by Karen Chance
It also seemed to have a steering issue. We ricocheted around the narrow street like a giant pinball, but couldn’t seem to rise above it. Unlike our airborne pursuer.
A wash of fire rained down on us, hot as hell, for a split second. Then Zheng jerked the wheel, sending us scraping along a wall and plowing through a mountain of debris, throwing it up on all sides and discouraging our attacker. But not for long.
I saw it wheel away in an arc that clearly signified another attack incoming, one we couldn’t survive considering that I was watching it through the burnt-edged holes that had been eaten through our roof by the last one.
“Dory!” Tomas grabbed my purse. “We can hide in here!”
“We can’t!”
“It’s the best chance we have. We can’t fight that thing!”
“Listen to me. Fire will burn the purse to ashes—”
“But we won’t be in the purse. It’s just a gateway—”
“And what happens if a gateway is destroyed?” Louis-Cesare demanded. “It’s what we tried to tell you before—”
Tomas scowled. “I don’t need to be told anything by you!”
“Screw this,” I said, and disappeared into my armory.
Tomas was right behind me as I threw open the door to my main stash of weapons. Something big, something big, something—okay, yeah. If those two didn’t do it, nothing would.
“Why are you so resistant to this?” he demanded, catching my arm.
I would have had something to say—and possibly more than say—about that normally, but there wasn’t time. “Because, if the doorway is destroyed, we are stuck in here, unable to get out. Me and Sarah and the other humans will asphyxiate quickly enough, when we run out of air. But you and the other vamps will be stuck forever. Do you get it now?”
I guess he got it, because he let go of my arm. Or maybe that was because Louis-Cesare had just shown up, and they wanted to try killing each other again. I left them to it, burst back outside, waded through the guys, and grabbed Ev.
“What are you doing?” he asked curiously.
“Can you launch this with one of your rockets?”
He looked at the small disk on my open palm. “Is it sticky? I could put it on the side of one of my rockets—”
“Yes, yes, it’s sticky!” I said, peeling off the little paper backing.
“I can try.”
“What is it?” Louis-Cesare asked me. Because I guessed he’d decided this was slightly more important than beating up Tomas.
“The biggest thing I’ve got.”
If it didn’t work . . .
I decided not to think about what would happen if it didn’t work.
The dragon made its dive, Ev raised the launcher to his shoulder, being way too calm for any human blood to flow in those veins, and let loose. The recoil sent him stumbling back into us, putting all three of us on the floor. And giving me a perfect view of what happens when a two-ton paper dragon meets a device that magnifies an explosion by a hundred times.
“Yeah!” Zheng yelled, the guys whooped, and I continued to stare at the firework-sized confetti raining down everywhere, gobs and gobs of it, like we were flying through a ticker tape parade.
Only those usually follow a victory, don’t they?
And ours wasn’t won yet.
“Oh, come on!” Jason yelled. “This is bullshit!”
He had a point. Because the confetti was still blowing through the air when an army of motorcycle riding assholes pulled up alongside us. And in back. And for as far as I could see down the road, where they were running over our other pursuers, in some cases literally.
The samurai were back for an encore, and this time, there had to be a couple hundred of them. I guessed they’d followed the dragon, who had thoughtfully led them right to us. And while this enemy couldn’t fly, we weren’t doing so hot at that right now, either.
The truck had levelled out at barely five feet off the ground, which didn’t even clear some of the garbage piles. It definitely didn’t put us out of the reach of our latest problem. Who were already climbing on board.
I grasped for my purse, had a boot stomp down on my hand, and grabbed an acid grenade off Bertha instead. I shoved it in my attacker’s unnaturally large mouth and as far down his throat as I could reach, then pulled the pin. And watched a miracle happen as Zheng’s boys fought to wrestle him back off the truck.
Nothing had worked on these guys, absolutely nothing.
Until now.
The grenade went off and his “ink” started to smear, his eyes dripped down his face, and his features melted. The guys were forced to let him go after a moment, because there was literally nothing left to hold onto, just a black and white puddle of goo on the floor. They looked at me; I looked at them.
And then we were all throwing acid grenades.
The results, however, were mixed. The grenades flattened the samurai’s tires, as their rides seemed to be made of the same stuff they were, and turned them into monstrous versions of themselves, with greatly elongated noses, gaping maws for mouths, and earlobes that stretched halfway down their chests. But they didn’t stop them. Maybe because the explosions were hitting the roadside or their armor, instead of discharging internally.
And then my hand reached for another grenade—and reached, and reached and reached, because we were out, damn it!
Even worse, we plowed into a garbage pile a second later that had completely blocked the street. The truck was tough; it made it through. But it caused an avalanche of soda cans, tumbled bricks, and charred roof tiles to hit the windshield, half of which lodged there, blocking Zheng’s view ahead.
“Clear it off! Clear it off!” he yelled, but his guys were too busy unloading on the ever-growing field of monstrosities behind us.
