Fury's Kiss (2 page)

He didn’t have fangs in me yet, but he didn’t need them. Because Hollywood had gotten it wrong. Even plain old vamps could leech blood molecules through the skin using a simple touch. As a master, this one could probably do it without even that, just by being in my vicinity, assuming he could concentrate. Which, judging by the bulging eyes, was probably not the case.

But then he got a leg over mine and flipped us.

Okay, then
, I thought grimly. It looked like the choking thing wasn’t providing enough of a distraction. Fortunately, he’d left me a hand free.

So I used it to break his nose.

“Damn it!” He actually looked surprised. “Stop fighting me!”

“Sure thing,” I grunted, struggling for a foothold. “I’ll just lie here and let you drain me.”

“I’m not draining you!”

“Then why do I feel like shit?”

He stared down at me, exasperation and what looked weirdly like concern shimmering in liquid blue eyes. “Because you took two bullets in the last hour?”

Oh, yeah.

For a second, dizziness and an odd sense of familiarity combined to mess with my head. I stared up at the stranger, trying to place him. It should have been easy; he wasn’t exactly the sort of guy you forgot.

The hair was actually more auburn than red, and there was an absurd amount of it for a man, flowing over his shoulders and my hands. It should have made him look girlie, but somehow it didn’t. Maybe because it framed a strong, aristocratic face—high cheekbones, sensuous lips, hard jawline—that managed to be arresting even covered in blood from the broken nose. A nose that was already twitching back into place, like the smear of red was sinking back into the pale perfection of his skin, leaving him looking as if he’d never been injured at all and—

Damn it!

This is how they operate
, I told myself harshly. They drain you until your brain doesn’t work so well, then turn on the innocence or beauty or charm, confusing the hell out of you until you black out and they finish the job. Only that so wasn’t happening this time.

Of course, that would be a lot easier to manage if I had a stake. Or a knife. Or anything remotely weapon-like, because hand-to-hand against this bastard was starting to look like a gesture in—

I paused, noticing the shackle dangling off my right wrist.

Oh, goodie.

“I’m trying to help you,” he rasped, somehow getting a hand under the chain before it decapitated him.

“Sure you are.” I grunted, really putting my back into it. “Next you’ll be telling me you’re my boyfriend, come to get me out of this.”

He burst out laughing, since clearly he was off his head.

Or maybe that was me, because now I was hearing voices.

“Status.”
The word rang in my ear as clearly as if someone were looking over my shoulder. My head whipped around, but the only occupants of the iron-barred cage I’d woken up in were me, the vamp and a desiccated rat.

“I have
…ugh…
located her.”

“Estimated extraction time?”

“That is…still being determined.”

“There is a problem?”

The vamp’s hand flailed out and grabbed one of the cage bars. I smashed my foot—the one in the steel-toed Cat—down on it. He cursed and let go.
“Yes, well…a few.”

“Show me.”

And suddenly things went from weird to super-ultra-weird as a picture flashed through my head as vivid as a movie. It was upside down and jiggling, but the best I could tell it showed some chick wearing a blood-splattered tank and a crazed expression. Her short dark hair was spiky with sweat, her face was livid with bruises
and her weird golden eyes were slitted with effort as she—

Oh. I guessed that was me.

Wow, I look like shit
, I thought, right before I noticed something else. I looped the slack of the chain around the bar behind me for leverage and—

Oh, yeah. That worked better.

“What the hell is she doing?”
That was someone new, a crabby voice with an English accent.

“With respect, Lord Marlowe,”
the vamp snapped,
“what does it look like?”

“And she is trying to remove your head because…?”

“She doesn’t recognize me. I believe drugs may have been involved. She—”

“Drugs have no effect on dhampirs.”

“I will be sure to tell her that, my lord
.
As soon as my vocal cords knit back together!”

“What about Lawrence?”
That was the first voice again.

“I found him at the dock. He is dead.”

“You are sure? He’s first level—”

“Quite sure.”
The vamp’s mental voice was dry. I got another flash—this time of a vampire, or what was left of one, the pieces arranged almost artistically on a patch of bloody concrete—and then it was gone.

