As I watch over a period of ten seconds, the circle grows noticeably smaller. It’s closing in on them. They only have a minute or two left before they succumb.
Now or never.
I duck down again and shimmy out from behind the wall, placing myself in the cover of the overturned door. I briefly stop to check Martine’s pulse—still there, but incredibly weak—and reassert my grip on the gun. Memories flicker through my mind. Seeing my right hand the first time the bandages were changed, a mangled mess of puckered flesh haphazardly sewn back together during an emergency surgery so I wouldn’t lose my fingers. My first physical therapy session, the day after the last of my stitches were removed, when I tried to close my fingers but couldn’t. That day four weeks ago when it became apparent that I’d never be able to rely on my right hand again. The confirmation that my nerves were dead and would never regenerate. That’d I’d have to “make do” with what function I had left.
Eyes clenched shut, I wrap my right hand around my left to reinforce my grip and press the top of the barrel against my forehead, mouthing to myself weak reassurances. But somewhere in the middle of my sad little spiel, a bright spark of anger crops up out of nowhere, and a mental voice scolds me:
Why are you so afraid of failure now, huh, Kinsey? You faced Charun even though you couldn’t possibly win a fight with him. You killed McKinney even though you were half dead from his torture. You kept fighting Bollinger even after he shot you to pieces. Why are you so frightened this time around? You were so disadvantaged to begin with in these supernatural boss fights that a ruined hand is hardly a blip on the radar. You’re barely less capable than you were before. But you’re going to let a few numb nerves stall you in a fight that could determine the fate of the world? Are you a hero, or aren’t you, you whiny little shit?
My eyes snap open as a wave of comprehension slams into my chest. The pissed-off side of me is right. I’ve been challenging beings far greater than myself for my entire first year as a DSI detective. There’s no reason why I should be afraid to try now any more than I was all those other times. There’s no reason why I should curse my damaged right hand any more than I cursed my slow human legs or my weak human arms or my dull human senses in all those fights. At the end of the day, two working hands or one, I’m still laughably outmatched by these creatures. Even if I was ten times the man I currently am, I’d still be a pathetic contender. I need to accept that and move on. I need to do what I can.
Composure bleeds into my muscles, and a lopsided smile tugs up one side of my mouth.
Time to make a nuisance of myself one more time.
I take a slow, deep breath.
Then I pop up from behind the door and shoot the closest vampire in the back of the head. Brain matter sprays out of his forehead and splatters across the cylindrical force field—it sizzles on contact. The man wobbles on his feet for a second before he topples sideways. He’s not dead, not with his arms and legs twitching so hard, but a good headshot can disable a vampire for much longer than any other normal wound. And it does exactly that. The guy loses his ability to concentrate his magic on the binding spell, and the cylindrical white field groans loudly before dissipating in a bright flash. The rest of the circle, unfortunately, remains intact.
But now there are only four vampires maintaining it.
Everyone in the hall spins around to face me. I shift my handgun to my right hand, tug the shotgun from the duffle bag, and fire once, spraying the entire group with birdshot. They recoil as the bits of metal tear into their skin, but it’s nothing more than a distraction. Moving quickly, I toss the shotgun aside, raise my handgun again, and aim for the next closest Knight, an Asian woman whose face I’ve seen before. The enemy shifter was wearing it earlier.
I shoot at her, but she yanks her head out of the way in the nick of time, and the bullet only skims her ear. However, I notice she doesn’t move her outstretched arm, the one that’s connecting her magic to the binding circle, so I adjust my aim and fire again. This bullet eats right through the woman’s bicep, but her arm still doesn’t budge. She snarls at me and curses in at least three different languages as blood dribbles down her forearm.
I aim at her chest the third go-around, but I don’t get a chance to fire. Lizzie stomps her foot on the floor, and her magic lashes out toward me, a bright yellow spear of power arcing through the floor tiles. I leap out of the path of the attack, and a second later, a magic landmine explodes in the exact place where I was standing, propelling pieces of tile and wood every which way. A large chunk of wood collides with my hip and throws me off my trajectory toward the wall, and instead I fly into a dark room and crash headlong into a table.
