Necromancing Nim (36 page)

“Don’t tell anybody,” she added belatedly. “About the pot, I mean. I could lose my job if they knew I said anything.”

“Sure. No problem.”

The corridor we traversed was much more inviting than the tunnels under the vamp archive. It was wider and appeared to have been built specifically as a walkway, rather than being adapted from the steam tunnels. In fact, it was much like the corridors under the quad.

“Do you live down here?” I asked Lily.

“Nah. I live in the dorms for now. Crash here sometimes, though. Here…” She opened a door, which led off the corridor onto a sort of lobby. “You can wait here.”

The waiting area was equipped with a large, squishy sofa, the kind that swallows you whole when you sit in it. I didn’t have to worry about that, though, because someone was already sitting there, perched carefully on the edge to keep from sinking into the couch’s inescapable depths.

“Hello, Ms. Taylor,” said Pieter. He smiled, his narrow face almost friendly.

I gave Lily an accusing look, but she just shrugged.

“The good guys pay great, but the bad guys pay even better,” she said.

“Well, fuck,” I answered, because there didn’t seem to be much else to say.

Halitosis? Hide that vampire breath with our special spray formula. All-natural ingredients give you breath as sweet as summertime, with no strong aftertaste. Try FangKleen today!
—Television ad.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“It’s nice to see you again,” Pieter said, still smiling.

“I’m sure it is,” I answered, “especially since all your other friends suck.”

“Literally, in some cases.” My words seemed not to wound him. Too bad, because I was running pretty low on other weapons. Although there were a couple of things in my pockets—I always have a couple of things in my pockets. Good things. I was glad I’d taken the time to weapon up before I left the Union.

“What do you want?” I knew the answer, of course, but I wanted to hear him say it. And I wanted to delay the moment when he ripped my throat out, because I really wasn’t excited about that prospect.

“I want the stone.” He spoke in a cordial enough tone, but his eyes had gone hard. “What the hell else do you think I want?”

“I don’t know. True love? A million dollars? A house in Aspen?” Among the things in my pockets were my water pistol, pepper spray and a Ziploc of garlic in my hoodie, ready for use if I could make a quick grab for them. The one thing I didn’t have was the stone, which fact I was sure wasn’t going to impress Pieter when he discovered it.

“I know you have it,” Pieter went on, shifting forward a little on the couch. I refrained from the urge to take a step back, not wanting to yield to him at all, or give him the joy of realizing exactly how scared shitless I was.

“I don’t have it,” I said.

“You do. I can feel it. You’re practically vibrating with it.”

That was interesting. It made sense, given the healing procedure I’d been forced to endure and the part the stone had played in that. If I was attuned to the stone strongly enough for my blood to create the necessary changes in Sebastian, then I was probably attuned to it enough to distort Pieter’s perceptions of me.

“Sorry,” I said, unconcerned. “Wrong gal.”

“Give me that ridiculous hoodie.”

I’d gotten the sweatshirt at a concert. It was emblazoned with the name of the band and a giant teddy-bear face, and I liked it. “This hoodie is not ridiculous,” I said. “It cost me sixty bucks.”

“It’s wonderful. Give it to me.”

I was silent for a moment, wondering why the hell he didn’t just take it. He held me in an eye-lock for the space of several breaths, and as I stared at him, it began to become clear. Literally, as the glamour he held over his own face slid away under my concentrated attention. I wondered why I hadn’t seen past it right away. Again, probably a side effect of our various attunements to the stone and to each other.

Under the glamour he was carefully holding in place over his entire body, he was drawn, the skin of his face pulling taut over his cheekbones, his eyes sunk even deeper than they normally were. He was almost skeletal, or, more accurately, mummy-like, as if he’d been desiccated. I got it then, in a quick flash of intuition. Sebastian was sick because of his separation from the stone, just because he’d had the stone in his possession for a number of years; how much worse off must Pieter be now that he’d both possessed the stone and also had it inside him for a short time? The separation must be tearing him apart even more thoroughly than it was tearing up Sebastian. He was actually in a worse position since the stone, attuned to me as it now was, would no longer accept him as a host, at least not easily, if I understood things correctly.

In short, Pieter was fucked. No wonder he was so cranky.

Of course, as I ruminated, I also did not give Pieter my hoodie, as he’d demanded. His lip curled up. “Give me the fucking hoodie.”

“No,” I said, and I reached into my pocket and pulled out my purple plastic squirt gun.

He stared at the gun blankly, then barked out a laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not.” I squirted him in the face, and he screamed.

While he was dealing with melty burn injuries on his face, I wheeled and headed for the door.

Backup. He had to have backup. There was no way he’d come all the way out here after us on his own. And, of course, there was no way to know how much damage he and his cohorts might have already done to Roland and her fellow librarians.

No one was waiting in the corridor outside the waiting room, though, and I turned, heading back the way I’d come, to move back up through the library, up to the sunlight and safety.

Yes
. The word was quite clear in my head.
Outside. Then to—

I fumbled a step and nearly fell on my face. Okay… Weird enough that somebody was talking in my head, but even weirder that the voice had broken off mid-sentence. Shaking my head, I picked up the pace, heading, I hoped, out of danger.

Or not. A figure swung around a corner right in front of me, cutting me off. Vampire, I registered, a split second after I filled her face full of holy water. She screamed and clawed at her eyes, and I ducked around her and broke into a full-tilt run.

Blinded or not, she was still in pursuit. Tenacious little vampire bitch, that was for sure. But the water to the face had slowed her down enough for me to pound back up the staircase, then make it to the door that led back into the library with her several paces behind me.

