Falling from the Light (The Night Runner Series Book 3) (23 page)

“She told me that there were humans that could amplify her strength. Told me to find her some and send her the blood. She…” He tapped his temple. “She left the specs inside my head—that way I’d know when I analyzed the blood that it was the right stuff. If you asked me, I couldn’t explain it, but when I see it under the microscope, I just…I know. Like with yours.” He clapped his hands together. “Immediate positive.”

His eyes unfocused and he swallowed convulsively. He wasn’t merely afraid. He’d probably been the smartest guy in every room he’d walked into since he was a child, and suddenly a creature had shown up and invaded his mind. I understood the anger, the surreal resentment that didn’t go away no matter how you reasoned yourself around it. But unlike Kevin, I now had people who understood and who wanted to help me. Staying where I was, I
reached
for Malcolm. Without reservation, he flushed me with power, warm and soothing.

He slipped back into the room, and I could feel his attention on me even though my back was to him. The flames in the candles shot up about three inches, crackling. Kevin jerked and rubbed his hands on his thighs.

“That’s unnatural. Not to mention they’re r-ruining this hotel.”

“I gotta tell you, I don’t think a little fried circuitry or smoke smudging is what’s going to bring this place down. But we’ll leave a big tip for housekeeping. Tell me about the blood, how you collected it.”

He hooked his heels onto the bed frame, pushing his knees toward his chest, and crossed his arms. Withdrawing. I softened my expression, and appealed to his vanity.

“It must have been hard, trying to track these people down. I’m surprised you were able to find any.”

“Not hard if you know what you’re doing. The first two were volunteers for a big clinical trial Goya was doing. I’d call them back, pretend we were testing new products. They’d come in every month or so. At first I shipped the stuff overseas, but she kept demanding changes, and more of the stuff. So I figured, why should I work my ass off and jeopardize my job when I was only getting a token payout? It was obviously good shit. I told her I hadn’t found any more candidates, then I branched out. Got a part-time gig at a medical screening lab. It took me about three months to get ten names, but after that it was easy. All I had to do was call people and offer them money, and they came back.”

“And you started developing your own products.”

“Radia was already in the pipeline, and everybody was raving about it.”

“With no regard for what might happen.”

“If this Morsus blood was so strong and suckers knew about it, then they’d all be using it, right? I figured the old bitch was getting off on it, a high or something.”

Malcolm touched me again, reassuring, focused, calm. I wasn’t so calm.

“You’re smart. If I had to guess, you were raised in a comfortable, supporting environment. So you don’t do shitty things—things society might disapprove of—out of desperation. You choose to do this.”

“I’m not hurting anyone.”

Glass cracked. The sound of Thurston reaching the end of his rope in the other room. Malcolm closed the door and turned the lock. In response to my questioning glance, he shrugged, but his expression hardened when he looked at Kevin.

“I didn’t know about that at the time.” The human threw his hands up. “Abel showed up. He’d heard about me from someone in LA. He recognized that my sample size was too small, but that the serum was doing something. He said he’d send a bunch to South America, that he had buyers there, lots of them, and that they wouldn’t mind testing it. The old lady never told me what was happening, why she needed it changed. He gave me results, a ream of paper that showed scoring on five hundred individuals. There were no violent side effects.”

“They were fake, his results.”

“There wasn’t anything on the news.” Kevin crossed his arms, his tone aggressive, but his uncertainty was clear. I glanced at Malcolm, who answered the unspoken question.

“Very little made the news because we contained it. If those deaths had been connected to a drug, there would have been mass panic.”

“They wore Goya gear,” I said. “The distributors down south. How do you explain that?”

“They what?” Kevin’s face was a mask of confusion. “No, that’s not right. The company never even knew. I never labeled anything or…”

“Abel planted the trail,” Mal said, making the connection before I did. “He wanted to draw Bronson to a neutral place. Goya’s headquarters happens to be near that neutral place. This way, he got to sow a little destruction first.”

“That fucking…” Kevin made an incoherent sound, his face growing redder. He paced angrily, swearing every time I tried to reengage him. Angry, indeed.

