The Viper, page 11
The guard prodded her, and she stumbled forward. Any time she slowed, she was poked in the back by what felt like a finger, but she suspected was a gun. As she passed by the closed doors, she could smell the drugs, the chemical sting in the air making her eyes water—and she thought about the prisoners who were forced to sit at tables and add compounds to raw cocaine and heroin, and then package the powders into saleable units. For hours. For no pay and little food.
At the wall, the guard’s hard hands spun her around and put her back against the plaster and the felt. Chains seethed with a metal chorus as her wrists were locked on the wooden pegs. She didn’t fight him. There was no way she could overpower the guard in any way that would work in her favor, and she was already bruised and fighting for breath from pain.
As the guard stepped back, there was a pause—perhaps he expected her to beg him for mercy, or at the very least ask him why again—
The knife came out of a holster at his waist, and as its blade caught the light with a flash, she began to tremble.
Leaning into her, he put the sharp edge to her throat, the hood’s folds providing no protection at all. Underneath her robing, she closed her eyes and realized she had always been waiting for death to come to her, but as a far-off kind of thing. She had lived through an attempt on her life already; she’d assumed old age would get her—
The male jerked his arm, the blade slicing through the hood.
“No!” But she wasn’t begging for her life. “No—”
As he peeled the folds back, Nadya ducked her head and leaned to the side, chasing the covering until it was gone. And then the lights were too bright for her eyes. Turning her face to her shoulder, she did what she could to hide herself.
“Jesus… Christ,” the guard whispered.
When he stepped back, she wanted to tell him to stop staring. But she couldn’t speak.
And then someone approached.
The footfalls were heavy, the pace quick, the arrival imminent. Nadya guessed who it was, and was not wrong.
The head of the guards stopped next to her male with the knife—and for a moment, all she did was stare.
“My hood,” Nadya said hoarsely. “Please… give it back to me.”
The other female cleared her throat. “You know why you’re here.”
“No, I do not.” Nadya squeezed her eyes closed, as if she could make the world go away if she just didn’t see anything. “Why.”
There was more silence, but she wasn’t going to solve that problem. It would just be a waste of energy.
“You killed my guard,” the female in charge said in a low voice.
“I most certainly did not. You will find all your males doing well, with several having already left—”
“No, the one whose corpse was removed. I have an eyewitness.”
Nadya frowned into the shoulder of her robe. “Then he doesn’t know what he saw—”
“You put a pillow over my guard’s face and suffocated him.”
“I did not.” Nadya shifted her eyes over, until the image of the taller, stronger, dark-haired female entered her vision. “So do whatever you will with me—”
It happened so fast. The female grabbed what little hair Nadya had and yanked it, nearly snapping her skull off the top of her spine. As she cried out, the harsh face came close to her own.
“You should be very afraid of me.”
Nadya pulled weakly against the pegs, chains rattling softly. “I am afraid of you, but there is nothing I can do. I am not strong enough to fight anyone or anything. Therefore I must accept what happens.”
She met the other female’s eyes—and was surprised to find a certain removal in them, as if the camp’s new leader had taken a step away, even as the distance between the pair of them was unchanged.
“Who did this to you,” came a quiet inquiry.
“He’s dead.”
“Who ahvenged you.”
Nadya blinked slowly. “I did. I took care of things… in my own way.”
The other female shook her head, and then her expression hardened. “You should have lied to me.”
“Why?”
“Because you just admitted you’ve murdered before.” The female’s eyes narrowed. “Not what I’d lead with if I were bargaining for my life.”
“You’re going to kill me anyway.”
And besides… the only thing Nadya had felt like living for was dead and gone. What did she care what happened to her now? Something about losing Kane had stripped her of whatever connection she had with the world.
Even though he had never been hers.
The sound of the knife being drawn out of its sheath was a ring of metal like a note sung, resonant, high-pitched, lingering in the still air.
The head of the guard’s face did not change as she brought it up. “At least you know what I must do. What is taken from me, I must redress.”
“What is your name?” Nadya asked.
That got a brow arch. “I don’t need a formal introduction to use this weapon. And if you’re trying to make some kind of connection, it’s not going to save you—”
“I don’t need to be saved and I have no regrets.” Abruptly, she dropped the act. “That guard who died in my clinic, he dragged a prisoner who was suffering from burns all over his body off that bed like he was a piece of meat. He showed no concern for the suffering. He enjoyed it, actually.”
The female looked bored. “Nurses shouldn’t be ahvengers.”
“And guards shouldn’t be murderers. Neither should you. If you want to keep order, that’s one thing, but when was the last time anyone stepped out of line.”
The blade came up right to Nadya’s eye. “It is going to be such a relief to get you to stop talking.”
Nadya closed her eyes again. “And it will be a relief to have nothing left to say.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Following the whole who-are-you/who-am-I confrontation, Kane stepped away from Apex and the wolven. As he paced around the room, he was aware that the light was coming soon, and that him losing his shit was just going to slow down everything. But he was having trouble controlling a sudden, roiling panic.
