Here now, he was only cold. He shivered uncontrollably, and his vision swam in and out, and he heard Mama’s voice, that tender voice from his boyhood sickbed. She was singing to him, soft and sweet, her hand reaching now and again to press to his forehead, checking for fever, though he couldn’t feel her touch.
And someone was whining, still. An ugly sound, like one of the dogs when they’d been stepped on. His spaniel Joy, or Mama’s old Scottish Terrier – what was his name again? Ah, Eira. Someone needed to pick the dog up, to soothe it and tell it to hush. It just kept whining…
Another sound intruded on his sluggish drifting – a loud sound.
He heard shouts, and a rush like a hard wind, and then a scream. And then footsteps.
Danger some rapidly fading part of his hindbrain yelled at him. Get up, get up, danger.
But he couldn’t get up. Could only lift his head, weakly, his eyesight blurred and dim.
Someone hurried toward him. Mama? But no, Mama had been right here beside him a moment ago. Papa? The long coat…but, no, Papa didn’t have red hair, or a boy’s freckled face, or…
“Alexei.” A hand touched his shoulder, and it was real, real enough that he knew Mama’s hand had only been a dying hallucination. “Alexei, can you hear me?”
He thought he mumbled something, but it was very hard to move his mouth.
Severin, he thought, finally, putting a face to the mop of red curls, and the big, worried green eyes. His little mage boy. The rushing sound had been his fire.
Another voice spoke up, somewhere off to his right, weak and threaded with pain and wooziness. “He’s a hemophiliac,” this person – Dante, his brain screamed, that’s Dante! – said, slurring a little. “You have to stop the bleeding, and then he needs to feed, or he’ll go into a coma.”
A coma? Yes, that was right. Vampires didn’t die – not unless you took the heart out.
That was how Rasputin had died: Sasha had ripped out his throat and then clawed the still-beating heart out of him. Had fed it to Nikita, because he loved him, and wanted him to live.
Why had he ever hated them for that? For what they’d done to Grisha?
Why was he thinking of this now?
He scraped together what voice he could. “Dante?”
“I’m here,” he answered. And cleared his throat. Chains clinked together. “I’m right here. Sev, put pressure on the bleed.”
“Right, right.” The boy’s face stood out stark white above Alexei, the veins visible in his eyelids, and at his temples.
Alexei’s arm lifted; he could barely feel it. Pressure came down on the inside of his elbow. Severin breathed raggedly through his mouth, he smelled of acrid panic, but his hands didn’t fumble. He stacked up gauze pads, and then wound surgical tape over it. “The key,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Let me…”
He went away – Alexei closed his eyes a moment, just to rest, so tired – and returned. The cuffs opened, clink, clink, clink, clink. Severin tried to haul him upright.
A very bad idea.
“Oh,” Severin said, on a gasp, and after a whole lot of swaying and choking down of bile on Alexei’s part, he was back flat on the table. “You need to feed. Right.” When Alexei slitted his eyes, he saw Severin pushing up one sleeve.
“Wait,” Dante said. “Sev, if he feeds from you, will it dampen your magic?”
“I don’t – I don’t know.”
“Yes,” Alexei tried to say. Mages expended a great deal of energy wielding fire. Once they’d expended too much, they were capable only of sparks, and in need of a lie-down.
He blacked out, a little, then. When he came to, a body lay across his chest, ribs pressing against his own as the creature breathed. He – and it was a he – smelled of sweat, and dirt, and unwashed skin, and of wolf.
Alexei’s fangs descended. His mouth filled with saliva.
“Here, love.” Dante’s voice. Dante’s hand at the back of his head, helping to lift him. The other hand held greasy hair away from a throat, one right in front of his face. A wolf throat.
Alexei bit.
He drank for what felt an eternity. Drank until he felt the tingling of warmth and circulation in his feet again. Until his belly felt full and hot. Until his vision cleared – and sharpened. Until his head stopped swimming, and his hands were strong enough to reach up and hold the wolf himself, by the hair and the back of his dirty shirt.
