Death's Rival (11 page)

I said, “Leo’s primo is bleeding out. I need someone strong to feed him. Fast.”

“We have our own wounded. Leo is not alone to suffer assault tonight. We too are under
attack,” she said, unintentionally repeating Bruiser’s words, from what felt like
days ago, as he told vamp-warriors to get Leo to safety and to protect Katie. “My
Alejandro and Estavan were injured as their carriage drove up. The little priestess
is in a healing trance with them. The elder priestess is
missing
,” she spat. “The others are fighting and dying to ensure our safety. Who do you suggest
I send to feed a
human
?”

Fury spurted through, me, hot and blazing at her callous disregard of any but another
vamp, even a
valuable human
, like the primo. “I don’t care who you send,” I ground out, “but it better be fast,
or so help me, by all I hold holy, I’ll stake and behead you myself, and rip out your
fangs and mount them on my necklace.” My breath came hard and fast, as if I’d been
running.

“Deo. You would too. And Leonardo would let you,” she hissed. “I will recall someone
from the battlefield. He will be there in moments.” The cell connection ended and
the ambulance started to move.

“Stop,” I said. When the paramedic ignored me, I swiveled on my heel and slid against
the driver, shoving him. One handed, I opened the door and continued my momentum,
pushing him off his seat and out onto the drive, even as I slid into the driver’s
seat, hit the brakes, and threw the ambulance into park. I looked down, ascertained
that I hadn’t run over the driver, and said, “If you’d been wearing your seat belt,
this wouldn’t have happened.” I looked to the paramedic in back and started to tell
him something, but the words died in my throat. He was doing CPR on Bruiser.

Time slowed into something spiked and thorny, as if each second, each compression
to Bruiser’s chest, were a wound stabbed into my soul with a cold iron blade. Again
and again. The medic was shouting. Something about getting to the hospital. The driver,
also a paramedic, opened the back ambulance doors and jumped inside, black boots landing
with twin thumps, two cops behind him. I turned off the ambulance. Opened the door.
Threw the keys into the dark. Just before the paramedic body-slammed me.

The world tilted. Smoky air rushed at me as I fell from the ambulance, following the
trajectory the driver had taken. The driveway hit my shoulder, hip, one booted foot.
Men piled up on me. Pressing me down. Burying me. I couldn’t breathe. Didn’t really
want to. I’d lost Rick. Now I was losing Bruiser.

My arms were yanked behind me. My face ground into the pavement. Cuffs ratcheted down
on my wrists, cold and metallic. The weight began to shift off me, one body at a time.
No one searched me. I was a girl, skinny and hysterical. Why would I have weapons?
Or maybe they just didn’t care. Or more likely, they knew I couldn’t get to anything
useful, even the gun in the spine holster. When the last man rolled to his knees,
I got a breath, painful and short and heavy with smoke. I heard Koun speak. “Get out
of my way or I will gut you where you stand. I am here to heal the human.”

I started laughing, coughing, abrading my face on the rough pavement. “He’ll do it
too,” I said from the ground. “The blue tattoos are Celtic. Koun’s one of Leo Pellissier’s
warriors. He’s about a thousand years old and he’s been fighting since he was in diapers.”

“My father placed my first knife on my belly the very hour I was born.”

“I stand corrected. Or I lie corrected. Let him heal Bruiser. He can save him. It’s
why I stopped the ambulance.”

“Bruiser is what she calls the primo. She is in love with him and human women like
pet names.”

“I’m not—” I stopped.
In love with him? Human? Crap
.

I heard Koun enter the ambulance and the doors shut. After that, my world was sounds
and flashing lights and smoke and the distant pop of gunfire. There was a battle taking
place in the distance. The rhythmic three-cracks of semiautomatic handguns, the overlapping
thuts
of machine-gun-style, fully automatic and illegal weapons, the boom of shotguns,
the guttural shouts of orders and the screams of the wounded. Koun had come from the
battle.

I realized that the humans around me didn’t seem concerned about the gunfire I had
heard when I arrived. They didn’t even seem aware of the small war in the distance.
It was vamp-magic, something new I hadn’t seen before. I smelled vamps on the wind,
multiclans of them, only half of them recognizable by scent as Leo’s, the rest the
beery scent of his enemy. I smelled vamp-blood and blood-servant blood, a
lot
of blood-servant blood.

