She does not belong here either. The rage was building, almost colorless in its intensity.
He did not quite realize he was growling until he turned a corner and came nearly face-to-face with a trio of mortals—two males, plus a female with strawlike pale hair. The central figure, ruddy-headed and jittering with nervousness, took one look at him and backpedaled, nearly pratfalling to bony posterior, and the inelegant squeak he let out might have been amusing in another time or place.
The other two, both wearing strange bleached cotton coats, froze in the eternal manner of prey. Their bodies knew before their minds, a sudden drift of glandular terror spreading in a haze—the faint tingling sensation in the wanderer’s eyes meant the killglow was upon his gaze, liquid crimson spreading and behaving as no light should, droplets rising upon invisible updrafts at the corners.
“Ohshit,” the man on the floor piped, in a choked whisper almost lost in the continued alarums. “It’s one of them, it’s a vamp, it’s a fucking sucker!”
The wanderer recognized that voice—he had heard it through a phone’s tinny earpiece, speaking ever so casually to sweet Simone; its timbre was also familiar from the hotel, wafting down the hall just before a leman was stolen.
Ah.The fractures of looming insanity twitched, and his fangs slid free. The two white-coated mortals screamed in oddharmony, one voiding its bladder in a hot gush, and then he was upon them.
Blood hit the back of his throat, jaw distended and teeth driven in. The claret was nearly tasteless, though it laved the thirst; oddly, the lack of flavor helped the wanderer focus, as it could never approach the nectar he longed for. He drank merely to replenish a day’s energy spent searching, dropping the male mortal the moment the body was drained, catching the female as she scrabble-clawed along the hard smooth wall in search of escape. A useless attempt, just like the red-haired one crab-scuttling on palms and heels, blindly retreating.
And upon all three was the very faintest ghost of fragrance. They had been in contact with his treasure, within the past hour.
“Oh please,” the copper-furred male squealed. “Ohplease ohplease Janie,I didn’t mean it?—”
Too late. The wanderer was upon him then, draining the mortal in a few casual gulps. The cargo of nourishment made the pull of his fledgling strengthen, tugging relentlessly. Now he was replete, though he should take more to feed his prize when he found her. What state would she be in, brought to this place and enduring an entire day of torment? While he had languished and lingered, betraying his only purpose—to guard what he had taken.
A chatter of gunfire erupted in the near distance, echoing through overlapping tunnel-throats. A faint note underneath the pulse and the annoying screech was something else, and the wanderer’s nerves caught fire afresh with recognition.
Now he heard other things as he dropped the skinny male, licking the last traces absently; his skin would absorb splashed nutriment as well. No urge to glut, merely the imperative to find her, to aid his leman—for the song of her killgrowl was as music to him.
Between himself and that melody was the pattering of mortal feet, the soft confusion of mortal pulses, and a high, dizzying aroma of exquisite fear.
Good.One clear, cold thought, flotsam upon the whirling maelstrom.You should scream, and run, for you tried to hide her from me.
He streaked into motion, and two junctions later he found the source of the footsteps, a tide of animals far less wholesome than those he had freed.
Claws out, eyes shining with a red haze, he plunged through them as a flame through paper cutouts, tracing the flow to its source.
CHAPTER 27
Terrible to hurtother vampire hunters, really, but her body didn’t care. If they just wouldn’t shoot at her, she’d leave them alone?—
That’s a lie, Simone. Because even if bullets hadn’t spattered against the floor, whining crazily and striking sparks, ricochets plowing into the crush near the door where other hunters—or maybe security, since now there was an additional group, men in regular ol’ tactical without the chain neck-wraps and wearing silverX-OLbadges instead—were still trying to get through, the smell was there.
Blood. Fresh, sweet human blood.
Its fragrance cut through everything else, even the remaining zoolike stink, and hit the back of her throat like a runaway semi, lighting a fuse all the way down her spine, yanking her arms and legs with terrible easy fluidity. As if she hadn’t been shot full of poison, as if she hadn’t been hung up like a bargain-basement imitation crucifix, as if she was no longer tired, or afraid, or uncertain.
She landed in the knot of men near the elevator, her nose twitching as it filled withmale, sweat, gun oil, live fire, her left-hand claws sending a burst of pain up to jolt in her savagely stretched shoulder as they skittered across the body armor’s ceramic plates. Down into a crouch, then, before she erupted as one tried to swing his rifle-butt at her. Throwing both arms and her right leg out, each limb hitting with a solidcrack. Three bodies went flying, more bullets spewing crazily for the ceiling, and a chip flicked against her cheek. Concrete, metal, ricochet fragment, she didn’t know or care; Simone was already on the hunter who seemed to have the most presence of mind, since he’d tried to hit her and now was struggling in a slow blundering human way to level the rifle.
Fury filled her. The fact that he was just a guy doing a job, a fellow bounty-collector, didn’t matter. It was always the same, fuckingmen, even if you were on their side they’d lash out. All they saw was a pair of tits, an innie instead of an outie, and that made it all right to do whatever they wanted.
Pow. He crumpled, thrown back against the slowly closing elevator doors, and a warped jangling echoed from inside the luxuriously carpeted box. Sparks flew, different than those wrung free by humming bullets. Simone turned neatly on forefoot, her hair lifting as she spun; her childhood longing for ballet lessons was a sweet strong nostalgic pain.
Funny, the things you think of. Her hands flashed out again, tearing the chainmail from a stocky blond man’s throat; he had three bluish teardrops tattooed on his left cheek. Vamp kills, maybe, and as her claws slid through human flesh it wasn’t the same as killing a bloodsucker, no indeed. No wet rot turning into gleaming dust but a hot spray of deliciousness she tore herself away from almost as soon as the first droplets sprang free, since the men at the door had suddenly begun firing through the crowd.
The cacophony took on yet another dimension, screams turning hellish instead of merely terrified. Along with the sweet,sweet burst of shining blood came a darker, fouler tinge—bowel-cut effluvia, urine-stink, the brassy stench of death.
This is my life now. Well, she’d made a complete fucking hash of the human one, maybe she should try really being a vamp. What had being restrained, being polite, beinggoodever gotten her?
Tables shattered, glass disintegrating, a thin blue jet of flame spurting from a nozzle—maybe the blowtorch deciding to work on its own, maybe something else? The bullets were bees, humming to shred anything softer than concrete, various substances spilling and mixing, caustic clouds rising, fluorescing to vamp sight as bits of lead and glowing metal plunged through their hearts.
She could have slowed down, watched every chemical interaction and reaction with interest, but the streams of fire were converging and she knew they were using the real ammo, the stuff supposed to bleed a vamp dry in seconds flat, and the moment Simone stepped into one of those chattering metal rivers she would lose more than just a bit of skin.
Then the world shifted, turned over, paused in its steady path through space.