by S T Branton
I didn’t know it at the time, but I became aware of Rocco’s renewed presence long before Marcus did. The mob boss approached from the other side of the double doors, and I tried my best to warn Marcus somehow, but I couldn’t make my body do anything, despite the electric current of energy Marcus’s flask had given me.
Marcus was standing with his back to the doors when Rocco hit him.
Trapped in my healing body, I screamed without a voice. I struggled to force my limbs to respond to my commands. Nothing worked. My eyes were still closed, but I could see them in my mind.
Marcus was losing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
If I had known Marcus was so weak, I never would have let him fight. I would have dragged myself up out of that pit or died trying. I wouldn’t have allowed him to shoulder the burden of saving me. I didn’t know he was just going to get his ass beat by Rocco Durant.
By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. Marcus was matched in stature to Rocco, but not in weight, and his strength was starting to flicker out. He had not had the sword hilt in his hand when Rocco attacked, and the first thing Rocco did was wrench it off Marcus’s belt and toss it out of reach of both of them.
“You and me,” he said, smiling that awful smile. “Fair fight. Let’s go.”
It wasn’t a fair fight. I knew it as I lay some feet away, swimming through a daze of healing. In my trance state, I had the ability to understand how strong they were on a level that was deeper than squats and bench presses. It was a weird glimpse into a world I had never even considered before.
I could see the vitality of Marcus’s spirit, and I also knew that spirit was slipping away.
Not because of Rocco, but because of the wound in his back. It had spread while we were separated, and now, I caught sight of it whenever Marcus’s back was to me, a network of dark veins spiderwebbing hungrily over his torso. The wound he had suffered in Carcerum was consuming him.
I didn’t want to watch Marcus die, but my eyes stayed glued to the fight, even as the tears well up under my eyelids. Rocco’s punches were hard and unforgiving, frighteningly relentless. Marcus’s weakening form gave way under his might. It wasn’t even. Rocco Durant had become a vampire and harnessed the full strength burgeoning in the ones we had slaughtered in the pit. He would not stop unless pierced through the heart or taken apart by the sword.
I knew this as surely as I knew my own name. And that knowledge followed me as I broke through the surface, back into the waking world.
***
My body still wouldn’t work, but I was fully present in it again, and I could open my eyes. The space just above my heart that the vamp lady had tried to vent for me no longer felt like it was releasing my soul into the next realm. I knew I was very close to moving. Just not quite there.
Marcus lay limp under Rocco’s pummeling strikes as the mob boss finally began to slow down. He was panting, gasping, and coughing. I wished a heart attack on him right then and there, but it failed to materialize, like so many of my other wishes.
Instead, the large man crawled, wheezing, off of Marcus and shambled over to me.
“Good,” he said, upon looking down into my face. “You’re awake. I’d hate for you to miss this.” His hand ran a sleazy path over my leg that made me flush with rage and disgust. His gaze traveled down my body. “I meant what I said, you know?” He lowered his voice. “You’re not a bad looker, kid. What do you say we make the most of our time together, huh?”
If I could have thrown up, I would have. I’d never asked for an extreme close up of Rocco Durant’s face, but I was getting an extended one as he leered over me. I knew exactly what he was thinking; I could see it in his ugly, lecherous mug. I would rather die than let him do that to me.
I had a plan brewing, though, and sometimes, plans require a little sacrifice. Or a lot.
“You’re gorgeous when you can’t talk, sweetheart. I bet you’ve heard that one before.” He chuckled at himself and smoothed the tattered remains of my shirt. “Looks like my little pets did most of the job for me, huh? Before you killed them all, that is.” His grin widened into a shark’s rictus. “I’m impressed, little lady. Most people woulda been chum inside of ten seconds if they ever did something as stupid as you did. I’m not sure you know how lucky you are. That’s all right. Rocco will teach ya.”
It took him a minute to heave his bulk across me, but then, Rocco Durant was straddling my hips and pressing his weight down on me. I felt my diaphragm straining to inflate. My heart beat faster.
