"Itold you thattonight I'd had e-fucking-nuff!" Carlos yelled, and then sent his vehicleforward, standing on the seats and riding it like a surfboard up the side of the building in a crazed zigzag pattern, heading for Vlad. Plate-glass windows exploded under the screeching tires; demons lifted their heads from their victims and temporarily stopped feeding. Carlos threw his head back and released another Neteru battle cry, but this time as a blinding white-light charge left the tip of the blade he held in his right hand, a pure black charge of dark power tore from his left hand.
"They used to callme the Chairman, bitch!" Carlos shouted, sending alternating black and white pulse mortars at Vlad, whose shields wouldn't hold against the onslaught.
In a rare display of uncertainty, Vlad glanced around at his thinned troops and called them to safety.
"Retreat!"
But no sooner than the word had left Vlad's fanged mouth, Carlos sent a combined black-and-white charge to blanket the ground around them for a mile.
"If you're gonna go to Hell tonight, then let's go together, motherfucker!"
Vlad leapt toward his crippled stallion, which had not yet regenerated from the Mustang collision. A white-light charge from the tip of Carlos's blade instantly entered through the creature's eyes and exploded its head, leaving flaming reins in Vlad's hands. Demons that surrounded him immediately paid the ultimate price, melting and bursting into flames from Carlos's silver glare as he dashed toward Vlad like a man possessed.
Through a splinter of night, a thick black cloud of transporter bats emerged and swarmed, forming a hissing, screeching tornadolike funnel to collect Vlad. Hurling debris, cars, street signs, and anything not firmly secured into Carlos's path, the swirling manifestation surrounded Vlad and then took off, heading deeper into the heavily populated area of downtown Detroit.
Beyond fury or sanity, Carlos became a white-light blur behind the dark funnel cloud, closing in on it as it ate up asphalt and flung debris in its wake. Attempting to knock Carlos off course when the debris didn't deter him, a retinue of brave but foolish bats defected from the cloud and dove at Carlos, only to fall to the ground screeching and burning from his silver sight.
Gaining momentum, the dark twister lifted above street level, moving like a horizontal cone along the People Mover monorail-the wide top end of the funnel sucking in power from the rails, siphoning in bodies from the train cars to strengthen and feed the demons, and then jettisoning metal and gore behind it.
Clarity came to Carlos in the form of a quiet place in the midst of the fury . . . a place that he'd never found before. There was no noise, no time, no forward thrusting velocity, even though his body was traveling almost at the speed of light. He could see another train car in harm's way just ahead of the ravenous funnel.
Carlos reached out his hands, abandoning his blade. The blade of Ausar fell between the fabric of the universe and the power from it leapt into both palms. A ball of black light fused with the white light that shot from his hands, creating a thick energy rope that instantly wound around the bottom tip of the funnel cloud. Then the time-space differential snapped back into real time the moment he yanked on the cord.
Demon bats fell out of the funnel's centrifugal orbit. Vlad crashed hard on the People Mover rails in a sliding collision as the combatants entered Cobo Center Station. Battle-frenzied, disoriented bats screeched and flew at humans, smashing the plate-glass windows leading into the convention center while Vlad and Carlos began a low altitude flight chase through the glass-and-chrome structure.
Vendors dove for cover, workers and tourists scattered, as the two missilelike forms rocketed past them, ripping up carpet, scorching the air, busting out glass panels, and upending furniture from the sonic boom shock waves of their energy signatures.
But concern for collateral damage slowed Carlos's roll. It also tapped his dwindling energy reserves as he soft-flung people out of harm's way, and shielded the innocent from exploding glass and twisted metal as he passed civilians while trying to stay on Vlad's tail.
Reality warred with his conscience; he had to get Vlad out of the building before there was enough structural damage to bring it crashing down on thousands of innocent people.
