In time, I only heard the ring of steel on steel, the thud of steel on flesh and bone, I only saw the contrails of blood catching the torchlight as they lashed the stone walls with a fresh wet embroidery of spatter.
The din, the heat, the motion… it was impossible to tell who was friend or foe, but I sensed Grizelle behind me, her long, lithe reach keeping enemies from reaching me even as I slashed and kicked and screamed my way forward, looking for Ric in this dungeon of chaos.
"Why? How? Quicksilver here?" I managed to shout.
She shrugged and elbowed an advancing mummy, then took it apart like a chicken dinner.
"He was on the boss's list."
Snow had somehow brought Quicksilver into this slaughter? As if it didn't matter if I lost my beloved dog too?
My weary sword arm lifted to cut down a pair of warriors, whose fallen forms erupted instantly in sizzling flames from the Inferno fighter bearing a flame-thrower behind me.
These creatures are not alive, I reminded myself again and again. These are undead predators and their zombie flunkies, no more than movie extras. These deaths aren't real, because the victims aren't alive.
But we are.
But maybe Ric still is.
Chapter Thirty-four
By now everything was happening in slow motion and my senses finally understood that the battle was winding down.
Apparently, as many Egyptian soldier vampires had been decapitated as possible, as many zombie mummies had been minced to papery remnants. Who could tell?
Whether Snow stood, or any of his allies beyond Grizelle I didn't know. Or care.
Where was Ric?
We'd fought our way into the absolute deepest, darkest depths of the Egyptian tomb maze beyond the river, the master vampire lair. I'd seen not a glimpse of Kephron and Kepherati, too noble to join the fight, probably.
And no Ric. And no Ric? Was he dead and buried already?
No. That made no sense. They'd want him in one form or the other, alive or dead. Perhaps they might use him better dead. Newly undead to raise the dead. Were we too late?
No!
But we were up against the far wall of the current dungeon.
I couldn't beat my way forward past a stone wall.
I stopped, straightened and lowered my sword point.
The dragon's roars were distant. There didn't seem to be anyone left to skewer, slash, burn, or make doubly dead.
Behind me, Grizelle growled softly. Hearing a woman growl like a tiger is unnerving. I knew she'd shifted to tiger form earlier, but back to woman as the battle waned. I knew she'd protected me on Snow's orders, and resented and begrudged Snow for that, but not for Ric's sake. He'd need me now as he never had before.
I felt Grizelle's heavy hand on my shoulder. She didn't much like me. Snow was her boss, her reason for being. He was too involved with me for her liking. But no six-inch-long tiger claws bit into my flesh, only inch-long supermodel fingernails.
And then I looked harder at the last wall.
Fallen bodies of all kinds mortal and immortal lay around us like effluvia coating a flooded floor.
Grizelle hissed behind me, an eerily human/feline sound. I heard Snow approach us. "Grizelle," he said without expression, sounding winded and weary. Snow weary? "What is it?"
There was silence. I felt I stood alone on an island.
And then the scene before my eyes took rational shape after the irrational jumble of battle when limbs flew and heads rolled and bizarre appendages twisted and broke off.
I viewed a mass of pale and dark shifting motion, of refuse and vermin devouring refuse. I saw a Dumpster from Hell disgorging its contents, leaving a swatch on the stone floor, and remembered the dead groupie behind the Inferno.
I took in iron cuffs bolted two feet from the floor. Empty.
I saw the verminous, devouring, shifting black blanket of bugs and the cloud of buzzing darting insects massing above them.
I discerned the barely visible oases of human flesh.
I roared like the tiger Grizelle was. The silver familiar melted from a breastplate into a thick chain in my hand that I wielded like a whip at the fist-size hovering insects.
They had bug-eyed evil faces with hypodermic-long stingers for nose and mouth. My whirling chain caught them in the pixie-size bodies and hurled them against the stone wall. They left fat trails of blood as their bloated forms disintegrated into cinders. Again and again they hit, smack, spilling blood.
Ric's blood.
Ric's lifeblood.
The roaring in my ears was stupefying, but vampire tsetse fly after vampire tsetse fly hit the wall. I hauled back until my arm would hardly lift again, until my bloody chain wrapped around an object behind me so solid it almost jerked me off my feet.
I looked behind, snarling like Grizelle. I saw Snow's black-leather forearm covered in a bloody spiral of metal. For a confused moment I thought the silver familiar had jumped over to him again.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Grizelle bend and spray a shower of white over the festering floor.
I lunged to stop her, but Snow took my neck in one hand. "It's the salt they kept here, for the leeches. Let her use it."
Leeches?
I watched. And saw. Ric's naked lower body was alive with shiny black slugs, massed over his genitals, twining his legs, his arms, while his bare upper body was a smallpox field of the vampire bugs still biting.
Salt crystals fell like snow on this horrific human landscape of torture and literal eating alive.
Grizelle's human face was cast-iron with fury, her teeth bared to reveal the tiger's formidable fangs. She'd been frozen in mid-shift, unable to release either side of her nature in the face of this travesty. The beast part would run ravening to tear apart the perpetrators, the human part had to undo the obscenity as much as possible.
I felt the same conflict. Kill and rend and revenge. Save and succor and mourn.
The leeches were falling aside, Ric's naked human form revealing the horror of every inch invaded and bloodied.
I released the chain, feeling it lighten and armor my wrist, and fell forward, upon him. His face was sagged to the right, revealing the site of the vampire bat bite of his long-distant Mexican desert boyhood. My imitating that moment had become an exciting but natural part of our sex play. With my nil experience, it seemed harmless.
Now the place was a gaping, ragged wound where vampire after vampire had suckled. A mortal wound. A day of this and I hadn't known.