by Karen Chance
And he looked a little different.
A good bit of his once expensive tux had been eaten away, giving him the look of a yearlong castaway on some desert island. But the skin underneath, other than being corpse white, was fine. And while he had some blood on him, I didn’t see any obvious wounds, meaning it probably wasn’t his.
So Slava’s boys weren’t harmed by whatever corrosive was flowing through their veins, but everybody else was. And that didn’t spell coincidence to me. That spelled forethought and planning and deliberation and—
And setup.
My eyes widened as the implication hit. We’d just been played. Again.
But not by Slava, who had been as toxic as the rest of them. And who didn’t have the skills for messing around with vamp DNA. So by the necromancer, obviously, and whoever he was working with, which I was suddenly having a hard time believing was just a group of smugglers.
But there was no time to work it out now, not with the tux reaching for the doorknob.
I shoved Ray at the hallway door, shot out the window and dropped our last grenade. Then I went pelting out after him, only to find him looking from the smoking elevator shaft to a horde of vamps coming down the stairs. And apparently deciding on the latter, because he yelled and started to charge like a crazy man before I grabbed his collar and threw him the other way.
“What good is that going to do?” he yelled. “It won’t go up!”
“Good. Because we’re going down,” I said. And pushed him into the elevator shaft.
The grenade went off as we dropped, rattling the walls around us and sending a billow of smoke into the air over our heads. Which probably would have bothered me more except that I’d guessed right. The shaft didn’t stop at level twelve.
And while that was great as far as the plan was concerned, a two-story drop isn’t fun even when you’re at your best, which I definitely wasn’t. And even when you don’t land in a mass of twisted metal from the elevator you just blew to smithereens. And even when you don’t look up and find a bunch of bloody vampires glaring down at you from the doorway you just jumped out of. Although they worried me less at the moment than the smoking remains of the elevator on the floor above them, which was sparking and swaying and looking like it was about to—
“Fuuuuck!” Ray said, summing things up. Right before he started shooting at the vamps and I got to my feet, fell down, got up and started wrestling the doors open to level fourteen. There was a stabbing pain in my left calf, my ankle kept trying to collapse on the other leg, and then a vamp jumped down.
Right on top of me.
He was riddled with damage from Ray’s bullets or shrapnel or whatever fighting had taken place before I got here. Or maybe all three. He was less a vampire at this point than a bunch of holes in the vague shape of a vampire, which didn’t stop him from sinking his teeth into my shoulder.
I grunted in pain, because it hurt like a bitch. And worse, that’s not an easy hold to break. The feeding instinct takes over as soon as they latch on, and the blood they drain gives them extra strength even as it weakens their victim.
Only that wasn’t happening this time.
The vamp raised his head after barely a second, looking vaguely puzzled, like I didn’t taste so good. Or like his body couldn’t process what he was sucking out of me when he was no longer, in any sense of the term, alive. He just didn’t know it yet.
I helped him out with that, slinging him against the concrete wall of the shaft, and then getting splattered with vamp parts when I shot him at point-blank range. I realized a bare second later that he wasn’t one of Slava’s, and that the splatter oozing down my face and cleavage wasn’t burning me to a cinder. But I screamed anyway, because I felt like it, and because it wasn’t like everybody didn’t already know where we were.
And all of them were probably going to be here any second.
I grabbed Ray’s arm. “Come on!”
And he tried. But he’d run out of ammo, and in the split second it took him to slam in a new clip, three more vamps dropped down the shaft, like dark bullets. They landed in a V formation, and the one in front grabbed Ray’s other arm and jerked back, stretched him between us.
Everybody froze.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Ray watched me with big eyes, but didn’t say anything. I finally found out what it takes to shut him up, I thought. And then I raised my gun an inch so it was aimed directly between his captor’s eyes.
“Stop three with one weapon?” the vamp asked. “That would be impressive.”
“Like your brains when I splatter them all over the wall.”
I’d suspected I wasn’t actually talking to the guy I was facing, who was looking a little, I don’t know, dead, for an animated conversation. But I was sure of it when he grinned. “Not mine, dhampir. You forget—I am not there. You won’t clip me this time.”
“This time? Do I know you?” Because I didn’t know many necromancers. And only one powerful enough to pull off something like this. But he was supposed to be as dead as the vamp I was facing, burnt to a crisp in a raging fire.
Or, you know, not.
It didn’t look like I was going to get confirmation, though. Because the necromancer just shook his puppet’s head. And the other two vamps did the same thing at the same time, like they were on a string.
So not really three pairs of eyes, then.
“No, no, none of that,” he tut-tutted. “Not that I expect you to get out of this, but you have proven to be…resilient. I think I shall save my explanations.”
“Well, that’s going to make this pretty boring.”
He grinned wider. “I do not think you will find it so.”
And yeah. Guy had the creepy-comments part of the villain thing down pat.
“But I did wish to thank you for letting us know where your uncle is hiding. He has proven elusive.”
I didn’t say anything, but that kind of clinched it. A decent number of people knew I was a dhampir, but damned few realized who my father was. Much less my uncle.
