“Fuuuuck!” Ray said, summing things up. Right before he started shooting at the vamps and I got to my feet, fell down, got up and started wrestling the doors open to level fourteen. There was a stabbing pain in my left calf, my ankle kept trying to collapse on the other leg, and then a vamp jumped down.
Right on top of me.
He was riddled with damage from Ray’s bullets or shrapnel or whatever fighting had taken place before I got here. Or maybe all three. He was less a vampire at this point than a bunch of holes in the vague shape of a vampire, which didn’t stop him from sinking his teeth into my shoulder.
I grunted in pain, because it hurt like a bitch. And worse, that’s not an easy hold to break. The feeding instinct takes over as soon as they latch on, and the blood they drain gives them extra strength even as it weakens their victim.
Only that wasn’t happening this time.
The vamp raised his head after barely a second, looking vaguely puzzled, like I didn’t taste so good. Or like his body couldn’t process what he was sucking out of me when he was no longer, in any sense of the term, alive. He just didn’t know it yet.
I helped him out with that, slinging him against the concrete wall of the shaft, and then getting splattered with vamp parts when I shot him at point-blank range. I realized a bare second later that he wasn’t one of Slava’s, and that the splatter oozing down my face and cleavage wasn’t burning me to a cinder. But I screamed anyway, because I felt like it, and because it wasn’t like everybody didn’t already know where we were.
And all of them were probably going to be here any second.
I grabbed Ray’s arm. “Come on!”
And he tried. But he’d run out of ammo, and in the split second it took him to slam in a new clip, three more vamps dropped down the shaft, like dark bullets. They landed in a V formation, and the one in front grabbed Ray’s other arm and jerked back, stretched him between us.
Everybody froze.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Ray watched me with big eyes, but didn’t say anything. I finally found out what it takes to shut him up, I thought. And then I raised my gun an inch so it was aimed directly between his captor’s eyes.
“Stop three with one weapon?” the vamp asked. “That would be impressive.”
“Like your brains when I splatter them all over the wall.”
I’d suspected I wasn’t actually talking to the guy I was facing, who was looking a little, I don’t know, dead, for an animated conversation. But I was sure of it when he grinned. “Not mine, dhampir. You forget—I am not there. You won’t clip me this time.”
“This time? Do I know you?” Because I didn’t know many necromancers. And only one powerful enough to pull off something like this. But he was supposed to be as dead as the vamp I was facing, burnt to a crisp in a raging fire.
Or, you know, not.
It didn’t look like I was going to get confirmation, though. Because the necromancer just shook his puppet’s head. And the other two vamps did the same thing at the same time, like they were on a string.
So not really three pairs of eyes, then.
“No, no, none of that,” he tut-tutted. “Not that I expect you to get out of this, but you have proven to be…resilient. I think I shall save my explanations.”
“Well, that’s going to make this pretty boring.”
He grinned wider. “I do not think you will find it so.”
And yeah. Guy had the creepy-comments part of the villain thing down pat.
“But I did wish to thank you for letting us know where your uncle is hiding. He has proven elusive.”
I didn’t say anything, but that kind of clinched it. A decent number of people knew I was a dhampir, but damned few realized who my father was. Much less my uncle.
One did, though. One old, powerful necromancer did.
Because he’d last attacked me at Radu’s estate.
“He’s like that,” I said evenly.
“But now, I am afraid, our little game is over.”
“Might want to do a recount,” I told him. And dropped Ray’s hand.
“W-what are you doing?” Ray demanded as he was abruptly jerked against the vamp.
“Sorry.” I grabbed something out of my pocket. “But you know too much. I can’t let them have you.”
“Bullshit!” He stared at me, hurt and bewildered and mad as hell. “What are you—auggghh!”
He broke off in a genuinely terrified scream as I pulled my hand out of my pocket and threw something on the floor. Because I guess he didn’t know I was out of grenades, any more than the vamps did. They dove, scrabbling around in the trash, and I raised my gun—at the ceiling. And shot out the last support cable on the elevator.
There was no time to get out, no time to do anything but grab Ray, who was looking at me like I’d gone crazy. And jerk him back into the one safe place as the whole burnt-out, messed-up, bloody elevator car came crashing down around us like a ton of bricks—or two tons, since that’s what the thing weighed. The remaining part of the floor crushed the three puppets, even as the hole left Ray and me standing in the middle of a smoking ruin.
