Renegade (Sabrina Strong Series Book 8)

Book summary

In "Renegade," Sabrina embarks on a daring quest into the Dark Veil to rescue Princess Aljehambra, who has been taken by the enigmatic Hawk, a son of Drakulya. Facing a world of outlaws, vampires, and wizards, Sabrina races against time using horses and trains as her only means of travel. Amidst the perils, her unwavering determination to reunite with her true love propels her forward, regardless of the challenges that lie ahead.

Excerpt from Renegade (Sabrina Strong Series Book 8)

The pounding on my front door interrupted my small, happy moment. I hadn't had too many of those as of late.

“Sabrina! Sabrina, I know you're in there. Open up!” A pause. “I need to talk to you!”

“Go away!” I said, hoping he'd take the hint. The person hammering on my door was my werewolf friend, Hobart. I was so tired of men trying to keep an eye on me, filling up space in my home, eating my food … I told Hobart I wanted to be left alone tonight. That translated well, didn't it?

“I need to speak with you. I have a message from Vasyl.”

I didn't want to hear anything Vasyl had to say. He'd left me, and that was that.

“Okay, answer your phone, at least!”

“No!” I yelled from my chair. My phone was … I wasn't sure where, but I wasn't going to answer it, and it was turned off anyway. And for that matter, I couldn't move from the chair I currently occupied. Not without crutches. So, screw him.

Besides, this was my favorite part of the movie, Wyatt Earp, with Kevin Costner playing Wyatt Earp. He'd gotten himself a cup of coffee and a cigar from one of the places he either owned or visited (it wasn't too clear). Then one of the brothers came running in, telling him that the “cowboys” were waiting for them down at the O.K. Corral. I knew shit would hit the fan now, mainly because I'd seen it a couple of times before, but it had been a while. I used to watch it with my father. We used to have popcorn and he would have a beer, and I would have a cola. Oh, how I wished those days could come back.

What would Wyatt have done, or said to Hobart, I wondered? Maybe he would have given one of his eloquent yet quiet speeches that made men back down. “Lady says she wants to be alone. You have a problem with that?” He would give Hobart a flinty glare, and knowing he was a werewolf, would threaten him with a silver bullet.

I turned up the volume and continued watching. Sure, it was on video (yes, I still had a video player instead of a DVD, but my father resisted upgrading), and I could watch it any time I wanted. And I wanted to watch this particular movie tonight. I really didn't know why. But this was one of my father's favorites. I missed him so. This weekend would have been his 45th birthday. I supposed it was why I wanted to be alone and watch this movie to remember him by, since he’d died five months ago.

That, and also another person in my life had died. This time it happened because they had been with me, and the bullets were meant for me, but he was in the way of the slug's trajectory.

I had to shut down my thoughts, unplug myself from reality, and go back to watching the video. That famous face-off at the O.K. Corral—which lasted only about 30 seconds—with guns blazing from both sides. I had forgotten the aftermath where Morgan Earp, Wyatt's brother, got assassinated while playing pool one night.

The blood leaked out from beneath him, coloring the snow … I felt a wash of disbelief … this was my fault … my fault he was there with me …

I continued watching the intense train ride where Wyatt and the others were taking Morgan's body back to California. It was dark when they got off the train somewhere, and these jerks—the Clantons and the McLaurys—were setting up an ambush. Wyatt managed to kill one of the leaders of the gang. He shot him with both barrels of a shotgun, and kept shooting him with both handguns until they are empty. Revenge tended to do that to you, I guessed. You go a little crazy with the need to pay back your enemy who shot a loved one. Yes, I understood that.

“Yeah!” I shouted and pumped my fist while watching the scene. Then I took a sip of the wine cooler—a berry flavor I was quite fond of. This was my second—no, my third. Yeah. I was feeling no pain, as they say. I was only slightly aware that it had become quiet outside, and Hobart had stopped beating on my door (good).

I moved to set the bottle down and it was lifted out of my hand before I could do so. Startled, I looked up and found an extremely tall blond vampire standing behind my chair. He put the bottle under his nose and sniffed. His lips curled in disgust.

“Hey! Who said you could come in?” I blurted. If I could, I would have been up out of my chair in a shot. But my broken leg hampered this. A good thing he was a friend—in a convoluted sort of way—or I would have sicced the Dagger of Delphi on him, that is if I had a clue where the damned thing was.

“Do you think it wise to be drinking in your condition?” he asked in his sultry baritone, completely ignoring my question.

“What condition would that be?” I challenged, struggling to move in my father's large La-Z-Boy. I wasn't supposed to put a lot of weight on the leg yet, and I had it raised on the footrest, doing exactly what I'd been told to do. Relaxing. Getting up from the chair quickly was not gonna happen.

