Fury's Kiss (35 page)

“Ray!” I said sharply, only to be ignored. “Ray!”

He just stared at me out of a blackened face, like some kind of whacked-out commando who’d failed camouflage school. His blue eyes were wide and glazed; his black hair was sweaty and sticking up everywhere; and he was drooling slightly. He looked completely out of it, and that really wasn’t going to work right now.

So I slapped him again.

Only to have him promptly slap me back.

After which followed a bitch-slapping fest that I won by virtue of kneeing him in the gonads.

“Oh. Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God!”

“Get up!” I told him impatiently, because I hadn’t hit him that hard.

But he just continued to moan and roll around, to the point that I seriously contemplated leaving him there. But Ray had been stuck here for a couple weeks while the Senate pumped him for information, and there was a good chance he knew more about this place than I did. He could hardly know less.

So I jerked him up again.

And was rewarded by a slightly more sane, if entirely infuriated glare. “The fuck was
that
?” he screeched.

“That was to get your attention. I need—”

“You hit me in the
nuts
!”

“And I may do it again if you don’t—”

“You don’t just go around hitting guys in the nuts!”

“Ray—”

“You just don’t, okay? That is not cool. That is not on. That is not—”

“Ray!”

“—ever, ever—
God
! There’s got to be some damned limits—”

So I did it again.

“THE FUCK?”

“Ray. Get a grip—”

“
I have a grip!
I have a damned fine grip! If I didn’t, I’d be dead already, and I don’t know why I’m not and it’s no thanks to you and
where the hell have you been?
”

“That’s what I’m trying—”

“We have to have a talk,” he told me, his voice trembling slightly. “About your responsibilities as a master.”

“I am not your master.”

“One of which is protection, okay? Which I haven’t been seeing too goddamn much of!” He took off his bushy hat and threw it at the floor. For a second he just looked at it, a crumpled mass of leaves and Scotch tape
sliming about in an oil slick, and then his face crumpled, too. And he grabbed me in a bear hug that threatened my ribs. “Oh God,” he said brokenly. “I didn’t think you’d ever get here!”

I just stood there a second, completely nonplussed. Of all the crazy things that had happened today, I thought this might actually top the list. I had a master vampire sobbing in my arms and no idea what to do about it.

Except for the obvious.

“Ray?” I told him, stroking his dirty, disheveled hair.

“Hmm?”

“I know you’re upset—”

He nodded into my neck.

“—and you’ve probably been through a lot today—”

He nodded harder.

“But right now I need you to do me a favor.”

He looked up. “What?”

I clenched a fist in his mane and jerked his head back. “Man the hell up!”

“Oh, that’s nice!” he said, wrenching away. “That’s just great! Do you have any idea what I’ve been through?”

“No, and I don’t care.”

“You
suck
as a master!”

“I am not your master!” I said, pulling a rifle sling over his head and checking out the gun attached to it. Which I supposed he’d been using for a club, since it contained no actual bullets. “Where’s the ammo?”

“Like I know. I got it off a dead aide,” he said, talking about one of the Senate’s human employees. “But I couldn’t stay to frisk him ’cause there was more of those things coming—”

“What are they? Where are the Senate’s people?”

“
They’re
the Senate’s people! Don’t you get it?” He glanced around fearfully. “It’s like
Night of the Living Dead
around here,
except they aren’t living.
”

“Just tell me what you know,” I said, and started stuffing my pockets with grenades. And cut my finger on a freaking
cleaver
he had wedged up in there.

“I don’t know anything, okay? I just—” He stopped
and took a deep breath, I guess for effect. Or maybe because in times of stress, old habits resurface. “I was in the break room, trying to make myself a damned cup of coffee. ’Cause Marlowe had to do something tonight and didn’t have time to yell at—excuse me, interrogate—me some more until tomorrow. But they wouldn’t let me go, not even back to your place to get a change of clothes, assuming that stupid driver ever brought back my luggage. Even with my shirttail out, it’s getting a little drafty in—”

“Ray.”

