They were being chased.
This was problematic for Edna, Gretel and Kevin, since Edna’s maximum speed was barely more than her usual waddle, and Gretel doing corners was a hazard to both her companions and the local architecture.
Kevin stood on the landing of the emergency stairs, haranguing his companions.
“Come on, guys!” he wailed. “Security is like, so close behind us!”
“Now dear…” panted Edna. “When you’re… like me… you won’t… be in such a hurry…”
Kevin groaned with impatience. “This is just brilliant. We’re like, being chased by these guys with sticks and wands and shit, and I’m stuck with Mother Teresa and a gourmet troll. Gretel!”
“Yes, Kevin?” rumbled the troll.
“Can you carry Edna?”
“I am not going to be carried!” barked the priestess. “It is simply not dignified!”
Below them, the doors to the staircase slammed back and two men barrelled through. One carried a baton and a radio; the other didn’t, but only because his fingers were in the process of growing into long black claws.
“I’m very sorry,” rumbled Gretel, scooping up Edna and popping her under one arm. “But I do think this is for the best.”
“Stop there!” roared the guard who was still human enough to muster speech. His companion was already dropping to all fours, face breaking out into a snout, ginger-red hair spreading across his flesh; and while he wasn’t quite a fox, being larger and more unrestrained, he nonetheless had the fox-like teeth all sorted, and by now the claws and growl.
“Uh, guys,” Kevin squeaked at the guards as Gretel lumbered past, “I know you are doing your jobs and whatever. But I am like, so totally a master of the night and spawn of darkness, and you are seriously cramping my style.”
“Vampire!” exhorted Gretel from beyond the swinging doors to the next floor.
The man-fox-guard prowled up the stairs, the remnants of his uniform barely clinging to his back, hackles raised, teeth bared. Kevin raised a finger in polite request. “Actually,” he said, “hold that thought.”
To his surprise, both the man and the not-quite-man hesitated. Kevin felt himself puff up a little with pride.
“Vampire!” yelled Gretel again, in a voice loud enough to make the banister hum. “Are you coming?”
The fox-man’s lips curled back. A low growl spread from the base of his belly.
“Tell you what,” quavered Kevin. “I’ll like, spare you my awful vampiric wrath, just this once. But only because I’m feeling merciful and it’d totally ruin my hair.”
The fox-man pounced. Kevin gave a shrill cry and ran, slamming through the double doors to the adjoining office. Claws raked the air behind him. Gretel was waiting with a desk manoeuvred and ready. “Get rid of them get rid of them get rid of them!” shrieked the vampire as he ran.
Calmly Gretel waited for the doors to slam back behind Kevin, then pushed the desk across, jamming them shut. There was a scratching of claws and scrabbling of hands from the other side, but the doors rattled against the heavy desk in vain.
“Oh dear,” quavered Edna, propped up in a swivel chair to catch her breath. “Do you think they’re going to be terribly upset?”
“Darling, I think we’re a little past that.”
The scratching at the door abruptly stopped. There was a shuffling of feet and a crackle of radio. Then silence. A deep, expectant silence.
“Uh…” murmured Kevin.
The doors blew in off their hinges, taking the big desk with them down the central gangway. Biros, papers and computer fragments spilled across the room as they flew by. Through the smoking wreck of the doorway stepped the fox-man and his companion. And now there were marks visible on the upright guard’s skin, runic sigils burning–the line through the circle, the zigzag scar of the railway, the raw red stop sign and the blue and white police wards–and carved into his flesh. Seeing the trio, the man with burning skin grinned and drew his hands back, power flickering between his fingertips, lips moving silently around a new spell.
Gretel lurched towards him, swinging a great fist back. The fox, its body as long as a man and its forelegs still patchy with human skin, leapt on her, fangs bared. Fox and troll crashed down together as heavily as a melting cliff of ice; blood and fur mixed as they battered each other.
