by Witt, L. A.
Daniel shoved me into the backseat of his car. My vision clouded. No matter how much I struggled to maintain situational awareness, all I could think of was pain. The nanobots swarmed the wounds, and I couldn’t tell where the injury ended and the burning of their repairs began.
My head spun. I was losing blood too fast. Even if the nanobots repaired the wounds and stopped the bleeding before this killed me, the damage was done. I’d be lucky if I could stand, never mind make an escape into the Gutter, without feeding and recovering first. Assuming I recovered at all. And Daniel had already lost a lot of blood, too. Too much to risk giving any up to a wounded vampire. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Squealing tires dragged me back into semi-awareness.
Daniel skidded around a curve. Lights flickered past the windows. He held his palm computer in one hand, the wheel in the other, cursing under his breath as he tried to both drive and punch in numbers. There was blood—my blood, I hoped—on his sleeve and his hands, leaving deep crimson marks wherever he touched the wheel and the keypad.
He glanced at me. “Stay with me, Liam. You die on me, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
I’d have laughed if it didn’t hurt so much. Or if his voice hadn’t shaken so badly. I’m sorry, Daniel. I’m sorry. Please, God, don’t let me get him killed . . .
“Oh, fuck, Liam.” He looked over his shoulder again. “Vampires can’t really bleed to death, can they?”
Yes, they could.
They could, and I was.
“Liam, please tell me this can’t kill you.”
“It’ll slow me down.” I moistened my dry lips. “That can kill us both.”
He cursed. From the outskirts of my senses—what little I was aware of besides pain and my rapidly waning consciousness—came the rumble of engines and the scream of sirens. Tires squealed. Daniel jerked the wheel one way, then the other, each movement sending fresh waves of nauseating agony through me. I tried to brace myself on the door and the seat, but everything I touched was slick with blood.
Finally I gave up on steadying myself and just pressed my hands into the wounds, struggling to staunch the bleeding. Every inch of tissue was on fire as nanobots worked, but the blood still flowed. Too much, too fast. My grasp on consciousness slipped.
The car swerved violently to one side. A sharp impact dragged a groan out of me and a string of curses out of Daniel. Metal screeched, tires squealed, and the car jerked into motion.
“Show them the computer,” I slurred. “They won’t fuck around if they think you can still . . . can still bring the place down.”
He gripped the wheel in one hand and pulled the computer out with the other. He held it up. Then he rolled down the driver’s side window and held his hand out.
My vision turned black. Returned to clarity. Turned black again.
Speed. Just speed. The weightlessness of unobstructed forward motion, coupled with dizzying semi-consciousness. I didn’t hear any other engines or tires.
“Talk to me, Liam.” Daniel’s voice shook. “Still with me?”
“Think so.”
“I lost them for now,” he said. “Where do I go?”
I licked my lips. “Just . . . somewhere we can stop. And get . . .” I paused, lost in another wave of pain. I’d had a plan. I’d played this all the way out. What was the next step?
“Help me out here,” Daniel pleaded.
“Find a place to ditch the car. Near a manhole cover.”
“A manhole cover?” Before I could reply, he added, “Right, you know what you’re doing.”
I faded in and out. After a while—minutes? I couldn’t say—the car stopped.
“Where are we?” My voice sounded far away.
From even farther away, Daniel said, “Fuck if I know. Close to a manhole cover.”
“Good. Help me up.”
“Should you be moving like—”
“Not gonna sit here ’til someone finishes me off. Help me.”
He sat me up. The world lurched and spun, but I forced myself to get out of the car and onto my feet.
“Open the manhole,” I said.
Daniel knelt beside it. He slipped his fingers under the edges and grunted quietly as he lifted the heavy iron disc.
How the fuck I was going to manage a climb down, I didn’t know, but until I came up with a better idea, this would have to do.
“Are you sure you can do this?” Daniel asked as he guided me to the ladder.
“No.” I half stumbled onto the top rung, still hunched over. “But no other choice.”
