Death's Rival (28 page)

The flashbang and CS went off. I opened my eyes just in time to land. I kicked laterally
into a vamp’s knee joint. Heard the crunch over the ear protectors. He was falling
down and away, coughing, his blood spouting from neck and chest, bubbling from the
silver shotgun wounds. He was one of the vamps with acidic blood. It burned where
it splattered on my exposed knuckles. I staked him in the belly, low down. Flipped
him over and secured his hands with three zip strips, knowing they weren’t made for
a vamp’s strength, but hoping the injuries and the silver he was breathing would weaken
him enough to hold him for a while. He was coughing like he had a bad case of pneumonia
or had just been pulled from the water, drowning. So were the other two vamps who
had come in with him, both on the floor coughing and bleeding from the eyes, the silver
mist in the air burning their skin. They looked like they both had really,
really
bad sunburns. Just to make sure they stayed down, I staked them both in the lower
bellies and secured them with zip strips. I’d have to get some silvered strips. Yeah.
Why hadn’t I thought about that before now?

I clicked off the light and turned to see Bruiser finish off the two he’d been fighting.
He stabbed, twisted, and slid the blade out of one. That vamp fell to his knees. Bruiser
cut across a biceps of the last one, hitting bone, and caught the long sword the vamp
dropped. Using the new blade, he took the vamp’s head, whirled, and took the head
of the other one.

“There can be only one,” I murmured, and started laughing. Bruiser turned to me so
fast I felt the air blow past my face. He swung the long sword back to attack. Beast
slammed into me and I leaped away, across the room, landed, and pulled both Walthers.
“Bruiser? It’s Jane.”

The room went still. Bruiser’s face was emotionless, a mask. No recognition, no warmth.
He hesitated for a space of three heartbeats. He advanced on me, stepping fastfastfast.

“Don’t make me shoot you,” I said, backing away.

One of the vamps I had staked and secured kicked out at me, drawing Bruiser’s attention.
That was all I needed. I dove at him, swinging, knocking his head with the butt of
the gun in my right hand. Not a nice way to treat a handgun, not to mention a head.
They hit together with a satisfying thud and Bruiser dropped, catching himself with
his open sword hand, holding the long sword with only a finger and thumb. When he
looked up, he shook his head. “Jane?”

“Yeah. We’ll talk about this later. Six vamps down. Weapons fire from upstairs.” I
pointed across the room. “We need to check that.”
That
was the old bank vault and the specially built safe room to its side.

We moved slowly across the open space to the room. It was built from cinder block
reinforced with rebar and concrete. It had its own roof, flat and smelling of tar
paper, about three feet from the warehouse ceiling. My eyes had acclimated to the
dimness of the windowless place, but the inside of the room was blacker than pitch.
I pulled the halogen light from my belt and shined it into the room.

The room was twelve feet square, with a six-foot-across circle in the middle made
of salt. There was no pentagram, no runes, no magical elements to guide a witch in
a working. But there was a body. A recently dead body. She was hanging from the rafters
by a rope, her big toes barely touching the floor. She was naked. With a stake in
her heart. Her fangs were small, marking her as, maybe, a hundred years old.

“Sacrifice,” Bruiser said.

“Yeah. And her blood smells funny.”

“One of the sick ones.”

“I’d say so,” I said, turning for the old bank vault. I shined my light inside. The
metal shelves were bare. Whatever had been planned for this room either hadn’t been
finished or had been carted out already.

“Report,” Eli said into my earpieces.

The fighters upstairs started reporting in. “One old vamp DB. Two humans contained.
No injuries. Did not sight de Allyon.” In the shorthand Derek used for ops,
DB
meant dead body,
contained
meant uninjured and restrained.
No injuries
referred to the men under Derek’s command.
Not de Allyon
meant the vamp wasn’t the one we were after.

“Danced with three humans, now contained. They were waking up and we had to hurt ’em
some. No injuries. Did not sight de Allyon.” It sounded like Tequila Blue Voodoo,
proving that Derek had brought a mixed party of his men.

“One young fanghead DB, two humans contained. We’re beat all to hell and back, but
don’t need anything except beer,” Angel Tit said. “Did not sight de Allyon.”

“One vamp, age indeterminate, DB, two injuries. Medic needed for John. Not life-threatening.
I need a couple of stitches,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Did not sight de Allyon.”
I thought it was El Diablo, who I had last seen feeding a vamp on the field of battle.

