I wake up. In the hallway. In the museum. In Aurora.
Alive.
Chapter Fifteen
Confusion reigns supreme as I lie slumped against the wall in the ruined hallway, a thousand jumbled thoughts bouncing around in my head that all add up to: Why am I not dead?
My experience on the island was not a dream or a vision or a memory—it didn’t feel remotely similar to the true memory of my mother’s death that was revealed to me when Delos punched the wrong place in my mind—and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a hallucination caused by my dying brain cells either.
I was actually there, in that strange realm of the Eververse, eavesdropping on a conversation between Don, a man who knew my mother, and Pell, his long-time friend frustrated by his behavior. I overheard them discussing the current supernatural political climate on Earth. Caught references to a mysterious group who apparently had a hand in the latest global upheavals. Like, I surmise, the Black Knights’ coup against the Vampire Parliament. Foley mentioned something about that, about the Knights possibly being influenced by a third party. It fits.
My experience was real. I know it.
But that means I definitely died. There’s no other way I could’ve been spirited off to the Eververse. So how am I back here, breathing, heart beating, in the very place where Lizzie Banks murdered me?
A survey of the hall tells me little. The fight, if it’s still going on, has moved elsewhere in the building. The burned walls are no longer smoking. The giant mounds of debris have stopped shifting. The dismembered body parts of various combatants scattered across the broken floor have long cooled and drained of blood, or disintegrated to ash. Underneath the collapsed portion of ceiling, Paula’s hand is still sticking out, as if desperately reaching for help; it’s not moving, indicating she’s long dead. Annette is no longer trapped in the rubble. The girder has been tossed aside. She must’ve been rescued by either Lucian or Foley.
On that note, Foley’s body isn’t anywhere in the hall, nor is Lucian’s. They survived this leg of the fight. Bad news is that Lizzie Banks doesn’t appear to have suffered a lethal blow either. She’s nowhere to be seen.
I take this to mean that she ran off somewhere after my death, perhaps back downstairs to the atrium, where reinforcements in the form of the turned Knight mooks were likely waiting in case they were needed. Lizzie was injured and outnumbered three to one after all, and would’ve had a difficult time beating two trained spies and her brother, even with that day killer spell active. She probably retreated only as far as she needed to grab some help and improve her chances. Lucian, Annette, and Foley would’ve followed her in an attempt to strike her down before she could reach that help.
Being dead, I got left behind. Which I can’t blame anyone for. Still, it kind of hurts.
I push myself into a sitting position against the wall and drag my hand across my chest, feeling for the mortal wound that cost me my life. But my fingers find nothing except a hole in my blood-drenched shirt, perfectly smooth skin underneath. The other wounds I acquired during the battle have healed as well. The dislocated shoulder is back in its socket. The badly sprained ankle isn’t even swollen. All the little cuts have closed, and the bruises have faded to only faint discolorations, hardly noticeable against the tan of my skin. I’m as healthy as I would be had I ingested…
Oh, hell.
Vampire blood.
I smack myself in the face and groan. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since I ingested Foley’s blood, which means that, although the blood had long lost most of its healing boost, it still had plenty of juice left to turn me into a vampire when I died.
Cursing myself, I repeatedly bang my head against the wall as the idea of being a goddamn vampire settles on my shoulders. Being forced to drink human blood as sustenance. Being feared by practically every single human being, including all my friends at DSI. Being forced to uproot myself and move every couple decades to stop people from questioning why I never age. I’ll have to become a freaking nomad. If I want to stay in human society. But the only alternative is joining vampire society. God, Lucian’s going to have a field day with this.
Staving off my disgust for my “new self,” I run my tongue across my teeth, feeling for the fangs I should’ve grown. Except, strangely, they aren’t there. I prod my gums with a finger to double-check and still find nothing.
