Sealed with a Curse

Page 45

I didn’t bother with the elevator. When I saw the coast was clear in the foyer, I leaped down an entire story. I landed in a crouch in time to hear Taran’s increasingly panicked voice. “Celia Wird! Get your ass to the cardiac lab—now!”
My nursing shoes beat against the tile, moving so fast I tumbled into a skid and kept going as I turned into the hall leading to the lab. I burst through the double doors in time to hear, “Son of a bitch! The lab. You’re needed in the goddamn cardiac lab—”
My tigress eyes took in the scene at once. Bodies—lots of bodies—of nurses, doctors, and patients were scattered like crumpled trash around the tiled floor, over procedure tables, and along the steps leading up to the glass control room where the patient’s vital signs were closely monitored.
Taran had barricaded herself in the control room by welding one of the metal file cabinets to the door. She looked up from the microphone she’d been screaming into, her face red with fear and fury. She pointed to the giant oxygen tanks against the opposite wall. Calling her fire would have ignited the lab…and most of the hospital.
A pity, considering four infected vampires stuck to the glass like bottom-feeders.
Crap.
They pounded against the thick crackling glass in expensive suits and dress shoes. These freaks weren’t as sick. The tinge to their skins varied from fair to dark brown—but after fighting varying levels of bloodlust vampires over the last few days, my tigress had come to recognize the scent of their infection, no matter how subtle.
I crouched and ambled around one of the overturned tables. They hadn’t noticed me in their haste to get to Taran. I fell into a crawl. If I could sneak up through the middle, I could shift two into the tile and possibly hold off the others until Shayna and Emme arrived.
It sounded like a great plan. It might have worked if I didn’t hear a sniff followed by a stomp.
A set of loafers landed in front of me. My eyes skimmed up the legs to the voracious mouth, watching the vampire’s incisors lengthen and snap. He pointed to me and whispered, “magic” with the same enthusiasm I would say “cookies.”
Double crap.
He dove on me like a seasoned pro wrestler. I rolled out of the way, tearing through my scrubs and changing. The two vampires who decided to help their buddy paused at the sight of my three-hundred-and-fifty-pound beast. I hoped to intimidate them enough to think twice. They didn’t. They pounced on me, and the closest one bit hard into my neck, narrowly missing my jugular.
I swatted him off as Shayna appeared. She lifted an IV pole and transformed it into a long, sharp scythe. She spun with it, decapitating one vampire as I tore into the chest of another. Shayna and I scrambled to our feet. Two vampires left.
And one of them had Emme.
The vampire wrenched back Emme’s hair, exposing the straining cords of her neck. His thick arm held her tiny frame close to his body. “Mine,” he hissed.
No. She’s. Not! The roar from my chest rattled the instruments lining the metal stand behind me. My massive paws stepped forward; I was ready to pounce. The fourth vampire flopped like a fish out of water beside us, jerking from Taran’s bolts. He’d broken through the glass and reached in. His mistake.
My legs bent in a deep lunge; my tail flicked behind me. This bastard was hurting my sister, and I was going to make him bleed.
“Don’t, Celia,” Shayna whispered urgently. “He’ll break her neck.” Her hand disappeared behind her back, reaching for a metal clamp, shaping it into a dagger behind her.
A terrified whimper broke from Emme’s throat as silent tears of pain leaked down her chin. But it was the vamp who screamed.
He released Emme and spun. About eighteen different surgical instruments stuck out of his back like quills on a porcupine. Emme used her force to skewer him like a shish kebab. She wiped her eyes, refusing to watch as she drilled the instruments into her attacker’s back until he burst into ash. Shayna ran to her shaking form.
“He was too fast. I didn’t see him coming,” Emme cried.
“It’s okay, Emme. You got him. You’re safe now, dude.”
I changed back and used one of the metal tables to finish breaking through the glass to free Taran while Emme scrambled to heal all the limp bodies.
Taran’s blue-and-white mist surrounded the large cluster of victims as Emme slowly brought them back to consciousness. Taran paced in front of them as I commandeered a white lab coat from one of the docs and wrapped it around me. She kicked at a metal pan. “Shit, Ceel. How am I going to explain away this mess? If I tell them it was an exploding oxygen tank like I did last night, OSHA is going to shut our asses down.”
Taran had a point. Thank God there were no surveillance cameras in the wing. “I don’t care, just—” I froze as my eyes darted around the lab. “Where’s the other vampire?”
Shayna jumped and pointed to an open area. “He was just flopping right there a second ago.”
Shit.
My sisters and I scrambled out into the hall in time to see the doors leading out to the dock shut behind someone hauling ass.