Daniel might have said something after that, but I didn’t hear him over the blood pounding in my ears. Or the deafening roar of the giant fans below the streets, covered with iron grates, keeping the Gutter’s smog shoved down where it belonged.
I stumbled off the bottom rung and tried to get out of the way so Daniel could come down, but the world suddenly shifted beneath my feet. My knees buckled, and I collapsed on the diamond plate floor.
“Liam!” Daniel’s feet clanged beside me, and in an instant, he was on his knees next to me.
“Fuck,” I groaned. Black spots encroached on my field of vision. My limbs felt heavy and liquefied, and everything spun around me as nausea crept up my throat. The worst of the bleeding had stopped, and the nanobots were still hard at work, but they couldn’t replace blood anywhere near as fast as I was losing it. There was only one way to make up for that, but dare I risk slowing us both down even more?
Daniel helped me onto my back. The diamond plate was cold through my shirt, but a much deeper chill had my teeth chattering and my body shaking. Even Daniel’s hand in mine couldn’t get warmth into my fingers or under my skin.
“Tell me what to do.” He squeezed my hand. “How do I get us out of this?”
Fuck. Fuck, I didn’t know. How did we get out of this?
Or, I thought with a chill that ran the length of my spine, could I get out of this?
I looked up at him. I’d gone to the Sky to take him out, but now there was no way in hell I’d let him die tonight. Even if I didn’t make it myself.
I gripped his hand and held it close to my chest. “If I can’t keep going, get out of here. You’re not safe in the Sky.”
Fear carved deep crevices between his eyebrows. “And I’m safe in the Gutter?”
“No. No one is. But you’re safer there than up here.”
“Liam, I don’t think you understand.” He squeezed my hand again and leaned down so we were almost eye to eye. “I can’t survive down there without you. There’s a contract out on my head, and I’ve never even set foot below the Sky.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed. I’d been ill-prepared, and the Gutter had nearly eaten me alive. I couldn’t turn it loose on him.
I also couldn’t stand. Staying conscious was about the extent of my physical capacity.
I moistened dry lips. “Find someone. Anyone. I’ve gotta feed.”
Abruptly, Daniel released my hand. I opened my eyes, and startled when I realized he was shoving his sleeve up.
“Daniel, you’ve already lost too much blood, I—”
“Shut up.” He pushed his sleeve to the elbow. “I’m the only one here, and I’m not leaving you.”
“Won’t do us any good if we’re both too weak to move.”
He offered up his wrist. “Then don’t take too much.”
I glanced at the bare skin, then met his eyes. He’d let me feed countless times when we’d been together; it was one of the more intimate things we’d shared. Under these circumstances, I didn’t know if revisiting that now was welcome or wrong.
“I need you,” he whispered, pushing his arm toward me. “Please.”
I swallowed. Welcome or not, I didn’t have a choice.
“Help me sit up.”
He slid his arm under my shoulders. Lying on my back was agony, but sitting up was nothing short of hell. Pain and blood loss conspired to loosen my grasp on consciousness, and my vision clouded as th
e world listed beneath me. Everything between my hips and ribcage burned and itched as nanobots fused tissue back together and rebuilt damaged flesh. Now that I was vertical, blood rushed out of my head and the world went black.
“Liam.” Daniel’s voice was miles away. Warm hands cradled my face. “Liam, stay with me. Come on, we don’t have much time.”
I blinked, forced my eyes open. “Your neck. Let me . . .”
His eyebrows jumped. “Why?”
“We’re not out of this yet,” I said. “You need to be able to use your hands. Arms. Whatever. Can’t risk injuring muscles or tendons.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Okay. Okay, we’ll do it that way.”
I exhaled. “You sure about this?”
He nodded, swallowing hard. He’d always been ready and willing, never even flinching when I fed off him, but he knew as well as I did this was dangerous. Feeding was one thing. Feeding after we’d both lost a shitload of blood was an entirely different one.