And on both sides of us, I realized, as the road was just wide enough to allow them to pull alongside. They were threatening to swamp us, taking machine gun bursts directly to the face, which did little more than give them a bad case of acne. Yet their hands crumpled the guns they grabbed as if they were made out of paper.
The only reason we weren’t already overrun were the two first-level masters, who were on opposite sides of the vehicle and raging like beasts. They were somehow keeping the sides clear all by themselves, allowing our firepower, for what it was worth, to be massed in back. Although how much longer that would last, I didn’t know, as Bertha was quickly being denuded.
“Damn it, I can’t see!” Zheng yelled, slinging us back and forth across the road, trying to dislodge the debris.
It didn’t work.
So, I hopped up onto the roof to do it myself.
“Get back in here!” Zhen yelled, spotting me.
“In a sec.”
I started throwing things off the windshield, what I could reach, then slid down to the hood to get the rest. That would have been easier if a rider hadn’t managed to find a way onto the top of the brick wall, riding along the narrow edge to target Zheng. So, I sent a wrecked TV at his head.
It bounced off without unseating him, despite the fact that I had not lobbed it. I had sent it with the force of desperation, and at major league baseball speed. It would have killed a human; at the very least, the bogie should have been knocked off the wall.
Instead, he jumped his damned motorcycle onto the hood, and sent a sword slashing down at me, which I caught in a lead pipe and twisted away. Which would have been great, if he hadn’t then used a gauntleted fist to punch a hole in the solid steel beside my head. And if he hadn’t immediately grown another sword.
And that was what it looked like: as if the new sword had just sprouted straight out of his body. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what, as I was too busy getting my feet up and kicking the bastard off me. Dhampirs are strong, especially when we’re about to get decapitated, so it actually worked.
He landed on his back against the windshield, but it sure didn’t look like I’d damaged him. Luckily, Zheng took car
e of that, reaching out of the window and ripping the creature’s damned head off. I fell back against the hood, feeling a surge of relief, until I noticed: the body didn’t fall away. Instead, it lunged for me again, which was—
Really fucking creepy, I thought, getting arms up, but not because I was currently wrestling with a headless body. But because something was poking up out of the armor’s neck hole. Something, I realized a moment later, that looked a lot like the top of one of their shiny helmets.
“Shit!” Zheng yelled, and yeah. That about summed it up. I kind of lost it at that point, something about seeing a creature regenerate a head doing something to my own that the sword hadn’t, and not something good. I started whaling on it, which unlike the bullets, did seem to have an effect.
But not enough of one.
A few seconds later, I was staring at a brand spanking new head, just like the sword, complete with an extra wide mouth full of teeth that started snapping at me like a dog.
I threw the creature back and screamed at it, in a cross between horror and disgust, and a sword came slashing through the air. But this time, it wasn’t aimed at me. The bastard’s second head went bouncing away into the night, and I looked up to see Louis-Cesare running along the top of the wall. He was hacking at the riders who were trying to flank us, and making it look like a ballet in the process.
“Show off,” I heard Zheng mutter.
“What are you doing over there?” I yelled at my hubby.
“I might ask the same of you!” And then I had company, because he’d just run out of wall.
We screeched around a corner, onto another street, and Louis-Cesare leapt to the roof of the truck, pulling me up after him. He had a one of the samurai’s swords in his hand, which he sent flying at another rider. It skewered him, and the force behind it must have been pretty impressive. Because this time, the guy went swerving into a third, taking them both out.
But it didn’t matter. There were so damned many. They must have been hit by a hell of a magic cloud to be able to regenerate like that. But if they could . . .
Then we didn’t have an army of hundreds after us. We had an army of thousands. And we couldn’t take them all.
That was evident by a single look at the back of the truck, which was getting boarded on all sides now. The new road was wider, allowing us to be flanked more easily, although Zheng’s guys were doing amazingly well—he had obviously brought his A-Team. But the best they could manage was hold their own.
And they wouldn’t be doing that for long, as we were almost out of ammo.
Bertha had a single necklace left, which somebody grabbed almost before I’d finished the thought. I should have been able to resupply everyone, having a damned arsenal with me, but most of my stash was magical and the rest had been taken by my team. I didn’t know what we were supposed to do when we ran out.
But someone else did.
Jinxes are outlawed because they cause bad luck—really bad, in the case of talented ones. Which I assumed that Sarah was, or she wouldn’t be able to target her gift. And she could absolutely target it, judging by the lightning that flashed overhead, and then speared down, straight at our enemies.
It burned through a couple dozen riders, turning them into blackened shells of themselves, which started to dust away even as they rode. But it wasn’t done yet. It also leapt from them to those around them, hopping along rows until maybe thirty or forty had been sidelined. It gave us a short breather, mostly because the riders behind them had to navigate past the tumbled bikes and burnt bodies.
Which they did pretty damned fast.
It wasn’t enough, but it gave me an idea.
I bent down and grabbed Zheng’s shoulder through the window. “Floor it.”
“It’s already floored!”
“Through there!” I pointed ahead, to where a large building with double doors was looming at the far end of the street.
