by Tessa Cole
Nothing.
Hank stepped close, his nose crinkled in disgust, his sidearm raised, and his flashlight sweeping into the hall behind me.
“Did you see which way he went?” he asked.
“No idea.” I squeezed my eyes shut, focusing on slowing my pounding heart and hearing past the rush of blood in my ears. Hank’s breath came fast, and I could hear the faint thu-thump of his pulse.
Protocol said in a situation like this we had to stick together, even if that meant losing the perp. If the guy had been normal— or rather, if he’d seemed normal, we could have made a judgment call and separated, but no Union City officer faced anyone or anything magical alone. Ever. That was a policy only the dumbest or most desperate cops broke. And I was neither dumb nor desperate… not any more.
“Dispatch, two Charlie eleven in pursuit at Washington Park High School on Glendower,” Hank said into his radio, his voice soft. “Requesting backup.”
The radio crackled and clicked. “Ten-four two Charlie eleven, backup is on its way.”
“Do we honestly think backup will arrive in time to trap him in the school?” I asked, still straining to hear the guy’s footsteps.
“No, but at least there’ll be more of us in the area to answer a call when he loses it on someone.” Hank glanced the other way down the hall, his expression grim. “So which way?”
“It’s fifty-fifty. How about—”
The temperature plunged and a scream ripped through the air. My pulse, not even back to normal, shot back into a rapid beat.
“Left,” Hank said, passing me to take point.
We hurried down the hall. The guy screamed again, a desperate, wild sound that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
A door jerked open, and I could see the guy racing to get back out into the hall. But something yanked him back, pulling the door partially closed after him. Cold stung my hands and cheeks, the guy’s fear a sudden, deep-winter freeze.
Oh, shit. This is bad. The memory of running into the alley and finding the archnephilim flashed through my mind’s eye. Please let it be a hallucination making him terrified of whoever is in that room.
“Second door down,” I said. “Someone else is in there.”
“I see it.” Hank hurried to the entrance, but the crack wasn’t big enough to see inside.
The guy screamed again, followed by a low growl, crunching, and the sound of something wet.
Shit shit shit. That really didn’t sound human.
I opened my mouth to warn Hank, but he shoved the door open and rushed inside to make way for me in the doorway.
I jerked into the opening to cover him and my thoughts stuttered. Time froze and all I could do was stare at the horror in front of me and wish to God I couldn’t see in the dark.
The room was large, with no windows, and filled with massive pieces of equipment. Large pipes ran along the low ceiling and up the walls, snaking deeper into the room and beyond my ability to see in the gloom even with my enhanced vision.
The temperature had snapped back to normal, and I knew our perp was dead or awfully damn close to it. Hank’s flashlight shone on him, his throat ripped out, his body limp and held in the arms of a pale, almost translucent-skinned woman. Blood covered her face around her mouth and her lips were drawn back in a feral sneer, revealing vampire fangs. Her eyes were all black, but didn’t hold any of the intensity I’d come to recognize as pure vampire. All I could see was animalistic fervor and hunger. Desperate, consuming hunger.
Behind them, piled in the corner between two big pieces of machinery, were more bodies. All were mangled in some way, missing limbs, throats ripped out, faces smashed, and all in various stages of decomposition, the worst at the bottom of the pile. So many bodies. I could count at least two dozen, but with the size of the pile there had to be a lot more.
Bile burned my throat and I couldn’t make my mind fully accept the horror. Vampire dens like this, with piles of discarded bodies, only existed in horror movies. They weren’t real. Even before supernatural beings had come out of hiding to save themselves from Michael’s war, vampires had had laws governing their behavior. Sure, some disobeyed those laws, but vampire society had been swift in controlling them. They were swifter now since humans knew about them, and there were enough interested in becoming blood bunnies that they didn’t have to kill anyone to keep their secret.
But this was more than just killing to keep a secret. This was primal, feral, inhuman in ways not even vampires or demons were inhuman.
