Nightshades (13 page)

“Where did he go?” Alex shouted.

“Who?”

Just then, the room flooded with light.

After Giselle’s abrupt exit through the window, it had taken Lindy a few minutes to get herself fully loose. During that time she heard a lot of screaming and gunshots. Alex’s voice was definitely in the mix, and her spirits lifted a little.

Conscious of the danger, she slipped to the door and peeked through a crack, trying to get some idea of the layout and the situation. It was fairly dark in the big space outside the door, but she had no trouble making out Alex McKenna at the front of a cluster of agents in visors as they shot at the shades hidden all around the room. There was no sign of her brother, which worried her.

Hector’s people were slinking along the floor, through the shadows, while the BPI agents were distracted by one or two of them making noise. A few of the shades were attempting to sneak away to the exits, but most of them—seven, by her count—were creeping along the walls, intent on getting close to Alex’s group and cutting them off. Cutting them down.

Alex stumbled forward a little to give his team more room. A large shade—Gregor—saw his opportunity and dove at the BPI agent. Shit. Lindy raced forward and hit him hard, her momentum shoving Gregor all the way off Alex and into the cheap plaster wall. Lights, they needed lights, or Alex’s team would be useless. Spotting a switch next to one of the office doorways, Lindy picked her way around the bullets and flicked it on, wincing at the transition.

Now able to see the room, the federal agents adjusted quickly and began shooting at the shades—but they were too fast, and they could survive plenty of wounds before they’d bleed out. They were gaining ground. “Alex!” Lindy shouted. The lead agent looked up. “You have something for me?”

He gave her a short nod and grabbed at the back of his pants, pulling two small objects from where they’d been tucked into his belt. Lindy grinned as the twin push daggers came sailing through the air, slow enough for her to pluck them out by the handles. She dropped Giselle’s falchion on the ground in favor of her preferred weapons.

The push daggers looked like tiny swords, with four-inch blades—just long enough to sever a man’s spinal cord—that attached to solid oak handles shaped like
T
s. Lindy grasped each handle so that the blade protruded between her middle and ring fingers on each hand, and instantly each weapon became an extension of her. In the middle of the firefight she embarked on her own stealth mission, spinning around the room to attack shade after shade. With each one she swept the blades across a number of major arteries: brachial, aortic, femoral, whatever she could get close to. The shades dropped to the ground, bleeding out too fast to heal.

She managed to take out three shades by herself before they realized she was among them. By then, however, they’d snatched two of the agents out of the hallway and were drinking them dry. The other agents had begun to break formation, inching forward in hopes of rescuing their teammates before they died of blood loss. Lindy cursed and started running forward to help, but Alex waved her on. “Get the kids!” he shouted. Lindy understood: She was the only one far enough in the room to make it to the other patient chambers.

Before she could respond, however, she saw light glint off a blade raised high in the air. Giselle. “Behind you!” she screamed at Alex. He immediately spun to the side, and Giselle’s blade sliced the air where his head had been. She’d left the building, recovered a backup blade from somewhere, and come up behind the agents . . . which meant whoever had been left to guard the door was probably dead. Giselle started to rush Alex, but the agent had his gun up and was firing rounds into her heart. “The kids!” he yelled over his shoulder.

Lindy bolted at the first patient room she saw, the one next door to her former cell. Inside, she found another ancient dentist chair with a heavyset kid of eighteen or nineteen strapped to it—only he just had one zip tie per limb. He was wearing jeans and a rumpled T-shirt, and he smelled terribly of body odor and fear. His forearm was exposed, and she could see multiple puncture marks dotting the white skin. His eyes were open, but dull.

“Hi. What’s your name?” She sliced through the zip ties as she spoke. The kid’s glazed eyes rolled over to her.

“Josh,” he said hoarsely.

“Do you think you can walk, Josh?”

“No.”

“Too bad. You have to.” In a much-practiced movement, she tucked one of the daggers into the back of her pants and reached down to drag the kid up. “My sister,” he mumbled. “I swear I heard my sister screaming.”

“I’ll get her, too.” Lindy looked around the room and decided the kid’s best chance was the window, but this one was boarded up. She leaned back on one heel and kicked a foot—straight through the plywood. Oops.

