by J. R. Ward
On to numbers three to infinity. V hit whatever was safe to take out, making sure that he didn't cross-hair or impair friendly fire while still remaining effective. Some hundred and fifty yards of video game later and he'd reached both cover and danger: the first of the dorms, which they had originally planned to ambush. The damn thing was a hollowed-out shell with plenty of hidey-holes only a fool would assume were empty, and he was careful to monitor his six as he back-flatted down the side of the brick building, ducking under windows, jumping over low bushes.
The cotton-candy/rancid-meat stench of lessers leaking everywhere swirled around in the cold gusts, mixing into a war salad with the echoes of gunshots and the shouts of the enemy. Anger in his gut drove him forward and kept him focused at the same time as he tried to drop targets without getting shot himself.
As soon as he got to Rhage, he was going to fat-lip that goddamn beauty queen.
Assuming destiny didn't black-shroud the SOB first.
The good news? With the Fore-lesser gone, the Lessening Society's response was no more coordinated than the Brotherhood's attack had been, and the fact that the enemy was poorly armed and pathetically untrained was another bene. There seemed to be a five-to-one slayer-to-gun ratio, and a one-in-ten competent fighter rate--and given the numbers? That might just save their asses.
Left, pop! Right, pop! Dodge. Drop and roll. Spring up and keep running. Over two downed slayers--thank you, Assail, you crazy sonofabitch--pop! right in front of him.
The magic happened about five minutes and fifty thousand years into the fight. Without warning, he separated from his body, peeling free of the flesh that was working so hard and with such accuracy, his spirit floating above the adrenaline that forest-fired his arms and legs, his essence witnessing himself pumping off rounds and pressing forward from a position over his own right shoulder.
It was the zone, and usually something that took him over pretty much as soon as he started fighting. But with Rhage under his skin, up his ass, and fucking his head, the shit was late to the party.
It was because of his above-the-fray perspective that he noticed the catch-22 first.
Sometimes the counter-intuitive, the WTF, the against-the-grain, was as important as all the things you expected to see in a battle.
Like, for example, three figures running laterally across the theater of engagement for the exit. Yeah, sure, it could be lessers who'd pissed their pants and were deserting--except for one thing: The Omega's blood in their bodies was one fuck of a GPS locator, and having to tell that kind of boss that you'd pantywaisted out of an engagement like this would guarantee the sort of torture that made Hell look like a couch surf.
Goddamn it, he couldn't let them go. Not when they could end up calling cops and adding another layer of FUBAR to this funhouse.
Assuming they hadn't already done that.
With a curse, Vishous took after the three free-thinkers, dematerializing out in front of where the trio seemed to be heading. As he re-formed, he knew they were fucking humans even before he saw that the one in the rear was running backward with what was no doubt a cocksucking Apple, iConformist POS front and center and on video record.
He fricking iHated anything with a goddamn Macintosh trademark.
V jumped out into the guy's path, which of course J. J. Abrams didn't notice, because, hello, he was too busy getting footage.
Vishous extended his shitkicker, and as the human went into gravity shock, the phone airborned and V caught the thing and shoved it into his leather jacket.
Next move was to stomp the guy's sternum and put a gun in his face. Staring down at the holy shit and sputter that was going on, it took all of V's self-control not to slit the guy's throat, then go Jason Voorhees all over the pair who were still on the run. He'd beyond had it with humans. He had real work to do, but noooo, he was once again wiping the asses of these rats without tails so that the rest of them didn't get upset that vampires walked among them.
"D-d-d-d-don't h-h-h-h-hurt me," came the whine. Along with a whiff of urine as the guy pissed himself.
"You are so fucking pathetic."
Cursing again, V pulled a mental snatch-and-grab, checking to see if the CPD had been contacted--which was a "no"--before wiping clean the kid's memories of his pot smoking rendezvous with his buddies being interrupted by all hell breaking loose.
