But not by Slava, who had been as toxic as the rest of them. And who didn’t have the skills for messing around with vamp DNA. So by the necromancer, obviously, and whoever he was working with, which I was suddenly having a hard time believing was just a group of smugglers.
But there was no time to work it out now, not with the tux reaching for the doorknob.
I shoved Ray at the hallway door, shot out the window and dropped our last grenade. Then I went pelting out after him, only to find him looking from the smoking elevator shaft to a horde of vamps coming down the stairs. And apparently deciding on the latter, because he yelled and started to charge like a crazy man before I grabbed his collar and threw him the other way.
“What good is that going to do?” he yelled. “It won’t go up!”
“Good. Because we’re going down,” I said. And pushed him into the elevator shaft.
The grenade went off as we dropped, rattling the walls around us and sending a billow of smoke into the air over our heads. Which probably would have bothered me more except that I’d guessed right. The shaft didn’t stop at level twelve.
And while that was great as far as the plan was concerned, a two-story drop isn’t fun even when you’re at your best, which I definitely wasn’t. And even when you don’t land in a mass of twisted metal from the elevator you just blew to smithereens. And even when you don’t look up and find a bunch of bloody vampires glaring down at you from the doorway you just jumped out of. Although they worried me less at the moment than the smoking remains of the elevator on the floor above them, which was sparking and swaying and looking like it was about to—
“Fuuuuck!” Ray said, summing things up. Right before he started shooting at the vamps and I got to my feet, fell down, got up and started wrestling the doors open to level fourteen. There was a stabbing pain in my left calf, my ankle kept trying to collapse on the other leg, and then a vamp jumped down.
Right on top of me.
He was riddled with damage from Ray’s bullets or shrapnel or whatever fighting had taken place before I got here. Or maybe all three. He was less a vampire at this point than a bunch of holes in the vague shape of a vampire, which didn’t stop him from sinking his teeth into my shoulder.
I grunted in pain, because it hurt like a bitch. And worse, that’s not an easy hold to break. The feeding instinct takes over as soon as they latch on, and the blood they drain gives them extra strength even as it weakens their victim.
Only that wasn’t happening this time.
The vamp raised his head after barely a second, looking vaguely puzzled, like I didn’t taste so good. Or like his body couldn’t process what he was sucking out of me when he was no longer, in any sense of the term, alive. He just didn’t know it yet.
I helped him out with that, slinging him against the concrete wall of the shaft, and then getting splattered with vamp parts when I shot him at point-blank range. I realized a bare second later that he wasn’t one of Slava’s, and that the splatter oozing down my face and cleavage wasn’t burning me to a cinder. But I screamed anyway, because I felt like it, and because it wasn’t like everybody didn’t already know where we were.
And all of them were probably going to be here any second.
I grabbed Ray’s arm. “Come on!”
And he tried. But he’d run out of ammo, and in the split second it took him to slam in a new clip, three more vamps dropped down the shaft, like dark bullets. They landed in a V formation, and the one in front grabbed Ray’s other arm and jerked back, stretched him between us.
Everybody froze.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Ray watched me with big eyes, but didn’t say anything. I finally found out what it takes to shut him up, I thought. And then I raised my gun an inch so it was aimed directly between his captor’s eyes.
“Stop three with one weapon?” the vamp asked. “That would be impressive.”
“Like your brains when I splatter them all over the wall.”
I’d suspected I wasn’t actually talking to the guy I was facing, who was looking a little, I don’t know, dead, for an animated conversation. But I was sure of it when he grinned. “Not mine, dhampir. You forget—I am not there. You won’t clip me this time.”
“This time? Do I know you?” Because I didn’t know many necromancers. And only one powerful enough to pull off something like this. But he was supposed to be as dead as the vamp I was facing, burnt to a crisp in a raging fire.
Or, you know, not.
It didn’t look like I was going to get confirmation, though. Because the necromancer just shook his puppet’s head. And the other two vamps did the same thing at the same time, like they were on a string.
So not really three pairs of eyes, then.
“No, no, none of that,” he tut-tutted. “Not that I expect you to get out of this, but you have proven to be…resilient. I think I shall save my explanations.”
“Well, that’s going to make this pretty boring.”
He grinned wider. “I do not think you will find it so.”