The peculiar energy rushes from my chest to my legs, a faint tingling sensation zipping along my nerves. It tenses my muscles and nudges me into the proper landing position. I plummet down, down, down—and I hit with a splash in the center of the pond, halfway between Lizzie and Foley, bending my knees and ankles to the exact right angle to cushion my joints, planting a hand on the floor to keep myself steady, like I’m some kind of parkour master pulling off my latest awesome stunt.
I have no clue what’s happening right now, but I’m going to roll with it.
As the water kicked up by my impact rains back down, I rise and face Lizzie Banks. She stands frozen five paces away from me, eyes wide in shock, stretching the lacerations on her face so hard they start weeping fresh blood, distorting her expression into a grotesque mask that perfectly captures the cruelty in her heart. Her fevered gaze darts from me to Foley, who sounds like he’s reached the edge of the pool, water cascading off his pants and shoes as he clambers out. I can tell Lizzie is planning to use one last burst of her vampire speed—and probably all the strength she has left—to lunge past me and tackle Foley. So I don’t give her the opportunity.
Still not quite sure what the heck I’m doing, I move into a combat stance and raise my right hand. The energy responds again, pooling in my shoulder before shooting down my arm, where it grows stronger and stronger until the entire limb is vibrating with what I can only call physical static, not quite an electrified feeling but something not far from it. Lizzie’s eyes snap back to me, and she drags up her one good hand. Small flames gather around her fingers as she pumps what remains of her magic into a final, decisive spell.
Lizzie snaps her fingers, and a massive funnel of fire bounds toward me.
On instinct, I lift my left hand and make a quick swiping motion in the air. The fire funnel splits in half like I took an axe to it and flies harmlessly off in two directions, both sides striking the water with a hiss. I stand in between two rising clouds of steam, totally unhurt.
Lizzie gapes at me.
I grin at her. “Surprise.”
And, with an ounce of flourish, I turn my right hand over, palm up, and snap my own fingers.
A bolt of violet lightning as thick as a tree trunk blasts out of my hand and strikes Lizzie Banks in the chest. It flings her into the staircase that leads to the second floor’s west wing, and the stone stairs explode like a meteorite burning up in the atmosphere. A brilliant, blinding flash of light. A thunderous boom that rocks the entire building. Every intact piece of glass in a hundred-foot radius shatters. Burns like tree roots arc across the wall from the epicenter of the strike, crawling all the way up to the ceiling, sparks and flames sprouting from the cracks as if the gates of hell are trying to open onto Earth.
Then the lightning strike is over.
Complete silence falls across the atrium.
The smoke around the crater in the center of the staircase billows away to reveal the remains of Lizzie Banks: nothing but a vague, blackened lump that could hardly be called a person. As I watch, my hand still held aloft, utterly flummoxed about what just happened, the lump comes unstuck from the wall and falls to the floor, where it disintegrates into a puff of black ash that slowly drifts across the room.
I don’t know how long I loiter in the pool, ogling the enormous scar on the wall, still smoking from the strike. But eventually, I become aware that everyone in the atrium, vampires and DSI agents alike, is staring at me in shock. Dropping my tingling right hand to my side, I turn around in short, halting steps to face Foley, who’s lying on the floor, clutching his wounded abdomen with the hand missing fingers, single eye big as a saucer, jaw hanging open.
When we make eye contact, his jaw clacks shut, and he whispers in a tone of pure awe, breaking the oppressive quiet of the room, “Why…Why didn’t you tell me you were a wizard?”
I honestly almost reply with, “I’m not a wizard, you dumbass.”
But I don’t. Because that’s when my dumb ass finally gets it.
I raise my right hand and hold it in front of my face. Tiny violet sparks jump between my fingers.
“Oh,” I say. “I have magic.”
Chapter Sixteen
Foley passes out.
The enormity of my realization—holy shit, I have magic!—immediately gets kicked to the backburner, and as the battle near the exit resumes with a series of shouts and gunshots, I hurry to the edge of the pool and climb out. Ignoring the awful sensation of soaked socks, I drop to my knees at Foley’s side and check his pulse. I have to dig my fingers into his bruised and bloodied neck to find it. Weak. Erratic. He’s lost too much blood again, and this time, he doesn’t have a pack full of blood bags to replenish himself.
