Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (30 page)

Tiens’ eyes glowed in the dim yellow light from the bedside

lamp. “Charming.”

246

Fuck you
. Liana dropped the towel on her pile of dirty clothes, picked up her clean shirt and shrugged into it. Her skin tingled with chill, the room was barely heated. The long thin scars on her buttocks and side twitched; Tiens drew in a sharp breath. Goody for me.
 
I’ve surprised him
.

“What is that?”

Liana sighed, buttoned up her shirt, pulled on her panties and stepped into her jeans.  The leather patches were dark from chem-washing. She dropped into a rickety chair and pulled her socks on, laced up her boots and double-knotted them. “Just a demon.” And a very, very close call.
 
Closer than you would ever believe
.

The walls between Hell and the world were so thin now, and it took so little for a demon-trained magus to break them.  The only trouble was, she had little control over what came through  –  and the name she used to make the walls thin down to transparency was the name of a demon the new Prince of Hell wither feared . . . or wanted to punish.

“M’sieu  –” Tiens began.

“Don’t you
 
dare
 
tell Jaf. If I’m going to be helping you, you  don’t get to go carrying tales to him. He’s got enough to worry  about and it’s not his fucking business anyway. Clear?”

“I cannot  –” His throat moved as he swallowed, and a nasty

gleam of satisfaction lit in Liana’s chest.

“If you can keep what almost happened between us a secret,  you can also keep a little bit of lost skin to yourself.” She fingercombed her dark hair, then began braiding it back with quick  motions. “Now, if we can get down to business. What does this  Nichtvren look like? I don’t want to kill the wrong one.”

247

“Female. Dark. Very young.” He made a restless movement

as she tied off her braid.  “I will be there to meet her, and her

thralls  ”–

“How many?”
 
You didn’t say anything about thralls before,

dammit
.

“I do not know. All I know is that she will arrive, and God

help me afterwards.”

This just keeps getting better
. “Anything else you want to tell me, Tiens?”
 
If I was my mother right now I’d be kicking your ass. But, I’m just me, and I don’t even know why I’m doing this
.

Her heart turned into a heated bubble inside her chest.
 
I’m lying. I know why. Because once I do this, we’re even and I can leave again
 
.

He rose slowly, and Liana dropped her eyes. Her left hand shot out and closed around her katana, which was leaning against a spindle-legged table that passed for furniture only in the most charitable of senses. She dragged it closer to her  like a lifeline.

The air turned hard, tensing, and Tiens halted a bare two

feet from her.

This is your honour, Lia. It must never touch the ground
.  Dante’s voice, from the very first time a ten-year-old Liana had touched a sword.

The first time she had  known what made her different, and

only human.

248

“I could say I am sorry, and that I wish I had chosen  otherwise. But you would not believe me, since I need your  help.” A slight sound of moving fabric, and he leaned down, his  warmth  –  he must have fed, blood or sex providing the  metabolic kick to fuel his preternatural muscles  –  brushing her  cheek. “And have committed the sin of
 
asking
 
for it, as well.  Tell me, if I asked for that offer again, if I begged and said you  were right, would you bare your throat to me?”

His lips almost touched her cheek, his breath a warm dampness, flavoured with night and oddly enough, a little bit of mint.
 
He must have brushed his fangs
. She pushed down hysterical laughter at the thought, her body stiffening, remembering soft kisses and murmurs, the feel of his fingers over her damp, young, mortal flesh. Air caught in her throat, let out in a sipping gasp, and her right hand twitched towards the katana hilt.

Tiens retreated, blinking out of existence and reappearing across the room. Two inches of steel gleamed, glowing blue with spidery runes, the dappled reflection against cheap wallpaper giving the entire room an aqueous cast.

“And she reaches for a knife, to make her lover disappear.”  Tiens let out a sound that might have been a laugh. The walls  groaned sharply under the lash of his voice, a sound she  remembered from childhood, the physical world responding to a

more-than-human creature’s temper.

“You aren’t my lover, Tiens. You made that very clear  ” – the sword slid back home with a click and an effort that left her  sweating  “–  five years ago.”
 
Five years, two months, fourteen  days. Should I count up the hours too? But I’ve changed. Living  down south where life is cheaper than a bottle of soymalt-40  will do that to you
.

249

“Does this mean you will not aid me against my enemy?”  He stuffed his hands in his pockets, for all the world like a  juvenile delinquent on a holovid show.

Isis, save me
. Liana shrugged. “I’m here and I already  bought more ammo. It would be a shame not to use  it.”

Private transport docks radiated out from the main transport well servicing the west half of Saint City, and this one was a long, sleek, black metal tongue extending out into infinity. Liana hugged the shadows at the end of the bay, wishing she could use a plasgun. If she could outrun the blast when a plasfield interacted with reactive paint on the underside of a hover, she could just blow this Amelie bitch up and not stop running until  Saint City was a smudge on the horizon behind her.

And if wishes were noodles, nobody would starve
 
.

Tiens stood at the end of the dock, the orange glow of city light and freeplas tinting his pale hair and now-wrinkled suit.  Liana’s left hand hovered, touched the butt of her plasgun, then returned to the 9 mm Smithwesson projectile gun. Hollowpoint

armour-piercing  ammo; hopefully she could bleed the Nichtvren  out in short order  –  if she could
 
hit
 
her, that is. She wasn’t a  preternatural crack shot like Dante, didn’t have Dante’s grace or  unthinking berserker speed. Seeing her foster-mother fight was  like seeing fire eat petroleum fumes. Human reflexes could only  do so much, and Nichtvren were dangerous.

How many thralls is she going to have
 
? Miserable acid boiled in Liana’s stomach.
 
I have a really bad feeling about this
.

So why am I doing it? Because I have to (the oldest reason

in the world). What am I trying to prove? Only that I can
.