I joined Malcolm, leaning against his side so that our arms touched. His fingers brushed my side, inching my shirt up until they skimmed flesh. I smiled, caught the motion in the foggy mirror, and bit my lip to hide it. I felt like I was thirteen, lingering in a room I had no business being in just to be near someone.

“This is bullshit.” Kevin stomped to a halt at the foot of the nearest bed. I faced him. “How do I know you’re not still working for Abel? If that guy’s trying to pin all that shit on me, well…I’m not going to take it.” He turned to Malcolm and put his hands on his hips. “You know what she is, right? His pet project. She’ll turn me over to him so fast—”

“Kevin, calm down.” My stomach clenched, full of bitter sickness.

“I saved your life! And for that, you k-kidnap me and who knows what’s next? You were almost fucking
dead
. Do you remember that? Another minute and you wouldn’t have had a pulse! And what thanks do I get? You’re going to turn me back over to that guy!”

“Enough,” Malcolm snapped, but I could feel him staring at me.

“Kevin, shut the fuck up.” My throat burned and my stomach turned into a cold rock.

“No! No! This is your fault. Abel had a fucking gleam in his eye when he went after you. You’re like a goddamn albatross for undead shit.”

“Enough.” Malcolm, absolute. “You will stop. Now.”

The room chilled beneath the burst of influence, and Kevin swayed, staggering back.

“Is what he’s saying true?” he asked.

“Mal—”

“Is it?”

Kevin’s jaw dropped and his eyes went glassy.

“Stop it, Mal. It’s not his fault. He’s scared, saying anything.” I grabbed his arm. The wave of influence ceased abruptly, and Kevin reeled back.

“What happened when Abel blooded you?”

“My heart went ballistic. I’m pretty sure I told you this before.”

“You died? You fucking
died
?” He grabbed my elbow with bruising force, his expression vicious.

I twisted my arm, but couldn’t break his hold. “Lucky me, I got all the side effects on the warning label. Cardiac arrest. Memory loss. A state of infantile comprehension. All the shit they warn about.”

He bowed, resting his forehead against mine as tension tore around us. Light leaked through his lashes. “Whatever happens, I will keep you safe or I will help you put yourself back together. But I will not lose you. That isn’t an option. Tell me that you feel the same.”

Something cracked in my chest and I wrapped my hands tight around Malcolm’s wrists, my voice low but steady. “I’m not sure I even know how to give up.”

“Good. That’s good.” He tilted his head to kiss me, holding me in place as he pressed his lips to mine. Holding me as though he could keep me there forever. Then he stilled.

There was a sound on the other side of the door, Soraya’s voice, low and steady like she was reading from a list, or giving instructions. She’d been talking for a while, but I hadn’t been paying attention to her, and apparently neither had Mal. His head swiveled toward the door. Their extraction team must have arrived. From outside, a man barked short words in rapid rhythm. Something thunked against the door.

Too late, I realized that what I was hearing was a countdown. Too slow, I turned toward Malcolm, who shoved me. For a confusing instant, I was airborne. Then I landed hard on the bathroom floor. Tears sprang to my eyes, and through them I didn’t see Malcolm move, only a sweep of darkness as he slammed the door between us. I blinked, and the seam around the door exploded with light.

It took me two tries to rock to my feet in the near dark, and by then the fight was fully on. Furniture shrieked as it scraped along the floor. Men shouted. Soraya snarled, a sound of feminine wrath that scraped along my nerves. Something crashed against the door and I threw myself against it, pushing back. The last thing I wanted was for whoever was out there to get in and get their hands on me. One abduction a week was more than enough.

The door began to splinter around the handle and I held on through two more kicks, teeth rattling and hands shocked from the force of the blows. Glass shattered in one of the rooms, followed by the sound of something large crashing around. Over that, I heard a man yell “shoot the lock.” They were already in the room, which left only one lock to shoot. I jumped into the bathtub, curling against the tile as a burst of gunfire demolished the door.

