Death's Mistress

Page 20

My every instinct said attack, but my instincts always say that. And right now it wouldn’t be smart. On my own, two was doable, even two masters. But I wasn’t on my own. And a fight would allow the rest of the family time to zero in on our location.
There was some muffled foul language from the duffel. I gave it a poke. “Settle down!”
“Let me out! I’m suffocating in here!”
“You don’t have lungs.”
“I’m going to puke in this thing.”
“You don’t have a stomach, either,” I told him, steering the body over to the wall. I unzipped the bag and a big nose popped out. “Gah! What the hell have you been carrying in this thing?”
“It’s my gym bag.”
“It smells like something died in here!”
“If we don’t get out of here soon, something might,” I told him grimly. “The main exits are guarded. Tell me you’ve got a secret way out.”
“Do you have any idea what those cost?”
Of course. I would decide to kidnap the only vamp dumb enough to skimp on the necessities. “A back door, then!”
“There’s a courtyard behind the bar, but it’s just a space between buildings. There’s no exit that way.”
“There’s about to be.”
We booked it back across the club, wove through the five-person-thick crowd around the bar and pushed through a door. The storeroom proved to be a claustrophobic brick rectangle, with no windows and only a narrow aisle between shelves. But a small breeze drifted through a slightly ajar back door.
I pushed it open and found myself in a narrow courtyard containing broken pallets, bags of garbage and a couple cats. Their eyes glowed at me for an instant before they scampered up a fire escape to safety. On every side, buildings rose tall and dark, hemming us in, as Ray had said. The shortest was three stories, and while I might have scaled it on my own, I couldn’t do it towing a half-dead vampire.
It looked like the only way out was the one the cats had taken.
I tugged on the pull-down ladder, wondering how I was going to get Ray’s well-padded ass up four flights. And then I wondered if I’d get him up at all when the structure shrieked in protest and refused to budge. Decades’ worth of rust clung to my hands and sent a cloud of red flakes into the air. The ladder probably hadn’t been touched since the building was erected, maybe a century ago.
It finally came down, but it wasn’t wide enough for me to haul anybody up alongside me, and I doubted it would hold the weight of two adults anyway. So I sent the body up first. Its coordination was about what you’d expect for someone without a head, and it didn’t help that the stairs shuddered with every step. But amazingly, they looked like they might hold.
Of course, the universe wasted no time in punishing me for that nanosecond of optimism. Halfway up the second landing, a scream of overstressed metal echoed around the courtyard and a hail of old bolts came rattling down. The fire escape tore away from the building on one side and sagged out into the air.
The body stopped, quivering in fear, and one look at Raymond’s face showed why. The two parts were obviously in some sort of communication, or it wouldn’t have been able to move. But the only thing being communicated at the moment was terror.
So I slapped him.
Furious blue eyes swiveled up to mine. “Wasn’t beheading me enough?”
“Move. Or you’re going to be headless permanently,” I hissed.
Ray’s eyes swung back to his body, which had slumped over like the corpse it was, causing my jacket to begin to slide off. I moved forward to catch it, and thereby narrowly missed being skewered by a spear of metal that fell off the building. It took out the awning over the back door instead, crumpling the heavy aluminum like paper before slamming into the paving stones.
Ray gave a startled yelp, but the near miss got his body moving again. And this time, he wasn’t messing around. Freedom was a few steps away, and he went for it, taking the last few flights with the fire escape collapsing under him. He leapt into the air on its final shudder and grabbed the edge of the roof next door, dangling there precariously.
I didn’t wait around to find out if he made it. Rusted metal rattled down the old bricks and exploded against the paving stones, flinging shrapnel everywhere. Along with it went a crashing cacophony of sound loud enough to wake the dead—and that included the dead searching for us.
Chapter Eleven
Grabbing the duffel, I headed back across the courtyard at a run, leaping over fallen pieces while trying to dodge the ones still raining down. Something hit my right shoulder like a hammer blow, but I couldn’t waste time seeing how bad it was. I charged back through the storeroom and burst through the door—just in time to see half a dozen vamps converging on it.
I ducked back inside and slammed it behind me. It was sturdy old oak—probably a relic from the club’s original incarnation as a factory—but that would buy us seconds at best. Maybe they hadn’t seen us, I thought hysterically, before doing a Ray and throwing the lock.