"You had a bad trip, you dumb-ass," V muttered. "Bad trip. This is all just a bad fucking trip. Now run the fuck along back to Daddy and Mommy's."
Like the good little preprogrammed toy he now was, the kid was up on his new old-school Converses and tearing off after his friends, a look of total confusion on his flushed face.
Vishous pulled another jump ahead and intercepted Frick and Frack. And what do you know, V's mere presence, materializing out of thin air, was enough to bust through their panic--the pair hard-stopped like they were chained dogs that had run out of steel links, jerking back in their shoes and pinwheeling their matching Buffalo Bills parkas.
"You asshats are always in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Mentally lights-outing them, he patted them down, cleaning their pockets and their short-terms at the same time--then he sent them off on their pussyfooted flee once again, praying that one or the other of them had an undiagnosed heart condition that would suddenly show up under the strain and kill him outright.
Then again, V was a nasty bastard, so there you had it.
No time to waste. He headed back to try to catch Rhage, re-outing his forties and looking for the most efficient way to the sonofabitch. Too bad dematerializing into the thick of things was a no-go, but shit, there were guns pointing in every direction of the compass. At least necessary coverage came quick, first in a series of maple trees and then in the form of a building that had to have been yet another dormitory.
Slamming his back against the cold, hard brick, his ears tuned out the heaving breathing of his lungs. The heaviest discharges from firearms were on the left, up and forward of his position, and he quickly dumped both clips even though he had three bullets remaining in one and two in the other. Fully restocked, he jogged toward the far corner of the building and put his head--
The slayer popped out of the last window he'd ducked under, and without the creak of the sash, V would have gotten drilled. Instinct rather than training had his arm swinging out and around before he was conscious of moving, and his index finger pumped off a pound of lead right into the fucker's face, clouds of black blood exploding out the rear of the skull like ink bottles getting dropped from a great height.
Unfortunately, an autonomic contraction of the slayer's grip on whatever autoloader it had in its hand caused a number of bullets to go flying, and the burning stripe on the outside of V's hip meant he'd been hit at least once. But better there than any other place--
A second slayer came around the corner, and V caught it in the throat with his left-hand gun. That one appeared to be unarmed, nothing of note dropping to the overgrown grass as the thing grabbed for the front of his neck to try to hold in the black gusher.
No time to peel any weapons off either of them--or to stab them back to the Omega.
Up ahead, Rhage was in trouble.
Out in the heart of the campus, in the town square-like area formed by a circle of buildings set some five acres apart, Rhage was center-of-attention with a peanut gallery of at least twenty slayers closing in on him.
"Jesus Christ," V muttered.
No time for strategy. Duh. And no one else coming to Hollywood's aid, either. The other brothers and fighters were engaged all around, the attack having dissipated into half a dozen skirmishes that were being fought in different quadrants.
There was nobody to spare in a situation that could have used three to four wingmen.
Instead of one who had a thigh wound and a grudge the size of Canada.
Goddamn it, he was used to always being right, but sometimes it sucked ass.
Vishous surged forward and focused on o
ne side of the melee, picking off slayers as he tried to give his brother a viable escape route. But Rhage . . . fucking Rhage.
He was somehow on it. Even though the math didn't add up to anything but a casket equation, the dumb bastard was a thing of deadly beauty as he slowly circled 'round and 'round, discharging his weapons on a first-come, first-served basis, refueling his autoloader without missing a beat, creating a ring of writhing, half-dead undead bodies like he was the eye of a helter-skelter hurricane.
The only thing that wasn't in control? His handsome-for-the-history-books face was contorted into a monster's snarl, the killing rage within him not even partially leashed. And that would have been almost acceptable.
If it weren't for the fact that he was supposed to be a professional.
That sort of murderous emotion was an amateur's downfall, the kind of thing that blinded you instead of focused you, weakened you instead of made you invincible.
