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“Oh, great.” He looked heavenward. “She has an idea. Have you been listening? They’ll kill us!”
“Not if we kill them—” I began, only to cut off when a sudden rushing noise filled the air. And Ray grabbed my gun and went ballistic on something on the wall over our heads.
“Die! Die! Die!” he screamed, emptying the clip and causing spent shells to rain down all around us. And okay, maybe I’d been wrong about the calm thing. Because he was just standing there, trembling and panting and staring—
At the air-conditioning vent that he’d just shot the crap out of.
“—first.” I took my smoking gun out of his limp fingers and patted him on the back. “See? That’s the spirit.”
Chapter Twenty-six
“Oh, good. That’s…Yes,” Ray said, slumping against the wall as the shield protecting the cabinet dropped.
I felt a little light-headed, too, because there were actual weapons in the weapons case. Not a lot—somebody had been here before us—but anything was better than we had. “Get rid of it,” I told Ray, passing over the loathsome thing we’d used as a key.
“You’re inhuman,” he told me. And snatched it.
And as soon as he was out of sight around the corner, I let my head fall onto the cool, shiny metal of the cabinet for just a second. I could still vaguely feel it squirming in my palm, like its body was doing on the lobby wall. I tried to tell myself that the guard who had provided the handprint—and the hand—we’d needed would have approved. The creature that had taken him over wasn’t him, and if he’d been here, he’d have wanted us to do what was necessary to avenge him.
I knew vamps well enough to know that, even if I hadn’t known him.
But my brain kept wondering who he’d been. Or if I’d met him before. Or about how I’d feel if someone had just sawed off part of Louis-Cesare in order to fool a stupid—
I shuddered in visceral horror all over, hard.
And looked up to see Ray staring at me.
He didn’t say anything and neither did I. I just licked my lips and went back to work, because weakness right now was not fucking okay. I started searching through the cabinet looking for something better than the damned .22—why the hell did they even have a .22?—that someone else had rejected. Someone else who was probably dead, because whatever they had picked hadn’t been good enough.
And that went double for what they’d left. I grabbed a couple clips for the .45, shoving them in my pockets. And then just stood there, lusting after my favorite shotgun—a sweet, double-barreled 10-gauge loaded with three-and-a-half-inch shells. Every time I pulled the trigger, it was the equivalent to four blasts from a standard 12-gauge or a nine-second burst from a submachine gun.
It was glorious.
Only for this, I would have liked two. Or three, in case I ended up breaking one over something’s head. What I found instead was a sad little .410, all alone in the back, because nobody hunted zombies—much less freaking vampire zombies—with a rabbit gun.
Nobody except me, since there was no alternative and I was out of time.
I flung it over my shoulder, grabbed all the ammo that would fit it and turned to Ray. He’d g
iven me the layout of the lower floors, and helped distract the guy we’d used for a key long enough for me to do what had been necessary. If I got out of here, I owed him a lot.
“Keep your head down,” I told him. “I’ll send help as soon as I’m out.”
He just stared at me. I didn’t have time to figure out what his problem was, so I just clapped him on the shoulder. And took off for the bank of elevators.
They were to the left of the reception desk, in a little alcove of their own, but still plenty close enough to the main room for my purposes. In fact, things were looking about as good as they could under the circumstances, until I caught sight of one of the elevator panels. I got out and checked the other elevator, but it was the same story.
Son of a bitch.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Ray demanded, sticking his head in the door.
“There’s only twelve lower levels,” I told him.
“What?”
“There’s only twelve, but Radu said he was on fourteen.” I looked up. “Why would he say that?”
“Who the hell cares?” Ray looked at me like I was crazy. “You can’t use the elevator—are you nuts?”
