Silver Bullet (11 page)

“What’s the plan?” I asked, gripping the shotgun tightly in both hands.

Fritz was on his BlackBerry even now. He lowered it to address me. “If David Nicholas is attacking with nightmare backup, we want sunlight. They’ll be less powerful in the sun.”

“The roof,” Suzy said.

I turned to head out the door again.

The hallway beyond was completely black.

A pair of pale hands emerged from that darkness, seizing me by the neck of my shirt. They jerked. I staggered a step before managing to catch my footing.

Anything that could touch me should have been touchable right on back.

I fired the shotgun.

Having another explosion that close to my head without ear protection felt about as good as jamming an ice pick through my skull. For sure, I wasn’t going to escape this week with all of my hearing intact. I’d be happy to sacrifice the ability to hear a few frequencies if it meant escaping with my life intact.

Unfortunately, that didn’t look like the case. My shot didn’t do anything.

Something hard cracked into my back, attacking from behind. It pushed me to the floor. My cheek was smashed into the carpet.

The darkness swarmed over me, obscuring my view of everything—the sunlit doorway that Suzy was standing in, the Berber carpet an inch from my nose, even the nose itself. A harsh buzzing filled my ears. Heat flooded my skin.

Someone was sitting on my back, knees digging into my ribs, knuckles pressed against my scapula.

Cèsar…
My name drifted on the air.

Fear bit into my lungs, but Malcolm had told me that I didn’t have to take it—that it could be escaped. Even as the terror grew, I knew that I needed to get my body moving. Put distance between the source and myself. Get blood flowing through my body, and, more importantly, my brain.

Whatever was sitting on me couldn’t be real heavy. It was bony, not big.

I could fight back.

Dammit, Cèsar, fight back!

But it felt like I weighed a thousand pounds. I was chained, tossed into a pit with spiders at the bottom. Glistening pincers reached toward me. Eight red eyeballs on every ashen white skull watched me fall.

No—that was the fear. A hallucination.

Fight
.

I twisted and jammed my elbow backward.

And, somehow, I hit something.

A sharp cry split the air. The pressure on my back vanished. I was still holding the shotgun in one hand—I kept my grip on it as I scrambled to my feet.

Suzy and Fritz were in the shadows, too, but I could barely see them. All I could tell was that Suzy was running away, calling for Bellamy, shooting into nothingness. She was gone by the time I thought to reach for her.

But Fritz was within arm’s reach. My hand closed on his wrist. He spun to look at me. Shock whitened his face. “The roof,” I said. “
Now
.”

We ran. I wasn’t real proud of it, but we ran.

The darkness chased us up the hallway toward the fire exit. The green sign brightened as we approached.

Fritz and I climbed the stairs two at a time.

Door at the top. So close to sunlight.

I hesitated halfway up, looking back down the shadowy hall with its potted plants and framed paintings of the desert. The darkness had sucked the color out of everything. I thought I could hear shouts from farther down the hall, but it was hard to tell with my hearing all jacked up by the gunfire.

Malcolm and Bellamy. Suzy and Isobel. They were out there. They were fighting while we were running. “Go ahead,” I told Fritz as he pushed open the door. I gave him the shotgun.

“Wait,” he said.

I didn’t let Fritz finish. I shoved him out the door.

A hand caught my ankle. Jerked me down the stairs.

My stomach lifted into my throat as I fell. My chest slammed into the steps, sending pain lancing through the scratches on my belly. I twisted to see what had caught me, following the bony hand up the sleeve of a leather jacket to a grinning, skeletal face.

David Nicholas.

“Hello again,” he said.

I slammed my shoe into his face.

It felt like kicking a rubber ball. My heel sank into his nose without breaking anything. The sole left the momentary imprint of treads on his face.

Even though David Nicholas hadn’t spoken, I heard his voice in my mind.
I see you’re injured. Shame it would be if that went bad.
Cold fear flooded me. I forgot to try to wrench free of him.

I fumbled at my shirt, lifting the hem to see the bandage underneath.

The bandage was gone. The gash from the werewolf’s claws had become deeper, slicing straight to the glistening bone. And through the tunneled flesh, I could see meat—so much meat, like walking down the refrigerated aisles at a grocery store. Cut of flank, cut of ribs, all marbled with fat.

