Even from the other side of the clearing, Ruger could see the man’s face clearly. “Crow,” he murmured. “That sneaky son of a bitch.” His voice held a trace of admiration and there was even a smile on his colorless lips.
Lois shrank back from the advancing wall of flames. Fire and smoke rose into the night and leapt from tree to tree. The steady night breeze and the dryness of the autumn plants and bushes stoked the fires into an inferno in just seconds. The white articulated arm whipped back and forth, shying away from the fire, and finally slithered back down into the mud of the swamp, safe from the flames. Sarah Wolfe lay over the spot where the arm had vanished, and her body shook and trembled with the palsy of shock.
Ruger ground his jagged teeth together and his smile of appreciation metamorphosed into a more predatory grin.
Lois clutched Ruger’s arm. “Come on, baby, let’s get out of here.”
“Oh, hell no!” snapped Ruger. “I want him so bad I can already taste it.”
Lois gave the fire a fearful look and then stared over to where Griswold’s arm had vanished into the mire. “To hell with this,” she said, and instantly turned and ran toward the only gap left in the towering ring of fire.
“Bitch!” Ruger called after her, but he wasn’t crushed by it. They were predators and predators did what they had to do to survive. Afterward he’d find her, and if he did horrible things to her to make her pay for running out, he knew it would only make her hotter for him.
Mike dodged a lunge by a vampire that had once been his gym teacher, Mr. Klinger. He spun away from a second grab and whirled in a slashing turn like a helicopter’s blades, and the top of Klinger’s head leapt a foot into the air. Others came at him and he cut and cut and cut. It was not pretty swordplay. It wasn’t something from the samurai movies Crow watched; it wasn’t dynamic like those Blade movies, or acrobatic like Buffy. It was raw and savage hack and slash, subpar for any martial arts class, but it had all the power of his fury and the speed that comes from need; and it was a weapon in the hands of a dhampyr, and that counted for a lot. Like the garlic in the guns, a weapon in the hands of a creature such as Mike delivered fatal cuts every time. It would have been very useful for him to know that, to understand that he did not need to be as precise with his cuts, but there was no way he could have known. Even the Bone Man didn’t know that, not that he could tell him if he did.
Mike cut and killed as if he had been born to it; his face was a mask of strife, his soul was lost in the total acceptance that this was what he was put on earth to do. And if he died doing it…then so what? There would be no one left alive to mourn his death. To some degree he’d always known that, but to die this way would at least mean something.
Then, in one of those moments that seemed designed by a God who is as perverse as he is vicious, Mike turned around, sword raised—and his mother stood not eight feet away. She was more beautiful than he’d ever seen her, pale and intense, smiling without any of the cowed or drunken shame that he’d always seen in her eyes. For a crazy moment, seeing her so alive, so in command of herself, lifted Mike’s heart, but that gladness was fractured at the core and as soon as his mother smiled her wicked smile, he felt his hopes shatter in his chest.
“Mom…” he said, holding the sword in one hand and starting to reach for her with his other.
For a moment—and maybe it was Mike’s breaking heart that played a trick on him, or maybe there was a single thread of humanity still sewn through the twisted fabric of what Lois Wingate had become—the ugliness of his mother’s smile wavered and the hungry light in her eyes dimmed. She started to say something…then stopped herself, her smile fading, and without attempting any attack she backed away from him and fled into the flickering black-and-yellow shadows.
He needed to stand there and deal with the grief; he needed to repaint his understanding of the world so that it matched this reality—but there were more vampires to fight, more killing to do, and so he turned away from the hole in his life where she had been and kept cutting.
Val struggled to her feet and aimed her shotgun at the nearest vampire, who dodged and then rushed her as she pumped in the next round. She aimed at the last moment and pulled the trigger. The hollow click was lost beneath the tumult, but Val felt the weight of it chunk down on her heart. The vampire bowled her over and they went down together. She tried to jam her forearm under its jaw, but it was far too strong, and inch by inch the snapping fangs came closer to her throat. The stink of the garlic slowed the monster, but its desire was murder, not feeding, so he began clawing at her throat with his nails. Abruptly he stopped and blood splashed Val’s face. Spitting the foulness of it out of her mouth, she shoved at the body and it fell away. The grinning head fell to one side and the body to the other.
Val looked up in stunned surprise and saw Mike standing over her, his sword blade trembling from the tension in his hands. He kicked her shotgun toward her and stood over her as she hastily reloaded. A vampire staggered drunkenly toward Mike, the look of fear and confusion on the creature’s pale face tightening into abject terror as he saw the long blood-smeared blade move in a silvery flash. Mike kicked aside the sagging corpse, his face hard and his eyes as cold and sharp as the razor edge of the sword.
Val rose behind him and looked around for Crow. She saw him chasing a trio of vampires with jets of gasoline. Then a shadowy figure slipped up behind Crow, and Val screamed, “RUGER!”
She began running, but a dozen vampires swarmed at her and Mike and suddenly all she could think about was fighting and killing.
Crow heard Val’s cry just as he felt someone behind him. He whirled around to bring the sprayer up, but Ruger was already too close. He caught Crow’s hand, ripped the plastic pistol grip out of his grasp, then backhanded Crow so hard and fast that it was just a blur. Crow spun down to the ground, the torch flying away, and his shotgun slipped from his shoulder.
“Come on, Kwai Chang,” Ruger taunted, “let’s try for round three here.”
Crow shrugged out of the tank straps. He made a play for his holstered pistol, but Ruger kicked it out of his hand and then short-kicked him under the chin so hard it turned the firelight around him to sparkling party lights. Hard hands caught Crow under the armpits and he felt himself pulled roughly to his feet. Through pinholes in his dancing vision he saw Ruger’s leering face, heard his whispering voice.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’m gonna enjoy this.” Ruger licked his lips and grinned.
“Fuck you,” Crow said and kneed him in the crotch, then thumbed him in the throat. That wiped the leer off the killer’s face and Crow iced that cake by hitting him in the face with a hard two-handed shove that sent him stumbling backward. Crow made a dive for his shotgun, which was lying in the dirt, but Ruger beat him to it; he shouldered Crow out of the way, snatching up the weapon, took the shotgun in both hands, and with a grunt of effort bent the barrel to a crooked forty-degree angle. He tossed the ruined weapon to Crow. “Go ahead, asshole, shoot me.”
This time Crow wasted no time on banter. He dropped the useless gun as he pivoted and kicked Ruger in the knee as hard as he could, the crack of bones audible even through the surrounding noise. Ruger cursed and dropped to his good knee. That gave Crow time to reach for his sword and he whipped it out in a fast draw that beat anything he’d ever managed, but Ruger grabbed the shotgun up and parried the blade. The man’s speed was unbelievable, faster by far than when they had first fought in Val’s front yard—and he was plenty fast then—and even faster than Ruger had been when they’d battled it out at the hospital. Both times Crow had tried to kill Ruger; both times he thought he’d succeeded. Now he was up against a Ruger who was pure monster and at the top of his powers. Crow watched in horror as Ruger rose to his feet, no trace of pain on his face; Crow could hear the bones snapping back into place in the killer’s leg.