A klaxon of warning rang out dully, and emergency lights flashed crimson in the hallway. But more importantly, the steel-and-glass doors between me and the waiting room quickly started closing.
I didn’t wait around to see if they tried to overcome the barrier and follow me; instead, I darted back down the hallway in the direction I’d come. Hospital attendants were already starting to spill out into the hallway, checking for fires and securing patients, and I took advantage of the chaos to quickly duck out of sight. I turned a quick corner and slipped into a random, no-heartbeat room, darting right past a shivering nurse’s back before he could turn around.
This wasn’t Charles’ room, but at least it was empty. I double checked behind the curtain divides anyway; I didn’t want an innocent bystander stuck in the middle of a tussle between me and four other vampires during an impromptu fire drill. I fell into a fighting stance as the door nudged itself open a few inches but relaxed a little as two coyotes spilled inside, one scooting under the nearest bed and the other skittering to a stop at my feet.
“The hell are you doing in here?” Jason’s voice felt comically mismatched coming from a coyote’s mouth, and I simply had to stop thinking and stare for just a moment. “We thought you’d take the opportunity to get out of the hospital, not just corner yourself again.” The other little canine poked its nose out from under the bed next to me and blinked innocently as if to agree.
I decided to take talking animal-people in stride. “Something came up,” I rasped in reply. This room smelt like old blood too; I just couldn’t get away from the scent. “But I’ve got a plan.” I glanced around.
“What is it?” Rain-yote prompted from near my ankles.
I shrugged. “Gonna do what I should have done in the first place.” I went over to the reinforced hospital window, glanced down for clearance below, then kicked it out into the empty night, frame and all. Then I ducked and stepped into its place as it shattered on the black asphalt beneath us.
Charles picked that moment to stir and look down. “Ohhhhh helllll nooo.” The big magician groaned and clutched at me. “Thish ish it. Thish ish how I die.”
“Shhhhh,” I replied and stepped out on the edge of the windowsill, the unrestrained wind plucking at my hair and clothes.
“Hey!” Rain yelped and ran over to the window.
“Yeah, what about us?” Jason yipped, keeping his coyote voice down.
In response, I turned and held out my arms. Two sets of ears twitched toward the door and hallway beyond, then two animals leapt into my arms. I stepped off into empty air.
I plummeted nearly fifty feet to the pavement like a rock—a rock covered in wizards, animals, and magical instruments. I couldn’t roll to absorb the shock, but I didn’t need to; my legs did that, and I bent my knees to try and protect my passengers from the impact. My knees creaked a little, the pavement cracked a little, and I heard Charles lose his breath in a whoosh right in my ear, but he seemed mostly okay. I didn’t feel like lingering was a good idea though. I drew in shadow again, more hastily than before, and spilled coyotes onto the parking lot. Across the street was a subdivision full of houses, condos, and most importantly, trees.
I beat feet toward the relative safety of concealment for about three seconds before Charles started pulling my hair, getting one of his big hands tangled in my messy locks as he tried to steer me back toward the hospital grounds.
“Ow!” I said reflexively, feeling some hair come free. “Goddammit, what now?”
“Thruck.” The wizard stated loudly, firmly. I was almost glad to hear him becoming more coherent again. “Noht leavin’ mah thruck.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I glanced toward the nearest coyote. “Where…”
“This way!” Rain piped up, excited. I rushed after two tiny streaks of gray and brown fur, barely managing to keep up as they led me to the adjacent parking deck. Stairs flew by under us until we came to the third floor, a dark expanse sparsely populated by a few scattered vehicles with Charles’ stoic black Silverado right in the middle. Hunger, frustration, and anxiety nibbled away at my concentration, and I let my shadows drip off of me and go their own way.
“Okay.” I ripped the key ring off of Charles’ bag as we approached. “Here’s your damn truck. Let’s get in and—”
I noticed the heartbeats only a moment before three Sanguinarians stepped out from behind the thick support pillar right next to the truck. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” That accounted for three of the four unidentified inhuman heartbeats I was hearing; I scanned the shadows for the fourth.
