I take a bunch of deep breaths to psych myself up (and to be sure I’m truly fixed inside), grit my teeth, and spring around the corner to run at a full sprint toward them. They start shooting immediately but aim too high as I duck through the doorway. I then randomly zigzag left and right to cross the twenty feet of distance between us.
They continue to fire wild shots at me, but now thatI’m out of their killing hole, I’m a lot harder to tag—especially since I must be moving at over a mile a minute. Not a single bullet touches me before I drop to baseball slide on my hip along the slick floor up to the desk. When I’m just a few feet away, I roll forward and hammer the metal desktop in front of me with the heel of my palm, hard as I can. The steel bows in, but I don’t penetrate, so it hurtles into the undead Hunters behind it with an ear-splitting smack. Desk and vampires go flying back more than twenty feet down the hallway.
I don’t stop. I leap back up into another flat-out sprint, side doors mere blurs as I pass, and I’m over the desk and on the now-bloodied, mangled creatures before they can even look for their weapons. Not wanting to take any risks, I reach down, grab the chin and shoulder of the closest one, and rip his head off, before quickly doing the same to the other two. There’s a lot of connective tissue and stuff—it is beyond gross, moving well into full-on horror. But right now, I’m hopped up on adrenaline, scared of getting shot again, and more than strong enough to do it. I’ll worry about my therapy bills later.
I then leap back behind the desk for cover, before peeking around the corner to see what’s next.
I expect to find another line of vampires with weapons between me and where I need to go. And therearesix more undead Hunters with guns. But there is also a shimmering force-field-like curtain that spills out from the ritual space stairwell.
Black-eye purple and vibrating with menace, I have to blink a couple times to make sense of it. The stairs to the cavern below are located halfway down the hall on theright, about twenty feet ahead. The force-field comes up the stairs from the ritual space, out the open stairwell doorway, and stretches floor-to-ceiling across the hall in front of me before disappearing into the far wall, neatly dividing the corridor into two halves—the front half, where I am, and the back half beyond. This must be the section of wall between Hell and Earth that the ritual pulls into our world so it can punch through. The electric aluminum taste of ozone fills my mouth, but despite Mom thinking I’d need to use my special ability to see it, the toxic magic is powerful enough to be visible to the naked eye.
Five of the new vampires glare at me from behind its menacing flicker.
But one of them is on my side of the barrier. Blonde and square-jawed, she runs toward me, Doc Martens slapping the linoleum. Her Beretta is pointing forward, gripped in both hands. I’m not looking to eat any more bullets today, so I quickly roll onto my back and kick the desk in front of me with my juiced-up strength. It, along with the decapitated undead behind it, goes careening down the hall, screeching and banging. The charging vampire has no time to avoid the collision, and in a vivid example of pool-hall physics, the desk slams to a halt on impact while the creature goes flying back—straight into the deadly, god-proof barrier.
She sticks to the toxic wall like a bug on flypaper, arms and legs splayed out. Almost instantly, the black-purple energy seeps over her entire body to boil away her Kevlar armor, her skin, her organs, and finally her bones, all dissolving from the outside in. She barely gets out thebeginning choke of a scream before she’s completely gone.
Her feral road-warrior buddies behind the barrier goggle at the spectacle, jaws dropped. I have to admit, it’s so terrifying, even I need to take a moment.
But that’s all I give myself. I have no clue how this god-tier magic works, but I’m certainly not going to count on it being bulletproof. I run forward over the blood-streaked floor, leap over the desk, and rocket full speed towards the Hell wall, before quickly cutting right into the stairwell that leads down to the ritual space. I hear shots being fired from behind the barrier, but since they don’t hit me, I have no idea whether the ammo gets dissolved, too.
I’ve got other things to worry about.
My souped-up vision confirmed I’d have enough room on my side of the toxic magic to make my way into the downward passage. Now that I’m up to the barrier, I see that it actually divides the rough stone stairs at an angle. The good news is that the right half (my half) is much wider at the top, which makes the left half tight enough at the entrance to keep the remaining vampires stuck in the hallway above. The bad news is that it narrows on my side relatively quickly, so I have much less room to maneuver than the last time I went down these stairs. And since I don’t want to get anywhere near the magic’s fizzing edge, I stick tight as I can to the stairwell’s carved-out stone wall as I descend. The extra level of hazard slows me—I might be going fifteen or twenty miles per hour at this point—but what comes next stops me in my tracks.
