Chapter 10 #2
Still, he’s not the only paranormal in the room who can make people want things, which means that maybe there’s a way for me to salvage this. If the whole “wanting to leave” clause is still in effect, he might have to let me, Rafa, and the kids go.
The problem is I’ve never used my power deliberately. I’ve only used it once—on that Uber driver, Dan. It was awful. And it was my monster that did it, not me.
But my hunger’s been recently fed and satisfied. So when I look inside, instead of seeing something hostile and ravenous, what I sense feels a lot more like an ally. And its message is clear:
Just give me the word, boss.
Valiente, visibly shaken from my psychic parry and finding his feet, flicks a glare at Rafa. Ozone magic lashes out at the Hunter like a whip. Rafa immediately jerks toward me and vacantly pulls back his fist like some robot soldier, winding up to deliver a haymaker to my face.
That decides it. I let my monster loose on him.
Make him want to leave with me.
The demon within is only too happy to comply.
I don’t know what I expected using this power to be like. What happened in the Uber is so mixed up with my own shame, I just remember bits and pieces. But the emotion that I send into Rafa doesn’t feel angry or coercive or manipulative. Instead, it feels… a lot like love.
It’s not the satisfying, joyful sense of connection I’ve felt with Collin.
It’s more like that excited roller coaster crush feeling when you realize you’re totally into a guy and you’d do anything to be with them.
When you want to know everything about them.
When all you can think about is finding some way to touch them, and hopefully see them naked.
It’s both intoxicating and delicious.
The change on Rafa’s face is instantaneous. He goes from staring at me dead-eyed to deeply, passionately concerned.
“Alvin!” he utters, eyes squinting as if suddenly recognizing me. And before I can even respond, he whirls around to Valiente and hammers a brutal strike into his father’s face.
Rafa has been beaten badly, but he’s an insanely strong guy, and some of his helplessness was clearly an act arranged by Valiente. The blow crumples his father’s nose and sends the vampire tumbling onto his ass, which buys me a few more seconds.
I connect to my monster—my incubus power—so I can extend it to all the kids around the room.
But I immediately realize it’s not going to work.
Maybe it’s because I’m not strong enough or skilled enough to use it on multiple targets.
Or maybe it’s because the power is inherently sexy and these are children, and I can’t think of them as anything different.
But while I am able to form a connection and get a quick sense of some dulled, desperate emotions underneath a blanket of Valiente’s compulsion, I’m not able to send the young humans any commands.
And as I try, my control over Rafa starts to shake.
He sways awkwardly over his father, arms limp, and looks confused, hesitant.
I return my full focus onto Rafa, and his expression snaps into fierce resolve.
He swivels, ducks down, and slams his shoulder into me, lifting me up over his back just like the last time he carried me from this place.
Apparently, it’s a go-to move for him. Then he’s moving us, full sprint, toward the stairs.
He might be in my power, but apparently that doesn’t mean he won’t have ideas of his own.
“I’m sorry, but I need to get you out of here!” he blurts out. “I can’t risk him using the kids against you!”
I feel like I’ve got the strength of the Hulk coursing through my veins and, yet again, he’s treating me like a damsel in distress.
Except me hanging over Rafa’s shoulder is hardly the safest place for me to be.
Rafa blasts like a linebacker through the two vampires blocking the way out.
Thankfully, with Valiente stunned, they’re too dazed to move to hurt him or the children next to them.
But vampires recover fast, and by the time we hit the stairs, shots are being fired at us.
One rips through my bicep before we’ve climbed high enough for the top of the cavern’s stairwell entrance to provide cover.
The bullet wound scorches through my arm like a hot poker, but it only stings for a couple seconds as I feel my power being directed to heal the injury.
By the time we are at the top of the stairs, except for a hole in my windbreaker, it’s as if it never happened.
Chatty Cathy is there waiting for us. Keeping me clear, Rafa twists his upper body to strike her in the face, but unlike the last time we ran up a bunch of stairs, he’s breathing hard, already running on fumes.
(Probably because he really is hurt.) She easily grabs his fist before it can connect and cruelly twists his arm.
It forces him to buckle, knee slamming to the ground, and I tumble off him.
She then raises her cadaverous hand, jagged claws on her fingertips, so she can stab him through the throat, and he seems winded enough to let her.
But if things are different for him this time around, they are even more different for me.
Drawing on the fed-incubus power now crackling inside, I spring to my feet.
Her savage thrust at Rafa’s neck seems to slow to a crawl.
Before she’s even halfway to him, I’m able to step in and punch her in the center of her chest, and I do it as hard as I can.
The result of that is… surprising.
I hit so fast, and with so much force, my arm goes clean through her. Or, at least, as clean as punching an undead bag of blood can be. You know that chestburster scene from Alien? It’s like that except through her back. I rip her spine fully out of her body, and it splats against the back wall.
I don’t know what I thought fighting vampires as an incubus would be like. Burning them when I was some kind of kaiju in Hunter’s Point had a dreamlike quality, but with my enhanced senses, what I’ve just done feels very visceral, very real. It’s super-duper gross.
She instantly collapses against my body, and Rafa stares at me wide-eyed while I try to keep myself from dry heaving. But I clearly don’t have time to be a delicate flower right now.
I rip my arm out of what’s left of Cathy, let her drop, and spin to see a whole conga line of armed vampires rushing up the last few stairs at us.
“Stop! Stop!” It’s Valiente calling up from the base of the stairs, but I’m not willing to find out whether he’s yelling at the vampires, or me and Rafa. As the first one reaches me—it’s the burly guy who had Emma—Bluto—I try a high-ish side kick, dialing back to what feels like 60% power.
