Using the flat of the blade, I slapped his wrist and knocked the handgun to the floor.
He shouted something about being a policeman, and how I was under arrest, and also a few curse words and something generically derogatory about my parentage, and then he swung at my head with his free hand.
I would love to tell you I knew some way to knock him out quickly, so maybe he’d wake up in an hour none the worse for having been concussed, but this wasn’t a movie. Absolutely, I could have discarded the sword and beaten him up with my typically non-lethal fists until he was no longer awake enough to shoot me, but that kind of thing takes time. (Also, I don’t know where movies get the idea that you can knock someone out, and then when they wake up later it was like they’d been napping, and they’re otherwise pretty much okay. That kind of thing can take weeks to recover from. I know this from experience.)
I didn’t have any time to fight him until he was unconscious, is my point, so when he took his shot with his left hand, I stepped aside, grabbed the hand and pulled so he was off balance, and slid the sword up beneath his ribcage.
I held it there until the life went out of his eyes, which was maybe ten seconds. Then I took the sword out and left him to sag against the wall in the pool of his own blood.
“Mirella, how are you doing down there?” I asked, while fetching the gun.
She didn’t answer, so I started down to see if I could help. She met me on the landing between.
“I’m all right,” she said. She was covered in arterial spray. “Human and goblin. You?”
“Just the cop. Human. Where are we going?”
“Up. More are coming. Let’s hope you’re right about being able to jump to the next roof.”
The dead policeman on the fourth-floor landing didn’t even give her pause. It made me hesitate, and I was the one who did it. The first thing I could think of was, now I had to steer clear of Chicago for a few years, like I did in Boston, which was the last city in which I ended up killing a human. It was a lawman then, too, although I don’t think the police ever connected me to that one. They wanted me there for something I didn’t do.
The hotel was eight stories and we had no idea—assuming we made it to the eighth floor—if we would find the stairs continuing upward to a roof exit. The building felt like the right kind of old to have a rooftop egress, but there were two stairwells; that exit could have easily been located at the top of the stairs next to the elevator instead.
Mirella was of the same mind. She stopped us at the seventh-floor landing in order to peer around the railing and get a look. I could hear people racing up the stairs beneath us. It sounded like two, but I’m much better at that kind of guess when I’m hunting in a jungle.
“No,” she said. “No exit. We go here.” She pointed at the seventh-floor door.
“We can go up to eight and across.”
“Here,” she repeated. “They’ll expect us on eight.”
Through the door, we found a hallway more or less identical to the one we’d just left. The lighting was a little different, and there was an ice machine, but that was all. A cache of weapons would have been nice.
It was all clear until about a third of the way down, when I heard the door open behind us, as the people on the stairwell caught up. I turned to check: two of them. If Mirella’s count was accurate, we were only missing another two.
Unfortunately, a dead straight hotel corridor was a terrible place to be, if your concern was being struck by rapidly moving projectiles. We only had one direction to go, presenting a target that would have been easy to hit even if we were dealing with humans.
The first person through the door behind us wasn’t human; he was a goblin, and the first thing he did on breaching the door was fling a knife at my back. I was aware enough to step aside, but a second knife had already been thrown in anticipation of the space I was about to occupy.
This one almost got me. My reflexes aren’t nearly good enough to bat a knife out of the air—I didn’t try—but I could get out of the way. Kind of. I twisted around, got my legs tangled up, and landed awkwardly on the floor. This was sort of a good news/bad news situation, because I continued to not be stabbed, but flat on my back is about the worst position to be in if I wished to evade additional projectiles.
But I still had Mirella. She spun around and threw a knife, which the goblin dodged easily. The werewolf behind him did not. He fell backwards with her blade stuck in his throat. I had to assume he was the actual target.
This bought enough time so I could regain my feet, and we were running again, but only for about five steps.
“Drop!” she ordered.
We both fell to the floor, as two arrows whizzed above us.
The goblin had a bow-and-arrow. I wondered if this was the guy who’d hit Thelonius, but again, it’s possible they’re all just given one at birth.
Mirella rolled over and threw another knife. The goblin was crouching in anticipation, and would surely have been able to dodge it had it come anywhere near his person…but it didn’t It didn’t come close. He didn’t have to duck or anything.
Mirella had missed. By a lot.
All three of us stayed where we were for a second or two, as we contemplated the likelihood of such a thing.
The goblin snapped out of it first, notching another arrow.
“All right, I can do this too,” I said.
I may not be very good at throwing knives, or batting them down, which was why I didn’t have a knife in my free hand and the sword was only going to be useful if the goblin came a whole lot closer. But I’m an excellent shot with a handgun, and I had one of those.
I fired twice. Both rounds hit him in the chest. He looked shocked that a gun had been introduced to his bow-and-arrow fight, and annoyed in general. (Goblins and elves both consider firearms gauche.) Neither of these expressions helped him to continue breathing.
“Let’s keep moving,” I said.
“Adam…”
“Later. Just keep moving.”
