“This is getting tiresome, Jack,” he growled, hollowed teeth clicking together.
“Yeah, well, history has a way of repeating itself.”
“And I see you brought her,” he said even more menacingly, if that was possible, looking towards Maggie.
She grinned.
“Where’s Lucy?” I asked.
“You’d take another from me?” he said.
“Another?” Maggie asked, a brow quirked.
“Jack didn’t tell you? He killed my last childe.”
Maggie looked from Adam towards me, and then back.
“Burned her alive,” he said. “Why, not far from where you’re standing.”
“And?” Maggie asked finally.
“And, he made an oath that he would find me another. Thus-” He motioned towards the door behind him.
Maggie settled her eyes on me again.
“Wait. You were going to..?” Maggie said, letting her voice trail off.
“No, I wasn't.” I was telling the truth, this time at least, about not throwing her to the wolves.
“He made the oath in blood.” Adam added, his tone gleeful now.
“Jack, I told you-” Alice said. I cut my eyes towards her, glaring. She fell silent.
“Adam. I’m taking her with me,” I said finally, leveling the gun at his head.
The vampire looked from the gun to me, and smirked.
“Seriously, Jack? A gun?”
I kept my eyes on Adam’s face and for a long moment said nothing. My mind worked furiously. I really hadn’t thought this through at all. I knew the gun couldn’t kill Adam. I’d have to empty the clip into his forehead at point blank range if I had even a hope of killing him. This far away a bullet would, at best, irritate him. That’s assuming I could even hit him.
“Fine,” I said, lowering the gun. Adam lifted both brows curious.
“Jack?” Maggie asked, her voice bordering on manic disbelief.
Adam started to giggle, small little tremulous sounds that echoed out of this throat. His smile widened, showing the pointed little fangs that lined his mouth.
“Really, Jack, that’s how you want to settle this?”
“This ranks very highly amongst your most idiotic ideas,” Alice said, now sitting on the bar.
“Right up there with sell my soul to a demon,” I said.
Alice glowered at me.
I turned my attention back towards Adam.
“Yeah. This is how I want to do it.”
“So let me see if I’m following you now. You’re invoking right of challenge?”
“You’re gonna get us killed,” Maggie said.
I cut my eyes towards her, just briefly, then back towards Adam.
“Something like that,” I said to Adam.
“Then drop the gun,” Adam said.
“I want to see the girl first.”
Adam whistled. Lucy staggered up the steps, hugging herself. She stopped beside Adam, flinching when his eyes fell on her. She looked horrible. Her hair was matted to her face, her clothes torn and stained with dirt and a variety of other forms of nastiness. She looked towards me, lower lip trembling and eyes downcast. Adam reached out, stroking her cheek with the backs of his knuckles. It looked like it took everything she had to not vomit at his touch.
“I think I want her to see this,” Adam said, his words lofty and arrogant, “her knight in shining armor broken and drained. You know, Jack, she has it in her head that you’re going to rescue her. She told me so.”
“Well, maybe I’ll make her day then.”
Adam chuckled.
I lowered my head, took a deep breath, and steadied myself. I hit the switch on the side of the gun, ejecting the clip. It fell to the floor with an empty clatter. I pulled the slide back, freeing the remaining round from the chamber. Adam’s smile widened, becoming something that promised hunger and violence. I tossed the gun to the floor absently.
“There,” I said quietly.
Adam looked towards his thralls.
“Do not interfere,” he ordered.
“Goddamn it,” Maggie said.
“You know, after I kill you, the witch will be next.”
“Not my problem,” I said. “I'll be dead, what the fuck will I care?”
“Asshole,” Maggie muttered. “Fucking asshole.”
“I must admit, Jack, I admire that about you. Your obscenely blatant self interest.”
I didn’t answer. I stepped in throwing a hard fist at Adam’s head. He ducked it, black talons whistling a hairs breath from my cheek. The daylight outside had slowed Adam down. Not much, mind you, but enough that he wasn’t already watching my head bounce across the floor.