The house, not far from where I lay, burned hot and fast, until the walls started
to fall in, loud, roaring crashes, the screech of heated wood. The water from the
trucks was now being turned primarily on the trees, the barn, and the outlying buildings
to keep the flames from spreading. The house was a total loss, according to the firefighters
around me, pulling hoses across me and stepping over me.

Sometime later, the paramedic I had left doing CPR on Bruiser squatted near me. “Sorry,
ma’am. I thought you had lost it. Didn’t know you had called a fanghead to help him.
I’ll see if I can get you released.” I grunted. Even later, another man straddled
me, one boot to either side of my hips, and removed the cuffs from my wrists. My arms
slithered down to my sides, boneless and bloodless and tingly, as circulation was
restored. He helped me to stand, patted my shoulder, and walked off before I could
get a good look at him. But I got a good whiff. I’d know him again.

The paramedic came back, staring at me, studying my face, my body, and only now noticing
the array of weapons. His gaze lingered on my ringless left hand. “Are you really
his wife?”

“I don’t wear rings when I fight. They can get hung up on things.” Which was a lie
of omission and misdirection, but I didn’t care. My voice went breathless. “Is he
going to live?”

“We don’t know. He has a sinus rhythm sometimes. A normal heartbeat,” he clarified.
“Sometimes not. My partner is bagging him.”

“Bagging him” meant Bruiser wasn’t breathing on his own. I blinked tears away just
as Koun stepped from the back of the ambulance, licking his own wrist. I had been
healed by vamps a few times, but I didn’t know what it took to be healed from . . .
death. Apparently blood, and from Koun’s pale skin, a lot of blood. He was half-naked,
dressed in sweat-slick skin, blue and black tattoos and a loincloth, sword at his
side. Koun was taller than I was with the shoulders of a Viking and eyes like the
North Sea. He was blondish, forever young, and mercy had long burned out of him. He
looked and saw me. “I left my master’s fight to heal a human,” he snarled. “You owe
me a boon, woman.” He pulled his sword.

I stepped back, going for my Walther. But he was on me in an instant, moving faster
than I could see, with a little pop of displaced air. His long blade coming at my
throat. Time slid into slow motion. His sword sliced at me, level and lethal, catching
the red of embers, wavering in the heat of the burning clan home. Beast slammed power
to me. The blade slicked into my throat as I jumped away, still fumbling for the gun
even as my feet went out from under me and my muscles went into a shoulder-tucked
roll. I landed hard. Heard officers shouting, “Put down the weapon!” And, “Police!”
like a chorus of the tone-deaf. Gunshots sounded and Koun stumbled, coming back up
upright, the wounds not even slowing him. He stood over me, one foot to either side,
much as the cop had stood, his sword held in both hands, blade down, over me. “A boon!”
he demanded.

I thought a boon was a favor, but with more connotations, and I wasn’t going to agree
to the unknown without a negotiation, even if I sucked at them and I had a sword at
my throat. “What boon?”

“I am weakened, and the primo requires yet more blood. You will fight in my place.”
With one hand, he pointed to the trees, in the general direction of the gunshots,
which were coming closer, more distinct.

“Done,” I said. He stepped back and I rolled to my feet. “How many are there? Who
are they?”

“Perhaps three score of the enemy were still alive when I left, unless our attackers
have reinforcements. They did not announce themselves by name or clan. We have half
that many, fighting against shadows and cowards.” At Koun’s words, the humans nearby
should have commented or questioned or at least said, “Huh? What?” They didn’t. More
vamp mojo I didn’t understand.

I thought a score meant twenty, so sixty opponents. Crap. It was a small war. I turned
my back to him and trotted across the pasture, stopping at Bitsa to pull the M4 and
slide into the harness.

Fun,
Beast thought at me.
Hunt
. She poured excitement and power into my bloodstream.

My breath deepened; my heart thumped like a bass drum against my ribs. “Not fun, so
much,” I said aloud. No leather and armor, no silver studs, no magical shield to protect
me from bullets.

Jane does not have a magical shield. Jane has Beast.

