Chapter 13

Gavin’s mind was focused, razor-sharp. The bastards moved fast. The fire alarm still blared overhead. The crash of breaking glass sang from not far away. The Rosarium goons were probably fanning out to surround them from other sides of this maze of hallways and glass.

A trio of gunshots galloped down the hall. Bullets tore strips of plaster and paint from the walls. Gavin clutched his pistol tightly. He felt his blood roiling, and he pushed his mind out toward the assailants. One body full of blood responded to his mental touch, but the footsteps suggested there were two coming.

Gavin was transported back to the night of Operation Pyrite. Only a few weeks prior, he, Walter, and Karmen had been pinned down in an alley just like this against a similarly sized group of roaches. Against all odds, they’d stood their ground and won, a shocking victory even now. Their toll had been Karmen’s life. A dreadful premonition stirred Gavin’s stomach; this time, would Lena be the price of survival? He wouldn’t let himself think about it; the very suggestion of that thought drove him to the edge of madness.

His lungs held a breath. Resolve flaring, he swung out from cover. Two black jackets approached with devilish purpose. He picked the one whose blood he couldn’t feel and squeezed the trigger twice. The bullets struck his target in her shoulder and arm. With a shriek, the woman went off-balance and crashed against the wall.

The other one—a man—adjusted his gun’s sights in response. Gavin rolled back behind cover just in time. Splinters burst from the corner. The taste of scorched wood hung in the air. His shaking muscles stilled, clenched tight, statuesque, stonework.

“Nice shot.” Opposite his position, Lena flipped a knife in her hand and stood up calmly. Her eyes were closed as if in meditation, her hands tight fists. In a flash, her eyes shot open, and Gavin felt a wave of hemomancy wash over him.

The woman Gavin had shot contorted with a horrified cry. The sound was so horrible it was impossible not to look. From the edge of cover, he watched as the woman’s bullet wounds exploded into bladed crimson streams that plunged into the other gunman’s chest and arms, piercing him through like a hail of arrows from Roman archers. The man’s anguished cry joined the cacophony as the blood shards tore the gun from his hands.

Lena moved, fluidly and angelically. With an overhand swipe of her arm, she propelled the silver glint of a knife into flesh. The impact threw the man from his feet, and he crumpled into the expanding pool of blood staining the carpet. He struggled ineffectually as the left side of Lena’s body tensed and rolled. His wounds issued forth an unimpeded flow, and a few moments later he stopped struggling. Flash exsanguination had claimed yet another hemo.

Gavin shook his head in disbelief. “You’re just fucking showing off now. Why can’t you use your gun like a normal person?”

Lena slipped down the hall. “This is embarrassing, but I can’t quite get used to shooting. The knife has always felt more reliable to me.” She planted the heel of her boot on the shot woman’s neck. Fractured hemocrysts still grew from the bullet wounds in her arm and shoulder. Her bleeding was now voluminous, and her struggling was weak and pathetic. Gavin could feel a psychic disturbance between the woman and Lena. It seemed the roach was trying desperately to staunch the flow by forming more hemocrysts, while Lena was keeping the liquid flowing. The flow won, and soon a second corpse encrusted the hall.

“Jesus,” Gavin muttered, his stomach racked by pangs of remorse. Hemomancy was a macabre dance made far more gruesome by Lena’s frightful skill in it. As so often he did, he wondered what had propelled the woman to such terrifying heights.

After confirming the woman’s death, Lena gave Gavin a chilling look. “More coming,” she said. “On either side.” Her eyes flicked to the glass offices lining the intersections on either side of them. “Left or right. Which do you want?”

Gavin was about to object to splitting, but the words stuttered to a premature halt. Her thinking was a step ahead of his; there were still four roaches, including the ace. If they tried to stick together and fight as one, they were likely to lose in a full-on battle. If they split up, they could take the roaches by surprise and thin their numbers out before the main event began.

Gavin’s blood was running hot again. There was no hiding. He sent his own mind outward and was lucky to feel one body resonate in reply. “Left,” he said. He wasn’t going to let Lena outshine him. He may have only been a knight, but a knight had his pride. He released the clip from his handgun and pulled another from his concealed magazine holster.

“Right’s mine, then. Good luck,” Lena said as she made for the indicated hall.