Until the wolf stopped whimpering.
He finally disengaged, gasping for air, blood running down his chin. He was sitting upright, now, and Dante was rubbing soothing circles between his shoulder blades. Dante himself looked wretched; as Alexei glanced at him, he reached up to swipe a finger beneath his nose, and it came away bloody. His nose continued to bleed, another drop sliding down toward his upper lip.
“Don’t mind me, just having a little aneurysm.” He smiled, his teeth bloody.
“Shit.” Alexei licked his lips clean, cleared his throat. Wiped his chin with his sleeve. “That should be healed. Sev healed you.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Here, have some…” He glanced down toward the wolf he’d fed from.
It was the feral, the other half of the pair that had attacked Trina.
He was dead.
“I don’t think there’s any left, sweetheart,” Dante said, softly.
“Oh.” He’d drained him totally. His stomach squirmed, and he thought he might bring some of it back up.
“He was mad,” Dante said, consolingly. “I had a look in his mind when I compelled him over here, and there was nothing left to salvage of the man he once was. They had him locked up here, left for dead. He’s at peace, now.”
Severin stood on Alexei’s other side. “We have to go.”
Alexei heard shooting.
“Gustav–”
“Gone,” Dante said, jaw clenching. He wiped more blood from under his nose. “And we should be, too.”
~*~
Of course, Lanny thought. Of course the scary fucking monsters caught up to them when they were standing at a dead end.
They weren’t quiet. You could hear them coming for a ways, their snarling, growling, haphazard, slapping footsteps echoing off the walls.
“Severin!” Nikita shouted back over his shoulder. “Get him up!”
Lanny reloaded the AK-47 he’d picked off a dead man and wished like hell it was something with more kick. The vampires they’d fought so far had felt pain, had reeled back, had fought more like humans – albeit wildly strong ones. But this…
He’d played his fair share of first-person shooter zombie games, and he wasn’t relishing doing it in real life.
“Okay, I gotta ask,” he said, as the sounds got louder, came closer. Christ, what was so hard about getting a prince off a table? “If one of these things bites us, are we gonna start craving brains or something? Will we go rabid, too?”
“No, nothing like that,” Will said tightly. He was nocking an arrow; they had silver heads, he’d explained. “They can’t make you what they are without the proper exchanging of blood, just like with any vampire. And a vampire can’t turn another vampire – or any immortal, for that matter. They’ll really just be able to tear you to pieces.”
“Oh, well, so long as it’s just that.”
The two kids were huddled in their midst, right in the center, the older one holding on to the younger one.
“Either of you know how to do the fire trick like your brother?” Lanny asked.
“They’re children,” Will reprimanded.
“Yeah, they’re about to be dead children if we don’t get out of here.”
“We’re coming,” Dante called from the room behind them, but it was too late, wasn’t it? Of course it was.
Val shifted his weight, ready and coiling with energy. Gave his sword a twirl; the blade parted the air audibly. “When the gunfire doesn’t stop them, be ready to draw your sword, Captain.”
Nikita grunted in resp
onse.
The sounds swelled, and the monsters came around the corner, straight toward them.
~*~
The important thing, Nikita thought, clinging to scraps of rationality, was that they not shoot or stab one another. There wouldn’t be time to bind up a wound and feed in the midst of the melee. And it would be a melee, he saw, as the dirty, ragged, uncooperating horde rolled down the hall toward them, a seething mass of tattered clothes, grimy skin, glowing eyes, and bared fangs.
He holstered his gun, and drew the sword Fulk had given him. It didn’t feel too heavy and awkward now, when he needed it. “See that corner they came around? We have to get past it. There’s another hallway after that one that leads down to the parking garage. That’s our goal. Kill as many of them as you can. Keep the kids in the center. Alexei, you back there?”
“Yes,” he called. “We’re here.”
“Does compulsion work on these things?” Nik asked.
Will said, “Not that we’ve seen.”
“Alright. Cut them down, then.”
