FURY'S KISS

            I dove for the operating table, since it was the only source of weapons, and grabbed a couple knives while sliding underneath. Meanwhile, the vamp was jumped by half the guards, who he promptly threw into the other half. Mages hit the deck, bullets started flying, jars started breaking and I hesitated, feeling conflicted. 
            The problem was that I didn’t know if the mages were the bad guys, come to throw me back in my cage, or the good guys attempting a rescue. And then one who’d fallen nearby looked up and spotted me.  And I barely had time to push the table over before a couple dozen bullet-shaped dents pinged out of the metal in front of my face. 
            Well, okay then. 
            The guy stopped firing after a few seconds, probably figuring out that whatever caliber he was using wasn’t enough to punch through the thick old metal. So he used knives instead. And they must have been enchanted, because where the bullets had only pockmarked the surface, the knives sliced right on through. 
            But they didn’t slice through me, because I wasn’t there anymore. Bullets slammed into the wall over my head and sparked off the bars of the cages I dove behind. But only one hit me, and it was a minor wound in the calf that I barely noticed because I was too busy noticing the contents of one of the jars, which had been smashed by the earthquake or the bullets or who-the-hell-knew. 
            And, okay, maybe that hadn’t been formaldehyde, I thought, as the hand that landed in it went numb to the elbow. But it looked like the effect wore off fast. Because the creature that had been floundering around in it--something that looked like an octopus if they had six inch fangs—suddenly perked up. And lunged for my face.
            I screamed and slashed out with a knife, which didn’t appear to do much more than piss it off. It came after me as I ran and stumbled and ducked behind this crate and that cage, not being picky, because bullets and fangs. And then I fell, tripping over something I never saw because I was too busy rolling to the side to avoid the creature, which hit the concrete beside me with a slimy, squelching sound that I thought might haunt my dreams assuming I survived to have any. 
            And then it lunged for me again and I kicked it. 
            Although, no. To be fair, I kicked it, with enough force to have sent a football fifty yards to the end zone. Only there was no end zone, there was only the mage’s face, which had popped up over the nearest cage with an anticipatory gleam in his eye right before the creature gnawed it out.
            At least, that’s what I assumed it was doing. It was kind of hard to see considering that pale tentacles had wrapped around the man’s entire head and neck. But the munching sounds would seem to indicate—
            I blinked and stumbled back as something tiny skittered underfoot. It might have been a rat or a roach, but I wasn’t in the mood to take chances. I was in the mood to make it out the damned door. Which I would have--if another flood of mages hadn’t been blocking it as they poured inside, taking the odds from insane to just plain silly.
            “Dory! Get out of here!” It took me a second to realize that the vamp had spoken, mainly because I was kind of surprised he was still alive. And even more so when he threw me a gun. “Go!”
            I plucked it out of the air. It was a shiny black 9mm Glock 18. Nice. 
            And then I sprayed bullets—but not at the mages. Because pistol ammo probably wouldn’t get through their body armor and because I wasn’t feeling that charitable right now. If you’re going to be a bitch, might as well be a big bitch, I thought, a little hysterically. 
            And took out the shelf behind them.
            Suddenly, it was like the shooting gallery at the fair if the gun was fully automatic and the ducks never moved. I’m not going to say I broke every bottle, but if there were more than two or three remaining when I finished emptying the clip, I’d be surprised. Bullets ricocheted, jars exploded, bits of flying glass and shrapnel took out other jars, and not-formaldehyde rained down on the mages. Whose faces went saggy, and whose numb hands dropped their weapons, even as they stared around trying to find the source of the barrage. Which they never managed to do since they rapidly went from confused and pissed off and homicidal to…
            Well, whatever emotion can best be described as “lunch.”
            The only exceptions were the ones who had been spry enough to dodge back out the door before the fun started. Or the ones who had thrown themselves at the vampire, I guess under the impression that they’d last longer. Or the one who had been in front but who had ducked behind a bunch of crates.
            You know, the one I hadn’t seen.
            He emerged shrieking a spell that blasted me off my feet and through the air, before slamming me back into the wall hard enough to crack bone. Hard enough to liquefy my insides.  Hard enough to cause the whole room to bleed--
            Red.

*   *   *

            I woke in the middle of a battle, which was not unusual.
            A human was lunging at me with a knife, attempting to gut me, which was.
            I blinked at him.
            He was yelling something that I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my ears, which always took a few moments to subside. But the sound bounced off the inside of my skull like rocks. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying, like an insect buzzing around my ears until I reached out and-- 
            Yes.
            That was better.
            I peeled myself off the wall and looked around.