They scuffled about at the entrance, but didn’t enter. And then, all of a sudden, it got quiet. From outside someone yelled at us to turn the TV down, and I hiccupped as I swallowed a hysterical laugh.

Crouching, hands fisted, I peeked around the wall. The men wore tactical gear, desert camo, black vests, and lots of straps and lumps. But it wasn’t coordinated. Army surplus matched to gun-store specialty stuff. Amateurs. They had guns, but the firearms were useless as Malcolm held one several inches off the floor by his throat while he smashed the other’s face into the door frame. Wood rained down, followed by the first body. The second guy continued to kick and claw at him, but the strikes were weakening.

“Sydney?” He turned so that I saw his profile in the uneven light. His voice was low and harsh when he asked. “Are you hurt?”

I stepped out of the tub, boots rolling on debris before I found solid footing. The door was little more than a jagged sheet of splinters hanging askew from the top hinge. I pushed it aside with a finger and ducked around it.

“I’m okay.” Except for how I was shaking so hard my teeth were rattling. Mal’s eyes were pure gold above fully extended fangs. The man dangling from his hand had gone limp.

“Mal?” I touched his arm and he jerked so violently that I stepped back, half expecting him to snap at me. His eyes weren’t just bright; they were illuminating half the room, and the power flooding out of him was sharply hostile. Nobody would mistake him for a human now. I swallowed with a click.

“Maybe…maybe you could set that guy down.”

His head turned slowly and he examined the man—six feet tall and solid—as though he hadn’t realized he was holding him. He dropped him into an unnatural heap, then crossed the space between us in a blink.

He was trying to be careful, but I still felt my bones creak when his arms closed around me. The floor was covered in wood, drywall, and disemboweled mattress parts, and blood and candy-apple-red wax streaked the walls like a series of small Rorschach images.

“Are they dead?” I asked, staring over his elbow at a figure that appeared to be breathing.

“Not yet.” His voice rumbled in his chest, and I wormed my hands between us. It should have triggered a claustrophobic reflex, but instead it felt like all of me was protected in the shelter of him. We stood there for a long moment, during which the wattage of his eyes dimmed, and the power and tension in his body subsided…some.

“Is everyone else okay?” I asked, realizing that it was awfully quiet. His fingers dug in for a moment before he released me.

“Come.” He tugged on my hand.

“Who are they?” I asked as I picked my way along behind him. There were four bodies on the floor, all men. Their weapons lay near them, except for one wicked-looking knife stuck in the wall at about head level.

“Mercenaries, human. Not well trained.”

“They look like a gang of overgrown kids that decided to play SWAT.”

“Abel would have hired them earlier, since he and all his people are under watch at Tenth World. He couldn’t contract with one of the regular outfits, not without drawing notice. Not that their skills mattered. All he had to do was get the order out.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “If I could undo it, I would.”

“No.” He stopped in the doorway to the adjoining room and grabbed my arm. “This isn’t on you. The fact you survived at all is a goddamn miracle. And you didn’t only survive. You fought. That’s all you need to think about.”

It didn’t make me feel any better, but this wasn’t the time to dwell on it. I cleared my throat. “So what now?”

“As soon as everyone is in shape to travel, we’ll move out. Will you see to the chemist?”

The other room was fortified. The two queen-size beds had been torn apart and plastered over the window and door, which must have been broken in. Kevin sat on the dresser beside the TV with a broken tube, cradling one arm and looking pale. Thurston knelt over a body on the floor, a body which Malcolm quickly dropped beside. I sucked in a breath. It was Soraya, and she’d been burned.

“
I
t would appear
,” Malcolm said, “that we will not be receiving assistance.” His tone was low, a pleasant cover laid over a jagged surface as he scraped burned flesh away from Soraya’s arm with a shard of wood. It was the sort of voice you used in a hospital room when a family member lay dying and you didn’t want to upset them.

He’d known her for almost two decades, had sacrificed years of his freedom for hers when they’d barely even been acquaintances. While she was strong now, she hadn’t always been. He’d talked about her emaciated body, her fragile mind. Never when she was around, and he didn’t question her in front of anybody now, but there was a time when he was the only thing standing between her and true death.