The table’s collapsible legs give out, and the damn thing falls on top of me. I raise my hands to protect myself, and the edge of the table slams painfully into my wrists, office supplies that had been scattered across the tabletop pelting my legs. A heavy metal stapler lands on my knee, and a shout wrenches itself from my throat. For a second, as all the commotion of my collision stills into the faint shuffle of falling papers, I allow myself to grit my teeth and wish I was in a happier place.
I try to dig myself out of the mess but find my duffle bag tangled up in something. I have to contort myself to slip the strap over my head and get free. Letting out a frustrated huff, I climb to my feet, raise my gun again, and head for the exit. As I near the empty doorframe, Lizzie calls out, “Dammit, Edgar, heal that stupid gunshot wound and get back on your feet, will you? The binding spell’s not stable anymore.”
The response, if there is one, is lost to the whine of the binding circle. Edgar must be the guy I nailed in the head. Still off his feet, for the time being, but that won’t last forever. I have to figure out how to remove the other Knights from the circle formation without getting myself killed by Lizzie’s exceptionally powerful magic in the process.
“Oh no, you don’t!” Lizzie sneers, and a moment later, Foley cries out again.
A revelation clicks into place. Lizzie stopped focusing on the spell pinning Foley to the wall when she attacked me, and he almost managed to get free. If I can grab her attention for a longer period of time, get her slinging a few strong shots at—
Like a streak of lightning, Martine the half-dead vampire sprints by and hurls himself at the Asian woman I was shooting at. I scramble out of the room in time to see her arm impale his chest like a sword, but that doesn’t even slow the man down. He wraps both his arms around her torso and clings to her, and despite her best efforts to shake him off, he doesn’t fall. Instead, he begins to glow navy blue, and the light above and around him dims as if he’s drawing it in, charging himself up—he’s sucking in environmental energy, the same way beggar rings do, to augment what’s left of his own power.
The Asian woman shouts in alarm, and the other three noble Knights, Lizzie included, rapidly spout out similar sequences of foreign words that must be spells. Inside the binding circle, Lucian does the same, his spell work quicker than the rest, and a bubble-like magic shield springs into existence around him, Paula, and Annette. A nearly identical shield covers Lizzie half a second later, and two slight variations pop up around the two male Knights. But the Asian woman, still struggling to throw Martine off, is too slow on the draw.
Everything in the hallway grinds to a stop. Like time itself halts its flow. All except the pulse of Martine’s navy blue aura, which collapses in on itself until it’s nothing but a tiny blue point of light, situated directly over his heart.
Instinct overtakes me, and I throw myself back into the room just as Martine self-destructs. The shockwave blows out the wall, and I avoid the cascade of debris by hauling myself over the very table that fell on me and using it as a shield. I slap my hands over my hears to protect my eardrums from the roar, and curl up into a tight ball as intense heat resonates into the room from the epicenter of the blast, searing my exposed skin.
A second later, the whole thing is over. The roar fades. The room stops rocking. The d
ebris falls, leaving nothing but a haze of dust and ash floating in the air.
Heart pounding, skin stinging from mild burns, hands aching from taking the brunt of falling debris to protect my head, I slowly peek over the top of the table, peeling my eyes to hunt for shapes in the smoky hallway.
The first thing I discern is Lucian’s crew, protected by his exceptionally strong shield spell. Even though they were less than five feet from the blast, they’re completely unhurt. The next thing I see is that one of the Knight men didn’t outlast the explosion. His shield collapsed midway through, and he was flung from the outer edge of the circle and into another room. The light in that room is on—though it’s hanging from the ceiling by exposed wiring—the swinging bulbs highlighting the horrifically burned skin of the man’s face and neck. Blackened and flaking. His clothing is fused to his body.
That’s going to take a while to heal, I think, nauseous at the sight.