            It was…colorful. The meaty smell of new blood painted the room in spatters, glowing crimson bright against the darkness. The stench of tainted magic came from a fire eating its way across the floor, flaring along the spectrum as it consumed old potion stains. And a familiar, skin ruffling scent followed some of the humans, a sickly green that lingered like aftereffects every time one of them moved.
            The combined stench was bad, but I had woken in worse, in battlefields days old, full of bloated corpses. No, it was alright.
            But something else wasn’t. 
            Something was wrong.
            It wasn’t the strange things running around underfoot. One started for me, then paused, raising long feelers like a crab’s out in front of it, before abruptly turning and scurrying away. I let it go.  
            Surprisingly, it also wasn’t the vampire. There was one here, raising every hair on my body from the power he was radiating. First-level. Old. Perhaps four hundred years, perhaps more. But the blood lust was cool in him, his outline merely a vague blue shadow, only the pale mist steaming up from his body and the thin silvered veins under his skin showing any difference between him and the humans.
            Satiated or gorged.
            Irrelevant.
            I let my eyes move on.
            The room was cool, too—blues, grays, darkness in corners, one small source of light overhead. My nose twitched, calling it to me, only to be flooded with the ozone taste of electricity. I growled and then ignored it.
            But something else gleamed, in brilliant flashes here and there. I walked through the writhing mass of humans toward it. One grabbed my arm; I tossed him against a wall. Another raised a weapon at me—slow, slow, they moved so slowly I could have ripped his throat out before he finished the motion. I settled for taking his rifle away and batting him across the room with it.
            I reached the source of the light, but I still couldn’t see it clearly. I growled again, and this time, something answered. A strange, haunting cry, and then a hand, bright, bright like flame, emerged from nothingness. And started feeling around the floor. 
I cocked my head to the side, nonplussed. I had seen many hands move about on their own, torn or cut off of vampires, or spasming from soon-to-be-dead humans. But they didn’t glow. 
            Only I glowed.
            I growled and grabbed it.
            Something gave a shriek, and the hand jerked back. And there was muscle behind it, oh yes there was. Not like the humans, two of which jumped me a second later and forced me to release the hand in order to crack their skulls together. And by the time I threw them aside and turned back, the hand was gone. 
            I growled.
            Something whimpered.
            Something else moved, and I caught a gleam again, like a candle behind a curtain. 
            I jerked at the fluttering thing and it slithered easily through my fingers. Cloth; waxed. I pulled some more and something on the other side grabbed it and pulled back. But I was stronger, and when I gave a jerk, it came away in my hands. 
            And the glow flooded the room.
            Golden light, like looking into the sun, spilled everywhere, so bright I wanted to shield my eyes. It made it hard to see features; hard to see anything. But features didn’t matter; I normally barely noticed them. Power I did.
            I went down on my haunches and reached for it, but something was in the way. 
Bars. Iron. New. I could still smell the solder. I pulled them aside and felt around in the box—why was it in a box?—and finally grasped it.
            It bit my hand.
            “No,” I told it. “Bad.”
            And then I snatched it out.
            I still couldn’t see it very well; in fact it was harder up close where the light hurt my eyes.  But it smelled wrong. I pulled it close and sniffed it, mentally filtering out the stink of blood and urine and peppery fear radiating off it, but for once, scent didn’t help. I pawed at it, checking its limbs. It whimpered again, and the light flickered.
            “Hurt?” I demanded, because I couldn’t find any unclosed wounds.  
            It didn’t reply. 
            “Hurt!” I said again, louder, because maybe it was deaf. But no. It flinched; it had heard me. And then some gunfire hit the cage, sparking off the bars, and it flinched again. And kept doing it, in little motions that flickered against the canvas like firelight.
            Oh. It didn’t like the noise. I stood up and tucked it under an arm. I would take it away from the sounds, and then it would be better. 
            I scanned the room.
            The humans were dead or as good as. The vampire, of course, was not. Injured, but not mortally so, which made it more dangerous. I narrowed my eyes at it. There was a faint tinge of pink around the blue now, blended by the currents of its power into mauve tendrils that smoked up from the surface of its skin. 
            I kept the small thing close as I skirted the field of bodies. The vampire turned as we did, but made no forward movement. But the currents shivering through its veins increased, as its power surged. 
            I growled a warning.
            The vampire was unhappy; I could feel it in the heat it suddenly gave off, in the way it flooded the air with ozone. My nose wrinkled. I hated that smell. How humans lived in cities steeped in the scent of those who hunted them, I would never understand. How could they know when they were stalked, when every house already reeked of the hunters? When every streetlight hummed like the stolen energy in their veins, making it almost impossible to tell the difference?
            I would take the small thing somewhere with no false lights. With nothing but trees and wind and scurrying things even smaller than it was. With sounds of the earth that would not make it shiver and mewl.
            The vampire hadn’t moved. 