Someone cursed. Maybe one of them, maybe me. I couldn’t tell anymore. The longer they talked, the more my head ached. By now waves of pain were stabbing my brain with every word, like needles through the eye.

“Where are you?”
the voice asked.
“We were tracking you, but lost the signal—”

“Because they took her into one of their labs.”

And suddenly I was in freaky visual number three, running through what looked like a time-lapse film of a city at night. For a couple of seconds, my brain took me on a crazy ride over mangled fences, under trash-strewn bridges and through a maze of alleyways that zipped by so fast, all the graffiti streamed together into one long, obscene snarl. It ended in what looked like a warehouse out of some dystopian nightmare, except
even postapocalyptic ruins don’t usually feature a bright orange hell-mouth swirling away in the middle of a wall.

“What is
that?” the English guy demanded.

“The other problem,”
the vamp rasped as the cage blinked into view again.

The transition left me dizzy and nauseous, and royally pissed off. Whatever kind of trick this was, it wasn’t going to work. I growled and got serious.

“That is why we have had difficulty finding their test sites,”
voice number one said.
“They’ve begun hiding them outside our world.”

“Yes,”
the vamp strangled out.
“It would appear that the Black Circle…is somewhat more inventive…than we had thought.”

“Are they folding space?”
the English guy asked. “
Or did you actually pass through to another—”

“
Do you know, my lord, somehow I haven’t had time to look!”

“Don’t take that tone with me when we’re trying to—”

“We will have operatives at your location in ten minutes,”
voice number one cut in smoothly. “
Attempt to contain the situation until then.”

“Under…stood.”

Great. The guy was like freaking Teflon; every time I thought I had a grip, he slithered out of it. He should have been dead a couple times over by now, but he didn’t even seem to be getting tired, while I was panting like a steam engine and sweating like a pig. And now he was about to have backup?

Of course, that might not matter, since I was going to be dead from an aneurysm soon if they didn’t
shut the hell up.

“And Louis-Cesare—be careful.”
That was voice number one again, sounding grim.
“I can control her fits, but not until she reenters our world. And the fact that she does not recognize you is a bad sign—”

“Oh, do you really think so?”

“Listen to me! The two halves of her nature do not communicate. Therefore the fact that she does not know
you may indicate that her vampire nature is perilously close to assuming control—”

“Yes, I have seen it before. I can handle—”

“You have
not
seen it before! You have seen it nearer the surface, perhaps, but still partly diluted by her human side, which tends to be—”

“Lord Mircea—”

“—dominant mentally. But when she perceives herself in mortal danger, her vampire half—”

“Lord Mircea!” The vamp had somehow managed to croak that out loud, but it didn’t help. The needle was an ice pick now, jabbing merrily around the inside of my skull. I made a sound between a snarl and a mewl, and smashed the vamp’s head into the floor again.

It didn’t help, either.

“—can assume full control and it is physically far stronger. It is also ruthless, cunning and
five hundred years old.
You must not—”

“What I must, my lord, is be able to concentrate!”

“Listen to him, you arrogant fool!”
the English guy broke in.
“He’s trying to tell you that nobody knows what a dhampir that old can do because they’re always put down before then! But if you’re not careful, you’re going to find out the hard—”

“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”
I screamed, unable to take it anymore. It was mental, because I didn’t have enough breath left for anything else. But it had an effect anyway. I got a flash of a couple dark-haired vamps sitting at a table; one winced as if in pain, while the other let out a curse and stumbled backward, knocking his chair over.

But the biggest reaction came from the vamp beside me. He went suddenly, rigidly still. I didn’t know if he was dead or just as freaked-out as I was, and right then I didn’t care. I just wanted out of there.

Fortunately, the door of the cage we were in was hanging half off its hinges, the bars twisted in ways iron wasn’t supposed to bend. I looped the chain around the vamp’s neck another time, and through the sturdiest bar I could find. Then I pulled it tight, smashed it shut and ran like hell.

