Chapter 10 #2
I had no good response to that, mostly because she was right and I hated that.
Nishi made the call. “Eve and Tegan wait for Greyson. Faith, you go inside with Salima and Cal. I’ll take point. We hold until Delia arrives.”
Eve did not look pleased about being left outside, but she nodded once. “Text me if you see Dagna.”
Faith muttered, “If she shows up, you’ll hear our confrontation.”
We moved inside.
The hospital hallway smelled like disinfectant and fear. The lighting was too bright, the kind that made everything look harsher, more real. A nurse ran past us with a tray clutched to her chest like a shield. Her eyes were wide, and her scrubs were smeared with blood.
“Security,” she choked out. “They’re in the east wing. They bit Dr. Clemons. They bit… oh god.”
Nishi caught her by the shoulders, voice controlled. “Listen to me. You are going to run to the front desk. You are going to stay behind the officers. Do not stop. Do you understand?”
The nurse nodded frantically and bolted.
We followed the sound.
Screams echoed down the corridor. A crash. A gurney clattering. The wet slap of feet that should not be moving so fast in a hospital.
We rounded the corner into the east wing and saw them.
Two undead in torn patient gowns, skin sallow, mouths smeared red. One moved with that old, stiff lurch, but the other was quicker, snapping its head toward noise with predatory focus. A third corpse staggered out of a doorway, dragging an IV pole that scraped the tile.
Two security guards tried to hold a line near the nurses’ station. One had a baton. The other had nothing but panic and a radio.
A patient in a wheelchair cried as an undead lunged toward him.
Faith fired.
The first shot took the undead in the chest. It barely slowed. The second hit the head, and it dropped.
Nishi moved like a blade, intercepting the lunging corpse with a low sweep that took its legs out. Faith finished it.
Cal stepped forward, shoulders tense, and for a heartbeat his skin looked like it wanted to roughen into stone. He did not fully shift, but the air around him thickened with that old gargoyle weight.
He grabbed the third undead by the collar and slammed it into the wall hard enough to crack the drywall.
It still tried to bite him.
Cal’s expression turned flat. “No.”
He snapped its neck.
It kept moving.
Cal swore, low and vicious, then held it in place while Faith put a bullet through its skull.
The hallway went quiet except for sobbing and the beep of a monitor somewhere behind a door.
My hands shook, not from fear, but from the draining pull of the bond and the constant effort of keeping the egg stable from across town. The exertion of fighting layered on top of it, and my vision dimmed for a second at the edges.
Cal noticed instantly. He moved closer, hand hovering near my arm. “Salima.”
“I’m fine,” I said automatically.
Faith shot me a look. “Stop lying.”
Nishi turned toward the nurses’ station. “Get patients moved to secure rooms. Lock the doors and barricade them.”
A doctor stared at us, face ghost-pale. “Who are you?”
“People who do not want you eaten,” Faith said. “Move.”
The doctor moved.
I leaned against the wall for half a second, forced breath into my lungs, and reached through the bond toward the egg. The dark patches were still there, still pressing, but they had not spread. That was something. It was also exhausting.
A blur of red hair appeared at the end of the hall.
Delia.
She moved fast, Spencer beside her, two vampires behind them, faces hard and focused. Delia’s gaze swept the corridor, then fixed on the cluster of staff and patients watching with terrified eyes.
“Oh,” she said softly. “This is going to take a while.”
Spencer’s eyes flashed red briefly, then steadied. “We’ll hold the wing.”
Delia nodded once, already stepping toward the witnesses. “You saw a violent patient incident. You did not see monsters. You did not record anything worth sharing.”
Her voice slid into minds like silk.
People blinked.
Phones lowered.
Some staff looked confused, as if their brains had decided the last five minutes were too much and filed it under a stress hallucination.
Relief hit me so hard I almost sagged.
Then my phone buzzed.
Eve.
One message.
Dagna is here.
I stared at the screen, then looked at Faith. “She’s in the parking lot.”
Faith’s expression hardened into something deadly and bright. “Good.”
Nishi gave a quick order to her hunters over comms, then looked at Cal. “Stay with Salima. Protect her. We are going outside.”
Cal’s gaze flicked to me, worried. “I’m not leaving you.”
