Max fired his own gun, taking the top off Belenos’s head.
The king fell to the ground, collapsing onto his right side. Talia dropped to her knees, blood oozing from her side. She pulled out the boot knife, feeling the ooze turn to a steady flow. Belenos was stirring. She groped for the Browning he had dropped, working by touch.
Horribly, with brains and blood oozing down his face, the king was sitting up.
Talia’s brain short-circuited. Vision was no more than blobs of color. There was a noise in her head like the steady screech of a car accident, waiting for the crash. “Stand back, Max.”
She’d found the Browning. She raised it, knowing she was a good shot. At this range, an idiot couldn’t miss.
She started firing. A spray of lukewarm blood caught her face and arms, blowback. It didn’t stop her. She kept firing.
And firing until there was nothing left but the click of the gun.
Belenos had no head left.
Max was gone.
And then the world began to fade to black.
Chapter 31
When she came to, Talia couldn’t figure out what she needed most: rest, water, blood, medication, or a therapist.
A bath. She pulled herself upright. Her side twinged where Belenos had stuck her with the knife, but she’d stopped bleeding.
Belenos.
The gruesome ruin of his body lay there, an arm’s reach away. He was melting, dissolving into a dusty slime as vampires did when they died for the second time. She’d well and truly killed him, a vampire monarch. Her sire. Her persecutor. Her killer.
She’d been a Hunter. She’d killed before. By rights, she should have felt remorse, jubilation, satisfaction, something—but no. Maybe those were emotions for later. Maybe this was too personal, too deep for ordinary feelings.
Right now it was more like ticking a mental check box. Belenos needed killing. No question. Tick. Done that.
Suddenly, she turned and threw up a spatter of liquid, missing herself but not missing the decaying splodge that had been his feet. Her body was experiencing something, even if her mind had checked out.
I have to get out of here. Her senses were coming back, and the smell of him was staggering.
Talia got to her feet, memories returning in a jumble. Michelle, finally avenged. Max, who had come to save his sister but had been too afraid to stay. Afraid of Dad.
Belenos was a crazy, dangerous sonofabitch, but in some ways was a stand-in for the real villain of this piece. Her father—the great Mikhail Rostov—was the one who’d given his daughter her real wounds. Without him, Belenos would never have had a chance to touch her.
And he was out there with the rest of the Hunters, killing her friends.
Lore. She knew he could take care of himself, but he was facing magic and Hunters. I have to help him.
I have to stop my father.
At the thought of that confrontation, Talia’s hands began to shake. How long had she been unconscious? She stole another glance at Belenos. Couldn’t have been too long. Vampires decomposed quickly, and there were still bits of him left.
She picked up his weapons, pulling the long knife from the remains of his chest. Without looking back, she left her prison and her jailer behind.
To find the first man who’d hurt her.
Talia walked for a while, listening to the sounds of battle around her, but not seeing anyone until she had gone some distance south. What was going on? What was it Belenos had said? Plans have changed. We have to be prepared to move in a hurry.
If he was packing up and killing the captives, he and the Hunters were losing. The first feelings of satisfaction began to warm her.
It was then she saw a party of four moving a little way ahead. Gun drawn and held in both hands, she ran forward as silently as she could. It was a woman and three men. When one of the men turned to speak to the female, she recognized Joe’s profile. By the height and shaggy look of the other two men, she was sure they were hellhounds in human form.
“Joe! Errata!”
They turned, Errata’s eyes flared with surprise. “Talia! Where were you? What happened to you?”
Talia looked down, realizing that she was splattered with Belenos’s blood. “I got sick of people trying to lock me up.”
Joe and Errata exchanged a wide-eyed look. “We’re one of the teams looking for prisoners,” Joe said. “Now we know where you are, but Baines is still missing.”
“He’s down here somewhere.” Talia accepted a bottle of water from Errata. “Somewhere where the wooden flooring has collapsed.”
While she finished the bottle of water—it wasn’t blood, but she was badly dehydrated—Talia told them about what Belenos had shown her in his quartz ball. It crossed her mind that what she wanted to do most was hunt down her father, but she owed Baines for treating her fairly. Revenge could wait a few more minutes.
“We’re near the ocean,” said Joe. “I’ve been down here before, looking at the sewers as part of the district business council. The area you saw is right around here. Do you think you’d recognize the look of the exact place?”
“Maybe,” she replied. “I’ll give it a shot.”
As they set out through the tunnels, one hound was left to relay the news that Belenos was dead and Talia found. Yaref, the hound that remained with them, was silent, dangerous-looking, and in star-struck awe of Errata. The latter was focused on filming everything with a small, expensive-looking camera.
“Here we are,” said Joe, holding up one hand to signal a stop. They shuffled to a halt. They’d come to an intersection of three tunnels. Two looked old, with slabs of shattered concrete making up the floor. One was more recently built. Bare lightbulbs followed a track down the ceiling, but the power was off. Errata swung around, making sure she got the location from every angle.
“Maybe it was near here, but this isn’t the exact spot.” Talia turned to the hellhound. “Do you know Baines’s scent? Can you track him?”
By way of answer, Yaref did the dissolve-and-reform trick, changing into a massive black canine. He applied his nose to the ground, snorting like a Shop-Vac.
“Where are we?” asked Errata.
“Under the old hotel row on Johnson Street,” said Joe. “Look.” He walked over to the wall, wiping off a few bricks with his sleeve and revealing an enameled metal plate screwed into the brick. “There’s a few of these sign plates around.”
Talia drew closer to see. It read FIVE LILIES HOTEL.
“There were old wine cellars down here,” he said. “The Five Lilies was around a bit before the Empire was in its heyday. There’s an apartment building on the old Lilies site now.”
The hound woofed, and then stood still as a statue, one paw lifted, nose pointing down an old, wet-looking passage.
“Seriously?” Errata asked.
Yaref gave her reproachful eyes.
“Lead on.” She sighed.
The tunnel was narrow and slimy. About a hundred yards on, Talia noticed a salty smell clinging to the old brickwork. “I can hear water,” Talia said.
“Parts of the waterfront are riddled with caves,” Joe said. “Watch where you put your feet. The tide has washed out the floor in places.”
“What were these tunnels used for?” Errata asked, looking more catlike than usual as she picked her way over the slippery floor.
“In the old days, they could deliver from the ships straight to the storage rooms under the hotels.”
Yaref was trotting ahead, making excited woofs. Joe was keeping up with him, but Talia and Errata lagged a little behind. The dog reached a junction in the tunnels, did some more loud sniffing, but then continued on ahead. The air got colder and danker, and Talia envisioned the tunnel ending and dropping them all in the Pacific.