Vampire$

Felix did manage to approach and look down and just glimpse, twenty-one stories down, three forms on the pavement, before.

“Nooooooooooooo…” burst slowly from Cat beside him and Felix felt his forward movement and he dropped his pistol as his right hand shot out and snatched a chain-mailed shoulder and he spun the smaller man toward him and away from the wall and sank his fist deep into his middle.

“Ooomph…” went Cat and sagged.

Felix didn’t wait. He followed with a right uppercut that caught Cherry full under the chin and decked him flat onto the terrace tiles.

Then he pounced on either side of his chest and jabbed a finger into Cat’s face and spat, though he knew the other man was too groggy to hear him: “No! You are not following anybody down!”

Then he rolled him up into a fireman’s carry and somehow bent down and picked up his empty gun and spun around for the door.

We’ve got to get out of here! We’ve got to get out of here now!

Because no fall, even twenty-one stories, was going to kill a vampire.

Back through the french doors and that huge room and those oaken double doors into the hail and mashing the elevator button. Should I wait? Should I take the stairs?

Or will it take the stairs? Just streak up them, floor after floor, to come get me?

But then the bell and the doors opened and the elevator was still there! Had it happened too fast for them to start down? Or some luck for a change?

Does it matter, stupid? Get moving!

The long ride down, floor after floor after fear of what might be waiting when they opened at the bottom.

But nothing. Just the lobby and startled people. Felix trotted down the steps toward the front door before pausing, suddenly, at the sights out on the street, people milling and cars pulled over and — Oh, shit! This is the side they fell on! It’s on this side!

He turned so abruptly toward the back entrance he almost dropped Cat.

The back entrance was at the end of a long tunnel-like corridor with nothing on either side of it but display windows and his own reflection and he thought about stopping before bursting out. Stopping and sneaking a peak. But he was too scared and too shaken and he might not have the nerve to move again, so when he came to the glass doors he simply bounced them open with his hip and he was out onto the sidewalk and there, parked across the street, was the Blazer.

“You stupid broad!” he cried delightedly and sprinted toward her.

Davette had the engine running and the side door open by the time he got there. The smile on her face was sweet and warm and simply everything.

Then she noticed it was just the two of them.

“What? But where…?” she began before he cut her off.

“This is it, dammit! Hit it! Let’s go!”

And she hesitated, but only for a second. Then she slammed the Blazer into gear and screeched away from the curb and ran the first light, turning right with the one-way street and then right again for the next one before Felix realized they were going back around to the front of the goddamned hotel!

“Uh… uh…” he tried to say. But it was too late. She had already made the turn and the front of the hotel Was there with its growing crowd out in the street.

“Hit it!” he yelled. “Faster! Faster! Don’t slow down!”

She barely glanced at him before obeying, slamming her foot down even harder on the gas and bursting past the pale, opened-mouthed faces and around the cars that had haphazardly stopped short, and then they were past them all.

But not before Felix had a chance to see it.

One body. One bloody crumpled form.

Adam.

But there had been three! He had seen three! What could it want with Jack’s dead body?

What?

Chapter 30

It would have been so simple if the plane for Rome had left the next day.

But there were papers and official documents and things to hassle over and the only thing that saved them was the Vatican being a separate nation, capable of issuing its own passports. Even with that, it was going to be three days of waiting.

Three days waiting and thinking and mourning.

And more thinking.

Cat thought fast. The first day, while they were sitting around the suite playing with their room service food, he suddenly looked up, shyly, at Felix and said, “Thanks, Felix.”

Which meant thanks for saving me? Thanks for coming up to help with Jack? Thanks for not letting me throw myself off the ledge? All of them?

Felix had looked at him and not really known. So he had just shrugged. Nothing more. Because he wasn’t sure, thinking back, if he had managed to do anything right.

So weird.

Every time he thought about what he’d done — going up to that bloody terrace — he got the willies. The hair and the goose pimples went up on his arms and he… got scared!

But then, every time he thought of that little god’s smug smile…

Then he got angry. And the desire to kick some ass was so strong!

But mostly, he was afraid. Deathly afraid.

Because they were still out there. Still wanting them. Still knowing who they were and still hunting them down. He knew this. He could feel this.

And so could the other two. He could see it in their eyes and in their posture and in the way they jumped whenever the elevator bell rang outside the suite’s door.

Felix finally had them moved to the end of the hail after that first night. That helped some. But that didn’t really solve it. They could still be found. Felix could still get to die. Or he could still get to kick ass.

You’re a mess, he thought to himself.

And then there was the matter of Davette. And the showers.

Cat hadn’t said a word all the way from the Adolphus to their hotel. When he had gotten to their suite he had gone straight to the little minibar there in the corner and tried to drink it dry and damn near succeeded. He was all but comatose within the hour and Davette had helped Felix pour him into one of the suite’s two bedrooms.

And after Felix had stood over him a few dark moments, watching him fit and start and twitch in his horrors.

“Sorry about your family, buddy,” Felix whispered at last.

Davette was waiting for him on the couch in the living room. She patted the seat beside her and said, “Tell me.”

Only then did he realize she didn’t actually know what had happened.

Good girl, he thought.

Then he thought, I could never have been that patient.

He sat down beside her on the couch, next to the fresh drink she had made for him, and told her.

It seemed to take such a long time, somehow. Because it was so sad and awful and because he didn’t know how much to tell her about his madness and he didn’t much want to think about it himself.

And because he was suddenly so goddamned tired. He never looked at her once as he spoke.