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“We have two behind us,” Desandra reported.
We were surrounded.
The thick front limbs of the tarasques tensed. Nostrils flared, sending clouds of vapor into the cold night. The tails curved upward, flapping back and forth.
I turned my sword, warming up my wrist.
Monstrous lips stretched. Wicked teeth bit the air.
“Let’s go!” I barked. “I’m bored.”
The beasts scuttled forward like giant cockroaches, moving with an odd gait, lifting the front and back leg on one side and the middle one on the other. The largest of the three beasts hooted like an owl. He was almost to me. In my mind I stepped to the side, swung, and sliced across its neck in a classic diagonal blow. The saber glanced off the carapace. No good.
Ten feet. Stand still.
Five . . .
The beast lunged at me. I dodged left. Wicked teeth snapped half an inch from my arm and I stabbed Slayer into the creature’s pale side. My enchanted blade ripped through flesh and sinew. Dark rust-colored blood spilled out from the wound and washed over the beast’s gray side.
To the left, Derek yanked a tarasque out of the air, flipped it on its back, and chopped its throat with his axe. To the right Ascanio spun in place, slicing at the beasts, his swords spinning in a familiar horizontal figure eight pattern . . . He was trying to use my butterfly technique. It was not awful. His feet were off, and he was leaning forward too much, but it wasn’t awful. I had no idea where he’d learned it.
If we lived through this little adventure from hell, I’d have to correct his form before it was too late.
A familiar sickening magic washed over my mind. Just what we needed. “Vampires. Incoming.”
The tarasque lunged at me and I sliced across its nose.
“How many?” Robert asked.
My tarasque screamed and fled.
“Two. They’re heading this way, fast.”
We had to finish the fight now. If we bled, it would be all over. A vampire was like a shark—a single drop of human blood would pull it from a mile away like a magnet.
The second beast attacked me from the right. I slashed the side of its throat. It crashed down and I stabbed Slayer into its left top eye socket.
Desandra spat some word I didn’t understand. A pale body flew above us through the air, crashed against a glass iceberg with a sickening crunch, slid down, and lay still, its six legs limp. Wow. Behind me a wet hacking noise announced someone cleaving through flesh.
The two revolting sparks of undead minds drew closer.
“A thousand feet,” I whispered. “Coming on the left. They’ll see us.”
A tarasque the size of a horse shot out of the darkness and leaped at us, six legs in the air. I stepped aside. That’s the problem with jumping. Once you went airborne, there wasn’t much you could do about changing where you landed. The beast fell right between us. I lunged on top of it and sank my sword between its ribs. The claws raked my steel-toed boot, ripping through duct tape and gouging the reinforced leather.
Derek cleaved the beast’s skull with his tomahawk, grabbed the twitching body, and hurled it to my right, into the shadows. Desandra grabbed another and threw it into the dark. Bodies flew around me. A moment and all corpses were gone.
“Five hundred feet,” I whispered.
Robert turned. A streak of red slid down his fingers from a small cut on his hand. Shit.
The vamps accelerated.
He stuck his fingers in his mouth. The cut on his hand knitted closed—Lyc-V scrambling to make repairs.
Turquoise eyes ignited on both sides of the road. How many of the damn things were there?
Desandra pointed up. Thirty feet above us a glass iceberg thrust to form an almost horizontal ledge. Derek grabbed me and hurled me up. I caught the ledge and pulled myself on it. He took a running start and jumped at the lowest part of the ledge. Desandra followed, slipped, and Derek caught her hand and muscled her up. Ascanio jumped straight up, like he had springs, and hoisted himself on the glass next to me.
Less than a hundred feet until the vamps reached us.
Robert ran to the nearly sheer glass wall, scrambled up, quick and silent, as if his hands had glue on them, and slid in place next to us. We lay flat on the glass, just close enough to the edge to look down. If the bloodsuckers looked up, they would see the outlines of our bodies through the glass.
Two emaciated, hard creatures loped into view directly below us. A man and a woman in their former life. The male still retained some semblance of humanity in his face and his body didn’t seem as dry, but the female was older. She must’ve been dark-skinned in life, and undeath gave her skin an unnatural bluish tint. She crouched on her haunches and raised her head, looking around. The Immortuus pathogen leached all fat and softness from its victims, atrophying their internal organs. Her breasts hung on her chest like two empty pockets of skin. Cords of muscle stood out on her neck.
“It was here,” a young male voice said from the female vampire’s mouth. I could identify all of the Masters of the Dead in Atlanta by sound. I didn’t recognize him, so he had to be a journeyman or someone new. Perhaps one of Hugh’s imports.
“There’s nothing here,” another male voice answered.
That’s right, there is nothing here. Move along, because we don’t have time for this. We had to get to Robert’s scout and the clock was ticking.
“I’m telling you, I felt a blood vector,” the first navigator said.
The male bloodsucker raised his arms. “Where is it, Jeff? I don’t feel anything.”
Nope. Definitely journeymen. Not highly ranked either.
The female vamp moved around and slid on the damp patch of dark blood. “Look. What the hell is this?”
“Whatever it is, it has no hemoglobin in it, because my boy isn’t pulling at his leash. Maybe it’s vomit. Maybe one of those twisted things that lives here came over and puked all over the glass and now you’re sliding around in it. Do you want me to call down and get some sawdust for you to deodorize her with when we bring them back?”
Journeymen. Always a pleasure.
The female vamp twisted its face, trying to mimic Jeff’s expression. “Very funny, Leonard. You’re a fucking comedian.”
“We had a route mapped out, but no, you had to go off the reservation because you smelled some phantom blood somewhere.”
“We’re supposed to patrol. I’m patrolling because it’s our job, Leonard. If you don’t want to patrol, you can go up to that bigwig and tell him that. Just let me know in advance so I can take pictures when he tears off your nuts and makes you eat them.”
