by Karen Chance
The transition left me dizzy and nauseous, and royally pissed off. Whatever kind of trick this was, it wasn’t going to work. I growled and got serious.
“That is why we have had difficulty finding their test sites,” voice number one said. “They’ve begun hiding them outside our world.”
“Yes,” the vamp strangled out. “It would appear that the Black Circle…is somewhat more inventive…than we had thought.”
“Are they folding space?” the English guy asked. “Or did you actually pass through to another—”
“Do you know, my lord, somehow I haven’t had time to look!”
“Don’t take that tone with me when we’re trying to—”
“We will have operatives at your location in ten minutes,” voice number one cut in smoothly. “Attempt to contain the situation until then.”
“Under…stood.”
Great. The guy was like freaking Teflon; every time I thought I had a grip, he slithered out of it. He should have been dead a couple times over by now, but he didn’t even seem to be getting tired, while I was panting like a steam engine and sweating like a pig. And now he was about to have backup?
Of course, that might not matter, since I was going to be dead from an aneurysm soon if they didn’t shut the hell up.
“And Louis-Cesare—be careful.” That was voice number one again, sounding grim. “I can control her fits, but not until she reenters our world. And the fact that she does not recognize you is a bad sign—”
“Oh, do you really think so?”
“Listen to me! The two halves of her nature do not communicate. Therefore the fact that she does not know you may indicate that her vampire nature is perilously close to assuming control—”
“Yes, I have seen it before. I can handle—”
“You have not seen it before! You have seen it nearer the surface, perhaps, but still partly diluted by her human side, which tends to be—”
“Lord Mircea—”
“—dominant mentally. But when she perceives herself in mortal danger, her vampire half—”
“Lord Mircea!” The vamp had somehow managed to croak that out loud, but it didn’t help. The needle was an ice pick now, jabbing merrily around the inside of my skull. I made a sound between a snarl and a mewl, and smashed the vamp’s head into the floor again.
It didn’t help, either.
“—can assume full control and it is physically far stronger. It is also ruthless, cunning and five hundred years old. You must not—”
“What I must, my lord, is be able to concentrate!”
“Listen to him, you arrogant fool!” the English guy broke in. “He’s trying to tell you that nobody knows what a dhampir that old can do because they’re always put down before then! But if you’re not careful, you’re going to find out the hard—”
“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” I screamed, unable to take it anymore. It was mental, because I didn’t have enough breath left for anything else. But it had an effect anyway. I got a flash of a couple dark-haired vamps sitting at a table; one winced as if in pain, while the other let out a curse and stumbled backward, knocking his chair over.
But the biggest reaction came from the vamp beside me. He went suddenly, rigidly still. I didn’t know if he was dead or just as freaked-out as I was, and right then I didn’t care. I just wanted out of there.
Fortunately, the door of the cage we were in was hanging half off its hinges, the bars twisted in ways iron wasn’t supposed to bend. I looped the chain around the vamp’s neck another time, and through the sturdiest bar I could find. Then I pulled it tight, smashed it shut and ran like hell.
I couldn’t see much; the windowless room was dim and there was a bunch of junk in the way—cargo crates, broken pieces of metal and machinery, and tarp-covered cages piled high and stacked like a maze. The only light came from a naked bulb swinging from a wire overhead, throwing leaping shadows against the walls. It would have been an accident waiting to happen even if I hadn’t been staggering about like an old drunk.
As it was, it took about five seconds to stab myself in the side with something, and to bark my shin on something else. Not that it mattered; even breathing sent burning signals shooting along my nerves, lighting up a constellation of oh-shit points. I grabbed the side of a cage, pulse pounding fiercely, nausea roiling in my gut, and wondered if the light was really fading in and out or if that was me.
And then I saw it.
As a door, it left something to be desired. Like everything, since it was just a dark rectangle set into a wall of peeling paint and rot. It would have looked perfect on one of those old B-movie sets, the kind with the dippy blonde edging slowly toward certain doom.
Only it looked like I was a brunette. And I’d already met the monster. And right now, I’d take it.
Or, you know, maybe not.
I pulled up abruptly after a couple seconds, but not because the vamp had caught me. That’s just how long it took to round the side of the cage. And to find myself in the devil’s own operating room.
The low light glinted off a rusty metal table sitting all alone in a cleared space near the door. It looked oddly like the trash heaps were trying to get away from it. I didn’t blame them.
It had a high lip, presumably to catch slippery organs, and leather restraints heavy enough to have held Frankenstein. He wasn’t on it at the moment, but there were weird stains on the restraints and around the drain underneath, and it reeked like a skunk dipped in sulfur. And if that wasn’t enough to make the point, there were saws and clamps and assorted nasty things piled on one end. There were also more cages heaped around, many with clawlike gouges in the bars.
Oh, yeah. There were also some creatures.
It looked like whatever had been in the cages hadn’t been too successful at getting out. Because jars of their not-so-spare body parts lined the room in shelf after shelf of formaldehyded nightmares. Most were just dark squiggles against the glass, or pale globules of what-the-hell preserved by somebody who probably slept with the lights on. But a few…
A few were staring back.