The kid’s eyes went wide. “You’re a vampire,” he blurted.

“Yes, but I’m with the good guys.” She kicked the rest of the wood in, creating a hole big enough for Josh to climb through. “Come on.” She tilted her head at the window, but he just looked at her with wide, terrified eyes. Lindy sighed, pushing back a strand of hair that had come loose from her ponytail. “Josh. You wanna stay here, or you wanna go sit in a nice armored FBI car?”

He went through the window.

After six or seven shots to the heart, Giselle had roared with anger, ignoring the already healing holes in her chest from Alex’s gun, and charged forward—not toward Alex, but past him into the main part of the room, toward the other shades. He began laying down cover for Hadley, who was trying to get to one of the injured agents, but he heard a screech of surprise and rage as Giselle nearly ran into Lindy, who had returned from the first patient room. The two women both went still for a moment, snarling at each other in a way that was more animal than human, and Alex wondered how he had ever been surprised to learn Lindy was a shade. Then their blades connected with a singing crash of metal.

For a moment, Alex—and pretty much everyone else in the room—just stared at them, trying to follow the shade-speed fight with his human eyes. Both women had obviously spent a lot of time with those blades; they wielded them the way Alex wielded his thumb. They fought with no discernible martial arts style, but a blend of anything and everything that was well suited to knife fighting. Giselle threw Lindy over her shoulder in a move that looked like modern aikido, but Lindy regained her feet in a sweeping balanced move that reminded him of capoeira. There was no style, but there was every style, and Alex realized with a shock that these women might have predated some forms of martial arts.

“Boss!” Hadley screamed. Alex tore his eyes off Lindy and Giselle and ran over to help Hadley pull a wounded agent from the shade who was trying to tug him away. When the agent was safely behind the choke point, Alex glanced around, taking stock of the rest of the battle.

And it was a
battle.

Lindy had taken out three shades during her terrifying lethal ballet, and Alex’s team had shot down two others, who had both taken so much lead that they’d sunk to the floor. One of them had grabbed a female agent, Raver, and drunk a good deal of her blood, but Hadley had shot it so many times in the head that it eventually fell still. Raver was alive, but so pale that he didn’t think she’d last long. Another agent had died in the same manner, and two more behind him had been killed by Giselle’s weird machete thing. The BPI team was slowly gaining ground, but the cost was high.

There were only three shades still fighting, if you counted Giselle. At the same time, Alex wasn’t convinced he was seeing everyone. They were too damned fast, and they knew how to use the shadows of the dental clinic to mask their movements further. And where the fuck was Hector?

He heard an anguished cry from Giselle, and looked back at her in time to see that she’d lost the machete thing in the fight. She stepped forward to hit Lindy, slowed down to human speed now, but Lindy stepped into the blow and, with a battle cry that chilled Alex’s blood, swung her arm around hard enough to send the small dagger most of the way through Giselle’s neck.

All around the room, the fighting faltered as Giselle’s head flipped backward, held on by only a flap of skin. The body dropped to the ground.

Lindy stared down at it with red hooded eyes. Her clothes were torn and her hair was wild, blood dripping from the ends, and her face burning with terrible beauty. In that moment Alex felt like falling to her feet and begging for mercy. And she was on
their
side. She staggered, struggling to stay on her feet, until she stumbled far enough back to hit a wall.

With Giselle dead, the shades in the room began to step backward, and the BPI team advanced toward the patient rooms.

“ENOUGH.”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It seemed to suck all the air out of the room, draining Alex of what little energy he still felt. He fell to his knees—as did every single person, shade and human alike, in the room. Everyone except Lindy, who wheeled around and glowered at the man who’d just exited one of the patient rooms. Her arms hung frozen in the air with the push daggers dripping blood.

From head to toe he seemed like nothing special, just another thirtyish businessman in a nice suit. He carried no weapons at all, his hands loose at his sides. But his eyes were a red so dark they were nearly blue, and he radiated power and authority. He turned his head slowly, scowling around the room as though they were all kids who’d been playing music too loud. The shades all bowed their heads and murmured something that sounded like “my king.”

“Don’t worry,” Lindy said to Alex, rolling her eyes. “He can only do that little trick once.”