            I eyed it warily. Its power had faded, the silver current barely visible now, but it was only reined in. And its wounds were closing. The only serious one was on its stomach, where some potion had splattered and was eating through the flesh. But the vampire’s healing abilities were faster than the poison’s destructive ones. Soon, it would be whole again. And if it fed from the few humans whose pulses still beat faintly, here and there, it would be back to full strength. 
            If I was going to attack, it should be now.
            “Dory?” The creature spoke, low and soft. The name wasn’t mine, but it was looking at me. The eyes were limned in silver, too, like the veins. They stared at me, deep and empty and awful.
            I growled and renewed my grip on the small thing, which was thrashing about. I would kill the vampire if forced, but I was injured, too, and would also need to protect the small one.  This was a fight I would avoid if I could.
            “Dory—” It held out a hand.
            I backed up, jerking the small thing with me. “Mine,” I said, low and guttural, and the vampire started as if surprised.
            It probably was. They always assumed that I did not speak. That I could not. So many had plotted my death, discussed it, laughed about it, while I was even in the room, because they assumed I was mindless. Like one of the failures of their kind, born mad.
            But I was not a failure. I was what I was supposed to be. I was dhampir.
            And they never lived to tell anyone they were wrong.
            “Mine!” I said, challenge in the tone this time. If it wanted a fight, so be it.
            But the vampire took several steps back, hands raised. “Oui—yes. Yours,” it agreed. The words meant nothing, because vampires lied, but it also changed color. The pink faded to blue, to gray, to black as it went dim and almost seemed to collapse into itself. Dark and small suddenly, instead of bright with power. I watched it narrowly.
            Unlike the young ones, those as old and strong as this could summon power in an instant, with little or no build up required. It was backing down. It was refusing challenge. 
But vampires lied.
            My muscles tensed, adrenaline drowning my system, power and speed and—ripping, tearing, burning, yessss. The blood lust flooded me as I prepared for fight not flight, always the preference, always the joy. And then I lunged—
            --at the door, slamming it shut a second before something crashed into the other side.
            The vampire jumped.
            “You did not feel them change?” I challenged, pushing against the clawed hand that was caught in the gap between the door and the wall. It was longer than a man’s, with huge, exaggerated knuckles under a covering of black hair, and thick yellowed talons that scored the heavy metal.
            “I was….distracted.”
            “That kind of distraction can get you killed, vampire.”
            “So I see.” It brought the butt end of a weapon down on the creature’s fingers, hard enough to sever several of them, and the rest withdrew with a howl. “Shifters.”
            “Yes. I smelled their musk when I awoke. Did you not?”
            “No.” The voice was clipped. “They scented as human to me.”
            “Pity.”
            That must have stung, because power flashed through its veins for a split second, before being reined in again. “There are thirteen, two of them injured,” it said, showing off. “The odds are acceptable.”
            “Not with the small thing.”
            “The small—you mean the child?”
            I looked down. The little one had grabbed onto my leg with a grip I would have defiedeven the vampire to break. That was good. It left my hands free.
            “Child.” I used language so seldom, sometimes the words wouldn’t come. But this one…
            “Yes.”
            “I will protect her.”
            I didn’t answer. I was looking at the claw marks the creature had left on the door. They had the same foul stench as the creatures, wrong unnatural, and were bubbling the green paint as they dripped down the surface. A moment later, the lock on the door began to sizzle, smoking as if a blowtorch was on the other side. 
            I glanced up at the vampire. “You were saying?”
            It scowled. It did that a lot. But a moment later, I joined it when the room lurched hard to the right, like a ship on the seas, and ugly cracks ran up the walls. One split the ceiling all the way to the light, causing it to flame out in a shower of sparks. But more light flooded through the cracks, crisscrossing the gloom in slivers of hellish orange.
            One lit on the bar of a cage, and the metal went as molten as in a furnace. But I had never seen a furnace turn a bar white hot in an instant. Or boil it away to smoke in another.
            I did not to bother to see what the rest of the rays were doing. My eyes lit on a turned over table not far away. It was in poor condition, but it had wheels. It would do.
I righted it and started piling things on top.
            “What are you doing?” the vampire demanded. It looked like it might have interfered, but the lock was now gone and its back was to the door, keeping it closed.
            More or less.
            “That will become apparent. Where are we?”
            “Nowhere. The dark mages who used this place folded over a piece of a ley line, creatinga pocket in non-space—” It broke off with a disgusted sound. “There is no time for this! We have to—”
            “There is time,” I said, poking my nose into a large jar. Little round balls of greasy metal. I added it to the pile.
            The vampire made another displeased sound, but it answered. “A ley line is a river of great metaphysical power.  Among other things, it separates worlds—”
            “I know what a ley line is.”
