Chapter 27
Terrible to hurt other vampire hunters, really, but her body didn’t care. If they just wouldn’t shoot at her, she’d leave them alone—
That’s a lie, Simone. Because even if bullets hadn’t spattered against the floor, whining crazily and striking sparks, ricochets plowing into the crush near the door where other hunters—or maybe security, since now there was an additional group, men in regular ol’ tactical without the chain neck-wraps and wearing silver X-OL badges instead—were still trying to get through, the smell was there.
Blood. Fresh, sweet human blood.
Its fragrance cut through everything else, even the remaining zoolike stink, and hit the back of her throat like a runaway semi, lighting a fuse all the way down her spine, yanking her arms and legs with terrible easy fluidity.
As if she hadn’t been shot full of poison, as if she hadn’t been hung up like a bargain-basement imitation crucifix, as if she was no longer tired, or afraid, or uncertain.
She landed in the knot of men near the elevator, her nose twitching as it filled with male, sweat, gun oil, live fire, her left-hand claws sending a burst of pain up to jolt in her savagely stretched shoulder as they skittered across the body armor’s ceramic plates.
Down into a crouch, then, before she erupted as one tried to swing his rifle-butt at her.
Throwing both arms and her right leg out, each limb hitting with a solid crack.
Three bodies went flying, more bullets spewing crazily for the ceiling, and a chip flicked against her cheek.
Concrete, metal, ricochet fragment, she didn’t know or care; Simone was already on the hunter who seemed to have the most presence of mind, since he’d tried to hit her and now was struggling in a slow blundering human way to level the rifle.
Fury filled her. The fact that he was just a guy doing a job, a fellow bounty-collector, didn’t matter.
It was always the same, fucking men, even if you were on their side they’d lash out.
All they saw was a pair of tits, an innie instead of an outie, and that made it all right to do whatever they wanted.
Pow. He crumpled, thrown back against the slowly closing elevator doors, and a warped jangling echoed from inside the luxuriously carpeted box.
Sparks flew, different than those wrung free by humming bullets.
Simone turned neatly on forefoot, her hair lifting as she spun; her childhood longing for ballet lessons was a sweet strong nostalgic pain.
Funny, the things you think of. Her hands flashed out again, tearing the chainmail from a stocky blond man’s throat; he had three bluish teardrops tattooed on his left cheek.
Vamp kills, maybe, and as her claws slid through human flesh it wasn’t the same as killing a bloodsucker, no indeed.
No wet rot turning into gleaming dust but a hot spray of deliciousness she tore herself away from almost as soon as the first droplets sprang free, since the men at the door had suddenly begun firing through the crowd.
The cacophony took on yet another dimension, screams turning hellish instead of merely terrified. Along with the sweet, sweet burst of shining blood came a darker, fouler tinge—bowel-cut effluvia, urine-stink, the brassy stench of death.
This is my life now. Well, she’d made a complete fucking hash of the human one, maybe she should try really being a vamp. What had being restrained, being polite, being good ever gotten her?
Tables shattered, glass disintegrating, a thin blue jet of flame spurting from a nozzle—maybe the blowtorch deciding to work on its own, maybe something else?
The bullets were bees, humming to shred anything softer than concrete, various substances spilling and mixing, caustic clouds rising, fluorescing to vamp sight as bits of lead and glowing metal plunged through their hearts.
She could have slowed down, watched every chemical interaction and reaction with interest, but the streams of fire were converging and she knew they were using the real ammo, the stuff supposed to bleed a vamp dry in seconds flat, and the moment Simone stepped into one of those chattering metal rivers she would lose more than just a bit of skin.
Then the world shifted, turned over, paused in its steady path through space.
A low foxfire smear bloomed amid the crowd, viridescent smoke pouring, coalescing. A wall of force expanded, dilating from a bar of crimson light with two swelling points.
Eyes. They were eyes. Their gaze raked past her, taking in the chaos with one swift sweep, and all the trouble, the noise, the glaring, the restless motion stilled.
She skidded to a stop, bootsoles smoking, her right hand tented lightly against the floor, fingertips just slightly touching a tangle of shattered glass and clinging nasty wetness as substances which shouldn’t mix were smeared together.
I thought I was fast. Simone stared, her fangs fully out and sensitive, pulsing in time to her banging, battering heart.
A single streak of motion tore through the shooters, spreading in a streak-cloud, flickering through black smoke to greenish mist, solidifying only to rip open a hard shell of body armor and the flesh beneath or to wrench a struggling lab-coated form asunder.
Blood gushed, sprayed, turned to a fine mist, a storm of iron-smelling droplets underlit with acidic lightning.
None of the vamps she’d killed with such wringing, tearing effort could have possibly fought this…
this utter catastrophe. It scythed through the crowd, leaving only twisted, dripping fleshrags and sheared bone in its wake, guns clattering to the ground with their smoking barrels split or torqued into sharp curves.
A bullet insect-whined past her ear. Simone flinched, but the streak of killing intent was already blinking across the room with a soft warm whisper of moving air, resolving into a lean shape dressed in black, one iron fist buried in the gut of a vamp hunter who had survived and managed to squeeze off a single shot in her direction.
The old vampire lifted the hapless bounty-chaser, and Simone realized he had punched through armor and belly to grab the lumbar spine. A single irresistible movement, like a terrier shaking a toy, ended with a deep thunk of snapping bone.
John dropped the limp form atop a broken pile of other, feebly twitching lumps which had once been vamp hunters.
Ringing, blaring fire-alarm screams coruscated through empty space. Thin, acrid smoke rose in curls. A few struggling heartbeats, weak cries, and a terrible copper stench of blood—the sudden cessation of gunfire and other noise was almost stunning.
Simone’s legs quivered. She wanted to stand, stayed nailed in place as John turned, slowly, the crimson glow in his eyes fading until they became shadowed blue-tinted holes, staring at her through fluttering, failing fluorescent light.
Half the overhead fixtures were cracked and emergency lighting, vomitously orange, flared and faded in irregular pulses just at the seam between ceiling and walls.
The thin crackle of flame merrily snacking on a pool of chemicals was concerning, but she couldn’t move.
A puff of breeze stirring her sweat-stiffened hair, a brush against her cheek, and John again resolved out of thin air, crouched easily before her.
He tilted his head, dark hair standing up in wild spikes.
His hat was gone, his eyes bright blue, and she was surprised to feel a deep flare of horrible, unforgivable relief.
Even more strange was him leaning forward and inhaling sharply. Something about his stare—wild, vacant, distant and terribly present at once—taunted her.
It was the glare of a wild animal interested in something. Uncertain, warily compelled.
“Simone.” Her name rode a soft, wondering exhale. “Sweet Simone.”
Oh, hell.