And now she seemed close to it again. She was motionless. Burns covered half of her right arm and parts of her neck and face. Sun didn’t burn vampires like fire burned humans. There was no redness, no blistering. Her flesh had turned gray and was…crumbling. Falling to ash when Thurston jostled her as he turned her head. Fangs extended, he tore into the flesh of his arm and held it over her face. Blood fell in a steady patter, and absorbed immediately into her flesh.

“It slows the spread,” Malcolm explained as he turned her arm. Flakes of ash floated away. It wasn’t merely skin that the sun had destroyed. It had charred both muscle and bone. “This will remove the dead tissue so that it doesn’t infect the remainder.”

I looked away when he started the next, deeper layer of peeling, flinched when Thurston tore into his other arm. Kevin had caught some shrapnel, but the slices across his shoulder and back were shallow and had mostly stopped bleeding. For once, he didn’t say anything. His tics, however, were going almost nonstop. I rolled a towel and helped him place it beside his neck to cushion the repetitive jerky roll of his head to the side.

“I’m usually better when I’m around vampires,” he said.

“Odd.” I finished taping a bandage to his back. “In my experience, usually everything is worse when I’m around vampires.”

The idea that my call had triggered these guys was a caustic grater in my mind. But there were other forces at work. The security team was supposed to have been prepped, and Mal had gotten his call out before I had. Abel wouldn’t have dared to intercept Bronson’s soldiers, so there was no way his team should have arrived first.

“Was it because it’s daytime?” I asked.

“They have gear for short excursions. Proper vehicles and rapid-deployment canopies. The time of day shouldn’t have stopped them.”

“Could they have been called back?” I asked.

Malcolm’s jaw ticked and he caught my eye. I sorted through the feel of him, digging down beneath the anger and beating aggression. He was frustrated and uncertain. He didn’t know. That wasn’t good.

I crossed my arms and gripped my elbows. The red crystal I’d found stuck to my palm after I’d finally been able to unclench my fists was warm against my skin. It was also about ten times bigger than the one I’d found in my mouth, and I was starting to suspect it had nothing to do with Abel.

“Damn.” Kevin tested the movement in his battered arm. “That’s so cold. I mean, I thought pharma was a tough business, but—”

“Your version of ‘cutthroat’ is figurative,” Malcolm said. He cupped the unsullied side of Soraya’s face. His thumb stroked gently over her cheekbone before he rocked onto his heels and stood. Shadows narrowed his face. “The degradation has stopped. Keep feeding her for as long as you can, Thurston, but do not exhaust yourself. You’ll have to watch over her.”

He opened the door to the bathroom and washed his hands. The mirror didn’t show his reflection, but it did show a pile of bound and gagged mercenaries stacked on and around each other. They looked pissed, and scared. One caught my eye and I held his gaze with a hard one of my own. He’d made his bed, and now it was a chipped bathtub. That was his decision.

I turned the crystal over in my hand. It was nearly the size of a nickel and smooth. “So what do we do?”

“We operate under the assumption that someone is working against us from the inside and that others might be coming. We need to get Soraya moved to a safe place, and we need to get gone.”

Kevin bumped me as he slid off the dresser, starting for the bathroom before turning on his heel to go into what remained of the other one. I guess he’d rather pee in a cracked toilet than in front an audience.

I crossed to Mal, drawn by the grief dragging at him. He rested his cheek against the top of my head and I slid my hands around his waist. When he tensed, I looked down to see dark stains on his shirt.

“How badly are you hurt?”

“Most of that’s not mine.” He drew back and grabbed my wrist. I opened my hand. “What I want to know is, where did you get this?”

“You know how some people take up knitting?” I scrunched up my nose. “I appear to have taken up creating red pebbles when I get stressed.”

“Pebbles, plural? Where are the others?”

“I…” I couldn’t quite bring myself to say that I’d spit the first one out. “I threw it away.”

“You made this,” Mal said, and it wasn’t a question.

