Fury's Kiss

by Karen Chance

  “And then he came after you?”

  “No, then they came after me. The guard—he gets up, staked, brains splattered all over the wall and everything, but he freaking gets up, and then they see me and they’re fast. But I got the door shut and I know this place like the back of my hand, right? So I managed to—hey, what are you doing?”

  “I’m going to need some help,” I said, grabbing his arm and dragging him back toward the door.

  “What?” His eyes bugged out. “Are you crazy? I’m not going back in there!”

  “I’ll protect you.”

  “Yeah, right!” He jerked back. “You got a rifle with no bullets, a handgun and some grenades. And let me tell you something about the grenades—”

  “They don’t work too well in close quarters.”

  “They don’t work at all!” he said, pulling back as hard as he could—which was pretty damned hard. “Not against those things. They just keep coming! And then you’ve got pieces and blood and ooze and—augghh!”

  I’d dragged him to the door and kicked it open, in preparation for shoving him through, but he’d grabbed one of the nearby wooden support beams and was holding on for all he was worth. “No! No, no, no! I’m not—”

  “Listen to me! I just need your help for a minute. Then you can hide while I go get Radu.”

  “Radu?”

  “He’s trapped in the basement. That’s why I need to get down there. Then I can—”

  “Do nothing,” Ray said savagely. “’Cause then you’ll be trapped, too, in a basement full of—what the hell. Why don’t we call ’em what they are? They’re freaking zombies! Vampire zombies, which doesn’t even make sense—I mean, who does that?”

  “A necromancer. A powerful one.”

  “No. Uh-uh. They try to co-opt babies when they can, or they used to anyway, but this is different.”

  “Because the guys in there are masters?”

  “Because the guys in there are dead! I told you, DEAD dead. And you know how fast our bodies decay. We make terrible zombies! Everybody knows that. We’re falling apart within hours.”

  I blinked, because something had finally made sense. “Yeah. But what if someone doesn’t need hours, or at least not many of them? You’re also a lot stronger, and faster, than a human.”

  “But zombies take a lot of power to create, like a LOT of power. You gonna throw that away for a couple hours?”

  “If the prize is big enough.” I just didn’t know what the prize was supposed to be. This was a working base, not a treasure house. And even if it had been…the Senate practically defined revenge. What was here that was worth that kind of risk?

  “Look, whatever, okay?” Ray said. “Point is, there’s a ton of them down there. You’ll never even get to Radu, and if you do, you’ll never get—”

  “There’s also a portal,” I told him.

  He stopped struggling. “What?”

  “You’re the portal king. You must know about it.”

  “Know about—wait. What?”

  “The Senate’s portal—”

  His eyes widened. “The big boy is here?”

  “What big boy?”

  “What big boy?” Ray stared at me like I was slow. “It’s only the biggest damned portal in existence! Connects to I don’t even know how many lines! And you’re telling me that it’s been here all the time?”

  “I don’t know about—”

  “Wait. That can’t be right.” His eyes narrowed. “They’d need a ley line sink for something like that, and they don’t got one here. That’s why everybody always assumed it was at the consul’s place upstate.”

  “Which it probably is!” I said, exasperated. “I didn’t say they had that portal, I said they had a portal. It connects Central to the consul’s residence in case of an emergency.” And if ever anything had qualified…

  “But—” He looked outraged. “Those slimy sons of bitches! They told me they didn’t have one here! Said it was for security reasons!”

  I gave him a look, and dragged him off the pillar. “Would you tell you it was here?”

  Ray thought for a second. “Okay, point.” He looked at me and his demeanor became more businesslike, as if talking about something he understood had calmed him. “But that don’t matter, ’cause you’re not gonna get to it.”

  “I will once I get to a weapons locker.”

  He shook his head. “That won’t do any good. They’re behind wards.”

  “What kind?”

  “The kind that shocked the crap outta me when I tried to break in. They need a guard’s touch to open. And there ain’t any more guards. Or if there are, they’re being real quiet. I hadn’t heard anyone for maybe fifteen minutes when you—why are you still dragging me in there?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “Oh, great.” He looked heavenward. “She has an idea. Have you been listening? They’ll kill us!”

  “Not if we kill them—” I began, only to cut off when a sudden rushing noise filled the air. And Ray grabbed my gun and went ballistic on something on the wall over our heads.

  “Die! Die! Die!” he screamed, emptying the clip and causing spent shells to rain down all around us. And okay, maybe I’d been wrong about the calm thing. Because he was just standing there, trembling and panting and staring—

  At the air-conditioning vent that he’d just shot the crap out of.

  “—first.” I took my smoking gun out of his limp fingers and patted him on the back. “See? That’s the spirit.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “Oh, good. That’s…Yes,” Ray said, slumping against the wall as the shield protecting the cabinet dropped.

  I felt a little light-headed, too, because there were actual weapons in the weapons case. Not a lot—somebody had been here before us—but anything was better than we had. “Get rid of it,” I told Ray, passing over the loathsome thing we’d used as a key.

  “You’re inhuman,” he told me. And snatched it.