“I understand how you feel,” he said, walking away from me in that smooth vampire way, through the dining room, and into the kitchen.

“You do, do you? Hah!” I said, my voice overly loud. Why was it whenever Tremayne showed up, I lost my composure and couldn't give a witty comeback? He simply had that effect on me.

In the next moment, the clink of glass indicated he had thrown my drink into the wastebasket—which further irked me. He stepped back into the dining room.

“I thought you were in L.A.,” I said, looking at him when he reappeared and stepped through the dining room, filling the six-foot wide doorway—which, by the way was impossible for any normal sized man, but this was Tremayne.

He put his large hands out to his sides. “I'm ba-aaack,” he said with a toothy smile.

“Why? I thought you were going to live there. Take over the western half of Vampire Junction, Mr. Big.” There. An improvement. When out of witty comebacks I went for jadedly flippant rejoinder.

“I went to straighten out my brother's will and all the crap that Ilona left for me to wade through. There's still more to be done, but I can't do much right now because the estate is in escrow.”

“But who's taking care of things out there?” I asked. Like I was worried or something? It had no bearing on my life whatsoever. At least, I hoped not.

“I sent Stefan out there. He's now in charge of the western half, and I'm back as magnate of the Eastern half.”

I made the appropriate “huh” sound, just to sound halfway interested. I wasn't sure how I felt about Tremayne being back within sixty miles of where I lived, since Chicago was the base headquarters of the eastern half. Already he was a thorn. Last month, I had let him into my house. I knew I'd be kicking myself for doing that. Yep. Here I was kicking myself. But I reminded myself at least Stefan was thousands of miles away from me, not trying to bed me.

“Let's get back to the subject at hand,” Tremayne said.

“Which is?”

Tremayne paused, seemed to chew on what he wanted to say to me for a long moment. That was unusual for him. He usually steamed ahead, everything be damned. But at the moment he looked like he was struggling with what he was going to say. Then he said, “I learned that a friend of yours died? Some guy you dated a while back?” he said, leaning a shoulder up against the aged oak threshold, his head just brushing the top of it. A good thing the wood was oak. It did well standing up under the weight of Tremayne.

Surprised, I licked my lips. “Who told you?”

“Hobart.”

Right. He wouldn't have called his master Vasyl, because Vasyl would likely suck me dry (because of his sudden desire for my blood). He called Tremayne instead. Damn vampires. This was exactly the reason why Tremayne was, at one time, not supposed to be around me because of his “drinking” problem. The more things changed the more they stayed the same.

He glanced down at me from where he stood. Tremayne, who looked like The Hulk's slightly slimmer, less green and handsomer brother, made my nine-foot ceilings look low with his seven-foot stature. When in a good mood, his eyes were a clear ocean blue, but when angry, they turned dark and stormy. Tonight, the color was somewhere in between, and I couldn't tell if he was happy to see me or irritated with me. His fangs weren't out, so I knew he wasn't excited to see me, thankfully; they were as long and as sharp as the icicles hanging from my house's gutters at the moment. Well, maybe not quite that long, but pretty darn close. But more importantly, they weren't out. Thankfully.

“So, he blabbed that to you, did he?” I frowned, not looking at him, picked up the remote, found the pause button, and paused my movie. This sucked eggs.

“He did.”

I stared at the TV. Deciding to simply turn the movie off, I reached for both remotes and turned everything off. “I wanted to be alone,” I said. “My father's birthday is on Sunday. I wanted to remember him by watching this movie. It was his and my favorite.”

“What's it about?”

“Wyatt Earp. He was born in a small town in Illinois.” I clicked the remote and the machine went through little clicking and whirring sounds and ejected the tape.

“Cowboy?”

“Lawman,” I said and looked up at him. “You know he never took a bullet? Even at this one part, where one of the cowboys shot at him repeatedly, bullets never hit his body. His long coat and boot took hits, but not him.”

“So, he lived to be old?”

“He was 80, I think, when he died in 1923,” I explained, looking away. “I got to see his grave in Colma, California, with my dad. I was seventeen at the time.”

A silence rose between us. Then he stepped across the room and swiped his fingers over the surface of the TV screen and looked at it. “This place needs to be cleaned.”

“I'll call Merry Maids tomorrow,” I said flippantly.

“What did you eat tonight? Pizza?”

“No. My sister-in-law made me lasagna. It was good.” I'd been home two days from the hospital. My right thigh was in a cast. It hurt a little bit and I was on pain medicine. Days ago, Mrs. Woodbine had shot me there, breaking the femur. The doctor called it a transverse break—a horizontal break—and I was lucky the slug hadn't hit an artery.