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And kneed death in the nuts.
Death, it turned out, knew a lot of French curse words. I was treated to most of them as we rolled around the floor, me trying to throw him off, him intent on draining me. And it looked like he was winning. At least, I assumed that was why the r
oom kept trying to gray out at the edges, and why my attacks were batted aside like the antics of an overly energetic puppy.
Until I made a sudden lunge to the side, snatched a fire extinguisher off a trash pile, and smashed it into his stubborn head. Which would have been great, except that it gave Red a chance to get a foot on the floor. He did something balletic that was too fast for my eyes to track, but it ended with me flipping over his head and then him flipping over mine, only to land five or six yards away.
On his feet, facing me.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded. “Spider-Man?”
“No.” He swiped a hand across his bloody face. “Your boyfriend, come to get you out of this!”
“In your dreams!”
“Frequently,” he growled—from all of an inch away.
Shit. I hadn’t even seen him move. And then he fisted a hand in the front of my tank, jerked me up to his face and—
Kissed me?
As crazy as it sounds, that’s what the lunatic was doing. In the middle of a mad scientist’s lab, watched by all the creepy things in their little jars. And it looked like crazy was catching, because for a second there I was kissing him back, sucking on a bloody lower lip that tasted like heaven, tasted like candy, tasted like the best thing ever. Until I came to my senses and abruptly wrenched away, freaked-out and furious and turned on and—
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“You are. Tu me rends fou!”
“What?”
“Fou, fou!” He made some weird gestures in the air. “You make me the crazy!”
I stared at him. “Buddy, I got news for you. I don’t think you need any help.”
The vampire looked offended, but he didn’t get a chance to respond. Not with the place taking that moment to start coming apart. The ground rumbled under our feet, a bunch of little jars shook their way off the shelves and a big red light started revolving by the door.
Because, yeah. What this place had really needed was a bloody strobe.
But that wasn’t half as bad as the ear-piercing alarm that split the air a second later. Or the fact that a nearby tarp-covered cage started shaking violently. Something in there really wanted out, and I really wanted to be gone before it managed it.
But it didn’t look like the door was an option, since it was currently being used by a bunch of G.I. Joe look-alikes. Or they would have been, if Joe dressed in black body armor and slung bandoliers of potions over the parts of him that weren’t already occupied by guns. War mages, I realized half a second before all hell broke loose.
Chapter Two
I dove for the operating table, since it was the only source of weapons, and grabbed a couple knives while sliding underneath. Meanwhile, the vamp was jumped by half the guards, who he promptly threw into the other half. Mages hit the deck, bullets started flying, jars started breaking and I hesitated, feeling conflicted.
The problem was that I didn’t know if the mages were the bad guys, come to throw me back in my cage, or the good guys attempting a rescue. And then one who’d fallen nearby looked up and spotted me. And I barely had time to push the table over before a couple dozen bullet-shaped dents pinged out of the metal in front of my face.
Well, okay then.
The guy stopped firing after a few seconds, probably figuring out that whatever caliber he was using wasn’t enough to punch through the thick old metal. So he used knives instead. And they must have been enchanted, because while the bullets had only pockmarked the surface, the knives sliced right on through.
But they didn’t slice through me, because I wasn’t there anymore. Bullets slammed into the wall over my head and sparked off the bars of the cages I dove behind. But only one hit me, and it was a minor wound in the calf that I barely noticed because I was too busy noticing the contents of one of the jars, which had been smashed by the earthquake or the bullets or who-the-hell-knew.
And, okay, maybe that hadn’t been formaldehyde, I thought, as the hand that landed in it went numb to the elbow. But it looked like the effect wore off fast. Because the creature that had been floundering around in it—something that looked like an octopus if they had six-inch fangs—suddenly perked up. And lunged for my face.
I screamed and slashed out with a knife, which didn’t appear to do much more than piss it off. It came after me as I ran and stumbled and ducked behind this crate and that cage, not being picky, because bullets and fangs. And then I fell, tripping over something I never saw because I was too busy rolling to the side to avoid the creature, which hit the concrete beside me with a slimy, squelching sound that I thought might haunt my dreams, assuming I survived to have any.
And then it lunged for me again and I kicked it.