Perplexed, I hunt around in the debris on the floor until I find a piece of glass. I hold it up to catch what’s left of the light—most of the ceiling fixtures are busted—at an angle that reflects my face. I expect to see amber eyes staring back at me. But I don’t. My irises are the same green as always.
So…I’m not a vampire?
Sweet relief sweeps through me, the knot in my gut untangling. But at the same time, an itching sense of anxiety creeps up my spine. Something screwy is going on here. People don’t come back from the dead for no reason. My soul got yanked out of the Eververse and shoved back into my fully healed body due to some sort of supernatural phenomenon. If not Foley’s blood, then what?
“Well,” I say to myself, “I won’t find the answer by sitting on my ass all day.”
I stand up. A little too fast. A headrush sends me reeling, and I have to steady myself by placing one hand on the wall. It isn’t until I push away from the wall a few seconds later that I realize I propped up my full body weight with my right hand, which didn’t object by losing tension or aching like it usually does when I flex the damaged tendons.
Holding my hand in front of my face, I examine the pink scars on either side. They don’t look any smaller than they did before, but I swear my fingers are more dexterous than they were. I close my fist a couple times, and the three fingers that have lagged behind for months move, if not smoothly, then at least completely.
There’s another item to add to my list of “Things That Don’t Add Up.”
Though the strangeness doesn’t stop me from feeling hopeful. Maybe my hand will return to a hundred percent one day. Maybe I won’t end up at a desk for the rest of my career. Maybe, maybe…
Since the ceiling in the direction I came from earlier is now on the floor, blocking off the hallway beyond, I turn to my right and slog through the rubble until I reach the next intersection. The guy Lucian threw into the wall is still stuck there. His head, however, is no longer attached to his neck. Instead, it’s on the floor halfway down the stretch of hall that leads to the left, looking for all the world as if someone dropped it there after casually ripping it free of its owner’s body. Decapitation really is an all-too-common occurrence when vampires are involved. At least I have a good clue about which direction Lucian and the others went though, right?
I continue on down the left-hand hall, which eventually loops back around toward the main corridor containing the east wing’s sprawling gallery. Shortly after the gallery comes into view in the distance, so do signs of a continued battle. Lucian, Foley, and Annette must’ve caught up to Lizzie as she was nearing the end of this hall, because there are long, jagged scorch marks carved into the walls, more broken floor tiles and ceiling tiles, and several damaged doors. But the ceiling is still intact, and the floor hasn’t caved in, and the hallway’s not on fire. They didn’t completely destroy the second floor of the muse…
My feet stop of their own accord at the threshold between the narrow side hall and the expansive gallery corridor, and I can do nothing but gawk at the sight before me. Dozens of toppled statues, shattered into huge marble chunks, decorate the floor. Twice that many paintings, some as small as pieces of printer paper, others the width of my living room, have been ripped from the walls and torn to shreds. Glass cases containing priceless handmade jewelry have been shattered, and their contents were clearly used as weapons, pieces of heavy gold necklaces and silver hairpins and platinum bracelets glittering here and there. Benches meant for visitors who want to sit and enjoy the view have been overturned or heaved all the way down the corridor, wooden boards cracked and broken, m
etal frames warped beyond repair. Someone even threw one bench into the ceiling—it’s stuck there, half in, half out, hanging like some kind of abstract display piece.
I take it back. The museum is ruined. Not only because the east wing is in shambles. But because when I finally force myself to step out into the corridor, the sounds of a raging battle echo up from the grand staircase that leads down into the atrium. The fight is still ongoing, and judging by the cracking, thudding, and other assorted “bad things are happening” noises, I’m going to assume that the atrium is also in the process of being completely trashed. This might not end as badly as the Wellington Center bombing, but Christ, there goes another expensive Aurora landmark. The city’s going to go bankrupt before this is all over.
Assassinating local leaders. Destroying local treasures. Threatening local civilians.