“Did you see that?” Raymond sounded vaguely awed. “Did you see what I did?”
“What’s on the other side of this wall?” I asked breathlessly.
“I was like… like Superman or something! I almost flew—” He broke off as the door shuddered under a heavy blow. So much for hoping they hadn’t seen us.
“Ray! I need to know—”
“My office is next door. Why?”
“You’re going to need to redecorate.” I pulled a wad of explosive putty out of one of the duffel’s side compartments and worked to get the wrapping off.
“What’s that?”
“Something I planned to use on the portal.” It was the latest thing, specifically designed to use an energy sink’s own power against it. But it ought to do a pretty good job on the wall, too. I tore off a small piece and slapped it in place.
Ray stared at it, his small eyes wide. “Are you kidding me? This is an old building. You’ll bring it down on our heads!” He paused for a moment. “And that’s all I got left!”
“I’m not using that much,” I told him, tugging my jacket back on for protection. I retreated to the other side of the room, threw up an arm to shield my face and pulled my Glock—only to have a leg smash through the bottom half of the door and kick it out of my hand.
So I grabbed my backup Smith & Wesson and emptied a clip into the vamp, but other than shredding the guy’s trousers, it didn’t have much effect. His flesh absorbed the bullets like water before forcing them out again, the wounds closing almost as soon as they were formed. He was obviously a master; all I was doing was pissing him off.
As he demonstrated by shooting a basketball-sized hole in the top of the door. For once, I didn’t feel like complaining about my lack of height. If I’d been a couple inches taller, Raymond wouldn’t have been the only one missing a head.
And then a cascade of bullets from a machine gun came through the hole, kind of negating the height advantage. Raymond was screaming, despite the fact that I’d hit the cement floor in front of the door, flattening us out. That didn’t stop the stream of bullets, but it allowed me to reach through the hole in the door, grab our attacker’s leg and pull.
He hit the floor, and I jerked him through the opening. I’d pulled a stake out of my jacket, but I didn’t need it; one of the tough old pieces of the splintered door did the job for me. Another vamp yanked him back out, using his body to snap off the remaining shards, and slid through the cleared gap as quick as if he’d been oiled.
I’d hopped back to my feet, but he used the shotgun he’d brought along to sweep my legs out from under me. He tried to bring the butt down on my head, but I jerked aside, got a foot in his sternum and shoved. He staggered into the far wall, and I dove for my Glock. My hand closed on it just as I heard the distinctive sound of a shotgun cock. I looked up to see it leveled on me, and the vamp grinning.
“Mine,” he told the others, who were jockeying for position at the new porthole in the door. He noticed my little gun and his lip curled. He spread his arms wide. “Go ahead,” he told me. “Give it your best shot.”
So I did.
A second later I had a room full of smoke, a jacket coated with vampire bits and a three-foot fissure in the bricks. The bullet had passed through the center of the vamp’s chest and hit the patch, setting off the equivalent of half a stick of dynamite. I glanced at the remaining vamps, who were gaping at my weapon. “Okay. Size doesn’t always matter.”
They didn’t say anything, and nobody made any attempt to open the door. I snatched up the duffel and scrambled through the hole, ignoring the edges that tore at my flesh. And belatedly noticed white tile, bathroom stalls and a woman with a jagged line of lipstick running from her mouth to her ear.
“Oops,” Raymond said.
The woman stopped staring at the hole to stare at my duffel instead. “Th-there’s something sticking out of your bag.”
I looked down to see a by now familiar nose poking out the side. Damn it, he’d bitten a hole through the nylon. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s right there!”
“One too many, huh?” I sympathized, pushing Raymond back inside.
“I don’t drink.”
“Well, maybe you should start!” Raymond yelled, as I burst out into the hall. “I gotta make a living here!”
There was more smoke outside, of the fake variety usually seen on Halloween boiling out of plastic skulls and jack-o’-lanterns. It allowed the laser light show to cut ominous blue flashes through the darkness and ensured that I couldn’t see a damn thing. But the sense that allows me to tell when a vampire is near doesn’t need sight. It’s like a tidal pull in the blood, forceful and elemental. And at the moment, it was shaking me harder than the bass line throbbing under my feet.
The place was crawling with vamps, even more than before. It looked like Cheung had called in some backup. And wasn’t that just all I needed?