The rune-wearer turned, seeking a target, and saw Edna cowering behind a pillar. He flung out his hands towards her, and their palms issued a blast of rippling, scalding air flecked with crimson. Edna yelped and dived for the floor, the back of her hair curling and blackening. Behind her the wall turned dark and sticky under a layer of melting chemical goo. The old priestess crawled over the wreckage of a nearby table, looking for safety, and the rune-wearer advanced, drawing more power out of the signs in his skin. Another blast of airborne force, this one black and garnished with diesel fumes and the roar of a bus. It smashed the desk behind which Edna was hunched, sending its remnants into a bookcase above her. Files and folders tumbled all around the priestess.
Grappling on the floor with Gretel, the fox-man was beginning to have the worst of it. His claws had torn her flesh, leaving vivid grey scars through which viscous yellow-brown blood seeped like engine oil, but no matter how much he bit and scratched, there was simply too much of Gretel between him and any vital internal organs. With a surge of silent energy, the troll gave a heave and rolled, slamming the fox-man against the floor beneath her. Like a bear smothering her prey, she flattened herself on top of him, wrapping one giant hand over his head and knocking it back hard onto the floor. Teeth tore at Gretel’s palm, and brown blood began to roll and mat in the spines of the troll’s skin, but she slammed down again and again until, with an impotent shriek of fury, the fox grew still beneath her.
Edna crawled out from beneath the mess of files and papers. The rune-wearer was not three paces away, pulling his hands apart for another spell. Dizzy and bewildered, she sat with ears ringing and hair still smoking, a lemming on the cliff top, as his hands moved with inexorable, ritual slowness, drawing up power.
Something moved behind him.
It was dark, fast and very nearly silent.
It said, “Oh God, I am so going to regret this,” and an instant later seemed to fold itself round the man.
His face changed.
A look of surprise flashed briefly into pain, before his features crumpled, along with the rest of him. His head rolled back, his jaw dropped. A line of blood dribbled down his neck and began to seep into his clothes. His eyes drifted shut. A second later the darkness unfolded from around him, and he slid silently to the floor.
Kevin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then stared in horror at the streak of blood across his bone-white skin.
“Oh. My. God,” he whispered. “Oh my God!”
He fumbled in his sports bag, throwing out handfuls of latex gloves, sterile wipes and plasters. Finally he hoisted aloft a great bottle of blue mouthwash, with which he set to rinsing his mouth like he’d swallowed cyanide.
“Where’s my dental floss?” he wailed. “I don’t feel well.”
“Kevin, dear? Are you… quite all right?” Edna asked, as she picked her way past the bloodied body of the guard.
“I didn’t do a medical history! Pass me that!”
A finger gestured imperiously at a syringe in a clean plastic package which had fallen from Kevin’s bag. Edna handed it over, and with practised professionalism Kevin ripped it from its package, bent down over the unconscious guard, rolled up his sleeve, slapped the soft skin in the crook of the man’s arm and pushed in the needle.
“I need a sample,” he explained. “For testing!”
“Testing for what?”
“Typhus!”
“Typhus?” echoed Edna. “I’m not sure that’s very common any more, dear.”
“Chlamydia!”
“Well, yes, I do hear that rates are on the rise.”
Kevin withdrew the needle and held it up to the feeble light. “Do you think he’s got the right antigens?” he asked. “Or if there’s any ice in this office?”
“May I have one of your bandages, please?” asked Gretel quietly.
“Oh no, you poor dear!” cried Edna at the brown blood seeping from a dozen cuts across Gretel’s great surface. “Kevin!”
“Help yourself,” mumbled the vampire, drawing back hastily as the troll bent down to rifle the bag. A fat wad of cotton was pulled out and Gretel wrapped it round her bloody fist.
To Edna’s offer of a safety pin she politely replied, “Thank you, but I think I will be all right.”
Kevin was swaying, his face even greyer than usual. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I’m not sure I will be.”
He removed the last of the blood from his hand and mouth with a sterile wipe, then dropped all his medical detritus into a yellow plastic bag marked BIOHAZARD.
Looking up, he added, “Someone said something about a plan?”