But sitting here waiting to recover on my own was out of the question if either of us were going to make it out of this alive.
Holding Daniel’s gaze, I tongued the point of one incisor. “I’ll be careful.” I leaned in. “I promise.” The sound of his heartbeat made my mouth water, and my head spun faster.
He said nothing, just tilted his head to the side. His fingers combed through my hair like they always had when we’d done this in the past, and his gentle—if trembling—touch made me shiver.
I kissed his skin and whispered, “Thank you.”
Praying for the restraint to do this without hurting him, I sank my teeth into the flesh at the base of his neck, just above his shoulder. Even more carefully, I punctured the pulsing vein. Warm, salty blood flowed onto my tongue and a million memories flooded my mind. Feeding off Daniel on those nights when we’d made love in secret. How I was always afraid my parents would find out I had a human lover, but when Daniel and I were together, I wasn’t afraid of anything. All the reasons I’d loved him back then, even if it meant risking everything, and how much I still—
“Liam.” He pressed against my arm. “Liam, don’t . . .” His voice was weak, almost slurred. Shit.
I ran my tongue over the wounds to close them, and the taste of his flesh and his blood made me want to rip through his skin all over again, but I wrenched myself away. “I’m sorry, I . . . did I take too much? Are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said quietly. “What about you?”
“Same.” I wanted more, needed more, but my head wasn’t so light now. As my vision cleared, though, I realized he’d paled more than he had all night, and my heart jumped. “Shit, are you—”
“I’m okay. Relax.” He smiled and added, “As long as you’ll make it.” He curved his hand around the back of my neck and drew me to him. Though Daniel had never been comfortable kissing me after I’d fed, he didn’t hesitate this time. It wasn’t a deep kiss, but it lasted a few long, dizzying seconds.
We pulled apart and looked at each other.
“You okay to keep going?” I asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“I will be.” I started to get up, but fresh pain ripped across my gut. Grimacing, I clutched my stomach and groaned.
“Shit, what’s wrong?”
“Not. Quite. Healed yet.” I took a slow, deep breath. “Fuck.” Feeding had brought me closer to full consciousness, and as a result, I was doubly aware of how much this hurt.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “How much longer will it take? Before you can go on, I mean?”
I winced as I settled back onto the floor, trying to get comfortable. “Fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe.”
“That fast?”
I looked at him, one eyebrow up. “It doesn’t feel nearly as fast on this end, just so you know.”
He laughed softly. “Well, we should have enough of a head start. I think we can afford to wait.”
We still had to find a way to get into the Gutter, and from there, someplace relatively safe from Richard Harding’s men, but Daniel was right. I had to rest until my wounds healed and my body regained some semblance of equilibrium. So did he.
Not here, though. The car was right overhead, so if anyone happened upon it, they could make the connection between that and the open manhole cover. Daniel helped me to my feet, and, leaning on each other like a couple of wavering drunks, we managed to stay upright.
“This way.” I gestured past the fan. There were hundreds like it all over the city, each spaced five or ten meters apart. We made it past three or four of them, then had to stop.
While we rested beside a roaring fan, I pulled up our location on a mod-map. I didn’t dare tap into a GPS, since that could clue someone in on our location, but the mod-map wouldn’t ping me on any other system. Once I knew our location, I did a quick mental calculation; we were several blocks away from the nearest subway station. We were also getting short on time.
Every few meters, metal grates over our heads let in spikes of crisp white light from the streetlamps. In a few hours, they’d let sunlight through, and some of those blades of light would make it through the fans into the Gutter. We had to get down and into some sort of shelter, but trying to make our escape to and through a subway station would take too long. And it would be too dangerous. We were much too conspicuous like this. Covered in blood, we’d even turn heads in the Gutter.
There was no other choice, then. We had to go down into the Gutter here. Now.
I shifted my gaze toward the fan. There was only one way down.
Shouting over the roar of the fan, I said, “I’m going to stop the blades. Then you’re going to jump.”