Ooookay, I thought, gawking at something that looked like an eye on a stalk. Dead things in jars were clearly a level seven on the creep-o-meter. But the operative word here was dead, and I didn’t think that something bobbing about in formaldehyde was exactly a huge—
The eye abruptly spun and looked at me.
And then the milky iris turned black as the pupil blew wide.
And then I don’t know what happened, because I and my suddenly full bladder were limping like mad for the door.
“Dory!” Somebody shouted a name behind me, but it didn’t mean anything. Not when my brain was busy doing a montage of scenes from the kind of movies they show at two a.m. And apparently, whoever I was, I liked old monster flicks way more than was healthy, because it had a lot of fodder.
“Damn it! Listen to me!” The voice came at the same moment that a hand latched onto my ankle. I was moving too fast to stop, not that I would have anyway—there are worse things than hitting the floor chin first. But it still hurt like a bitch, and my bitten tongue flooded my mouth with copper.
That was oddly appropriate, since a red haze had descended over my eyes, like maybe I’d cut my forehead, too. But it didn’t seem to interfere with my vision when I flipped over, jerked my foot back and then plowed it into the vamp’s pretty face. And broke his nose.
Again.
He cursed and I cackled, because it was funny. And because I was a little tense. Which wasn’t helped when I noticed the long white hand that was still wrapped around my ankle.
Well, shit.
The bastard gave a jerk, sliding me underneath him in a move so fast I barely realized what had happened. Until I looked up into the bloody face of death, swift and sure, glaring down at me. For a second, before I did the only thing I could.
And kneed death in the nuts.
Death, it turned out, knew a lot of French curse words. I was treated to
most of them as we rolled around the floor, me trying to throw him off, him intent on draining me. And it looked like he was winning. At least, I assumed that was why the room kept trying to gray out at the edges, and why my attacks were batted aside like the antics of an overly energetic puppy.
Until I made a sudden lunge to the side, snatched a fire extinguisher off a trash pile, and smashed it into his stubborn head. Which would have been great, except that it gave Red a chance to get a foot on the floor. He did something balletic that was too fast for my eyes to track, but it ended with me flipping over his head and then him flipping over mine, only to land five or six yards away.
On his feet, facing me.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded. “Spider-Man?”
“No.” He swiped a hand across his bloody face. “Your boyfriend, come to get you out of this!”
“In your dreams!”
“Frequently,” he growled—from all of an inch away.
Shit. I hadn’t even seen him move. And then he fisted a hand in the front of my tank, jerked me up to his face and—
Kissed me?
As crazy as it sounds, that’s what the lunatic was doing. In the middle of a mad scientist’s lab, watched by all the creepy things in their little jars. And it looked like crazy was catching, because for a second there I was kissing him back, sucking on a bloody lower lip that tasted like heaven, tasted like candy, tasted like the best thing ever. Until I came to my senses and abruptly wrenched away, freaked-out and furious and turned on and—
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“You are. Tu me rends fou!”
“What?”
“Fou, fou!” He made some weird gestures in the air. “You make me the crazy!”
I stared at him. “Buddy, I got news for you. I don’t think you need any help.”
The vampire looked offended, but he didn’t get a chance to respond. Not with the place taking that moment to start coming apart. The ground rumbled under our feet, a bunch of little jars shook their way off the shelves and a big red light started revolving by the door.
Because, yeah. What this place had really needed was a bloody strobe.
But that wasn’t half as bad as the ear-piercing alarm that split the air a second later. Or the fact that a nearby tarp-covered cage started shaking violently. Something in there really wanted out, and I really wanted to be gone before it managed it.
But it didn’t look like the door was an option, since it was currently being used by a bunch of G.I. Joe look-alikes. Or they would have been, if Joe dressed in black body armor and slung bandoliers of potions over the parts of him that weren’t already occupied by guns. War mages, I realized half a second before all hell broke loose.
Chapter Two
I dove for the operating table, since it was the only source of weapons, and grabbed a couple knives while sliding underneath. Meanwhile, the vamp was jumped by half the guards, who he promptly threw into the other half. Mages hit the deck, bullets started flying, jars started breaking and I hesitated, feeling conflicted.
The problem was that I didn’t know if the mages were the bad guys, come to throw me back in my cage, or the good guys attempting a rescue. And then one who’d fallen nearby looked up and spotted me. And I barely had time to push the table over before a couple dozen bullet-shaped dents pinged out of the metal in front of my face.
Well, okay then.
The guy stopped firing after a few seconds, probably figuring out that whatever caliber he was using wasn’t enough to punch through the thick old metal. So he used knives instead. And they must have been enchanted, because while the bullets had only pockmarked the surface, the knives sliced right on through.
But they didn’t slice through me, because I wasn’t there anymore. Bullets slammed into the wall over my head and sparked off the bars of the cages I dove behind. But only one hit me, and it was a minor wound in the calf that I barely noticed because I was too busy noticing the contents of one of the jars, which had been smashed by the earthquake or the bullets or who-the-hell-knew.
