by Joseph Rubas
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dr. Seward didn’t realize that Van Helsing was not at his side until he slammed through the door to the first-class entrance. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the old man wasn’t behind him either.
Pausing for a moment, panic rising within him, Seward yelled when Dracula crashed into him, knocking him hard to the floor. The breath sucked out of him, Seward’s vision grayed and threatened to go black.
Shaking with blind, stupid fury, Dracula fell on him then, wrapping his cold hands around his throat and squeezing.
The world went dim. Dracula was grinning. Opening his mouth. He had only one fang.
A loud boom filled the void, and Dracula jerked back.
Seward sat up just as Dracula got unsteadily to his feet, an ugly red hole in his forehead. Behind him, Murdoch skitted into the room, and Art fired at him, hitting him in the shoulder. Yelping, he fell back.
“You!” he said again, this time lower and meaner. “You...”
“Me,” Art spat, pulling the sharpened crucifix from his jacket. Dracula’s eye flickered to it, and then back to Art’s hard face.
“You think you can kill me with that?” Dracula hissed, cautiously moving forward. “You think killing me will bring back your precious Lucy?”
At the mention of her name, Art seized, his heart leaping into his throat. Dracula smiled at the effect that his words had had.
“You’re a fool, a buffoon, a tired joke…”
Shaking with rage, Art flung himself at Dracula, screaming like an Indian warrior on the American plains. Such a direct assault took Dracula by surprise, for when Art hit him he fell with a startled cry.
Art lost himself to primal fury. Weeping, yelling, trembling, Lucy dancing through his mind, dear, sweet Lucy in the vampiric state, her face cemetery pale and her lips bright red, her teeth long and her hands cold, he hit Dracula with a closed fist, the way that he would hit a normal man. He barely registered the flash up pain that snaked up his arm, barely realized that he had dropped the crucifix.
Dracula’s dreadful face, twisted with hatred, caked with blood, molded and dented with each hit. He reached out and swiped Art’s cheek with one clawed hand, drawling blood, but that didn’t deter Art. He was like a man possessed. His fist rose, fell, rose, fell, rose, fell.
“…Motherfucker!” Art was screaming. Somehow the gun was in his hand again. Hadn’t he dropped it? He was sure he had. But that didn’t matter. He shoved it under Dracula’s chin and fired.
Blood splattered Art’s face.
“Die, motherfucker, die!”
He fired again.