The temperature plunged, this time with Hank’s fear. Blood spurted from our perp’s neck with his heart’s last desperate beats to keep him alive. The viscous liquid oozed over the woman’s arms and splattered to the concrete floor.
She hissed at us, her fangs extended and eyes filled with a wild hunger, and leaped at Hank.
Chapter 2
I fired two shots at the vampire and the bullets slammed into her chest. Hank dropped his flashlight, drew his Taser, and shot from his hip. The barbs hit her square in the chest, the LEDs on them turning red, indicating Hank had pulled the trigger past the first and second catch to the device’s highest voltage, intended to drop the average super.
She screamed but kept going, something I’d never seen before. Even without bullets enspelled to hurt supers, two shots to the chest and that much electricity should have made her at least stumble.
Hank scrambled back, but she grabbed his arm and tossed him deeper into the room. His Taser clattered to the concrete, and he slid across the blood-slicked floor into the pile of rotting bodies. Somehow he’d managed to keep hold of his gun, but without his light, he couldn’t clearly see the woman leaping toward him as he scrambled to his feet.
My breath misted, Hank’s fear growing stronger. I fired again at the woman, and hit. She wasn’t using enhanced vampire speed, but I didn’t know if that meant she wasn’t using it or if she was too young to have it.
The shot made her jerk around and hiss at me, giving Hank a second to eject the magazine from his Glock and grab the magazine of enspelled ammunition. But a hand reached out from the pile of bodies, seized Hank’s ankle, and yanked, toppling him to his hands and knees.
Oh, shit.
The magazine slipped from his fingers and skidded across the floor into the band of light from his discarded flashlight.
Frost swept over the back of my hands and across my cheeks, making my teeth chatter. I aimed to shoot at the hand, but the woman lunged for me, yanking my attention back to her, and my shots hit her, point blank in the chest. She staggered — bully for that, she only had to be shot six times — but kept moving forward. Which meant I had to change my ammunition, because regular bullets sure as hell weren’t doing anything.
She slashed at my arm with her claws. They weren’t nearly as big as a shifter’s claws but I suspected they were just as sharp and I didn’t want to find out if that was true.
I jerked back and hit the edge of the doorframe.
The woman seized my arm and yanked me close, her fangs headed for my neck.
I dropped my flashlight and shoved her with everything I had. I wasn’t strong enough to get her to let go, but the push did put enough distance between us for me to rush through saying the combat spell and summon a divine light strike.
Light flickered from my palm. Weak and uneven. The power wasn’t even close to what I’d been able to summon when fighting the archnephilim, and not even as strong as it had been before that whole mess had happened, but it was all I had.
The vampire jerked her fangs back toward my neck, and I slapped my palm against her face, releasing the light strike.
She hissed and wrenched back, letting me go, and I scrambled away. With fingers numb with cold, I ejected the magazine from my sidearm, letting it drop on the floor.
The vampire snarled at me. She had a handprint on her face that only looked as bad as a mild sunburn, not the first- or second-degree burn it should have been. My blast had barely done an
y damage.
Hank screamed, and the frost on my hands swept over my wrists and up my arms. The front of his vest was shredded and so too was the left shoulder of his uniform, revealing deep, bleeding gashes. He fought with a bulky man wearing tattered clothes and covered from head to toe in blood. The man’s eyes were wild and filled with hunger like the woman’s, and his fangs were fully extended. They were ten feet away from the pile of bodies, and farther away from Hank’s magazine of enspelled ammunition. And Hank didn’t have the ability to summon any divine light like I did.
I opened the pouch on my duty belt containing the enspelled ammunition. The woman slashed at me again, her claws slicing into my vest.
Shit. I scrambled back, grabbed the magazine, and a blast of lightning screamed through my right forearm from Gideon’s brand and blazed through me.
My muscles seized, contracting tight as if I’d just been hit with a Taser. Panic raced through me, and my thoughts jerked to one thing: Gideon.
Gideon was in trouble. Gideon was hurt. Dying.