“They seem to be forming inside and on me.” I raised my chin as I said it. Maybe if I sounded confident, that would make it seem less weird. “It started…after Abel. I think it was coming from my hands. I kept finding red grit there, like a powder. I thought it was his…his.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with him blooding you, except maybe for the stress he caused.”

“You know what it is?” That was a bright side, kind of. I tried to hand the thing to Malcolm but he stepped back. Not a big bright side, I guess.

“Is it dangerous?” The crystal seemed so harmless, almost pretty.

“Not dangerous, no. Do you want to keep it?”

“Not particularly.” The way he was looking at it, I expected it to spontaneously combust. “Why’s it so special? Is it worth something?”

“That depends.” He closed his eyes for a moment and, when he opened them again, he looked even more grim. “If it could help Soraya, would you want it to?”

“To help her recover?” I perked up at that, though I had no idea what he was talking about. “Yes, of course.”

“Bring it here, then.”

He steered me toward Soraya. Thurston sat back, one hand pressed to the gouges he’d made in his other arm. His lips were turned down into a thin, pained line.

“Thurston?” I asked.

He raised his head, then blinked slowly.

“Go. Feed,” Mal said sharply. “You gave too much.”

Thurston glanced at me and I shook my head. “When it comes to the bathtub boys, I’m not objecting to anything. Do what you need to do.”

With effort, Thurston shoved to his feet and plodded into the bathroom. He politely closed the door. Unfortunately, his sacrifice didn’t seem to have done anything. Sora was so still, the gray creeping outward in a few places, unhealthy veins driving into the rest of her flesh. Malcolm knelt, pulling me down beside him. Then he pointed to the shell that remained of Soraya’s arm.

“Set it here.”

“Say what?”

“If it’s what I think it is, it will help her.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa…shouldn’t we be certain first? Or at least, I don’t know, think about the possible effects of dropping this flippin’ thing
into
her.” I couldn’t look at the hollowed canyon that used to be her arm. “I mean, I’m not a doctor, but I feel like there might be some sanitation issues.”

“Sydney, please.” He didn’t look at me as he said it, his eyes on Soraya, on the black-rimmed gouges the sun had made across her otherwise beautiful face, on the pallor beneath her mahogany skin.

Malcolm could have been burned like that, or worse. Which Abel the bastard would have counted on. He rarely did his own dirty work, but the jobs he arranged were filthy as hell. I dropped the crystal in at the junction of ruin and flesh, then wiped my damp palms on my thighs.

“What’s it supposed to do?” I leaned forward, pulling a candle closer.

“Hendrick was commissioned once to steal a diamond necklace in Libya. Human owner by the name of Shrage. It was fairly simple. Dogs, a skylight. I went along to keep him company. The necklace wasn’t in the safe. It was on his mistress, who was most enthusiastically on Shrage. Hendrick passed the time with Shrage’s bar and I passed the time in the safe beside it. He had a collection of uncut stones and, beneath that, a case where he kept gems that seemed to have not met his expectations. Chips, flaws, and fakes. Two of those were like this pebble of yours. They emitted a frequency. It’s not unusual for a vampire to develop an affinity with certain substances—gems and I are friendly—but Hendrick felt it, too. It is unusual for two vampires to develop the same affinity.”

“Even though you were changed by the same maker?”

Malcolm nodded, still watching Soraya as though he expected her to wake up. I drew my knees up and wrapped my arms around them.

“We took them.”

“Instead of the necklace?”

“No, we got that, too.”

“You snuck a necklace off a naked woman?” Kevin asked in an awed tone from the doorway.

“She wasn’t naked. She was wearing cowboy boots.” The corner of Malcolm’s mouth turned up. “Shrage liked Americans. Anyway, the diamonds had to be verified by a jeweler and, afterward, we asked him about the stones.”

“Oh!” I nearly fell over when movement caught my eye.

The crystal was melting and Soraya was absorbing it like the blood Thurston had poured over her. Malcolm took a sharp breath, then let it out with an airy laugh. He took my hand and kissed it.

When nothing else happened for a moment, I asked, “What did the jeweler say?”

