We found ourselves alone on a narrow street, tucked in between several taller buildings, three to six stories each, while the wind funneled impressively down the street and tugged at anything it could, sending trash dancing down the dark road. A few other cars were parked on the sides of the road, none of them in decent condition. Just behind us loomed the shadows of the rundown apartment buildings, bars on darkened windows with the occasional lit one straining futilely against the night.
I rounded the Supra and came to Tamara’s side. Sure enough, one tire had exploded into a shredded, rubbery mess, the kind you have to replace completely. The kind that leaves more rubber on the road behind you than was still attached to the car.
The kind that doesn't make sense on an expensive, well-maintained tire.
“Dammit to hell.” After a quick look over, she leaned back against the white car with a sigh, combing her black and purple hair away from her sapphire eyes. Tamara glanced over, her perfect face featuring an apologetic frown as she pulled out her phone. “Don’t worry; I will get you to a safe place by dawn. I promise.”
I leaned down to get a closer look at the exploded tire. “Tamara, I don’t think—”
BLAM.
The sound of an actual gunshot is different from a detonating car tire, especially when it echoes menacingly from the walls of the tall buildings around you. Something slammed into my side an instant before my mind registered the noise, throwing me forcibly against the Supra and denting the door. Like the last two times, the bullet didn’t feel like it penetrated, but I couldn’t be completely certain.
Gripping the sports car’s body for stability, I looked up at Tamara, whose jaw dropped in shock. “Ash—” she began.
I slammed into her hard; Tamara squeaked, startled, when I shoved her, moving too quick to be careful. The Moroi hit one of her side mirrors hard enough to rip it completely off the car as I took her place under the little red dot of a laser light.
The next high-caliber shot rifled into my throat immediately, a few days too late to damage it but hitting hard enough to force the air out of my throat in a choked cough. My head hit the driver’s side window, and it shattered in a concussive burst of sound and glass.
Tamara bounded to her feet, phone still in hand, sapphire eyes flickering with an instant of confusion. Then she caught up to the truth of what was going on. Her irises widened, unnaturally blue and shimmering. She darted forward, shouting, “Run!”
The command itself made me want to get up and move, but I stumbled, trying to get my strained, stiff muscles to do what I wanted. Tamara slowed for an instant, long enough to rip the shiny white hood from her Supra, wielding it like a oversized shield. She held it between us and the angle of fire as she paused to pull me to my feet.
A car’s hood won’t stop bullets, but it will at least confuse a shooter as to exactly where your head is. Or so I figured, as a bullet dove between our faces and burrowed into the Supra’s metal skin, the wind from its wake jerking at our hair. “Come on!” Tamara shouted, her eyes wide with alarm and adrenaline, giving me a powerful shove to get me moving.
I didn’t need the encouragement, arthritic vampire lurching after faster vampire, peeling a flattened piece of lead from the hollow of my throat as I went and tossing it far off into the depths of the city night. No sooner had we moved than another thunderclap rolled along the tired and worn building fronts and an expensive car window shattered just behind me, showering the inside of Tamara’s Supra with more fragmented glass.
I ducked and cringed reflexively, the lingering remnant of mortal survival instinct. So far, I had no evidence that guns could really hurt me, but I wasn’t going to abandon Tamara, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to just stand around until they proved me wrong. That sounded like an excellent and dumb way to die. So I flung myself forward into my best approximation of a run, somewhere in the back of my mind hoping that I wouldn’t have to deal with this damned stiffness for the rest of my unnatural life.
We sprinted several dozen feet down the dark, cracked asphalt street. Tamara ducked into the first side alley we passed without slowing down, tossing the car-hood shield aside as she went. My boots thudded heavily on the solid pavement as I did my best to keep up, but the Moroi was much quicker and more graceful than I. At a dead run, she was nearly a whole alley ahead of me before she even realized she’d left me behind.
I gave her my best “go on, don’t worry about me” wave, not daring to yell because I didn’t want to give away our position, but she either didn’t get the memo or didn’t care. Tamara stopped and waited a moment for me to catch up, beckoning encouragingly even as a dark shadow dropped down right behind her, taking a two-story-plus drop with slightly bent knees like it wasn’t shit. Uh-oh.
