screamed as they were severed as neatly as if I’d used a cutter. Wires erupted into clouds of popping sparks.
And something entirely inhuman let out a piercing shriek of pain, pain driven by unnaturally powerful lungs into a scream that was louder than gunshots.
I screamed in answer, in challenge, in defiance, and pelted forward. The runes on my blasting rod shone with white-hot fire, throwing brilliant silver-white light out ahead of me into the darkened building as I ran.
As I rounded the corner a shape was already in motion, coming toward me. My shield bracelet was ready. I lifted my left hand, fingers contorted into a gesture that had nothing to do with magic but that was generally considered insulting. My will poured into the charm bracelet hung with multiple tiny shields, and in an instant my power spread from there into a quarter-dome shape of pure, invisible force in front of me. The black shape of the vampire hit the shield, sending up concentric circles of blue light and white sparks, and then rebounded from it.
I dropped the shield almost before he was done rebounding, leveled the blasting rod with a flick of my wrist, and ripped the vampire in half with a word and a beam of silver fire. The pieces flew off in different directions, still kicking and thrashing hideously.
In the middle of the hallway was a second bisected vampire, which I’d apparently hit when firing blindly through the wall. It was also dying messily. Because I’ve seen too many bad horror movies and know the rules for surviving them, the instant I’d made sure the hallway was empty of more threats, I swung the rod up to point above me.
A vampire clung to the ceiling not twenty feet away. People have this image of vampires as flawless, beautiful gods of dark sex and temptation. And, while the Red Court can create a kind of outer human shell called a flesh mask, and while that mask was generally lovely, there was something very different underneath—a true, hideous, unrepentant monster, like the one looking down at me.
It was maybe six feet tall when standing, though its arms were scrawny and long enough to drag the backs of its claw-tipped hands along the ground. Its skin was rubbery and black, spotted here and there with unhealthy-looking bits of pink, and its belly hung down in flabby grotesquerie. It was bandy-legged and hunchbacked, and its face was somewhere between that of a vampire bat and something from H. R. Giger’s hallucinations.
It saw me round the corner, and its goggling black eyes seemed to get even larger. It let out a scream of . . .
Terror.
It screamed in fear.
The vampire flung itself away from me even as I unleashed a third blast, bounding away down the hall, flinging itself from the ceiling to the wall to the floor to the wall and back again, wildly dodging the stream of ruinous energy I sent after it.
“That’s right!” I heard myself scream. “You’d better run, pretty boy!” It vanished around the next corner and I shouted in incoherent rage, kicked the still-twitching head of one of the downed vampires with the tip of my steel-toed work boots, and rushed after it in pursuit, cursing up a storm.
The entire business had taken, at most, six or seven seconds.
After that, things got a little complicated.
I’d started half a dozen small fires with the blasts, and before I’d gone another half a dozen steps the fire alarms twittered shrilly. Sprinkler systems went off all around me. And at the same moment, gunfire erupted from somewhere ahead of me. None of that was good.
The alarms meant that the authorities would be on the way—and except for the smartest guys in CPD’s Special Investigations, they just weren’t ready to deal with a vampire. They’d be little more than victims and potential hostages to the supernatural predators.
The falling water wasn’t good, either. Running water grounds magical energies, and while it wouldn’t shut me down completely, it would make everything harder to do, like running through soft sand or over wet clay. And the gunshots weren’t good because a pair of bullets came through the wall not six feet away, and one of them tugged hard at the hem of my jeans over my left ankle.
“Ack!” I said.
Fearless master of the witty dialogue, that’s me.
I twisted my left wrist across the front of my body, brought my shield up again. A couple of bullets that probably wouldn’t have hit me