He swung again. Rather than stepping back, I stepped into it, taking it on the shoulder and chest. He’d been aiming for my head and by closing the distance, I’d killed a lot of the momentum and power behind the swing. He fell back, grabbing my sweatshirt, and in one fluid motioned twisted his hips and turned my momentum against me. I hit the floor hard, rolled through and sprang back to my feet. The ghost pains of my wounds echoed in my ribs, my jaw. Adam was on me in a second with a flurry of closed fisted blows. They hit like wrecking balls, hard enough that even though I had closed up in a boxer's defense, they sent shock waves of pain through my body.
A line of fire erupted across my gut as Adam’s claws tore through my sweatshirt and the layers of skin and muscle underneath. I could feel my blood, hot and sticky, rolling down my stomach. He pressed the attack harder, forcing me to step back, staying on the defensive as he slashed at me again and again with razor-sharp talons or tried to hammer me into the ground with hammering punches.
His fist slipped through, barely, catching me on the ear. A glancing blow from Adam was about the equivalent of getting hit in the skull with a Buick. The room spun, an explosive ringing echoing through my head. I hit the floor just as hard, skidding to a stop a few feet away from the bar. Adam paced towards me, his lips pulled back into a feral grin.
“Is this the best you can do, Jack? Truthfully, I’m disappointed. All I’ve heard about you, the things you did with Mister Lin? This is what everyone was afraid of?” He gestured towards me with both hands. “This? This is the infamous ‘Demon Jack.’”
He kicked me in the gut, hard enough to lift me from the floor and smash me into the bar. I fell into a heap at his feet. I looked from Adam to Lucy, spitting a mouthful of blood on the floor. Two things dawned on me at that second, with the vampire standing over me, mocking me.
One. If I didn’t get my head in the game, I was going to die. This parasitic little shit was going to kill me, right here in front of the person I had come to save.
Two. For whatever reason, I didn’t want Lucy to hurt anymore, especially not at the hands of Adam. I allowed the anger to build. I was angry that he had taken her, angry with myself for putting her in the position where he could take her, angry that The Three wise men had drug me into this whole goddamned mess. As stupid as it sounded, I was even angry I had broken my cardinal rule: don’t get angry.
I looked back at Adam and drew in a slow, calming breath. I didn’t think about Lucy, watching us with wild hope in her eyes. I didn’t pay attention to the thralls growing restless as the smell of my blood filled the air. I ignored Alice, blank faced and staring. I forgot about Maggie, the next victim if I died. She had done okay against Adam taking him by surprise. I didn’t want to put my money on her in a fair fight with him.
I reached up and used the bar to pull myself to my feet. I pushed down the pain, the rage, everything until it was just Adam, that weird distant tunnel vision, and me. I worked on instinct.
He was confident, expecting to end this quickly. I didn’t hear what he said, only saw his mouth move. He lunged, claws outspread and I met him head on. I used his momentum to my advantage, grabbing his arms, pulling his face into my forehead. There was a crunch and a wash of thick, syrupy blood across my face. I shoved back and Adam, bleeding from the nose a
nd mouth glared at me, eyes narrowed.
I didn’t give him a chance to press another attack. I pushed the fight this time, throwing light, quick punches, goading him. He met each slapping it away. It became a dance, something primal and animalistic. I played taps with him, searching for an opening, a spot to inflict a hit that would be enough to hurt him. Feathery blows landed against his face, his head, none of it enough to cause the vampire any damage. His blows landed, each bringing with it a new blossom of pain, pain quickly put aside and ignored to be categorized later if I survived.
No. Not if, when.
I wrapped up, pushing my way into him, neutralizing the advantage he had over me in both speed and power. I drove my shoulder sharply into his chest, sending him back a step and threw a quick kick towards his knee. He stepped back, lowering his guard just the slightest. I hit him as firmly as I could, put every bit of ignored rage into my fist, balling it up and swinging for the fences.