One did, though. One old, powerful necromancer did.
Because he’d last attacked me at Radu’s estate.
“He’s like that,” I said evenly.
“But now, I am afraid, our little game is over.”
“Might want to do a recount,” I told him. And dropped Ray’s hand.
“W-what are you doing?” Ray demanded as he was abruptly jerked against the vamp.
“Sorry.” I grabbed something out of my pocket. “But you know too much. I can’t let them have you.”
“Bullshit!” He stared at me, hurt and bewildered and mad as hell. “What are you—auggghh!”
He broke off in a genuinely terrified scream as I pulled my hand out of my pocket and threw something on the floor. Because I guess he didn’t know I was out of grenades, any more than the vamps did. They dove, scrabbling around in the trash, and I raised my gun—at the ceiling. And shot out the last support cable on the elevator.
There was no time to get out, no time to do anything but grab Ray, who was looking at me like I’d gone crazy. And jerk him back into the one safe place as the whole burnt-out, messed-up, bloody elevator car came crashing down around us like a ton of bricks—or two tons, since that’s what the thing weighed. The remaining part of the floor crushed the three puppets, even as the hole left Ray and me standing in the middle of a smoking ruin.
Staring at each other.
“What the hell did you throw?” Ray demanded after a moment.
“A spent cartridge.”
He just looked at me some more.
And then the bell dinged and the part of the doors that was still intact slid open.
On a bunch of very pissed-off vampires.
“It’s out of service,” Ray snarled, and blew one of their heads off.
He jumped out, but I was still in the hole, thanks to the shaft extending below door level.
Which made it hard to see faces but put me on a
line with everyone’s legs. So that was what I targeted, shattering the kneecaps of every vamp I could see. And while normal vamps, much less masters, could have healed an injury like that on the run, these weren’t normal vamps anymore.
And they weren’t healing.
The horror-movie looks should have already clued me in on that, if my brain hadn’t been occupied with freaking out. They looked like they did because their bodies, once damaged, stayed that way. Which was the first piece of halfway good news I’d had, and which explained why they went down like ducks in a macabre shooting gallery.
And why I started to think we just might have a shot at this.
Until Ray screamed again. It wasn’t his usual panicked yelp, which I’d sort of gotten used to by this point. It was a full-on agonized shriek, maybe because two vamps had grabbed him and were doing their best to tear him apart.
I put a bullet in one vamp’s head, discovered that was the last in the .45 and pulled the shotgun. And found that it was empty, too. So I jumped up, grabbed a knife and drove it into the vamp’s shoulder.
Who didn’t so much let go as have Ray wrench away with the hand and arm still gripping him. A punch in the solar plexus had the vamp doubling over, an uppercut had him straightening up again and then a boot to the stomach had him flying back into several others. And then we were stumbling through a heavy steel door because there was nowhere else to go, and barring it behind us.
Ray collapsed to the floor, screeching, and I beat the damned arm off him with the barrel of my now useless weapon. And then looked around for something to trap the gory thing with. And saw a row of familiar-looking steel cabinets lining one wall.
How appropriate, I thought, pulling a drawer open and tossing the hideous thing inside. I slammed it shut and didn’t even hear it rattling around. Not too surprising—the front panel had to be a foot thick.
Nobody knew better than the Senate that “dead” is a malleable term.
“We’re in the morgue,” Ray said faintly, looking at the row of coolers with glazed eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Fitting,” he said, and tried to say something else, but got a mouthful of blood bubbles instead.
I jerked open his shirt, and yeah, he was messed up. Maybe because the damned vamp had bled all over him, and he’d been one of Slava’s boys, so the result was akin to having an acid bath. Or because he’d landed badly, tearing his leg open on something that had left a wound ten inches long.
He’d managed to close it, vampire healing being what it was. But he couldn’t replace the blood he’d lost, and he’d lost a lot. And now somebody was trying to cave in the door behind us and finish the job.
I ignored them and knelt beside him, having no time for my usual squeamishness. And shoved my arm under his nose. Not that it did any good, other than to have him give me another weird look, confused and hopeful and wary and shocked, all rolled into one. It made him look constipated.
“What are you waiting for?” I demanded.
“I—what?”
“Feed, damn it!”
He stared at my arm; he stared up at me. He didn’t move. “Why are you doing this?”
“I lost one partner this week. That’s my quota.”
“Partner?”
“Well, you said it. I make a lousy master.”
Ray just looked at me for another moment, and the constipated look got worse. And then his fingers closed over my forearm, slowly, delicately. “Yeah, well. I may have to rethink that,” he said, and began to pull.
He wasn’t biting, just pulling blood molecules directly through the skin. But I had to swallow and look away, not to show how much I really, really hated this. But I guess I didn’t do so great, because Ray started talking again. Only this time I didn’t mind so much.
“So I guess this makes me your sidekick, right?” he asked. “Like I could be…”
“Robin?”
He scowled. “I ain’t no Robin.”
“What’s wrong with Robin?”