  And as soon as he was out of sight around the corner, I let my head fall onto the cool, shiny metal of the cabinet for just a second. I could still vaguely feel it squirming in my palm, like its body was doing on the lobby wall. I tried to tell myself that the guard who had provided the handprint—and the hand—we’d needed would have approved. The creature that had taken him over wasn’t him, and if he’d been here, he’d have wanted us to do what was necessary to avenge him.

  I knew vamps well enough to know that, even if I hadn’t known him.

  But my brain kept wondering who he’d been. Or if I’d met him before. Or about how I’d feel if someone had just sawed off part of Louis-Cesare in order to fool a stupid—

  I shuddered in visceral horror all over, hard.

  And looked up to see Ray staring at me.

  He didn’t say anything and neither did I. I just licked my lips and went back to work, because weakness right now was not fucking okay. I started searching through the cabinet looking for something better than the damned .22—why the hell did they even have a .22?—that someone else had rejected. Someone else who was probably dead, because whatever they had picked hadn’t been good enough.

  And that went double for what they’d left. I grabbed a couple clips for the .45, shoving them in my pockets. And then just stood there, lusting after my favorite shotgun—a sweet, double-barreled 10-gauge loaded with three-and-a-half-inch shells. Every time I pulled the trigger, it was the equivalent to four blasts from a standard 12-gauge or a nine-second burst from a submachine gun.

  It was glorious.

  Only for this, I would have liked two. Or three, in case I ended up breaking one over something’s head. What I found instead was a sad little .410, all alone in the back, because nobody hunted zombies—much less freaking vampire zombies—with a rabbit gun.

  Nobody except me, since there was no alternative and I was out of time.

  I flung it over my shoulder, grabbed all the ammo that would fit it and turned to Ray. He’d g
iven me the layout of the lower floors, and helped distract the guy we’d used for a key long enough for me to do what had been necessary. If I got out of here, I owed him a lot.

  “Keep your head down,” I told him. “I’ll send help as soon as I’m out.”

  He just stared at me. I didn’t have time to figure out what his problem was, so I just clapped him on the shoulder. And took off for the bank of elevators.

  They were to the left of the reception desk, in a little alcove of their own, but still plenty close enough to the main room for my purposes. In fact, things were looking about as good as they could under the circumstances, until I caught sight of one of the elevator panels. I got out and checked the other elevator, but it was the same story.

  Son of a bitch.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Ray demanded, sticking his head in the door.

  “There’s only twelve lower levels,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “There’s only twelve, but Radu said he was on fourteen.” I looked up. “Why would he say that?”

  “Who the hell cares?” Ray looked at me like I was crazy. “You can’t use the elevator—are you nuts?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” The lights flickered, and he waved his arms. “That’s why not! What if you get stuck between levels? What if they hear you coming? What if—”

  “They’re supposed to hear me coming.”

  “What?”

  “This is just a diversion,” I told him, looking at the main lobby. And at the gory creature that was still stuck to the wall. “To draw some of the vamps away from the stairs.”

  “And how does that help? You’ll still have—”

  “And to blow a bunch of them up. I’ve rigged a trip wire across the door. They fight their way into the elevator, and our odds will get a whole lot better.”

  Ray’s forehead wrinkled as he stared down at the complete absence of any such wire. “But I don’t see—”

  I clapped a hand over his mouth, turned him around and pointed him at the damned vamp. Who was now blind, and missing a hand, but not deaf. “They’ll hear the elevator, assume I’m crazy enough to come down that way, and get themselves blown up.”

  Ray wrenched out of my grip and turned around to stare at me. And then at the elevator. And then at me again. And then he started shaking his head and gesturing and mouthing something I didn’t even try to interpret because I could guess pretty well.

  “Meanwhile, I’ll run down the stairs on the other side of the building and get ’Du,” I told him. “Do you get it now?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I get it,” he said savagely, as the elevator doors started to close. With me inside, because regardless of what I’d just told Ray, I didn’t have the ammo or the firepower to fight my way down twelve floors of vamps. The idea was just to make them think I did, and buy me some time for what I really hoped would be a quick trip.

  And yes, Ray had a point. This was insane and stupid and a whole list of other things, but it was also the only plan that might work. Only it didn’t look like he thought so.

  He stared at me for half a second, looking mad as hell for some reason I didn’t particularly get. And then he apparently went crazy, too. Because he turned sideways and slipped through the narrow crack, right before the doors shut. Leaving me with nothing to do but glare, because I was holding down the twelfth-floor button and the close-door button at the same time and didn’t have a hand free to slap him.

  It was an old trick that worked for a lot of elevators to take you straight to your floor regardless of who else might have mashed a button. In other words, it was the express route down. Not that I expected to make it the whole way, but even half would improve our odds a lot.

  At least, it would if there hadn’t been any senior masters on duty tonight. I was assuming that was the case because of the speed of the takeover. It looked like the necromancer had used Slava’s boys as a kind of Trojan horse, and they couldn’t have gotten here more than half an hour before I did. And Radu had been in distress ten minutes after that.

  That didn’t say senior master to me.

  At least, I really hoped not, or this was going to be a very short trip.

  Of course, it might be anyway.

