by Dean Murray
He was dead before he hit the ground and I stepped away wounded and bleeding, but still more than capable of making sure I took a few more vampires with me.
The vampire stink got stronger as I got closer to the front door, but the blood smell was still too strong to allow me to pick out how many vampires I was up against. I looked at the door for a couple of seconds and then grabbed one of the utilitarian steel chairs scattered about the foyer.
My claws made short work of the seat and back, and then I tore the frame apart and wrapped one of the longer pieces around the door handles where they came together. It was crude, but I'd just locked the door against anyone who didn't have the strength to bend steel.
I felt a moment of regret at the action. I'd just locked all of the humans inside with the vampires. They could still go out the windows, but that would slow them down and potentially cost lives if I didn't manage to kill all of the bloodsuckers. It was regrettable, but it would also help keep the vampires imprisoned with us here as well.
It was the kind of decision I'd seen Alec forced into, especially when Agony had made his visit to Sanctuary. I'd hated him at the time for some of the things he'd made us do back then, but I knew this was the right decision to make, and for more reasons than just the twin jets of hate and rage burning inside of me. The only thing that was holding the vampires back from taking over the heartland of the United States was the fact that we shape shifters preyed on them like they preyed on the humans.
They didn't know we existed, which allowed us to stalk and kill them in small groups. If that ever changed then the advantage would swing irrevocably the other way. The vampires could reproduce with a speed only found in truly parasitic organisms and the mentalists inside of their ranks would be able to find our packs one by one and destroy us by bringing overwhelming numbers against us.
I needed to win tonight for more than just Ben and I.
I pushed the elevator call button with a knuckle and then waited with my heart in my chest as it came down. I half expected a dozen vampires to come streaming out of the car once the doors opened, but it was thankfully empty. I wedged a chair between the open elevator doors to make sure that it wouldn't be of any use to the vampires, stuck my head inside to confirm that they hadn't used it yet, and then turned for the stairs.
The mentalist attacked again when I was halfway between the first and second floors. My beast fought back, but this time the vampire had let the blanket exhaustion he'd been maintaining drop back to nothing more than a hint of what it had been. The change freed up resources that he used to hit me with an attack that had all of the subtlety of a falling anvil.
I stumbled on the stairs, dropping to the ground for a second as I tried to function in a world where I couldn't see or even tell which way was up. For long moments I couldn't do anything more than just stay there, crumpled to the ground, and hope that none of the other vampires would happen upon me.
I was completely defenseless to physical attack, but that didn't worry my beast, she was much more concerned with the fact that oily fingers were rummaging through my mind like it was nothing more than a series of file folders. My beast attacked with fire and the mental equivalent of fang and claws.
Exhaustion pulled at me, real exhaustion, not just the mentalist's working, but my beast seemed fresh and eager to continue fighting. I could feel a shining golden line running from her off into a place that was simultaneously far and close, a place that existed but couldn't possibly exist. It was the first time I'd ever noticed the slender thread, but I could tell it was important. Energy rolled down the line, feeding her an unnatural vitality that I could tap only the barest fringes of.
A starving man takes what he can get, so I did reach out for that golden conduit, skimming off something that was less than a tithe of a tithe of those terrible energies. Even that little bit of power kindled a fire that went raging through my insides.
My hybrid nerves didn't dull this pain, but I forced it below the level of consciousness and threw all of my efforts to supporting my beast. She clawed and bit, but I was more than just a savage animal, I had reason at my beck and call. Man had been building in one form or another since we'd first stacked two branches on top of each other to form a windbreak. I called upon those skills and began building a fortress inside of my mind.
Brick by immaterial brick, I built up a translucent wall and with each course of bricks I felt the pressure inside of my mind lessen. The mentalist tried to undo my work, tried to break down my wall, but my beast was there shredding his attacks, chasing him off while I continued to encircle us in a tower that was impervious to anything he might try to do to us.
It seemed as though my work lasted for hours, and even the energy I'd siphoned away from my beast was gone, consumed in the effort, by the time I finished, but when I was done we were alone inside of my mind.
I opened my eyes and pulled myself to my feet, heading for the heavy metal door only a few steps above me. My beast paced back and forth on the inside of my mental wall. She didn't like being caged, even when the cage was for our protection, but now she had the measure of our enemy and she knew we couldn't defeat him on the terrain of our own mind. She would leave the wall be for now. She wanted him dead at least as much as I did.
I paused just outside the gray door to the second floor, sniffing to confirm that the vampires were all on this level. Nobody had gone up to the third story, which meant that I'd probably contained them to this one floor unless they'd already started fleeing down the fire escape.
A series of deep breaths oxygenated my blood and then I threw open the door and dashed into the corridor beyond it. It was past the point where I could hope to sneak up on the vampires, instead it was time for boldness and speed.