The strike is still much stronger than I expect it to be, but this time it goes better.
I blast the vamp with the flat part of my foot, and he ricochets off the wall of the stairwell to fly down the steps like a slingshot stone, knocking back the entire row of vampiric Hunters behind him.
They continue to tumble on down, out of sight, hopefully knocking Valiente on his ass as well.
“Let’s go!” I say to Rafa, because he’s right—so long as this Vampire King can use the kids against me, I’m keeping them in danger. But if we can get out and away, they’ll be more useful to him alive than dead.
Rafa nods, jaw loose, still in awe of the new power I’m showing off. And then we’re running down the hall.
Three more vamps have emerged from the elevator to rush us. They’re in what looks like soiled khakis and polos, so they’re not more undead Hunters. We meet about halfway down the hall, just as two more tracksuited vampires burst from the stairwell behind them.
Rafa stops, braces in place, and pulls fists, ready to duke it out with them, but we need to keep moving.
I leap forward a dozen feet, land in a crouch, and harness the momentum of my whole body springing up to uppercut the lead monster in the chin, knocking his head clear off.
It bounces against the ceiling to smack into the floor, scattering one flickering tea light into another.
I then twist and swing my left arm into his buddy’s shoulder, karate-chop style, with such violence it rips the vamp’s torso most of the way off his hips—right before he flips over his side to smash into one of the side doors.
The broad explosion of blood is spectacular.
Covered in vampire guts and snarling my lips like a wild man (mostly to keep myself from hurling!), I turn to the third vampire.
His eyes bulge with terror. He immediately throws up his hands in surrender and rapidly backpedals away from me.
And when I glance up at the bloodsuckers in stained activewear who popped out of the stairwell, I see they’ve also turned tail and are racing back up the main stairs.
If you fed, they’d be running from you.
I’m not going to lie: being essentially bulletproof and ripping through nightmarish bloodsuckers like they’re made of papier-maché is a hell of a rush, even with the gore. It’s tempting to want to take out as many of these monsters as I can.
But the longer we’re here, the greater the chance that Valiente will figure out some way to turn the tables on me. Or that I’ll run out of juice.
Rafa is huffing and puffing by my side, his face pale. It’s time to go.
The Hunter is a lot bigger than I am, but we’re still less than a foot of difference in height. The fireman’s carry should work on him, but I’m afraid I could rip him apart if I try his signature shoulder-slam move. So I quickly kneel and cry out:
“On me! Now!”
I’m not sure he really understands what I want here, but he leans forward enough that I’m able to scoop him up without breaking anything and lock the hollows of his knees under my arm.
(It’s surreal—he literally feels no heavier than a sack of packing peanuts on my back!) Then I’m racing down the hallway at full speed.
That speed must be something north of sixty miles an hour, because I explode through the door of the stairwell in an eyeblink—crashing and twisting it against the first railing.
I blaze by the two tracksuited vamps, who leap aside to cower in a corner of one of the landings, and I’m up both flights of stairs before Rafa can even suck in a shocked breath.
The path out of this place is burned into my memory from our last misadventure, so I have us through the halls and into the marble entrance chamber of the Benevolent Society in just a few more seconds.
I expect the guard to be barring our way, maybe even with a gun extended, but he’s just standing near the elevator, arms relaxed at his sides. (And I’m probably mistaken, but when I glance at his face, I could swear he looks back with something that seems a lot like admiration.)
He certainly doesn’t stop me when I kick one of the huge exterior doors open (and half off its hinges) and make my way onto the still-empty street.
In fact, we encounter no resistance at all the entire run back to Stryker’s office, the only place in the city I can be sure is safe.
I’m so fast, I doubt even the few early morning normals dismally heading to work in the dark get a good look.
The lack of any obstacles turns out to be a very good thing, because when I slide Rafa off to his feet and use my key to get into the Aston Building, I feel my power waning. And by the time I’ve hustled us up behind the warded office door on the 11th floor, it’s evaporated completely.
Just like that, I’m back to being my normal, weak-ass self—completely bent over, hands on knees, a few feet from Rafa, raggedly trying to catch my breath.
But no matter how I feel now, I was able to get him out of there.
And he looks at me like I’ve just touched down in front of him from the sky wearing tights and a cape, instead of sweats and a windbreaker drenched with globs of vampire blood.
“Christ, Alvin,” he says. “You were incredible.”
I know I should probably let that compliment sink in for a moment and allow myself to acknowledge this one small win.
Anything to keep from falling into despair.
But having lost both the kids and Collin, and having hand-delivered Valiente exactly what he needed to fuck up the world, “incredible” is a far cry from how I feel right now.
Still, I don’t stop Rafa when scoops me up into a hug because, God knows, I could sure use one.
His whole body wraps around me, and he squeezes me in tight as I stagger back a few steps.
Maybe it’s the adrenaline, but now that we’re both out of danger, I have to fight hard to hold back tears.
Even though I feel like an absolute failure, the hard truth is I don’t have time to blubber right now.
Valiente is going to summon a god of death to Earth, and Collin is probably being tortured this very minute to make that happen. We have to figure out how to fix this!
But I’m just too keyed up to even begin that conversation. Instead, my shoulders and chest tremble with frustration in the Hunter’s arms. In response, he gives me a little affectionate kiss on my neck. And then another.
Followed by a hungrier, more intense, sucking one.
It’s not until his hand slips past the waistband of my sweats to cup my ass that I realize he’s pressed his hard erection against me.
Then in one sudden push, he lifts me up against the back of the door, and roughly shoves my pants down so he can get at my cock.