Bloodshifted (Edie Spence 5)

As if sensing my worries, they clucked like a mother hen. “You would be surprised how quickly we can move in the dark. Swear to return for us, and we will start.”

“Done.” I stared into the drawer I had open. How many times had I been told that blood was power? I reached in and grabbed a full set of anything I might need to get some extra blood for myself. Then I stepped over Natasha’s form and turned off the light. “Gemellus, get into the hall.”

* * *

The chill of the Shadows rolled down my neck, down my back, buttock, and thigh, like a cold grape; then it fell away from me and I stepped into the dimly lit hallway. I closed the door behind myself so that they could work in complete darkness.

“So you trust them, but you don’t trust me?” Gemellus asked.

“I’ve known them longer.”

Gemellus snorted. Then his face became serious and his hands curled into fists at his side. “I need to feed so that I can fight Raven.”

“I know.” I didn’t want to run upstairs into seventy hungry new vampires—but I didn’t want to stay trapped in the catacombs like a rat, either.

Which way is safest, baby? I wished I knew.

“You will let me feed, won’t you?” Gemellus pressed.

“Yes,” I said, exasperated. Raven knew all the passageways down here. All these rooms could be barricaded or overwhelmed; there were no good defensible places, which was probably the point—and Jackson had already proved the uselessness of locks.

I was considering running to the garage when I heard the sound of footsteps running down the hallway at full speed. Gemellus grabbed me and wrenched me back, putting me against the wall behind him.

It was one of the bouncers Jackson had introduced me to—only it wasn’t him anymore. I’d seen the bloodlust of the newly born before, and he was the textbook definition of it, twice as big as Gemellus and crazy-eyed. He hurled himself at Gemellus, trying to take the older vampire to the ground.

But Gemellus was faster, even with his limp. He feinted back, making the other man overstep himself, and Gemellus caught his hair with his hand and yanked his head down hard against his naked knee. For a second I was worried he was going to rip the man’s scalp off—and then there came the sounds of more footsteps running down the hall.

“May I?” Gemellus asked while the new vampire was concussed. I nodded in wild fear. Gemellus grinned evilly. Fangs came out and he bit into the man’s neck. He didn’t even look for the carotid, he just bit through it, windpipe and all. He spit the cartilage on the ground as the man dusted. The only thing left of him was the dust powdering the bloodstain on Gemellus’s chest. The bouncer had had cargo pants on—pockets galore. I shook them free of dust before pulling them on.

“May I?” Gemellus requested again. I glanced up—another newborn was on the way. Gemellus met this new one head-on, running into him at speed, bowling him down to pull both his arms off.

“Yes!” I jumped into the pants and pulled them up, buckling them around my waist. I shoved needles into one pocket, and the test tubes into the other.

Gemellus shouted, “May I?” from twenty feet farther up the hall.

“Yes!” I called back, and then heard him laugh again, like he’d laughed when he was first freed. I heard the wrenching sound of breaking bone; by the time I looked up again, Gemellus was covered in another vampire’s particulate mist.

A third one ran in, then a fourth—Gemellus had the advantage because the hall was narrow, and their hunger made them too stupid not to get in one another’s way. And a fifth one appeared behind them. Maybe by the time Anna got here there’d only be five vampires left.

Gemellus spun away from one and then pinned him against the wall, reaching in with both his hands underneath his rib cage to pop it out and open like a reluctant DVD case.

“Yes!” I shouted at him before he could ask, and I watched him bury his face into the screaming vampire’s heart. “You can kill everyone in the hallway but me!”

As he worked it was harder to see him move and react. I knelt down to pull a pair of pants off a dusted corpse for him to wear, but he was doing just fine nakedly. I got flashes of the new vampires coming at him. Club clothes, brown or blond hair, tanning-salon skin—and hungry hissing teeth. Each of them burst like an ash-filled balloon as Gemellus struck out with his hands and feet, broke and twisted them, crushed them against the wall, and in one inspired move used one’s torn-off arm to impale another before both fell to dust.