Two vampires were waiting for me a dozen feet down the left-hand corridor. They looked like twins. Two men, both golden-haired, tall and slender. The weapons in their hands were likewise matched weapons, huge swords that were meant to be wielded with two hands. I closed with them and hoped that neither was old enough to have developed any kind of power, telekinetic or otherwise.
Their weapons were fierce, heavy things that would easily take off even one of my massive limbs, but they weren't the ideal choice for fighting in such close quarters. I jumped back out of range of the first slash and made as if to follow along behind the sword so that I could bowl the lead vampire over, but the second vampire launched an attack only a heartbeat behind his fellow.
Instead of advancing forward I found myself forced further and further back. They were used to fighting together, displaying a skill and speed that would have been beautiful to watch if it hadn't been directed towards the job of ending my life.
The wound in my chest continued to ooze a slow flow of blood. Strategically positioned muscles inside of my body had already contracted in an effort to direct most of the blood in my body out and around the damaged section, but even for a hybrid that wasn't enough to completely stop the bleeding.
The weakness that I'd felt before had all been mental, though it hadn't been any less real because of that. It hadn't vanished, but it was quickly being joined by a physical exhaustion that threatened to make me clumsy and slow, easy prey for the vampires who were still pressing me.
The blades came at me again, slicing through the air with inhuman speed as I ducked and retreated, occasionally knocking them to one side with my claws in a spray of sparks. We were approaching a decision point.
I was tired and getting slower, but it was more than that. The corridor was too narrow for both of them to get at me like they would have liked. Instead of coming at me from multiple angles they were forced to trade off on who led, one aggressively attacking me while the other waited to strike if I tried to close and kill the lead vampire. They had driven me far enough back now that it would only take another step or two and I would be in the broad junction of corridors next to the elevator. If they surrounded me I was as good as dead.
There was a chance that I could sl
ip under the reach of one of them and kill him while the other was still too far away to help, but it was an infinitesimally small chance. It was much more likely that they'd just bleed me out, safe behind the added reach that their weapons granted them.
I stepped backwards as a blade licked out in an effort to cut me across the neck. I knocked the strike from the second vampire away with my claws and then had to step backwards again to avoid the backstroke from the first vampire which otherwise would have taken off my arm.
The second step was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. I was far enough back into the junction now that the first vampire started forward at an angle, anxious to flank me by getting into the other hall so that they could pin me against the elevator.
The smart thing to do, the thing they expected me to do, was to rush the first vampire while they were spaced slightly further apart than they had been. Failing that, I probably should have retreated more quickly, angling backwards myself so that I ended up in the other corridor and kept the fight from changing drastically one way or another by denying them the room they'd been hoping for.
I did neither. Instead I retreated, but rather than heading towards the other corridor I backed right up against the corner they'd hoped to trap me in. It was suicide except for the fact that during one of our last couple of exchanges I'd caught a glimpse of a heavy wooden chair next to the elevator.
It was one of those chairs that you sit in rather than on, a huge monstrosity that weighed close to a hundred pounds. I hooked it with the claws of my right hand and then hurled it at the first vampire with all my might.
The vampires hadn't exactly become complacent, but they'd thought that the parameters of the fight had been well established. They were fast, skilled, and with their swords they had a reach that exceeded even what I was capable of. They'd forgotten about the fact that I was many, many times stronger than either of them.
The chair shot across the empty space between me and my target, a target who had been so eager to box me in that he'd already made it to the other corridor, a corridor that helped limit his options for evasion. He tried to dodge the projectile, but I'd thrown it at waist level, too high to jump, too low to duck. His sword couldn't deflect this blow and his best efforts still ended with the chair clipping him in the shoulder, splintering in a spray of wood and fabric as it knocked him to the ground.
The second vampire pressed the attack in an effort to buy his companion time to get back up and help him, but he was too used to me retreating. A hybrid is capable of moving backwards with incredible speed, but that's not what we are really built for.
I was done retreating. I shot forward with the kind of vision-blurring speed that I'd always loved as a wolf. I checked his arm with my right hand, stopping his sword as he tried to swing it, but it was merely a safety precaution. I was already inside the arc of his weapon and my jaws closed on his neck before he even realized just how badly he'd misjudged me.
I let the body drop away and turned back to the vampire I'd hit with the chair. He was back on his feet, sword at the ready, but it was obvious that the chair or the fall had hurt his shoulder. He stepped forward and slashed at me, but the attack had only a shadow of his previous speed and grace. I stepped back out of range of the attack and then darted forward before he could recover.
He was still trying to bring his sword back around at me again when I grabbed his wrist and threw him into the wall behind me with enough force to break even a vampire's neck. I made sure of him with a couple well-placed slashes and then started down the dimly-lit hall.
I knew that there was at least one more vampire. I couldn't smell him, but none of the vampires I'd killed yet had been the mentalist who had come so close to incapacitating me just a few minutes earlier. I continued down the hall on the left, the hall where the twin vampires had been standing, and found the mentalist in one of the rooms in the middle of the hall.