No, no, no.
I bolted after him, only to see him disappear into the thinly wooded area behind the hospital. My sisters stumbled next to me, out of breath and jabbering away in a jumbled mess of anxious verbiage.
“Damn it, Celia. Where the hell did he go?”
I stared at the four-wheel-drive ambulance parked a few feet from where I stood. A cold sweat ran down the length of my bare back. I glanced at the woods, then back at the ambulance. We had to catch the vampire. And we had to do it now. But I didn’t like our only option. And, sweet Lord, I didn’t want to need it.
Taran tugged hard on my arm. “Celia. Celia. Damn it, are you listening?”
My voice echoed in my head. “We have to go after the vampire….”
Taran threw her hands in the air. “Yeah, well, no shit—”
I swallowed hard and looked at Shayna. “You’re going to have to drive.”
I only remember Shayna ever looking like that once. I was seven. She was five. It was Christmas. And Daddy had bounced into our tiny apartment dressed as Santa.
“Woo-hoo!” she screamed.
A snowstorm of swear words flew out of Taran’s mouth. Emme fell back against the cinder-block wall. “No, Celia, no,” she begged me. “Please don’t let her drive.”
Shayna rushed into the driver’s side without hesitation. Her head disappeared as she searched the cab. She jumped up, waving the keys at us. “Got ’em. Let’s roll.”
Taran swore again. I ignored her and jumped in the passenger side, dragging Emme with me.
Taran hopped in the back and pulled Emme between the seats with her. Taran was still swearing, but resolved to the fact that there was no other choice. We needed a vehicle that could cut through the thin section of woods and Shayna’s hyper-oh-my-God-we’re going-to-die speed.
Shayna adjusted the seat and mirrors in record time, starting the engine with a powerful roar. Taran released a ball of blue-and-white mist. It swerved out the window and into the forest, fixing on the vampire like a magnet to a set of jacks. And while Taran couldn’t track him by scent, the vampire’s magic remained close enough to draw her own power to it. Especially at the velocity we traveled. “Follow the bouncing ball,” she muttered.
Shayna rocketed around the trees well over eighty miles an hour. Bark and mud flew through the air, spraying the windows. My knuckles turned white from my grip on the “oh shit” bar, and my claws dug into the dash. Shayna’s eyes cut to me. “What’s wrong, dude? You seem upset.”
My hands trembled as they gripped harder. “Oh, I don’t know, dude. I’m half-naked in a stolen ambulance, chasing a lethal infected being back to his crib, where his entire family is probably waiting to eat us.”
Taran spoke behind me. “The she-wolf’s blood. It must have attracted the vampires, since the cardiac lab is next to the ED. I’m sure they fixed on my scent when they couldn’t find her.”
“Yeah!” I didn’t mean to scream. And I wouldn’t have had Shayna not careened over a small creek à la The Dukes of Hazzard. The entire ambulance landed in a skull-rattling thump. Shayna ignored the tires we blew to thunder into a field of ferns.
I glanced over my shoulder. Taran held tight to the bars welded into the sides of the ambulance. Her irises had turned white from the strength it took to work her magic as she banged to the beat of Shayna’s car ride from hell. “I can’t hold the track much longer, Ceel,” she muttered through clenched teeth.
And then she didn’t have to. My senses shot ahead of Taran’s magic ball. The vampire was in sight. He was fast. Shayna was faster.
I shrugged out of the doctor’s coat. “Get me close.” Shayna yanked the ambulance to the right with a hard jerk as the vamp abandoned the field and tried to disappear into the woods. I leaped out as my beast and tackled him into the tree. I pinned him into the trunk, hoping to get some answers. But when his fangs elongated and he went for my throat, I sliced my claws across his neck. He exploded in a mound of ash.
The back of the ambulance doors banged open and Taran and Emme fell out. Shayna tried to help them, but Taran jerked away from her. “You are the devil’s chauffeur! How the hell did you ever earn your goddamn license?”
Shayna frowned. “Why are you so mad? We got him, didn’t we?”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere with a busted stolen vehicle! Now what are we going to do? For shit’s sake, does anyone have a phone?”
“I left mine in my locker,” Emme mumbled, looking as green as Kermit’s backside.
Shayna dug into her back pocket and showed them her little box of toothpicks. “With everything that happened yesterday, I swapped my phone out for weapons.”
Taran slapped them out of her hands. “We need a phone. Or a working vehicle. Or a goddamn compass. Saving the world sucks donkey balls!”
Taran fell against the ambulance and took a deep breath. When she calmed, she retrieved Shayna’s toothpicks. “Sorry. I needed a moment.”