Hex Appeal (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 4.60)

I signed to Ellinghaus, making a spinning motion with one hand.

He got it and hit the siren.

Oh, yeah, that was good, annoyingly good. Combined with the shots I’d fired, the noise finally got the attention of the vamp guard at the inside gate. He came running at double speed around the main building.

Soon as he saw her—there’s a reason for the gray sweats on newbies—he concluded she needed to be disarmed and restrained. That was fairly impossible with an enemy who can go incorporeal and levitate, even filter through brick walls if need be.

She tried to take him out with pistol fire. He had the same advantage of being able to fade and return. While she might have gotten others by surprise, he was trained for just this kind of fight.

They went at each other like tigers in a tornado, much of it too fast to follow as they faded in and out, sweeping over the parking lot, trading shots and blows. She was no newbie, that was evident. He’d need an edge. We all did. I slipped off the machine gun and scrounged in the locker and seconds later left the relative safety of the bus.

Ellinghaus croaked something, but the music and siren blotted it out. Neither the guard nor Kellie Ann could hear me; I hoped they’d be too involved with each other until I got close enough.

I cut loose with the oversized toxic green water gun, soaking her (and the guard when I missed) with holy water. Neither reacted to it, except for some cursing from the spray. Their immunity didn’t matter, though. I dropped the empty gun and pulled out a Taser. I figured the salt in the holy water would add to the impact of its shock.

I’m too much of an optimist. It screws me over every time. Just as I made my range, Kellie Ann pulled a blurringly fast maneuver and caught the guard with a bullet the instant he went solid to attack. I couldn’t tell if it was wood, but he dropped and stopped moving.

Before I took another step, she was behind me, one strong arm around my neck, pulling me up and back. She slapped the Taser away; I’d had no chance from the start, just adrenaline and high hopes. I froze for an instant, feeling my ear tickle as she whispered into it to put me under again, but I couldn’t hear over the siren and Henry Mancini’s frenzied bass and horns. As she dragged me backward, heading toward the inside gate, I glimpsed Ellinghaus emerging unsteadily from the ambulance. With metal and wood in him, he’d never be able to vanish. The stuff short-circuited things. She’d kill him for sure.

Give him an edge, then.

She’d gotten the Taser, but missed the stun-gun flashlight in my pocket.

When I hit her with the business end, there was a hellish crack and zap as the voltage slammed through her. It couldn’t pass to me because of the limited distance between the contact poles, but she convulsed, muscles jumping, and fell forward.

Vamps are a lot heavier than you’d think. Something to do with changes to their muscle and bone density. She knocked the breath out of me as we slammed flat against the concrete.

It was a bitch, but worth it if it stopped her.

I lay helpless as her body bunched and twitched, her bare nails gouging the pavement like iron hooks.

Then she stubbornly pushed off, rolled to her feet, and staggered in an unsteady circle. If she tried to vanish, it didn’t work. The jolt was as good as a bullet for disrupting that ability.

She crouched and flipped me over, snarling. Her fangs were out. I was to be first-aid fodder.

Then Ellinghaus suddenly loomed over us, his prized machine gun cradled in his arms. Damn, he owned it. He lashed out with a sideways martial arts kick that knocked her clean off me. She landed yards away but managed to get upright, her feet under her for a sprint.

He cut loose, the gun in full-auto mode, firing in short, controlled bursts.

I couldn’t see much from my angle. Just as well.

Three rounds at a time he emptied the drum. The brass rained, and the smell of cordite and hot metal filled the air.

Out of bullets, but not out of fight, Ellinghaus lunged forward, and I missed whatever came next, for which I was grateful.

When he came back into view, there was a

lot more blood on him.

He rolled his head a little to work kinks from his neck and shoulders, then said, “That disagreeable person is no longer a problem, Miss Goldfarb.”

The ambulance siren wailed and whooped; Peter Gunn ended, and the next track began.

Aretha Franklin told the whole compound about R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

* * *

The rest of the bad guys had breached the outer gate after wounding Judy and forcing Rosa to take it down, but the inner gate stalled them. They couldn’t get Rosa to open it because it was a different spell sequence. She just didn’t know the right chant. They shoved her out of the way, forced to wait for Kellie Ann, their own special Trojan horse, to complete her part of the invasion.