Dominic turned on his heel one last time. Then he pointed south. “That way… I think.”
That was the direction of the substation. Her heart gave another kick against the inside of her chest. “Then let’s go south,” she said. Her voice sounded strained even to her.
“You’re sure?” He was studying her and there was a small crease between his brows.
“That’s what we’re out here for. Come on.”
She turned and headed back to the side street they had just passed. That street led south. The substation was just over half a mile away, squeezed between two apartment blocks.
Halfway down the street, they passed an elderly man walking his Chihuahua. Except that he wasn’t walking it, exactly. The tiny dog was hauling back on his leash, wining piteously. Then it would take a few steps as the owner’s tug on the leash almost lifted it off its feet. Then it would dig its feet back in and haul backward.
The man nodded a greeting as they passed, his rheumy eyes troubled.
“It’s the heat,” Dominic said as he passed.
“Frodo has never done that before, not in ten years,” the man said. “Every single day we walk this way. I just don’t understand.”
Blythe stopped to look at him and the dog. “Maybe you should give Frodo a break,” she said. “He clearly doesn’t want to walk today.”
The man looked down at the quivering Chihuahua. “You might be right. I wonder if he’s coming down with something?” Then, showing a surprising agility for a man of his age, he bent down and picked the dog up. “Shall we go home Frodo?” He asked softly.
The dog whined softly and licked his chin.
The man shook his head. “I guess we’re going home then. I don’t know….” He nodded at them both then turned and headed north.
Blythe watched them go. The little drama bothered her for reasons she couldn’t explain.
“Your gut talking to you?” Dominic’s voice was just as quiet as the old man’s had been. Everything was hushed, even human speech.
Hushed and waiting.
She realized she was massaging her chest between her breasts, as if that would alleviate the tension. She dropped her hand. “Let’s just get this done.” She turned and started walking quickly, at a speed that was just under the point where they would have to break out and start jogging. Dominic kept up with her easily. He was tall for a Latino and had long legs, so this pace was nothing for him.
Two minutes passed in silence. Then she glanced at him. “Is the whatever it is getting stronger?”
He nodded.
“Tell me where we need to change directions.”
“‘kay.”
They fell back into silence again. Both of them began to breathe harder although Blythe kept up the unforgiving pace.
“Over there,” Dominic said. He was pointing at the apartment block.
Blythe’s heart gave out a squeeze so hard it hurt. “Okay.” She angled her direction toward the apartments. They crossed the road.
“Just beyond the building,” he said.
“You’re sure?” She glanced at him.
He was frowning heavily. “Very sure. It is unmistakable.”
They moved past the corner of the building, so that the clear area between the two apartment blocks opened up and was fully visible.
Dominic halted. He pointed. “There. I’m certain of it.”
He was pointing at the dark green corrugated iron fence that surrounded the substation. Blythe walked up to it and peered between the fence and the gate, which was locked and bolted with a chain. There were big warning signs on the fence and the gate itself about high voltages. “Los Angeles Department of power and water” was written in fine letters at the bottom. Twenty years ago the building would have sprouted heavy wires and coils from the top of the roof. Everything was underground these days. However, there was still a low hum that seemed to emerge from the concrete itself. The flat-roofed building was three quarters buried in the earth, with concrete steps leading down to the heavy door. Another warning sign was riveted to the door. There were no windows.
There was nothing around the building except concrete, which rose to within a foot of the roof.
“Los Angeles doesn’t have basements or caves,” Dominic said. “Around here, that’s as close as you would come to being underground without burying yourself in the earth.”
Blythe turned away and plucked her cell phone from the belt carrier. She thumbed the quick dial and listened. When Peter answered, she said, “It is the substation, just as we thought.”
“We’re on the way.” He disconnected.
She put the phone away. “It should only take a few minutes for them to get here. We’ll wait.”
Dominic was peering through the space in the fence. “We’re going to break in there?”
“Peter’s got pretty good at picking locks. We shouldn’t have to break anything.” She grinned. “We always lock back up after, anyway.”
“Very considerate burglars,” Dominic murmured.
“Relax,” she told him. “You’ll burn up all your energy before you need it, if you don’t.”
“You should take your own advice.” He turned away from the gap in the fence and leaned against it, crossing his arms. “Look at you. You’re pacing.”
Blythe halted. She had been pacing.
Dominic looked over her shoulder. “This could be a problem, no?”
She wheeled around. Pulling into the driveway was a city maintenance truck, with high enclosed sides and padlocks on the hatches. Two men sat in the cab and they were staring at them.
“Shit,” Blythe said forcefully.
The passenger was climbing out of the cab. He wore overalls and an orange vest that would glow in the dark. His heavy boots crunched on the tarmac as he moved toward them. “You shouldn’t be hanging around here.”
“We are waiting for friends,” Blythe said.
The driver was getting out of the truck, too. This was getting worse.
Then the first worker glanced down at her hip and stiffened. “Is that a sword?” Wariness made him back up the step.
“It’s not for you,” she said quickly.
