by Karen Chance
“What is it?” Zheng demanded. “You hit?”
“No,” John gasped, clinging to consciousness as a hundred snapshots flashed in front of his vision: him hiding amongst the glowing advertisements; Zheng’s boys’ last stand; the huge fireball on the road; the pirates attacking his ship; his desperate flight down the mobile “staircase” outside. It felt like someone was flipping through a rolodex in his head.
And getting closer.
“It’s Dagon!”
“What?”
“I think . . . he’s lost us.”
Zheng pulled a knife out of one giant pec, frowned at it, and shoved it through the nearest vamp’s eye. “First good news I’ve heard all day!”
John shook his head. “No! He’s using the link . . . he has with me . . . like a tracking charm. He’s trying to locate us.” His eyes met Zheng’s. “We’re out of time.”
The big vamp scowled, but he didn’t comment, because a triad member took that moment to jump him. That might have been a problem since he was currently distracted taking apart two more, but a chivalrous little cook intervened with a sushi knife. And then smiled shyly at the huge, dripping geisha, whose makeup had mostly washed off, but who had somehow retained the wig.
“What’s he saying?” John asked, as the man began chattering at them.
Zheng shrugged. “Wants my number.”
John stared at him.
“Told you I wasn’t ugly.”
And then an extra dozen vamps dropped onto the café, which was too much for the levitation charm. The truck plummeted, so fast that John was fairly sure his heart had become permanently wedged in his throat. But something caught them before they shattered against the ground, something that gave but held, which should have been a godsend.
Except no.
Because they bounced.
Although that word completely fails to convey the experience of plunging to certain death one minute, and being thrown against the non-existent ceiling of the café the next. John flew up far enough to come eye to eye with a vamp clinging to the roof, or what was left of it. Which did not stop him from trying to punch a fist through John’s throat!
Fortunately, Zheng saw him and head butted the creature off into darkness, even as they fell. And then bounced again, sloshing John’s insides around in a very unpleasant way as he worked out what had happened. They’d become snagged on one of the rope bridges spanning the surrounding buildings, which was why they were leaping around like a paddle ball hitting a paddle.
But they wouldn’t be doing it for long.
Because the bridge was about to break.
“If we live, remind me to kill you,” Zheng snarled, and dragged John over the counter.
The buildings that crowded the edge of the park were thick and close, taking full advantage of the premium views. That put the network of bridges in between almost near enough to jump from one to another. The operative word, of course, being almost.
But a glance over his shoulder showed John about two hundred furious triad members on their tail. They were using the passing cars as John had, almost like a staircase, only they were a lot better at it. As a result, a cascade of vampires was flowing down the crazy causeway from the nearest platform, leaving John staring half in awe and half in terror.
And that was before the bullets began flying.
Which is why he didn’t object when Zheng tucked him under one massive arm and started bouncing from bus top to truck bed to rickshaw to bridge.
And then they were both doing it, because carrying another person was unbalancing Zheng, which is a problem when you’re dangling over a twelve-story drop! And because the assault on John’s mind had just cut out, as abruptly as it had come, leaving him gasping in relief. And with a brand-new clarity of vision.
Because a psychic connection goes both ways.
“Dagon’s afraid of me!” he yelled, slamming down onto the open back of a mail lorry, and sending letters flying like a flock of birds. And then jumping from that to a real flock, one occupying a bunch of bamboo cages on the back of another truck. It was fleeing over top of the bridges, ignoring the screaming mass of people below, who started screaming louder when the triad took off after it.
“Did you hear me?” John asked, as Zheng started pelting their pursuers with the only projectiles available. “I must still be a threat!”
“Yeah, you look like one!”
“Would you listen?” John demanded. “I have a broken arm, broken ribs, and I’m pretty sure I have a concussion! I’ve lost my weaponry, my backup is enthralled and under his control, and we’re outnumbered by a few thousand to one. So, what the hell is he afraid of?”
But Zheng was not listening. Zheng was throwing crates, which burst apart on impact, raining flapping, squawking, clawing fury down onto their pursuers. Which helped somewhat with the bullets, since the damned vamps couldn’t see where to aim. But didn’t do anything to stop them from gaining, and Zheng was running out of chickens.
And then he was out, when a speeding rickshaw hit them broadside, sending them and the chicken truck crashing into the building behind them.
John didn’t feel the impact, didn’t feel himself falling, didn’t know anything until his knees painfully impacted the surface of a wooden bridge, several stories below. Zheng had one arm tight around his waist, causing John to suck in a breath from the agony in his ribs, and was still clutching a chicken. But somehow, they were alive.
Like the bird, who flapped and squawked, and then squawked some more when it was rammed into the face of a pursuing vamp.
John glanced back to see a bunch of triad members jumping down from the nearest bridge, unphased by the maybe three-story drop to their level. Or it was theirs, until Zheng dragged him off the edge and onto another, this time two stories down. And so on, until a very beat up and disorientated John finally hit the ground, half a dozen jumps and maybe thirty seconds later.
Leaving him nowhere to go.