I had been sitting out in the sun too long. The injury was festering. It was hot and there were flies picking at the edges of the meat—
I’m nothing but
meat—surrounded by veins carrying blood and encasing a heart ticking moment by moment to an endless death.

It would be a shame for all that meat to go bad…

His voice was everywhere.

The skin peeled away, flaked and burned. The muscle bubbled. Pustules swelled and burst like boiling water, gushing hot yellow sick.

Malcolm had told me to run.

It was too late to run.

David Nicholas was on top of me, driving his hands into the bloody wound, tearing at it with green-tinged fingernails. He leaned so close to my face that I could smell the rotting flesh on his breath. “You got into my office. I don’t like intruders.”

I could barely gasp out a response. “Wasn’t the werewolf enough revenge?”

“What do you mean, werewolf?”

A howl shook the hallway.

The fear didn’t lift so much as shift. All images of rotting wounds blinked out in an instant. David Nicholas’s thrall disappeared. But as soon as I realized that I had heard a wolf’s cry, real fear crashed over me.

The howl punctured the darkness again. David Nicholas turned in slow motion, the shadows sliding around him, like they were part of his leather jacket and sunken eyes. I could see right through his eyelids into infinity. “Werewolf,” David Nicholas whispered again, as if realizing something.

He was gone.

The hard press of shadowy terror was gone, too. I could move again.

I scrambled to my feet, seized the door, and rushed into the safety of daylight.

UNFORTUNATELY, DAYLIGHT WASN’T WAITING for me on top of the roof.

The sun had dropped low to the mountains and the sky flamed violet-orange. Only a few slivers of light glowed between the lengthening shadows, and those would be gone in seconds, too.

There was a second door on the opposite side of the roof, leading down to a maintenance hallway. Malcolm hurtled out of the other door at the same time I emerged. His bicep was sliced open and he was slicked with blood to his wrist.

Fritz stood in the last puddle of light looking shocked, aimless. “You survived,” he said when he saw me. Well, he didn’t have to sound
that
surprised.

“Isobel?” I asked. “Suzy?”

“With Bellamy, heading for ground level,” Malcolm said. “Don’t worry. He’s a good man. He won’t leave the ladies alone.”

Momentary relief eased through me. But I could still hear noises underneath my feet. Banging and screeching and more howling. It was louder than the wind buffeting us on top of the buildings, like there was an entire war going on in the condo below.

I’d never been to Hell before, but I was willing to bet that was what it sounded like.

The sun dropped lower. The pool of light on the roof narrowed.

Fritz offered the shotgun to me, and I shook my head. No point in taking that. He looked more comfortable holding it than I felt.

“Did you call for backup?” I asked Fritz, noticing that his BlackBerry peeked out of his pocket.

“Not exactly,” he said. “The OPA is aware we’re under attack.”

“And?”

“And we’ve met the current limits of our support for the time being.” Which was probably the calmest way possible Fritz could say that the OPA wasn’t sending anyone to help us.

“Then what’s the plan?” I asked, spinning on Malcolm.

The kopis blinked at me. “Plan?”

Yeah, not the response I wanted to hear from the only guy there who knew how to hunt demons.

My panic hit its apex. We couldn’t just stand there and wait for the nightmares to come back. Sure, Suzy and Isobel would be fine—and that was important, maybe the most important thing—but I wasn’t ready to jump down David Nicholas’s maw, either. “The helicopter,” I said. “It can’t be far. Where’s the helicopter?”

“It’s relaying staff and equipment to the Silverton Mine,” Fritz said. “The next nearest copter can’t get here for twenty minutes.” About nineteen minutes too long. He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “It’s my fault you’re here without adequate training, Cèsar. Have faith. I won’t let you down.”

I wanted to believe him. I really did. Fritz was solid—the guy who had given me the job, a friend more than a boss. But even he could only do so much in the face of a nightmare’s assault.

Suddenly, everything within the building underneath us went silent. The banging sounds stopped. It was quiet on the rooftop as the chilly wind faded with the sun, and the final sliver of sunlight and safety vanished around us.