“No jokes today, love.” I recognized the speaker, a pale-skinned dirty blond in a black and white Venom T-shirt and jeans. “Just a bit of the old ultra-violence.”
“You look familiar,” I retorted, carefully setting aside Charles’ enormous duffle bag and propping his limp, useless body up against it where he could watch. He glared at me, which proved he really was getting better. “Didn’t I hit you with a stop sign once?”
She snorted, tossing her hair. “You got lucky, love.”
I rolled my shoulders. “Well, come here and let's get lucky again.” Under my breath, I whispered for the two teenagers in disguise to stay off the radar a little longer.
This would only take a moment.
Hopefully.
“Remember, Mr. Salvatore wants her alive,” one of the others commented. I realized I actually recognized all three of them; I’d run into T-Shirt Girl on the streets with Tamara once, but the other two guys were survivors from where I’d crashed Salvatore’s party back in the storm drain.
“Kinda hard to do that,” she snapped, “since she’s already dead.”
I went still, the first steps of my advance faltering along with my confidence.
T-Shirt Girl grinned, showing off her long, snake-like fangs. “Oh yeah, we know what you are, Strigoi. Surprised?”
I smothered my spike of fear with a grunt and another retort. “Your boss was smart enough not to show up in person. You three should've followed his example.”
“We came better prepared,” she replied, putting a hand on both of the other vampires’ shoulders and pushing them a couple of steps toward me. “Don’t just stand there, you assholes. Get her.”
The young-looking Sanguinarian with dark skin drew a thin, ice-pick shaped blade from his coat, running the edges across the inside of his bicep and coating the weapon in rich crimson. The other vampire pulled a punch dagger from his nice tailored jacket, one with a long, thin Damascus blade shaped like a stiletto, and did the same. Both of them moved to flank me, while T-Shirt Girl simply manifested her crescent-shaped, razor-edged blood claws and hung back.
I shook my head with a low growl. “I don’t have time for this.” Both of the advancing Sanguinarians hesitated. “So here’s the deal.” I glanced at the shadows near Charles’ truck, then back to the two vampires. “First, I’m going to put my foot up his ass.” I pointed at the Sanguinarian with the punch dagger, then looked at the other one. “Then I’m going to put his ass up your ass.”
While they glanced at each other in momentary confusion, I punched the one on the right in the face as hard as I could. The blow shattered his teeth and nose on impact, and sent him on a short, manned flight straight into a concrete pillar.
Meanwhile, Tamara emerged from the shadows at the front of Charles’ pickup and wrapped her silver-and-steel wire whip around T-Shirt Girl’s throat like a garrote, hauling her completely off of her feet before twisting her neck sharply to the side with a gut-churning crack of breaking bone.
The dark-skinned Sanguinarian lunged in at me, and it was only luck that I twisted enough for his thin blade to scrape along one of my upper ribs rather than diving in between them. I slapped the blade-wielding hand away, but he stepped in close, kicking the back of my knee hard enough to make me stumble. He punched me expertly in the face—with no real effect—then scraped another dagger strike off of my blocking forearm. As he lashed out with anothe
r lightning-fast punch, so did I; our knuckles met mid-air in a head-on collision.
I could hear the repeated snap as bones down his arm shattered from the impact, and he reeled in agony as the limb was temporarily reduced to limp, useless blood and meat. I took the opportunity to ram the toes of my boot into the lower part of his stomach, lifting him several inches off the ground, then grabbed him by the shoulders of his fancy dress shirt and spun, launching him headfirst into the concrete support pillar. From the look of his rapidly graying skin and shattered skull, it looked like he was more than down for the count.
The other vampire tried to leap on me from behind, the punch blade nearly forgotten as his blood loss turned him feral, but I’d had Sanguinarians do that to me so many times by now that I anticipated the attack. I turned and caught the vampire by the arms, pulling him toward me as I slammed my forehead into his face, shattering it once more and smearing us both with his cloying, sticky blood. His head snapped back from the force, and it was a simple matter to reach up, grab his head in both hands, and snap his head to the side so that he was looking back over his own spine. The punch blade clattered to the cold concrete, bloody coating pooling around it, and I dropped his limp body right beside it.