Adam was fast. He dropped his head, moving into the punch. I was too close, I connected, my fist hitting the side of his skull as opposed to his jaw. There was a thud, and he staggered, dropping to one knee. Pain erupted through my hand, pulling me from my pseudo Zen state. Instantly, my fingers went numb and my knuckles erupted with a throbbing ache.
I had staggered him. He’d meant for me to just break my hand on his skull. To his credit, I probably had. He hadn’t been expecting that much from me though. I couldn’t let the advantage go. I had to press it. I was tiring, rapidly. I bolted forward, my boot connecting with his chin. The blow was violent enough to snap a regular human’s neck. Adam’s body just went with the impact, lifting off the floor and landing in a tangled crash of limbs in the nearby tables.
Adam, shrieking with rage, threw the tables aside and pulled himself to his feet. Blood coated his chin, pouring from his nose over split lips. He growled, the sound echoing from somewhere far down in his chest. He tore towards me now, the calm, composed sociopath gone, replaced by something far more dangerous and feral.
He came to a skittering stop when the steel entry door burst open and hurtled through the air. It missed Adam by inches, slamming into one of the thralls near Maggie. The poor bastard never had a chance. Thrall and door hit the wall in a wet, sticky sounding thud.
Adam turned his eyes towards the door, anger and confusion fighting for dominance in his expression.
I didn’t pay attention. My eyes had fallen on Alice, trying to reconcile the fact there was another expression painted on her normally stone cold features. That was twice in two days time I’d seen her register something. Her eyes wide, mouth slightly open. She was standing on the bar, facing the door. She took a slow step backwards, blinking slowly.
Alice looked surprised.
No.
She was afraid.
Chapter 14
The first one through the door came at us in a full tilt, head down run. He was dressed in shabby cast-off clothing, a thick beard covering his face. His eyes practically radiated a familiar green light. He was leading a charge of at least twenty more, all with the same glowing eyes. Judging from the randomness of their appearances, they’d just been arbitrarily plucked off the street.
“Jack, you have to go, you have to run. Leave them, just get out. Please.” Alice pleaded, her features pulled taut with desperation. It was strange seeing her like that, the projection of my demon portraying such distinct and raging emotion. For over a decade we’d been bound together and I'd never seen anything like it from her. Seeing her displaying so many emotions recently was just fucking creepy.
I barely managed to step out of the way of a girl in her late teens before she crushed my skull with -of all things- a stop sign. It looked like it had just been pulled from the ground, a hunk of concrete the size of a watermelon still attached to the post.
“Mister Draughn,” Adam said.
“What?”
“I’m going to suggest that for our mutual safety we conclude our business at a later time and deal with the situation at hand.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” I said, ducking another swing. I had to sidestep just as fast as a knife-wielding postman tried to open my neck.
“Excellent, though, don’t think we’re done here, Jack,” Adam growled.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Behind me, I could hear Maggie chanting in Gaelic, the syllable's cadence rising and falling in a natural rhythm. Not being cut off from Alice, I was able to actually understand her now as opposed to earlier when she'd first snatched me up.
“Danu,
touch them with your breath,
and put in my hands your whisper,
born from your breast,”
I could feel the power rising with her chant, sudden and furious.
I turned, chancing a quick glance over my shoulder. She had moved in front of Lucy, putting herself between the incoming horde and the new vampire. She was bleeding already, the dripping knife held in one hand. She finished her chant, pursed her lips together and blew, and much the same as she had with the fireballs. A gust of wind tore from across the club, knocking three of the rushing assailants off their feet and slamming them into the far wall with bone jarring intensity.
I ducked the stop sign again, spinning into the frenzied girl. My elbow snapped up, catching her in the side of her neck while my other hand grasped the metal pole of the sign, wrenching it free from her hands. I continued the spin, using the weight of steel and forty pounds of concrete as added momentum and crashed the entire thing into the back of the girl’s thighs. There was an audible snapping as both of her femurs broke. She hit the ground in a heap. She didn’t so much as whimper, let alone scream and I actually had to jump back as she pushed herself up with her hands and started to pull herself towards me. I brought the concrete end down, in a quick, snapping arc across the back of her neck and shoulders. Her body twitched once before going still.
