She plucked it out of the air and stared into the two fly eyes, which put her whole face on one side of the screen. While there was no sound pickup on the device—which I’d suggest to Creede as an improvement—there was no mistaking what she said: “Hello, Celia.”
I dropped the remote as I felt a stabbing sensation in my chest. Not long ago, I’d had an exorcism done to sever my ties to a particular demon. It had left scars on my chest that looked like claw rips. At first I’d thought the scars were burning, but the feeling went deeper … like something had grabbed my heart and squeezed. Not good.
I’d known there was the possibility that the same greater demon might be behind this, but running into him so soon after my death and resurrection by doctors and priests was terrifying.
Part of me wanted to freeze and scream, but training and common sense overrode the impulse. Guards were running in our direction. By sheer instinct I pulled a boomer from a vest pocket and tossed it while I scooped up the remote. The boomer went off with an effect that was closer to a party popper than the deafening, blinding incapacitation that I’d become accustomed to. Damn. But it wasn’t the only thing in my arsenal. I tossed a mudder. Full of concentrated water, it created a three-foot-square patch of thick mud. The guards stumbled and fell to their knees, the ground literally stolen out from under them.
As Edgar began to pry the bars away from the concrete window frame, Jones pulled the pin on a military grenade and threw it at the wall, simultaneously casting a spell that silenced the explosion.
The barrier reacted to the explosion by sealing the breach, taking power from everwhere else in the system. I could feel the pressure against my body lighten and I could move almost normally.
My next boomer worked perfectly and the guards were down for the momentary count. I looked at the screen to see the possessed nurse flying around the room. Let’s hear it for ghostly tornadoes. I needed to wake Kevin and get him ready to go. Because none of us were going to be able to carry him once he was on the ground—we were all going to be watching our collective backs.
“Cover me, Jones!” I called, but because of the silence spell no sound came out of my mouth. So I tried the siren trick I’d learned on short notice while on the Isle of Serenity. I stared at the back of his head as he pushed air around, making it impossible for the guards to get off a shot at any of us. Jones, I thought. He flinched and turned his head slightly. I’m going to try to contact Kevin. Keep them off me. I won’t be able to see them coming when I’m concentrating.
He didn’t respond either verbally or in my mind, but he shifted position so he was directly between me and the guards.
It was very odd to have people moving and fighting in utter silence. Even the tornado upstairs was soundless. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t contact Vicki. Because while she was doing a great job keeping guards out of the room, she was likewise preventing Edgar from getting in. Frustrated, he was now on the ground, helping Jones keep the guards off me.
I concentrated on Kevin. Beaten, battered, and unable to protect himself. Yes, he was an ass, and yes, I was furious at him. But that didn’t mean I’d let some demon hag cut off his limbs. Kevin. C’mon, buddy. Hear me. Wake up.
There was a smooth, blank wall of quiet inside his head. This wasn’t just from being knocked unconscious. This took drugs and lots of them. Kevin. Wake up. Amy needs you.
Thankfully a werewolf metabolism is an amazing thing. The more I called his name, the thinner the wall in his head got. I don’t know how I could feel it, but I could.
Kev—ahhh! It was the scream that finally woke him. I tend to react unfavorably to bullet wounds. My whole body spun around when the bullet entered my shoulder and I found myself on the ground staring up at a lot more people than had been there when I’d started to contact Kevin. The pain was intense and caused a reaction I should have expected. The vamp inside totally came out and I leapt on my nearest enemy before I could stop myself.
But that tiny bit of me that was still human refused to slam fangs into the man’s neck, despite the scent of blood that filled the air.… Instead, I grabbed the rifle and ripped it from his hands and used it like a club across his jaw. He went down like a rock and lay still. The glowing red eyes I’d glimpsed before he fell told me that the nurse wasn’t the only possessed person here. I slid my blackened knife from its sheath and laid the flat of the blade on the man’s chest. Even unconscious, he screamed—silently. Hopefully I had just sent the demon back to hell where it belonged.
Sound returned just then and my ears were assaulted by screams, shouts, sirens, and gunfire. Louder than all that was a howl of pure rage and pain from above. As I put the knife back in the sheath, I looked up to see Kevin at the window, his hair whipping from Vicki’s storm. The guards looked up also and aimed their weapons in his direction.
No. They would not shoot him. That I could prevent. I leapt into the nearest guard just in time. The guard’s shot went into the cinder block a foot away from Kevin.
We went down in a tangle of limbs that made my shoulder erupt into intense pain. I struggled to keep from screaming a second time. Edgar jumped on the guard directly to my left before he could pull the trigger. He perched on the man like a spider, holding down each limb, hissing, fangs bared. I turned away just as Edgar’s head thrust downward and the man screamed.
A different movement caught my eye. Kevin had decided not to stick around long enough for anyone to get off another shot. He’d jumped from the window. A human might break his legs, hitting the ground from three stories up. But Kevin just landed in a crouch, his face contorted into a snarl of fury.
A hand grabbed my wrist and pulled. It was my bad arm, so I hissed in pain and reacted, my fist sizzling toward whoever was attached to the hand. Jones is nimble; I’ll give him that. He shifted his head so that my fist sailed past his ear.
“Time to go.” He raised his other hand and his eyes blazed with power.
Air pressed against my head until I thought it would explode, and then the world dissolved to white.
5
“Y’know, vampire healing isn’t your friend in a gunfight.” The voice, male and pure Jersey, brought me back to consciousness. My eyes popped open as I recognized the speaker. Gaetano, a medic who’d patched me up before, shook his head and cut deep into my shoulder with a scalpel. Thankfully I couldn’t feel anything other than pressure, which probably meant I’d been treated with a combination of morphine and a sedative spell.
“You healed right over the bullet. If I don’t get it out, it’ll sting every time you move your arm.”
“I’ll take healing over the alternative, thanks.” My tongue felt thick and unresponsive and it was impossible to keep my head straight. Good thing Gaetano was one of the good guys—or at least less bad than those who had shot me. Of course, I had been breaking out a prisoner, so maybe I was a bad guy and so was Gaetano. “By the way, are we the good guys or the bad guys?”
He smiled then and let out a snort. “Depends on the day, Graves. Today we were the good guys.” I remembered the glowing eyes of the nurse, who’d smiled with a saw in her hands, and agreed with a shudder. Gaetano’s hands pushed my shoulder down harder on the bed. The click of metal on metal said he’d probably reached the bullet. A weird sensation in my shoulder told me I was starting to metabolize the drugs. It was going to hurt soon, maybe before he finished. Maybe it would be better to concentrate on something else.