“Bindy,” Duval said mildly, and she moved back from Marty with a cat’s grace. She squatted by his feet, mouth and lips and tongue still engorged. Her teeth had slashed her top lip, and a faint track of blood ran down both sides of her mouth. There wasn’t much.
“You want to stay alive, don’t do that again,” Duval said.
“Maybe I don’t,” Marty said, glaring at the monstrous Bindy.
“She squealed when I killed her,” Bindy said, the words strange coming from her alien mouth.
“Bindy. Please.” Duval grabbed Marty by the hair and lifted him, and it was all he could do not to squeal himself. The vampire propped him on his feet then shoved him forward. “Room twenty-seven. Find it.”
Almost time, Marty thought. I’ll be found out soon. He walked along the corridor, checking room numbers by the pale illumination from night-lights as he went. At the end was a set of double doors, and he marched through them without pause. Whatever was on the other side, let it be. He hoped Rose was there, and maybe Lee with some of his guns, but there was no one, just another dark corridor perpendicular to the one they were on.
The doors were numbered even and odd on either side, like house numbers on a long, straight street. They soon reached number twenty-seven, and Marty paused outside.
“The door’s—”
Duval shoved the door. Its frame cracked and the door burst inward, and he walked through with barely a pause. Bindy nudged Marty inside and turned the light on behind him.
The room was twice the size of the floor area of his burnt-down house. There were eight walkways, and on either side of each, storage shelving held boxes and bags, some numbered, others seemingly placed at random. The shelving reached the underside of the service ceiling, above which pipes and wires snaked in all directions. To the left of the door was a large table and several chairs, and on the table was a set of sorting shelves with three dozen pigeonholes. The table’s surface was smeared with dust and grit, and the remnants of a shredded piece of string.
“It’ll take forever,” Marty said.
“Not that long,” Duval whispered. And he turned on Marty.
That’s it, he thinks it’s here, he’ll kill me now and—
But Duval had other plans. “You can join us,” he said. “I’m about to become the most powerful vampire on the planet. We’ve lost some, and we need to replace.”
“Are you bullshitting me?”
“No,” Duval purred, and Marty could see that he wasn’t. He was filled with revulsion, sickness rising into his mouth. He swallowed, wincing at the burning sensation in his throat, and spat.
“Fuck you, freak,” Marty said.
“We’ll see.” Duval surveyed the room for a moment, then started searching for the Bane, pulling boxes from the shelves and upending them on the floor, kicking through the contents, moving on to the next.
For a moment, Marty wanted to blurt out his deception, make the toothed fucker realize he’d been duped. It would be a sweet moment of petty vengeance. But then the time lost in searching here would be made up again… and he could not afford that. He had to give Rose and the others as long as he could.
As if in answer to that thought, gunfire rattled in the distance, reminding him of the police station slaughter. Duval didn’t even pause in his search. Bindy smiled at Marty before starting to look as well, and he realized that it was she who would turn him in the end.
Joining them had not been an invitation.
Rose ran behind a plinth, ducking low as bullets scarred shards of granite from the other side, UV light banging from her hip. When the shooting paused, she made a dash for a wide arch leading into the next hall, but realized the shooter’s intention as the firing commenced again. They weren’t out of bullets at all.
The bullets caught her across the left hip, shattering the light and driving her against the wall. The impact knocked a fire extinguisher from its mount and she tried running again. Another burst took her across the chest. She slid motionless to the floor, analyzing the pain, curious at the sensation rather than panicked. She had never been shot before.
She could feel each hot bullet folded in the grip of her cool flesh. Two in her side, three in her chest, each of them a distinct star in the cold vacuum of her undead body, and she already sensed her vampire flesh starting to fill in around them. Two of the rounds in her chest had ricocheted from her ribs, one passing through her right lung and lodging against her spine. Cracked ribs fused. Shredded lung tissue closed together. She writhed slightly, uncomfortable now rather than in any kind of agony, and stared across the floor as the figure approached.
It was a woman, tall, clad in black leather and cradling a very big gun. As she walked, she ejected the magazine and inserted another clumsily, having to pause and prop the gun’s stock against the floor to do so. She was breathing hard and fast, and her scent gave off a sexual excitement. It also spoke of her addiction, currently being fed; stale sweat and the rankness of bad, chemical-filled blood.
The woman stood again, and Rose tensed to move. The instant the barrel came around for the head shot, she would be on her. A quick snap of the neck, and then away. No blood. No feeding.
But the woman seemed to appreciate the melodrama of the moment, because she wanted to talk first.
“How’s that feel, bloodsucker?”
Rose chuckled, a noiseless grumble deep in her chest.
“Funny?”
“You? Yeah.”
The woman stopped five steps away and aimed at Rose’s stomach. “I blow your guts out, you won’t be laughing then, eh?”
“I like the leathers. Very Underworld.”
A quick burst into Rose’s stomach, three bullets, and at this range they passed right through. She groaned and rolled in fake pain—that’s what the woman wanted, after all—but in reality the impacts had felt little more than punches. They did not wind her, because she had no breath.
“Oh, yeah,” the woman sighed, shifting her weight back and forth from one leg to the other.
“Getting off on this?” Rose asked.
“Believe it.”
“What did they promise you?”
“Everything. All the things you weaklings are too afraid to be. You’ve got the fucking world at your fingertips, and—” As the woman talked, the gun barrel drifted until it was pointing at Rose’s throat, and that was that.
Rose threw herself from the wall, a shadow through the air, knocking the gun aside and straddling her attacker as she fell onto her back. The weapon clattered across the polished floor. The woman’s wide, startled eyes rolled slightly as her head struck hard, and when she brought a knife up in her left hand, Rose snapped it at the wrist, twisting her hand three times until it came off with a wet, grinding noise. The woman’s mouth opened, the pain so bright that the scream was locked in shock.
Rose grabbed the woman’s ponytail and pulled her up, bending, mouth open, tugging the bound hair down now so that her pale throat was exposed—
The suit’s startled eyes, involuntary sexual excitement, that gush of living blood that had come to mean so much…
Rose held back. The hunger was rich and burning, every fiber of her body craving the warm rush, but something in her altered mind still gave her pause. Something, she supposed, that maintained a portion of her humanity. The Humain part of her.
The woman whined. She was actually smiling. “Holy shit, you poor deluded bitch,” Rose said. She rested the back of the woman’s neck on her free arm and pulled hard on the ponytail, snapping her spine. The woman tensed for a second, then her whole body fell loose.