Then I regretted the deep breaths as, without the focus of needing to kill, the full stink of rotting blood and flesh in the room struck home and I gagged against it. Careful to breathe shallowly, I fled the room, forcing myself to move on to the next closed door.
Two more vampires died silently, in their sleep. The fourth room was much cleaner than the first three, no scattered blood, no bodies. The bed had been made up neatly around the figure sleeping in it, and the closet had been cleaned out and a number of dry-cleaning bags containing suits and what might have been black robes had been hung up in it.
I crossed to the bed and started to place the knife against the vampire’s throat when his eyes flicked open and he grabbed for the knife just as it touched his skin. Panicked, I tried to level the gun at him, but he swiftly knocked it out of my hand.
Quickly, I grabbed the knife with both hands and started forcing it toward him. With a snarl, he tried to punch me, only to allow the knife to slip forward and gouge his half-dead flesh. He jerked sideways, half-opening his throat and falling out of the bed.
He rolled to his feet and we faced each other across the bed. I held the knife, and he opened his mouth to shout for help.
To both of our surprise, all that emerged was a hoarse croak. I’d managed to sever his windpipe and vocal cords, rendering him unable to make any real noise. Where a human would have been spurting blood, however, he only oozed a thick brown liquid it took me a moment to realize was half-congealed blood. An injury that would have been quickly if not instantly fatal to many inhumans, let alone humans, was a mild inconvenience.
He snarled soundlessly at me and dove for the closet. I met him halfway there, trying to slash at his throat with the knife. He parried the blow and punched me in the stomach, sending me stumbling back a few paces as he reached the closet and produced what he was looking for: a sawed-off pump-action shotgun.
I didn’t even bother going for my gun—I didn’t have time. By the time he’d finished pumping the first round into the chamber, I was in his face, stabbing down into his right arm. Tendons snapped and bone cracked under the strike, and the pistol grip of the shotgun slipped from his nerveless fingers.
His other hand was still intact, though, and he used it to slam the gun broadside on into my face. I felt my nose break and was shoved back a step. I blinked away stars, and then blinked again when I saw what he was doing.
The vampire’s left hand still held the shotgun by its pump, but the pistol grip was now lifting again—held in a living simulacrum of a hand, formed from the brown ooze of the vampire’s blood. I was fighting a blood mage.
For a moment, I was staring down the barrel of a shotgun, convinced I was going to die. Then fear and anger hit me, and I remembered fire. The same whip of flame I’d first conjured when fighting Laurie suddenly flashed into existence in my hand and I lashed out.
The whip wrapped around his left hand, and I pulled. Just as the gun was about to fire, I tore off the vampire’s functioning hand with a tendril of flame, and he opened his mouth in a hoarse, creepily quiet scream of pain as the shotgun collapsed to the ground, his attention broken.
Taking advantage of his distraction, I wrapped the tendril around his neck. The vampire mage had enough time to realize what was about to happen and start to gesture his useless right hand at me to conjure some form of blood magic.
Then I burnt the fucker’s head off.
I HELD my breath for a moment as the vampiric blood mage’s body crumpled to the floor, half-expecting a horde of angry vampires, roused by our desperate struggle, to come charging through the door guns blazing.
When said horde failed to materialize, I allowed myself to slowly begin to breathe again, and picked up my knife and submachine gun. I had two more rooms to check before I reached the end of the floor, and I hoped that the others were just normal vampires. Because that wasn’t a contradiction in terms.
I had just slipped the door to the next room open when everything went to hell. To my ears, the sound of a suppressed submachine gun might as well be cracking thunder, and three of them opened up simultaneously beneath me.
Vampiric hearing wasn’t as good as mine, but it was good enough that the gunfire clearly woke up the vampire in the room I was entering. I never gave him a chance to do more than come to his feet, raising the Micro Uzi and putting a neat burst into his head. Even vampires die when they don’t have a head anymore.
I kicked the next door open, not bothering with subtlety. Kicking hinges out hurts, but it’s more effective than trying to break through the door directly. The cracking sound of a pistol firing echoed through the hotel as a heavy bullet barely missed me.
Diving through the door, I rolled under a second bullet and came to my feet to find two vampires in the room. Both were naked. The girl was rushing for the closet, presumably for some kind of weapon, while the man was bringing a very large revolver, a Dirty Harry gun, to bear on me as he fired again.
I threw my knife first, catching the female vampire in the leg as I jumped sideways to avoid a fourth bullet. I fired back while ducking under the bed, not so much intending to hit anyone as to keep the gunman down.
Two more bullets ripped into the bed, tearing apart the mattress and shattering the cheap wooden frame. That was six bullets, though, and revolvers were called six-shooters for a reason.
I leapt over the bed, one hand on the remnants of the frame, and landed in a perfect two-handed shooter’s stance. My second burst was not intended to keep anyone down, and three rounds slammed into the girl’s chest with bloody precision. For a moment, I thought I hadn’t done anything, as the congealed black goo that was vampire blood began to ooze from the holes—and then her blood caught fire and the vampire screamed for a moment.
I knew that the bullets had been coated in garlic oil. I knew garlic was bad for vampires. I hadn’t known that concentrated garlic oil ignited the blood of a living vampire like a match to gasoline. The girl’s body burned up from the inside out, and I watched in horrified surprise.
Which almost killed me, as the other vampire slammed a single heavy cartridge into the cylinder and pointed the gun at me. At this range, with no cover, he couldn’t possibly miss. If he hit me somewhere non-vital, I’d heal, but I’d be out of this fight. If I was lucky, he’d hit me somewhere really non-vital.
I didn’t feel lucky, and the barrel of the gun was huge. And then it wasn’t there anymore, as a half-seen, half-sensed, telekinetic blow smashed the vampire’s spine to pieces. The shattered corpse collapsed, and Talus stood behind him. The noble’s hand still glowed to my eyes with the force he’d used to destroy the vampire.
Gunfire continued to echo downstairs, and the suppressed submachine guns I knew were our companions were now being interspersed with the tearing sound of very real and very un-suppressed automatic weapons.
“Let’s go,” Talus ordered, and I followed him out.
The stairs at the rear of the hotel echoed with the gunfight going on below. With the top floor clear of vampires, Talus and I went down the stairs as quietly as we could, doing our best to work out where the fight was.
Halfway down the stairs, I gagged as a draft carried a suddenly intense smell of formaldehyde and rot up the stairwell. Talus and I exchanged questioning glances and he shrugged, clearly not having any more idea than I did.
The stairs exited into what had once been the hotel’s bar but now was the source of the smell of preserved rot. The remaining tables and chairs had been haphazardly tossed aside, clearing space for several neat rows of bodies. All of the bodies showed the telltale neck wounds of being killed by vampires, and all had been, from the smell, soaked in some kind of preservative. Three rows of ten bodies filed the room, and Talus looked at them with horror on his face.