Get off me, dickhole.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” The smile never left his face. “Are you having trouble breathing? Get used to it, girlie, because that’s how I like ‘em. Makes it harder for you to fight back.” He patted his belly. “I’m a little past my fighting days, see. Now I prefer submission.”
Ugh. I commanded my hand to ball into a fist. To my profound relief and delight, it did. Yes! I was that much closer to getting myself out of this.
Rocco reached down and grabbed my arms, one of each in his monster mitts. “Lemme help ya, sweetie. Life ain’t nothin’ without a little romance, am I right?” He wrapped my arms around his generous waist, and he propped himself up over me. The gaudy tie hit me in the face.
He laughed.
I let him amuse himself with that, despite the fact that I would have liked nothing more than to throttle him with it. He didn’t notice my hands creeping ever so slowly down to his back pocket, which had been made baggy, presumably by a bankroll or wallet the size of a paperback novel. The outline of something precious stood out against the fabric. Two more of those syringes.
Should have kept them all in your jacket, Casanova.
I withdrew my hand with the patience of a surgeon, enduring a thorough and much too close examination of my facial features. His thumb mapped my cheeks and jaw.
“I think you’re gonna make one hell of a specimen, toots,” he said. “I sure hope you live through it. You might be the one who helps us fulfill god’s master plan in the end.” He sat up. I gasped a little as more air was squeezed out of me. “Imagine it. You saw the fury of those pesky little shitbags up close, and that was only Stage One. We’re gonna have an army of full-fledged vamps. Hundreds of thousands of ‘em laying waste to the human world.” He shook his head in greasy wonder. “I never realized how completely useless humans were. Don’t do nothing except eat, piss, shit, and screw. Work? Means nothing. Money? Means nothing. You’re still gonna die someday.
“Vamps don’t have that problem. And now, I’m one of ‘em, so neither do I. And soon, that’ll be you, too.” He patted my cheek a little harder than strictly necessary. “Look alive, sweet cheeks! It’s the best damn day of your life.”
It sure was, but not for the reasons he thought.
With an effort that would have been lauded by Kronin himself, I heaved my waking arm up from where I’d let it fall off his back. The syringe from his pocket sat soldier-ready in my hand. Coordination was still something of a problem, but he had a neck like a damn Sequoia, and that made things easier for me. I felt the needle hit home. Not exactly where I wanted it, but close enough.
Rocco’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. I held the plunger down for as long as I could, and then I dropped it. He fumbled at the needle in his neck. “You… you…”
His hands slapped the floor, pushing him away from me. I watched him stagger backward, half crouched, his thick arms outstretched.
My tongue formed two crucial syllables in my mouth. The only two I needed.
“Fuck you.”
He didn’t respond outside of more incoherent babbling. A thread of drool hung from the corner of his mouth. “What… what have you done?”
I eased myself up on my hands. The motion was flooding back into my body. I felt better than ever.
“From the looks of it,” I said. “I just killed you.”
Then, Rocco Durant did something I did not like at all.
He st
arted to laugh.
It began as a high-pitched, wheezy giggle that deepened gradually into something more coarse and malicious, a regular devil laugh. That was around the point where I wondered if I might have made a mistake. I had assumed that another whole vial of concentrated vampire blood would just destroy him outright.
It was looking like that was not the case.
“Shit.” I got to my feet in a hurry, backing away from him. All his blood vessels popped out under his skin, a network of red and blue. The skin itself had flushed almost purple over the course of about thirty seconds. Even the capillaries in his eyes bulged.
“Shit!” I said again. I turned and ran for the sword.
I knew where it was; it had skidded into a corner after Rocco threw it. So, the issue wasn’t its location as much as it was my speed. I thought I was moving faster than I’d ever moved in my life, even at a half strength, I-just-woke-up-from-a-healing-coma lope, but unless my ears deceived me, Rocco Durant was on the chase.
