And the middle?
She couldn’t go down the Janelle rabbit hole right now.
Back over at her open door, Nyx leaned in and moved the deflated airbag out of the way. Where was her phone? She’d put it in a cupholder after she’d texted their grandfather as they’d left Hannaford. Great. Nowhere to be found—
“Thank God.”
Bracing her hand on the seat, she went down into the wheel well. And got a palm full of bad news.
The screen was cracked and the unit dark. When she tried to fire the thing up, it was a no go. Straightening, she looked over the ruined hood. “Posie, where is your—”
“What?” Her sister was focused on the road that was a good fifty yards away, her stick-straight hair tangled down her back. “Huh?”
“Your phone. Where is it?”
Posie glanced over her shoulder. “I left it at home. You had yours, so I just, you know.”
“You need to dematerialize back to the farmhouse. Tell grandfather to bring the tow truck and—”
“I’m not leaving here until we take care of that deer.”
“Posie, there are too many humans around here and—”
“It’s suffering!” Tears glistened. “And just because it’s an animal doesn’t mean its life doesn’t matter.”
“Fuck the deer.” Nyx glared across the steaming mess. “We need to solve this problem now—”
“I’m not leaving until—”
“—because we have two hundred dollars of groceries melting in the back. We can’t afford to lose a week’s worth of—”
“—we take care of that poor animal.”
Nyx swung her eyes away from her sister, the crash, the crap she had to fix so goddamn Posie could continue to give her heart out to the world and worry about things other than how to pay the rent, keep food on the table, and make sure they had such exotic luxuries as electricity and running water.
When she trusted herself to look back without hurling a bunch of be-practical f-bombs at her fricking sister, she saw absolutely no change in Posie’s resolve. And this was the problem. A sweet nature, yes. That annoying, bleeding-heart, emphatic bullcrap, yes. Iron will? When it came it down to it, boatloads.
That female was not budging on the deer thing.
Nyx threw up her hands and cursed—loudly.
Back in the car. Opening the glove box. Taking out the nine millimeter handgun she kept there for emergencies.
As she came around the rear of the station wagon, she eyed the reusable grocery bags. They were crammed up against the bench seat as a result of the crash, and it was a good news/bad news situation. Anything breakable was done for, but at least the cold items were cloistered together, united in a fight against the eighty-degree August night.
“Oh, thank you, Nyx.” Posie clasped her hands under her chin like she was doing a devotional. “We’ll help the—wait, what are you doing with the gun?”
Nyx didn’t stop as she passed by, so Posie grabbed her arm. “Why do you have the gun?”
“What do you think I’m going to do to the damn thing? Give it CPR?”
“No! We need to help it—”
Nyx put her face into her sister’s and spoke in a dead tone. “If it’s suffering, I’m going to put it down. It’s the right thing to do. That is the way I will help that animal.”
Posie’s hands went to her face, pressing into cheeks that had gone pale. “It’s my fault. I hit the deer.”
“It was an accident.” Nyx turned her sister around to face the station wagon. “Stay here and don’t look. I’ll take care of it.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt the—”
“You’re the last person on the planet who’d intentionally hurt anything. Now stay the hell here.”
The sound of Posie softly crying escorted Nyx back toward the road. Following the tire gouges in the dirt and the ruined foliage, she found the deer about fifteen feet away from where they’d veered off—
Nyx stopped dead in her tracks. Blinked a couple of times.
Considered vomiting.
It wasn’t a deer.
Those were arms. And legs. Thin ones, granted, and covered with mud-colored clothes that were in rags. But nothing about what had been struck was animal in nature. Worse? The scent of the blood that had been spilled was not human.
It was a vampire.
They’d hit one of their own.
Nyx ran over to the body, put the gun away, and knelt down. “Are you okay?”
Dumbass question. But the sound of her voice roused the injured, a horrific and horrified face turning up to her.
It was a male. A pretrans male. And oh, God, the whites of both his eyes had gone red, although she couldn’t tell whether it was because of the blood running down his face or some kind of internal brain injury. What was clear? He was dying.
“Help . . . me . . .” The thin reedy voice was interrupted by weak coughing. “Out of . . . prison . . . hide me . . .”