What had happened in that hut? With…
The old female, he remembered with a sudden clarity. Yes, he had been with someone, someone who had been a guide of sorts. She had offered him… what. An opportunity. Yes, she had—
“Kane?”
As his name was spoken, he looked at the two other males. They were standing back at a discreet distance, watching him as one might a caged, dangerous animal—as if they were assessing whether he was going to attack them.
“That is not who I am.” He put his hand over his heart. “I am… not this.”
“Okay… I know.” Apex glanced around. “We’ve got to get moving. And I’m going down there.”
There was a pause, as if each one of them was recalibrating themselves and returning to the mission, stepping away from whatever tipping point had been narrowly avoided.
Apex cleared his throat, and his voice got stronger. “I still have my prison uniform on, maybe they’ll think I wasn’t part of the escape.”
“Really?” the wolven drawled. “In those clothes, you look like you slaughtered a cow in the basement before you went on your little walk.”
Apex talked over the male. “I go out into the corridor, hit the stairs at the far end, and get down to the clinic at the lowest underground level. I isolate her and remove her out the back through the body chute. That’s where you meet me. Go down the hill from the parking lot. It’ll be about two hundred yards. You’ll see the train tracks and the chute’s entrance.”
The male’s face was composed to the point of being a mask.
“All right,” Kane said. “Go, and be safe.”
Apex stayed where he was for a moment, as if he’d seen a ghost. And then he turned away to the panel that was set into the wall and lifted it up.
Kane went to ask the wolven if they could stay for a little bit to make sure—
“Shit.” Apex leaned into an internal chamber. “Steel. I can smell the fresh metal.” The male retracted his upper body out of the tight space. “They’ve wrapped the dumbwaiter with all sorts of mesh. No dematerializing down there.”
Apex stood with his hands on his hips and his eyes staring into the dark hole in the wall like he was hoping for some kind of magic solution.
“We’ve got a real problem if I have to go a more direct route,” he muttered.
“The wolven and I can be your backup,” Kane pointed out.
“No, you need to take care of the nurse when I evac her and he’s no help.”
The wolven popped his brows. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t know the layout of this place.”
“Fine, but I have skills, and by the way, your tone was objectionable.”
“So the next time I point out the obvious I’ll give you flowers.”
“I prefer white roses to red.” Callum leaned in, his eyes becoming hooded. “Write that down, will you. I don’t like repeating myself—”
Lights pierced the window and flared across the wall, the icy white glow split into squares by the panes, the swing of the illumination from a vehicle turning down the lane.
Kane moved silently across the dusty floor to look out. Down below, a guard parked and got out of a big, boxy vehicle with darkened windows. The male was twitchy, glancing around the broad open area and the cars parked grille-first into the building.
All at once, everything changed for Kane.
“He has no one with him,” he heard himself say.
Closing his eyes, he gathered himself to dematerialize through the glass—
The hard grip on his arm took him out of the trance he needed to briefly shed his physical form, and he pulled at the wolven’s hold. “I’m going down there, and getting keys to this place—”
“Bite him.” The look in the male’s eyes was strange. “Don’t use a gun. Bite him.”
The male did have a point. No sound that way, although Kane wasn’t a fighter.
He couldn’t worry about that, though. He wouldn’t worry about that—
He had nothing to worry about.
As a rush came over him and his body began to swell with strength, he shut his eyes again and scattered into his molecular form, traveling easily through the window. Down on the asphalt, he re-formed at the far side of the guard’s vehicle and he wasted no time. Striding around the back bumper, he—
Set upon the vampire from behind.
Once again, his body was taken over, the animation emanating from somewhere inside of him that was nonetheless not intrinsically him: Clapping a hold on the side of the guard’s neck, he slammed the male face-first into the side of the vehicle. The impact made a sharp, declarative sound, and riding a surge of aggression, he shoved his hand down to the male’s hip and came back with a gun, the weapon tight in his palm. Slipping off the safety, even though he shouldn’t have known where it was, or how the weapon operated, he—
Another set of headlights flared, but they were still in the distance some.
The guard moaned and tried to recover his balance.
Bite him.
As if on command, Kane’s fangs dropped down, and he hissed as he jerked the head back to expose the throat. With a quick strike, Kane bit the male from behind, burying his canines deep in the veins and sinew. The gasp was not a surprise, and it was quieter than the discharge of the gun he’d taken would’ve have been—
The spasming didn’t make sense.
Against Kane’s body, the guard began to thrash and buck, and the seizures were so unexpected that he spun his prey around.
The male’s face was beet red and sweat was beading up across his forehead and above his lip. Eyes that were wide were going bloodshot, as if they were flooding from some kind of hemorrhaging, and his breathing changed pattern. As the wheezing started, high-pitched and panicked, the guard went for his throat with his hands—as if he were attempting to clear a constriction.
Kane glanced toward the ever-brightening light source coming around the building. Then he looked back—
“What the fuck,” he breathed.