Discomfort prickles at the back of my neck when only one solution presents itself, but I push through it and roll up what’s left of my right shirtsleeve. I coax Foley’s mouth open with my thumb and tip his head back at an angle. Finally, I press the underside of my exposed wrist against the top row of Foley’s teeth, just hard enough to let his fangs pierce my skin. The instant my blood wells up around the two punctures, Foley’s jaw automatically snaps shut around my arm. I bite my lip to stifle a yelp as he begins drinking.
The pleasant wooziness of vampire venom floods my veins, but it’s not nearly as potent as what Lizzie pumped into me earlier, so I let it settle as a dull buzz in the back of my mind and focus on the task at hand. Color returns to Foley’s cheeks, which had nearly been stark white from the blood loss. His numerous wounds begin to heal, lacerations stitching themselves back together, bruises lightening, his missing eye and fingers regenerating. It’ll be several hours before he’s fully healed, even with a blood boost, given how badly Lizzie tore him apart. But he’ll survive. That’s the important part. He’ll survive, and he’ll retake control of his house.
I did it, I think, satisfied but weary. I protected Foley Banks.
His good eye flutters open after forty-five seconds of continuous drinking, and he stops slurping up my blood like I’m a refreshing smoothie. His gaze is unfocused, and he rolls his eye around a few times, taking stock of his surroundings. Eventually, his attention drifts to me, and he realizes his fangs are still embedded in my arm. He tugs them out and licks a few stray drops of blood off his lips. As he does, he jerks like something startled him.
“You all right?” I ask.
Foley licks his lips again, brows furrowed. “I’m fine. It’s just…the taste…Why…?”
“I’m paying you back for earlier.”
He appears to be in a state of confusion. Not surprising. Vampires aren’t nearly as indomitable as they’d like us mere humans to believe. And Foley, being a young vampire, is considerably less formidable than the average example of his species. It’s a goddamn miracle he withstood Lizzie’s onslaught for as long as he did. A miracle he produced himself, largely through his own resolve to keep resisting even when the situation seemed hopeless. He’s strong in ways he doesn’t give himself credit for. I hope his new role as house elder instills more confidence in him.
He can’t support his weight yet, so I half carry him over to one of the intact pillars, kick some debris out of the way, and lean him against it so he can sit up instead of lying on the floor. I gently pat his shoulder and say, “You wait here and rest up. Let yourself heal. I need to go help DSI mop up the rest of the Knight goons and secure the museum.”
I glance over my shoulder. The battle is nearly won—in DSI’s favor—but almost all the agents are injured, and there are a few vampires still kicking who could easily kill someone before they’re subdued. I don’t want anybody else to suffer at the hands of these bastards. There’s been enough death and destruction tonight.
Foley mumbles something that sounds like, “Lucian.”
“Do you know where he is?” I don’t spot the man, or Annette, anywhere on the battlefield.
“There,” Foley mutters. He lifts his shaking hand and points to the hallway he emerged from a few minutes ago. �
��Hurt. Protecting me. Help him?”
“I’ll go check on him,” I reply. “If he needs my help, I’ll do what I can.”
Foley smiles weakly. “Thanks, Cal.”
I can’t help but smile back. “Hey, you did good tonight, buddy.”
“You did better,” he murmurs. “I could’ve…” His smile tightens as a series of pops and cracks emanate from his arms and legs. Bones healing.
I push myself up and back away. “Like I said, you take a breather. You have a lot of healing to do.”
His good eye languidly follows my movements, and as I turn around to rush off toward the battle, he says with an air of vague suspicion, “Yet you don’t have any.”
I choose to ignore that statement. For now.
To get to the side hall off the atrium, I have to cut across the battlefield, so my best course of action is to first help my comrades defeat the three remaining vampires and then go search for Lucian. I swipe up a gun somebody lost in the halo of dirt surrounding a broken ceramic pot, check to make sure it’s loaded, and seek out a target.