Every fiber of my being knew it.
For a week and a half, I’d been pretending I wasn’t permanently bonded with the angel. With my increased personal buzz, even with two nicotine patches muting it, I’d been able to pretend the electric hum radiating from Gideon’s angelic mating brand wasn’t there. Now it was the only thing I could feel, and my soul was screaming.
The white lighting sliced through my buzz, my thoughts, everything. Even the burn of my empathically created frost was gone. There was only him. There’d only ever been him, and I couldn’t lose him. I had to go to him, help him, protect him—
Hank screamed again. The male vampire had tackled him to the floor and straddled him. The sleeves of Hank’s forearms were shredded, the skin beneath bloody as he fought to keep the vampire’s claws from his face and neck. He bucked and twisted, but couldn’t get the vampire off of him.
The woman snarled and grabbed the front of my vest with both hands. I fought to move an arm, a finger, anything to defend myself, but Gideon’s electricity burned through every command my brain sent to my body, and I couldn’t think past the desperate need to go to him. Now.
With a roar, the woman jerked me around and slammed me into the wall with her enhanced vampiric strength. Air burst from my lungs and my head cracked against the cinderblock wall. Darkness swam over my vision, but still my panic was for Gideon, not for Hank or even myself.
Save him. Save him. I had to save him.
The voltage surging through me suddenly stopped and all my muscles went limp. My gun and the magazine with enspelled ammunition clattered to the floor, and my knees gave out.
A rush of exhaustion swept through me as Gideon’s brand stole strength from me to save him, and the woman yanked me forward and shoved me to the floor.
Hank howled in pain as the vampire gnawed on his forearm and the woman sank her teeth into my neck. I screamed the spell to summon divine light, praying the force of my summoning would somehow make my blasts stronger.
Somehow, the light hit with enough force to shove her off me, her teeth tearing my skin, and I dove for my sidearm and magazine. I managed to grab and slam the magazine into place, but the woman seized my ankle and jerked me toward her.
I twisted to face her and fired three times — because the bullet in the chamber wasn’t enspelled — point blank into her head.
Blue lightning crackled around her body. She roared in pain and collapsed on top of me. I turned my aim to Hank, who was thrashing and screaming. The vampire had pinned him with his body and was now latched to his neck, feeding.
I fired two more shots, hitting the vampire in the chest, not wanting to risk hitting Hank by going for its head. The shots sent blue lightning crackling around the vampire, but the spell didn’t drop him. It did, however, make him jerk away from Hank and rush toward me.
Another shot in the knee made him fall, and a final shot in the head — now that he was only a few feet away — killed him.
Hank gurgled and grasped at his neck, blood oozing between his fingers. The frost had thickened to ice on the backs of my hands, and my nose and throat burned with every frozen breath I gasped.
I scrambled to his side. My neck hurt. It was bleeding, but I didn’t think I was bleeding out — just being magically drained by the soul mate I didn’t want.
I dropped to my knees beside Hank, found the enspelled pip at his collar, and activated the distress beacon. The spell was for life-threatening injuries only, since it was ridiculously expensive. It immediately alerted paramedics to an officer’s location, wherever he was. No need to call dispatch and try to explain where in the school we were. The spell would lead the EMTs right to us.
Hank gasped a weak wet breath, his eyes rolled back, and his hands slid away from his throat.
My pulse raced, and I slapped my hands over the ragged gaping wound on his neck, fighting to keep the blood from seeping between my fingers.
“Hold on, Hank. Just hold on. Help is coming.” Please, hold on.
I shook with fear and adrenaline and jagged spikes of electricity from Gideon’s brand. And my skin hurt from the cold, even though the ice on the back of my hands was now cracking and falling off because Hank was losing consciousness.
I searched the room for signs of any more vampires, but nothing moved. Our flashlights shone with small stark bands across the floor, Hank’s into the pile of decomposing bodies, mine under a hulking piece of equipment.
