28. Smokescreen #2
The round hit Draco in the chest. He'd moved between me and the gun in the time it took her to pull the trigger, and the impact drove him backward into the far door. The sound he made was short and involuntary and I felt it in my spine.
“Draco.”
He was on the floor of the overturned car with his hand pressed against his chest.
“Get out of the car. Nico. Get out of the car now.”
The open door was above me and I pulled myself through it onto the exposed undercarriage.
The street outside was a disaster. The concrete was torn up from the explosion.
A crater sat in the middle of the road. Two other vehicles had spun out against the curb.
The silver smoke hung in the air like fog, thick enough that the buildings on either side of the street were shadows behind it.
I found Sabine standing in the smoke. She was ten feet away. Behind her, four figures in tactical gear held a loose perimeter.
Mateo was pulling himself toward the door, his body fighting every inch of the distance. The silver was in his lungs and his muscles and it was costing him everything he had to move at all.
Sabine raised the gun toward the car.
“Come with me. Or I put the next three rounds into your wolf, your driver, and your boyfriend. The compound in these rounds will kill a vampire at close range. Draco cannot survive three.”
“Nico, don't.” Mateo's hand caught my ankle.
“Let go, Mateo.”
“Don't do this.”
“She will kill all of you.”
“We heal.”
“Not from that. Let go, please.”
His fingers loosened on my ankle and the look on his face was the look of a wolf who had failed to protect his pack.
I dropped off the car and landed on the street.
“Walk toward me,” she said.
I walked toward her.
Then I hit her.
The punch came from the hip, the way my grandmother's neighbour Miguel had taught me when I was sixteen and came home from school with a split lip.
Miguel had boxed amateur for twenty years and retired with all his teeth because he fought smart instead of hard.
The first thing he taught me was that a punch from the shoulder was a warning and a punch from the hip was a decision.
My fist connected with Sabine's jaw. Her head snapped sideways. The gun swung wide.
She recovered fast. Her body absorbed the impact, redirected the momentum, and her free hand came up in a strike aimed at my throat that I dodged by dropping my shoulder and rolling left.
I came back in with a jab to create distance, a cross to follow, a body shot to make her fold. She parried the jab, slipped the cross, and took the body shot on her forearm. The impact of my fist against her guard sent a shock up through my shoulder.
“You hit hard for a restorer,” she said.
I didn't answer. Talking in a fight was for people who were winning and wanted the other person to know it. I wasn't winning. I was buying time.
The first kick caught me in the ribs. Fast, compact, and delivered with all of her body weight behind it. I stumbled. She followed with an elbow aimed at my temple that I got my arm up to block, and the impact numbed my forearm from the wrist to the shoulder.
I grabbed her arm pulling her off balance. Got inside her guard and drove my knee up into her midsection. She grunted and doubled forward and I hit her again, two quick shots to the side of her head, and her knees buckled.
She went down to one knee. I thought I had her. Then her leg swept out and took mine and I was on my back on the concrete with the silver smoke burning in my lungs.
She was on me before I could roll. Her knee on my chest. The barrel of the gun pressed cold against the skin under my chin.
“You fight like someone taught you in a parking lot.” She was bleeding from her mouth where my first punch had landed.
“Good instincts. No discipline. You telegraph your combinations from the shoulder and you drop your guard after the third strike.” The barrel pressed harder against my throat.
“I have been doing this for four hundred years. You have been doing this for weeks. The math is not in your favour.”
“Fuck you.”
“I respect the energy.” She stood, the gun still aimed at my throat, and gestured to the tactical team. Two of them moved forward. One grabbed my arm. The other pulled a hood from his vest.
The bloodstone was screaming against my chest.
The grip on my arm was steel and the hood was coming down and the silver smoke was in my lungs and my ribs were cracked and the gun was aimed at the car where Draco was fighting concentrated silver to get to his feet.
The hood came down over my eyes.
“Don't hurt them,” I said.
Sabine's voice came through the fabric, muffled and flat. “They'll live. The silver compound will metabolise in four to six hours. By then we'll be somewhere Mr. Reed cannot reach.”
They lifted me off my feet and moved me. I heard a vehicle door open somewhere to my left, and then the air changed around me. A different car. The leather was clean and the interior was cold and there was nothing warm about any of it.
Then I heard Draco.
His voice came through the smoke and the hood and the distance and the silver that was still burning through his blood, and it was the most terrible sound I had ever heard him make. In all the weeks I had known Draco, he had never raised his voice. He had never needed to.
He was screaming my name.
My name in his mouth like a wound that would not close.
I heard it for hours in the dark while they drove me to wherever they were taking me.
When they finally pulled the hood off my face and I saw the room they had brought me to.
The space was underground, carved out of raw stone, lit by torchlight that threw long shadows across walls covered in symbols that my threshold blood recognised before my eyes had finished adjusting to the dim.
My blood flinched from them the way it had flinched from the silver smoke, a full-body recoil that started in my chest and spread outward.
I heard it when a man stepped out of the shadows at the far end of the room and looked at me with ancient, patient eyes.
“Mark? It was you?” I said.
“Welcome, Nico. I've been looking forward to this.”