But then the door to the stairwell on the other side was opening, and the last human and the elf were there, blocking the way through.
“Okay, back this way,” I said, but an eighth and ninth pursuer had turned up behind us already. They both looked human, which was great because I prefer fighting humans, except that one of them had an M16, which trumped the handgun. He didn’t appear to have any misgivings about using it, even if it meant hitting the guys on the other side of us.
“Looks like you miscounted,” I said.
Mirella threw knives in both directions, not hitting anything but keeping everybody back. I decided since my handgun wasn’t going to be as effective against four as it was against one, I may as well use it as a hotel key substitute instead. I pointed it at the nearest door.
The doors in your better hotels have enough metal built in, so that even if you shoot and kick the hell out of them, they’ll take a long time to get open. (I’ve kicked in a few doors in my time.) This was another reason to be glad we were currently in a substandard hotel. I fired twice around the knob, and then kicked three times. It flew open—wood splinters scattering everywhere—and in we went.
Nobody was in the room, thank goodness. We didn’t need any hostages, and/or collateral damage to complicated this. Possibly—given all the violence going on in the hallway hadn’t warranted a single curious patron—the entire floor was unoccupied. I couldn’t imagine there was enough demand to fill the place on a weekday.
I shoved the half-shattered door closed behind us, as well as possible, took the mattress off the bed, and leaned it up against the door.
“Adam,” Mirella said. “I can’t see.”
She was waggling her fingers in front of her eyes and squinting.
“At all?”
“I’m not entirely blind, but everything’s fuzzy. And my hands are unsteady.”
“We already know the name of a doctor, so let’s get out of here and see about that,” I said.
>
“Right, yes. After we get out.”
She looked at the mattress, and blinked a couple of times, in case what she was seeing was actually a byproduct of her blurry vision.
“That won’t hold,” she said.
“It’s just so they can’t see in. Keep them guessing a few more seconds.”
“How will that matter?”
“We won’t be here by the time they shoot their way through.”
I opened the window.
“C’mon,” I said. “This side of the building has a fire escape.”
She climbed out and tried looking around.
“Hang on.”
She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. Her hands steadied.
“We have to go up,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because one of them in the hall was on the phone. They already know we’re on the fire escape. Reinforcements are around the corner. They’ll make it to the alley before we do.”
“All right. You first.”
We headed up. I hoped that if there was anyone already waiting for us up there, she’d hear them before whatever this disease had done to her eyes started to impact her ears as well.
I kept waiting for the wail of police sirens. I’d fired a gun in a building with paper-thin walls, and there were five corpses on various floors. Surely this was atypical for Chicago these days. But so far, nothing.
Once to the top—which was pleasantly unoccupied—we ran to the edge of the nearest building.
It was too far. From the ground, it looked like an easy jump, but now that I was standing there, it was clear this was no option. Only about six feet separated the buildings, but the other one was ten feet taller. Healthy, Mirella could make it, but I couldn’t.
“What is it?” Mirella asked. Her eyes were still closed.
“I should have scouted this before now,” I said. “Why didn’t we scout this?”
It was much too late for this observation, but until we were running for our lives through the hotel, it never occurred to me that neither of us had taken the time to review the structure for possible escape options. Her getting sick had thrown both of us off our game, and made us sloppy. Now we were facing the consequences.
“It’s too far?” she asked.
“Yeah, it is. We can either jump to the ground from here, or hope a helicopter touches down sometime in the next thirty seconds. Other than that, we’re fighting our way to the street.”
“Then we’ll fight,” she said, matter-of-factly.
She could barely stand, and hardly see, but Mirella wasn’t going to check out before taking as many of them with her as she could. I sort of loved that about her.
I was about to check the gun to see what kind of bullet count I was down to when I remembered the second phone in my pocket.
I pulled it out and just stared at it for a second. The driver said it was for an emergency, and, well, this absolutely qualified. Sure, we were cornered on a rooftop and probably only had a few minutes left to live, and—I’m just assuming—the Path didn’t have access to a SWAT team and a teleportation device, but I had nothing to lose. Maybe I could give them my last will and testament over the phone or something.
I hit the preset number. A woman answered.
“Hello.”
“Hi,” I said. “You guys gave me this phone, and—”
“Is there an emergency?”
“Yes, we’re on the roof of the hotel and we’re kind of cornered. The address—”
“I know where you are, Lord Venice.”
Then the line went dead.
“Who was that?” Mirella asked.
“She called me Lord Venice,” I said, which didn’t mean anything to Mirella at all. I was still processing it myself.
The door at the other end of the roof opened up, and the four guys from the seventh-floor hallway poured out. The one I took particular note of was the one with the M16. He was probably our biggest immediate problem.
“She can call you whatever she wants,” Mirella said. “If she can’t help us it doesn’t matter. You have to be my eyes; tell me where they are.”
A fifth and sixth attacker came up the fire escape. About thirty seconds earlier, I’d have made a remark about how this is why it’s a bad thing to be the mammoth in the hunt, because you eventually end up at a cliff with no choice but to run off that cliff.