I laughed. “Yeah. I do.” I trotted past the barn, where horses milled, restless and
anxious with the smell of blood and smoke. The scent of their fear was like an aphrodisiac
to Beast, but the added reek of big-cat sent the horses into full-blown panic. Hooves
struck stall walls, screams of terror and challenge bugled on the night air. I sped
up to take my scent away from them. Ahead, smoke and lights danced drunkenly in a
field, illuminating surrounding pine trees and another horse barn, the central barn
doors open to the dark and the stall doors like half-open eyes, staring out over the
field. This barn was older, without the telltale scent of fresh manure. By the smell,
it was full of hay and diesel-powered machines. The pasture around it had been planted
in hay, thigh deep and brown, ready for the final harvest of the long growing year.

Stopping behind a large-bole pine, I studied the scene through all my senses, the
night too black and the lights too bright to rely solely on sight. There were five
or six vamps and as many human blood-servants in the barn, some bleeding, stinking
of sweat and vomit. I caught the strong tang of a chemical that I now recognized,
bitter and metallic and artificial. Beneath the metallic tang I smelled the beery
scent that belonged to the vampire who had challenged and defeated three master vamps
and left them sick. It belonged to the vamp who had sent blood-slaves after me, and
who had killed and drained the men on the Learjet. And I realized, standing in the
trees, the air saturated with the stink, that though the beery scent was native to
the master vamp, the metallic, chemical smell was man-made, not natural in any way.

I looked out over the field of hay and the circle of trees, smelling and hearing others,
injured or dead, lying in the tall grasses, some of them the enemy’s vamps and humans,
some of them Leo’s.

I smelled Derek Lee, close, only a few paces over, his body strong with the bitter
scent of battle. He was speaking into his com unit, and I could hear the new men,
the Tequila Boys, his newest former marines, home from Iraq or Afghanistan, talking
back into his earpiece, their voices muffled. In the dark, I saw a guy in camo bend
over a vamp half-hidden in the grass, and offer his wrist to feed on. It was Tequila
El Diablo and it was unexpected that he would be generous to a vampire in need. Not
many humans, and even fewer marines, liked vamps enough to spit on them if they were
on fire, but maybe they knew one another, or more likely, money talks. Vamps were
known to offer most anything when they were wounded and needed blood to heal. El Diablo
was unusual for one of Derek’s men. I liked him for reasons I couldn’t name, except
maybe his ready smile and his laughing eyes. Marines with laughing eyes are a rarity.

Farther on, I saw another new guy, Tequila Cheek Sneak, as he clubbed a vamp to the
ground. It wasn’t one of ours, so I didn’t react, but I made a note to keep an eye
on him.

Farther yet, at the edge of the woods, I saw two other Tequila Boys pulling an injured
soldier off the battlefield. A vamp followed them to help with the healing; I thought
it was Leo’s former daughter-in-law, Amitee Marchand, which was weird on all sorts
of levels. Amitee hated Leo, but maybe a common enemy had healed some wounds.

Closer, I scented Innara and her anamchara, Jena, the mind-joined female vamp leaders
of Clan Bouvier. One moved, the light of weapons-flash catching her face, and I stepped
back into the shadows. Innara was no longer the thin, petite, elegant vamp of our
few meetings, but a warrior, lips pulled back in a snarl to expose fangs glistening
in the dark, a silver-plated short sword in one hand and a handgun in the other, her
eyes vamped out, the blood red sclera like openings into Hades. Her muscles were sharply
defined and blood smeared her mouth and chin.

The hairs on the back of my neck rose and bristled. Beast hissed deep inside. I had
never seen a vampire at war, and her vision didn’t blink away, but reappeared in negative
image on the inside of my lids. She was wearing a headset, a modern accouterment to
her primitive fury.

She was upwind of me and so didn’t know I was there until I said, softly, “Innara,
coleader of Clan Bouvier.”

Her head jerked and focused on me in the dark. She growled.

“It’s Jane,” I said. “Koun sent me to fight in his place. Will you tell the others
so I don’t get shot?” After a moment her lips relaxed and she nodded, speaking softly
into her mic. Derek turned to me and I lifted a hand, seeing the low-light-vision
goggles on his face. “Where do you want me?” I asked just as softly, trusting her
vamp hearing.

Innara moved with the air-popping speed of her kind and appeared next to me. I tried
not to jerk, but didn’t quite manage it, and Innara smiled up at me. Not a human smile
of amusement, but the hunting smile of the predator who saw prey flinch. “Leo’s Mercy
Blade was to lead the assault on the barn, with Koun at his side. In light of his
removal from the field of battle, we are reconsidering our options, and then the master’s
Enforcer appears, well weaponed. How fortuitous.”