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Although, no. To be fair, I kicked it, with enough force to have sent a football fifty yards to the end zone. Only there was no end zone, there was only the mage’s face, which had popped up over the nearest cage with an anticipatory gleam in his eye right before the creature gnawed it out.
At least, that’s what I assumed it was doing. It was kind of hard to see, considering that pale tentacles had wrapped around the man’s entire head and neck. But the munching sounds would seem to indicate—
I blinked and stumbled back as something tiny skittered underfoot. It might have been a rat or a roach, but I wasn’t in the mood to take chances. I was in the mood to make it out the damned door. Which I would have—if another flood of mages hadn’t been blocking it as they poured inside, taking the odds from insane to just plain silly.
“Dory! Get out of here!” It took me a second to realize that the vamp had spoken, mainly because I was kind of surprised he was still alive. And even more so when he threw me a gun. “Go!”
I plucked it out of the air. It was a shiny black 9mm Glock 18. Nice.
And then I sprayed bullets—but not at the mages. Because pistol ammo probably wouldn’t get through their body armor and because I wasn’t feeling that charitable right now. If you’re going to be a bitch, might as well be a big bitch, I thought, a little hysterically.
And took out the shelf behind them.
Suddenly, it was like the shooting gallery at the fair if the gun was fully automatic and the ducks never moved. I’m not going to say I broke every bottle, but if there were more than two or three remaining when I finished emptying the clip, I’d be surprised. Bullets ricocheted, jars exploded, bits of flying glass and shrapnel took out other jars, and not-formaldehyde rained down on the mages. Whose faces went saggy, and whose numb hands dropped their weapons, even as they looked around trying to find the source of the barrage. Which they never managed to do, since they rapidly went from confused and pissed off and homicidal to…
Well, whatever emotion can best be described as “lunch.”
The only exceptions were the ones who had been spry enough to dodge back out the door before the fun started. Or the ones who had thrown themselves at the vampire, I guess under the impression that they’d last longer. Or the one who had been in front but who had ducked behind a bunch of crates.
You know, the one I hadn’t seen.
He emerged shrieking a spell that blasted me off my feet and through the air, before slamming me into the wall hard enough to crack bone. Hard enough to liquefy my insides. Hard enough to cause the whole room to bleed—
Red.
I woke in the middle of a battle, which was not unusual.
A human was lunging at me with a knife, attempting to gut me, which was.
I blinked at him.
He was yelling something that I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my ears, which always took a few moments to subside. But the sound bounced off the inside of my skull like rocks. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying, like an insect buzzing around my ears until I reached out and—
Yes.
That was better.
I peeled myself off the wall and looked around.
It was…colorful. The meaty smell of new blood painted the room in spatters, glowing crimso
n bright against the darkness. The stench of tainted magic came from a fire eating its way across the floor, flaring along the spectrum as it consumed old potion stains. And a familiar, skin-ruffling musk followed some of the humans, a sickly green that lingered like aftereffects every time one of them moved.
The combined stench was bad, but I had woken in worse, in battlefields days old, full of bloated corpses. No, it was all right.
But something else wasn’t.
Something was wrong.
It wasn’t the strange things running around underfoot. One started for me, then paused, lifting long crablike feelers out in front of it, before abruptly turning and scurrying away. I let it go.
Surprisingly, it also wasn’t the vampire. There was one here, raising every hair on my body from the power he was radiating. First level. Old. Perhaps four hundred years, perhaps more. But the bloodlust was cool in him, his outline merely a vague blue shadow, only the pale mist steaming up from his body and the thin silvered veins under his skin showing any difference between him and the humans.
Satiated or gorged.
Irrelevant.
I let my eyes move on.