Eli said, “One old sucker DB. I’ll be joining you for those stitches and that beer.”
The men chuckled. “Cheek Sneak and I did not sight de Allyon.”

“No vamps encountered,” Rick said. “Three humans contained, no injuries, did not sight
de Allyon.

Bruiser said, “Two old vamps DB.” The mics went silent for that one. Bruiser had taken
down two
very
old vampires. Single-handedly. “Did not sight de Allyon,” he said. “But we did find
one younger vamp, DB, on ice, true-dead.” He looked at me and grinned, teasing. “Legs?
That leaves you.”

I frowned at him. Into my mic I said, “One human contained. Four old vamps contained.”
The radio traffic went silent. “No injuries. Did not sight de Allyon,” I added, that
important piece of info just hitting me.

“She buggered the rest of you and left us some vamps to chat with,” Bruiser said.
“Janie wins the pool.”

There was a pool?

“This I gotta see,” one of the guys said.

“Not until we go over this place with a fine-tooth comb. Lock it down,” Eli said.
“We want de Allyon.”

Bruiser and I quartered off the lower floor and went through it again. There weren’t
many rooms, only one unisex toilet, and no closets or hiding places. It was fast work.
“First floor clear,” I said into the mic. We started up to the second floor. Five
steps in, I heard something and looked back. “Correction. Two coming this way.”

That was when we were hit with the second wave. Vamps came rushing out of the new,
empty safe room and up the stairs with reptilian speed and grace, vamped out, screaming.
Hungry
. I could smell their hunger and their sickness. These were infected, and I had no
idea where they had come from. The dang vault and cinder-block room had been empty.

I fired the shotgun, hitting the first one midcenter. Beside me, Bruiser stepped down
two steps and took the head of the second one, the long sword in one hand, one of
the lovely midsized swords in the other. Blood fountained up from her stump. I fired
at the third vamp, knocking him back. Bruiser took the head of the two I had hit while
I finished up the rounds in the M4. When all seven rounds were gone, I pulled the
Walthers and started in with head shots, slowing them down, Bruiser to my side, finishing
them off. Soldiers poured down the steps to back us up, and we took the fight down
to the first floor, spreading out. And still the vamps came.

There was no grace, no finesse. It was just battle. Just blood and the stink of gunfire.
I saw two of ours go down in the melee, and vamps fell on them to drink. Eli and Derek
waded into them, stakes and blades flashing. I took a set of talons across one arm,
a fist to the gut, and a roundhouse kick to the kidneys. It was three on one and I
went down. Rule number one when fighting vamps. Stay on your feet.

I was still falling when the first vamp fell on me. Oofed out a breath it didn’t need
and went flying, a boot in the air in front of my face. A short sword followed, taking
off another vamp’s forearm with one swipe. Rick reached down and pulled me up, his
fingers like steel bands on my unhurt arm. He swung me around and supported me with
an arm around my waist until I was steady. Until I had drawn two vamp-killers. “Payback
isn’t
always
a bitch,” he said.

I laughed. I’d saved his life a couple of times. Now he’d saved mine.

It went on and on. And when it was over, Bruiser and Rick were standing back to back,
heaving breaths. Derek and I were against a wall, two downed soldiers at our feet,
where we were protecting them. Three other of the men he had brought were still standing,
but all were wounded. Two were dead. Derek hit 911 and called for medic.

Around us were fourteen vamps.
Only fourteen?
It seemed like hundreds. But none of them were de Allyon. Lucas de Allyon had not
been in his base camp.

All the blood and fighting and death had been for nothing. Wasted. My eyes filled
with tears that I blinked away. I wiped my face. Vamp blood was burning me. “
Crap.
Crap, crap,
crap,
” I whispered.

Near me, a man moaned. I opened my cell and called Leo. Fortunately, he was already
on his way. He’d be here quickly and would heal the injured humans. I closed the cell
and looked up to see six humans emerge from a wall. Not a doorway, but a wall, a hidden
opening to a hidden room. It hadn’t been on the plans submitted to the planning commission.
Vamps who broke the law. Imagine that. I almost started laughing until I got a whiff
of the blood-servants. They all smelled of the vamp sickness.

