She didn’t go down. The armor hummed as she swung the back of her fist at him. Vamp ducked as it swooped over his head, and he nailed her in the face again with a solid, meaty thud.
Even a human would have been thrown for a loop by a hit like that, but it should have been devastating to a haan. The armor, maybe combined with something like Nix’s inertial dampening field, might protect her body, but his fist connected hard. I felt the burst of signal, her surprise and pain, through the cluster. A strike like that should have shattered those delicate bones, but what I felt from her was more surprise than pain, fast turning to fury.
“Vamp!”
Nix moved toward her while her back was turned to him, and I saw something in his hand. It was the electronic wand he’d used to take his sample with the morning he showed up in my hotel room, only now he held it like a weapon. He swung it around, ready to stab her with it, but something, some invisible force, stopped his arm cold before he could land the blow. The needle-like prongs quivered an arm’s length away from her as the two struggled, and then Nix’s hand sprang open and the wand fell to the floor.
Without stepping away from Vamp, Sillith made a violent shrugging motion and something struck Nix. For just a second I swore I saw a hand, a haan hand whose long fingers were curled into claws as it thumped into the middle of his chest, but then it flickered and was gone.
What the…
Nix’s feet came up off the floor as he was hurled back toward me. His shoulder crashed into the lamp and sent pieces spinning across the floor after him. His body flew through the air and bashed into the wall next to the doorway so hard it broke the jamb. A slat of fake wood spun away as he caromed off and went down like a rag doll onto the floor.
Vamp was about to throw another punch when she turned back to him.
“Vamp, no! Get away from her!” I screamed.
He looked, and ducked down low when he saw me raise the pistol. Sillith reached down to grab him, and I squeezed the trigger.
I expected a single shot that I hoped would hit Sillith square in the head. Instead the gun let out three loud, overlapping bangs as it bucked in my hand. The first shot punched through the wall in front of her, but the next two got her, one in the shoulder and the other in the side of the neck. The armor absorbed the rounds, but they hurt her, I could feel it, and she stepped back from Vamp to face me instead.
I raised the gun again, ready for the recoil this time, when a sudden, crippling pain jabbed into my gut like the blade of a long knife. I gasped and doubled over, the gun’s barrel drifting off target.
Not now….
My vision blurred as the pain came again, and the strength went out of my legs. I couldn’t breathe, and as I fell to my knees the gun slipped from my hand. It thumped onto the floor, and when I screwed my eyes up to look I saw Sillith’s armored boots clomping toward me.
Something boomed from behind and for a moment all I could hear was a low ring in my ears. A smoking plastic shell bounced off the toppled dresser next to me, and then a second, muted boom sounded.
Covering my head, I looked back to see Wei leaned against the doorway. He supported himself on one leg, holding up the broken one as he stared down the barrel of a shotgun.
Before he could fire again, the gun leapt out of his hands, torn away by something I didn’t see. He stared, confused, and then something grabbed him and jerked him forward off his feet.
One of his shoes clipped my ear as he flew past and came down hard in front of Sillith. Vamp tried to get to his feet and was slammed back down onto the floor, pinned there by something invisible, with his face turned away. She reached down and picked up Nix’s wand, aiming the needles down toward Wei’s neck. The door slammed behind me and I heard the bolt lock, but when I turned, no one was there.
“Look!” Sillith snapped. I stared at the door, still trying to figure out what had happened.
“Look!”
I turned back toward her. She held Wei by the hair, craning his neck back so that his chin pointed up at the ceiling. The needles were an inch from the pit between his collarbones.
“Tell me where that boy is.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I kept the gun pointed away from her, but didn’t drop it.
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true,” I told her. “I don’t know. We’re looking for him, but we haven’t found him.”
“I’m a dead man anyway,” Wei wheezed. “Just run—” His voice choked off as she pulled back harder on his hair.
“The man Shao stole a twistkey,” she said. “He used it to bring a boy and a girl back here with him, and while he was there he made a recording. I want the boy, the girl, the key, and his wet drive.”
“Is he alive?” I asked her.
“If you don’t—”
“Just tell me, is he alive?”
She punched the needles deep into Wei’s chest.
His eyes bugged out as an electric whine rose in pitch, and the veins in his neck and face bulged. They popped up under his skin like squiggling worms, until they looked ready to burst.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Wait!”
With a loud snap, Wei’s entire body erupted. I jumped back, cringing as sheets of warm rain splashed down over me. In the second before I shut my eyes, I saw a wrinkled, empty blob of skin shrink down through the collar of his shirt.
It slopped down onto the floor between us like a big, wet towel. I kept my head turned away, paralyzed, as fat drops dripped down from my hair. The front of my shirt was soaked, but it wasn’t blood like I’d first thought. It was water. Warm, salty water. I wiped it from my face as my mind reeled back to Nix’s first visit, when those needles were pointed at me.
“What’s that?”
“It will take the sample I need.”
“Is this going to hurt?”
“Turn around,” Sillith said.
I remembered Nix’s anxiety, his uncertainty as he’d moved the needles closer.
“…no, it won’t hurt.”
“Turn around,” she said again.
I turned to see Vamp, soaked and struggling, as she reached down into the wet pile of Wei’s empty clothes. From inside she pulled what looked like a big blood-colored amoeba, fat tentacles slithering out from the sleeves and pant legs while Vamp stared in shock from a few feet away.
She touched the needles to the blob, and water squeezed out of it like a sponge as it shriveled further. She held up the little mass left behind so I could see.
“What did you do—” I had started to ask when she fed the fist-sized jelly through her mask’s dispersion field.
I heard a long slurp, followed by the gurgle of a sink draining. At the same time, through the mite cluster, I felt the familiar rush I felt whenever I gave a bottle to one of my surrogates. It was pleasure, and the relief of hunger being satisfied, if only for a while. Sillith had just eaten Wei.
“This is what you are,” she said, displaying her empty hand. “This is your place.”
Vamp was jerked up off the floor, then slammed back down in front of her. His knees splatted down onto the wet floor, and his arms were pulled back taut behind him as if bound by invisible ropes. His head craned back and Sillith leaned in to point the needles down at his exposed throat.
I couldn’t speak. It was hard to even breathe. All I could think at that moment was that I didn’t have an answer for her. I didn’t know where Alexei was, not for sure, and I didn’t have the twistkey she wanted either. Even if I wanted to tell her, and if it would stop her from sticking Vamp with those needles, then I would have. I couldn’t, because I didn’t know. I couldn’t even think of a lie.