Staring at each other.
“What the hell did you throw?” Ray demanded after a moment.
“A spent cartridge.”
He just looked at me some more.
And then the bell dinged and the part of the doors that was still intact slid open.
On a bunch of very pissed-off vampires.
“It’s out of service,” Ray snarled, and blew one of their heads off.
He jumped out, but I was still in the hole, thanks to the shaft extending below door level.
Which made it hard to see faces but put me on a line with everyone’s legs. So that was what I targeted, shattering the kneecaps of every vamp I could see. And while normal vamps, much less masters, could have healed an injury like that on the run, these weren’t normal vamps anymore.
And they weren’t healing.
The horror-movie looks should have already clued me in on that, if my brain hadn’t been occupied with freaking out. They looked like they did because their bodies, once damaged, stayed that way. Which was the first piece of halfway good news I’d had, and which explained why they went down like ducks in a macabre shooting gallery.
And why I started to think we just might have a shot at this.
Until Ray screamed again. It wasn’t his usual panicked yelp, which I’d sort of gotten used to by this point. It was a full-on agonized shriek, maybe because two vamps had grabbed him and were doing their best to tear him apart.
I put a bullet in one vamp’s head, discovered that was the last in the .45 and pulled the shotgun. And found that it was empty, too. So I jumped up, grabbed a knife and drove it into the vamp’s shoulder.
Who didn’t so much let go as have Ray wrench away with the hand and arm still gripping him. A punch in the solar plexus had the vamp doubling over, an uppercut had him straightening up again and then a boot to the stomach had him flying back into several others. And then we were stumbling through a heavy steel door because there was nowhere else to go, and barring it behind us.
Ray collapsed to the floor, screeching, and I beat the damned arm off him with the barrel of my now useless weapon. And then looked around for something to trap the gory thing with. And saw a row of familiar-looking steel cabinets lining one wall.
How appropriate, I thought, pulling a drawer open and tossing the hideous thing inside. I slammed it shut and didn’t even hear it rattling around. Not too surprising—the front panel had to be a foot thick.
Nobody knew better than the Senate that “dead” is a malleable term.
“We’re in the morgue,” Ray said faintly, looking at the row of coolers with glazed eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Fitting,” he said, and tried to say something else, but got a mouthful of blood bubbles instead.
I jerked open his shirt, and yeah, he was messed up. Maybe because the damned vamp had bled all over him, and he’d been one of Slava’s boys, so the result was akin to having an acid bath. Or because he’d landed badly, tearing his leg open on something that had left a wound ten inches long.
He’d managed to close it, vampire healing being what it was. But he couldn’t replace the blood he’d lost, and he’d lost a lot. And now somebody was trying to cave in the door behind us and finish the job.
I ignored them and knelt beside him, having no time for my usual squeamishness. And shoved my arm under his nose. Not that it did any good, other than to have him give me another weird look, confused and hopeful and wary and shocked, all rolled into one. It made him look constipated.
“What are you waiting for?” I demanded.
“I—what?”
“Feed, damn it!”
He stared at my arm; he stared up at me. He didn’t move. “Why are you doing this?”
“I lost one partner this week. That’s my quota.”
“Partner?”
“Well, you said it. I make a lousy master.”
Ray just looked at me for another moment, and the constipated look got worse. And then his fingers closed over my forearm, slowly, delicately. “Yeah, well. I may have to rethink that,” he said, and began to pull.
He wasn’t biting, just pulling blood molecules directly through the skin. But I had to swallow and look away, not to show how much I really, really hated this. But I guess I didn’t do so great, because Ray started talking again. Only this time I didn’t mind so much.
“So I guess this makes me your sidekick, right?” he asked. “Like I could be…”
“Robin?”
He scowled. “I ain’t no Robin.”
“What’s wrong with Robin?”
“What’s wrong?” Ray rolled his eyes. “Two words: green Speedo. And he was lame. Batman was always having to save his ass.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Hey, I was doing okay before you showed up. All right?”
I decided not to comment on that, mainly because I hadn’t been doing any better. “So Robin’s out.”
