Chapter 28

THE OTHER BABY vamps also looked to see where the shrieking came from, and that was the opening I needed. I looked over my shoulder at Sabrina. “As soon as there’s any kind of break in the action, start hauling Fitzpatrick back the way we came.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Sabrina replied.

“You are, or Sean is going to die. I can protect you, or I can protect him. I can’t do both, and I can’t carry both of you back to the surface. It would slow me down too much, and they’d swarm me. I can take out enough of them so you’ll be able to get away, but only if you do this my way.”

“Yeah, like that line has ever worked on me.” I felt her grab my right ankle and unwrap the Ruger pistol strapped there. The LCP had six in the magazine and one in the chamber, with a spare magazine in the holster. “I’ve got thirteen chances to take them down. This would be a good time to tell me this thing’s loaded with those vamp-killer rounds, too.”

“Sorry about that,” I said with a shake of my head. The LCP uses a .380 round, not the 9mm my Glock fires, and I didn’t get ammunition made in both calibers. Looking back on it, probably not my best decision. After all, my backup gun was most likely to be drawn in situations just like this—when the shit was all over the oscillator.

“Then I just better not miss,” Sabrina said, standing up behind me. The half-dozen vamps before us looked torn between attacking us and feasting on Sean, who had moved himself all the way over to the far wall and now sat with my sword in his left hand, his pistol in his right, and his back pressed to the tunnel wall.

“Yeah, better not,” I said. “Let’s go kill some shit.” I snatched the stake from the left side of my belt, drew my KA-BAR from its sheath on my right hip, and sprang into action.

Newborn vampires are a lot like baby horses, or teenaged humans. They have these new bodies, and they don’t really know how they fit together. So they’re a little clumsy. Even with six of them, I didn’t feel outnumbered. Especially with the backup I had. I ran straight at two vampires on the far right end of their clump, and one was down with a hole in his chest before it even registered what was happening. He died looking like the guest of honor at a surprise party. Surprise! You’re dead.

The other one saw what was coming, but she wasn’t coordinated enough to stop me. I stabbed low at her gut, but she blocked that. Which was exactly what I planned. While her hands were wrapped around my right wrist, I jerked the stake free of the vamp’s chest to her left and jabbed it into her temple.

I heard the flat crack of the Ruger and turned to see a female vampire drop to her knees in front of Sabrina, a third eye opening up in the center of her forehead. Sabrina fired twice more, dropping a college-age male vamp to her right, then she pulled a silver stake of her own out of her jacket and put it through the eye of each vamp in turn.

I turned to the pair still standing between us and said, “You want fast, or slow?”

One of them, a young woman in the black pants and white shirt of every mid-class restaurant ever, sprang at me with her hands outstretched. “Fast it is, then,” I said, holding my stake up for her to run onto. She obliged, and I shoved her corpse off to land with a thud on the dusty floor.

The other vampire, this one even younger in death, looked like a grubby teenager turned into an even grubbier vampire. Her long hair was matted, maybe blonde, what I could see of it under the hoodie she wore. She reminded me of Rabbit, and remembering his death, I got pissed all over again. She took one look at the girl on the ground in front of me, then turned to sprint in the opposite direction, deeper into the tunnels.

“Shit,” I muttered.

“Worry about her later,” Sabrina said. “We have other problems.” She wasn’t kidding, either. Sean had three vamps down across the station, but they were surrounding him, feinting in at him from all directions. He had maybe ten seconds before one got past his guard. Then one of the vamps would strip Excalibur away from him, and he’d be toast.

Good thing I didn’t need ten seconds to do what I had to do. I ran half the distance to him, then dove the last half. I crashed into the mass of newborn vampires with knife and stake flashing. I took a good eight of them to the ground with my first charge, then sprang to my feet to start the scrap in earnest. I wasn’t trying to kill them, just get enough breathing room for Sabrina and Sean to get away. I could kill the vamps later.

Well, I needed to kill some of them. So I did. I gave myself over to the fury that coursed through me when I looked into the eyes of these kids. And some of them were kids. Out of the twenty or more baby vamps in front of me, at least a dozen were high-school age. Most of them were girls, the kind of kids who should have been worrying about football games, boys, or crap like that, not trying to drink human blood in an abandoned subway project. But here they were, the majority of them sporting the mismatched clothes and tattered shoes that marked them as living on the street or bouncing from shelter to shelter, and every one of them red-eyed and starved for blood.

My knife and stake flashed silver in the low light, and wherever my arms swung, vampires fell. I cut through them like a scythe, my arms and mind fused into a dark dance of true-death. This was different from when I called on the Soul of the City to strengthen me in a fight; this was the Master’s Strength and Speed infusing my limbs, making me more powerful than I’d ever dreamed and capable of meting out justice in the blink of an eye.