Derek covered them and made them sit down with their hands on their heads. I thought
about the sick and bleeding Asheville vamps. Here was a treatment that might save
them until we figured out how Sabina had healed that guy . . . the vamp . . . the
dumb pretty one whose name was totally gone from my exhausted brain. Callan! Yeah.
Callan. I texted Leo. “Humans here have antibody to illness. Send to Asheville?”

Instantly he texted back “On the next plane.”

Gotta love modern forms of communication. Then I texted to Adelaide “Got treatment.
Will send ASAP.” I closed my phone. And slid down a wall to sit on the floor.

Eli wandered over, his combat face still in place, looking hard and remote. He stood
next to me, staring out over the battlefield, and when he spoke, his lips didn’t move,
a sotto voce not even vamps could have overheard. “The marine called Cheek Sneak.
I caught him taking pics and texting. I took his phone. You want I should give it
to Alex?”

“Yeah,” I said, and closed my eyes. Had we finally found our other tattletale? “If
you prove he’s been talking to the enemy, tell me first. Not Derek.”

Eli breathed a low laugh through his nose. “Copy that.” He meandered away.

“You’re hurt.”

I opened my eyes and looked at Rick. “So are you,” I said. He was burned and limping,
and blood crusted his knuckles as if he’d hit a wall. Or maybe beat in a vamp’s face.
Either one sounded like him.

“My were-taint will heal it,” he said, offhand. “But yours is bad.” He knelt, lifted
my arm, and I saw that blood coated my sleeve. He peeled back the cut cloth to reveal
the injury, three oozing wounds, parallel, made by vamp talons. The lacerations were
about two inches across and cut into the deltoid muscle deeply enough that when he
pressed it open, a tiny pulse of blood started, rhythmic and steady. A tiny artery
had been severed.

“I’ll heal it when I shift,” I murmured.

Rick sat beside me and opened a military med kit on his belt. Inside was a tourniquet,
the kind a medic put on a severed limb to stop the bleeding, packages of sterile gauze
and alcohol pads and cleanser. Stuff to sew up a wound, black thread and tiny curved
needles. A syringe of clear fluid. It was marked M
ORPHINE
.

“You are not sewing me up,” I said.

Rick laughed. “No. I’m not. But I will pack it until we can get out of here.”

“Okay. Sure.”

I watched as he tore away my sleeve and cleaned and bandaged my wound. He tied the
gauze snugly and wound cling wrap around my arm. It
hurt,
but I watched his hands, sure and steady as he worked. I smelled his scent, sweat
and blood and cat. When he was done, he raised his eyes to me and smiled, flashing
that small crooked bottom tooth. A shiver cut through me, burning and icy.

Rick lifted a hand and touched my burned face. Gently. So gently. I closed my eyes,
inhaling him. Wanting him, and knowing that I couldn’t have him without risking contracting
the were-taint. “You smell so good,” I whispered.

“I miss you,” he whispered.

“I miss you too,” I said. “This so sucks.”

He chuckled. “Yeah. It does. What’s worse, now I have a job that’s likely to pit us
against each other way too often.” And then he was gone, taking his med kit and its
little syringe to a soldier we had thought was dead but who was still with us. In
agony.

I looked up to find Eli’s gray eyes on me, a strange look on his face, an odd amalgam
of something sharper than mere curiosity, more intense than suspicion. And maybe something
like longing. It took me by surprise. He studied me and I studied him. And then he
turned away.* * *

A bit less than an hour after sunset, Leo arrived in a rented, extra-long stretch
limo. With him was Sabina, the outclan priestess, healed of the disease that had taken
her down, and three blood-servants chosen for battle experience, more so than beauty.
Lounging on the beautiful upholstery was Grégoire, Leo’s
secondo
heir, dressed in sky blue silk pajamas. Next to him on the long seat were the surprises.
Rick introduced his unit—a werewolf stuck in wolf form, and Pea, a juvenile grindylow—and
with them was his supervisor at PsyLED. Her name was Soul. She was gorgeous.

Soul could have been anywhere from forty to sixty, the kind of woman who was ageless
and sexy and sultry, and made all the men in visual distance perk up and think about
taking her to the nearest hotel. She had smooth olive skin and black, flashing eyes
and platinum hair, the kind nature gives some formerly black-haired women. It hung
down her back in long, supple waves. And she had curves in all the right places. I
disliked her on sight.