Dead Matter (21 page)

“Good luck with that,” Aidan said. Everyone turned to look at him. “All I mean is … no one can stop what will happen. It’s prophecy; all of this is written. It’s inevitable, right?”

“We can wait out inevitability,” Brandon said with a laugh. “Or have you forgotten what we are?”

“Listen,” I said. “I doubt the streets are going to run red with blood tonight, right? No one other than the two of us humans knows you’re here. I personally don’t buy into your prophecy, but either way, I’m a bit too exhausted to be your savior even if you’ve interpreted your book correctly. I’m leaving. Just let me get the hell out of here and get some sleep. I’m not tackling your fancy book or saving anything or anyone tonight.”

I walked off toward the chamber doors. Nobody moved to stop me.

“But the prophecy says …” Brandon started.

“Don’t say it!” I shouted, interrupting him.

“You’re the chosen one,” he finished.

I threw open the heavy wooden doors and turned to face the lord of the vampires.

I pointed back to the stacks of movies and the flat-screen television. “Someone’s been binge-watching one too many seasons of old television series,” I said. “Too bad you didn’t try Sunnydale High. You want the Slayer. I’m just a government drone with a stack of casework back at my desk and bags under my eyes.”

I worked my way out of the castle and across the open courtyard, heading toward the portcullis and gates leading out. I had lost track of what time of day or night it was in the outside world, but in here it was currently night. If the torches lighting the way were fake or part of the fancy electrical wiring of the Gibson-Case Center surrounding us, I couldn’t tell. I’d find out soon enough what the real world had in store for me when I got outside.

Despite it being artificial night in here, the castle grounds were relatively quiet given the nocturnal nature of its occupants. That meant real night must be in effect out in the city with most of the vampires out enjoying a night on the town instead of cooped up in the Epcot version of rural Transylvania.

When I passed the gate hanging overhead at the castle entrance, the sound of my lone footsteps echoed out as I crossed the bridge over the fake moat. Despite knowing full well that I was in the center of Manhattan, the replication of the foreign countryside at night had me spooked. I kept my pace slow and steady to keep my nerves in check, but I couldn’t shake the feeling.

I stopped once I was off the bridge and safely on the cobblestones leading off to the exit guarded by the living statues. The spooked feeling wouldn’t let go. I looked around with caution, the surrounding forest full of shadows and trees whose limbs reminded me of the haunted forest from
The Wizard of Oz
. Through them, I saw a set of the familiar red exit markings and headed toward it.

Only to see the red exit lights start to move, and before I had time to react, the realization hit me. “Those aren’t exit lights,” I said, dropping to the ground as they dashed toward me. I hit the ground hard, avoiding injury by landing in my leather coat as something hit me. Eyes with blood-red irises and red-black pupils met mine as a leathery, dry-skinned creature pinned me in place. Its veins were drawn tight over its skin and they were everywhere. It hissed at me with vicious fangs showing and the stench of rot on its breath. I knew this type of monstrosity, but this time I didn’t have a grocery store arsenal to defend myself with.

For a second, fear paralyzed me into inaction, but I remembered my training and shook it off. Agents died in the field marveling at the monstrosities that attacked them. I was determined not to be one of those statistics.

I felt for my bat, but with signs of my movement, the creature dug its talonlike nails into my arms. The pain was excruciating, but thanks again to my jacket, they didn’t pierce my skin.

“You’re just as fugly a little thing as the other one was, aren’t you?” I asked it.

I don’t know if it understood me or merely sensed that I was mocking it in an effort to calm my fear, but it reared back, its mouth showing its devastating array of sharklike teeth crisscrossing back and forth in its open maw. Something fleshy fell from its mouth onto my neck and I tried not to panic. The creature let out a primal cry, but then I noticed it wasn’t focusing on me anymore.

A shadowy blur of motion blazed over me, grappling the creature and pulling it off of me. I sat up on my elbows to follow the action. Aidan Christos stood about fifteen feet away, the creature hugged tight against his chest. It tore and squirmed for its freedom, but Aidan wasn’t having any of it. After a moment or two of struggle, it broke one of its arms free and started clawing at Aidan’s face. Vain to the end, Aidan immediately let go of it and felt to see if he had been harmed. The creature dashed off into the darkness of the surrounding forest. Several other dark flashes flew around the edge of the forest as well.

