Chapter 16 Brecca #2
This fight was different. Two-on-two. Rael took the one on the left, Alek took the right, and the stairwell became a kill box of blade-work and speed and the shriek of metal on metal. Torres and I crouched three flights below, guns drawn, watching for any reinforcement from above.
A Lucian blade caught Alek across the ribs.
The sound it made — serrated steel on Vampyren flesh, the particular wet tearing that I knew from three years of treating exactly this kind of wound — made my stomach drop.
He grunted, a deep involuntary sound that carried more surprise than pain, but didn't stop.
Didn't slow. His return stroke was savage, powered by the full strength of a seven-foot Vampyren warrior who had been hit harder and kept fighting, and the guard's blade shattered under the impact, fragments of serrated steel spinning through the stairwell like shrapnel.
Alek finished it with a thrust through the chest that pinned the Lucian to the concrete wall behind it.
Rael's fight was different. Faster, more fluid, two creatures of the same species moving at the same terrifying frequency.
His opponent was skilled but desperate, the blade work increasingly frantic as Rael pressed forward with the controlled, purposeful aggression of a man fighting for something beyond survival.
The Lucian blade — Mark's gift, the serrated weapon cleaned and re-edged and designed for exactly this speed — found its opening.
Rael drove it through the guard's midsection and the fight was over.
Eleven seconds. I counted. When you're a medic watching people you care about fight for their lives, you count the seconds because it's the only thing keeping you from screaming.
"Alek." I was moving before the bodies hit the ground, medical kit open, hands finding the wound on his ribs. "Let me see."
"It's shallow." He pushed my hand away. "Keep moving."
"It's a six-inch laceration across your—"
"Shallow." His eyes were hard. "I've had worse from sparring."
"You're bleeding—"
"Brecca." Rael's voice, quiet. The wordless pulse: he is Vampyren. He will heal. We cannot stop.
I closed my kit. Alek was already climbing again, one hand pressed against his ribs, leaving a smear of dark blood on the railing.
Vampyren blood. Cold, darker than human, lighter than the iridescent black of Lucian.
Three species' blood types, mixed on the concrete stairs of a building designed for humans who'd argued about parking validation.
We climbed. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Each floor felt like a mile. My legs burned. Torres was breathing hard beside me but her weapon hand was steady and her eyes were sharp and she hadn't said a word since the first engagement. She didn't waste breath on commentary.
Thirty-one. One floor below Tyvor.
I could feel him now. The specific, directed attention of a mind watching us climb toward it.
Tyvor's consciousness was a furnace at the top of the building, radiating psychic heat that intensified with every floor.
Rael's jaw was clenched. His glow had gone from faint to bright, the silver-blue light pulsing with each heartbeat, impossible to suppress because the proximity to Tyvor was flooding his system with the fight-or-flight response that his species expressed through light.
"He's waiting," Rael said. Not whispering anymore. There was no point. Tyvor knew we were here. "He will not run. Running is—" He paused. "Tyvor does not run."
"Then we go to him," Alek said. Blood was still seeping from his ribs, dark against his armor, and his gold eyes burned with the focused fury of a warrior who was out of patience and ready to end things. "One more floor."
And then the pain hit.
Not through the stairwell. Not through a blade. Through the bond.
Tyvor's broadcast slammed into the network — a pulse of psychic energy so powerful that Rael dropped to his knees on the landing, his hands flying to his temples, a sound escaping him that vibrated at a frequency I felt in my bones.
The pain reached me too, diluted by my human mind's inability to fully process psychic input, but present.
A spike of white-hot agony behind my eyes, a pressure that felt like my skull was being compressed.
I grabbed the railing. Stayed on my feet. The bond was a buffer. It transmitted the pain at a fraction of the intensity Rael was experiencing. What I felt was a headache. What he felt was a psychic battering ram.
"Rael." I knelt beside him. Hands on his shoulders. I pushed through the bond — not pain, not resistance, but the thing I'd told him I would be. An anchor. My consciousness, my frequency, warm and steady and human, pressed against the tidal wave of Tyvor's broadcast.
I'm here. Hold on to me.
He grabbed my wrist. The luminescence flared, brighter than I'd ever seen it, a burst of silver-blue fire that lit the stairwell like a flare. His eyes found mine and they were wild with pain but focused. Focused on me.
"He's above us," he said through clenched teeth. "One floor. He knows we're here."
"How many guards left?"
"Two. With him. On the thirty-second floor." He was shaking. The psychic assault was ongoing — a sustained broadcast aimed directly at his mind, trying to shatter his consciousness before we reached the top. "I cannot— the pain—"
"You can. Listen to me." I put my forehead against his. The gesture felt instinctive, the same thing I'd seen Danton do with Cassi, the contact point where two minds could feel each other most directly. "Feel my heartbeat. Not his voice. My heartbeat."
I felt him reach for it. My heartbeat, sixty-eight beats per minute, fast with adrenaline but steady, human, alive.
He found it and held onto it the way a drowning person holds onto a rope, and I felt the pain recede.
Not vanish — Tyvor was too powerful for that.
But dim. A manageable roar instead of a paralyzing scream.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Move."
We stood. Alek was already at the door to the thirty-second floor, blade ready, blood still seeping from his ribs. Torres was behind him, weapon up. Two warriors waiting for the signal.
I looked at Rael. He looked at me. The bond hummed between us — his pain and my anchor, his fear and my defiance, two minds that had chosen each other in the dark.
"Together," I said.
"Together," he said.
Alek opened the door.