It looked as though they had cleared out. Bolivar wished the mother had accompanied them here. Her blood link to the boy would have proved valuable. But the Master had tasked Bolivar, and its will would be done.
The job of bloodhound instead fell to the feelers, the newly turned blind children. Bolivar came out to the kitchen to see one there, a boy with fully black eyes, crouching down on all fours. He was “looking” out the window toward the street, using his extrasensory perception.
But Bolivar needed to see it for himself, needed to be sure, moving past him to the stairs. Bolivar rode the spiral railing down on his hands and bare feet, down one floor to the street level, where the other feelers had retreated to the shop — then continuing his descent to the basement and a locked door.
Bolivar’s soldiers were already there, in answer to his telepathic command. They tore at the locked door with powerful, oversize hands, digging into the iron-bolted frame with the hardened nails of their talon-like middle fingers until they gained purchase, then joined forces to rip the door back from its frame.
The first few to enter tripped the ultraviolet lamps surrounding the interior of the doorway, the electric indigo rays cooking their virus-rich bodies, the vampires dissipating with screams and clouds of dust. The rest were repulsed by the light, pushed backward against the spiral staircase, shading their eyes. They were unable to see through the doorway.
Bolivar was the first to haul himself hand over hand up the staircase, ahead of the crush. The old man still could be inside there.
Bolivar had to find another way in.
He noticed then the feelers tensed on the floor, facing the smashed windows and the street beyond, like pointer dogs responding to a scent. The first among them — a girl in soiled briefs and an undershirt — snarled and then leaped through the jagged shards of glass to the street.
The little girl came right at Angel, loping on all fours with fawn-like grace. The old wrestler backed up into the street, wanting no part of her, but she had locked in on the biggest target and was set on taking him down. She sprang up from the road, black-eyed, open-mouthed — and Angel reverted into wrestler mode, handling her as though she were a challenger throwing herself at him from the top turnbuckle. He applied the Angel Kiss, his open- palm blow smacking the girl out of the air in mid-leap, sending her lithe little body flying a good dozen yards away, tumbling to the road.
Angel recoiled immediately. One of the great disappointments of his life was not knowing any of the children he had sired. She was a vampire, but she looked so human — a child, still — and he started toward her with his bare hand outstretched. She turned and hissed, her blind eyes like two black bird’s eggs, her stinger darting out at him, maybe three feet in length, considerably shorter than an adult vampire’s. The tip flailed before his eyes like a devil’s tail, and Angel was transfixed.
Gus intervened quickly, finishing her with a hard swipe of his sword that scored the surface of the road, scraping up sparks.
This slaying sent the other vamps into an attack frenzy. A brutal battle, Gus and the Sapphires outnumbered at first three to one, then four to one as vamps fled from the pawnshop and emerged from the basements of the adjacent buildings burning along the street. Either they had been psychically summoned into battle, or simply heard the ringing dinner bell. Destroy one, and two more came at you.
Then a shotgun blast exploded near Gus and a marauding vamp was cut in two. He turned to see Mr. Quinlan, the Ancients’ chief hunter, picking off rioting white-bloods with military precision. He must have come up from underneath like these others. Unless he had been shadowing Gus and the Sapphires the entire time, from the darkness of the underground.
Gus noticed, in that moment — his senses heightened by the adrenaline of battle — that no blood worms coursed beneath the surface of Quinlan’s translucent skin. All the old ones, including the other hunters, crawled with worms, and yet his nearly iridescent flesh was as still and smooth as skin on a pudding.
But the fight was on, and the revelation passed in an instant. Mr. Quinlan’s killing cleared some much-needed space, and the Sapphires, no longer in danger of being surrounded, moved the fight from the middle of the street toward the pawnshop. The children waited, on all fours, on the periphery of the battle, like wolf cubs awaiting a weakened deer to kill. Quinlan sent one blast in their direction, the blind creatures scattering with a high-pitched squeal as he reloaded.
Angel snapped a vampire’s neck with a sharp twist of his hands, and then, in a single, swift move, rare for a man his age — and girth — he turned and used his massive elbow to crack the skull of another one against the wall.
Gus saw his chance, and broke away from the melee, running inside with his sword in search of the old man. The shop was empty, so he ran up the stairs, into an old, prewar apartment.
The many mirrors told him he was in the right place — but no old man.
He met two female vamps on the way back down, introducing them to the heel of his boot before running them through with silver. Their shrieks adrenalized him as he jumped over their bodies, avoiding the white blood oozing down the steps.
The stairs continued belowground, but he had to return to his
Before exiting, he noticed a section of busted wall near the stairs, exposing old copper water pipes running vertically. He set his sword down on a display case of brooches and cameos, finding a Chuck Knoblauch- autographed Louisville Slugger baseball bat with a $39.99 price tag. He hacked away at the old wallboard, smashing it open until he located the gas line. An old cast-iron pipe. Three good hacks with the bat, and it separated at a coupling — fortunately, without producing any sparks.
The smell of natural gas filled the room, escaping from the ruptured pipe not with a cool hiss but with a hoarse roar.
The feelers swarmed around Bolivar, who felt their distress. This fighter with the shotgun. He was not human. He was vampire.
But he was different.
The feelers could not read him. Even if he were of a different clan — and, clearly, he was — they should have been able to impart some knowledge of him to Bolivar, so long as he was of the worm.
Bolivar was mystified by this strange presence, and made to attack. But the feelers, reading his intent, leaped into his path. He tried to pull them off, but their dogged insistence was strange enough to merit his attention.
Something was about to happen, and he needed to take heed.
Gus reclaimed his sword and slashed his way out through another vamp — this one dressed in doctor’s scrubs — on his way outside and into the next building. There, he ripped away a burning section of windowsill, running with the flaming plank back into battle. He drove it, sharp point-down, into the back of a slain vamp, so that the wood stood like a torch.
“Creem!” he called, needing the silver-blinged killer to cover him as he went into the gear bag for the crossbow. He rummaged for a silver bolt, finding one. Gus tore off a piece of the downed vamp’s shirt, wrapping it around the bolt head and tying it tight, then loading the bolt into the cross, dipping the wrapping into the flames, and raising the crossbow toward the store.
A vamp wearing bloody gym clothes came wilding at Gus, and Quinlan stopped the creature with a crushing punch to the throat. Gus advanced to the curb, hollering, “Get back,
Gus was racing away when the building shattered in a single blast. The brick face collapsed, spilling into the street, the roof and its wooden underpinnings bursting apart like the top paper of a firecracker.
The shockwave knocked the unaware vampires to the street. The suck of oxygen brought an odd, post- detonation silence to the block, which was compounded by the ringing in their ears.
Gus got to his knees, then his feet. The corner building was no more, flattened as though by a giant foot.