I plowed through the door, and, in spite of the surroundings, I didn’t slow down. Instead, I conspicuously checked my watch and kept moving at a half run, repeating, “Late, so late, oh my God, so late…” over and over, by all appearances in a blind panic and oh, so very, very late for class or a date or a doctor’s appointment or who cared as long as people got the hell out of my way?

Behind me, I could hear gasps as my pursuer emerged, drawing considerably more attention than I had due to having taken a faceful of holy water. She wasn’t going to be able to fake it out of there nearly as well as I was. My plan was going really well, truth be told, as students and librarians parted like the Red Sea in front of me, driven by sympathy for my obvious predicament.

The vampire, either not properly briefed or just unable to orient herself with her eyes half-burned out, followed as I ran across the library’s bottom floor to the stairwell. I veered toward the wall of windows on the courtyard side. Again, she followed. I heard the “whoosh” sound as she incinerated. A wave of vamp dust hit the back of my head. Shit. That was going to be a pain in the ass to get out of my hair.

I barreled up the stairwells, the sound of startled shouting fading behind me.

Keep running. That voice again. It was clearer this time and sounded familiar. Sebastian. I should have recognized it straight off, but I wasn’t used to voices in my head. Yet another side effect of our growing blood bond, I presumed. They were supposed to call me on the damn cell phone, not poke around in my head. Stupid vampires.

“Where?” I said it out loud, out of habit or because I had no faith in actual telepathy as far as my ability to produce it.

“Just go. Get away.”
The voice went weaker again, and I wondered if it had to do with distance, Sebastian’s health, or just lack of familiarity on both our parts with this type of communication.

I didn’t have long to think about it; as I hoofed it toward the first floor stairwell door, a huge, dark bulk burst through it and nearly collided with me. I reacted fast enough to sidestep, sending the wide-shouldered vampire slamming into the opposite wall. Shit. I should have known they’d send more than just the woman-pire after me. I hefted the squirt gun again and emptied it into his face—there wasn’t much of the holy water left at this point but enough to start his eyeballs smoking.

I headed for the door, pushed through it. He wasn’t far behind me, but I just kept running, straight up the stairs to the ground-level foyer, out the door and into the still-lethal sunlight. Only then did I look back to see the huge vamp standing just outside the entry door in the shade, face distorted with anger, red, blotchy burns decorating his ugly face. He could go no farther, not until the sun went down.

I resisted the urge to turn around and go, “Neener, neener,” and just kept right on moving.

“Where?” I asked again, still aloud, hoping Sebastian would be able to hear me.

This time, I didn’t hear his voice, but I somehow knew where I was supposed to go. I broke into a trot, heading across the grass, north to what, if I recalled correctly, was Foellinger Auditorium. I’d seen a couple of concerts there. My college career had been short but far from uninteresting. The big, Romanesque, dome-topped building wasn’t that far, but I was flagging, making the distance seem like a few miles rather than a number of yards.

“Down,”
Sebastian’s voice said.

“Yeah, well, duh, down. Everything’s down,” I muttered, irritated, edgy with adrenaline and starting to develop a stitch in my side from all the damned running. The clear voice devolved into a sense of being guided, of being pushed and pulled in a certain direction. Which was a little unsettling but required less concentration on my part, but that was fine with me. The sensation led me into the building, down the stairs, all the way down to the basement, past storage areas and heating equipment, to another inevitable door. The door said No Admittance, but I admitted myself anyway. And found myself back in the tunnels, heading back toward the main campus, praying with every step that I wouldn’t run into any more vampires on the way, because my purple plastic squirt gun was empty.

I did run into more vampires. I half ran, half jogged for about ten minutes with no idea where I was going. Pausing occasionally to catch my breath, I followed the increasingly strong directional impulse that felt like a wire attached to my solar plexus, tugging me inexorably forward.

I had stopped to rest again, bending over, hands on my knees, breathing hard and deep, when a dark form lurched seemingly out of nowhere toward me. I squeaked, gasped, then screamed like a girl. It moved toward me, hands out, and grabbed my arms. Lashing out, I planted the heel of my hand in the middle of his face, eliciting a grunted, “Fuck!” followed by, “Jesus, Nim! Shit!”

And then I realized it was Colin.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. You snuck up.”

“You broke my fucking nose.”

“Right.” I was still annoyed at his unnecessary stealthiness. He could have approached a little louder—then he wouldn’t have gotten smacked in the face, and I wouldn’t have nearly wet myself. “I doubt it. Besides, you’ll heal.”

“Whatever.” He tested his nose gingerly with two fingers, still glaring at me.

“Where’s Sebastian?” I asked.

“Around the corner. Are they following you?”

“I don’t think so. I left one of them behind at the library. Lost him when I went outside.”

Sebastian appeared then, popping into view as abruptly as Colin had, but not in danger of being walloped since I was half expecting him.

“They can catch up underground. This tunnel leads back into the library system.”

“Oh, lovely.” And here I’d thought I was at least halfway out of danger once I’d gotten to Foellinger. “How did you guys get down here?”

“There’s a connection in the Union basement too.” Sebastian started moving back the way he’d come, Colin and I trailing after.

Colin pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to his face. He didn’t appear to be bleeding anywhere, so I had to assume he was trying to make me feel bad. It wasn’t working. I’d rather enjoyed popping him one. In fact, if he gave me an opening, I was thinking about doing it again just because he was being such a baby about it. I’m a terrible girlfriend. Well, maybe not so terrible for vampires.

“Is the whole damn campus connected?”

“At this point, pretty much,” Sebastian said. He seemed to know where he was going, taking a right at an intersection in the corridor. “Between the official navigation tunnels for students and the unofficial tunnels the vamps here have been working on since the fifties, you can get about anywhere you need to go. Fortunately or unfortunately.”

“Pieter’s here already,” I put in, though if they’d come to rescue me, they probably knew that.