“Sword,” she said, nodding at the broadsword on the wall next to me. I tossed it to her and grabbed the katana for myself. I ran to join her by the door as we heard movement in the hallway. “You take the ugly one,” she whispered.
I was about to question her on which one was the ugly one when I noticed the smile creasing her lips. “Did you just make a joke?”
“It seemed the appropriate time.”
The glass window to the hallway exploded behind me and I turned to see Blondie enter through it, glass filling the air around me as a rain of broken shards was came down sideways. I held up an arm to protect my face and spun backward to avoid the worst of it. In that moment, I heard the door slam open and my mother spring to action against the second vamp. I heard a great exhalation of breath from her as she swung her sword and I heard it hit flesh. After that I was done listening because the first vampire was in front of me and I had a fight of my own to deal with.
I raised my blade as he feinted toward me, catching him on the wrist and opening it. Whether he noticed or not was open to debate, because he didn’t react at all, pushing hard against the edge of the blade and sending it back at me, knocking me off balance as he did so. I came up and got a good look at his jagged teeth, formed into a smile under blond hair that looked bleached, and a face that was so lacking in humanity it made Wolfe look like a compassionate school guidance counselor by comparison. He pursued me and I tried to step back, but off-balance as I was, it turned into a hop as I tried to buy time.
It worked enough to let me get my footing, but he was still coming, so I poked at him, at the chest, and the tip of my sword bit into his dark shirt and the flesh beneath. I turned it into a hard, ramming motion that again elicited no reaction, but I pushed and he stumbled back from the force, as though I had shoved him with my hand instead of a pointed blade. Still, he made no noise; the only sound in the room was my breathing and my mother’s, somewhere behind me.
I took the attack to him, swinging my sword as he used his hands to block, that soulless grin still exposing his teeth. Every strike opened his flesh, but no blood dripped out, and I watched as the skin seemed to pucker and bind back together before my eyes. I made a dance out of my sword, practicing a kata of my own creation, a free-flow of motion, the sword spinning in my hands. I went low, hacking at the legs, wondering if I cut the muscles if it’d slow his motion. I buried a strike in his knee and he wobbled before recovering and slicing me across the shoulder with a slash of claws that caused the fabric of my shirt to rip at the sleeve.
I whirled in a circle and came at him low again, catching him in a perfect strike across the back of the knee that cut his leg out from under him – not literally, but the force of my blow was so great that when the blade had bitten in, it reached the bone. When the momentum of my attack had nowhere else to go it pulled his leg from the ground as though I had performed a leg sweep.
The vampire stumbled, now on one leg. Sensing his predicament, I launched into a side kick that would have killed a human, hitting him in the head with it. As it was, the vampire lost his footing and hit the far wall, shattering one of the mirrors and landing on his face.
I leapt to exploit the advantage and landed on his back, driving my sword into it. I felt the impact up my arms as I drove home my blow, the tip of the blade striking and sticking against his ribs, its momentum halted. The shock of the attack caused him to whiplash and it drove his head into the mat, from which it rebounded up, a jarring motion of the spine that would have killed a normal person by breaking their neck.
His neck.
I heard the voices whisper in my head, Gavrikov and Wolfe, giving me the answer I sought. It took me only a moment to grasp their meaning and I dropped to my knees, straddling the vamp’s back as I grabbed the dulled edge of my blade and slid the sharp edge against his throat and pulled.
The blade cut through the tissue without effort, then stopped, halted by a spine that was strong, as though it was steel. His hands came up and seized mine, trying to stop them, but he had no leverage. I pulled, and felt the blade stir another centimeter, then another, ignoring the lancing pain in my hands as he clawed at them, tearing through my gloves and into my skin, ripping at my sleeves and my wrists.
I felt the last tug cut through and the hands tearing at me went limp as the sword burst free from the back of the vampire’s neck. I fell onto the mat as something heavy that wore a patch of blond hair bounced off my chest. I batted it away with a free hand. Yuck. I scrambled to my feet to see Mom and the raven-haired vampire locked in battle. She was giving him about eight different kinds of hell and he was giving it right back. I angled myself to come up from behind him as she was falling back from a wave of his attacks. I struck as he was moving forward, a hard swing to the back of his neck that sent him to the floor face-first. I followed up with a repeat of what I’d done to the other vampire.
Mother stood back and watched as I pulled, again, hands forcing the blade against his throat until I finished and fell backward again, similar to the last time, this time not bothering to get up immediately. I lay on my back, breathing hard from the exertion of what I’d just done. I saw a hand reach down. I looked up and took it, and Mother helped me to my feet. “Nice work,” she said, looking at the two separate bodies that lay on the mats. “I ran across a vampire a long time ago, when I was working with the Agency.” She frowned. “Had to use a flamethrower to put that one down.”
“Yeah, I used a flaming club to take it to these two the last time I fought them,” I said, peeling the shredded gloves off my hands to examine the damage they’d done to my skin. The gouging wounds left by their claws were mostly superficial, but they still stung. “Tough bastards, though.”
“Yeah,” she said, and nodded. “We should get going.”
I sighed. “I don’t want to go with you.”
I saw a veil slide down behind her eyes, whatever momentary pride she was feeling evaporated. “We’re leaving. Together. You are coming with me.”
I felt something like steel run down the length of my spine and I pushed my chest out as I stood up straight. The air was heavy in the room, like summer humidity was creeping in from the window we’d broken out front. “No, I’m not.”
“You will,” she said again, her voice rising, “and—” Her hand came up and then she jerked, twitching hard and falling to her knees. As she dropped, I saw two little threads trailing off her back and leading to someone standing behind her, in the shadows, a taser extended from a shadowy hand.
He stepped into the light the moon cast across the floor from the windows, and I recognized his face. “Sorry to interrupt this moment of mother-daughter bonding,” Michael Mormont said with a malicious grin, “but I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that the two of you aren’t going to be going your own way.” His mouth twisted, and his eyes slipped into the shadow as his grin became more perverse. “You’ll both be coming with me.”
Chapter 22
One Year Ago
I did get up off the basement floor, eventually. I went upstairs and showered, a long one that lasted over an hour. I scrubbed myself clean of the accumulation of waste and stink that I had gathered in the time I’d spent in the box. After that, I sat down in the tub and let the hot water run over me, let it tap at my skin, on my head, felt the warmth as it washed over me.