Lauren screeched with anger as she bolted towards him again. This time Dante was armed. He threw one of the side mirrors directly into her face, mid-stride. The blow broke her nose and sent blood streaming across her face, yet it only halted her for a second. She leaped on top of him and began unloading with both fists. Dante took several hits before lunging skyward with her in his arms and dropped her head first onto the wreckage of the car. His feet had only hit the ground when Lauren’s heel cracked him in the jaw. He fell to one knee.
“I thought you were bad,” Lauren screamed as she vaulted a kick that connected to Dante’s head, throwing it backward. His fangs tore into the side of his mouth, searing the gap open wider. “You’re nothing compared to me!”
Another kick connected that Dante did not even see coming. He couldn’t take much more of this.
She aimed another kick but this he saw. He snatched her foot out of the air and with a wrenching twist, her fibula snapped. Lauren howled in agony and fell, holding her leg. Dante tried to stand but stumbled, the blows to his head were harder than he’d realised.
He rose again and then it was his turn to scream in pain. Fucking newborns. Lauren had healed incredibly quickly, rising to dig a large piece of remnant bonnet into his back.
Dante launched the back of his head into her forehead and struck with two quick elbows. She staggered back allowing him to remove the shard. Dante unleashed a vicious back fist that snapped her head around, yet she retaliated with a slap of her own, shredding Dante’s cheek with her nails and fragments of shattered glass still in her hand.
Dante coughed and spat blood, trying to rise when Lauren’s vice like grip latched around his throat, pinning his back to the wall. Dante looked at Lauren, no mercy in her eyes, only cold fury.
The searchlights on the ground found them, Dante heard the cries and shouts from the people below as Lauren hung him over the side.
“Your public wants you, darling,” Lauren said.
Dante wrapped both of his legs around her head. “They want us both.”
With that, he used all of his weight to flip the both of them off the roof. They tumbled three storeys to the alleyway beside T with nothing heard but more cries and shouts from the crowd and Alex still on the roof, watching them fall.
Dante felt an explosion in his shoulder as he hit the pavement, staying in the same spot unlike Lauren who slammed onto a closed industrial garbage bin. Dante had barely opened his eyes when Lauren began to stir.
Both rose gingerly and at the same time but it was Lauren who started her attack. Rushing at him, slinging heavily with one fist after the other, screaming with the exertion of each move. Dante ducked the swing and the following one. The next he flung away with his one good arm. Finally, she was beginning to slow down.
“Fight back!” Lauren screamed.
She lunged at him but he dodged, shoving her away.
“I know what you want,” Dante said, “But I’m not going to give it to you.”
“Come on…you—” she bellowed.
She lashed out with a slap that carried minimal force. Dante let her, knowing she was faltering.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” he said softly.
“Fuck you!” she yelled through the beginning of tears. “I’m better than I ever was! I’m immortal.” She came at him again, groaning with savage frustration. She lashed out at him but it was strikes without power, moves without thought. She wasn’t screaming anymore, she was rambling, and sobbing his name. “Please, Dante…” she begged with her eyes and her words, grasping his torn shirt as if it were her salvation, “I can’t live like this… Please…”
Dante grasped her face with both of his bloody hands, looking into her eyes.
“This is your nightmare. I can’t wake you up, no one can. Death will not bring you peace. You have lost everything you loved and that loved you. You must live with the things you have done for eternity, like I must. But if you need a friend, I will be there.”
She slumped to her knees and buried her head against his thigh, not letting him go, crying uncontrollably. Dante stroked her blood and sweat-saturated hair, consoling her.
The crowd around them burst into applause and shouts of amazement.
“Wow!”
“No wires.”
“I know…how’d they do that?”
“I didn’t know they were putting on a stunt show this year.”
*
Dante sat in his office as Lauren used his personal shower to clean up. Michelle and Alex had travelled with Matt to the hospital. The latest word was that he had not yet regained consciousness and his diagnosis was not promising. Dante thought about the filthy looks Michelle and Alex had given him as Matt was loaded into the ambulance. He knew Alex had more reason to be angry, since she’d believed he was dead. Michelle on the other hand, weary from the enormous amount of blood she had given him when he’d awoken a few hours before, had known he wasn’t dead, but didn’t like the result from tonight’s fight.
He tried to work out his explanation, fairly confident they would understand his reasoning. Someone must have told Matt where to be, what to look for, and yet purposely slipped him the wrong information on how to kill a vampire. Dougie had prevented Julian from taking his body. But where would he have taken it?
There was more going on here and Dante had chosen to remain hidden, watching and waiting to see if the answers would present themselves. Michelle had seen Lauren
