I screamed and jerked back as he came at me, moving with a boneless grace, his fingers curled into grasping claws. My finger tightened on the trigger and he twisted to one side, hissing a spitting mixture of pain and epithets as he fell just short of me when I pressed my back flat up against the door. The bullet barely slowed him down, since he gathered his feet up under him and leapt up almost as soon as he’d fallen, black blood oozing sluggishly out of the wound in his shoulder.
I seemed to have acquired a sixth sense, knowing exactly what he was going to do before he did it. As he sprang forward again, I ducked, twisting my body around to get in another shot to his torso as he came at me. There was little room to maneuver, and he was driving me back from the only exit, but I wasn’t so interested in that as in avoiding having him sink his fangs into me or crush my arm again.
His eyes had shifted to glowing red pools of hot hatred, his fangs nearly cutting into his lower lip as he came at me. There was no room for thought as he reached grasping fingers for my wrist, capturing the one that held the gun and forcing the third shot to go wild. I could hear shouts and pounding on the door as we fought, but they were distant, somewhere outside myself. As he crashed into me, I fell back, digging a knee into his stomach and forcing him to flip over my head and land painfully on his back. Whoa. Where’d I learn to do that?
His grip loosened as he hit the floor, and the two of us twisted and shifted like snakes, coming back to our feet in seconds and warily facing off just a few feet apart.
As I reached for the other gun, he came silently forward once again, lips peeling back from his fangs as he slid one arm around my waist in mockery of a lover’s touch. The other came up to grab my wrist again, forcing my arm back and to the side as he drove his fangs against my neck, trying to bite through the material.
I could feel the pressure of the bite, but the fangs never penetrated. I’d probably have one heck of a weird-looking bruise at the crook of my neck later on. Enraged, he scraped his fangs over the material as he kept trying and failing to pierce the shirt, which I was more than thankful for right at that moment. His grip on my wrist was painfully tight, but my other arm was still free. I slid my free hand up and under his jaw and shoved, hoping to at least get him off my shoulder.
The result was a little more than either of us were expecting. His jaw audibly snapped shut and he staggered back unsteadily, like I’d given him one mother of an uppercut. His fingers at my back slipped and slid against the slick material of my shirt and finally lost their grip entirely. He had wrapped the fingers of his other hand entirely around my small wrist, and didn’t let go, almost jerking me off my feet as he pulled back.
Unthinking, quick as a whip, I closed the newfound distance between us with a stake in my free hand, just barely piercing his chest right above where I somehow knew, just knew, a blackened husk of a heart rested. He went very still, the hatred frothing behind those black eyes turning into an abrupt kind of panic and fear. I was willing to bet it had been a very, very long time, if ever, since he’d had to worry about an untimely end to his existence. He hadn’t had a doubt in his mind when he attacked that he would win. I knew for a certainty that it was the “real” Royce looking so afraid. After all, what did the holder of the focus have to worry about other than losing a valuable pawn? If not for the fact that I knew he had been trying to kill me a few seconds ago, I might have felt sorry for him right at that moment.
“Look,” I said quietly, realizing dimly and with a vague sense of horror that there was a part of me that wanted to push that stake home, wanted to end his existence, and that I had to put effort into not destroying him then and there. “I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want to fight you. I just want to get out of here. So you’re going to back the fuck up, give me some space, and let me walk. Capeesh?”
He nodded, and I watched in morbid fascination as something twisted and swam behind his eyes even as his fingers slowly released their vise grip on my wrist. Though I didn’t really want to show weakness in front of him just then, as soon as he let go, I shook my wrist out and grimaced just a little. Man, he had a tight grip.
Fortunately, I had never lost my hold on the gun, so once I’d worked a little circulation back into my wrist, I lifted the weapon until it was aimed square at his nose. Next I tucked the stake that had magically found its way into my hand back into its sheath as I slowly backed toward the door again. He stayed right where he was, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, but otherwise unmoving. It looked like the holder of the focus was trying to goad him into doing something stupid, and he was gamely fighting against it. That, and, oddly, the blood that had been trickling out of the bullet holes in his shoulder and stomach had ceased flowing. Creepy.
Once I put my hand on the door handle, he spoke, voice low and uneven, like his control was wavering. “La Petite Boisson tomorrow night. Bring the mage.”
His eyes were closed, his expression contorting like he was in pain. When his eyes opened again, that feral glitter had come back to them, and he took a step toward me. His voice was once again that sickeningly sweet lull, promising all sorts of things that I really, really didn’t want anything to do with. “When I get my hands on you, you will beg to die. But I won’t let you. I am going to drag out your death for days, weeks, years. You could only wish you had gone the easy route and given yourself over to Royce.”
“That’s nice. Here’s how it’s actually going to play out,” I said with far more brashness than I felt. My insides felt like they’d turned to iced jelly, but I kept talking smooth and bored like I was going over my grocery list instead of threatening the obviously psychotic holder of the focus. “When I find you, and you stop hiding behind your big bad vampire flunky”—Wow, did I really just call Royce a flunky?—“I am going to kick your sorry, cowardly ass from here to the Mississippi. And trust me, I will find you.”
He snarled and took another threatening step, so I shot him in the knee. He fell, howling and cradling his injured leg, and I stared in stupid shock. I hadn’t even thought about pulling the trigger, hadn’t even really tried to take aim. The laser sight wasn’t on. How could I have managed to hit him? I’m not that good a shot.
Yet somehow I’d just felled him with no real effort, knowing instinctively that it would take him too long to recover from the knee injury for him to follow me. Go in for the kill. He’s easy prey now, a soft voice whispered in the back of my mind. He can’t run or fight back as well wounded like that. All it will take is one quick thrust and it will all be over. Chilled, I shook my head violently to stop the thoughts prodding at me, holstered the gun, and yanked the door open.
The people who had been gathered outside the door backed up immediately, all of them looking frightened and shocked. I threw one last, pitying look over my shoulder to the vampire who was glaring at me with someone else’s hatred in his eyes. There was some part of me that was hating back, not Royce, but the one who was making him lash out against me. Sure, he was a manipulative bastard, probably worthy of some loathing, too, but I knew what it was like being under someone else’s thumb. It couldn’t have been easy for someone who was so used to being in control to be subjected to something like the hold of the focus. He was suffering from that indignity a lot more than I was just now.
He was a vampire, but he had also been human at one time. While he’d been a manipulative asshole in the short time I’d known him, he hadn’t done anything to physically harm me exactly, only use me. The holder was something else. Whoever it was seemed out for blood. Royce was smart enough to have let me go once he knew the papers had been doctored; it was the holder forcing him into acting like such an unconscionable, unreasoning shithead.
That made it much easier to make my next decision.
“I’ll save you,” I promised before turning on a booted heel and rushing past the people and through the offices, faster than I’d ever run in my life. The cubicles and doorways were a blur, and once out the door, I barely paused in my rush to the gleaming exit sign down the hallway. I’d take the stairs and meet Arnold and Sara outside so we could make a quick getaway.
But who will save you? asked that mocking voice in the back of my mind.