“You guys have been watching TV, right?” Dominic said, moving up beside her. “About the vampires and about the Summanus?”
The driver, a big man well over six feet, tilted his head to look at Dominic. “That fantasy bullshit?”
“It’s not bullshit. It’s really not.” Dominic spoke quietly. There was such conviction in his voice that both men hesitated.
“We think there might be Summanus sleeping in your substation.” Blythe used the same quiet, firm tone that Dominic had.
“We know there are Summanus sleeping in your substation,” Dominic added.
The driver hitched a heavy set of keys off his belt and hefted them. “If there really are those things in there and if they’re asleep, then there’s no problem. We’ve got a schedule to keep.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Anger touched her. “The Summanus have been killing people for the last month. Have you had your head up your ass the entire time?”
It was such the wrong thing to say. She knew that as soon as she opened her mouth. Derision set the driver’s face into a stony expression. “Get out of my way,” he said, as he moved forward, shouldering his way between them.
The other worker stepped between them, too, rolling his eyes. The driver tackled the bolt on the fence with his keys.
Blythe moved up behind them. “Please, you have to listen. The Summanus are incredibly dangerous. We have no idea what they’ll do if you disturb them while they’re nesting.”
“Nesting?” He repeated. Then he snorted. “Sounds like doves.”
“These creatures rip out your stomach and eat your innards, gentlemen,” Dominic said, using the same tone as before. “And that’s just the appetizer. Their main course is to gnaw the meat from your bones.”
The driver got the gate opened and strode through, the
n climbed down the steps with a heavy tread. “All part of the job,” he growled over his shoulder. “I’ve faced down Hells Angels and I’m still standing.”
“He has,” the other guy said.
“That just makes him stupid, not brave,” Blythe said. She turned her back on them. There was nothing she could do to stop this now. She looked at Dominic. “Do you have any weapons on you at all?”
His black eyes were grave. “I didn’t think I’d be going into combat.”
“This is a rescue mission now,” she said. She bent over and pulled her knife from her boot, flipped it and held it out to him hilt-first. “I’ll take the sword because I’ve got more practice with it. You’ve used a knife before, haven’t you? Not just been attacked by one?”
Dominic took the knife and hefted it. He pointed at the scar on his cheek. “The reason this is a scar and not the wound that put me in the grave is because of the knife I was holding at the time.”
She nodded, feeling a touch of reassurance. “If this happens,” she said, “then just cut anything you can reach. We’re not here to kill them, now. Our priority is to get those two idiots out of there alive.”
The heavy door to the bunker was forced open and dirt and gravel under it scraped across the concrete inside. Even from the open gate of the compound they could smell the difference in the air that emerged. It was dark and dank and smelled of wet leather.
Blythe wrinkled her nose. “I will never wear leather again,” she muttered.
Dominic swapped the knife from his right hand to his left and back again, feeling the weight of it and testing it for balance. “When I get home—if I get home—I am throwing out my jacket. Or maybe I might just burn it.” He glanced at her as the two workers pushed their way into the building and disappeared inside. “Let’s go.”
They followed the two men into the bunker.
Chapter Thirteen
As they moved inside, banks of fluorescent lights flickered on overhead, flooding the room.
Dominic lunged for the switches and turned them all off with one down-sweep of his hand.
“What the fuck?” The growl came from ahead of them.
“The light will wake them,” Blythe said. She was standing just ahead of him.
“Oh, God,” one of them said, gasping. “That smell is awful.”
“I don’t think the Summanus hear things like we hear them,” Blythe said, “Although you should stay silent for now. We’re going to go around that bank of electronics I saw ahead of us. This isn’t a big room. They have to be back there.”
Dominic’s eyes were adjusting to the dark. It wasn’t perfectly dark. There was light from the door standing ajar behind him, which was just enough to show him the mounds of mysterious equipment and machinery in front of him. The driver was standing over by a console. The passenger was right behind him, facing them. His eyes were very wide.
Blythe had her sword out. She had drawn it silently.
“Dominic,” she said softly.
He followed her as she moved in slow paces past machinery mounted on a concrete mound six inches high. It hummed.
There was a tightening in his gut and a sick, shaky feeling he recognized from his days of wandering aimlessly across two continents. He was afraid.
He hefted the knife again, reminding himself not to squeeze the hilt too hard. Clenched muscles were slow to move.
As they rounded the corner and moved into the dead end between the machinery and the concrete walls of the bunker, his fear rose up in his throat and squeezed his balls and his belly. He could almost feel the Summanus. There was more than one and they were just ahead.
The end of the corridor was empty.
Blythe gripped his arm and squeezed. Her fingertips pressed against his lips and he understood that she wanted him to stay silent.
From under her jacket she pulled another knife, the one he had suspected she had hidden away. She handed him the sword. Then she leaned very close to him and murmured in his ear. “Not enough room to use a sword. I go in, you guard.”
From the corner to the blank end wall, the corridor stretched barely twelve feet. The Summanus had to be so close they could touch them, yet they were nowhere in sight. That made it worse.