“Split up!” he gasped, half bent over from the pain, and because he was definitely slowing the big vamp down.
“Bullshit!” Zheng was staring around, probably looking for a vehicle to steal, but the vamps could do that, too. And they wanted John, not him.
“Split up!” John yelled again, and took off, only to be hauled back by a pissed off master vamp.
“Yeah, ‘cause you’ll last so long without me!”
“I’m not the mission! Dagon is the mission!”
“I told you—I don’t know how to kill a demon lord! I don’t even know what he looks like!”
“Trust me. When he shows up, you’ll know.”
“But he hasn’t and the city is going to hell! Where the fuck is he?”
John didn’t answer. He was too busy staring across the park, to where a massive vampire army had just rolled in like a dark tide. There must have been thousands of them, eclipsing the cars on the road by their sheer mass, although that wasn’t what drew the eye. No, that would be the huge, semi-transparent, five or six story figure that would have looked like Dagon if Dagon was a laser projection out of the world’s worst light show, one designed to send little children screaming.
John was suddenly feeling a lot like that himself, only there was nowhere to go.
He pawed at Zheng, who was still looking upward. “There.”
“What?”
“There! Right there!”
“What—oh.”
For a moment, Zheng just stared. And then his eyes flicked from approaching army to approaching army, and he looked at John. “This time, I have an idea.”
Chapter Forty-Two
T his is a terrible idea!” John yelled, crouched on the back of a low flying rickshaw.
He and Zheng were headed outward into the park with the triad on their heels. Some of the vamps were hanging off the sides of other vehicles, flying above the crowded road below; more were running across the top of the bumper to bumper traffic, denting hoods and cracking windshields; and still more
were pelting beside the long line of cars, including some on all fours like animals. John stared at them, vaguely horrified as always at the way vamps could walk the line between impressive and terrifying, and sometimes manage to be both at the same time.
Like now, he thought, feeling the blood leap in his veins.
Fuckers, he thought savagely, and threw up a shield, expanding it outward and catching maybe twenty of their pursuers on the bubble that he threw back into the rest. The effort made his head spin, but it bought he and Zheng a few seconds, although that wouldn’t be enough. Not when there was nothing ahead of them except—
Oh.
For a moment, John watched a wave of vampires boiling toward him from the other side of the park. They’d been stationary a moment ago, clustered around the feet of the huge, ghostly image of Dagon. But some command John hadn’t heard must have been given, because now they were headed this way, and headed fast.
Zheng saw them, too, and grabbed him under the arms. “Hold on!”
Yes, John thought, half hysterically. I’ll do that. It’s not as if this plan could possibly get any more—
“Fuuuuucked!”
The two armies crashed into each other at almost the same moment that John and Zheng went soaring. Their lifeline was a thin rope dangling down from above that Zheng had wrapped around one burly arm—the one that wasn’t wrapped around John—and which had jerked them up so fast and so hard that John feared whiplash. Although not so fast that he didn’t feel fingers scrabbling at his boots.
He lashed out, kicking someone in the face, and then made the mistake of looking down. Only to see a mountain of vampires piling up on themselves, several stories high and arms outstretched, trying to reach him. It was a Mount Everest of hate, and it was growing ever higher.
But not high enough. He and Zheng hit the side of the barge a second later, and were unceremoniously hauled overboard by their crew, including Kong who was missing an eye but still clutching the machine gun. Until he threw it and John aside, in order to run shaking hands over his master, while screaming at him in Cantonese.
John didn’t fare any better.
“Asshole!” the temple dancer said, slapping him over the head with her fan. “I say look out, you look out!”
John could only nod, his breath currently being stolen by the rapidity of their ascent and the pain signals flashing from virtually every part of his body. And by the massive battle now going on below as their ship headed back toward the heavens, and which he could see through one of the holes in the hull. For a moment, he just lay there, panting, and staring in disbelief at something he’d never before witnessed: an all-out, vamp on vamp battle.
It looked like Zheng’s plan had worked, and Dagon’s forces had mistaken the triad for John’s allies.
And were acting accordingly.
It was hard to sort out one side from the other, as vampire bodies went flying, backlit by moving searchlights, boiling skies and distant neon. John expected the triads to be quickly overwhelmed, but he soon realized that he’d underestimated them. The enthralled vamps were far more numerous, but the triads were still in their right minds and not blindly following orders.
Meaning that they could improvise.
Like picking up entire cars from the road and throwing them at their enemy. Or wrenching off hubcaps and using them like deadly frisbees, sending half a dozen heads airborne. Or by grabbing some rope out of a car and using it to snare a passing truck with an exposed fan blade, which a bunch of them then swung around like a buzz saw, while bloody flesh spurted up like a wave on either side.
Zheng looked over the edge of the barge. “Heh. Good one.”
John wondered if he might be going mad. And then he was sure of it, when the massive figure of Dagon materialized the pale greenish outline of what appeared to be a spear. And pointed it straight at him.
The enthralled army reacted immediately, although how they thought they were going to get up here, John had no idea.
Oh, he thought a second later.
Like that.