My bulging, surprised eyes did a better job of warning her than my random flailing. Tamara twisted in place in the nick of time, setting her feet into a fighting stance as the larger, shadowy figure swung a weapon down at her head.
She winced sharply in pain as she caught the blow with her forearm instead of deflecting it, then leaned in and cracked her assailant audibly under the chin with the pale, open palm of her other hand. By the time I got close, she’d already wrapped a slender hand around the weapon, yanked it out of the man’s hands, and spun neatly, hitting him squarely in the chest with it.
As the attacker staggered back, I closed the distance quickly, expecting another of the Mystery Military Brothers, but I couldn’t have been farther off of the mark. Instead, the assailant was a fair-skinned, clean-cut man of indeterminate age in a light jacket, dark shirt, and slacks. He didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary at all—until he lunged and snarled at Tamara, revealing a dripping pair of slender, curved fangs over an inch long. Uh-oh.
The Moroi recoiled in fear, then smashed him in the face with a two-handed blow from her captured weapon, a three-foot octagonal rod of black matte steel. With Tamara’s full inhuman strength behind the blow, it did an excellent job of destroying his momentum, literally crushing his face in as he leapt at her. I cringed at the sight, catching a whiff of bland, unappetizing blood. The impact threw him across the alley, cracking the back of his skull on the far wall.
But, to my shock, he didn’t go down.
I watched as fair skin faded rapidly to pale, then to starkly ashen as he supported himself with one arm clutching the brick behind him, the other hand holding his disturbingly damaged face. His heart drummed out a distorted rhythm, and between his fingers, I watched as dark green eyes ran to bloody red, the veins in the sclera darkening and standing out sharply like the roots of a crimson tree.
Because I was staring, transfixed, I noticed him glance up, focusing on the chunk of skyline visible above us.
“Come on!” Tamara yelled, melodic voice wild, overlaid with a supernatural echo that rebounded off of the tight alley walls and the inside of my skull. She grabbed my arm, desperately pulling me along in her wake, trying to rush past him and escape.
Instead of letting her, I clamped my grip around her slender forearm, stopping her dead with a surprised squeak and yanking her backward. Just in time, too: three others dropped down, cutting off the way forward, all dressed stylishly for a night of clubbing—people, that is—on the town. One hit the ground right where Tamara would have been standing if she’d continued forward, landing with uncanny grace and brandishing an honest-to-goodness iron-bound tetsubo, its striking length studded with sharp, hooked spikes.
She nodded to me once, appreciatively, as footfalls from behind signaled that the other path was just as closed to us. A brief, comforting touch trailed along my shoulder as Tamara turned, standing back to back with me. I felt her heart rate shift and her body tense as she braced herself for the inevitable assault, trusting me to hold off those on my side.
The problem was, I had no idea what I was doing.
Years of occasionally watching WWE, MMA, and Jackie Chan flicks with my dad hadn’t really prepared me for a real fight, not one like this. Ne
ither had the string of glorified shoving matches I’d gotten into since becoming a Strigoi. The man in front of me, a lean, fit specimen in a crimson dress shirt and ebony slacks, spun the tetsubo in a rapid flourish and brought it down toward my skull, curved fangs bared in a merciless, predatory grin. In that moment, caught woefully off guard, I realized I truly lacked the skill or experience to deal with this scenario.
But, like with the Rawhead Next Door, maybe I didn’t need either.
With no time for clever planning, I simply raised my forearm. The weapon had the leverage of someone trained and supernaturally strong behind it, and he didn’t even try to avoid the block. Probably because on a normal person, it would have bit right through my skinny arm and kept on going. But for the new and improved Ashley Currigan, it needed much bigger teeth. The tetsubo’s impact shredded the sleeve off of my hoodie, but the sharp spines broke off on Strigoi flesh. The heavy weapon rebounded and shuddered in his grip like he’d hit a steel beam with it. He glanced at the club like it had betrayed his trust, but before he could recover, I grabbed his outstretched arm.