Ella, Amy, and Ramirez are tag-teaming one of the vampires, and he’s wearing down pretty quickly. A full team of lower-level agents are gunning for another, who’s already missing an arm and is moving at a snail’s pace. And Harmony Burgess, along with another woman, are engaged in close combat with the third. The second woman took a hit to the chest at some point, and is barely capable of standing upright, while Harmony, a sniper by trade, is struggling to fight with so little space between her and the enemy vampire.
The third vampire is the obvious choice. I dash halfway across the floor, take a firing position about ten feet away from the Knight goon, and raise my gun—with my right hand. My fingers aren’t a hundred percent still, but they respond much better than they did before my mysterious resurrection. So I reinforce my grip with my left hand, like usual, and take aim at the vampire’s back. He dodges a couple knife swipes from Harmony, and a gunshot from the wounded agent, but he slips on a bloody puddle on the floor and accidentally places himself in the perfect spot: in a gap on the battlefield where I can’t hit anyone else with a poorly aimed shot.
I pull the trigger.
The bullet tears through the vampire’s spine at an angle and blasts out of his chest. He goes down with a faint, gurgling gasp, collapsing at Harmony’s feet. Harmony, about to make another knifing attempt, stops short and pivots around to face me. I give her a little wave. She stares at me for a second, slack jawed, then returns the wave in a stilted manner. I nod at her fighting partner, the woman now on her knees, clutching her heavily bleeding chest. Harmony crouches next to her friend, one hand groping at the pouch on her belt that contains her first-aid supplies.
Vampire felled, I look to the other side of the battlefield to see if anyone else needs help, only to find that the other groups managed to defeat both their enemies in the time it took me to shoot the one.
Ramirez looms over the vampire he, Amy, and Ella were fighting, gun pointed at the guy’s head, a silent warning that he will not hesitate to end the goon’s life if he gets any funny ideas. The goon, to his merit, simply lies on the floor and glares at a random spot on the ceiling. Not that he can stand up. Both his legs are broken.
The lower-level team practically decapitated their opponent. The guy is unconscious, eyes open but unseeing, a wide gash in his neck spurting blood across the floor. Even if he doesn’t die, he won’t be getting up anytime soon.
I stuff my pilfered gun into my waistband and turn to head for the side hall, but before I make it two feet, someone steps into my path. Ella. She’s bruised and bloodied and broken. Four fingers dislocated. One knee so swollen you can see it through her pants. A deep gash on her upper neck, curving underneath her right ear, destined to become another scar for her collection. Left eye swollen shut from a brutal punch, the entire side of her face black and blue. Her jaw is probably busted, and she definitely lost a few teeth. Yet despite all those injuries, she still manages to give me a teary-eyed smile before she hobbles over and envelops me in a tight hug.
Mildly confused, I return the affection, making sure I don’t squeeze her too hard in case she has cracked ribs. “Uh, it’s nice to see you too?”
Ella pulls away, wiping her right eye with the back of her hand, as if she’s actually close to crying. Even though we just won a critical battle with a major supernatural threat. I’ve never known Ella to get this emotional on the battlefield. I’ve seen her paranoid, sure, worried that the team baby is going to end up having his ass handed to him again, worried about her friends falling at the hands of the more powerful creatures that go bump in the night, worried about the well-being of helpless civilians. But I’ve never seen her so close to breaking down.
“Is something wrong?” I bite my lip. “Did we lose someone?” I peer over her shoulder and hunt for Desmond. He hasn’t moved from his place against the wall since I spotted him earlier, and while he certainly looks bad—breathing ragged, head drooping, blood flowing freely from his head wound—he’s still alive. As long as we get him to a hospital soon, he has a fighting chance. So maybe she’s upset at someone else’s death? Did Delarosa die, maybe? Another captain? Or another agent she knows well? I only vaguely recognize most of the dead agents, but that doesn’t mean—
Ella smacks me. It’s so unexpected that I actually spin around in a perfect circle. For a moment, I don’t quite understand what happened, and I raise my hand to my stinging cheek and work my jaw to ensure no teeth were shaken loose. I stare at Ella in disbelief. “You…You hit me.”