I’m getting tired of this shit. I swear—
Something like adrenaline surges through my body, and in a moment, I go from feeling rather sedate to feeling energized in a way I never have before. Like I downed a whole bottle of stimulants, and they’re winding me up for the fight of my life, dangling all my nerves over the edge of a cliff, revving up my thoughts to work twice as fast as normal. I can almost swear my vision sharpens, and the far-off sounds of battle become more distinct, and the white-gray haze hanging in the air prickles my skin, and I can taste blood and salt and death underneath the dust. But it must just be my brain hyper-focusing on the task at hand, powered by my anger over the destruction the Black Knights have wrought.
Burning with a desire to help my allies win the battle in the atrium—though with no idea how to manage it, seeing as I am unarmed—I trudge out into the corridor and head for the staircase. As I near the balcony, the sounds of battle grow ever louder, until they rise into a cacophony of booms and snaps and roars of fire, electric crackles and shrieking winds, thuds of bodies hitting floors and yelps of people crying out as they’re beaten and bloodied, stomped out of the fight and cast aside like cannon fodder. When the wide atrium comes fully into view, revealing the breadth of the devastation below, I can’t help but hesitate and take stock of all the damage.
Tables that had been piled high with expensive food lie overturned, their contents flung across the room and crushed by the pounding shoes of a dozen combatants. The centerpiece of the room, the gurgling fountain topped with that massive abstract statue, is in total ruin. The low stone wall that lined the pool was broken by a powerful hit from either a spell or a beggar magic strike, and the water spilled out and flooded the floor. The entire sunken central section of the atrium is sitting under four inches of water. The statue itself was wrecked as well and now sits in pieces in the newly created pond, like stones in a riverbed.
Bodies dot the water too. All of them are Knights. Two of the mooks who accompanied Norris to the DSI building fell near each other. One took a blast to the face that blew his entire brain out through the back of his skull. He’s now positioned near the edge of the pool, hands clutched like he was desperately trying to escape. The other guy had his throat ripped out, spine included. He lies face up in the red-tinted water, blank amber eyes staring only at the torn gold streamers rippling in the air, still clinging to the pillars and what remains of the boundary of potted plants. Most of the plants were either torched by a fire spell or kicked out of the way at some point. Dirt is scattered everywhere, along with shredded leaves and broken branches.
The bulk of the fighting is concentrated near the main exit of the atrium. Amid a field of broken glass from the destroyed front doors, DSI agents dressed in black and vampires in fancy suits battle for a pyrrhic victory. Several agents are already down, a few missing limbs, at least one deceased, and many of those still fighting have taken heavy injuries. It looks to me that they swarmed the building in force and ambushed the Knights stationed inside, but were then surprised by more Knights entering the building from their backup positions outside. The backup crew probably saw DSI coming—the SUVs are hard to miss—and hid until they could get the drop on the agents by attacking from behind.
Guilt chokes my throat. Because I told Riker to send help. But I mentally kick myself to make that foolish feeling disappear. DSI has an obligation to stop supernatural crimes in progress. Every agent on that battlefield below knew what they were risking by charging in here to fight strong, fast, deadly vampires. Feeling guilty for alerting them to a major supernatural attack on Aurora is an affront to the courage they displayed by showing up to a battle that could’ve very well been hopeless. I should respect their sacrifice, not make this all about me.
Even so, I feel a deep desire to help them somehow. My team is down there.
Ella rounds on an oncoming vampire twice her size and throws a force-powered punch that punts the guy twenty feet across the room and slams him into a pillar so hard it nearly topples over. The vampire practically peels off the marble, nothing left of him but bone fragments and a slurry of former organs. But before Ella can recover from that punch and regain her stance, a female vampire grabs her arm and tries to rip it off her shoulder. Ella, thinking quickly, allows the vampire to yank her off her feet and throw her across the room. And because the vampire woman doesn’t expect it, she stumbles slightly. Which allows Amy, charging up from behind, to shoot an enormous stream of fire at the vampire’s back.