“I’m coming,” I replied, and my voice sounded steadier than I felt. “If Dagna is here, she’s connected to the relic. I might be the only one who can feel the thread once the shield is breached.”
Cal did not like that. I could feel his displeasure through the echo of our earlier bond flare, as if his emotions were louder around me now.
Still, he nodded. “Then stay close.”
We moved back through the hospital corridors, past Delia working faces into calm, past Spencer coordinating vampire reinforcements, past officers trying to pretend they had this under control.
Outside, the parking lot had shifted. The air near the shield edge pulsed, like heat shimmer made of shadow.
Eve and Tegan stood near the service road, waiting.
Greyson arrived a moment later in his truck, stepping out with a metal case in his hand like he was bringing a power tool to a magic fight, which, to be fair, was exactly what he was doing.
He popped the case open and pulled out a compact device that looked like a lantern built by an angry engineer. Runes etched along its frame. A crystal core. Wire wrapped around it in a tight spiral.
Faith stared. “What is that?”
Greyson smiled without humor. “A magical argument with physics.”
Tegan leaned in, eyes narrowing. “You built a shield piercer.”
“I built a shield irritant,” Greyson corrected. “It will not drop the curtain. It will give us a slit to look through, for about thirty seconds, before the shield adapts.”
Faith’s mouth tightened. “Thirty seconds.”
Greyson gave her a look. “It’s the best I can do on short notice.”
Faith sighed. “Fine. Do it.”
Greyson set the device on the ground, adjusted a dial, then pressed his palm to the top. The runes flared.
The air in front of us rippled.
A thin vertical seam appeared in the shadow film, like someone had unzipped reality just a little.
And standing on the other side of it, half in the dim pocket of the shield, was a woman with dark hair and a smile that belonged in a nightmare.
Dagna Fade looked as if she had seen better days.
She clapped slowly.
“Honestly,” Dagna said, voice carrying through the seam, “you people are exhausting. I throw a little chaos into the city and you all come running like it’s a holiday sale.”
Faith stepped forward, rage written in every line of her body. “Where is the relic?”
Dagna’s smile widened. “Straight to business as usual. I am almost disappointed.”
Eve’s eyes flashed. “Don’t pretend you’re here for fun.”
Dagna tilted her head. “Fun. Profit. Revenge. It’s a rich tapestry.”
My stomach clenched as the bond tugged, and the egg’s pressure flared through my ribs.
Dagna’s gaze slid to me.
Her eyes narrowed, as if she’d found the thread she wanted.
“Well,” she purred, “there you are. That explains the sudden patch job on the egg.”
Cal moved closer to my side so fast I nearly stumbled. His voice went low. “Stay away from her.”
Dagna laughed softly. “Protective. How sweet. Tell me, Salima, does it feel strange, being tied into something about to die?”
My skin went cold.
Not because she was right.
Because she knew.
And behind us, Greyson’s device began to whine, the runes flickering as the shield started to adapt.
Tegan’s voice rose. “Greyson, how long?”
“Ten seconds,” he snapped.
Faith lifted her weapon, eyes locked on Dagna through the seam. “Answer the question.”
Dagna’s smile did not falter. “Find me,” she said lightly. “If you can.”
Then she stepped back into the darkness, and the seam snapped shut as the shield slid into place like a curtain falling.
Greyson swore, hand slapping the device. “And that is what thirty seconds looks like.”
Faith stared at the spot where Dagna had been, fury vibrating off her. “She’s close.”
Tegan’s tracker needle trembled in her palm, then spun once, as if embarrassed.
Eve’s face went hard. “She wants us chasing her.”
Cal’s hand brushed my elbow, steadying me as the bond tugged again, draining and relentless. “And she wants the egg to fail while we do it.”
I swallowed, feeling the absurd weight of it all pressing on my lungs.
Zombie outbreaks to keep us running. A shield to hide the relic. A calling strong enough to petrify an unborn gargoyle.
And Dagna close enough to look me in the eye and taunt me about a bond I could not break.
I looked at the hospital entrance, then at the dark patch where the shield hid whatever she was doing.
“We don’t get to choose one crisis,” I said quietly. “So we do what we always do.”
Faith’s gaze snapped to me. “What’s that?”
I forced a thin smile I did not feel. “We do the impossible.”