“What? Are you insane?”
“You’ll just have to trust me,” I shouted. “It’s either that or wait for someone to find us.”
Daniel glanced at the fan, then looked me in the eyes and heaved a resigned sigh. “Have you healed enough?”
“I’ll manage.”
He chewed the inside of his cheek. “All right, let’s do this.”
I hauled myself to my feet, wincing at the ache in my abdomen where muscles and tissue were still fusing back together. It would all be good as new within the hour, but I didn’t want to wait any longer than we absolutely had to.
Daniel followed me to one of the fans. Standing on the edge, I activated the mod on my temple, and a display of the building beneath us appeared on top of the fan, outlining in thin green lines everything we couldn’t see through the haze below.
“You’re going to go down between the blades. About two meters below is a ledge.” I gestured at the image of the concrete lip below. “Drop straight down, stay close to the wall. Then get out of the way, and I’ll join you.”
He nodded slowly.
I turned off the projection. “Once the fan stops, you won’t have much time. I can only hold it for so long.”
“Hold it?” He blinked. “You mean you’re—” His eyes darted toward the huge blades. “You’re going to stop it yourself?”
“Unless you can come up with a better idea, yes.”
“Are you—”
“Yes, I’m insane.” I drew my pistol from my waistband. “Go stand behind that pillar.” I gestured at a wide concrete support post.
Daniel eyed the gun warily before doing as I said. Once he was safely hidden, I turned toward the fan and shot off one of the four bolts securing the iron grate over the blades. The bullet ricocheted, pinging off an overhead beam before slamming into the concrete wall in a small explosion of dust and rocks. The second and third rounds blew off the bolts, but didn’t bounce.
The fourth, though, ricocheted off the grate, and embedded itself into the pillar behind which Daniel stood. My heart skipped. Fuck. Way too close.
I checked to make sure all the bolts were out of the way, then shouted, “All right, come give me a hand with this.”
He came out from behind the pillar, and together we lifted the grate out of the way. Then I wal
ked out onto one of the horizontal beams over the exposed fan blades.
I knelt and looked at him. Over the roar of the fans, I shouted, “You ready?”
He shook his head.
“Good! Here we go.” I braced with one arm and my foot dangerously close to the blades. Then I held my other hand just above the fan and watched, flexing and straightening my fingers as I counted, timed, memorized the intervals of the spinning blades below me.
One . . . two . . .
I shoved my hand in and grabbed a blade, swearing and grimacing as the edge dug into my skin. My muscles ached with the strain of trying to hold the fan in place and keep my balance on the beam. I was weak and exhausted, and modified vampire strength or no, holding the blade back was more difficult than I’d anticipated.
“Go!” I shouted. “Now!”
Daniel looked at me like I was insane. Then his eyes darted toward the unmoving fan and the tendrils of thick, yellow Gutter haze snaking upward.
“Daniel, now!”
He closed his eyes and mouthed either prayer or profanity. After one last heartbeat of hesitation, he opened his eyes and disappeared through the opaque cloud.
Once he was gone, I waited about fifteen seconds to give him a chance to catch his balance and get out of the way, not to mention recover from the shock of breathing in that noxious pollution. Then I adjusted my position so I could jump while keeping the fan still for the moment. I didn’t want to have to wait for the nanobots to rebuild an entire damned limb, or reinstall the module in my right hand, so I had to time this perfectly.
One . . . two . . . three.
I jumped.
The fan jerked into motion with more force than I anticipated and threw me off balance. I slipped between the blades without injury, but I was already lightheaded, and now I was disoriented. Panic rushed through me as I plummeted through the haze.
Where’s the ledge? Where’s the fucking ledge?
I landed with one foot on and one foot off, too much of my body weight over the wrong foot, and didn’t even teeter before I kept falling.
Hands shot out and seized my arm and shirt. I stopped abruptly, and my vision turned white as recently healed flesh tore open across my abdomen.