The front of the guard’s uniform was covered with blood, the flow from the bite so great, it was pumping out in surges. Kane had a dim thought that he must have hit an artery—no, it was too much blood. Grabbing hold of the guard’s hair, he pulled the lolling head back to see what was going on… with…
The strike mark was… liquefying?
“Dearest Virgin Scribe.”
The skin and the anatomy of the neck were being melted away somehow, denaturing before his very eyes. And as the breakdown continued, the blood flowed to the beat of the heart.
Everything was dissolving, even the bones of the spinal—
Flop.
As the head separated from the body, the latter dropped to the ground by the vehicle’s back tire, and Kane was left holding the former. The eyes, so wide the whites were showing, stared back him, the lid of the one on the left twitching such that it appeared to be winking.
Like this was all one big fat joke.
“I told you. You don’t need a weapon.”
Kane wrenched around to the wolven, who’d dematerialized down to the pavement and was standing with his hands on his hips.
“Did I do that?” Kane asked. Then he corrected himself. “How… did I do that?”
* * *
Apex re-formed down by the SUV just as a guard’s body went loose and hit the cracked asphalt like a deadweight. Because that was what the male was: Alive no more than a minute ago, and now an inanimate corpse but for the involuntary muscle contractions. One bite and the bastard had gone down.
There were questions to ask.
“Now’s not the time,” Apex said as a box van came around the corner of the building.
They all ducked—well, he and the wolven did. Kane was still standing there like a tool, holding the decapitated head like it was a trophy that he didn’t want, his eyes locked on the guard’s as the neck continued to disintegrate.
Apex grabbed the idiot’s free arm and yanked him to the ground. “Jesus! You wanna get killed?”
As Kane looked over in confusion, the box van pulled in on the far side of the SUV. Apex glanced to Callum—no wolven. The male had taken off somewhere.
Maybe he’d seen a squirrel.
“Listen,” Apex whispered. “I need you to focus.”
When the male just blinked, Apex grabbed the head by the puss and thanked God they were downwind of the guard who was getting out from behind the van’s wheel.
Slapping a hold on the side of Kane’s neck, he jerked him close.
Staying quiet, he tried to communicate with his eyes: Now. Do what you did, now.
There was a sudden flash of recognition, as if something within the guy responded to exactly the demand that Apex was attempting to send through the thin air between their faces.
After which Kane’s expression changed, a dark intent coming over him.
The male rose up and turned away, moving in total silence around the back of the SUV. The sounds of what happened next were music to the ear: Gasp. Grunt. Another flop onto the pavement.
The scent of fresh vampire blood blooming in the air.
Apex left Kane to it, and leaned over the guard. The weapons strip took seconds because he just transferred the belt holster onto his own waist. Then he looked over his shoulder at the rear of the hospital.
The exit he’d evac’d Kane out of was locked with a keypad combination that Mayhem knew, but Apex had never bothered asking for. No way to infiltrate there. There was another opening, however.
Apex glanced back down at the guard. “And I do have a knife. Thanks to you.”
Taking the blade out, he shifted his position to the male’s right arm. Moving down to the wrist, he yanked up the uniform sleeve, flattened the palm, and placed the knife directly over the wrist joint. Putting his shoulder into it, the cut went quick, the crack reminding him of a whip’s call.
He picked up the hand and turned it wound side up so the leaking wasn’t that bad.
At that moment, Kane came around the back of the SUV. There was blood on his chin and another head hanging from his grip. He didn’t look surprised, though. He seemed pretty damn satisfied with himself.
“What did you do with the body?” Apex asked.
“Stripped the weapons and rolled it under the van.”
Apex blinked and rose to his full height. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I love you.”
Kane nodded to what Apex was holding. “If you needed an extra hand, you could have just asked for help.”
“Funny. Very funny.”
With a grunt, Apex rolled the body of the first dead guard under the SUV. Then he threw the head in there with it, a basketball that bounced against something and clanged into the undercarriage.
“We’re going that way.” Apex pointed to the woods on the far side of the parking area. “And no, I don’t want to debate it. That’s how we’re getting in.”
Leaving Kane in the dust, he figured the guy was welcome to beat his head against the entrance to those private quarters, or to try to get in through the first floor they’d been on, but the guy wasn’t going to get far. The underground levels of the building were as secure as a bank vault.
And daylight was coming fast.
Just as Apex came up to the tree line, he heard approaching cars, and a quick glance over his shoulder informed him that not only had Kane decided to follow-the-leader, but the wolven had showed up again—and the male had easily four times the number of weapons he’d brought with him.
Guess he’d been busy taking out threats Apex hadn’t sensed and certainly hadn’t seen.
Turning away, Apex disappeared himself into the trees, and the other two were tight on his heels as a pair of vehicles came around to the rear of the building. Looking back again, he was glad they were downwind and therefore their position was somewhat secure because the shit was going to hit the fan. Vampire noses were so precise, it was easy to tell the difference between fresh blood, as in minutes or moments old, and anything that had been spilled an hour or two or five ago. This new set of guards was going to know that the killings had just happened, and conclude that either someone else had escaped or somebody was trying to get in.