He was a fast old bastard now, thanks to my quick thinking. How was I supposed to know the benefits of vampire blood were stacking, not fatal?
I never ceased to amaze myself with my own innate ability to screw things up.
Somehow, I got to the sword, and I picked it up. It was burning by the time I turned back to face Rocco. I didn’t want to start off this fight trapped in a corner. Maybe he’d be twice as tall now. Or have four legs or four arms. Claws, a tail, horns that shot venom? It was all fair game as far as I knew.
Not even this open-minded approach was enough to prepare me for Rocco Durant’s second vamp transformation. I felt my mouth drop open as I took him in.
Nope. No. Absolutely not.
This was not what I had signed up for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The monstrosity formerly known as Rocco Durant towered over me, its hulking shoulders dwarfed by a pair of leathery wings that stretched out six feet in either direction. His face was a grotesque amalgamation of the one I knew mixed with a wild animal’s. Sickly pale, almost translucent skin stretched over a brand-new jaw from which a crop of fangs bristled unevenly.
I was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to look like that. Clearly, I’d messed with vamp evolution by overloading him.
Every bit of exposed skin gleamed with a disgusting, slimy sheen. The long, grotesque fingers ended in ragged nails that were slightly curved on the ends, and obviously razor sharp. I thought back to the vamp in my loft, trying to get at me with a similar configuration. Hopefully, these would prove equally unwieldy.
I started to move in, keeping my eyes on as many points of danger as I could. The sword didn’t feel so heavy anymore—almost the same as the training sword I used with Marcus.
Marcus.
My eyes flicked to his body, lying where he had been taken down. His eyes were closed. He looked ragged, like a fresh corpse. But to my surprise, his chest hitched as it rose and fell. The tough old grandpa was still hanging on.
Okay, Vic, I told myself. You know what to do. Make this fast.
Marcus’s life still hung in the balance. I still had a chance to save him.
Rocco watched me with freakish eyes that seemed like they were popping out of his face. The sockets stretched nightmarishly to contain them. They resembled bat eyes. I wondered if he was blind or half blind.
At this point, I’d take either.
His lower half was heavy and strangely proportioned. Giant feet on muscular legs tapered up to a confusingly tiny waist. If I could mess with his center of balance and get him to roll on his back, killing him would be a piece of vampire cake. I’d have to get him on the ground anyway. His body had contorted and grown to nearly ten feet, too tall to try the upward thrust that had worked so well before.
Why did Rocco Durant have to make everything so complicated, right up until the bitter end?
“Hey!” I shouted. I even waved the sword to help him locate me, in case those eyes really didn’t do much for him. “Never thought I’d say this, but I liked you better before!” I gestured to my face. “That blood really messed you up in here, huh?”
The eyes narrowed into dark slits. I smirked. He was too vain to suffer insults about his appearance lightly, even in gross monster form, which was weird because he had always been staggeringly ugly.
I expected him to come shambling forward, but he moved with a surprisingly lithe kind of grace, like a predator built for one purpose. Whenever he moved, light glinted off the fangs fighting to burst from behind his pallid lips. There were way more than two crammed in that horrible maw. Could I afford to get close enough to stab him without getting bit?
It was a chance I really didn’t want to take, but I didn’t have much of a choice. The stabby plan was the only plan. Let’s just hope he cooperates long enough to die.
We circled each other warily. His huge black eyes were glued to my face. In their bottomless depths, I thought I caught the sense of something moving. A shudder passed down my spine. He wasn’t as big as I might have expected, but damn, he was creepy. And something told me he was going to be dangerously fast.
Soon enough, he proved my hunch correct. I only had a split second to catch him gearing up for the charge, but it was just barely enough. He came flashing toward me in a hideous blur, and I got ready to try and nail the right timing.
I’d always been athletic, my training had only increased my natural abilities, so I felt like I had a decent chance of at least moderate success. But man, he was quick. I felt him pass just under the flat of my blade. Damn it to hell!