And, okay, maybe that hadn’t been formaldehyde, I thought, as the hand that landed in it went numb to the elbow. But it looked like the effect wore off fast. Because the creature that had been floundering around in it—something that looked like an octopus if they had six-inch fangs—suddenly perked up. And lunged for my face.
I screamed and slashed out with a knife, which didn’t appear to do much more than piss it off. It came after me as I ran and stumbled and ducked behind this crate and that cage, not being picky, because bullets and fangs. And then I fell, tripping over something I never saw because I was too busy rolling to the side to avoid the creature, which hit the concrete beside me with a slimy, squelching sound that I thought might haunt my dreams, assuming I survived to have any.
And then it lunged for me again and I kicked it.
Although, no. To be fair, I kicked it, with enough force to have sent a football fifty yards to the end zone. Only there was no end zone, there was only the mage’s face, which had popped up over the nearest cage with an anticipatory gleam in his eye right before the creature gnawed it out.
At least, that’s what I assumed it was doing. It was kind of hard to see, considering that pale tentacles had wrapped around the man’s entire head and neck. But the munching sounds would seem to indicate—
I blinked and stumbled back as something tiny skittered underfoot. It might have been a rat or a roach, but I wasn’t in the mood to take chances. I was in the mood to make it out the damned door. Which I would have—if another flood of mages hadn’t been blocking it as they poured inside, taking the odds from insane to just plain silly.
“Dory! Get out of here!” It took me a second to realize that the vamp had spoken, mainly because I was kind of surprised he was still alive. And even more so when he threw me a gun. “Go!”
I plucked it out of the air. It was a shiny black 9mm Glock 18. Nice.
And then I sprayed bullets—but not at the mages. Because pistol ammo probably wouldn’t get through their body armor and because I wasn’t feeling that charitable right now. If you’re going to be a bitch, might as well be a big bitch, I thought, a little hysterically.
And took out the shelf behind them.
Suddenly, it was like the shooting gallery at the fair if the gun was fully automatic and the ducks never moved. I’m not going to say I broke every bottle, but if there were more than two or three remaining when I finished emptying the clip, I’d be surprised. Bullets ricocheted, jars exploded, bits of flying glass and shrapnel took out other jars, and not-formaldehyde rained down on the mages. Whose faces went saggy, and whose numb hands dropped their weapons, even as they looked around trying to find the source of the barrage. Which they never managed to do, since they rapidly went from confused and pissed off and homicidal to…
Well, whatever emotion can best be described as “lunch.”
The only exceptions were the ones who had been spry enough to dodge back out the door before the fun started. Or the ones who had thrown themselves at the vampire, I guess under the impression that they’d last longer. Or the one who had been in front but who had ducked behind a bunch of crates.
You know, the one I hadn’t seen.
He emerged shrieking a spell that blasted me off my feet and through the air, before slamming me into the wall hard enough to crack bone. Hard enough to liquefy my insides. Hard enough to cause the whole room to bleed—
Red.
I woke in the middle of a battle, which was not unusual.
A human was lunging at me with a knife, attempting to gut me, which was.
I blinked at him.
He was yelling something that I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my ears, which always took a few moments to subside. But the sound bounced off the inside of my skull like rocks. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying, like an insect buzzing around my ears until I reached out and—
Yes.
That was better.
I peeled myself off the wall and looked around.
It was…colorful. The meaty smell of new blood painted the room in spatters, glowing crimson bright against the darkness. The stench of tainted magic came from a fire eating its way across the floor, flaring along the spectrum as it consumed old potion stains. And a familiar, skin-ruffling musk followed some of the humans, a sickly green that lingered like aftereffects every time one of them moved.
The combined stench was bad, but I had woken in worse, in battlefields days old, full of bloated corpses. No, it was all right.
But something else wasn’t.
Something was wrong.
It wasn’t the strange things running around underfoot. One started for me, then paused, lifting long crablike feelers out in front of it, before abruptly turning and scurrying away. I let it go.
Surprisingly, it also wasn’t the vampire. There was one here, raising every hair on my body from the power he was radiating. First level. Old. Perhaps four hundred years, perhaps more. But the bloodlust was cool in him, his outline merely a vague blue shadow, only the pale mist steaming up from his body and the thin silvered veins under his skin showing any difference between him and the humans.
Satiated or gorged.
Irrelevant.
I let my eyes move on.
The room was cool, too—blues, grays, darkness in corners, one small source of light overhead. My nose twitched, calling it to me, only to be flooded with the ozone taste of electricity. I growled and then ignored it.
But something else gleamed, in brilliant flashes here and there. I walked through the writhing mass of humans toward it. One grabbed my arm; I tossed him against a wall. Another raised a weapon at me—slow, slow, they moved so slowly I could have ripped his throat out before he finished the motion. I settled for taking his rifle away and batting him across the room with it.
I reached the source of the light, but I still couldn’t see it clearly. I growled again, and this time something answered. A strange, haunting cry, and then a hand, bright, bright like flame, emerged from nothingness. And started feeling around the floor.