Chapter 29
She floated through nightmare hallways full of corpses, veering as the rumbleroar and sounds of breakage changed, sometimes meeting dead ends, often unable to pick her way past stacked bodies.
Each time she got near a window the necklace got worried, swamping her with clear plastic goop, slowing her down and making it hard to think.
I’m not wandering, she kept repeating internally. I’m doing recon, I’m looking at the house.
Then the rumbling swallowed her, crashing and creaking all around. She turned down a cramped, dark hall, thankfully free of sprawled, rotting shapes, and saw bars of faint light crisscrossing along its shaft. Not windows, she realized with a burst of muted relief, just holes.
Drywall dust floated in the air, like the glittering poof-grit of dead biters.
Splinters and shards of wood, drywall, paneling, glass littered bare linoleum; this had to be a service passageway.
A mansion was like a mall or a grocery store, there had to be places for the help to scurry around without visually afflicting their betters, and those passageways were never given more than a slap-kiss of cheap paint.
Pow. Crash-crunch. Boom. The whole structure rocked like a ship in a hurricane, and visions of Looney Tunes chaos made her want to laugh.
Her lips twitched as she picked carefully between chunks of wreckage; she reached the first bar of light falling across the hall and stopped, wrestling down the urge to smile since she couldn’t afford to spend the extra energy.
The sounds were coming from her left. She turned, staring through floating veils of vaporized plaster and drywall dust at a dim cavernous vista of broken walls, furniture smashed to flinders, bits of ceiling descending with majestic slowness, fierce shining glitters of broken glass.
It was amazing the roof hadn’t caved in yet, though a low groan rising under the noise of a vampire fight gave her the syrup-slow realization that it wouldn’t be long before that was a major possibility.
Confused motion. Her new eyesight was sharp, but they were moving so fast and she couldn’t quite tell what the hell. Something else was happening, some new force fighting for control of her tired body.
“Leila!” A familiar voice, cutting through clear, thick lassitude. “Down!”
Her knees folded in immediate, unstinting obedience. Something big and dangerous whooshed overhead, the roar swallowing her whole, and crashed along the ballroom’s parquet, throwing up more jagged splinterspears. Two combatants, so far as she could tell, both with dark curly hair.
It can’t be. There was too much crap in the air, her vision was failing. The necklace was warm against her throat, but it didn’t have to work so hard now to keep her trapped; her limbs were leaden, her head filling with the funny floating sensation of drifting off to sleep.
One vampire had his hands buried in the other’s midriff; both snarled, their eyes glowing with bars of wet spreading crimson glow. She was still trying to figure out which one was the ancient, crazyass biter when her body shut down.
Dawn had risen.