I wished it was different. I wanted to be in love. He was worth it. Hell, I was worth it, too.
But it just wasn’t the way it was going to be, and deep down I think we both knew it.
“Richard,” I said, in my best commanding officer voice, “we do not have time for this. Take the cruiser and get us help, now. Go.”
He wasn’t used to taking orders, particularly; that’s what happens when you grow up in the richest, most powerful human family in Morganville. He still thought of me as a girl from the wrong side of town, not somebody who’d been to hell, kicked ass, and come home alive.
That was a mistake. He was starting to realize it, finally. And revise his attitude.
“Okay,” he said at last. “I’ll go. But you stay safe.”
I gave him a little smile, but it was my battle smile, without humor. “Always,” I said. I was a survivor. Hell, I’d survived worse than this. Supernatural horrors were bad, but they were nothing to the burning hatred and viciousness that humans could visit on each other. I hadn’t lived through segregation, but my dear, sweet, tough old Gramma Day had; she’d been born in the days when colored couldn’t eat in the same restaurants, dance in the same clubs, drink from the same fountains, or pee in the same toilets as whites. Humans were capable of a whole lot worse than vampires, in my experience.
Maybe they just inherited their viciousness from us.
The rain was letting up, but where it hit bare skin it burned like stings, or bites. Cannibal rain. I’d seen a lot of crap, but this was weird even for Morganville. As Richard headed for the cruiser, I resisted the urge to tell him to be careful. He was a Morganville native; he understood the rules. He was tough, deep down, too. He’d be all right.
I had a split second to wish I’d said it.
A sudden gush of water came off the top of the looming roof of the building, splatting down over Richard and in front of him, and in the next second it was forming arms that weren’t arms, a body that was more boneless worm than human form, and my brain refused to process what that was, that face—
I yelled and brought the shotgun up but Richard was right in front of it, held as a shield. It knew. It knew what it was doing.
It grinned at me, some horrible and incredibly wrong configuration of teeth and tongue and lips, and its eyes were melting and forming and bulging and I felt an utterly strange impulse to scream and hide my eyes, like a child, as if that would stop what was about to happen.
Then it enveloped Richard. Dragged him into its own body. The thick, heaving mass closed around him, and I heard him scream. Just once, before his mouth disappeared.
If I fired, I’d hurt the draug, but I’d kill Richard.
“Shoot it!” Captain Obvious was screaming at me. I recognized the voice, heard the buzz of the words, but I was completely focused on what was in front of me. “God, shoot it now!”
It won’t hurt him much, I told myself. They had Shane for hours, submerged in that tank. It can’t hurt him so much; it’s just trying to force me to shoot and kill Richard.
He was struggling inside it, like a bug caught in molasses.
The watery, sticky form of the draug was taking on a pinkish tint.
Do something!
I left Captain Obvious and his yelling, raced to the cruiser, and pulled open the back door. Claire was pounding on the window, reaching across Shane to do it. She was holding out a bag of white powder, and for an insane second I thought drugs, which was always a problem in any small town, but as I hesitated she screamed, “Throw it at the draug!”
I emptied the whole bag, flinging the contents at the creature.
The scream drilled into my head like a laser, and I dropped the shotgun and fell down, stunned, instinctively pulling into a fetal position and covering my ears, but that shriek plunged deeper and deeper into my head, whiting out every thought, every instinct except the purest, to hide.
And then it started to fade.
The rain stopped, as suddenly as the cutoff of a faucet. The puddles underneath me seemed to actually crawl, as if they were trying to get away, and I thought I was going insane, again, as I flopped over on my back and saw the silvery streams of drops going up into the air against the law of gravity, shimmering and weirdly, horribly beautiful in their sinuous curves.
The clouds were smaller overhead, I realized. They’d risked a lot to do this, and it had cost them. This was dry country, arid and unforgiving, and water got trapped quickly in the loose, sandy soil. Not all the draug’s—cells? whatever it was—could survive this process of rain and reclamation.
I was just getting to my feet when I caught sight of Captain Obvious, staggering to his feet. He was cradling his badly broken arm close to him, but he’d picked up a rifle from the wreckage of the truck.
I looked where he was aiming.
The draug was—I didn’t know what to call it. Misshapen, because it had tried to flee back into liquid form, but frozen into something that was misty, gelatinous, and shot through with thick black lines like veins. It was horrifying, and inside it, Richard was still trapped.
“No!” I screamed, and grabbed for my shotgun.
I wasn’t fast enough.
Captain Obvious fired twice, directly into the dead, rubbery body of the draug. His eyes were wild and crazy, driven insane by the shriek and the utter wrongness of what we’d seen, and I understood that, I understood the impulse to smash that evil, horrific shape into bits.
But Richard was inside it.
I somehow managed not to shoot Captain Obvious. I don’t remember moving, but suddenly I was standing over him, and I dimly remember clubbing him with the heavy stock of the shotgun in my hands. He was down again, senseless. I resisted the urge to kick him in the broken arm.
Michael Glass had gotten out of his side of the cruiser and was standing there, pale and still. He was staring at me as if he’d never seen me before. Well, he hadn’t. Not like this. Not on full auto.
I tossed him my shotgun on the run, and he caught it, and then I was plunging both hands deep into that awful, cold, thick substance that had been the draug.
Elbow-deep.
I got hold of one of Richard’s arms and pulled him out. It was like hauling someone out of deep, heavy mud; it took every ounce of my strength and leverage to wrestle his hand free, then his elbow, then his shoulder—and then the draug’s dead, solidified form slumped away from him as gravity dragged its boneless body down, and he came completely loose.
He was covered in wet, stinking clumps of black matter. Whatever the powder had done to the draug, it had certainly killed it, because that was the smell of dead things rotting on beaches.
Richard pulled in a deep, bubbling gasp and opened his eyes. His skin was sunburn-red, stung all over from the draug’s grip, and there were red flecks of hemorrhage in the whites of his eyes. He’d almost suffocated.
One of the bullets Captain Obvious had fired had hit him in the side, probably in the liver; that was bad, but the one that had hit him square in the chest was worse. The wound in front was pumping out bright red arterial blood, and the second I saw it a queer sense of calm settled over me. I knew that sensation. It was my emotions shutting down to protect me from what was coming.
I lowered Richard to the damp pavement and tried putting pressure on the wound, but it was useless. That was a major arterial tear, too close to his heart. I packed the hole with wadded-up ripped pieces of his shirt, but that couldn’t stop it. I was only keeping the blood inside, where it would fill up his chest cavity and kill him from suffocation if his heart didn’t stop first.