Okay. Names are power. We’d had that back at the lake. Big deal. Fangs are more power. We’d had that at the lake too. Con had chosen to let me go. Bo wasn’t going to.
Why had I agreed to this anyway?
“You feel the pull strongly?” Con went on in that infuriatingly calm voice. “Bo has connected to our presence here. If we are separated, go on. Follow that connection to its end. Leave me. I will catch up with you when I can.”
Oh good. I was so glad he would make the effort to catch up with me later. Although I wished he’d used the word goal or aim rather than end.
“I recommend—” he added, dispassionate as ever—I was trying to remind myself that he always sounded unbothered, not to say dead. Or maybe that it was a good sign he sounded so unflapped now, as if this was still all part of the normal range of vampire activities. I almost didn’t hear the rest of what he was saying: “—you do not attempt to retreat into any Other-space, including the way I have brought us both. You would only draw some of Bo’s creatures after you, and their advantage there would be greater than yours.”
Right. Like it wasn’t greater than mine everywhere.
I realized that while we were no longer in the chaos-space, we weren’t exactly in No Town either. Or at least I hoped it wasn’t No Town, because if it was, our human world was in even more trouble than most of us knew about…than I knew about…again the thought came to me: What did I know? Pat said a hundred years, tops, before…And the people who came to No Town for thrills weren’t likely to notice that the whole scene was sliding over the edge of normal reality into…
I felt the pull strongly all right, like a hand around my throat that was slowly tightening. If I was a dog on a lead, I was wearing a choke collar, and my master didn’t like me much. Maybe it was that sense of pressure that made my vision go funny; but then, my vision had been funny for two months now, and I was kind of used to funniness. But this was a new kind of funniness, where things seemed to dance in and out of existence, rather than merely in and out of light and darkness.
There were streetlights where we were—some of them still worked—and great swathes of darkness. There was the uneven pavement under our feet, the potholed roads, the crumbling curbs. Once I stepped unawares on a manhole cover and the sound this made, even in this night of horrors, made my heart leap into my throat. There were tall buildings that seemed to prowl among the shadows; a few of them had dim lights burning that gave the old peeling posters on their walls an undesirable life: huge painted eyes winked at me, fingers as long as my legs beckoned to me. The way the clubs leaped out of the night with their noise and bewildering lighting, stabbing and erratic, rhythmic and dazzling, rainbow-colored or this week’s fashion match, heightened that sense of Otherwhere: hey, I wanted to say to some of the humans we passed, you don’t need drugs, let me tell you, there are spaces between worlds, there are master vampires that loop invisible ropes around your neck and drag you to your doom…
We are running through No Town. I hear our footsteps—no, I hear my footsteps, and the kind of unmatched echo that chills your blood, because you know it means you’re not alone, and what you’re not alone with isn’t human. I remember when hearing and seeing were simple, it had to do with sound and light and the manageable equations they taught you in school. I am wondering if anyone notices us; the only kind of running that goes on here is the furtive kind, no joggers out to burn off last night’s burger and fries or reach the buzz of an endorphin high. No one, hearing running footsteps—especially running footsteps with an unmatched echo—is going to look up if they can help it. I guess I can stop worrying about seeing someone I know…
A few people do look up, though: bad consciences, old habits, a momentary—or drug-induced—forgetfulness about who or where they are? I think I meet the eyes of one young woman: I see her take me in, take Con in, disbelieve us both…and then we’re past her, running out of the light-surf, back into the ocean of darkness.
Into a fresh seethe of vampires. They didn’t want to connect with me. Lucky me. I winced and twitched out of the way of anything I saw, anything I half-saw; I stopped trying to see anything, and let my instinct—whatever instinct this was—keep me moving. Where was Con? No, I still knew him from the rest of them. For one thing, he was the center of the seethe. If there’s only one guy on your team, he’s the one everybody else is jumping on.
It went on in a horrible almost-silence.
There was a hot circlet around my neck and across my breast; there were two small fires burning in my two front jeans pockets. Apparently they’d learned their lesson that first time, when the sunsword had hit the pillow; they didn’t set my clothes on fire this time either. And it wasn’t because they weren’t really putting it out: they were. The evening we’d blown SOF HQ wasn’t even a dress rehearsal for what was going on now.
Even with my talismans going full throttle my luck didn’t hold for long. Something—someone—crashed into me, tore me away from Con, out of the seethe; it was taking me somewhere. It was, in fact, the same direction I was being dragged by my invisible leash, but I didn’t feel I wanted any help getting there sooner; besides, whatever Con had said about going on without him, I’d rather not, thanks.
I saw a shape, and ducked away from it. It seemed a little uncertain of its own bearings; it missed its grab, and teeth ground down my arm, strangely fumbling, if teeth can fumble. Hey, my jugular is up this way. I wished for a nice apple-tree stake, well impregnated with mistletoe, except I didn’t know how to use it; staking takes training. The table knife had been a one-off…I put my right hand in my pocket, braced the butt end of my hot little knife against my palm, and pointed it up between my fingers: not with the blade open, just the hard blunt end of it, like a single fat brass knuckle. I saw it momentarily, shining like a tiny moon, like a slightly misaligned gem-stone in a ring.
Then I swung it, with my paltry human strength, up in the general direction of where the base of the breastbone that belonged to the teeth in my other arm might be.
I connected. The wide blunt end of my knife…sank in. As it did it blazed up, no longer moonlike but sunlike, golden, shining, a tongue of flame, and in its light I saw a golden lattice extending up my arm.
I had just time to remember what had happened in an alley when I had used a table knife.
The noise was different. There were no narrow alley walls for the gobbets to smack against. Instead I heard the thick heavy splat, like loathsome rain, as they fell around me. I’d forgotten the smell—the smell of something long dead and rotten. I thought, they’re not even a little human any more when they explode: they shatter so easily, like throwing an overripe melon against a fence. No melon ever smelled like this…
Con rematerialized from wherever he had been, from whatever he had been doing. I just managed not to wince out of his way too. The problem was he looked like a vampire, and at the moment he looked a lot more like a vampire than he looked like Con. One of the even-more-comforting-than-usual stories about vampires is that sometimes, during vampire gang wars for example, they go into berserker furies and tear anything they can get their hands on apart, not only their enemies but their comrades, the guys on their own side. Supposedly the berserker fit can last quite a while, and if a particularly effective dismemberer gets to the end of the bodies around it before the fit wears off, it will tear itself to shreds too.