  An arm suddenly punched through the door panel when we were on level six, only to get withdrawn, missing a good deal of flesh, when we hit seven. Where several more tried to widen the gap, but I kept my finger on the button and Ray grabbed my .45 and shoved it through the hole and just kept on firing. I don’t think he could see what he was aiming at, but it didn’t matter; it kept them back from the door, which was all we needed.

  Or more or less kept them back. By level eight, the door was dented all over as fists and feet caved in the heavy metal, and by nine it was buckling and by ten there were faces staring at us through gaps big enough to drive body parts through and by eleven enough of those parts had been wedged inside that the elevator shuddered to a halt. I could still hear the gears grinding, trying to take us down, but nothing was happening, and that wasn’t good.

  “You have a plan for this, right?” Ray said, not looking at me because he was too busy hacking at body parts with his cleaver. Which wasn’t working so well, because the acid had mostly eaten through the blade.

  “Get out of the way!” I told him, hitting the button to go back up.

  The sudden reversal, along with a few blasts from the shotgun to clear the door, worked to get us going again. But in the wrong direction. And some of our newfound friends thought we were leaving too soon, because now the floor was starting to dimple, too, as fists and feet hammered at it from underneath.

  “How are they holding on?” Ray yelled, firing his rifle as we shot back up, because he’d already emptied my .45.

  “Vampires!” I said, knocking him out of the way and grabbing two grenades. I tossed them out the shredded door on level ten, went up to nine, hit stop and waited.

  “What the—” Ray began, but I cut him off.

  “How many upper-level masters were here?”

  “What—I—” His head jerked up as somebody landed on the roof. And somebody else stared at us through the slashes in the door, just two dead eyes that didn’t glow anymore in a darkened corridor.

  “Ray!” My voice snapped his attention back to me.

  “I dunno. I dunno. Not many. Most are at the games; everybody with enough clout traded shifts and got off.”

  “Good,” I said, as an explosion from the floor below rocked the elevator around us.

  But it still worked when I hit the button to go back to level ten, the doors opening onto a smoking war zone of twisted metal and acid-etched walls, and blown-apart bodies that were still moving. Like the intact ones tearing through the elevator floor behind us. And the ceiling above us.

  “Now what?” Ray demanded, as I grabbed two of our last three grenades, pulled the pins and tossed them into the elevator as we left it, right after I hit the button for eleven.

  The doors closed, the elevator of doom plunged, and we ran flat out. Down the dark hall and into a now deserted stairway, since most of the bad guys on this level were currently grease marks on the walls. Most but not all.

  I slit the throat of one right outside the door, bisecting it in passing all the way to the bone. Had to shoot another at the bend of the stairs, because he was leaking acid and I couldn’t get too close, and the sound drew the attention of three vamps in the corridor at eleven. Who turned and started tearing our way, just as the elevator exploded behind them. They ended the journey in pieces, landing against the hall door with meaty thuds and a wash of red against the small square window.

  Ray stared at it as we ran down the last flight, maybe because the vamps’ body parts were already thumping against the metal kickplate. And then at me as I paused to reload outside the door to level twelve. But he didn’t say anything, just reloaded his own gun with slightly shaking hands, his eyes flicking back and forth between the stairs behind us and the doo
r ahead.

  And then I kicked it in and we were through.

  Into nothing.

  Nothing weird, anyway. Just an empty, quiet corridor, fresh and clean and smelling faintly of some kind of pine cleaner, odd only because nothing was. There were no homicidal body parts, no corpses, no gore.

  And no Radu.

  I kicked open doors on one side of the hall while Ray took the other. But all we found was a few offices, a couple of holding cells and what looked like an interrogation room complete with two-way mirror. It was coldly clinical, completely unlike the baroque facade upstairs or the luxury guest and meeting spaces on the upper floors.

  I guess nobody made it down here who needed to be impressed.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Ray said, looking around the empty interrogation room. “Okay. He isn’t here. So where the hell is he?”

  “Level fourteen.”

  “There is no level fourteen!”

  “There has to be. There’s no lab on this floor.”

  “But you saw—”

  “If it’s a restricted level, they may not have put it on the elevator pad. That doesn’t mean it’s not here. We probably need a key for an override.”

  “Which we don’t ha—”

  I clapped a hand over his mouth as the door was kicked open. It was the one to the other half of the room, where a conference-type table sat surrounded by chairs and harsh lights. We watched through the mirror as a couple of long-haired corpses came in.

  A lot of the older vamps have long hair, because they like it or because it tended to be the norm in earlier centuries or because human fads can bite them. But most of them keep it closely confined, not straggling in bloody clumps over acid-pitted faces. The one closest slowly turned his head in our direction, and I saw that half his cheek was gone, leaving just a raw, red cavity that looked like it was getting bigger as I watched.

  And how the hell did that work? If the acid ate through them, too, why were they even mobile? Why weren’t they a bunch of blackened bones on the floor?

  And then I noticed: the one who looked the worst was one I knew. Not personally, but I’d seen him on guard duty a time or two when I came to get paid. But the other—well, judging by the tux, I had to assume he was one of Slava’s guys.