“Nothing, but he sprayed us with poison, shot Hendrick, and dropped a cage between us, then fled through a tunnel. We caught up to him three weeks later. He was ancient for a human. Maybe two hundred, kept alive by vampires who paid in drops of blood because he was useful. He was known for his encyclopedic knowledge and unimpeachable character.”

“Shooting you seems pretty peachable.”

“To be fair, Hendrick cut him first. But before that incident, it was all fair dealing. But that’s not the interesting part.”

“I’m going to go ahead and beg to differ there.”

Skin flaked off of Soraya’s face, leaving behind two shiny scars where before there’d been only holes. That seemed like an improvement.

“When we found him, he didn’t look a day over fifty. Black streaks in thick hair that had been sparse and white. A spring in his step. He’d played tennis the night we found him.”

“How did you find him?” Kevin asked. He dropped to sit against the wall.

“His blood hadn’t changed.” Malcolm shrugged. “I’d gotten the scent, and Hendrick managed a taste before the poison got in the way. The informal term for these is blood pearls. They seem to stimulate regeneration.”

“Where do they come from?”

Malcolm shrugged. “Neither of us had heard of it before and we were in the business of knowing about things of value. Shrage had been told it would act like a fountain of youth and it hadn’t done anything for him. But the jeweler had researched it for a lifetime.”

“And it worked for him?”

“Not at first. But he knew what we did not. He found the person who’d made it and gave him some sob story. The next one worked for him. There are all kinds of rumors of vampires and humans miraculously healing each other, but most involve contact, not objects. Nobody I’ve met knows what they are or how they work.” His lie was smooth, but I felt it beneath the convincingly delivered words. I glanced at Kevin. Yeah, not the audience for sharing secrets of rare vampire treasures.

“What’s the official term for them?”

“There isn’t one. I’ve known hundreds of rare-goods dealers, and I’ve yet to find anything more than the occasional whisper of their existence.” His eyes searched my face, but I had nothing to give him. They were more of a mystery to me. “There’s no known cure for badly injured vampires, other than time and luck.”

“Luck,” Soraya rasped, grabbing all of our attention, “is not on our side.” Her eyes opened, slits through which no light shone.

“How are you?” Malcolm murmured, stroking her face.

“I imagine death…isn’t much worse…than this.”

The crystal had melted completely and her flesh had pinkened. That was probably a good sign.

“Oh, Sora.” Mal rolled up his sleeve and gently tipped her head back. “You need to drink now.” I looked away when he tore into his own wrist. My gaze remained stuck on her arm, and I startled when a trickle of blood ran from her whole flesh to the ruin below. It sank in, and for a second I thought my horror-movie-cured brain had imagined it. Then she screamed, and every hair on my body stood up. Malcolm held her tight, forcing her to continue feeding while her body rebuilt itself from the inside out.

“
W
e need to go
,” Malcolm said.

I pointed at Kevin without looking up from where I was sorting weapons and money on a sheet. “He’s going, too.”

“There’s no need to complicate things,” Mal said. “We’ll deal with him later.”

“He’s going.” Bronson wanted him back today and, after all this shit, I needed something good. Something positive.

“And why is that, Syd?”

I raised my head so that he could see that it was my conviction rather than a compulsion. His eyes narrowed as he worked it out.

“I hope you asked for something valuable in exchange.”

“I did.” I clipped a knife to my belt. “I’m going to procure us transportation.” I waved Thurston off when he showed me a bus schedule he’d picked up somewhere.

“Get something smooth,” Kevin said at the same time Mal said, “Get something old.”

And that’s how I ended up buying a rattly van with a panorama of a desert sunset—complete with a towering cactus menacing a mostly nude woman in a headband—painted along both sides. There were fewer delicate electronics in old vehicles, and this one had enough room to hold a bunch of blankets and pillows and other crap that would hopefully keep Mal’s energy from killing the thing before we got to Tenth World. The owner talked me up to twenty-five hundred bucks, but I got him to throw in a Journey 8-track and half a bottle of Febreze. So it was a pretty good deal.