I hated every second of it. I felt every chest puncture beneath the tip of my stake, felt every spine part at the slash of the heavy silvered blade in my right hand, felt the muscle pulling at my weapons as I withdrew them through now-dead flesh. I heard the thuds as bodies landed around and behind me, but I didn’t slow down. I couldn’t. If I hesitated, Sean was dead. If I stopped even for a second, either Fitzpatrick or Sabrina would fall victim to the hunger surrounding them, and I couldn’t let that happen.

So I didn’t. I didn’t hesitate, I didn’t slow down, I just kept on stabbing and cutting and killing until the floor under my feet was slick with blood and the stench of copper was so thick in the air you could taste it. I fought until there was nothing in front of me to kill, and when I stopped, I stood alone in a circle of dead vampires that resembled nothing so much as a terrorist attack at a high-school dance.

I looked back at Fitzpatrick, who sat staring at me with wide eyes. Streaks of blood covered his face and chest, some of it his but mostly spatter cast off from my blade on the backswing. “You okay?” I asked, my voice sounding raspy and harsh to my own ears.

“Y-yeah. I think I’m almost all healed up.” He stood up and held out Excalibur to me. “Thanks. For the sword, and the save.”

“Comes with the gig. Things like this can’t happen. When they do, someone has to put them down. That’s what I do. That’s why I’m the Master of the City.” As I said it, something fell into place inside my head. This was what I was supposed to do. Not the whole mafia don bullshit that I picked up from Tiram. Not dealing with petty criminals and helping them escape prosecution. That was what this job had turned into, but not what it was meant to be. This, dealing with threats to the city, both the supernatural and the mundane citizens, this was why I was here.

I wiped my KA-BAR and my stake on my ruined jeans and tucked them into my belt. Then I took Excalibur from Sean and slid the legendary blade into its sheath. I felt its healing energy course through me, mending the dozens of tiny cuts and bruises I picked up in the fight. I looked over at Sabrina, who was methodically staking any vampires that remained intact.

“You okay?” I called to her.

“I’m good. Is it okay if you never do that again?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You hulked out, babe.” She shrugged. “I don’t have any other good way to describe it, but your eyes went full black, and I’d swear that you grew claws. You looked, I don’t know, bigger somehow . . .”

“And nothing could get near you. Those vampires didn’t stand a chance. If they got within arms reach, they were dead. Even the ones that tried to turn and run, most of them were toast,” Sean agreed.

“What do you mean, most of them?” I asked. “Did some of them get away?”

“Yeah,” Sabrina replied. “Probably seven or eight total.”

I let out a long sigh. “Son of a bitch. Did they go deeper into the tunnels, or back toward the surface?”

“Toward the surface,” Sean said.

Another sigh. Someday I’d catch a break. Apparently this would not be that day. “Of course. What time is it? Can I dare hope that they’ll just run out into the sunlight and burst into flames?”

“Six-thirty,” Sabrina said, walking over to us.

“So almost full dark, given the time of year. Naturally. All right, let’s go.” I said. I held out a hand to Sabrina. “Give me back my gun and help Sean walk. We need to get him to the hospital for a transfusion.”

“I’m good,” Fitzpatrick protested.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, and I’m not letting you just carry around my magical sword to keep you on your feet. You’re going to the hospital if I have to mojo you into it.”

He started to protest again, but wobbled on his feet and gave up. Sabrina retrieved her service weapon from where she’d thrown it, handed me back my pistol, and we started the trek back to the surface. I took point, since I didn’t need a light, but we made it back to Rabbit’s body without incident.

I knelt by the small Morlock once more. “Sorry I wasn’t faster, buddy. I promise, I’ll avenge you, and I’ll make sure somebody takes care of your people. You were a good leader. Shitty nickname, but a good leader.”

I stood up and we started back to the surface. We’d barely gotten back into the normal sewer section of the tunnels when my phone vibrated. I froze, pulling the black rectangle out of my pocket and swiping a finger across the screen.

“Shit,” I said as I read the text from Greg.

“You just get a really bad text?” Sabrina asked, and I turned to see her face illuminated in the glow of her phone.

“Yeah, you?”

“Yep.” She held the phone up and I stepped back to where she and Fitzpatrick stood. The message on her screen came from Lieutenant McDaniel, but it matched the information Greg sent me.

“Vampire attack at the baseball stadium. Dozens injured. Panic downtown. Need help NOW,” said the screen.

I looked at Sabrina and Sean, covered in blood and beaten half to death. “Well,” I said, “I guess we know where to find the runaways.”