Stepping away from Tamara, I spun him in a full circle, his body light and helpless as a ragdoll in my hands. I slung him full force toward the other two attackers; one went down, clobbered squarely under the weight of his friend. The pair tumbled away in a tangle.
The other, a short, tanned woman in a pantsuit, dodged around them and came at me with an authentic-looking katana, the diffused moonlight glinting sharply off its deadly edge. I forced down my survival instincts and took the blade to my ribs, only sustaining a narrow slash to my already ruined clothes. I dropped my arm, trapping the blade against my side. Seeming unwilling to let go of the sword, she braced herself and gave it a vicious yank.
She might as well have tried pulling the Sword from the Stone.
I shrugged at her and kicked her in the chest. Her breath whooshed out audibly, banished from her lungs, and she flew ten quick feet to enjoy an abrupt encounter with unyielding masonry. I verbalized my exhilaration with a “Hah!”of triumph, broke the sword in two with a snap of my wrist, and threw it after her.
“Tamara!” I bellowed. Way’s clear, I started to add, but the words died in my ravaged throat as several more well-dressed assailants appeared at the end of the alley directly ahead of me, closing it off as surely as if they’d raised a barricade.
I glanced behind me to spot Tamara standing tall, now wielding two of the strange rods, two of her three opponents grovelling on the ground and presumably looking for their teeth. But her breathing and heart rate were already elevated, and the number of reinforcements flooding into that end of the alley made it clear we weren’t leaving that way, either. Not in one piece, anyway.
Uh-oh. I ground my teeth as Crushed Face rose and rejoined the group, his skin deathly pale and his handsome features now sharp and feral. The chasm Tamara had made in the front of his head was simply gone. In the background, the three I’d sent flying rose to their feet as well.
“Shit,” I breathed. “What now?”
20
You wanted a monster
The noose tightened rapidly around us. Our original six attackers had more than doubled, leaving us surrounded and woefully outnumbered. They were all armed with some sort of deadly melee weapon, similar to what we’d already faced. The black, octagonal bars were the most prevalent—a weapon I’d never quite seen the like of before. It almost looked like a crowbar, minus the hook on the end; a tool more balanced for bashing, bludgeoning, and breaking people rather than prying boards loose.
The reinforcements weren’t our only concern, either. All the enemies Tamara and I had put down were on their feet again, even Crushed Face, who was lucky to be alive, much less conscious and ready to rejoin the fight. His handsome appearance might have shifted to monstrous and inhuman, but his face was once again fully formed, and his bloody red eyes were hella angry. Katana Lady discarded the sundered blade of her broken weapon, giving me a stare that promised death. Her tan faded away as her shoulder reset itself into socket and healed before my eyes.
Tamara and I pressed back to back once more as the air grew hungry for violence and blood, surrounded by a mob that was half Jekyll, half Hyde, and half masquerade. And completely uninjured.
“Goddammit,” I growled, scanning the growing crowd. “Why is everyone trying to fucking kill me?”
Tamara shifted against my back. “They're Sanguinarians,” she said quietly, her breath coming quickly. “And they’re not trying to kill you, Ash. They’re trying to capture me.”
“Which would be a lot easier if you’d just give up, Princess.” I swiveled to find the speaker, a young man sporting a stylish, dark blazer, stepping out of the pack to stand just out of Tamara’s reach. “Why give us such a runaround when you know you’re gonna like it in the end anyway?” Metal bar cocked over one shoulder, he gave Tamara a crude grin, baring fangs that dripped viscous fluid, almost as if salivating.
She spat at his feet.
Red crept in at the edges of my vision, and I leaned around Tamara and locked eyes with the Sanguinarian, a low, inhuman growl working its way unbidden from my throat. Grasping his weapon with both hands, he took a step back, and his confident, eager expression wavered with doubt.
“We gotta get out of here,” Tamara whispered, mouth near my ear. “Or they’ll hold us up, and more will just keep coming.” I didn’t look away from the encroaching vampires, but I could feel Tamara squeeze my arm subtly. “Ash, I know you’re new to this, but do you think you can fight your way out of here? I can’t do it alone.” The slight tremor in her voice betrayed her fear.