And they were upon them.
Sasha was in the lead. He took off, running low and fast to the ground, leapt – and shifted in mid-air, the magic of the transformation shivering across his body, a sparkling distraction for one split-second as the lead vampire paused, his fellows bumping into him from behind. When he was human-shaped, Sasha hooked an arm around that vamp’s neck, and let his momentum carry them forward, down to the ground, amidst all the others.
Nikita’s heart leapt.
The vamp’s neck broke with an audible crack, and Sasha was on four legs again when he hit the ground, and turned to hamstring another with his fangs.
Nikita could only send up a quick prayer, and lift his sword to meet the vampire that rushed toward him.
The thing didn’t even try to shield itself. He reached out for Nik with both arms, hissing, dirty, chipped fingernails like claws. Nikita swung hard, and the sword carved a furrow through its face. A deep wound; he glimpsed bone and the gleaming pink of sinus cavities. Blood spurted, up the sword, across his hands, down the thing’s own body, unheeded. It staggered, his balance badly affected, but it didn’t stop trying to come for him. Its claws scrabbled at his jacket.
He swung again, at the neck. Arterial spray this time, a stark line of it up the white wall. And he must have severed the spinal cord, because it dropped, boneless, and growled wetly convulsing.
He didn’t have time to wish for time to kill it properly. Another was right behind it, tripping over its fallen kin, and this one did get a hold of Nikita’s jacket, scratching at his face with its other hand.
Hot, thin lines of pain bloomed down his cheek. He took a grip on oily hair, yanked the thing’s head back, and did an ugly job of slitting its throat with the edge of the sword.
The blood spray went into his face this time, blinding him a moment, getting in his mouth. The taste was awful, the usual copper-chocolate of blood tainted by rot. He spat, and pushed the vampire away. When it hit the ground, he hamstrung it, to keep it down, and it twitched and flopped in a puddle of its own blood.
He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and when he blinked them mostly clear, it was in time to see another one lunging for him. It hit him before he could get his sword ready, slamming him back into the wall. Mouth wide and fangs dripping saliva; breath foul and stinking of past meals and rotted teeth. It ducked its head, too fast for Nik to even respond, going for his throat–
And threw its head back, howling – not with pain, but with rage. Val had run it through from the side, through its whole rib cage, through its lungs.
Blood bubbled out from between its lips.
Val withdrew his sword, and Nikita kicked the thing away. It staggered back a step, and Val took its head off with one powerful stroke.
The head went sailing back into the crowd of vampires, and the body fell like a tree.
“Thanks,” Nikita panted, and turned to face the next one.
~*~
Now was not the time to remember a parapet atop a Theodosian wall. Not the time to remember banners snapping in the wind, the clatter of spears on shields, the twang of bowstrings as arrows were loosed. To remember the stink of gunpowder, and the deafening, wavelike crash of humanity down below. Not the time to remember a white stallion, and the man sitting astride it, looking down at the endless devastation that battered their walls again, and again, and again.
Now was not the time to remember it, but Val remembered it anyway.
Numbers mattered in warfare. Numbers had mattered at the fall of Constantinople. Sometimes, he thought, as he took the arm from one of the Absent Ones, and sent it staggering into his fellows, it wasn’t about who was the superior warrior, but about the way nothing could stand up forever, when the enemy was endless, and kept coming, and coming, and coming.
They weren’t there yet. But. He thought of Constantine, and his fallen city, all the same.
He stabbed one in the chest, and chopped halfway through a neck on the next. One got under his guard on his side, and put a hand around his throat. He threw out an elbow, couldn’t dislodge it, and had to swing all the way around with his sword. It took out an eye on the way, and then the blade cleaved his attacker’s skull.
Val was only distantly aware of the burn of exertion in all his muscles; of the way his breath heaved and snagged; of the need to feed, growing greater all the time. One of the things on the ground, one of its legs gone, bit him in the thigh, and blood ran hot from the wound. He stabbed that one through the eye, and another was on top of him, bearing him back to the wall. He got his sword up in time, gripped its blade with his other hand – the steel bit into his palm and fingers, the bleeding was bad – and shoved the sword into the creature’s mouth…and back and back until the whole top of his head was gone, and he fell amongst the growing pile of bodies on the floor.
