“Where to begin… ?” he said.
15
“WHAT THE FUCK WAS that?”
Lee was dragging a box from the back of the third tier of shelving when the howl filled the room. He felt it deep inside, caressing his spine and ribs, setting his hair on end and chilling his balls.
Connie and Patrick shared a glance. “We don’t have long,” Connie said.
Lee let go of the box and pulled his guns. They felt good and heavy, grips backed with rubber to cushion against their heavy recoil. He’d read about these .454 rounds stopping a buffalo, and he couldn’t wait to see what they did to a bloodsucker’s face.
Patrick stared at him from across the room, where he was still standing by the door and listening for danger. “Put them away,” he said. “Keep looking. Something happens, I’ll give you time to draw your toys.”
“This toy could take your skull apart.”
“How good’s yer aim, human? How steady’s yer hand.”
Lee laughed, holstered his guns and started searching again. He trusted Patrick that much, at least. If and when the vampires hit this room, he’d have prior warning while the Irish Humain took them on, time at least to draw his guns and get off a few good shots. Body shots first, hopefully, to blast out their spines so that they couldn’t move anymore. Then the head shot.
He dragged a box out and emptied its contents across the floor. They’d stopped trying to search quietly, ceased the orderly hunt, because with the noise going on elsewhere in the building it was only a matter of time before they were found. Lee had thought about why the vampires hadn’t reached this room already, and there was only one explanation: Marty had lied to them about where the Bane was. If Richards had told him the right room number, he’d managed to keep it from the vampires, the consequences of which would be dire for him. He admired the kid’s guts. He felt close to the kid. They were the only humans involved in all this, apart from those scumbag servants the vampires had taken to themselves. And “human” wasn’t a name he’d honor them with.
Even Stella Olemaun.
“Fuck it,” he said again. It was becoming a refrain, and for some foolish reason it brought a trace of comfort. Fuck it. Fuck everything. He couldn’t let what had happened affect what would happen, however much he’d been deceived, lied to, and manipulated. And really, the Humains had only used him for purposes he’d support, hadn’t they?
Kicking through the box’s contents, he saw nothing that might be the Bane, or contain it. He moved on to the next shelf. Connie was drawing closer, and soon they’d meet in the middle of the room, searching the last shelving stack together, reaching the final box, and if nothing came to light, then they’d have to assume the Bane wasn’t here at all… or they’d missed it.
From Ashleigh Richards’s archived blog, he’d gleaned only the vaguest of descriptions: damned round thing.
Next box.
Through Assyria, into Greek and Roman sculpture, and Rose saw a fleeting shadow disappearing into a stair area. She followed, the smell of blood bringing her up short. A guard lay dead at the feet of a Greek god, taken apart like a lion’s kill.
“Rose,” Francesco said. He grabbed her arm and ran on, but she’d seen the way he looked at her. He knows. He can sense the blood on my breath. But that didn’t matter right then.
They descended two flights of stairs, Francesco swinging around the junction without pause. It was too late for care or caution. This was a running fight now, with the Bane as prize for whoever reached the end first. Rose hoped that Marty had not got in the way already, but she knew it was a vain hope. Even if they had kept him alive upon arrival, once they had the Bane they’d have no purpose for him anymore. He’d die. Or maybe they’d turn him, to replace one of those she and the Humains had killed.
She would do whatever she could to stop either possibility, but if it was a choice of two, she would give him death.
At the bottom of the stairs they emerged into a junction of three corridors. Francesco faced one corridor, turned, took a few steps along another. Rose scanned the floor for any trace of the vampires’ presence, trying to sense which way they had gone, where they had disturbed air in their passing. She wanted to run and fight, but she knew these few seconds were vital. If they chose the wrong direction, that might lose them the prize.
Francesco paused and tilted his head to one side. Then he nodded to Rose and rushed off along one of the corridors. She followed, and after turning one corner Francesco stopped outside a room, pointing at the ruptured lock.
“Hope you choke,” she heard from within, and it was Marty, and she burst through the door and located him instantly, hunkered down in a corner with one of the male vampires crouched over him, his arm raised and fingers clawed ready to deliver a hacking swipe.
“Eyes!” Francesco said softly. She closed her eyes and clapped her hands over them, heard Click click, and then the vampire’s screams.
Her own exposed skin burning, Rose ran, opening her eyes to the vaguely lit room and smelling the stench of the vampire’s scorched eye sockets. Marty was a shadow in the corner—she could smell his blood, feel his pain—but she could not let that distract her. Not yet.
She struck the vampire hard and shoved him across the room, heels plowing furrows through piles of ransacked boxes and their shattered contents, her fingers curling into his throat and closing, fingertips touching in cool wetness.
He hit a tier of shelving and grunted, and Rose punched him hard in the face. She felt her fingers and hand shredded by his teeth, but she grasped his jaw and pulled down on it with all her weight. He thrashed, hands battering her back and shoulders, and then her head. But by then she’d unhinged his jaw and all but torn it off. She let him fall and kicked him over onto his side.
“Head,” Francesco said, but he didn’t have to tell her. Rose knew very well how to finish him off.
Afterward, she went to Marty and knelt before him. He was bleeding from a dozen places, and his eyes were only open a crack.
“Marty?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“Dandy.”
“What room, Marty?” Francesco was beside them now, and for an instant Rose resented the fact that he wasn’t at all interested in her brother’s well-being. But there was so much more going on here.
“Seventy-two.” His voice was fading, and his eyelids fluttered as they closed.
“Marty, did he bite you?” Her brother didn’t answer, so Rose grabbed him by the shoulders and shook, ignoring the warmth of his blood on her right hand. “Marty!”
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head and wincing at the pain it caused him.
“Rose,” Francesco said, stern. “You have to leave him for now.”
Marty had slipped into unconsciousness. Blood loss, pain, shock, fear—they’d all combined to usher him into the dark, and even if awake there was little he could do to help them anymore.
“I’ll come back for you, Marty,” she said. She picked him up and slid him onto an empty shelf at eye level, shoving some torn boxes in after him. It was poor camouflage, but it would have to do for now.
As she turned, she caught Francesco looking at her. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Come on.”
They left to find room seventy-two.
He’d thought that he would have time. But he almost didn’t.
The door smashed open and Lee spun around, glimpsing Patrick falling beneath a shadowy shape and two more vampires entering behind him. One of them was tall and bald but for a tied-back Mohawk, and he was the least-human vampire Lee had ever seen. His eyes were black pits in his pale face, like coals pressed into the face of the most grotesque snowman ever built, and his long arms tore the air before him as he went for Connie. It was her size that prevented her from having her throat torn out immediately; she fell between the shelving tiers she was working and scampered away out of sight.