“What’s wrong?” Ray rolled his eyes. “Two words: green Speedo. And he was lame. Batman was always having to save his ass.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Hey, I was doing okay before you showed up. All right?”
I decided not to comment on that, mainly because I hadn’t been doing any better. “So Robin’s out.”
“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I always figured I’d be more like…Q.”
“Q?”
“From James Bond. You know.”
I looked at him. “But Q had stuff.”
“I got stuff.”
“Yeah, but Q had cool stuff.”
Ray scowled. “I got cool stuff,” he told me. “But we shouldn’t need it. This is Central! There’s got to be a crap ton of defenses built in.”
“Yeah,” I said, glancing around. But I didn’t see anything that looked particularly helpful. Just a few exam tables, some dirty footprints and the rows of coolers built into the wall.
One of which appeared to be vibrating.
And it wasn’t the one I’d thrown the arm into.
Great.
“Oh, crap,” Ray said, staring at it. Looking like a guy who had just about reached tilt and couldn’t take one more piece of bad news. I didn’t feel any different, especially when I stood up and wove a little on my feet from light-headedness. But better to deal with whatever it was now, while it was trapped, than have it pop out in the middle of the coming fight.
I grabbed Ray’s rifle and sidled up alongside him, trying not to think of some of the things the Senate could have on ice. Or that Ray had all of three bullets left—our last. Or that neither of us was exactly in shape for hand-to-hand right now.
I just nodded at him, gripped the pull, took a deep breath.
And yanked open the drawer.
Only to have something jump out at me, so blindingly fast that I couldn’t even see it clearly. Something that grabbed the gun, jerked up the barrel and caused the shot I managed to get off to hit the ceiling. Something with a fan of dark hair, a porcelain fist, and a flash of turquoise eyes—
And lashes longer than mine, I thought, relief making me weak-kneed. “Radu!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he told Ray. “I’m Q.”
I slumped against the side of the coolers. “You could have told me where you’d be!”
“Well, I didn’t know, did I?” he asked, releasing the gun so he could climb out. “I had to improvise.”
“So you put yourself in the morgue?”
“Zombies are stupid, Dory.”
“But the necromancer controlling them isn’t!”
“But even the best of necromancers can’t control more than two or three puppets at a time. Or see through everyone’s eyes. And whatever you were doing was keeping his attention nicely,” Radu explained.
“Glad I could help.”
Radu nodded regally. “The only inconvenience was that, once in, I couldn’t contact you or any vampire in the area might have felt it. But I knew you’d find me.” He gave me a stern look. “Although I must say, you took your time.”
“You’re welcome,” Ray said sourly.
Radu glanced at him. “Why is he here?”
“He’s my team.”
The door shook as something all but buckled it from the other side. “And what is that?”
“The bad guys.”
Radu put his hands on his impeccably tailored hips. “What kind of a rescue is this?”
“A do-it-yourself kind,” I told him, my eyes lighting on a couple of fire extinguishers. “Where’s the portal?”
“On the floor below, of course.”
“Of course. And how do we get there?”
“There’s a ramp at the end of the hall. But it won’t do any good, I’m afraid.”
“Why not?”
“Well, really, Dory.” Radu looked at me impatiently. “If it were that easy, I’d have simply managed things myself, wouldn’t I?”
“I dun
no. Might have messed up your manicure,” Ray muttered.
Radu ignored him.
“What’s wrong with the portal?” I asked, dragging the fire extinguishers off the wall. And blessing the vamp paranoia about fire, because they were huge.
“There’s nothing wrong with it. I just don’t know the password.”
I stopped, halfway to the door. “What?”
“Shit,” Ray said violently.
“What password?” I demanded.
“Well, for the shield, of course,” Radu told me.
“Stop saying that. There’s no ‘of course’ when I don’t know shit about this place! And what shield?”
“The one designed to keep anyone from using the portal to gain unauthorized entry, of—” He broke off at my look. “Well, didn’t you expect the Senate to have something? Considering how many enemies—”
“I expected you to know how to turn it off!”
“Well, I would, if I usually worked here. But I don’t and the passwords are changed on a weekly basis. And, of course, I always have escorts—”
“Stop saying that!”
“Well, I’m sorry—”
“Save the apologies,” I snarled. “You have to remember!”
“Well, I can’t—”
“You have to! You were there when they said it!”
“Dory. One has staff so that one does not have to remember.”
“Goddamn it, Radu, that’s not good enough!”
“Well, just shoot me then!”
“I don’t have any bullets!”
Only that wasn’t actually true, I realized a second later. I had bullets; I had a whole box of them for a .44 Magnum. I just didn’t have the Magnum.
But I did have the .410.
I grabbed it and pulled out the box of ammo, shoving loose bullets into my coat pockets and one into the autoloader of the gun. And yes, it fit. But that wasn’t necessarily good news.
The problem was that Magnum bullets pack a whale of a punch, and not just on whatever they hit. They also put tremendous pressure on the barrel of the gun firing them. Including more than was recommended for a .410.