250

A sleek, silver hover detatched itself from the traffic-holding pattern overhead and dived gracefully, gyros making a faint whining  as its underside swelled with frictionless reactive paint. The whine of antigrav rattled Liana’s back teeth, crawled inside her skull and stayed there.
 
I wonder if he got my message.  I wonder if he’s even in town. I wonder if he’ll show up. He could always find me, he said
. Her heart decided to complete the fun and games by hammering up into her throat, bringing the taste of sour copper with it.
 
I wonder if now’s the time we’re going to test that statement
.

The hover was combat  –  and mag  –  shielded. It nosed up to the dock as Tiens stepped back a single pace, his shoulders slumping. Liana didn’t scan it  –  whoever was in there would be able to feel her attention, and that would go badly all the way around.

The hover’s main passenger hatch dilated, antigrav  reachinga whining peak and receding as systems shut down. Liana’s fingers touched the plasgun’s hilt again. If she squeezed off a shot . . . but Tiens was right there, too.

Do I care
 
?

She drew the projectile gun, smoothly, slowly. There would be no glint off the barrel, this catwalk was too deep in industrial gloom. Four escape routes, one of them straight down and onto another slim grating hanging out over space.

This isn’t good
. She watched Tiens, his shoulders bowing under an invisible force, as two  small lights gleamed, down low, in the shadowed hatch.
 
What the hell
?

It couldn’t be a Nichtvren. If it was, it was a joke and not a good one. It was the kind of joke immortal beings play on humans without thinking of horrific consequences just because they can.

251

The little girl wore a blue gingham frock and shiny red patent-leather shoes. Her hair hung in carefully coiffed ringlets and her feral little face caught a random reflection of light, filling with the stray gleam like a dish with milk. She had asharp little nose, plump cheeks, dark eyes like coals with the dust of centuries over them. Her aura swirled once, counter-clockwise, and ate the deep bruising that was Tiens on the landscape of power whole, enfolding him.

You didn’t tell me she was a goddam nine-year-old, Tiens
.  Her mouth was dry and as slick as glass. Liana sighted as the blond Nichtvren went to his knees. There was no way even such a creature as old and powerful as him could fight whatever was in that little-girl body.
 
Isis save me. She’s got to be ancient. At least a Master, maybe as strong as the Prime  –  though I just saw the Prime that once. Scary fucker he was, too
 
.

Her hand tightened, the hammer clicking up as the trigger eased down. Their voices drifted up to her, some archaic language  –  maybe Old Franje, mellifluous and accented. Tiens, with a ragged, breathless edge to these words  Liana had never heard before; the other Nichtvren in a sweet bell-like tone over a sucking whirlpool of something candy-sweet and rotten.

The little  girl stepped forwards, her shoes glittering like polished rubies in the backwash of landing lights. Tiens crumpled and a low sound of agony scarred the night. He sounded like something red-hot had just been rammed into his belly, his body curving over to protect violated flesh.

Let him suffer. God knows I suffered enough
.

And yet, she’d taken the job.
 
This is your honour, Lia. It

must never touch the ground
.

252

The thing was, the ground kept moving. Liana squeezed the

trigger.

The bullet flew true, and half of the little girl’s head evaporated. She toppled backwards, and Liana was already moving, her hand slapping the guard rail as she vaulted, a moment of weightlessness before her boots thudded onto the catwalk below.
 
Move, move, move
 
!

The world exploded  turning over, metal screeching as it tore under a lash of razor-toothed Power. She fell, cart-wheeling through space, the catwalk peeled back like so much spun sugar, and she landed
 
hard
, the gun skittered from her grasp as something snapped like greenwood  and a wave of sick agony spilled down her left ribs.

A molasses-slow eternity of rolling to bleed momentum left  Liana, hyperventilating, on the cold metal of the dock, her arms and legs twisted oddly and something wet and sticky dripping in her eyes. Firefly points of light streamed through the dark sky,the traffic patterns of both the freight and passenger hovers trembling on the edge of coherence for a moment before darkening as something bent over her. Left arm useless, a bar of lead, right arm still  working, fingers against a leather-wrapped hilt and the sword rising as every muscle in Liana’s body screamed. It was an arc of silver, a solid sweep of metal, and it sank into the side of the little-girl Nichtvren’s scrawny neck with a sound like an axe hitting hardwood.

Isis save me, this is going to hurt in a moment
. The pain turned red and rolled over her as blood sprayed, impossibly red, a tide of stinking copper death.

And the little-girl Nichtvren screamed something no doubt filthy in her mother tongue, claws springing free of her delicate childish fingers, half her dress soaked with bright claret from the swiftly rebuilding ruin of her skull. Other noises intruded under

253

her screeching  –  a tide of roars and screams, the sound of a  projectile rifle stuttering on automatic, howls of pain and at least  one spiralling death scream.

Then it happened, the way it always did.

Time stopped.

Liana’s bloody hand gleamed, slick and wet, the ring’s shine lost under liquid. A pinprick of green flared in the gem’sdepths, opened like a hover’s fisheye hatch, spat a single spark that turned black as it imploded. Emerald light crawled through the widening aperture, sending vein-like traceries through the coating of blood, and flared to cover Liana’s right hand in a

supple, metallic glove of green light.

Strength like wine jolted up her arm, spilled down into her chest, burned  fiercely  in her broken left humerus, pulled Liana to her feet as if she were a puppet, the strings tied to flexible fingers that bent in ways no  human’s should. Green flame crawled like liquid oil down her fingers, mixing uneasily with the blue glow of runes in the depths of blessed steel, and threaded through the small female body that was even now screeching, thrashing with flesh and Power both,  metal crumpled and thin trickles of hot blood tracing down from  Liana’s ears.