Gemellus had missed out on centuries of bloodlust, and now he seemed to be trying to catch up, all the while biting, feeding, filling up, getting stronger. I found myself becoming profoundly glad he was on my side—and worried that I hadn’t made him swear enough. The carnage was mesmerizing, and the dark part of me wanted to join in. I looked away to ignore it just when I saw a familiar face in the throng.

“Not him!” I raced up, dragging pants along. “Not him!”

Gemellus paused, a few seconds away from killing Jackson—and Jackson was there holding a lighter out.

Gritty dust fell in lazy circles from all the vampires Gemellus had just killed. Ten or eleven—I’d lost count. My eyes wept and I’d inhaled enough vampire dust to practically count as one. The still-naked Gemellus was slicked with the stuff; he looked like a golem.

“Who is he to you?” Gemellus asked.

I looked at Jackson, his hand still out, thumb upon the lighter’s striker. Gemellus didn’t know what it was that Jackson held, but I did.

And if he knew just who Jackson was to him, he’d probably kill him.

Jackson looked from Gemellus to me and grunted. “Where’s Lars?”

“Gone.”

“I didn’t think you were like that,” he said, still holding the lighter up.

“And I didn’t think you were like that. With Natasha.” There was a backpack across his back, I had no doubt the computer was in it.

“Just because I don’t know how it works doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s valuable.”

“May I?” Gemellus asked, leaning in.

There was a chance Jackson didn’t know what he’d done. Raven had ordered Wolf to order Jackson, and it’d been a change from killing people, drilling bone out of a vampire’s dusty daytime corpse. But I could see him putting two and two together as fear lifted his face.

I shook my head, begging him not to say anything—

“It’s you,” Jackson whispered.

“We’ve met before?” Gemellus said, taking two impossibly fast steps closer, while Jackson held the lighter out like a cross. “You…,” he said in recognition, his voice sinking.

“Gemellus, stop!” I shouted, and he did so.

Jackson’s eyes flickered from Gemellus to

me. “Don’t let him kill me, Edie. I was just following orders—I didn’t know—she never told me what they were doing—I needed proof to take back to House Grey—”

I swallowed, throat suddenly dry.

He stopped talking and his jaw clenched. “You’re not like this. I know you.”

“You should ask Lars what I’m like.” Cold black tar welled up inside. It would be so easy to sic Gemellus on him now; I wouldn’t even have to bloody my own hands.

Gemellus lifted his lips in anticipation, showing fangs that had taken thousands of lives. The tip of my tongue went to my newly sharp canines involuntarily, and I tried to imagine drinking blood, hot, salty, sweet.

Never, baby. Not if I can help it. “The computer for your life.”

Jackson made a strangled noise. “I have to have something to show for all this—”

“You’ll be alive. That’ll have to be enough.” There was enough dust in the hallway that if Jackson turned the lighter on we’d all go up. He had to see that.

“Then what happens to me?” he shouted. “If I can’t give this to House Grey, and Wolf dies—the past forty years I’ve put into this have been for nothing? I’m just cast back out into the world again? I don’t know what it’s like out there anymore—I can’t just walk back out into it and be human, pretend like none of this ever happened to me.”

“I’m sorry, Jackson. It’s the computer, or your life,” I said. Gemellus growled and leaned in. Jackson’s eyes flickered over Gemellus’s shoulder at me.

“I mean it. I swear. Give me the computer—and the lighter—and I won’t let him kill you.”

Gemellus howled something obscene in a language I didn’t know.

“Hold!” I shouted back at him, and he held. Jackson watched our exchange, and he swallowed.

“You swear it on the life of your child?” Jackson said.

“I do.”

Jackson hesitated, then slunk to the far side of the hallway, coming around Gemellus—who turned as he did so to keep him always in sight.

“Lighter. Then computer. Then you go and take the fastest car you can and get the hell away from here.”