The third thing I see is Lizzie and the one other Knight still standing. Their shields held, but both are cracked like glass, and the man’s ears are bleeding from the concussive blow. He’s swaying on his feet, barely holding his hand in place to support the binding circle, which is now visibly weakened. The glowing symbols on the floor are flickering, as if running low on power. Lucian, standing at their epicenter, notices this at the same time I do. He grins and says something I don’t hear.
I suddenly realize I can’t hear much of anything, except for a high-pitched ringing sound. Tinnitus.
Damn it. Just what I need right now.
I rise from behind the table and pick my way through the rubble, climbing back out into the hall to search for the one person I can’t see from inside the room—Foley. Thankfully, I find him not dead, but he’s not in great shape either. He was far enough away from the blast to avoid the worst of it, but he took some of the heat and a few large pieces of debris. He’s bleeding from nasty lacerations on his face and legs. Though it looks like the slab spell holding him against the wall ironically took most of the damage. It’s severely cracked.
I raise my gun and shoot Lizzie in the chest with all the bullets I have left. The first few ping off her broken shield, which then shatters, and Lizzie whips her head toward me right as the next bullet punches a hole in her sternum. She grunts at the impact but doesn’t lose her stance. Another bullet pierces her stomach. She doesn’t lose her stance. The next one eats a chunk out of her shoulder. She doesn’t lose her stance. The next bites into her thigh. She doesn’t lose her stance. And the last one? That one punctures a major blood vessel in her abdomen. Still, she doesn’t lose her stance.
But she does lose her concentration on the spell she’s using to hold Foley.
The slab shatters, and Foley slides to the floor. He looks up, perplexed, one of his eyes weeping blood from where a small piece of debris struck the sclera. He glances from his sister, who’s now staring at me in shock, not quite believing she was bested by a petty human, to Lucian, who appears to be building up a substantial magic charge, eyes closed in concentration. And finally, Foley glances to me, an expression of unending gratitude stretching across his torn, bloody face.
Then he snaps a few of his dislocated joints back into place and charges his sister.
Lizzie rounds on him, but with her wounds, she isn’t fast enough, and Foley rams her like a tractor-trailer. She’s wrenched from her place on the edge of the circle, and the two of them soar through an empty doorframe and crash into the detritus in the room beyond. A scuffle begins, brutal punches and kicks and swipes destroying computers and desks and chairs, denting walls and cracking tiles. I take the fight for what it is—a distraction—and rush the lone Knight left fueling the circle. He’s still dizzy from the explosion and doesn’t see me coming until I hurl myself at his chest. In a normal situation, a vampire would be able to deflect my skinny ass easily. But this guy, off balance thanks to his injuries, stumbles slightly to the right when I collide with him.
This is apparently all that’s needed to completely destabilize the circle. Because a moment later, as I’m rolling to a bruising stop through a pile of splintery debris, a thunderous crack resounds through the hall. I turn my head in time to watch Lucian’s magic flare out in a solid sphere of force and slam into the unsteady Knight, who gets flung so hard he’s nothing but a blur in the air as he zips by me and smacks the wall at the end of the hall. His limp body hangs from the partial hole punched through the drywall, blood and gore dripping from two dozen wounds, his chest almost concave from the force of the impact with Lucian’s spell.
Lucian steps out of the flickering remnants of the binding circle and rolls his shoulders. “Much better,” he says, his voice faint against my perforated eardrums. He smirks at me. “Not bad, kid. Not bad at all.”
He speeds off into the room where Foley and Lizzie are brawling, both of them too injured and drained of their magic energy to easily defeat the other at this point. When Lucian enters the fray, Lizzie screams in frustration, a bitter, ugly sound that perfectly matches her personality. But the sound is cut short as the tingle of magic scratches my brain again, and the room lights up with the harsh glow of three different practitioners’ spells igniting at once. A colossal boom shakes the entire hallway, and smoke pours out of the room, followed by three quick-moving blurs as the fight crosses the hall and enters yet another room.
If this keeps up much longer, the museum won’t have a second level left at the end of the night.