“You,” she says in a tone I do not like, “kicked Nick’s cane out from underneath him. You hurt his knee. His knee, Cal. Then you ran out of the building like a maniac and got kidnapped by a bunch of shady vampires. Then we got a freaky call from you saying Aurora’s about to get taken over in a vampire coup, and we raced all the way over here and ended up in the middle of this utter catastrophe of a charity gala. Then that fucking vampire spy with his stupid grin ran in out of nowhere and told us you were dead.”
Oh, of course Lucian told them I died. Jerk has loose lips for a spy.
“Well, as you can see, I’m still alive.” I fake a cough. “And I was planning to apologize for the rest of the stuff on that list. If you like, I can start apologizing now.”
“You”—she punctuates the word again like she’s stabbing a table with a steak knife—“are going to be apologizing for this for the next five years.”
My throat tightens. Because “apologizing” in the context Ella is using means she’ll be wiping the floor with my face in hand-to-hand combat demonstrations for academy trainees. Literally. Wiping the floor. Like a mop. I foresee tasting a lot of sweat and blood in the near future. And doing paperwork. Lots of paperwork. All the paperwork no one else wants to do. Because that’s how you make a DSI agent miserable when they screw up. You embarrass them in front of rookies, and you shove paperwork up their ass until they vomit it out.
Oh, god. Can I go back to the Eververse now?
Ella huffs. “Honestly, Cal, what were you thinking? Keeping such vital information from us? Running off on your own to fight vampires? I don’t understand why you would—”
Someone clears their throat. “Most of that was my fault, actually.”
Lucian stands at the threshold of the side hall, leaning heavily on Annette. Neither of them are in good shape—half of Annette’s chest is nothing but bloody ribbons, and Lucian’s left arm is hanging by a thread—but somehow, they both survived Lizzie’s final attempt at butchering her adversaries. Since it’s clear that they can’t walk more than two steps without falling to pieces, Ella and I close the distance instead. Ella marches straight up to Lucian with both her hands in tight fists, looking like she wants to take a swing at him. But she chooses to let a bit of the steam out in a harsh glare. Lucian can’t talk if he’s unconscious after all.
“Explain,” Ella demands. “How exactly did you get Cal tangled up in this disaster
?”
Lucian gives her a wry smile. “In a series of good old-fashioned shenanigans.”
“Don’t screw with me.” She taps the gun strapped to her right leg. “I’m not in a good mood. Not after the losses we were just dealt. The deaths of good men and women. The career-ending injuries.”
“Yeah, about that last part.” Lucian gestures toward the severely injured agents being gathered in a makeshift triage area near the opposite wall by their slightly less injured coworkers. “I was thinking we could do a quick mutual exchange to get everyone back on their feet.”
Ella stiffens. “What do you mean?”
“A blood exchange,” I guess. “You drink some human blood to accelerate your healing, and then give your blood to the injured agents. It would save those who are actively dying and heal those who would otherwise end up permanently disabled.”
“You got it, kid.” He gives me a once-over, lips quirking at the corner like he’s not sure what to make of me. Last time he saw me, I was lying dead on the floor, so I understand his confusion. Whatever he decides about me though, he chooses not to share it for the time being. He focuses on Ella and lifts the arm that’s not about to fall off in a way that signals she should make her choice quickly.
Ella ruminates on the offer, tapping her foot in an agitated manner. She observes the triage area. The agents with severe injuries moaning and gasping, who might not last until the paramedics outside the museum are escorted in. The ones on the verge of death, already silent, their eyes staring blankly at the ceiling as the last of their life slips away. The ones who had limbs severed, eyes gouged out, ribcages crushed. The ones with spinal cord injuries who will never walk again. The ones with head injuries who could end up in comas or worse. Like Desmond.
“Why would you offer us that?” Ella asks. “Vampires never offer their blood to humans without a good reason.”
Day Killer (City of Crows Book 5) Page 20