Vishous worked as fast he as could, spot-on'ing chests, guts, heads, until the stench saturated the open air even with the wind blowing in the opposite direction. But he had to compensate for Rhage's ever-rotating shooting field, staying out of range himself, because shit knew he had no confidence that the brother would differentiate between targets.
And that was the fucking problem when you were half-cocked in battle.
Then it was done.
Kinda.
Even after those twenty or twenty-five lessers were down on the ground, Rhage still spun around and continued shooting, a death carousel with no more riders left on its demon horses that was too stupid to know where its own off switch was.
"Rhage!" V glanced around as he kept his guns up, but stopped his own discharging. "You fucking idiot! Stop!"
Pop! Pop! Pop-pop!
Hollywood's muzzle kept coughing out flashes of light even though there was nothing to shoot at--except other fighters off in the distance who just happened to be out of range for the moment.
But were not guaranteed to stay that way.
Vishous moved in closer, stepping over the animated corpses on the ground, keeping at Rhage's back as the rotation continued. "Rhage!"
The temptation to shoot the guy in the ass was so strong, his right hand lowered a muzzle to butt-cheek level. But that was just a fantasy. Giving Hollywood a lead injection would only trigger the beast when V himself was within appetizer range.
"Rhage!"
Something must have gotten through to the brother, because the barrage of do-nothing shooting slowed . . . then stopped, leaving Rhage in a panting, sagging neutral.
That was so out in the open, they both might as well have had neon arrows over their heads.
"You're out of here," V barked. "Are you fucking even kidding me with this shit--"
That was when it happened.
One second, he was moving around to get in front of his brother . . . and the next, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, one of the not-dead-enough lessers lift an unsteady arm . . . that had a gun attached to the end of it. As the bullet came blasting out of that muzzle, V's brain did the triangulation as fast as the lead slug flew.
It was going into Rhage's chest.
Right into the center of Rhage's chest--because, hello, that was the biggest target outside of one of the fucking dormitory doors on the campus.
"No!" V screamed as he went to jump into the path.
Yeah, 'cuz him dying instead was such a great outcome? Lose/lose, either way.
No blaze of pain as he airborned, no resounding kick of a bullet's entry into his side, his hip, his other thigh.
Because the goddamned thing had already found home.
Rhage let out a grunt and both of his arms punched to the sky, that patented, autonomic compression on the triggers in those hands emptying those clips: Bang, bang, bang, bang! up to the sky, up to the heavens, as if Rhage were cursing in pain.
And then the brother went down.
Unlike the Omega's boys, a direct hit like that would knock out any vampire, even a member of the Brotherhood. Nobody walked away from that shit, nobody.
As V screamed again, he hit his own patch of ground and discharged one of his weapons, plowing the slayer with the hole-in-one shot with enough lead to turn the fucker into a bank vault.
Threat neutralized, he scrambled to his brother, crab-walking on his guns and the balls of his shitkickers. For a male who never felt fear, he found himself looking into the gaping maw of pure terror.
"Rhage!" he said. "Jesus fucking Christ-- Rhage!"
THREE
Havers's new clinic was located across the river, in the center of some four hundred acres of forest that were vacant but for an old farmhouse and three or four new-built kiosks for entry into the subterranean facility. As Mary drove the last stretch of the twenty-minute trip in her Volvo XC70, she kept glancing in the rearview mirror at Bitty. The girl was sitting in the backseat of the station wagon and staring out the darkened window next to her as if the thing were a television and whatever show was on was captivating.
Every time Mary refocused on the road ahead, she cranked down harder on the steering wheel. And the accelerator.
"We're almost there," she said. Yet again.
The meant-to-be-reassuring statement was doing nothing for Bitty, and Mary knew she was just trying to soothe herself. The idea that they might not make it to the bedside in time was a hypothetical burden that she couldn't help trying on for size--and, man, did that crying-shame corset make her feel like she couldn't breathe.
"Here's the turn-off."
