Death's Rival

and up the stairs with reptilian speed and grace, vamped out, screaming. Hungry. I could smell their hunger and their sickness. These were infected, and I had no idea where they had come from. The dang vault and cinder-block room had been empty.

I fired the shotgun, hitting the first one midcenter. Beside me, Bruiser stepped down two steps and took the head of the second one, the long sword in one hand, one of the lovely midsized swords in the other. Blood fountained up from her stump. I fired at the third vamp, knocking him back. Bruiser took the head of the two I had hit while I finished up the rounds in the M4. When all seven rounds were gone, I pulled the Walthers and started in with head shots, slowing them down, Bruiser to my side, finishing them off. Soldiers poured down the steps to back us up, and we took the fight down to the first floor, spreading out. And still the vamps came.

There was no grace, no finesse. It was just battle. Just blood and the stink of gunfire. I saw two of ours go down in the melee, and vamps fell on them to drink. Eli and Derek waded into them, stakes and blades flashing. I took a set of talons across one arm, a fist to the gut, and a roundhouse kick to the kidneys. It was three on one and I went down. Rule number one when fighting vamps. Stay on your feet.

I was still falling when the first vamp fell on me. Oofed out a breath it didn’t need and went flying, a boot in the air in front of my face. A short sword followed, taking off another vamp’s forearm with one swipe. Rick reached down and pulled me up, his fingers like steel bands on my unhurt arm. He swung me around and supported me with an arm around my waist until I was steady. Until I had drawn two vamp-killers. “Payback isn’t always a bitch,” he said.

I laughed. I’d saved his life a couple of times. Now he’d saved mine.

It went on and on. And when it was over, Bruiser and Rick were standing back to back, heaving breaths. Derek and I were against a wall, two downed soldiers at our feet, where we were protecting them. Three other of the men he had brought were still standing, but all were wounded. Two were dead. Derek hit 911 and called for medic.

Around us were fourteen vamps. Only fourteen? It seemed like hundreds. But none of them were de Allyon. Lucas de Allyon had not been in his base camp.

All the blood and fighting and death had been for nothing. Wasted. My eyes filled with tears that I blinked away. I wiped my face. Vamp blood was burning me. “Crap. Crap, crap, crap,” I whispered.

Near me, a man moaned. I opened my cell and called Leo. Fortunately, he was already on his way. He’d be here quickly and would heal the injured humans. I closed the cell and looked up to see six humans emerge from a wall. Not a doorway, but a wall, a hidden opening to a hidden room. It hadn’t been on the plans submitted to the planning commission. Vamps who broke the law. Imagine that. I almost started laughing until I got a whiff of the blood-servants. They all smelled of the vamp sickness.

Derek covered them and made them sit down with their hands on their heads. I thought about the sick and bleeding Asheville vamps. Here was a treatment that might save them until we figured out how Sabina had healed that guy . . . the vamp . . . the dumb pretty one whose name was totally gone from my exhausted brain. Callan! Yeah. Callan. I texted Leo. “Humans here have antibody to illness. Send to Asheville?”

Instantly he texted back “On the next plane.”

Gotta love modern forms of communication. Then I texted to Adelaide “Got treatment. Will send ASAP.” I closed my phone. And slid down a wall to sit on the floor.

Eli wandered over, his combat face still in place, looking hard and remote. He stood next to me, staring out over the battlefield, and when he spoke, his lips didn’t move, a sotto voce not even vamps could have overheard. “The marine called Cheek Sneak. I caught him taking pics and texting. I took his phone. You want I should give it to Alex?”

“Yeah,” I said, and closed my eyes. Had we finally found our other tattletale? “If you prove he’s been talking to the enemy, tell me first. Not Derek.”

Eli breathed a low laugh through his nose. “Copy that.” He meandered away.

“You’re hurt.”

I opened my eyes and looked at Rick. “So are you,” I said. He was burned and limping, and blood crusted his knuckles as if he’d hit a wall. Or maybe beat in a vamp’s face. Either one sounded like him.