At the base of the stairs are two more Hunter-vampireson my side of the barrier—one kneeling, one standing behind—and they’ve got semi-auto shotguns. The same kind that Rafa uses. And the moment I appear, they start blasting.
If the barrier wasn’t there, or if I had more experience, maybe I could make it all the way down without getting hit. But the last stretch is at least thirty feet long and only a few feet wide. They’ll absolutely be able to take chunks out of me before I reach them. I might be pretty cool right now, but I don’t think I’ll be able to come back from a shotgun shell to the brain.
Fortunately for me, my reaction speed is currently off the charts. As the steps under me explode into fragments, I slam into reverse, scrambling frantically to back the hell out of their line of fire. Even though the shots come crazy close, I make it clear without getting struck with anything.
Then I freeze, listening hard. I worry for a moment that they might come racing up, cornering me between their shotguns and the armed vampires in the hallway. But they seem content to stay where they are. Valiente clearly values his choke points.
My mind races, trying to figure out if there is any clever way through this. But it’s pretty obvious from thelastset of stairs that, even juiced-up, I’m hardly an acrobat. And no amount of super-strength or speed is going to change the space-time continuum. If I want to get into that ritual space, I’m going to have to cross that distance.
Which means I’m going to need to get hit. By shotgun blasts. More than once.
I wish I could say that I’m not terrified by that thought. That since hundreds of thousands of others willbe killed if I don’t stop this, I easily recognize that me getting hurt, badly or not, is a small price to pay. But even though I really want to be some kind of hero, I also want to keep breathing. I’ve just found out that I can have a happy, guilt-free life. It would suck so much to have that life end before I got a real chance to taste it.
I could bail. Maybe finally call those Feds for help. With my enhanced muscles, I’m sure I could make it out to the street in one piece, and even the most clueless authorities wouldn’t be able to ignore the wicked magic in the air.
But my mother was right. The government’s not going to be able to fix this. And there’s no way I could face Rafa if I just turned around here. Not after what he risked for me. Not after he was so sure I was worth it. Hebelievedin me. So did Collin.
Crap.
All right. Let’s think about this. I’m still full of juice. I’ve already seen I can recover from a bullet to the chest. If I can protect my head, I should be able to get through, right? It’s just going to hurt like hell.
If I’m lucky, anyway.
Well, if anyone is due for their luck to change, it’s got to be me. Time to stop thinking and suck it up, buttercup!
I give myself a couple more willpower-focusing breaths, raise my arms to cover the top of my head with my elbows, crouch forward, and run down the narrowing section of stairs at a full sprint—yelling at the top of my lungs for good measure. I can’t see through my arms at all, but I lead with my left shoulder in the probably insane belief that if (when) I get hit, it’ll knock me toward therocky wall on the right instead of the caustic barrier to my left.
I honestly can’t tell you if that bit of wishful vector math actually pans out because I’m almost immediately blasted straight through the stomach and then again through my chest on the way down the stone steps. These are shotgun shells, so each strike is such an exquisite, body-shaking explosion of pain and shock, my vision completely blacks out. I only know I’ve reached the cavern below because I feel myself crash into two bodies, and we all go rolling into a heap onto the floor.
Getting shot in the lung before with a handgun bullet was the most painful, terrifying experience of my whole life. This is worse. I’m in a twisted jumble over a mass of Kevlar-clad elbows and knees that smell like death. I’m filled with nausea and frothing agony. My arms, legs, and face drain ice cold. I can literally feel my life pouring out of me through my chest and stomach as blood soaks through my shirt, pants,everything. I can’t move. (Did a slug hit my spine? Did it even have to?) And I’m blind.
But I’m not dead. Not yet. My vision comes back first. I glance up to see that my incubus-fueled momentum carried us about a third of the way into the room. Valiente is on the far end of the cavern on that big stage in a freshly pressed, richly textured charcoal three-piece suit. Like with the stairs, the toxic Hell barrier divides the entire space, including the raised platform he’s on, front to back, into a right half and a left half before disappearing into the cavern’s edge behind the stage. I’m obviously still on the right side. Valiente’s standing on the left—behind the deadly floor-to-ceiling magic—glaring daggers at me.Lining the flanking walls are the kids, chanting softly, six of them on Valiente’s side of the barrier, and seven on my side. Jerky lavender energy snakes its way out of each of their chests, and near each group of kids is a single Hunter-vampire. As luck would have it, the vamp on Valiente’s side of the barrier is Rafa’s mom, lurking right next to a blank-faced Emma.