“Oops,” I growled, glaring at the corpse.
A thump caught my attention as Tamara went flying into the side of Charles’ truck, the stalwart vehicle shrugging the impact off without so much as a dent in the door.
T-Shirt Girl wiped a dribble of blood from her mouth and looked from the two dead Sanguinarians to me, then to Tamara. “T’hell with this, I’m out,” she coughed, her accent thick with her own blood. Before Tamara could recover or I could reach her, she darted for the edge of the parking deck and threw herself off. By the time I got to the edge myself, there was no sign of her.
I cursed.
Tamara was still rubbing the back of her skull as I jogged back over. “Wow. Whoever the hell she is, she’s strong.” The Moroi shook her head, seeming impressed. I would have been too, if my stress gauge wasn’t just about maxed out.
“We’ll have to deal with her later,” I growled. Well, I will.
“You do realize she knows what you are, right?” Tamara eyed me with obvious concern.
“Yeah.” I tried to keep the anger, the frustration born of worry, out of my tone, but my words grated on each other like loose gravel and made it obvious. “But first things first. We’ve got to get Charles and the boys out of here.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the drugged wizard, who had somehow managed to fall over during the fight and now fumbled at his staff with rubbery fingers.
“Okay.” Tamara gave me a sympathetic smile and laid a hand on my shoulder in passing; my temper cooled a couple of degrees at the casual touch.
The coyotes came out of hiding, eyes wide, and Tamara and I managed Charles into the passenger seat of his truck. “Well, this is a role reversal, huh?” I said, climbing into the driver’s seat and leaning over to buckle the hospital-gown-clad Charles securely in. I scented fresh blood and pulled away quickly; I must have managed to scrape him against something during our daring escape.
I turned the key and the Silverado roared to life, as if eager to get its owner to safety. It might have been less enthused if it had realized who was behind the wheel. Man, I haven’t driven in what, over a year? I hope it’s like riding a bike. At least it wasn’t a stick shift. That would have been a death sentence for both of us.
As if reading my mind, Charles somehow managed to grab both the door and ceiling handles. “Pleash dohn’t deshtroy mah thruck.” He slurred, glaring at me pleadingly. His irises were still nearly pinpoints and his skin still looked a little clammy, but his words were coming out clearer and clearer. Any accomplished magician could handle and regulate altered states, and from what I could gather, Charles was a rather powerful magician. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be out of commission much longer, just as he hopefully wouldn’t die from an overdose.
I rolled my window down, and a pair of coyotes bounded through it in quick succession and settled themselves into the seat between us. “Seat belts,” I rasped at them jokingly, but they just stared at me, one of them sporting wide eyes; I had no idea which was which anymore except that maybe Rain was the slightly smaller one. Behind me, light flared, cutting across the parking deck as Tamara woke her Hellcat to follow us.
Muscle memory kicked in quickly, and after a jerky start, I got us down to the parking deck exit. I thought about gunning it through the lowered, striped bar blocking our path, but I didn’t know if that only worked in movies or not and figured it’d garner us more attention than it was worth either way. Besides, Charles was glaring at me like a hawk the whole time, and I had little hope that he was too narcotics-addled to remember. So instead, I fished a few quarters out of his cup holder and leaned out the window.
I managed to get the bar up and hit the gas, only to immediately slam on the brakes again to avoid running over the detective from earlier. I winced as a coyote bounced off of the dash, and the other tumbled gracelessly into the floorboard.
“Hands in the air!” The man bellowed, waving his gun back and forth between Charles and me. He hadn’t quite thrown trigger discipline to the wind, but he looked less stable by far than I’d have liked. “Hands in the air now, or I open fire!” Wisely, he circled to the side so that he couldn’t be easily run over, coming toward my side of the truck and staring me down.
