Page 39 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

A shape slips across the lower drift, too quick for Ben's lamp, too silent for human feet. It turns toward the sealed way behind us.

Vivienne whispers, "That is not ours."

The vampire darts toward Hannah but Elias moves before it reaches her. One moment he is beside me; the next he has the stranger by the throat and pulling out his heart. Its body drops.

"Hannah." Vivienne's voice has dropped to almost nothing. "They're on us."

I hear it in the same heartbeat — the whisper of cloth, the soft tick of wire being paid out hand over hand. "Down," I say. "Everyone behind me. Now."

The first hunter comes out of the side cut fast. I drive him into the rib of the tunnel hard enough to split stone, and it shrieks, dust sifting down across us both. A second one whips something pale and fine through the lantern light — ash, ground to powder, bloodroot in it — and it fills my chest and turns every breath to broken glass. I cough, and the cough costs me half a second, and that's all the third one needs.

The wire comes around my forearm out of the dark. It isn't rope. It's bloodroot, twisted and barbed, and where it bites it doesn't only cut. It burns inward, a black heat that climbs the arm toward my heart, eager, alive. I get my free hand into it and rip it loose, and the barbs take skin and more than skin, and the burning keeps crawling after the wire is gone.

"Alaric—" Hannah, close behind me.

"Stay back." The ash has me half-blind and slow — slower than I have ever fought — and these men know precisely what they carried down here. They didn't come to kill me cleanly. They came to take her, to make her speak the room, to walk her back to it at the end of a leash. That will not happen while I'm breathing.

"Lily, the lamp — hold it on me, don't drop it." Hannah's voice has changed. It's flat now, fast, working. "There's a cord by your head, the gray one. On three you pull it hard as you can. One. Two. Three."

Lily yanks. Far above us a bell starts hammering, ringing down the wire to some station I can't see, and the hunters flinch toward the sound — for one breath they read it as men, as discovery, as anything but a frightened child and a frayed cord. It's enough. I put one of them through a rotted timber and the roof comes down where he stood.

"Brine," Hannah says, hauling on my good arm. "There's an old salt store down the grade, a pump room — Elspeth's notes, bloodroot can't keep its teeth in salt water. Move with me. Move."

I plant my feet. "Take Lily. Get to the adit. I'll hold the cut."

"No."

"Hannah—"

"I said no." She's already ducked under my ruined shoulder, taking weight I outmass her by triple, and Ben catches my other side. "You kept them off us. Now I keep you upright." She drags me down the grade toward the sound of water and the rusted bones of an old pump. "Elias, cover the cut. Vivienne, the lamp. Lily, my hand — don't you let go of me."

The brine, when we reach it, closes over the wound like cold fire fighting hot. The black heat in my arm stutters and slows. Not gone. Slowed. My ribs grind when I breathe and the ash still grits inside my chest, but where the salt soaks in, the bleeding eases.

Behind us a fall — a charge, or rotten stone giving up — brings down the cut we left, and the light shudders, and Ben swears and shoulders at my side with his pistol up. The hunters are still out there. I hear them working the rubble, calling low to each other, hunting — but not here, not yet, and not toward the archive.

"They don't have it," I rasp. "The room. They don't know where it is."

"Not yet." Hannah doesn't slow. Her face in the brine-light is set and terrified and absolutely sure. "Which means we get it all out before Nathan does. We don't stop. You don't stop. Keep your feet under you, Alaric, and stay with me."

The drainage swallows us, water sucking at our boots, the dark folding shut behind. I keep my feet under me.

29

HANNAH

The brine channel pulls at our boots like cold hands trying to keep us. I keep one arm locked around Alaric's waist, his weight heavier than it should be, the other hand skimming the rough stone to my left. Salt crust flakes under my fingers. The drainage slopes gently downward, black water swirling around our ankles and soaking the hem of my jeans. Behind us, the sounds of the hunters are muffled but persistent—low voices echoing off timber props.

"Keep moving," I say, voice low. "The flow is stronger this way. It has to lead out."

Alaric's breath rasps against my hair. The bloodroot burns are still open on his forearm, angry and slow to close. He tries to straighten, to take some of his own weight, but his steps falter. "Hannah. Leave me at the next side cut. I can slow them."

"No." I adjust my grip, feeling the unnatural cold of his skin even through his sleeve. "We stay together."

Lily's light bobs ahead of us, her shoulders tight. She hasn't said much since we found her in the tunnels, but I can feel the guilt coming off her in waves. "Mom, I'm sorry. I thought I could help. I saw the marks on the posts and just… followed."

"You're here now," I keep my tone steady. "Hold the lamp higher. Watch for any low scratches on the timbers. Anything that looks deliberate."

Ben stays close on Alaric's other side, one hand on the pistol at his belt. Elias brings up the rear with Vivienne, their steps nearly silent. The vampire woman's gaze keeps flicking toward the jacket I'm clutching closed with my free hand. She suspects something. I don't blame her.