There were too many of them, and he was out of practice.
Blood was on his face, and he tasted his uncle’s awful taint every time he wet his lips. Every limb he severed, every neck he notched – all of it was one more strike against Romulus.
Against the uncle who’d facilitated the stealing of his childhood, of his father, of his brother, of his virginity and his innocence.
How about that, Uncle, as he drove his sword through a ribcage. How about that, as he spilled a belly to the tile.
He didn’t think of Mia, or of his freedom, or of the dazzling glitter of New York City.
Only of blood. Of killing.
Of being Valerian Dracula. Vlad’s brother who’d slain a dragon.
And who’d set designs on more.
~*~
Lanny shoved the muzzle of his AK into the mouth of the vampire in front of him and pulled the trigger. He’d hit the brain stem, and the thing fell backward, spasming violently, but no longer able to stand.
Even that had been a risk. He couldn’t afford to use the gun in tight quarters like this, with Sasha up ahead, and Val just over there, and all of them tangled up like dancers in a mosh pit.
With most of those dancers on PCP and trying to tear his throat out.
He had a knife, but no sword. Still, he pulled the knife, and held it in his left hand. The right he balled up, and when the next one came at him – because the fuckers never stopped – he punched it.
He was used to opponents dodged and blocking, shielding their faces. This thing didn’t do that. It dove for him, grabbing for his throat, and his punch, a strong right hook, connected with the vampire’s nose square-on. He’d broken noses before, but this hit, with all his vampiric strength behind it, shoved the nose up, into the creature’s brain. Its arms dropped, and it stood there, stunned, head tilting side-to-side unnaturally, growling, drooling.
He slit its throat with the knife, and shoved it over against the wall, where it slid slowly down, leaving a smear of blood behind.
He heard a scream to his left – the high scream of a child –and turned on instinct. The vamps had broken
through their line, there were just too many of them to hold back, and two were bearing down on the mages. It was the little one who’d screamed, clutching his older brother’s hand.
Lanny headed that way.
But as he did, the older one – he’d said his name was Twelve – lifted a hand, palm facing the vampires, and, brow furrowed with concentration, sent a swell of fire at them.
It wasn’t anything like the giant plumes of fire that Severin had dealt at the warehouse, but it was enough. There was so much grease on the vamp’s hair and clothes that they caught instantly, and the hall filled with the stink of burning hair.
The vampire recoiled. In pain? Will said they didn’t feel that.
The fire spread fast, licking at skin, burning hair and clothes to cinders.
No, it was frightened, because the vampire beside it reeled back, too, screeching.
Lanny reached the kids – and an idea. “Can you keep doing that?” he asked Twelve. “Setting them on fire?”
He was white-faced with terror, but nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Stick close, then, and try not to set me on fire, okay?” He swapped the knife to his right hand, and scooped up the little one so he was perched on his left hip, held in the crook of his left arm. “Okay, kiddo, hold on tight. Can you do that, too?”
“I – I don’t know.”
“It’s okay, let’s just go.”
Twelve was right in front of him as they started forward; Lanny’s knee brushed his back with every step. “They’re afraid of it. See if you can make like a torch, okay?”
“Okay.” Twelve lifted both hands, and fire sprouted in his palms, crackling and bright.
The vampires shrank back away from it.
“Nik!” Lanny called.
“Yeah, I see.”
He felt the others fall in behind him, and they started their slow way down the hall, Twelve’s flames clearing a path amidst startling, hissing vampire things.
It didn’t deter them completely, though.
One came in on Lanny’s right. He brought the knife up, quick, and stabbed it through the soft underside of its chin. It gargled and choked on its own blood as he pulled the blade free.
Golden Eagle (Sons of Rome Book 4) Page 66