In a partial ruse, Carlos momentarily slowed enough to come out of an energy whirl, panting, wiping silver sweat from his silver-soaked body. The hint of vulnerability was all he needed to reverse the chase and to get Vlad to come after him.
Bursting through the glass-and-chrome doors, Carlos allowed himself to be pursued by the enraged entity, crossing the pristine white concrete that led to Hart Plaza. A wide circular fountain on one side of him and with the Detroit River in sight, he knew he could battle away from the population density of office buildings and possibly pull Vlad into the water while chanting a blessing to holy water fry him. But the moment he swerved his course toward the riverbank, Vlad veered off, blowing away traffic along Woodward Avenue then careening toward the Detroit-Windsor tunnel that would take him into Canada.
Carlos didn't need to see more; he knew where Vlad was headed. If he got to Nuit's Toronto offices, another refreshed army awaited. But in Vlad's immediate path were motorists who'd be trapped in an inferno as black Hellfire scorched the tunnel entrance. It would take all of his power to send instant cooling and fire retardant into the opening behind Vlad, who was using the innocent as body-shields.
In a quick fold-away, Carlos came out on the other side of the tunnel and hovered right in Vlad's path. The sounds of car accidents, multiple collisions set his teeth on edge and jarred his skeleton, but he had to stop this threat.
The impact of Vlad slamming into Carlos almost flattened him. But fury and old street ball made the contact flip into a tackle, ending with Carlos's hands around Vlad's throat in the middle of the highway.
Black charge cracked down Vlad's arms as his hands also found Carlos's neck. But the silver glare that raked Vlad's face made him cry out and cover the burns with his palms. Both warriors struggled to knock the other off balance, using their legs as weapons in the vicious dance. Razor-sharp, talon-edged bat wings exploded through Vlad's armor to stab into Carlos's shoulders and a spaded tail whipped out from Vlad's spine to drive itself into one of Carlos's kidneys. Carlos bellowed from the pain and arched, but didn't let go of Vlad's throat, reveling in triumph as his silver-saturated blood began to incinerate any appendage that molested him.
"How you like me now, bitch?" Carlos said through his teeth as Vlad scrabbled at his throat. "Go ahead, put your thumbs in my eyes, open up a jugular with your fangs, get all up in my silver shit and watch your ass get neutered one appendage at a time!"
Battle-length fangs filled Carlos's mouth as he turned Vlad's head to the side to deliver the ultimate vampire indignity-dethroated by an adversary with longer fangs.
"After I rip out your throat, Count, your head by the Neteru blade is mine."
The chime of his sword filled the air at the same time Carlos released his right hand to have the searing heat of the weapon fill it. Injured and exhausted from the battle and chase, Vlad struggled-buta millisecond movement of his eyes made Carlos drop him, spin away, and allow Elizabeth to gore him with a black blade.
A black charge hit both Vlad and Elizabeth, hurtling them backward before Carlos could think. It was instinct sparked by fury. Nuit opened a section of night with Lucrezia and quickly dragged the injured couple through it. However, before he could completely shut the dark portal, Carlos sent several combined mortars into it.
The earth belched out huge international messenger demons with barrel chests, straight from the Vampire Council on Level Six. Blade swinging, crazier than crazy, Carlos took the rush as he took heads, the new onslaught actually giving him energy rather than depleting it.
But the sudden urge to feed from the gore sobered him. He was getting lost in the memory, had to follow the fast-moving red-glowing pulse point on the ground. Carlos spun and took off, his eyes on the ground as his body again became a blur with scythe-wielding messenger demons in hot pursuit. Suddenly he was in a tunnel, underground, but not in Hell. Disoriented he slowed, looked around, and to his horror he was in an underground mall beneath the city of Toronto!
Humans were everywhere. The potential for catastrophic losses made him surface, breathing hard, dirty, sweating, injured, and gore-stained. Carlos turned and simply looked at the few straggling demons that had chased him this far, incinerating them, and finally began to feel the deep stabs to his shoulders along with the kidney injury.