“Yeah. So they just left me here. And I was gonna make some coffee and then do a little Web surfing, maybe watch some TV. But I’m down in the kitchen and I hear this commotion outside in the hall. So I open the door and there’s one of the guards getting slammed against the wall by this guy. And the guy was like—he was messed up. Blood and stuff everywhere, all oozing and holes and—and he was dead, okay? Not our kind of dead, either, but DEAD dead. And soon the guard was, too—”

“And then he came after you?”

“No, then
they
came after me. The guard—he gets up, staked, brains splattered all over the wall and everything, but he freaking
gets up
, and then they see me and they’re
fast
. But I got the door shut and I know this place like the back of my hand, right? So I managed to—hey, what are you doing?”

“I’m going to need some help,” I said, grabbing his arm and dragging him back toward the door.

“What?” His eyes bugged out. “Are you crazy? I’m not going back in there!”

“I’ll protect you.”

“Yeah, right!” He jerked back. “You got a rifle with no bullets, a handgun and some grenades. And let me tell you something about the grenades—”

“They don’t work too well in close quarters.”

“They don’t work at all!” he said, pulling back as hard as he could—which was pretty damned hard. “Not against those things. They just keep coming! And then you’ve got pieces and blood and ooze and—augghh!”

I’d dragged him to the door and kicked it open, in preparation for shoving him through, but he’d grabbed one of the nearby wooden support beams and was holding on for all he was worth. “No! No, no, no! I’m not—”

“Listen to me! I just need your help for a minute. Then you can hide while I go get Radu.”

“Radu?”

“He’s trapped in the basement. That’s why I need to get down there. Then I can—”

“Do nothing,” Ray said savagely. “’Cause then you’ll be trapped, too, in a basement full of—what the hell. Why don’t we call ’em what they are? They’re freaking zombies!
Vampire zombies
, which doesn’t even make sense—I mean, who
does
that?”

“A necromancer. A powerful one.”

“No. Uh-uh. They try to co-opt babies when they can, or they used to anyway, but this is different.”

“Because the guys in there are masters?”

“Because the guys in there are
dead
! I told you, DEAD dead. And you know how fast our bodies decay. We make terrible zombies! Everybody knows that. We’re falling apart within hours.”

I blinked, because something had finally made sense. “Yeah. But what if someone doesn’t need hours, or at least not many of them? You’re also a lot stronger, and faster, than a human.”

“But zombies take a lot of power to create, like a LOT of power. You gonna throw that away for a couple hours?”

“If the prize is big enough.” I just didn’t know what the prize was supposed to be. This was a working base, not a treasure house. And even if it had been…the Senate practically defined revenge. What was here that was worth that kind of risk?

“Look, whatever, okay?” Ray said. “Point is, there’s a ton of them down there. You’ll never even get to Radu, and if you do, you’ll never get—”

“There’s also a portal,” I told him.

He stopped struggling. “What?”

“You’re the portal king. You must know about it.”

“Know about—wait. What?”

“The Senate’s portal—”

His eyes widened. “The big boy is
here
?”

“What big boy?”

“What big boy?” Ray stared at me like I was slow. “It’s only the biggest damned portal in existence! Connects to I don’t even know how many lines! And you’re telling me that it’s been here
all the time
?”

“I don’t know about—”

“Wait. That can’t be right.” His eyes narrowed. “They’d need a ley line sink for something like that, and they don’t got one here. That’s why everybody always assumed it was at the consul’s place upstate.”

“Which it probably is!” I said, exasperated. “I didn’t say they had
that
portal, I said they had
a
portal. It connects Central to the consul’s residence in case of an emergency.” And if ever anything had qualified…

“But—” He looked outraged. “Those slimy sons of bitches! They told me they didn’t have one here! Said it was for security reasons!”

I gave him a look, and dragged him off the pillar. “Would
you
tell you it was here?”

Ray thought for a second. “Okay, point.” He looked at me and his demeanor became more businesslike, as if talking about something he understood had calmed him. “But that don’t matter, ’cause you’re not gonna get to it.”

“I will once I get to a weapons locker.”

He shook his head. “That won’t do any good. They’re behind wards.”

“What kind?”