I ran over to Aidan. He looked at me, panicked.

“Am I okay?” he said, still feeling around.

“Are
you
okay? I was pinned under that thing! You’ve at least got the ability to heal.”

Aidan’s face relaxed a little. “So I’m okay?”

“Yeah, you’re still looking like the poster boy for emo,” I said. “Now, do you mind telling me what the fuck was that thing, er, things?”

“One of us,” Aidan said, taking his time to walk a circle around us, looking, trying to pick the creatures from out of the darkness.

I looked, too. If it was out there, I couldn’t see it. “One of you?” I asked. “That thing is
so
not like you.”

Aidan’s eyes lit up and he turned to me. “Sorry about your arm.”

“Huh?” I asked. “There’s nothing wrong with my arm …”

Before I could say another word, Aidan lashed out and grabbed my right arm hard around the wrist. He looked overhead, searched high above, and then jumped straight up, taking me with him. It felt like my shoulder had exploded, but we were already flying through the air when one of the creatures swooped back, right where I’d been standing.

I screamed.

“I said I was sorry,” Aidan said. At the top of our flight arc, he grabbed onto one of the support beams among the rigging and lighting that helped create the false sense of night and day down below. He hoisted me up until I could grab onto one of the beams with my free arm. Aidan let go of me and I wrapped both arms against the cold steel, holding on for my life.

“Stay here,” he said, and before I could ask him just where the hell else he thought I might go, Aidan let go and dropped several hundred feet below.

I pulled myself up onto the crawl space among the crisscrossed bars up here, feeling a little better with something under my feet. I looked down, trying not to let the full sense of the height grab hold of me. Aidan was being charged by several of the creatures. Their feral ferocity made them dangerous, but quick thinking seemed to keep Aidan one step ahead of them as he dodged them and played one creature against another, leaving several of them in a snarling tangle of limbs as they fought among themselves.

The bars and pipes around me erupted into motion as if I were in an earthquake. I looked up thinking that maybe the supports were giving out with my added weight on it, but they looked fine to me, not that I knew a blessed thing about structural engineering. I turned my eye to the rest of the structure. One of the creatures stood along it about a hundred feet away.

And it was staring at me.

Screw this, I thought. I looked down. Aidan was swamped with the other creatures down below. Comparatively, one didn’t seem like too bad a contest for me, if I was standing on solid ground and not up here among the lights, that was.

The creature gripped on tight to the bars with its talons as it carefully made its way toward me. I pulled my eyes away from it long enough to use care unsheathing my retractable bat. The last thing I wanted to do was drop the damn thing and find myself totally unarmed up here. I locked both my legs into the beams beneath me and clicked the button on my bat.

Nothing happened. “Shit,” I said, shaking it. That vampire Gerard must have damaged it even more than I had thought back in Brandon’s chambers. Stupid vampires with their stupid preternatural strength.

I looked up and the creature was already much too close for comfort. I could already smell the stink of it from where it was.

I twisted and pulled at the bat. Deep inside it, several pieces of metal ground against one another, but as I spun it in my hands, it started to extend. A dull metal screech came from it, like pulling open an old rusty drawer. The sound seemed to incense the creature more and it roared even louder. The last chunk of the bat pulled out to its full extension and I gripped it hard with both hands.

The creature lurched forward, lowering its voice into a deep, throaty growl.

“Batter up,” I said, hiding my fear behind false bravado. As it charged, the teeth in its maw were a hideous parody of what I knew vampire fangs to look like. A rank blast of air came from it as it closed in on me.

As it leapt for me, I swung hard at its head. It connected with a meaty
thunk
and my bat stopped, lodged there, it seemed. The top of my bat was caught in the creature’s mouth, both keeping it from biting me and occupying its claws as it tried to pry free. The already battered metal began to tear in its mouth and I tried to pull it away. Desperate claws lashed out to knock it away, but I held it there, twisting it a little and hoping to hurt it when a new idea hatched in my brain.

