~*~
Severin heard the door lock behind him, and whirled. Through the window, he saw Dante and Alexei sink down to their knees, and topple over, facing one another, hands touching. Like lovers – he knew that word, and that they were. But it struck him as a terribly vulnerable position here, now, as Gustav and two of his lackies strode toward them.
Severin reached inside himself for fire. It didn’t matter that the doors were metal – some part of them would melt.
But–
“LC-7!” someone cried in a glad voice.
He turned his head, fingertips crackling, sparking, and saw one of his handlers, Dr. Hastings, approaching, lab coat flaring out behind her as she hurried, two orderlies in scrubs tagging along with obvious reluctance.
Handler – that’s what Dante had called them earlier this morning, at the apartment, his lip curling in distaste. And that’s what they were: not teachers, not mentors, not friends. Handlers. People put in charge of making him do what they wanted him to do.
He could burn them. Dr. Hastings would go up like Dr. Severin had: clothes and hair first, catching with bright, leaping orange flames; and the skin would roast red, blistering, blackening, bursting and peeling, until their bodies bent double and wilted, black all over and crumbling like used matchsticks.
She said, “Seven, there you are! Oh, we’re so glad you’ve come home! We were worried!” Her voice too bright, too loud; her eyes too wide, and too wild. She was terrified.
She was a distraction.
He wiggled his fingers, and the sparks leapt from tip-to-tip, ready.
Her smile was a demented rictus; it looked like it pained her. “Your brothers are so worried, too!”
His brothers.
The flames receded, drawing back down into his bones, where they slept.
A glance through the window revealed that Gustav’s lackies had cuffed both unconscious vampires with silver and were lifting them up beneath the armpits, dragging them away while their heads lolled. Gustav lifted his head, and met Severin’s gaze, briefly; smiled tightly – smugly.
Severin could get to him – to them – but it would take a moment for his fire to get through the door, and at that point he’d be weaker. Shaking, in need of a rest. And his brothers would still be trapped inside; he’d have to go hunting for them when he wasn’t at his strongest.
He watched Alexei’s boots disappear back through the swinging doors into the kitchen, and his stomach cramped so badly he thought he might he sick. But he swallowed a few times, and turned to Dr. Hastings just as she reached him. Tried to make his voice appropriately pathetic. “Dr. Hastings, I’m afraid.” He’d never been a liar, and technically, he wasn’t lying now: he was afraid, for his friends, for his siblings. “I want to see my brothers.”
Relief eased her awful smile a fraction. “Yes, of course. We’ve moved them to a secure location. Come with me.”
He went.
~*~
They were moving too easily through the building. The thought pounded like a second pulse in Nikita’s temples.
Too easy, too easy, too easy…
They’d encountered a few more groups, some human, some vampire, and they’d cut them down. Not all were left for dead – at least not the vampires; they would recover eventually, if someone didn’t happen along and relieve them of their hearts.
His own thrill had worn off – his adrenaline dropping back to a sustainable level.
But Val…
The prince was enjoying this. Perhaps a little too much.
He was in the lead now, and brought his sword up before they rounded the next corner; brought it down just as a vampire stepped into view, and cleaved him from the join of his neck nearly to his navel with an ugly sequence of sounds and blood spray. He had to put a foot on the vampire’s twitching body and lean back to pull the sword free, while the rest of them dealt with the vampire’s two cohorts. A quick, messy, but effective fight, and then it was onward again.
They reached the central office, the hub of the whole building, with only a few scratches between them. Unsurprisingly, at this point, they found the room empty. All the monitors and screens were lit up, though.
Will went straight for one of the computers, while Nikita shut and locked the door; it never hurt to be careful, even if this felt more and more like either a trap, or like a waste of time.
When the lock had clicked into place, Sasha shifted back to two legs. He swayed a moment, and Nikita reached for him – but he could feel that Sasha was fine, only a bit dizzy from the shift in forms. He shook himself all over, tossed his hair back, and then grinned at Nik. “I’m okay,” he said, unnecessarily. The words were nice, though.