Blythe moved step by slow step down the corridor, while Dominic hefted the sword in his right hand and the knife in his left. He weighed and discarded all the possible scenarios that might happen now.
As she moved, she checked every nook between the irregular shapes of the machinery and the controlling devices that ran it. There were a lot of them. Many of them looked far too small for the tall Summanus to hide within.
The other side of the corridor was blank and featureless concrete which they could safely ignore.
When she was within four feet of the end of the corridor, Blythe halted. She put the knife up by her shoulder, staring hard at a dark shadow. Even from here, Dominic could hear her breathing, which was ragged and far too fast for a professional soldier who had been in tighter scrapes than this before.
The Summani didn’t emerge from the crack, it exploded from it with a squeal that seemed to steal Dominic’s thoughts. He gasped.
Blythe had the knife up already and the Summani fell on it. Blythe was already moving, spinning herself in a circle. The knife followed her movement and sliced sideways.
The Summani was screaming and Dominic heard the two workers crying out their fright on the other side of the room.
The lights flickered to life and at that same moment the second Summani burst from a cranny that was behind Blythe. She had her back to it.
Dominic acted without thought. The shout of defiance burst from him as he lunged forward, thrusting the sword. The tip buried itself inside the creature, sliding through the leathery vestigial wings lying flat against his back. Deliberately, Dominic pulled the sword upward.
The Summani flipped itself backward, pushing off with its spring-like joints. He shuffled back five paces as the thing somersaulted in the air and landed in front of him. His sword was ripped out of it by the movement and fell against the floor with a metallic scrape. He lifted it up again, just in time, as the Summani launched itself at him, its elbows out for a strike.
Fighting for his life was something he remembered well and he fell back into the mindset and the posture with frightening ease. Time slowed down. He raised his left arm in a simple movement that knocked the descending elbow out of the way, then moved into the space that was created. He leaned in and thrust the sword again, this time squarely into the middle of its torso.
He yanked upward quickly, then stepped back and pulled the sword out before the creature could react. There was a sickly sound as the interior organs sagged in the cavity.
He lifted the sword up high over his head and swung it in a flat arc. The blade whistled as it moved through the air. It sliced through the thing’s neck with little resistance.
The head with the glowing eyes and the long snout toppled to the ground with a wet sound. For a few seconds the body remained standing, then collapsed on top.
The sickly wet leathery smell intensified.
Behind him, someone groaned and he heard the sound of vomiting.
He ignored it. Just ahead of him, on the other side of the steaming body, Blythe was attacking the second Summani. She had it backed into a corner. One arm was pinned under her hand against the concrete wall, the other was missing from just above the elbow. Black ichor was dripping from the amputation.
As he watched, she thrust the knife into the creature’s abdomen at full force, grunting as she drove home, over and over again. The Summani’s snout had dropped forward against the top of its chest.
Dominic dropped the sword and knife and jumped over the carcass. As Blythe swung her arm back for another blow, he gripped her wrist and threw his weight into preventing her from swinging again. “It’s dead, Blythe. You’ve killed it. Enough.”
She was gasping loudly. He could feel from the way she was pulling on his hands t
hat she hadn’t heard him. He tried again. “Blythe! Stop!”
She turned quickly. Her eyes were enormous. Glassy. Dominic knew that she wasn’t seeing him at all.
Still holding her wrist, the one that held the knife, he gripped her other shoulder and shook hard. “Blythe! Cool down. It’s finished. You’ve killed it.”
She blinked. Her gasping turned into a hitching of the chest that sounded very close to tears. She swallowed hard. “I’m fine,” she said. Her voice was more husky than usual. Dominic pulled on her shoulder again, this time moving her forward, farther along the corridor. He had to get her out of there.
It was the driver’s mate who had followed them around the corners then graced himself by throwing up. He was leaning against the wall, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, looking sheepish. Dominic pulled Blythe past him without a word, stepping carefully over the pile of vomit.
“What do we do with the bodies?” The man said weakly.
“Whatever you want. I don’t give a damn.”
When they reached the door, Dominic looked at the driver, who was standing frozen at the console. His eyes were huge.
“Warn everyone,” Dominic told him.
The driver nodded.
Dominic tugged Blythe into following him up the concrete steps. Once outside, he slowed down, taking deep breaths of fresh air. The sunlight was bright and most welcome.
Blythe leaned up against the iron fence, breathing hard.
“I’ll have to go back inside for the sword and the knife,” he told her. “Will you be okay for a couple of minutes?”
She swallowed and nodded. Her eyes still had a glazed look that he didn’t like, although she was responding normally. Then her gaze settled on his face. There were long tendrils of hair shadowing her eyes and he brushed them out of the way.
His pulse, which had been slowing down, picked up the pace a little.
Her lips parted.
The urge to kiss her was powerful. He battled it.
This close to her with only an inch or so separating their bodies, he found it next to impossible not to read her mind. So he knew that she recognized the moment, too. She was fighting her instincts, as well. She was the sort of woman who would take the kiss if she really wanted it and that strength was another goad.
Blood Revealed Page 14