            “Then you know that they are meant to be travelled through very quickly—as when stepping through a portal. They are not designed to be used as a permanent residence!”
            “Yet someone has done so.”
            “Those with an extensive knowledge of magic and a pressing need to hide have used the trick for centuries, but it carries great risk. If the spell they used as an anchor fails, the shield bubble keeping out the ley line’s energy will fail, too, and in that case—” it broke off with a gesture at the room. “Do you understand?”
            I glanced up. In the few seconds I had worked, the scene had changed. It now looked as if the room was made of glass, and someone had thrown a ball at it. The impact point was a solid heart of flame, with boiling orange-red energy radiating outward in jagged rays. They lit the remaining pieces of the room like the sun through stained glass, causing the gunpowder in the air to shimmer like gold dust.
            So much power.
            It was beautiful.
            I tore my eyes away. “I understand that we need to get out.”
            “Yes, yes! We need to get out! Therefore making a barrier will do us little—”
            “I am not making a barrier.”
            The vampire looked at the heavy pieces of trash I had gathered on the table. “Then what is that?”
            I didn’t bother to answer. “Open the door,” I said instead.
            “Efin!” It threw up its hands, and then had to replace them quickly as the door buckledbehind it. “Yes, yes, d’accord.  Now you and the child, you stay behind me, do you understand?”
            I looked at it. It liked to scowl, it liked to demand things, and it liked to talk. It reminded me of someone. 
            “I understand.”
            “Good.” It took a breath. Then another, which made little sense as it did not breathe. And then it spun to the side.
            The door crashed open and a snarl of fur and unbridled savageness boiled into the room. And stopped, several yards in, slavering mouths agape. Which is what most creatures would do when faced with the solid field of flame the back half of the room had become.
            They would have recovered in a second. I didn’t give them one. I swung the table outward, putting all my strength behind it, and with the heaviness of the metal augmented by the tower of machinery on top. Machinery that spilled over when its base slammed into the shifters’ backs, or stomachs for those with slightly better reflexes, not that it mattered; not that anything mattered. Not with a thousand pounds of falling steel and iron and tiny rolling metal bits sweeping them toward their doom.
            And then I was jerked back by the vampire. Its teeth were out and its blood-lust was rising. But I did not think it was about to feed with the flames licking towards us. “Get on,” I told it impatiently, shoving the table at it.
            “You get on!” It snarled, and threw me and the small one onto the pitted table top. And then through the door. And then down a corridor, which was fast collapsing behind us.
            I twisted around in time to see that several of the shifters had somehow made it out also, but they were uninterested in attacking us. They barreled into two of their own who had stayed behind, and then attacked them in their panic to get out. They went down in balls of fur and thrashing limbs and the next second were consumed by the gaping maw of energy behind us.
            It was less like glass now, I thought, holding the whimpering small thing as the corridor curled up, concrete, brick and plaster, all the same. As if the scene were merely an image drawn on paper and held to a match.
            It was oddly unreal, like the expression on the vampire’s face as it ran, pushing us with inhuman speed, racing the impossible until fire lapped at its heels and I jerked it onto the table with us. The flames followed, crackling like lightning across the width of the tunnel, burning through the vampire’s jacket and scoring a searing wound in its arm. Smoke, stinking of burnt flesh and fabric, flooded the air. The corridor bucked and buckled. Electricity lifted the hair on my arms and prickled at my exposed skin, the space left to us sizzling with it as we scrambled backwards, as the tunnel flamed out around us, as beautiful death reached fiery hands out for us—
            --and missed.
            The floor bucked wildly one last time and, suddenly, we were bouncing into darkness, the table smoking like a flare, the portal behind us burning not orange but bright, incandescent white for one, brief instant.  Before it exploded like a bomb, picking us up and throwing us through the air and into a large group of people that were rushing through what looked like a warehouse door. 
            But they weren’t people; they were vampires. Dozens of them, some getting out of the way in time, others somersaulting along with us as we hit the ground, as we rolled toward a street, as I reached for the small one the impact had torn out of my arms and a knife at the same time, because the fight was not over yet. No, the fight was just beginning as I rolled to a stop and surged to my feet and--
            “NO!” 
            The voice tore through me like a hundred knives, plucking me out of the air halfway through a leap and sending me crashing to the ground. My body twisted, but the power wouldn’t let me rise. Not the vampire’s—not this vampire’s. There was only one who could do this to me, and I looked up with no surprise at all to see the diffuse outline of a being made of moonlight, shimmering in the air above me.
            “No,” I told it. And “wait” and “child.”
            But it didn’t listen. It never listened. 
            And then the glow faded, and there was nothing but darkness.

           

 Look for Fury's Kiss on October 2, 2012!