His lips, and chin, and cheeks were smeared with drying blood that cracked when he smiled; blood between his teeth, a smudge on the end of his nose.
Nikita wanted badly, suddenly, to kiss him, bloody teeth and all. Knew a hot urge to lick inside his mouth and taste all that blood, the violence his mate had wrought.
His face heated, because this wasn’t the time, and also because it was a strange urge.
But Sasha huffed a laugh like knew exactly what he was thinking, and swiped his nose with his sleeve.
“Come on.” Nik cupped the back of his mate’s neck as they joined the others peering at the monitors, the need to touch too strong to ignore. Sasha made a low, glad little chuffing sound of contentment.
“Shit,” Will swore, quietly. “That’s Severin.”
It was. On the screen, footage showed the mage walking alongside a woman in a white coat, followed at a hesitant distance by two men in surgical scrubs.
“Where’s Alexei?” Nikita asked, voice coming out rougher than intended. Shit, if that damned tsarevich had gotten himself–
“There.” Will pointed to the neighboring screen, where two limp figures on gurneys were being wheeled down another hall. They passed directly under the camera, Alexei’s face unmistakable.
“Fuck,” Lanny said, a bit numbly. “Now what? Now we’ve gotta go rescue the kids?” He cast a look across them. “Do we gotta even rescue the kids?” he asked, in an undertone.
If had just been Nikita, he would have said no. What was a little more guilt on top of what he’d carried his whole life? And they were, after all, mage kids, and not regular humans.
But Will said, “Yes,” in an unusually firm tone. “They’re Red’s brothers. I won’t leave them here, not after this.”
Val had produced a cloth from his pocket and was wiping his sword down, whistling a tuneless scrap of song. “It shouldn’t be too difficult.”
Yeah, way too much fun.
“Can you find the other children?” Nik asked.
“I’ll look.” He put his fingers to the keyboard and began clicking through camera feeds, revealing hall, after hall, after hall, after lab space, after office, after exam room. Privacy hadn’t been spared, even in the big multi-stall restrooms – though at least it was only a view of the sinks.
Two things became apparent.
One: the building was even larger and more complex than they’d anticipated, halls and rooms appearing that hadn’t been on the original blueprints from the building’s previous life.
Two: the place was a ghost town.
“Where is everybody?” Lanny asked.
Will clicked past the bodies they’d dropped, limp and lifeless, save a few of the vampires, who twitched and tried feebly to roll over – those who hadn’t fallen into healing comas.
But nothing living moved through the halls, save the people moving Alexei and Dante, and the people moving Severin.
“Here we are,” Will said, and pulled up a feed that showed a room as white and sterile as every other in his hellscape, only this one held three metal-framed single beds with white linens. One was empty. Two held boys, younger than Severin, both of them sitting up and looking toward the door, like they could hear someone coming.
As they watched the door swung open, and Severin and the woman
in the lab coat entered.
The smallest boy got up on his knees, and reached out toward Severin.
“They’ve evacuated,” Val said, walking down the long bank of monitors, gaze flicking from screen to screen. “Or hidden.” He glanced over his shoulder at Nikita, a strange gleam in his eyes. No longer the high of a fight, but something darker, edged with a fear that struck Nik as old, and maybe not even related to this moment. “In my experience,” his voice tightened, “an army only pulls back for two reasons.”
Nikita lifted his brows, too wired, suddenly, to be impatient with the theatrics.
“Because you’ve lost, and the city’s been taken,” Val said, a shiver in his voice, now, “or because you’re scattering your shock troops to make way to–”
“Guys,” Lanny said.
“–give your artillery a go at the enemy.”
Nikita went to Lanny’s side, where he stood staring goggle-eyed at a monitor.
“What in the ever-loving fuck are those?”
Everyone crowded around to get a look.