He stared back at me, his expression a cross between outrage and disbelief. “Have you seen this truck? It’s not going to fit!”
“No, it isn’t. That’s the point.”
“Have you lost it? ‘Cause you need to tell me if—”
“Zheng! These things got distracted a minute ago and forgot about us—”
“So?”
I held up the second little disk I’d taken from my munition’s stores. “So, we need them to forget again.”
“Shit,” he said. And then he was yelling a bunch of other stuff in Cantonese that I guessed was informing the guys or maybe cursing; it was hard to tell.
“Sarah!” I yelled.
She looked back.
“Can you do another lightning blast?”
“When?”
“Now!”
She nodded. “Thirty seconds!”
“Get ready,” I told Zheng, and passed down my last two smoke bombs.
“What are you talking about?” Louis-Cesare asked. And then, when I pulled the bracelet for my one-person shield out of my purse, he grabbed it.
“What the—give it back!” I demanded.
“Not until you tell me what it’s for.”
I would have argued, but we didn’t have time. “When the rooster attacked the dragon, it got the rest of the bogies off our back,” I said quickly. “They got into a fight with each other and stopped pursuing us.”
The blue eyes narrowed. “You want to start a fight?”
“No. I want them to believe that there’s nothing left to fight.” I grabbed for the cuff, but he was too fast. Damn it!
I glanced at the upcoming building, and there was no time to argue. It had to be now. And then lightning cleared a path around us, bright enough and powerful enough to cause all the hairs to stand up on my arms. I crawled into the cab and pushed at Zheng’s huge shoulder. “Go!”
“They’ll see us leave!
“What the hell did I give you smoke bombs for?”
He cursed.
“Just make sure everyone gets clear!” I said, dropping into the driver’s seat as he scooched over.
“They’ll get clear.” He grabbed my arm, his eyes serious. “Don’t die.”
“She won’t.” Someone said, as Zheng threw the bombs and bailed. Billowing white boiled up all around us, covering our team’s flight. But, of course, one vamp hadn’t bailed, and the damned building was coming up fast.
“Give me the cuff,” I demanded.
“Give me the explosive.” It was Louis-Cesare’s implacable voice, and God, I was so sick of this shit! It felt like I had to fight him and our enemies, too!
“You can’t do this!” I snapped. “You weigh ninety pounds more than me, and it was calibrated to my weight!”
“I will risk it.”
“You’ll be dead!”
“Better me than you.” It was obdurate. And so stupid that it made me want to kiss him and kill him, at the same time.
So, I kissed him, tenderly, for a second, my hands sliding over his body, my tongue twining around his. Then I pulled back. “All right! But I need my bag! The charges are in there!”
I pointed to where it lay on the floor in back of the truck.
“I’ll get it.” He swung out of the cab, grabbed the bag and was back in a second, his body framed in the passenger side door.
“I love you,” I said, and saw when his eyes caught the flash of white on my wrist—the bracelet I’d taken from his pocket when I kissed him.
But it was too late.
I lashed out with both feet and swerved at the same time, and he was gone, they were all gone. A second later, I had my foot back on the gas the second bomb I’d taken for the dragon pressed to the passenger side dash. It was just in time.
I sent thousands of pounds of solid steel crashing through the too small doors of the still-intact building. Or still-intact before I exploded the charge, because the only way to survive this was to make sure that our pursuers thought we hadn’t. And then the world whited out.
Chapter Forty-Six
Dory, Hong Kong
Maybe I passed out, or maybe it was just the force of the blast making it feel that way. I didn’t know. I just knew that I came back to myself inside a giant orange fireball, watching the seat flaring up around me, the rubber on the steering wheel melting onto my lap, and the now missing windshield showing nothing but a solid wall of flame.
It was mesmerizing. Until a huge piece of masonry caved in the passenger side roof, and I snapped out of it. I scrambled out of the now missing driver’s side door, hit the floor and rolled through the fire.
I was all but blind from the smoke, but I was also almost out of time on the shield. So, I crawled, across a burning hellscape until I cleared the wreckage, although it was hard to tell exactly when that was. The whole world was on fire. But I kept on going, trying to get away from anything lethal.
I didn’t make it.
When the smoke cleared enough to let me see anything, it wasn’t another ruined lobby. It was an echoing space that looked more like a warehouse, with a high ceiling, red brick walls, and a concrete floor covered with burning debris and dead guys.
And fey.
A lot of fey.
They were not burning and they were not on the floor. But I didn’t immediately react because I was dizzy and my eyes kept wanting to cross. However, I’d have probably needed a moment, even on a good day.
It was a lot to take in: the human corpses on the floor, which I didn’t think had gotten that way because of me, since I didn’t recall shooting anybody full of arrows; the burnt concrete around the blast, radiating outward to burning detritus sticking out of the brick walls; the large group of Svarestri warriors, now headed this way.
I belatedly began to scramble for weapons, only to recall that I’d given most of them to Louis-Cesare. And it probably wouldn’t have mattered in any case. There were twenty, maybe thirty fey here; I couldn’t tell through all the drifting smoke.