva said softly. “They played this well.”
    “Thank you,” the driver said. “My name is Tomas. You already met my sister Re’gan. We were sent to pick you up.”
    “Sent?” I asked. “By who? No one knew we were coming here.”
    Tomas laughed. “You hunters are all alike. Constantly underestimating the powers you are up against. Do you really think you were able to travel all the way from Spain without being noticed? Our eyes are everywhere. We see everything. Know everything.”
    Eva reached out and slapped the side of Tomas’s head with a cupped hand. The car swerved as he cried out.
    “What was that?” he said, rubbing his ear.
    “What? Didn’t you see that coming?” Eva said with a smirk.
    Under normal circumstances I would have gotten a good laugh, but all I could think about was what was happening to the others. I thought about how many creach were at the train station. What Tomas had said rang true. They must have expected us to arrive to have that many creach waiting.
    “Who sent you to pick us up?”