Chatty Cathy is there waiting for us. Keeping me clear, Rafa twists his upper body to strike her in the face, but unlike the last time we ran up a bunch of stairs, he’s breathing hard, already running on fumes. (Probably because he reallyishurt.) She easily grabs his fist before it can connect and cruelly twists his arm. It forces him to buckle, knee slamming to the ground, and I tumble offhim. She then raises her cadaverous hand, jagged claws on her fingertips, so she can stab him through the throat, and he seems winded enough to let her.
But if things are different for him this time around, they are even more different for me. Drawing on the fed-incubus power now crackling inside, I spring to my feet. Her savage thrust at Rafa’s neck seems to slow to a crawl. Before she’s even halfway to him, I’m able to step in and punch her in the center of her chest, and I do it as hard as I can.
The result of that is… surprising.
I hit so fast, and with so much force, my arm goes clean through her. Or, at least, as clean as punching an undead bag of blood can be. You know that chestburster scene fromAlien? It’s like that except through her back. I rip her spine fully out of her body, and it splats against the back wall.
I don’t know what I thought fighting vampires as an incubus would be like. Burning them when I was some kind of kaiju in Hunter’s Point had a dreamlike quality, but with my enhanced senses, what I’ve just done feels very visceral, very real. It’s super-duper gross.
She instantly collapses against my body, and Rafa stares at me wide-eyed while I try to keep myself from dry heaving. But I clearly don’t have time to be a delicate flower right now.
I rip my arm out of what’s left of Cathy, let her drop, and spin to see a whole conga line of armed vampires rushing up the last few stairs at us.
“Stop! Stop!” It’s Valiente calling up from the base of the stairs, but I’m not willing to find out whether he’syelling at the vampires, or me and Rafa. As the first one reaches me—it’s the burly guy who had Emma—Bluto—I try a high-ish side kick, dialing back to what feels like 60% power.
The strike is still much stronger than I expect it to be, but this time it goes better. I blast the vamp with the flat part of my foot, and he ricochets off the wall of the stairwell to fly down the steps like a slingshot stone, knocking back the entire row of vampiric Hunters behind him. They continue to tumble on down, out of sight, hopefully knocking Valiente on his ass as well.
“Let’s go!” I say to Rafa, because he’s right—so long as this Vampire King can use the kids against me, I’m keeping them in danger. But if we can get out and away, they’ll be more useful to him alive than dead.
Rafa nods, jaw loose, still in awe of the new power I’m showing off. And then we’re running down the hall.
Three more vamps have emerged from the elevator to rush us. They’re in what looks like soiled khakis and polos, so they’re not more undead Hunters. We meet about halfway down the hall, just as two more tracksuited vampires burst from the stairwell behind them.
Rafa stops, braces in place, and pulls fists, ready to duke it out with them, but we need to keep moving. I leap forward a dozen feet, land in a crouch, and harness the momentum of my whole body springing up to uppercut the lead monster in the chin, knocking his head clear off. It bounces against the ceiling to smack into the floor, scattering one flickering tea light into another. I then twist and swing my left arm into his buddy’s shoulder, karate-chop style, with such violence it rips the vamp’s torso mostof the way off his hips—right before he flips over his side to smash into one of the side doors. The broad explosion of blood is spectacular.
Covered in vampire guts and snarling my lips like a wild man (mostly to keep myself from hurling!), I turn to the third vampire. His eyes bulge with terror. He immediately throws up his hands in surrender and rapidly backpedals away from me. And when I glance up at the bloodsuckers in stained activewear who popped out of the stairwell, I see they’ve also turned tail and are racing back up the main stairs.
If you fed, they’d be running from you.
I’m not going to lie: being essentially bulletproof and ripping through nightmarish bloodsuckers like they’re made of papier-mâché is a hell of a rush, even with the gore. It’s tempting to want to take out as many of these monsters as I can.
But the longer we’re here, the greater the chance that Valiente will figure out some way to turn the tables on me. Or that I’ll run out of juice.
Rafa is huffing and puffing by my side, his face pale. It’s time to go.
The Hunter is a lot bigger than I am, but we’re still less than a foot of difference in height. The fireman’s carryshouldwork on him, but I’m afraid I could rip him apart if I try his signature shoulder-slam move. So I quickly kneel and cry out:
“On me! Now!”
I’m not sure he really understands what I want here, but he leans forward enough that I’m able to scoop him up without breaking anything and lock the hollows of hisknees under my arm. (It’s surreal—he literally feels no heavier than a sack of packing peanuts on my back!) Then I’m racing down the hallway at full speed.
That speed must be something north of sixty miles an hour, because I explode through the door of the stairwell in an eyeblink—crashing and twisting it against the first railing. I blaze by the two tracksuited vamps, who leap aside to cower in a corner of one of the landings, and I’m up both flights of stairs before Rafa can even suck in a shocked breath. The path out of this place is burned into my memory from our last misadventure, so I have us through the halls and into the marble entrance chamber of the Benevolent Society in just a few more seconds.
I expect the guard to be barring our way, maybe even with a gun extended, but he’s just standing near the elevator, arms relaxed at his sides. (And I’m probably mistaken, but when I glance at his face, I could swear he looks back with something that seems a lot like admiration.)
He certainly doesn’t stop me when I kick one of the huge exterior doors open (and half off its hinges) and make my way onto the still-empty street. In fact, we encounter no resistance at all the entire run back to Stryker’s office, the only place in the city I can be sure is safe. I’m so fast, I doubt even the few early morning normals dismally heading to work in the dark get a good look.
The lack of any obstacles turns out to be a very good thing, because when I slide Rafa off to his feet and use my key to get into the Aston Building, I feel my power waning. And by the time I’ve hustled us up behind thewarded office door on the 11thfloor, it’s evaporated completely.
Just like that, I’m back to being my normal, weak-ass self—completely bent over, hands on knees, a few feet from Rafa, raggedly trying to catch my breath. But no matter how I feel now, Iwasable to get him out of there. And he looks at me like I’ve just touched down in front of him from the sky wearing tights and a cape, instead of sweats and a windbreaker drenched with globs of vampire blood.
“Christ, Alvin,” he says. “You were incredible.”
I know I should probably let that compliment sink in for a moment and allow myself to acknowledge this one small win. Anything to keep from falling into despair. But having lost both the kids and Collin,andhaving hand-delivered Valiente exactly what he needed to fuck up the world, “incredible” is a far cry from how I feel right now.
Still, I don’t stop Rafa when scoops me up into a hug because, God knows, I could sure use one. His whole body wraps around me, and he squeezes me in tight as I stagger back a few steps. Maybe it’s the adrenaline, but now that we’re both out of danger, I have to fight hard to hold back tears. Even though I feel like an absolute failure, the hard truth is I don’t have time to blubber right now. Valiente is going to summon a god of death to Earth, and Collin is probably being tortured this very minute to make that happen. We have to figure out how to fix this!
But I’m just too keyed up to even begin that conversation. Instead, my shoulders and chest tremble with frustration in the Hunter’s arms. In response, he gives me a little affectionate kiss on my neck. And then another.