Slowly, I raised my hands, and the detective came a little closer, lowering his voice somewhat. “Look, I’m sorry really about this.” He swallowed hard. Up close, I could see his aim wavering, just a little, and could see the sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead. My eyes went wide as he shifted his aim toward a helpless Charles. “But I don’t have a choice; you don’t know what it’s like, what they’re like—”
“Stop!” Tamara’s voice rang out from behind us, the clear peal of power it carried ringing on the air. Inside the cab, the two coyotes froze, motionless, and even I went still for a moment. A shudder rippled through the man as Tamara Moroaică got out of her car, hands open and unthreatening, and stepped slowly toward him. Her eyes shone, huge and lambent blue in the darkness. “You don’t want to do that. Put the gun down.”
Her soft suggestions might as well have been iron-clad orders. But, to my astonishment, he didn’t comply.
The detective shook frenetically, like a leaf in the wind, staring wide-eyed at Tamara while still aiming the gun towards Charles’ side of the truck. “No… I don’t want to… But I don’t have a choice. They won’t let me—”
“Enough, already.” I couldn’t handle any more stress, not with the smell of blood one seat over, not with a frantic pulse hammering out a crazy rhythm in the detective in front of me. Before I’d growled the first sound, my hand was already clamped over the barrel of the gun as I hung halfway out of the open window.
A sharp snap of sound shattered the air, causing the coyotes under my feet to whine in pain. Something thumped dully into the palm of my hand, and a hot piece of deformed lead tumbled to the pavement. I hadn’t counted on the flicker of pain I felt as the burning powder exited the barrel, but since it didn’t set me on fire, it only irritated me further.
I promptly took his gun away, crumpled the barrel in my iron grasp, and tossed the warped piece of scrap through the open back window and into the truck bed alongside Charles’ staff and duffle bag. “There. Can we go now?”
The detective started to protest, until he caught my eyes, until he heard the rumble of my rising growl.
“Go.” Tamara said, and he turned and bolted, tripping on a concrete parking marker in his haste to flee toward the safety of the hospital. The Moroi looked in our window. “Are you two okay?” She eyed me more than Charles.
I shook my head.
“I’hm bleedigh,” Charles announced candidly.
“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” I rumbled. We needed to leave before anything else happened.
CHAPTER S
EVENTEEN
Probably the most obvious hideout
We reconvened at Charles’ house, over what I thought were my very reasonable objections. Objections like the police probably knowing exactly where it was, and it being the first place they’d look.
“They’re not going to come here and look for trouble,” the wizard insisted again. In the hour and a half it had taken us to make it here and dig in, his speech had become unfortunately coherent, if still a bit on the heavy, sluggish side. “That one detective was clearly under Sanguinarian influence. Getting their lackeys to arrest me for a while, or even shoot me ‘accidentally,’ is one thing. Encouraging an organized assault on my sanctum is another. One that risks getting the Grand Magisterium seriously involved.”
I paged through my phone’s browser as Tamara checked his concussion. “So, what, you reach home base and you’re safe? That’s it?” I raised a skeptical eyebrow. “And I knew there was something going on with that guy. He even smelt funny.”
“Actually, yes,” Tamara replied. “Historically, the Magisterium has taken a very dim view of attacking their wizards in their chosen sanctums. As in, they get together and drop a class five tornado on your home in return kind of dim.” She leaned over to peer at Charles’ eyes. “The rest of us kinda learned to back off after a few of those abject examples.”
“Unless, of course, we’re stupid enough to invite you people in, first,” Charles commented thickly, trying to shoo Tamara away from his face. She ignored him.
“Well, that explains a lot.” Like his initial reluctance to ever let us into his home. A reluctance that, I’d noted, hadn’t extended to Rain and Jason. Maybe changelings didn’t count, maybe he was still too drug-addled to think it through with his normal degree of paranoia. But having gotten to know Charles better over the past months, I figured it was more likely because they were kids.
Blood Red Ashes (Dying Ashes Book 2) Page 18