I straightened, popping my back, then my neck. I squared my shoulders. “Just watch me.”
I shoved Tamara behind me as Blazer Asshole lunged forward, weapon raised. I blocked it with my face as eighteen inches of blood-rusted iron burst from my fingers, shredding blazer and vampire with equal ease. He cried out in shock, and I punched him in the throat as hard as I could, crushing it with a gruesome crunch and sending him flying through the ring of hungry Sanguinarians.
That shut him up.
My heart thumped a single, elated high-pressure pulse. My blood boiled. I was angry, mad, livid. From the moment I’d woken up, I’d struggled against this strange, almost overwhelming rage, even as my other emotions varied wildly in intensity. I’d fought it while my world fell apart around me and while an assortment of asshats tried to kill me and the three whole people trying to help me do the right thing. Now they were coming after Tamara, the only person who had tried to help me, no matter what I might have become, the one person who had single-handedly saved my life.
I was tired of holding back. So I stopped.
A tall woman blindsided me with another of those black steel rods, and I caught it on the rebound. Yanking it out of her grasp, I hit her with it in the ribs so hard that it bent the metal. She paled and her pretty face turned hideous as she gasped for air. I grabbed her by the jacket and threw her at someone else, not watching long enough to see if I hit or missed. For the first time, I simply let go, and it felt incredible. Someone else slammed into me bodily, and I kicked their legs out from under them, sending them smashing face-first into the alley cement. I kicked them into the nearest wall, headfirst, my nostrils flaring at the scent of unappetizing blood as it sprayed in a crimson fan across the brick.
“Whatever you do, don’t let them bite you!” Tamara shouted from behind me, but I was too distracted to fully register what the words meant, much less respond. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and slung the bent rod in my hand at it, knocking my target down to a chorus of splitting bones. Someone didn’t get the memo; Katana Lady tried to kick my legs out from under me. I spun blindly, claws bared, and was rewarded with a splash of rich, red blood as the lengths of metal sank into her gut.
I slung the vampire free of my claws and into the wall, then strode over before she could recover and seized her by the throat, slamming the back of her head i
nto the brick, over and over. I watched her skin go from fair to pale to sallow, unhealthy gray. Her eyes turned nearly solid red and her features sharpened, becoming less human and more feral, almost alien. Her wounds were healing as fast as I inflicted them, until they suddenly stopped healing at all, and her bleeding eyes rolled back in her head, ash-colored skin stretched tight over bone.
Given my lingering anger over the atrocities One-Horn had visited on my girlfriend, the endless parade of psycho army guys trying to murder me for days, and my heart-wrenching reunion with Lori… I didn’t feel bad about slamming this blood-sucking monster into the wall until she stopped moving. I roared wordlessly as I threw her all the way down the alley in disgust, and righteous wrath.
If anyone had hit me while I’d been focused on pummeling her, I hadn’t even noticed.
Suddenly recalling the larger fight, I turned to look for Tamara and got a faceful of vampire instead. Blazer Asshole came bounding in out of nowhere, intact but deathly pale, fangs dripping and face twisted into an animalistic snarl. He landed on my chest and latched on, dripping red claws like razor-edged slivers of blood ripping into my clothes and scraping along my dead skin. I recognized numbly that those claws were slowly but surely sinking into my flesh, my dead Strigoi skin finally parting beneath their crimson edge. He reared back and hissed in my face, splattering me with venom and frothing spittle.
I reached for him to yank him free, but something caught my arm and I stumbled as a Sanguinarian wrapped her arms around one of mine and set her feet. I grinned, unimpressed, until another one latched on as well. Then another. Sanguinarians piled on me, one after the other, each of them inhumanly strong, dragging me down until I stumbled. Belatedly, my mind registered their coordinated battle cries of “Let him get her!” “Hold her back!” and the ever-popular “Capture her!”
Uh-oh.
I jerked away from Blazer Guy, accidentally exposing my neck. He bit down, stabbing fangs into the flesh between my collarbone and throat.
Dead Girl's Ashes (Dying Ashes Book 1) Page 17