And then he was scrambling back, hitting the other side of the barge, as vampires came flying through the air. Not on vehicles and not as if they’d suddenly grown wings. But as if they’d been picked up, spun around, and flung with that insane vampire strength. Dozens of them.
Speeding bodies slammed into rickshaws, enough that it caused the previous midair collisions to look quaint. Fires were suddenly dotting the airspace, vehicles were twisting and falling, luggage and people’s possessions were raining from the skies. And that was just from those who missed their target.
The rest were slamming into the barge, causing it to wildly skew around, although how much so John couldn’t tell.
Because they were on him.
It had happened just that fast, mere seconds between the command being given and the assault reaching him, which would have been impressive enough to take his breath away if it wasn’t already being stolen by something else. Along with his blood, he thought, kicking a vamp into another and buying himself time to erect a shield. But it wasn’t going to be enough, not with the vamps hitting the sides of the ship now punching through, destroying the vessel and dragging it hard to one side as they fought to reach him.
He was going to get everybody killed, he thought wildly, and then he saw it: something familiar sailing toward him across the battlefield.
A swoop of white, a rustle of wings, and a kick to a glowing, khaki covered posterior later, and John found himself in command of a wildly improbable ride. But one thing about war mage training, not to mention a life not exactly devoid of strange events, was that he’d learned to take things in stride. Which was why he didn’t hesitate, but drove his heels into the sides of the world’s largest pigeon, and the next thing he knew, he was airborne.
He got a brief flash of the barge below, which the vamps were trying to pull apart mid-air, of the glowing advertisements wailing on them, and of Zheng pausing with a vamp head under each massive bicep to stare up at him. John couldn’t hear him at this range, but the mouthed words were clear enough: “Where the hell are you going?”
“To finish this,” John said, and pulled on the reigns, wheeling away toward the big green figure directing the battle.
It wasn’t easy. Not least of which because the fight came with him. Vamps leapt off the barge and caught flying rickshaws in order to pursue him, while the missile launchers from below simply changed targets, following him across the sky, pelting him with speeding, clawing bodies.
John kept thinking he’d seen everything in a fight, and Hong Kong kept upping the ante. Although, in a weird way, the insane battlefield in the sky reminded him of some of the aerial fights of World War II. With the searchlights strobing the greenish underbellies of the clouds and occasionally blinding him, with the rickshaws silhouetted against the angry skies like battling aircraft, and with the missile-like vamps being thrown from below screaming by like anti-aircraft fire, it all seemed vaguely familiar. And filled the skies with even more obstacles when there were plenty already!
And then there was one more.
As impatient as always, Dagon wasn’t willing to wait while his army caught up to John’s impressively skilled ride, which so far was dodging any and everything thrown at it. He decided to give an assist in the form of a strike from that great spear. But not by sending it up at John, who was moving so quickly that it would have been like trying to slice a fly in two with a sword. No, Dagon’s strike went down, deep into the bowls of the earth, throwing up a great wash of dirt and tasteful garden plants as it went in, diving deep. And when it came out—
Blue fire erupted along with it.
John jerked the reins of his strange ride to the side, just in time to avoid a column of deadly sapphire light. Ley line energy, he realized, like the kind that had set the road alight and almost taken out the barge on their way here. Only that had been diluted—the excess from whatever crack had formed far underground and had likely hit a pocket
of natural gas. But this was no crack.
It was a full-on rupture, sending a blue geyser spearing upward, and releasing something into normal space that was never supposed to come into contact with it. And which clearly didn’t understand the rules of this strange, new world. With no magic to guide it, it was just a column of raw power, one that was currently sending filaments of blue lightning outward into the surrounding space, like exploratory fingers.
Deadly, fiery fingers, that disintegrated anything they came into contact with, leaving men, vampires, and vehicles alike turning to ash and blowing away on the wind.
John stared for a moment in horror, not having any idea even how to begin to stop or repair it. But he did know how to keep it from happening again. He wheeled his ride around, looking for something, although not the big green projection on the field that was now wading into the fight, sending people screaming and rickshaws scattering, and drawing all eyes.
Except for John’s.
Because, while he didn’t know what that thing was, he knew what it wasn’t. And what it wasn’t was a ghost. John couldn’t see ghosts, and neither could the rest of the fleeing crowd, who were staring over their shoulders like Godzilla was on their tails. What he could see was magic, and while the battle field was suffused with it, demon magic had its own, unique flavor.
And there was only one source of it around.
John somehow focused through the insanity on a human-sized figure almost hidden by drifts of smoke. He was well out of the fighting, tucked against a building and behind a phalanx of vampire bodyguards. Because Dagon had always been a coward.
John didn’t know how a former member of the demon high council had ended up in the body of a tall, lanky vampire, and right then, he didn’t care. He only cared about one thing. And the next second, he had it, because there was one spell that even a mass of vampires couldn’t save you from.
The massive fireball that John released tore through the air, blasted apart Dagon’s protection, and lit up the man. Whose wildly flickering bug eyes had landed on John a second before John’s spell landed on him. But he was too late to do anything about it.