The door I’d entered through opened.

David Nicholas sauntered onto the twilit rooftop. A smile spread over his face at the sight of us huddled by the wall, whipped by chilly spring winds.

“Well, well, well. Look at what we’ve got here. Looks like a regular buffet, doesn’t it, Donna?”

The woman that came onto the roof from behind him didn’t respond. She held a thick iron chain with a skull-sized bludgeon attached to the end, and she spun it in lazy figure eights at her side. She was brown skinned, brown haired. Could have been sculpted from the mountains. Not a succubus.

“Basandere,” Malcolm filled in, muttering the word out of the corner of his mouth. “Earth spirit. Basque.” She looked like she belonged in a freaking army. She wore leather body armor and carried that chain like she knew how to use it with lethal intent.

Fritz lifted the shotgun to his shoulder. He aimed at the basandere. “Stay back.”

The other door opened and a cold wash of fear came through it. A second nightmare emerged. It was another male, straggly and unwashed. Looked like any of the guys living under the freeways in Los Angeles.

We were surrounded.

“You’re all new to the area, so you might not know this,” David Nicholas said as he strolled toward us, “but you don’t fuck with my space. You don’t fuck with
me
. You don’t carry guns into Craven’s and threaten my dealers.”

My mouth was dry, but I found the ability to speak. “Sorry. Won’t do it again.”

“Apology not accepted,” David Nicholas said.

As the red light of sundown faded, he began to grow in size. No, that wasn’t right—he was still man-sized, still skinny, and passably normal. But his presence was growing. What Abuelita would have called his aura.

The basandere took a step and Fritz fired.

The pellets smacked into her gut. She grunted, but kept coming, swinging the chain at him. Fritz moved faster than I expected. He ducked it easily.

That confrontation was like firing a starting pistol.

David Nicholas jumped. His fear strangled me, and Malcolm’s advice echoed in my skull.
Get away from it. Get your blood moving.

Move, Cèsar!

I dodged, throwing myself into a roll. I came up on my feet outside David Nicholas’s reach.

There was a tool bag propped against an air conditioner. I fell upon it, seizing the first heavy thing I found—a wrench—and hurled it at the nightmare.

The tool whistled through the air end over end. My aim was good. It smashed into David Nicholas’s face. Soft-boned or not, the impact still staggered him.

Behind him, I could see Malcolm fighting with the other nightmare, Fritz with the basandere. Amazing how we were one on one yet the odds felt so very much against us.

David Nicholas threw the wrench back at me, earning my attention once more.

I didn’t dodge in time. It glanced off my injured shoulder, numbing the arm.

And then he was slamming me into the air conditioner, his aura exploding, filling the darkness of twilight with immense fear. I swung a fist at him, but getting hit by the wrench had slowed me—I missed.

Where were we?
David Nicholas whispered into my mind.

With those words, I saw rotting meat again, torn ragged in the teeth of a skull.

The door on the corner of the roof banged open. The noise distracted my attacker. David Nicholas turned to see what had happened, and I took the opportunity to shove him off of me.

From the depths of the hallway below, the werewolf leaped onto the roof.

I threw myself down, and the wolf rushed over my head, driving into David Nicholas. Its jaws clamped shut on the nightmare’s arm. David Nicholas screamed as black blood gushed out of his jacket.

The wolf threw its head back and forth, tearing at the nightmare’s flesh.

What bullets hadn’t been able to touch, the werewolf absolutely shredded. It ripped pieces of sallow flesh from David Nicholas’s body. They dissolved into puffs of smoke the instant they contacted the floor.

It took me a second to realize that David Nicholas wasn’t just screaming. There were words in there, too. “Fall back! Fall the fuck back!”

The other nightmare vanished first, dissipating into smoke. The basandere released Malcolm and stepped away. She was bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds. Fritz had done a number on her, even though I hadn’t been able to imagine him so much as swinging a punch until that moment.

David Nicholas jumped out of the werewolf’s path, phasing across the shadows. He wrapped his arm around Donna’s shoulders.

“This isn’t over,” he said.

And then they both vanished, leaving us alone with the werewolf.

Out of the frying pan
…