I couldn’t see much; the windowless room was dim and there was a bunch of junk in the way—cargo crates, broken pieces of metal and machinery, and tarp-covered cages piled high and stacked like a maze. The only light came from a naked bulb swinging from a wire overhead, throwing leaping shadows against the walls. It would have been an accident waiting to happen even if I hadn’t been staggering about like an old drunk.

As it was, it took about five seconds to stab myself in the side with something, and to bark my shin on something else. Not that it mattered; even breathing sent burning signals shooting along my nerves, lighting up a constellation of oh-shit points. I grabbed the side of a cage, pulse pounding fiercely, nausea roiling in my gut, and wondered if the light was really fading in and out or if that was me.

And then I saw it.

As a door, it left something to be desired. Like everything, since it was just a dark rectangle set into a wall of peeling paint and rot. It would have looked perfect on one of those old B-movie sets, the kind with the dippy blonde edging slowly toward certain doom.

Only it looked like I was a brunette. And I’d already met the monster. And right now, I’d take it.

Or, you know, maybe not.

I pulled up abruptly after a couple seconds, but not because the vamp had caught me. That’s just how long it took to round the side of the cage. And to find myself in the devil’s own operating room.

The low light glinted off a rusty metal table sitting all alone in a cleared space near the door. It looked oddly like the trash heaps were trying to get away from it. I didn’t blame them.

It had a high lip, presumably to catch slippery organs, and leather restraints heavy enough to have held Frankenstein. He wasn’t on it at the moment, but there were weird stains on the restraints and around the drain underneath, and it reeked like a skunk dipped in sulfur. And if that wasn’t enough to make the point, there were saws and clamps and assorted nasty things piled on one
end. There were also more cages heaped around, many with clawlike gouges in the bars.

Oh, yeah. There were also some creatures.

It looked like whatever had been in the cages hadn’t been too successful at getting out. Because jars of their not-so-spare body parts lined the room in shelf after shelf of formaldehyded nightmares. Most were just dark squiggles against the glass, or pale globules of what-the-hell preserved by somebody who probably slept with the lights on. But a few…

A few were staring back.

Ooookay
, I thought, gawking at something that looked like an eye on a stalk. Dead things in jars were clearly a level seven on the creep-o-meter. But the operative word here was dead, and I didn’t think that something bobbing about in formaldehyde was exactly a huge—

The eye abruptly spun and looked at me.

And then the milky iris turned black as the pupil blew wide.

And then I don’t know what happened, because I and my suddenly full bladder were limping like mad for the door.

“Dory!” Somebody shouted a name behind me, but it didn’t mean anything. Not when my brain was busy doing a montage of scenes from the kind of movies they show at two a.m. And apparently, whoever I was, I liked old monster flicks way more than was healthy, because it had a lot of fodder.

“Damn it! Listen to me!” The voice came at the same moment that a hand latched onto my ankle. I was moving too fast to stop, not that I would have anyway—there are worse things than hitting the floor chin first. But it still hurt like a bitch, and my bitten tongue flooded my mouth with copper.

That was oddly appropriate, since a red haze had descended over my eyes, like maybe I’d cut my forehead, too. But it didn’t seem to interfere with my vision when I flipped over, jerked my foot back and then plowed it into the vamp’s pretty face. And broke his nose.

Again.

He cursed and I cackled, because it was funny. And because I was a little tense. Which wasn’t helped when I noticed the long white hand that was still wrapped around my ankle.

Well, shit.

The bastard gave a jerk, sliding me underneath him in a move so fast I barely realized what had happened. Until I looked up into the bloody face of death, swift and sure, glaring down at me. For a second, before I did the only thing I could.

And kneed death in the nuts.

Death, it turned out, knew a lot of French curse words. I was treated to most of them as we rolled around the floor, me trying to throw him off, him intent on draining me. And it looked like he was winning. At least, I assumed that was why the room kept trying to gray out at the edges, and why my attacks were batted aside like the antics of an overly energetic puppy.