It was a cell. An unpainted concrete rectangle with a drain in the center, and a heavy door with a small, barred window that could be nothing else. And inside…
There were five of them. Men. Dressed in rotting rags that had once been clothes, rather than the sterile white scrubs the mages wore. Their hair was wild, and snarled, and they had patchy, unkept beards. They looked like people dressed up for Halloween; like the paid frighteners in a haunted house. No one went around looking like that, mortal nor immortal.
Two stood at the door of the cell, beating at it with their fists, scrabbling with dirty nails at the edges. One slammed his shoulder against it again, and again, and again.
A face popped up, right in front of the camera, startling all of them. A gaunt, dirt-streaked face with eyes that burned. No sign of intelligence, no consciousness, just this awful glow. The mouth opened, its lips chapped and cracked, and revealed a set of long, vampiric fangs.
“Vampire,” Nikita said, his pulse thudding like the low, distant thump of cannon fire. “They look insane.”
“That’s because they are,” Will said. “They aren’t thinking creatures, anymore. There’s no soul, and no intelligence – beyond the instincts to feed, and sleep, and fight, and kill.”
“Shit,” Lanny breathed. “How’d they get like that?”
“Romulus. So far as we can tell, every mortal he turns eventually becomes one of those, some more quickly than others.”
“Mehmet,” Val said. His voice had changed; no excitement or bloodlust now, no humor or drama – only an awful, chilling flatness.
Nikita tore his gaze from the screen and looked at him.
The prince breathed in shallow little open-mouthed pants, lower lip quivering as the air rushed over it. He stared at the monitor, eyes huge, pupils nothing but pinpricks.
“Val,” Nik prompted.
“His Imperial Majesty, Sultan of the Ottomans, Mehmet, Son of Murat. The Conqueror.” He swallowed, gaze never wavering. “Romulus turned him. It took…it took a very long time. But his body was failing; he was not resilient, like a regular vampire. Strong, yes, but…deteriorating.” Another swallow, and his whole body trembled, now, his hair rustling against his shoulders. “I killed him before he was…that.”
“Val,” Nikita snapped.
Val blinked, and dropped his gaze. Sucked in a deep breath. “They’ll die like regular vampires?” he asked, like he hadn’t just gone wandering back through his own memories, and been terrified by them.
“Yes,” Will said. “Though they don’t seem to feel pain – or, if they do, it doesn’t slow them down. They’re relentless; there’s no strategy, no attempt at self-preservation. They just…keep coming.”
“That’s some real Walking Dead shit, man,” Lanny muttered.
“Oh,” Will said. He clicked the mouse, and the feed shifted: there were other cells, five more, six, seven, all full of more of the strange vampires – until he reached a feed that showed a wide, square concrete room studded with cell doors.
“My brother calls it the Absence,” Val said, sounding like he was sliding back into his own head again. Nikita took a grip on his shoulder and squeezed tight, fingertips digging in. Val covered it with his own and squeezed back: I’m alright. “That’s what happens, when Romulus turns someone,” he continued, a little stronger. “Something in his blood creates a void. An absence. The soul is gone.”
“They can go to hell, then,” Lanny said. “Or rot in those fucking cages until they turn on each other.”
“I doubt that will be their fate,” Will said.
On the screen, the shot of the center of the cell block, a light on the wall started to flash; a revolving red one, its beam panning out across the floor. And all the cell doors slowly began to swing open: activated by a remote of some kind.
“Artillery,” Val said, grimly.
“They’re siccing them on us,” Sasha said, already growling in the back of his throat.
“They’re in the subbasement,” Will said, checking the bottom of the screen. “Which means they’ve got several flights of stairs to come up.”
The cell doors were halfway open, and tainted vampires were already spilling out. They crashed into each other, squabbling amongst themselves.
“The children are in a room partway between here and where they’re taking Alexei.” Will pulled out a flash drive and jammed it into the nearest monitor. All the screens went to static. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “If any of those things get outside the building…”
They’d be loose in Queens.
