by Karen Chance
Going to demand a goddamned refund, Dory thought, watching a very costly net spell last all of a couple seconds. Of course, those seconds bought her time to run like hell, to get out of hearing range, to blend in with the cacophony of night on the bayou. But it wasn't like he was going to take the hint and go away. Wasn't like he was going to think, hey, you know what? She could have thrown something a lot more lethal just now, maybe we should talk.
No.
Vamps didn't think like that. If he stopped to wonder about it at all, her actions would be taken for stupidity or weakness. And that would only make him more inclined to find her again, because every predator loves easy prey.
Her lip curled, baring fangs that there was no one there to see. Because she wasn't prey. In the vamp world, she was pretty much the apex predator, the mongoose to his snake. And she was about to Rikki Tikki Tavi his ass.
Dory hunkered down behind a tree, opened the maw on her great big bag, and considered. She wanted to neutralize him -- had to neutralize him if she was ever going to get anywhere -- but didn't want to kill. Okay, she wanted to kill, but killing first level masters with big families was a good way to be on the run for centuries. Vamps were like elephants; they never forgot a damned thing. Not when it came to revenge, anyway.
So no killing.
But damn if having to do non-lethal wasn't a royal pain in the --
Dory never even felt the blow land. One second, she was on the bank, pawing through her bag, and the next she was hitting down in a patch of mingled swamp and mud, face first.
And the next she was flipping and hurling the object in her hand at the blur coming at her like a freight train. A freight train that hit the muck where she'd just been lying and stayed there, thrashing about in the web spell she'd thrown, instead of ripping her throat out. But if he got out of this one as fast as the other --
And he did.
But Dory had expected that and already been moving, reaching into her bag and lining things up, and then rapid firing spells at him as he threw off the web and lunged for her again, muddy and wild-eyed and furious.
And even more so when her arsenal in turn stunned him, tripped him, stunned him, enmeshed him, stunned him, stunned him, freaking stunned him --
This wasn't working. He shrugged off everything she could throw at him, almost as fast as she could throw it, and before long she was going to be out of tricks. And then what?
Well, then she died, Dory thought, pragmatically.
But probably not quickly.
And fuck that.
She bit the bullet - literally -- slipping a small silver capsule out of a side pocket and into her mouth. It wasn't cyanide, it wasn't defeat, because she wasn't dying here today, no matter what asshole thought. But, God, it suddenly felt that way!
But not because he'd grabbed her.
He was still thrashing around, throwing off her last supposedly escape proof net, when the disorientation of a $5,000 spell hit her like a baseball bat to the head. Or make that heads. Because Shards was a next level, coven crafted, how do you like them apples spell that left Dory feeling like she'd just been ripped into a thousand pieces.
Which was unfair, since it was only three.
Three copies jumped out of her skin, looking like identical triplets. Or like mirror images, only they weren't. Decent illusion spells went for $100 bucks a pop if you knew someone and twice that if you had to pay retail; when you were forking over the price of a decent used car, you got a little more.
Which was why the shards dove on command for the bag, grabbed fistfuls of pain, and unleashed them on the master vamp, who - predictably -- had just jumped back to his feet.
And Dory Prime grabbed the sadly depleted leftovers and ran.
She heard the fight escalate behind her, the Shards giving the vamp almost as much hell as she would have, and that was with weapons. Once they ran out, they'd attack him physically, for as long as the charm held, which given what she'd seen of him so far, wouldn't be long. But it ought to buy her a couple minutes, and she needed them.
She needed them badly, she realized, stopping by a cypress tree and panting heavily, but not because she'd planned to.
But because her head was still reeling from that initial savage blow. It had been stunning, easily enough to have killed a human and to make a vamp rethink his life goals. It felt like he'd cracked her freaking skull, to the point that her vision was blurry and her usually excellent reflexes were shot.
Which probably explained why she staggered trying to grab the tree, tripped over a root and went tumbling down the short embankment into the water.
And into the nursery for every damned gator in the swamp.
Dory looked up, dripping mud and dizzy as hell, and froze.
A little moonlight filtered down through the heavy, mossy canopy, gleaming off the lily pads and dappling the algae . . . and the backs of more gators than she could count. They were everywhere. Everywhere. To the point that the "water" mostly wasn't, but was made up of moonlight hitting the ridges on their knobby hides.
And that wasn't right, was it? Gators didn't . . . flock . . . did they? Or whatever the term was, although she was pretty sure there wasn't one because they didn't do that! They were loners, or so she'd always heard . . . .
Only it appeared that she'd heard wrong.
She'd also been wrong about the nursery thing. Because while some of those hanging about on shore, grabbing a few moonbeams, were fairly small, maybe three or four feet tip to tail, others . . . were not. She spotted a bunch in the eleven to thirteen foot range, a few leviathans of maybe fifteen, and one that she was pretty sure was her addled brain playing tricks on her, because it had to be twenty freaking feet long.
Dory stared at it. Twenty feet of muscle. Twenty feet of terror. Twenty feet of prehistoric hate with a maw of what-the-fuck and claws they didn't make anymore because even nature had looked at those things and thought, you know what? That was a bad idea.
Like stopping to gawk at the wildlife with a master on your tail, she thought, when something flew out of the forest and grabbed her.
To any watching humans, what happened next would have probably looked like a blur, something so fast and fluid against the night that they could have been excused for missing it all together. But Dory wasn't human, and she'd danced this dance before. So many times that it was like an old tune on the radio, one you start humming with the first few notes, without thinking.
One second, the vamp version of the Incredible Hulk was grabbing her, and the next her feet were in his stomach and he was being flipped over her head and thrown half a dozen yards through the air.
Straight into the pit of hell.
Dory's arrival had led to a little snarling and snapping, mostly among the closest beasts. Which had sensed someone there who shouldn't be, even though they couldn't see her. But her utter stillness and the suit's muffling abilities had ensured that they'd mostly calmed back down.
Until a hundred and seventy pounds of enraged vampire splashed down, right in the middle of them.
And then froze, as all five of her remaining stun bombs hit him at once, right in the chest.
He disappeared under a few thousand tons of thrashing fury, and Dory stumbled up the bank, feet slipping, head reeling, and stomach churning because this wasn't the way she did things.
This wasn't the way she did things at all.
So much for non-lethal.
God damn.
Chapter Eight