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“I thought you were going to therapy with him.” I kept my gun aimed at him as I bent down to pick his up.
“I don’t need therapy, there’s nothing wrong with me!”
I started to reach for the fallen gun, and it was suddenly harder to “see” it. My eyes must have returned to normal. I had to glance down to touch the gun on the ground. The moment I touched the grips I knew the gun was an out-of-the-box Glock. I hated the grips they came with, and most cops I knew modified them, like tailoring clothes, so they fit better. Kane started to roll up on his side. “Don’t move,” I said, and pointed my gun more solidly at him. His Glock was in my hand, but I didn’t want to look away long enough to find a place to put it in my vest.
He pressed his hand to his stomach wound. “If you kill me, Asher will die just like Scaramouche.”
“What are you talking about? Scaramouche is dead?” I asked.
“When Deimos turned into a dragon he broke the wall and knocked the coffins over. Capitano burned up in the sun. Look if you don’t believe me.”
“Don’t so much as twitch, Kane, I mean it.” I backed up, angling for a closer look into the room that Deimos had destroyed. I glanced quick and saw coffins scattered around. I had a second to see two bodies charred into black sticks. I hadn’t heard them scream; had they slept through it all, or had the dragon breathing fire on me distracted me? I guess it didn’t matter.
“I just see the dead vampires,” I said.
Kane pressed his hand to his stomach and groaned. “Scaramouche is near the door where he ran in to try and save his master, but it was too late.”
I took a step back and looked toward the door, and there he was, Scaramouche. He lay on his side, one hand outstretched toward the burned bodies. I couldn’t see anything wrong with Scaramouche except that his eyes were wide open and frozen in death.
I caught movement and put all my attention back on Kane. He tried to sit up and fell back to the ground, writhing with one hand pressed to his stomach. “This really hurts.”
“Good,” I said, and meant it.
I heard gunfire in the distance, and a sound like a roar that was between a lion, a bear, and an elk, or maybe my mind was just trying to find common ground with a sound I never thought I’d hear outside of dream, or nightmare.
“You’re not going to run off and let me bleed to death, are you?”
I had no radio or even my phone. I had no way to call for medical, or anything. “Damn it.”
He curled up on his side, clutching his stomach, moaning. I heardthe dragon’s roar and the sound of fire, something bigger on fire than the bodies in the house. I couldn’t stand here and do nothing.
“You are always such a pain in the ass,” I said.
“Asher dumped me for you and Jean-Claude, nothing I’ve ever done to you is as bad as that,” he said, and rolled himself into a tighter ball, then shuddered in pain as if that hurt more. Stomach wounds were supposed to be a slow kill, plenty of time for the hospital, but I wasn’t used to shooting to wound; maybe I was wrong.
“Shit, don’t die, Kane.” I went over toward him, gun still out, but I didn’t want to shoot him again until I’d seen the hole I’d already put into him. “Uncurl yourself so I can see the wound.”
“It hurts too much.”
“You always were a whiner,” I said.
“You shot me!”
“You shot at me first! Now show me your damn wound.”
He held his hand up toward me; it was covered in blood, fuck. His other hand had something in it, and I shot him in the chest before I had time to think it through. His hands collapsed to either side and a second Glock fell to the ground beside him. It was one of their subcompacts, which is one reason I missed it, but that was no excuse. I should have patted him down, wounded or not. I walked wide around him with the gun in my right hand pointed at him solid. If he had so much as twitched again I’d have put one in his head. He was a shapeshifter and that meant harder to kill. I got to the other side and kicked the subcompact away from his hand. He was dead, I knew it when I saw it, but I wasn’t bending down to take his pulse. That had horror movie surprise written all over it.
I said a prayer that Asher would survive Kane’s death, and then I found a home for my borrowed Heckler & Koch USP 45 on my vest. It took time to change out holsters from the empty Springfield and put in the H&K so the gun rode secure. I checked the Glocks for ammo automatically. The full-size Glock was down to thirteen; thesubcompact had all ten with one in the chamber. I pulled out an AR magazine from its pouch on my vest and put it in Edward’s equipment bag. He had my AR-15 with him, so I didn’t need extra ammo right now anyway. I put the subcompact in the empty pouch. I didn’t like Glocks, but I liked having eleven extra bullets if I ran out. I was not searching Kane’s body for his holster, so I put the full-size Glock in Edward’s bag. I was going to rummage around in Olaf’s bag to see if he had anything else I wanted to borrow, but the dragon roared again. Deimos was still alive; that meant everyone else was still in danger. I had two grenades, eleven rounds in the H&K, eleven in the little Glock. I had three extra magazines for my AR-15 when I got it back from Edward. It would be enough or it wouldn’t, but either way I had to get in the fight. I grabbed the silver fire blanket off the ground and started running toward the sounds of fresh gunfire.
I glanced at Kane’s body as I ran past, and I felt bad about killing him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t earned it, and it wasn’t just about Asher. I killed people professionally, but they were usually strangers. It was always harder to kill someone you knew, even if they tried to kill you first. It slowed me down, as if all the heavy thoughts were physical weight. I let them go, had to; I’d feel guilty about Kane later, and I’d feel worse if Asher…I screamed out loud, “Run, damn you, run!” and I ran.
53
They had corneredDeimos at the cliff’s edge over the river. He was on all fours with a long snaky tail twitching like an angry cat. He tried to go up on his back legs, but the moment that his front feet left the ground they poured so many bullets into him that I could actually see them like black rain going sideways into the dragon. He gave that unearthly scream again, his muzzle thrown upward like a howling dog.
There was a huge semicircle of armed people around Deimos. I spotted Edward and Olaf in the front, their silver fire suits flashing in the sunlight. The people on either side of them had no fire gear, but there were no crispy-crittered bodies anywhere that I could see either. How the hell were they keeping Deimos from flaming people?
He started to rear up again and they plastered him with bullets again. It was like the ultimate firing squad except that the target wouldn’t die. I realized that silver bullets were expensive, and most police departments couldn’t afford that many of them. Most of the cops on site had either never had silver ammo or had used up all they had rounds ago. How did we kill Deimos without enough silver to take out his head and heart? I’d never tried to kill anything this large.