I'd expected the leader of the group to be a man. I'd had the feeling that the mental intrusions I'd been dealing with had been too heavy-handed to be the work of a woman, especially not a delicate, thin woman with long blonde hair and large, innocent eyes.
The illusion of innocence lasted only an instant and then I took in the devastation she'd left in the room. The occupants were dead, gone to feed the vampires and fill half a dozen blood bags that currently sat in an open cooler at her feet.
"What are you? Can you even talk?"
My lips pulled back, revealing enough fang to make most normal people shake in fear, but the vampire just stood there expectantly.
"You know what I am, you pillaged enough of my memories and thoughts to have at least a basic idea."
Another layer of the illusion was stripped away as her eyes took on a self-satisfied, sadistic look. "You're right, I know what you are. I'm astonished that you've managed to keep your existence a secret for so long. I never would have expected that level of sophistication out of mere beasts."
"Better a beast than a soulless monster who murders innocents."
There was another flicker of emotion on her face. I'd just told her something that she'd needed to know, but I didn't see how she'd taken any kind of advantage out of what I'd said.
"I thought you'd deny being a beast."
"I would have, but I don't actually care what you think. I'm just here to end you."
She looked down at the sword in her hand, another long rapier, and then shrugged. "You might find that more difficult than you expect it to be, but that's not what I want to talk about. I expected you to deny the fact that you're an animal; I was prepared to prove otherwise. Your mind was too alien to be human. I suspect that's why you were able to shake off the sleep construct in the first place. Even when I invaded your mind I still had a hard time understanding most of what I saw there."
She was stalling, but I didn't know why. I needed to end this so that I could go back down and get Ben. We needed to disappear before anyone woke up and called the cops. I moved forward, testing her defenses, but she stepped back, smoothly keeping herself out of range.
"I can save him, you know, but if you kill me you're going to have a very difficult time keeping him alive."
A chill ran up my back and lodged in the base of my skull. "Who?"
"Ben. That's his name, isn't it? He's going to just continue getting weaker. It won't matter what you do. Put him on antibiotics and his liver will fail, or his kidneys. Put him on dialysis and his heart will stop beating. You're fighting his own body now, it doesn't want to continue living."
It was the only thing she could have possibly said to stop me from pouncing. I opened my mouth and this time I was the one who was stalling for time. "How do you know that?"
"I was in your mind. I've seen everything about you. You've loved Ben for years. He was taken by vampires and when you saved him he dropped into a coma."
"You're lying, there's no way that you could have pulled all of that out of my mind that quickly."
She shook her head. "You're nothing more than a child, you haven't even seen two decades come and go, and you'll be dead in another sixty years. I've lived for thousands of years. You're fortunate really, there are only a handful of vampires who can save him and you've stumbled into me, someone who can help you."
I let my hands drop slightly and did my best to look confused. It was only partially an act. Most of my attention was directed inwards, searching, scouring my mind for something I couldn't feel, but which I suddenly knew had to be there.
It took less than a second to find them, a network of clear threads inside of my psyche. They'd grown through the seams in my wall where the blocks butted up against each other. They were so tiny and blended in with their surroundings so well that my beast hadn't been able to distinguish them as being alien, as being something that needed to be destroyed.
Her probes had buried themselves in nearly every part of my brain, but they hadn't penetrated the section where my beast was anxiously pacing back and forth. I looked out a
t her and knew just how precarious my situation was.
For all I knew she could read my thoughts as I had them, maybe not all of them, but certainly she'd know if I started to attack. She'd know which attacks were feints and which were real. She'd know where I was going to be as soon as I decided on a course. Fighting her would be like trying to fight my own shadow, a shadow that could kill me at any instant.
I let my mind dwell on her words, and it was only partly a ploy. I knew that she expected me to be considering her offer. She knew how much Ben meant to me, she'd trolled out the best possible bait imaginable.
A week before, even a day before, I would have said that I wasn't capable of making any kind of deal that resulted in a murdering parasite like her walking free, but I'd changed at some point over the last twenty-four hours. I needed for Ben to survive, had to have it in ways that defied reason.
In the grand scheme of things Ben's life wasn't any more valuable than anyone else's. If every life is precious like I'd been taught in school then how can you put one life in front of any other life? It was like picking between priceless paintings, only I was ready to pick, ready to discard one to the flames if it meant I could save the other.
I knew most people wouldn't agree with me. Some would probably even say that I was picking the wrong life to save. Ben had been a drug addict. He was a high-school dropout. Most people would say that if you stacked him up against an average person that they should live and Ben should die.
If I were to let this vampire go in return for her healing Ben's mind then I'd be condemning hundreds, possibly thousands of other people to a slow, painful death at her hand. There was no way to know how many more years she'd live before someone else stopped her. Even worse, each person she changed over into a vampire just made the math worse. She was the terrible, parasitic seed and there was no way for me to know how many apples of death she'd be responsible for as a result of me letting her go now.