“Right.” Nik ejected his empty magazine and slid in one of the extras loaded with silver. He touched the hilt of his borrowed sword, briefly. Something told him he’d be drawing it before this was through.
“Five, four, three, two,” Will said. The flash drive’s light went out, and he pulled it out and pocketed it. “Alright. Shall we?”
Sasha went back to all fours, and led the way down the hall, howling.
~*~
Mia was conscious, at least. “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” she chanted, teeth chattering, like she was trying to convince herself of the fact, or like the words were a lifeline she gripped desperately to stay awake.
From what Trina could tell, she’d taken rounds on the forearm, shoulder, both thighs, and her hip, if the blood was anything to go by. There was so much blood. A human would have been unconscious at best right now, and probably dead.
“She’ll recover,” Much said, voice tight, “but she needs to feed. Where are her damn wolves? Hey,” he said to Mia, touching her face with surprising gentleness and righting her head when it tried to tilt to the side. She was sitting upright against the underside of the propped-up table. “Stay awake. Here.” He tugged up the sleeve of his shirt, exposing one boy-slender wrist. “You need to–”
A gunshot thudded into the other side of the table. Thank God they were only using AKs, Trina thought a little hysterically; a shotgun or a deer rifle would have punched right through the wood.
“Damn it,” Much hissed.
Trina risked poking her head over the table, and fired off a shot of her own. Through the haze of blue smoke, she saw a figure go down on one knee. But there were more; there was an endless supply.
Behind her she heard Dr. Fowler say, “Oh, no, please–” She didn’t know what Kolya was doing to him, but she hoped it hurt like hell.
We’re going to die, Trina thought. She wasn’t normally given over to pessimism, but she didn’t see a way out of this. Eventually, the soldiers would get through the smoke and their pitiful return fire, and overtake them. And then…
And then she heard a gorgeous sound. The high, clear, echoing howl of a wolf.
She couldn’t see, but could hear a sudden scuffle at the door. Soldiers shouted, cursed, and she heard more than one body hit the floor before two figures all but fell into the room, light glinting off bloodied steel, the blades
flashing amidst the thinning smoke.
Flash – flash – a snarl, and three more soldiers toppled. The breeze from the window had dispersed the smoke down to green tatters, and she saw Fulk and Anna, a little bloodied and rumpled, but whole.
Anna cut down one last soldier with a slender, faintly curved saber.
Fulk thrust the point of his own sword through a throat, kicked the soldier backward out of the room, and then slammed the door shut. He thumbed the lock, and scrambled to drag a chair over and jam it beneath the lever. “That won’t hold,” he said, turning to face them.
Trina stood, relief making her lightheaded.
Anna surveyed the room, her stance ready. A long, red cut marred one of her cheeks; blood spray that clearly wasn’t her own dotted her throat. “Y’all okay?”
“Mostly. Mia was hit.”
Both wolves leapt over the table. “Secure that other door,” Fulk barked, and Much went to do so.
Trina stepped back, giving them room.
Anna and Fulk knelt down on either side of Mia. “Oh no,” Anna said, softly, pained.
“She’s alright,” Fulk said, but Trina heard the nip of panic in his voice. “She’s alright. Here, darling.” He laid his sword down, caught her jaw gently in one hand, and turned her face toward him. “Can you hear me?”
Mia swallowed, and blinked groggily. “Fulk–”
“Yes, it’s me. Here.” He let go of her – Anna leaned in and put supporting hands on her shoulder and the back of her neck – long enough to bite his own wrist and then pressed it to Mia’s mouth. “Drink.” It was a command.
Mia tried to turn her head, but Anna cupped her nape and pressed her in until Mia out her mouth on the bleeding punctures, and, after a limp moment, latched on and began to feed.
Anna let out an explosive breath. “Shit.”
Fulk frowned at his charge a moment, then turned to Trina. “How did this happen?”
Trina resisted the urge to back away another step in the face of his glare. “They came in behind us, an ambush. She jumped in front of me.”
Golden Eagle (Sons of Rome Book 4) Page 64