“My were-taint will heal it,” he said, offhand. “But yours is bad.” He knelt, lifted my arm, and I saw that blood coated my sleeve. He peeled back the cut cloth to reveal the injury, three oozing wounds, parallel, made by vamp talons. The lacerations were about two inches across and cut into the deltoid muscle deeply enough that when he pressed it open, a tiny pulse of blood started, rhythmic and steady. A tiny artery had been severed.

“I’ll heal it when I shift,” I murmured.

Rick sat beside me and opened a military med kit on his belt. Inside was a tourniquet, the kind a medic put on a severed limb to stop the bleeding, packages of sterile gauze and alcohol pads and cleanser. Stuff to sew up a wound, black thread and tiny curved needles. A syringe of clear fluid. It was marked MORPHINE.

“You are not sewing me up,” I said.

Rick laughed. “No. I’m not. But I will pack it until we can get out of here.”

“Okay. Sure.”

I watched as he tore away my sleeve and cleaned and bandaged my wound. He tied the gauze snugly and wound cling wrap around my arm. It hurt, but I watched his hands, sure and steady as he worked. I smelled his scent, sweat and blood and cat. When he was done, he raised his eyes to me and smiled, flashing that small crooked bottom tooth. A shiver cut through me, burning and icy.

Rick lifted a hand and touched my burned face. Gently. So gently. I closed my eyes, inhaling him. Wanting him, and knowing that I couldn’t have him without risking contracting the were-taint. “You smell so good,” I whispered.

“I miss you,” he whispered.

“I miss you too,” I said. “This so sucks.”

He chuckled. “Yeah. It does. What’s worse, now I have a job that’s likely to pit us against each other way too often.” And then he was gone, taking his med kit and its little syringe to a soldier we had thought was dead but who was still with us. In agony.

I looked up to find Eli’s gray eyes on me, a strange look on his face, an odd amalgam of something sharper than mere curiosity, more intense than suspicion. And maybe something like longing. It took me by surprise. He studied me and I studied him. And then he turned away.* * *

A bit less than an hour after sunset, Leo arrived in a rented, extra-long stretch limo. With him was Sabina, the outclan priestess, healed of the disease that had taken her down, and three blood-servants chosen for battle experience, more so than beauty. Lounging on the beautiful upholstery was Grégoire, Leo’s secondo heir, dressed in sky blue silk pajamas. Next to him on the long seat were the surprises. Rick introduced his unit—a werewolf stuck in wolf form, and Pea, a juvenile grindylow—and with them was his supervisor at PsyLED. Her name was Soul. She was gorgeous.

Soul could have been anywhere from forty to sixty, the kind of woman who was ageless and sexy and sultry, and made all the men in visual distance perk up and think about taking her to the nearest hotel. She had smooth olive skin and black, flashing eyes and platinum hair, the kind nature gives some formerly black-haired women. It hung down her back in long, supple waves. And she had curves in all the right places. I disliked her on sight.

I stepped back behind the wall and studied her. Soul was wearing some kind of long, floating, diaphanous dress made of layers of silk gauze that brushed her feet. Over it she wore a watered silk coat to her knees. She was wearing a pair of black dancing shoes with straps over the instep that I coveted. Around her neck was a thin gold chain with a solid gold apple depending from it. In Beast sight, she glowed with the heat of magical energies, not witch, not were, but something not human. She was also carrying a staff with a psy-meter mounted on the top. A supernat working for PsyLED. Great. Just freaking ducky.

Soul, the wolf, and Pea went straight to Rick. Leo came straight to me. Instantly I flashed on the forced feeding, the pain and the fury and the helplessness. My hands clenched, but I forced down my reaction, knowing that anything I felt he could read in my body language, or smell drifting from my pores. I took a slow breath and blew it out.

“Report,” Leo said. It sounded like a military command and I was forced to remember that Leo had fought in wars for centuries, Grégoire at his side, as he was now. Or leading the way. Despite his slight build, delicate form, and silk pjs, or perhaps because of it all, Grégoire was a fierce warrior. I’d seen him jump in front of a