Alex staggered to his feet, the first one to manage to do so. Behind him, he heard several agents trying to crawl out the door. He didn’t turn his head to look. “You must be Hector,” he said in a voice that sounded much weaker than he’d intended. “Special Agent in Charge Alex McKenna. You’re under arrest.”

Hector didn’t even glance his way. “You killed her,” he spat at Lindy. “She was my—”

“Your what? Pet psycho?” Lindy retorted, raising her weapons in a defensive position. “You didn’t give a shit about her, any more than you do about Ambrose.” Lindy hadn’t lifted herself off the wall, and Alex suspected she was more hurt than she was letting on. Hector was looking at her as if lasers might shoot out of his eyes and fry her on the spot.

“Hey!” Alex interrupted, to break the spell between them. Both siblings looked over at him. Alex had the muzzle of his gun pointed squarely at Hector’s heart. “You are under arrest,” he said firmly, stepping toward Hector.

The shade just glared at him and looked back at his sister. “And what of your little friends here?” he asked. “Will you stand by and let him kill me? Or perhaps even help him?”

Lindy’s posture sagged. With the blades by her sides, she said, “You have to answer for those kids, Hector. I won’t kill you, but I won’t stop Alex, either.”

Hector’s eyes gleamed. “
Alex,
huh?” He turned his attention to the BPI agent. “I do not recognize your government’s sovereignty,” he countered. “I am a king. And the stuff of nightmares.”

The power in his voice sent a shock of fear up Alex’s spine, but Lindy scoffed, limping forward to place herself between Hector and Alex. “You’ve been reading your own press again, brother,” she said. “You are not the monster of fairy tales. You’re just a man with a strange virus and an overinflated ego.”

Hector’s eyes narrowed. “You want a fairy tale?” he said very softly, taking a step forward. Alex couldn’t see Lindy’s face, but the fury on Hector’s was enough to scare anyone. Alex inched a little bit to the right so he could shoot Hector without hitting Lindy. “I can give you a fairy tale,” Hector taunted.

Before anyone could react, he blurred away from Lindy—straight at Alex.

To his credit, Alex McKenna got a shot off.

Unfortunately, it missed Hector entirely and buried itself in Lindy’s right shoulder. She hissed with pain but still whirled around to follow Hector’s progress. He charged at Alex, stepping into the agent’s extended arm, and raised something—Giselle’s blade, which he’d had hidden behind his back all along. Lindy saw him bring it down in a sweeping diagonal motion that sliced through the agent’s cheek, chin, and straight down to the left subclavian artery in Alex’s shoulder. Then Hector continued right on past him, straight for the exit that Giselle had opened up earlier.

Lindy screamed a curse and threw herself down beside Alex. Hector had cut deep; the wounds were spurting blood. The agent’s good eye, the one that hadn’t been filled with blood, stared up at her in confusion. More blood streamed down the side of his face and neck. Too much. She slapped her hand down over the artery to seal the wound, then realized that Hector had twisted the blade as it exited, making it nearly impossible to close the cut. “Fuck!”

He tried to say something, his lips twitching helplessly, but the effort made his cheeks move, and the pain was obvious. Lindy shook her head at him. “It’s okay,” she said, her own voice sounding high-pitched and uncertain. “You’re gonna be okay.” She tore her eyes away from him and looked up at the young female agent, Hadley, who was standing over them with wide eyes and clothes saturated in blood. More blood was splattered on her plastic visor, but she was still
standing,
and that was all Lindy cared about. “Call an ambulance,” she snapped. “Do
not
pursue Hector. Take whatever shades you’ve arrested, zip tie the hell out of them, and keep them separated.”

Hadley stared at her stupidly for a moment, swaying on her feet.

“
Do
it, Hadley,” Lindy commanded, putting a little force into her voice. Which made her sound like Hector. The young woman’s eyes snapped into focus and then narrowed, but she scrambled away to follow Lindy’s orders.

Lindy turned back to Alex. Arterial blood was still pumping out of his shoulder, running between her fingers. She fought against the desperate urge to dip her head down and drink it; shade saliva was an anti-
coagulant
, and she would only kill him faster. But she needed to get a lot of shade saliva into him quickly without letting it touch the main wound.