“Maxine!” Eddie raced up the street toward her, a long rifle in his hands. The barrel was smoking. He slung it onto his back. He reached out and took her forearm and pulled her a few steps down the road. “Maxine, we need to go—”
“Eddie?”
“I can’t take him on alone.” He huffed as he was now running down the street with her, pulling her down the street. “I can’t—”
“No. You very well cannot.”
That was the voice that brought so many people so much fear. It was dark, it was expansive. And it was furious. He stood in the center of the road, blocking their path. All pretense of humanity was gone from him. His face was a mask of anger, and his eyes…were pure red, from lid to lid. The wound on his shoulder was already gone.
Eddie pulled up to a screeching halt and pulled two revolvers from holsters at his hips. He pointed them at the vampire. “Back down, you toothy cunt, or I’ll fire.”
“And you think you can stop me?” Vlad sneered. He wore the expression of something that thought of the boy as nothing more than an ant. And he was likely right. “You? Where all others have failed? Tell me, boy, have you even struck puberty yet?”
“Fuck you, you—”
“Enough!” She stepped around Eddie, stunning him. She took hold of both barrels of his guns and pointed them straight down at the ground. “Eddie. Please. This is how you die, if you do this.”
“Maybe I can stop him,” the boy insisted. “I can.” His words were strong. But what she felt from him was only terror.
“No…you can’t,” she murmured and placed a gloved hand on his cheek. “And you know you can’t. It’s all right.”
“Maxine,” Vlad’s voice echoed easily in the empty street without trying, “come to me.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “I leave with you, and he lives. Neither you nor any of your creatures touches him.”
Vlad bared his teeth once more like a feral animal. “He seeks to kill me, empath. You would have me foster mercy for one who seeks my death.”
“He seeks to stop you from murdering a city! You are not some helpless innocent lamb. Do not pretend you are somehow wronged by him.”
“Mind your words.”
“And you mind yours, vampire.” It was her turn to be angry. “You spare his life until the dawn comes tomorrow, or I take his gun and bury a bullet in my brain. Then where will you be without your new shiny toy? Left to return to your siege of the city, I suppose.”
Vlad flinched. His anger faltered. She wounded him. She could feel his hurt from where she stood some twenty feet away. She regretted it immediately, but it was too late to take it back. “Maxine…” When he blinked, his eyes were no longer pure red from lid to lid. His voice was no longer angry, but…mournful. He held out his hand to her. “Come to me.”
It was no longer a command. It was a plea. Do not harm yourself, it whispered. Let me protect you.
Did he honestly care? Did she honestly matter?
She turned to Eddie, who was watching the whole thing as if someone was putting on some sort of farcical play in the middle of the street. “Ma’am, don’t ask me to do this. I can’t leave you.”
“You can, and you will. Your word, Vlad Tepes Dracula,” she called over her shoulder to the vampire. “I will have your word.”
“He will not be harmed. By neither me, nor any of my creatures. I am not to be blamed if he is struck by a carriage in the street, am I?” And there was the Vampire King she recognized. Cynical. Jaded. His wound in his heart had already healed like the one in his shoulder.
Or it had on the outside, at any rate.
“Go, Eddie. Please.” She put her gloved hand on the boy’s cheek once more and stroked it. He would be a handsome man. If he lived that long. “With me, he is distracted. He will not wage his war until I am dead, or his. I will hold on as long as I can. I will buy you all time. Now please…go. Save yourself a pointless death.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he nodded, clearly sick to his stomach at the thought, but unable to argue. He glared over her shoulder at the vampire. “Fuck you.”
“Children these days.”
Maxine rolled her eyes at Vlad’s snide comment. Eddie backed away several steps, then a