I didn’t say that, though, because we weren’t going to be jumping off this cliff.
The fellow with the M16 stepped ahead of the pack.
“Hi there,” I said. “Don’t suppose we can talk about surrender.”
“Sorry man,” he said. He sounded like a Chicagoan by way of Malibu Beach. “Contract’s for a straight kill. We just need your face so we can send proof. I mean, if that makes you feel better.”
“That you won’t shoot me in the face?”
“Tell me where he is, Adam,” Mirella muttered. “I’ll throw—”
“I have it covered,” I said to her.
“Yeah,” the gunman said. “Oh, and we’d all appreciate it if you didn’t take a header off that roof there. Then it’d be really hard to prove we got you, and you know, man’s gotta get paid.”
“I get you, but, I didn’t mean our surrender, I meant yours.”
He was checking his gun in the casual sort of way someone who’s intimately familiar with a tool might. Like he’d raised it from childhood.
“Come again?”
The three guys behind him sort of laughed amongst themselves. The two at the ladder mostly just looked confused. Maybe they didn’t speak English.
“Yeah, when I asked if we could talk about surrender, I was talking about yours. I thought it would be polite to give you a chance before you all died horribly.”
“What is that?” Mirella asked. Her head was tilted up, toward the roof we couldn’t make the jump to.
“Do you hear her?” I asked.
The guy with the gun shook his head at me.
“Pretty sure you’re not gonna talk your way outta this, friend,” Mr. M16 said. “Real sorry.”
“Someone’s running this way,” Mirella said. “Quickly. Who is this?”
“An old friend.”
The man with the gun didn’t get a chance to do anything with it before a visually alarming blur leapt from the edge of the other building, over our heads, and directly on top of him.
Hopefully, he died on impact, because otherwise he was going to have a really messed up recovery.
It was hard to follow precisely what happened after that, to two of the three who’d been standing behind him. It was something like blunt-force decapitation, but it happened so fast, if someone were to claim a particularly violent god had struck them down with the power of the divine, from the heavens, everyone who witnessed it might have to consider taking the claim seriously.
The fourth guy, the elf, squared up to defend himself with a longsword. To face him, the visually imprecise blur that had torn through three people in two seconds slowed for long enough to reconcile into the shape of a young woman with auburn hair. She was wearing a blue track suit and running shoes, and had the hair back in a ponytail. If you added in a pair of earphones and took away all the blood, she’d look like your typical upper-middle-class jogger.
The elf made a game attempt to defend himself, but she had his throat out before he even finished his downswing.
The two humans at the fire escape ladder had enough sense to turn around and head back down as fast as they could, which wasn’t remotely fast enough. One of them managed to disappear over the side, but she caught the wrist of the second, pulled him back up with one arm, and then threw him halfway across the roof. He skidded to a stop in the kind of awkward position that strongly indicated he wouldn’t be getting back up again.
To deal with the last one, my friend in the tracksuit disappeared over the side for a few seconds. We heard a startled gasp, a not-at-all masculine shriek, then a long silence, and a squishy t
hud.
“What’s happening?” Mirella asked. It had been only about six seconds between the part where we were about to die and the part where we were sharing the roof with a lot of body parts. Mirella still had the sword out, and was squinting to try and understand the inexplicable.
“I told you, an old friend.”
“What do you mean? Who is this person? Not Eve.”
“No, not Eve.”
The woman in the tracksuit jumped back up onto the roof.
“Hello again, Lord Venice,” she greeted.
Mirella crouched into a battle stance. She could barely see, but she could smell just fine.
“Vampire,” she muttered.
“Bonjour, Eloise,” I said. “Mirella, it’s okay. We go way back.”
“How have you been?” I asked Eloise, in French.
“Please, I am trying to remain in English now, while I am in this country.”
“All right. I didn’t even know you were in America.” Last I checked on her, she was in Europe.
“Yes. It is the surprise.”
Eloise looked around at the carnage.
“You should have called sooner. I barely arrived in time.”
“If I’d known who I was calling, I probably would have. The Path isn’t supposed to come with its own private, one person army.”
“It does not. This is exclusive to founders service.” She cocked her head. “We should be leaving.”
“Sirens,” Mirella said.
“Yes,” Eloise said. “Five or six blocks out. They’ll set up a blockade.”
“Then we should be on the other side of it before that happens,” I said. “I’d rather not kill any more cops today.”
13
Eloise had to help us off the first roof. The next three were pretty easy jumps I could clear alone. I insisted—against my girlfriend’s vehement objections—that Eloise help Mirella get across. Mirella looked ready to stab me, but in her current state I was pretty sure she’d miss.
Once we reached the corner where Eloise had a car parked, we hit upon a new problem: getting down to it. She’d evidently scaled the side of the brick building on which we stood, before traveling across the rooftops to come to our rescue. This wasn’t an option for us, and neither was her leaping down while carrying us in her arms. It was a ten-story building; I was reasonably positive she couldn’t cushion the impact so completely we’d come out of it undamaged.
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