Chapter 36
The tugging in his bones, the yearning in his veins pulled him onward, slicing swiftly between snowgusts in mistform, bursting through the whispering speed when needing to cut against the wind, across rooftops.
A foot brushing a cornice, the glass of an office building showing a subtle glimmer as light refracted from disturbed flakes, the startled bark of a vehicle’s horn as he touched down in the middle of a street, pushing off again with a crimson flash—his eyes glowed from lid to lid now, showing the rage of a sanguinant whose leman had been harmed.
Had been taken.
He might have expected earthbound prey to use a winding way, many a doubling and turn to throw off pursuit, but they had not. Still, constrained by roads, their route was longer than his; he arrowed for earth, the pull loud and clear instead of attenuated to a mere whisper by distance.
There. A large, ramshackle structure, its flank jutting on pilings over a polluted river, was all too easy to infiltrate.
Mistform thickening as he streamed past piles of ephemera and sullen, long-abandoned machinery, swirling once about a grey delivery van, its side-hatch left open and the small interior light gamely carrying on.
Every third fixture overhead was live, fluorescents buzzing to themselves and emptiness.
A pair of unsurprising scents; the traitors had spent some time here, making arrangements though hardly improvements. There might be security cameras pointed at likely approaches—he heard heartbeats as well, all three familiar yet only one welcome.
And a thread of glorious, wonderful scent reaching even into the the mistform’s haze, drawing him onward. Was this a second iteration of ambush, using his prize as bait?
Voices, now, as he swirled toward the source of the pull.
While their interesting new ammunition was merely bothersome to him—necessitating some small attention paid to resealing wounds and keeping the claret where it belonged, two skills any daywalker was more than conversant with—it could quite possibly bleed his fledgling to the point of exhaustion, and she would require much care afterward.
There was the risk of more open flame as well; even if he had proved his own immunity, she was still vulnerable.
He could celebrate his new status later. Lukas gathered himself, mistform clotting into the mortal-visible range as dense crimson fog, and followed the clarion call of shared blood toward the other end of the warehouse, downstream and shoreward.
Almost there. All will be well, Beatrice.
A gunshot boomed sharp and jarring between piles of rubbish, echoing against the roof’s exposed bones.