Mitsuru reached for her knife, and without any conscious thought, the blood ran in rivulets up it, coating the length of the metal, a flowing, ruby tint that dripped slowly from the fine edge of the blade. She smiled at it, almost involuntarily, then she saw Leigh take another hesitant step back, and that was all she needed. She was like a bull seeing red, assuming bulls could actually see color. She charged Leigh and Leigh tried to defend herself.
Anyone could see that it was losing battle. Leigh had to put all of her energies into avoiding the constantly shifting sanguine blade in Mitsuru’s right hand, and that meant she had no time for achieving position, or avoiding the black blood that splashed her every time they closed. Better, Mitsuru could see that she was slowing down, whether due to accumulated damage or just fear and distraction, she couldn’t say. She watched Leigh’s eyes move, locked on to the crimson blade, and decided to try a left knee to the body, which landed solidly, staggering Leigh backwards. She checked the low kick that Mitsuru followed with, but it brought them close. Mitsuru feinted high with the blade and then hit Leigh with a left cross instead, landing solidly on the orbital just below the eye. That must have made the vampire angry, because she threw a punch for Mitsuru’s body. Mitsuru let it connect, wincing as it struck, but again, it paid off. The streamers of black blood on her stomach were quite adhesive. Leigh stared at her arm in horror as the boiling, black liquid sheathed her fist. She struggled helplessly and Mitsuru laughed as she advanced, leading with her knife, aiming for the vampire’s neck.
She heard Gaul in her head, trying to tell her something, but the bloodlust was too much.
“There is a lesson to be learned here, Leigh,” Alistair said contemptuously, from right behind her. “No matter how powerful you may are, you are never too powerful to bring a gun.”
She tried to dive and roll, she tried to turn and strike, but it was too late for any of that. Alistair had used his telepathy to mask his presence until he was close, and she could feel him in her head now, slowing her reaction time. She didn’t hear the shots, but she thought she felt the impacts. She closed her eyes automatically. She opened them, reeling backwards, to find herself uninjured, and facing a surprising tableau.
She wasn’t sure when Margot had managed to make her way back to her feet, or how she was even still moving after the beating she had absorbed, but she was there, one hand on Alistair’s wrist, bent at the waist as if she was coughing. Across the chest of her grey shirt, blood blossomed like chrysanthemums. Bone and bits of flesh burst from her back like shrapnel. The explosive lead azide rounds had torn such a huge hole in her head that it made almost no sound at all, when her body hit the ground and the contents of her skull spilled out across the stone in front of Alistair’s shiny, patent leather shoes. He stepped neatly aside.
“You bastard,” Mitsuru hissed, clenching her fists while black blood oozed across her body, adhering to her skin like hot oil, thick and viscous, coating her from head to toe. “Alistair, this ends here.”
Alistair leveled the gun, a small smile playing about his face.
“I couldn’t agree more, Mitzi,” he said softly. “I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time.”
Alice’s specialty was, to put it simply, creating bad days. Bad days for other people.
But as she picked herself up off the ground for the third time, nursing a bruised elbow, burns on her shoulder and back, and a wrist that was so badly swollen she couldn’t really use it, she was starting to wonder if maybe she hadn’t gotten too old for this stuff. The only reason she was still alive, she knew, though she never would have admitted it, was that Korean woman was unfamiliar with Xia’s protocol. If Xia had been himself, he would have cooked her already.
The problem was twofold — she was getting tired, for one, and for another, she couldn’t get close enough. Michelle’s telekinetic strikes were invisible, and they sent her sprawling back on her ass every time she tried to get close. She’d gotten lucky, once, and sidestepped it based on where the bitch was looking, but all that had done for her was get her close enough that Xia could set her on fire, which he promptly did. She had been through a lot, and she was feeling drained, M-Class or not. She could port until her body collapsed under the strain without ever running out of power, but that very well might happen in the near future, given her exhaustion and battered body. To do what she had in mind, and put a bullet in Song’s head, she needed to be no more than about thirty meters away. She’d managed thirty-five so far, but she’d been on fire at the time, and unable to capitalize.
The sad fact was that, even if she did get inside, there were still four of them, and Christopher Feld, for all his cowardice, was not someone to take lightly. Anyway, Xia was her partner, and she had no plans to hurt him, no matter what the situation was. This meant her hands were more or less tied. Besides, she had landed on her ass so many times in front of these people that it was getting embarrassing.
Then, there was a series of gunshots, echoing, from the other side of the enormous room, if Alice’s guess was right. The French bitch and zombie-Xia turned to look at the noise, just for a moment, and Alice took a deep breath.
Three jumps, three quarters of a second, fifty meters. She was genuinely afraid that she would end up puking all over whoever was on the other side when she got there.
The first port was to a shadow cast by a beam of refracted sunlight, about halfway between them. She was there and then gone again, feeling weaker than she could remember.
The second jump was to the left and about ten meters away from them, in the shadows of one of the support buttresses. Christopher, always the bright one, saw her this time, and moved like he was going to grab Michelle, but Alice was gone again…
The third was tentative. She stalled in the Ether, and found herself remembering what she had taught generations of apport technicians — never jump when you are uncertain of your strength. Or you won’t wink in and out of the Ether, on your way to wherever you are going. You’ll make it that far and then you’ll stall, hanging there in the cold and the mists. Maybe forever. Nobody was sure if you even could die, out there in the Ether.
Alice watched the Ether roil and tighten around her like the walls of a cell, a claustrophobic and frigid embrace, and figured that she might have the opportunity to find out.
Chris saw Alice flicker, saw everything going very definitely wrong, and reached for Michelle’s shoulder, to try to warn her, to turn her in the right direction.
Alice stepped out of the shadow behind Michelle, looking like a corpse and smiling like a jackal. She wasn’t fast with her gun. She didn’t need to be. Michelle went flying backwards, but Chris didn’t see if she had the time to get a barrier up or not. Song Li had already started the transfer back to her own body, but it was a process. Alice fired four shots into her prostrate body, and then glanced hopefully over at Xia while she started to reload. Chris moved before she had the chance, his claws emerging in mid-lunge, and then he reeled back, in terrible pain, his arms and chest alight. He beat his arms against the flames frantically, but they only died down when the man wearing goggles sank down, first onto his knees, and then sprawled out sideways on the stone, as naturally as if he had planned a short nap there.
“Hello again, Chris,” Alice said, slapping the chamber on her revolver back into place. “I warned you not to fuck with me.”