Blood Rites (The Dresden Files #6) - Jim Butcher Page 0,48

and felt pretty slick to be doing the teamwork thing—but Thomas's damned jeans were so tight that the gun didn't come loose. I leaned too far in the effort and wound up sprawling on my side. All I got for my oh-so-clever maneuver was scraped fingertips and a good view of Lara Raith in gunfighting mode.

I heard a shot go past, a kind of humming buzz in the air that provided an accent to the mild, barking report of the pistol. There were several shots in the space of a second or three. Two of them hit Thomas with ugly sounds of impact, one in the leg, and a second in the chest.

At the same time he hurled a small ring of keys at Lara, and it probably saved my life. She swatted them aside with the gun that had been trained on me. It gave me a precious second or two, and it was time enough to bring up my blasting rod and loose a panicked strike at her. It was sloppy as hell, even with the blasting rod to help me focus my will, and instead of a wrist-thick beam of semicoherent flame, it came out in a cone of fire maybe thirty feet across.

That made big noise—a thunderous thumping explosion as the heat displaced cool night air. Lara Raith had the reflexes that were depressingly common in all of those vampire types, and she darted out of the way of the flames. She leveled both guns at me as she did, blazing away like in those Hong Kong action movies. But evidently even Lara's superhuman skill wasn't enough to overcome surprise, lateral movement, a firestorm, and the spike heels. God bless the fashion industry and the blind luck that protects fools and wizards; she missed.

I shook out my shield bracelet and hardened my will into a wall of unseen but solid force in front of me. The last few shots from Lara's guns actually struck the shield, illuminating it in a flash of blue-and-white energy. I held the shield firmly in place and readied the blasting rod again, and faced Lara squarely.

The vampire slipped into the shadows between the nearest building and a pair of huge industrial tanks and vanished from sight.

I padded forward to Thomas, keeping the shield up and in the general direction of where Lara had disappeared. "Thomas," I hissed. "Thomas, are you all right?"

It was a long beat before he replied, his voice weak and shaking. "I don't know. It hurts."

"You've been shot. It's supposed to hurt." I kept my eyes on the shadows, warily extending my senses as much as I could. "Can you walk?"

"Don't know," he panted. "Can't get my breath. Can't feel my leg."

I flicked my eyes down to him and back out again. Thomas's black T-shirt, was plastered to his chest on one side. He'd taken a hit in the lung, at least. If a major blood vessel had been struck, he was in trouble, vampire or not. The White Court were a resilient bunch, but in some ways they were just as fragile as the human beings they fed upon. He could heal up fast—I'd seen Thomas recover from broken ribs in a matter of hours—but if he bled out from a severed artery, he'd die like anyone else.

"Just hold still," I said. "Don't try to move until we know where she is."

"That'll get her," Thomas panted. "The old sitting-duck ploy."

"Give me your gun," I said.

"Why?"

"So that the next time you start talking I can shoot your wise ass."

He started to laugh, but it broke into agonized, wet coughing.

"Dammit," I muttered, and crouched down beside him. I set my blasting rod aside and slipped my right arm and one knee behind his back, trying to hold him vertical from the waist up.

"You'd better get moving. I'll manage."

"Would you shut up?" I demanded. I tried to ascertain the extent of his injuries with my free hand, but I'm no doctor. I found the hole in his chest, felt the blood coming out. The edges of the wound puckered and gripped at my hand. "Well," I told him. "Your wound sucks. Here." I took his right hand and pressed it hard against the hole. "Keep your hand there, man. Keep the pressure on. I can't hold it and carry you out too."

"Forget carrying me," he rasped. "Don't be an idiot. She'll kill us both."

"I can hold the shield," I said.

"If you can't return fire, it won't do you much good.