Hank jerked and his eyes opened and focused on me, his gaze desperate and afraid. A blast of cold swept around me and my breath misted, but I didn’t care if Hank saw it. All I cared about was that he lived. Please live.
And I would God damn not leave his side to help Gideon. No matter what every cell in my body was screaming.
“I’ve got you. Just hold on.”
He gasped another wet breath. His heart pounded, ragged beats pumping his blood through my fingers. God, why couldn’t healing magic be contained in a spell? But for whatever reason, it didn’t work that way. Spells could be created that enhanced immune systems, like the drug Divifend, or sped up healing for pulled muscles or the common cold, but no matter how hard every spellcaster tried, the innate magical ability to heal a life-threatening injury couldn’t be replicated with a spell.
His body jerked again and his ragged pulse started to slow.
I fought back a sob. Hank and I hadn’t been friends, but he’d been a decent partner and didn’t deserve this.
Finally I heard footsteps racing toward us and saw beams of light dancing in the hall.
“In here,” I gasped out, and an EMT team rushed into the room.
They took over, and I staggered back to the wall beside the door and sat. Gideon’s jagged electricity had eased off a bit, and I couldn’t tell any more if the dizzy exhaustion that numbed me came from him siphoning strength from me, shock, or blood loss.
I stuck my hands under my armpits to get them to warm up, my teeth chattering, my shivering spiking agony through my neck. I could only pray the EMTs would mistake it for shock and not actual cold.
And perhaps it was both. I’d had another horrible encounter in the world of the supernatural and another partner had been seriously injured. While there wasn’t any chance he’d become a vampire, not even the one-in-a-million chance like there was with lycanthropy — the vampire had to perform a ritual to sire another vampire, not just bite someone — that didn’t mean Hank’s life wasn’t in danger. God, please don’t let him die.
Logically I knew this time wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t run headlong into this situation because I was naive. But that didn’t ease the guilt churning inside me.
Fellow officer Brant Keels and his rookie — I still hadn’t learned the guy’s name — arrived, took one look at the scene, and the rookie promptly threw up in the hall. They called in the detectives, something I should have done the moment the EMTs took over. But it felt like I was thinking in slow motion and under water, every though
t dragging and churning. Which wasn’t like me at all. It had to be an effect of Gideon’s brand draining me.
Hank was rushed away and another set of EMTs arrived. The bulky woman with a buzz cut checked out the dead zip addict, while the man, just as bulky but with a less severe haircut, knelt beside me and checked out my neck.
“You should probably get stitches, and you’re going to have a nasty scar, but you must have a horseshoe up your ass,” he said, his voice soft, calm, doing nothing to clear my muddled thoughts. “That vamp just missed your artery.” He pressed a wad of gauze to my neck. “Hold this.”
I obeyed.
“Any other injuries?” He shone a penlight in my eyes, making me wince.
“I don’t think so.” The back of my head hurt, but I didn’t think I’d hit it as hard as I had two weeks ago when facing off with the archnephilim… although now that I thought about it, the blow could be another reason for my muddled thoughts.
“We should get you to the hospital anyway, just to check you out.”
“Can that wait until we talk with her?” a firm feminine voice asked.
A set of practical shoes and gray slacks stepped into sight. I followed the legs up to Detective Abby McLellan’s narrow face. Her already pale complexion was white, making the freckles dusting her cheeks and nose stand out.
“Are you up for answering questions, Essie?” she asked, crouching beside the EMT and brushing her strawberry blonde bangs across her forehead.
I glanced at the EMT. “Am I?”
“You’re not emergent, so you should be fine,” he said. “Get her to the hospital if anything changes, detective.” He rummaged in his bag, pulled out a roll of thick medical tape, and taped the gauze to the side of my neck.
“Jeez, Shaw,” Detective Tim Snyder, Abby’s partner, said as he strode up to us. His rich complexion hadn’t paled, but the hard line of his jaw said he was as shocked by the scene as Abby. “You have the shittiest luck.”
“Funny. The EMT was pretty impressed with my luck,” I said.