“Chew your food, pretty,” I said. The backs of my legs felt on the verge of cramping, but I was damned if I was going to ease up.

With a final metallic wrenching sound, a chunk of the bat tip tore away, leaving a sharp, exposed, nasty point. I prayed that what Aidan had said was true: that the creature truly was one of his kind. I plunged the remains of the bat straight into its chest, aiming for the heart. I felt the sickening sensation of the metal piercing the soft, rotting flesh of the creature. It convulsed in pain as fresh blood shot from the wound, coating the bat and running down to my gloved hands. I pulled the bat out and swung like I was at home plate, pitching the creature off its perch. It slid off the jagged end of my bat and fell toward the ground far below.

I caught my breath as I heard it hit the ground a wet
thud
. The sensation of something else landing on the support beams shook through the structure and I flinched in reaction, choking my bat up into swinging position once again.

Beatriz crouched along the top of one of the beams, her hands free and making it look effortless.

“Having a little trouble?” Beatriz said, flashing me a sickly sweet smile.

“I’m holding my own,” I said, my bat still covered in a crimson web of ichor. As I decided just how I was supposed to resheath it in that state, Aidan flew up in front of me, grabbing onto the beams with ease. He looked to Beatriz.

“Everything okay up here?” he said.

Beatriz’s smile widened. “Just watching over your boy, Aide.”

“Don’t call me that, please,” he said. He checked the grounds of the castle below. “I want you to go tell Brandon we’re having a little internal-affairs problem.”

“Maybe I should stay with you,” Beatriz offered. “We don’t know how many more of those there are roaming around.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Aidan said, then looked at the bat as if seeing it for the first time. “Not that he looks like he needs protecting.”

“Oh, I do,” I said quite earnestly. I held up the bat.

“This? I got lucky. Bring Beatriz with us. There’s strength in numbers and frankly, I need as many of the good-guy vamps on me as possible.”

Aidan smiled.

“Connor told me you were funny,” Aidan said. “But I hadn’t noticed until now. As for defending yourself, you’re doing fine.”

I looked over Aidan’s shoulder at Beatriz. She was looking at Aidan for some kind of further direction, and he turned to her. “Go.
Now.
”

“Have it your way,” she said. “Good luck explaining this to His Worshipfulness.”

Beatriz pushed herself off of the rigging and launched herself out across the darkness, falling into a perfect dive as she went. She twirled like an Olympic diver and hit the ground standing up.

As she ran off, I said, “I guess things like that are pretty easy to learn when there’s no fear of snapping your neck or death, what with the whole being-immortal thing.”

Aidan shrugged. “It does have its advantages,” he said.

Another sharp clatter suddenly arose farther down the lighting work, followed by a snarling hiss that had me already raising the remains of my bat. As I did so, I noticed a soft popping hiss coming off of it. I looked closer at the gnarled bat, only to discover that the smears of ichor from impaling the creature were corroding through the remaining metal. “Hey!”

The clattering of talons on the rigging grew louder and I felt the vibrations as another one of the creatures started closing in on us. I stared with concentration off into the darkness until I saw the beady redness of its eyes as it moved forward.

“You see that, right?” I whispered. “You know, given your preternatural peepers.”

Aidan gave me a look of “duh” and turned back to our approaching foe as it clawed its way along the rigging.

“We need to go,” Aidan said.

“No argument from me.” I held up the dissolving stump of metal in my hands. “I’m almost out of bat.”

Aidan looked around as he assessed our situation. “Grab on,” Aidan said. “We’re leaving.”

I looked at the bat. There was no point in trying to sheathe it now, given what little there was left to sheathe. Plus I was going to need both my hands free to hold on to Aidan if I was going to survive the trip down. Below, a small crowd had gathered on the castle grounds in a small-scale battle royale with these creatures. I let go of the bat and let it fall. I was pretty sure that the crowd below had the reflexes to dodge it. And if it clonked onto one of the creatures, or better yet, impaled it, all the better.