Movement in my peripheral vision catches my attention. Lucian’s two female cohorts have maneuvered out of the dead binding circle as well. But they seem to have very different ideas of what to do next.
Paula shuffles closer to the new leg of the battlefield, watching through the doorway as Lucian and Foley hopefully beat the crap out of Lizzie. But she doesn’t join the fray yet. She observes, her keen amber eyes darting back and forth, following every movement the way my paltry human eyes never could. I get the sense she’s waiting for the perfect opening, planning to strike when Lizzie’s back is turned, to end this battle in one swift, decisive blow.
Annette, on the other hand, walks over to the vampire I shot in the head, who’s now a mass of burned flesh barely clinging to life. Without hesitation, she stomps on his skull with her high-heeled shoe. The guy’s head disintegrates in a spray of bone and blood, and Annette’s heel snaps into pieces. She kicks off the shoe, covered with strings of brain matter, and then slips off her remaining heel as well, unconcerned about injuring her feet in the debris-strewn hall. As the bits and pieces of the now very dead vampire’s head settle into wet pools and red splotches on the floor, Annette leans over the center of the mess and spits into it.
Jesus. Remind me not to piss her off. I don’t want—
A grotesque figure leaps out of a room to my right and tackles Annette to the floor. It’s the vampire whose shield failed in the explosion. Despite the fact he basically has no face, and most of the skin on the front of his body has either burned to char or is sloughing off his muscles in big clumps, he locks his arms around Annette and doesn’t let go, even when she drives her hands into his back and audibly cracks his every rib. As I watch in abject horror, the man’s magic starts to behave the same way that Martine’s did right before he blew himself up. Panic floods my gut, and I scramble backward, hunting for something to use as a shield.
Annette yells in terror, and Paula, alerted to her distress, breaks away from the fight and closes the distance to Annette and the burned man in a quarter of a second. She rips the guy off Annette with a mighty heave and throws him down the hall. But when he’s only halfway to the door I hid behind earlier, his self-destruct spell activates. He explodes in a bright flash, and the shockwave races down the hall before any of us can take cover.
It picks me up and slings me ten feet. I land hard, bounce twice, and come to rest not far from the unconscious Knight Lucian threw into the wall a minute ago. My right shoulder is torn from its socket, my left ankle twists painfully, three
of the fingers on my left hand snap, and my empty gun sails away and lands amidst a pile of rubble. My already damaged eardrums take another beating, and for a few moments, as I lie limp on the floor, pointy bits of burning building materials raining down on me, I don’t hear anything at all, not even the rapid beating of my heart.
But, like always, reality fades back in, accompanied by even louder tinnitus than before.
I roll over and use a heavily scarred wall to hoist myself to my feet, then look around for Annette and Paula. That’s when I see that half the hallway’s ceiling has caved in. The underlying support structures finally took too much abuse, thick metal beams warped from intense heat and force snapping under the weight of yet another explosion.
Paula and Annette, who tried to weather the blast without getting flung away like I did, didn’t notice the ceiling coming down until it was too late. Annette is half buried, a massive girder pinning her torso to the floor. Paula is almost totally out of sight, nothing but her right hand sticking out from underneath a large, shifting pile of rubble. I can’t tell if the hand is attached to anything.
I push away from the wall and stumble toward them, praying I can move enough of the debris to at least free Annette. She should be able to lift the girder on her own, but if she’s too injured, her strength will be diminished. If I remove some of the smaller pieces from her arms and legs, allow her to heal for a minute…
I stop and blink. Twice. Three times. Four.
The hallway has suddenly gone pitch black.
My brain immediately jumps to the conclusion I’ve gone blind, that something conked me on the head too hard and scrambled my occipital lobe. My heart skips a beat. My pulse jumps up. My muscles freeze. My eyes dart back and forth, desperately trying to process any hint of light. But it’s like someone turned off the light switch to the goddamn world. I can’t see anything, not even vague shadows moving in the blackness.
Day Killer (City of Crows Book 5) Page 17