My one saving grace was that I somehow followed through at a rate of speed at least approaching Rocco’s. I tracked his progress with supernatural ease through eyes that had been seeing double and triple only twenty minutes before. As he looped around for the second pass, I planted my feet like rocks, steeling myself for the strike. No wonder Marcus chugged that stuff in his flask all the time. It made me feel like a superhero.
Rocco’s eyes were set in obsidian slits. His posture began to change as he approached me, and I put it together that he was getting ready to pounce. Maybe he thought the sudden movement would throw me off enough that I’d screw up and impale myself or something. I had to admire his level of optimism. Little did he know how well the sword responded to me post-healing. It felt almost like an extension of my own body.
The second time he blew past me, I sliced at him with greater precision, a honed sense of purpose. The tip of the sword struck something; I felt the tiniest bit of resistance at the top of the swing. Rocco made a high hissing sound, which I soon realized was the noise made by a stream of ash falling from a gash in his upper arm. He clutched at it with one freakish hand, glowering at me.
I made a show of shaking off the sword. He didn’t like that, which meant I loved it. But knowing how fast he had presented me with my main problem—how to pin him down long enough to put the blade in his heart. He did not need to be told that slowing down was as good as death, if skill and luck were on my side.
I found myself perversely enjoying the puzzle of strength and logic. Was I actually having fun while Marcus clung to life on the floor? He’d be having more fun than me.
Until I got the old soldier back in working order, I’d have to have enough fun for the both of us. Clasping the god-king’s weapon in my right hand, I advanced on Rocco’s position. He still held onto his injured arm, staring at me with those unsettling jet-black eyes. There was no telling how much he saw, or what the world looked like to him.
Obviously, he could kill me if I made a wrong move. Also, obviously, he looked a little different than he used to. But he had always been able to kill me if I made a mistake, and so far, I’d scraped by. There was no need to be more afraid of him now that he was like Nosferatu’s crackhead cousin.
But he was still alive, and I needed to solve that problem before he figured out a way to solve his. He seemed to be most comfortable strafing me, relying on his crazy speed to keep him out of harm’s way. If
I could stop him from moving somehow, I had a feeling I’d obtain the upper hand. And what better way to stop him than by using brute force?
It was my favorite strategy.
I kept creeping toward Rocco, pretending like I didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do. His hand fell away from the wound on his arm as he prepared to sprint at me again. Every time my blade twitched, it drew his inky gaze. I made a note of that—a distraction that could be used to my advantage. At the moment, however, I wanted to lull him into a false sense of security.
So, I stopped. Unsure of what my game was, he stopped too.
We stared each other down in a few perfect moments of stillness.
Then he came rocketing for me, claws and teeth flashing. I sent the sword on a wild goose chase through the air as I dodged, missing his gaunt form handily. He grinned, and that was when I recognized him most. Still made my skin crawl.
We effectively swapped positions.
“Is that all you got, you vamped-up piece of shit?” I taunted him as I scrambled backward.
A smile spread on his face. He broke into a hideous laugh. “I don’t need much more. You are just a spoiled little bitch. Me? I’ve transcended humanity.”
Rocco raised his thick arms as he cut a wide circle around me. He clearly thought he was homing in for the kill, but he was mistaken. Finally, the tables were turning in the culmination of our five-year fight.
He didn’t know it yet, but Rocco no longer had the upper hand.
“Come on then!” I screamed. My eyes narrowed in rage. “Let’s end this.”
I traced his trajectory with my new, steady eyes, pinpointing his exact location a few seconds into the future. Then it was my turn to run, blazing forward on stronger, faster legs. Rocco wasn’t the only one who was fast as hell. And by the time he learned, it was way too late.
The force of the collision sent us both flying into the wall. The building shuddered on impact. Wheezing, Rocco slashed furiously with his deadly nails, trying to get to my throat. I shoved back from him, answering his flailing with stabs of my own. Even confined between me and the wall, he was still fast. The point of the sword cascaded sparks whenever it struck the wall instead of Rocco.