“The kind that shocked the crap outta me when I tried to break in. They need a guard’s touch to open. And there ain’t any more guards. Or if there are, they’re being real quiet. I hadn’t heard anyone for maybe fifteen minutes when you—
why are you still dragging me in there?
”

“I have an idea.”

“Oh, great.” He looked heavenward. “She has an idea. Have you been listening? They’ll
kill
us!”

“Not if we kill them—” I began, only to cut off when a sudden rushing noise filled the air. And Ray grabbed
my gun and went ballistic on something on the wall over our heads.

“Die! Die! Die!” he screamed, emptying the clip and causing spent shells to rain down all around us. And okay, maybe I’d been wrong about the calm thing. Because he was just standing there, trembling and panting and staring—

At the air-conditioning vent that he’d just shot the crap out of.

“—first.” I took my smoking gun out of his limp fingers and patted him on the back. “See? That’s the spirit.”

“Oh, good. That’s…Yes,” Ray said, slumping against the wall as the shield protecting the cabinet dropped.

I felt a little light-headed, too, because there were actual weapons in the weapons case. Not a lot—somebody had been here before us—but anything was better than we had. “Get rid of it,” I told Ray, passing over the loathsome thing we’d used as a key.

“You’re inhuman,” he told me. And snatched it.

And as soon as he was out of sight around the corner, I let my head fall onto the cool, shiny metal of the cabinet for just a second. I could still vaguely feel it squirming in my palm, like its body was doing on the lobby wall. I tried to tell myself that the guard who had provided the handprint—and the hand—we’d needed would have approved. The creature that had taken him over wasn’t him, and if he’d been here, he’d have wanted us to do what was necessary to avenge him.

I knew vamps well enough to know that, even if I hadn’t known him.

But my brain kept wondering who he’d been. Or if I’d met him before. Or about how I’d feel if someone had just sawed off part of Louis-Cesare in order to fool a stupid—

I shuddered in visceral horror all over, hard.

And looked up to see Ray staring at me.

He didn’t say anything and neither did I. I just licked my lips and went back to work, because weakness right now was not fucking okay. I started searching through
the cabinet looking for something better than the damned .22—why the hell did they even have a .22?—that someone else had rejected. Someone else who was probably dead, because whatever they had picked hadn’t been good enough.

And that went double for what they’d left. I grabbed a couple clips for the .45, shoving them in my pockets. And then just stood there, lusting after my favorite shotgun—a sweet, double-barreled 10-gauge loaded with three-and-a-half-inch shells. Every time I pulled the trigger, it was the equivalent to four blasts from a standard 12-gauge or a nine-second burst from a submachine gun.

It was glorious.

Only for this, I would have liked two. Or three, in case I ended up breaking one over something’s head. What I found instead was a sad little .410, all alone in the back, because nobody hunted zombies—much less freaking vampire zombies—with a rabbit gun.

Nobody except me, since there was no alternative and I was out of time.

I flung it over my shoulder, grabbed all the ammo that would fit it and turned to Ray. He’d given me the layout of the lower floors, and helped distract the guy we’d used for a key long enough for me to do what had been necessary. If I got out of here, I owed him a lot.

“Keep your head down,” I told him. “I’ll send help as soon as I’m out.”

He just stared at me. I didn’t have time to figure out what his problem was, so I just clapped him on the shoulder. And took off for the bank of elevators.

They were to the left of the reception desk, in a little alcove of their own, but still plenty close enough to the main room for my purposes. In fact, things were looking about as good as they could under the circumstances, until I caught sight of one of the elevator panels. I got out and checked the other elevator, but it was the same story.

Son of a bitch.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Ray demanded, sticking his head in the door.

“There’s only twelve lower levels,” I told him.

“What?”

“There’s only twelve, but Radu said he was on fourteen.” I looked up. “Why would he say that?”

“Who the hell cares?” Ray looked at me like I was crazy. “You can’t use the elevator—are you nuts?”

“Why not?”

“Why not?”
The lights flickered, and he waved his arms. “That’s why not! What if you get stuck between levels? What if they hear you coming? What if—”