Adam grabbed the postman who had tried to gut me only seconds before and simply tore his throat out with a single bare hand. He tossed the bloodied hunk of flesh that once been an esophagus aside, a look of disgust on his face. He dropped the twitching Postman to the ground beside it. Behind me, the thralls were waging a losing battle, as one by one the green-eyed mob tore into them, simply beating or stabbing most of them to death with bare hands or crude instruments.
Maggie drew the blade across her arm again and threw another gust of wind, swinging her arm up mocking an uppercut and sending an overweight woman in threadbare clothing some twenty feet into the air. She hit the ceiling with a bone shattering thud, before falling back down to the floor, becoming still. Another cut, another gust of wind, and she sent an elderly man careening into the bar, his back hitting its edge and bending backwards, snapping with a sound like Rice Krispies.
I made a B-line through the melee, ducking and jiving around stray blows, taking up a spot beside Maggie. I grabbed the gun and clip from the floor as I went. It was a miracle that it hadn’t been kicked, picked up, or otherwise lost in the chaos. I jammed the clip into the handle, and jerked the slide back. Maggie was pale, her forearms and hands slicked with blood. Her eyes were glassy, and she seemed to wobble on her feet with every movement.
I lifted the gun, firing two quick shots into the chest of a blonde twenty-something guy in running shorts. The gun barked and he staggered with each shot. For a moment, he looked at me surprised, the green fading from his eyes. He held a hand to his chest and I saw the look of confusion falling over his baby blues. He staggered forward two more steps and then toppled. Adam promptly reached down and snapped his neck, ignoring the dying man’s whispered pleas, begging not to die. Adam turned, claws flashing, and tore the face off of another runner, probably blondie’s girlfriend. She hit the ground, writhing and screaming like mad, the green glow in her eyes vanishing. Adam silenced her with a quick stomp to her ample chest. Maggie threw another gust of wind, this time sending a thrall airborne and into a charging group of four more of the green eyed fre
aks, leaving them to fight amongst themselves to get back to their feet.
We had a brief moment to breathe, the fight now mostly turning to Adam and his thralls against the majority of the green eyes still standing.
“You gonna make it?” I asked Maggie, finally cutting my eyes back towards Lucy. She looked terrified, despite her newfound strength. A strength she hadn’t even had a chance to come to terms with let, alone employ. More than terrified, she looked hungry, her eyes on Maggie’s arms.
“Lucy.” I snapped my fingers at her.
Her eyes shot towards me, and I could see the naked need in them.
“Jack... Get me out of here. Please,” Lucy said.
“I don’t ‘ave much more left in me,” Maggie said, her voice whispery and far away. I looked between the two, Maggie pale, on the verge of falling out on me, Lucy, trembling with fear and hunger.
“Lucy, is there some way out of here?” I asked, firing another round at one of the charging green eyes. I was off my mark, hitting it in the shoulder instead of the face, spinning it around and sending it to the ground. It was back on its feet in less than a second. Maggie hit it with another gust of wind from her pursed lips, sending it tumbling end over end into two of its compatriots.
“I... I...” Lucy looked around, eyes wide, her head still trying to wrap itself around the scene in front of her, to separate herself from the instinct to gorge on the blood and carnage.
“Jack. I’m gassed.” Maggie groaned, dropping to one knee. She looked like it was taking everything she had to just stay conscious. The knife slipped from her hand, landing on the floor next to her bag.
“LUCY!” I yelled.
She reacted as if I’d slapped her, eyes snapping towards me. She thought for a second and nodded, turning towards the door beside the DJ booth.
“In the basement,” she said finally.
I grabbed Maggie by the arm, half dragging and half carrying her, and followed Lucy. She stumbled to keep up. I fired two more shots into the melee, hoping to discourage any would be followers.
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