The vampire goes down screaming as she’s consumed by flames.
Ella lands hard, something audibly cracking, but she gets up anyway and leaps back into the fray.
Desmond, I find, is one of the agents out of the game. He took a blow to the head at some point, and now he’s propped against a wall, his breaths coming in erratic heaves of his chest. Blood cakes the right side of his face, and his shaved scalp is split from his right temple all the way around to the nape of his neck. A wicked laceration that hints at a dangerous concussion. I know how to perform basic battlefield medicine, but there’s nothing I can do for a wound that bad. Same goes for most of the other casualties. Their injuries are too severe to manage with basic first-aid supplies. So I can’t be of help as a medic.
Something flashes above me, and I glance up to see one of the emergency lights still feebly blinking. Either someone turned off the alarm component at some point, or the system partially failed due to all the damage on the second floor. But it was active long enough, I know, to send a message to the fire department and the police. Hopefully, the first responders, including paramedics, are now on scene, attending to all the civilians who fled the building when the alarm went off. That means they’ll be available to help the injured DSI agents as soon as the fight concludes. God forbid they enter the building early. Somebody better be outside blocking the entrance.
A familiar scream punctuates the din of the battle, and Foley Banks flies out from a side hall branching off the atrium, looking considerably worse than he did the last time I saw him. He’s missing almost every finger on his right hand, one of his eyes has been gouged out, his mouth is a bloody wreck of lost teeth and torn gums, and he’s clutching a ragged wound in his side that tells me Lizzie tried very hard to disembowel him again. I honestly can’t believe he stumbles back to his feet after he crashes into a pillar with enough force to break his back. But he does. He spits out a glob of blood. Stands up. And faces his sister as she staggers out of the same hallway.
Lizzie isn’t looking too great either, her face split into sections by four ragged tears that I suspect match Foley’s fingernails, one of her hands so broken it’s only twitching, part of her pelvic bone completely exposed, where the skin and muscle were ripped away as a single, massive chunk. Yet she’s still moving forward with a spiteful determination, fury raging in her crimson eyes, the desire to end Foley’s life consuming every other want, every other need. She passes right by a fallen DSI agent and doesn’t even think to stop and drink his blood, even though it would accelerate her healing. No, she just marches forward, her one working fist clenching over and over as she draws closer to Foley, aching to rip his
head off.
I don’t know where Lucian is, but he must not be in any shape to protect Foley at the moment because he doesn’t appear. Instead, Foley retreats, not having the strength left to continue fighting Lizzie. He rounds the pillar and staggers into the pool of water in the middle of the room, kicking up pieces of the broken statue, discarded plates and champagne glasses, and at least one mangled body part as he tries to reach the other side. But Lizzie’s not far behind him. She follows him into the water, viciously kicking one of her own dead companions out of her path.
From my vantage point at the top of the stairs, I can see that Lizzie is moving faster than Foley. She’s going to catch him. She’s going to kill him.
Your job is to protect Foley, full stop.
One glance at the main fight between DSI and the remaining Knights tells me that no one else can protect Foley right now. It’s just me. Cal Kinsey. Guy mysteriously resurrected from the dead. No weapons in his possession. No time to run downstairs and snag any from an injured comrade. I have ten seconds, maybe less, before Lizzie closes the gap between her and Foley. Ten seconds to come up with a plan to save the day. Ten seconds to come up with a plan to save the world.
I only use five seconds. Because I don’t come up with a plan at all.
Spurred by that (apparently reckless) feeling of intense energy resonating in my chest, I climb onto the balustrade and leap off. The drop to the shallow pond below is roughly twenty-five feet. About halfway down, it occurs to me that my legs might break on impact, and I’ll embarrass myself by falling onto my ass and screaming in front of everyone. For whatever reason though, my body is unconcerned about this likely outcome.
Day Killer (City of Crows Book 5) Page 19