“You too.” He almost wished he hadn’t said it; she didn’t need his luck, after all. She was Lena Lockwood, the fucking Queen of Swords.

Shouts rang from the other side of the department. Then came the piercing report of gunshots mixed with shattering glass mere feet away. Gavin threw himself into a roll out of reflex and came up behind a low wood partition ringing the block of glass conference rooms. When he looked up again, Lena was already gone.

He bit down and tried to clear his mind. He again stretched his hemomancy outward, trying to locate his target. Somewhere on the other side of the next office, he found a vibrating wellspring of blood. His target was close, but a shivering through his own veins told him he’d been discovered as well. Their blood types were thus completely compatible; that meant he was facing someone who, like him, was A-positive. He sidled out of his crouch and eased himself to his feet, gun at the ready. The meeting area, overflowing with sky-blue furniture, looked like a vacant fish tank. He focused on breathing calmly.

A staccato hail of shots came from the other side. Windows exploded in chunks around him, and he threw himself prone again. His palm found a jagged shard among the crumbled safety glass as he scrambled back into a crouch. Skin ripped, and a lance of pain shot from his wrist to his elbow. Steadying himself, he stood again. And there he saw it, thirty feet away, through the wreckage. A shadow, attention on the wrong part of the wall. Gavin squeezed the trigger twice. Both shots missed. Amid another chorus of bursting windows, Gavin heard a bullet from his target go wild.

Gavin dropped back down behind cover. Then his attention was absorbed into the growing burn in his palm. The blood was moving, churning in response to the unseen hemomancer’s power. His fingers wound into a tight fist, and he put his mind to staunching the flow before it became a deadly fountain, the likes of which had doomed the roaches in the hall. For a few moments, two minds battled over the flow.

It was here, in the dueling dance of thoughts whipping at a well of vitality, that hemomancy was at its most brutal. It was here that it was rawest, most primal. Cast away the bullets, the steel, the technology, and this fight could have been waged nine hundred years ago. A shadow whose finger slipped on the blade; a noble of vermilion visage. Their duel was waged in a microcosm of all the strife and violence hemomancers had ever known.

Gavin allowed his control to lapse.

A great stream of blood erupted from his slashed palm, spraying toward the ceiling.

But his mind was sharper than his foe’s. His power rippled suddenly through the stream, and a pulse of force redirected the blood’s velocity. He sent it raining down in a hail of flash-formed hemocrysts. He heard the song of glass breaking and wood being punctured. He stopped the bleeding with his mind and leapt back to his feet. Between the walls of shattered glass, where two-dozen red crystals now pin-cushioned the carpet in the hall, he found his foe in the midst of a duck-and-cover maneuver. Gavin held his breath, raised his gun, and fired. The bullet struck the man in the leg, and a pained howl stabbed at Gavin’s ears. The man’s convulsions sent his gun tumbling across the carpet.

Gavin approached him, crushing tempered glass underfoot as he stepped through a ruined meeting room and out the other side. The man on the ground, clutching his leg, reached futilely for the gun that had stopped just out of his reach. Could he extract some information from the man? Or would it be best to put him out of his misery?

The roach decided for him. A spiral storm of blood erupted from his leg wound and slithered through the air toward Gavin. Gavin sidestepped, narrowly avoiding a spike of blood, and aligned another shot. Three more bullet holes soon traced the curve of the man’s back, and his struggling became a quiet, wilting resistance against the encroaching blackness of death.

Breath came hot and fast. The sound of gunfire blaring across the office had gone quiet with his own victory, and that meant that, for weal or for woe, Lena must have been finished with her own fight. Twinkling glass whispered as he glided deeper into the network of offices, toward where he thought the sounds of battle had last rung. He had to hurry. It was not impossible that Lena had gotten pinned down, or perhaps even worse. But he would not entertain such thoughts. He had to hurry.

The window-walls on either side gave way to opaque drywall as he moved into a corridor bisecting the department. A quick turn to the right would put him on a course for where Lena had gone off to battle. But as he rounded the corner and the passage opened ahead of him, Gavin stopped dead.

A figure was approaching from the far end of the hall, one with an olive complexion and dark, beady eyes. A venomous smile pried his thin lips apart, exposing a glaringly bright set of perfect teeth. Despite the zen of battle, a shiver of terror massaged Gavin’s arms to putty. Marco Ventura, the motherfucking Italian, had him in his sights.