Mary hit the blinker and took a right onto a single-laner that was uneven and exactly what all her internal rush-rush didn't need.
Then again, she could have been on a perfectly paved super-highway and her heart still would have been conga-lining it up in her chest.
The vampire race's only healthcare facility was set up to evade both human attention and sunlight's merciless effects, and when you brought someone in, or sought treatment yourself, you were assigned one of several entry points. When the nurse had called with the sad news, Mary had been told to proceed directly to the farmhouse and park there, and that was what she did, pulling in between a pickup truck that was new and a Nissan sedan that was not.
"You ready?" she asked the rearview mirror as she cut the engine.
When there was no response, she got out and went around to Bitty's door. The girl seemed surprised to find they'd arrived, and small hands fumbled to release the seat belt.
"Do you need help?"
"No, thank you."
Bitty was clearly determined to get out of the car on her own, even if it took her a little longer than it might have otherwise. And the delay was maybe intentional. The what-next that was coming after this death was almost too terrible to contemplate. No family. No money. No education.
Mary pointed to a barn behind the house. "We're going over there."
Five minutes later, they were through a number of checkpoints and down an elevator shaft, whereupon they stepped out into a sparkling-clean, well-lit reception and waiting area that smelled exactly like all the ones in human hospitals did: fake lemon, faded perfume, and faintly of someone's dinner.
Pavlov had a point, Mary thought as she approached the front desk. All it took was that combination of antiseptic and stale air in her nose and she was flat on her back in a hospital bed, tubes running in and out of her, the drugs trying to kill off the cancer in her blood making her feel at best like she had the flu, and at worst like she was going to die then and there.
Fun times.
As the uniformed blonde behind the computer screen looked up, Mary said, "Hi, I'm--"
"Go that way," the female said urgently. "To the double doors. I'll release the lock. The nursing station is right ahead of you. They'll take her in directly."
Mary didn't wait to even say thank-you. Grabbing Bitty's hand, she rushed across the buffed, shiny floor and punched through the metal panels as soon as she heard the clunk of the mechanism shi
ft free.
On the far side of the cozy chairs and the well-thumbed magazines of the waiting area, it was all clinical business, people in scrubs and traditional white nursing uniforms striding around with trays and laptops and stethoscopes.
"Over here," someone called out.
The nurse in question had black hair cut short, blue eyes that matched her scrubs, and a face like Paloma Picasso's. "I'll take you to her."
Mary fell in behind Bitty, guiding the girl now by the shoulders as they went down one hallway and then another to what was obviously the ICU section of the place: Normal hospital rooms didn't have glass walls with curtains on the insides. Didn't have this much staff around. Didn't have dashboards with stats flashing behind the nursing station.
As the nurse stopped and opened one of the panels, the beeping of the medical equipment was urgent, all kinds of frantic blips and squeaks suggesting that the computers were worried about whatever was going on with their patient.
The female held the curtain aside. "You can go right in."
When Bitty hesitated, Mary leaned down. "I'm not leaving you."
And again, that was something Mary was saying for herself. The girl had never seemed to particularly care which of Safe Place's staff were or were not around her.
As Bitty remained in place, Mary looked up. There were two nurses checking Annalye's vitals, one on each side of the bed, and Havers was there, too, putting some kind of drug into the IV that ran into a shockingly thin arm.
For a split second, the tableau sank in hard. The figure on the bed had dark hair that had thinned out and skin that was gray and eyes that were closed and a mouth that was lax--and during that first infinite instant as Mary took in the female who was dying, she couldn't decide whether she was seeing her own mother or herself on that bright white pillow.
I can't do this, she thought.
"Come on, Bitty," she said hoarsely. "Let's go hold her hand. She's going to want to know you're here."
As Mary led the girl in, Havers and his staff disappeared into the background, retreating without a fuss as if they knew damn well that there was nothing they could do to stop the inevitable, so Bitty's chance to say her good-bye was the critical path.
