“You’re okay,” I told him.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
I let the ma’am thing slide. He could call me Bessie the Cow if it made him feel good.
“Keep your head up,” I reminded him. “This shit isn’t done yet.”
We were so far from being through the worst of it. Harold had one of the cloaked men held up against the wall, the guy’s once-handsome face now bloated and purple as he struggled to breathe. If he was choking, it meant he needed oxygen, which meant he wasn’t a vampire.
Under different circumstances I would have told the demon to stand down, but fuck it. These guys all deserved to die. The humans among them were about to learn the hard way how short a mortal life could be. And when it came to the vampires, I would deal with the West Coast Tribunal later. As far as I was concerned they had their own damned explaining to do.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot that went on within the vampire community the Tribunal didn’t know about, and I had a hard time believing they were completely ignorant of the fact several vamps were running around town buying up all sorts of demon-summoning supplies.
That had to trigger some alarm bells somewhere, didn’t it?
I did a quick scan of the area around me
, my eyes burning from the smoke, making it hard to tell where all our men were and how many of the vampires were still around. I’d taken out two, and Harold obviously had a third well in hand—no pun intended—which meant there were three of them at worst.
A dark lump on the alley floor told me a fourth had gone down at some point. Two left.
As I was craning my neck to see through the smoke, something grabbed me from behind and dragged me to the ground. Before I was able to react, my attacker had jerked the rifle out of my hands and was sitting on top of me, both hands firmly wrapped around my throat.
I looked up into the unfamiliar face of a male vampire, his lips contorted into a sick kind of pleasure as his fingers tightened around my throat.
For a brief moment I thought, Well, shit, is this how I’m going to die?
It wasn’t as bad as being drowned in a sewer I guess, but it still lacked the excitement and panache of the exit I’d hoped to make. I grabbed his wrists, trying to loosen his literal stranglehold on my neck, but I couldn’t get him off me. He was stronger than me, and I didn’t have any supernatural strength to fall back on anymore. But I was also not about to let some demon-worshipping asshole be the last thing I saw on this planet.
I’d beaten worse than him before.
I just wasn’t sure how I was going to do it this time.
Black spots started to blot out my vision, and I wheezed helplessly. My throat burned. He was obviously taking his time and enjoying this, because he was strong enough he could have crushed my throat in a single squeeze if he wanted to.
I’d seen vampires do that before.
My temples throbbed, and my whole body jerked, attempting desperately to fight my way free of him.
This would be such a fucking pathetic way for me to die. I was so mad at myself right now.
Then everything was red and warm, and my neck felt mercifully free.
Was I dead?
I licked my lips and realized, no, I was very much alive, and my face was covered in blood.
Someone grabbed hold of me and hoisted me to my feet. I sucked in big lungfuls of air as I wiped away the thick smear of blood dripping into my eyes. The body of the vampire, a fresh gunshot wound in the back of his skull, was lying still on the concrete. I hadn’t even heard the shot go off.
I stared back into the face of the man I had saved only moments earlier.
“Keep your head up,” he told me with a smile. “Shit’s not done yet.”
Then he was gone into the smoke, my guardian angel whose name I didn’t know.
That guy was super-duper getting a raise when we got out of this.
My throat hurt, my eyes burned from the blood smear, and everything had an echoey, surreal quality thanks to my brain having briefly been deprived of oxygen.