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“I know. That doesn’t mean you’re good enough. ”
“Doesn’t mean I’m not, either. ”
They held that stare for a moment, then Val gave him just a flicker of a smile. She looked down at the weapons and grabbed more shells. “Take whatever you want. Crow took his good sword with him, and he told me that he was going to coat the blade with garlic oil. ”
Mike shook his head. “I don’t have to worry about that. ”
Her gaze flicked up again. “What do you…oh. ”
The dhampyr’s eyes were like torches. “I just hope I have some superpowers after all. ”
Right then a heavy fist began pounding on the door.
Val stiffened and turned. The pounding was so hard it shook the heavy institutional door in its metal frame. A wave of sickness twisted in Val’s stomach.
“Come owww-owwt!” someone called in a singsong. There were screams outside, but even through that they could hear the snickering laugh of whoever was beating on the door. “Come owwwwwww-owt!”
Val snatched a pistol off the bed and took a step toward the door.
“No, Val—don’t!” Newton cried. He was holding Weinstock’s pants and the doctor had a leg poised to step into them.
“Shut up,” Val snarled, and it wasn’t clear if she was talking to Newton or the monster outside. Then she racked the slide and put four rounds through the center of the door.
The next scream they heard was inhuman.
And Val Guthrie smiled.
4
Even though his guts were turning to gutter water, BK stood his ground as his attacker rushed him. Three times he’d nailed this psycho son of a bitch with crippling blows to the head and throat. Three times the attacker just shrugged them off. BK was not a spiritual guy, and he didn’t much believe in the boogeyman, but he wasn’t an idiot either. Something was way off the sanity radar here and whether he wanted to believe it or not he had to accept the fact that this guy was not acting human. No, he corrected himself in the microsecond between the time the guy sprang and when he leapt, not acting human, this weird-ass motherfucker was not human.
Belief and acceptance are sometimes very different concepts.
The teenager jumped from too far away and yet still covered the distance between them—and the impossible reality of that nearly got BK killed—but BK was a fighter and he’d been in hundreds of scrapes from schoolyard scuffles to extreme martial arts bouts to back-alley knife fights. His conscious rational mind was not always allowed to be in the driver’s seat; reflexes and gross motor skills are better for the battlefield.
As the attacker slammed into him, BK shifted slightly to one side, accepted the grab with one of his own, pivoted, and let the killer’s mass and momentum do all the work. The pounce turned into a pirouette and then the killer was falling with BK’s bulk on top of him. They hit the ground hard and fast, with BK’s muscle and mass driving downward to smash the attacker’s bones with the impact. BK didn’t stop there, didn’t even pause; as soon as his hands were free of the need to steer the attacker’s body, he let go of the teenager’s trunk, grabbed him by the chin and the hair, and then threw himself into a tight roll through the air. BK’s bulk, plus the twisting grip, created a savage torque that more than just snapped the neck—it wrenched the killer’s head around more than two hundred degrees.
The attacker went limp in an instant.
BK rolled all the way to his feet but froze in a crouch, staring at what he had just fought, and what he had just done.
“Oh my God…” He dropped to his knees, gagging at the taste of the bile in his throat. The moment was unreal; he could feel his pulse pounding like a muffled surf in his ears.
He heard screams off to his right and rose and he turned. A woman ran out of the cornfields, her blouse torn and bloody, and two men chased her. Both of them were as pale-faced as the teenager he’d just killed. The woman reached the Haunted House and got inside, slamming the door; immediately her pursuers began hammering their fists on the door. It buckled and splintered and they tore the flimsy wood away and went inside. There were more screams.
BK was running with no awareness of having wanted or intended to. He pelted across the lot, noting with strange detachment that many tourists were milling around, some of them singing and others dancing in the unstructured way mental patients will. They all looked stoned. He recorded that, but couldn’t deal with it now.
He reached the Haunted House just as one of the pursuers came hurtling back out through the doorway with a short length of broken wood rammed up under his chin, his shirt-front glistening with blood. The man fell flat on his back and didn’t move, so BK vaulted his body and dashed inside. Billy had gone in there.
Just inside he saw the young woman huddled in a corner by a bandstand that had instruments but no musicians—they weren’t scheduled to play until eight that night and it was just turning six now. There were bodies on the floor. One was a younger teenager whose throat had clearly been torn out; the other was a red-haired woman dressed in a den mother’s uniform. Her mouth was smeared with blood and there was a drumstick jammed into the socket of her right eye.
On the far side of the bandstand the second of the two pursuers was locked in a mutual stranglehold with Billy Christmas, and they rolled over and over, their feet kicking out to send guitars and high hats crashing to the floor. Billy’s face was streaked with blood and his shoulder was slashed from the deltoid to the elbow.
BK rushed over and grabbed the attacker by the hair and hauled backward with all his weight, pulling him away from Billy, whose face had started to turn purple. BK kicked the man in the back of the calf, dropping him to his knees, then grabbed hair and chin and, standing wide-legged, he wrenched the man’s head over and up. The vertebrae popped like a drumroll, and BK let the body flop to the ground.
Billy was already climbing painfully to his feet, eyes dancing with shock, and yet he was smiling the weirdest smile BK had ever seen.
“You okay?” BK asked.
