Nightshades Read online

  Hearing this, Lindy’s eyes burned with angry tears. She knew that this was all part of Hector’s plan: he could have easily mesmerized the kids to stay calm and quiet, but he wanted to let Lindy stew, let her listen, let her get upset. It would make her off balance, emotional—and Hector loved when she got emotional. Classic male mentality, and classic Hector. It was actually sort of comforting to realize his patterns of behavior hadn’t changed in fifteen hundred years.

  Thinking about patterns of behavior actually gave Lindy an idea, though. She renewed her escape efforts, but stopped focusing on getting past the zip ties and turned her attention to the chair itself. Underneath the padding, the construction was solid: made of some kind of heavy metal that didn’t even rattle when she shook her left arm or her legs. The right arm of the chair, however, had a little give to it. Lindy smiled.

  Slowly, as quietly as possible, she applied pressure, first in one direction, then another. She didn’t feel a change at first, but then little by little, the bolts began to deform and loosen. Lindy could feel the metal flexing under the pressure, but there was no way to know how much farther it had to go before the arm of the chair would rip all the way off. Then she could—

  With no warning, the door behind her slammed open again, and Lindy went still as Giselle sauntered into the room, a smug pout on her bloodred lips. Literally, there was blood on her mouth; she had just finished feeding, probably from one of the teenagers. She had changed into a black leather sheath dress that barely covered her ass, and her favorite weapon, the falchion, was strapped to one thigh. Her stringy pink and white hair was pulled back into a bun so messy it may as well have not existed. There was no sign of her facial injury. Lindy felt a little disappointed about that.

  “Hey, Giselle, how’s your nose?” Lindy asked cheerfully.

  The other woman’s smile was cruel. “It’s fantastic, thanks so much for asking.” She painstakingly wiped her lips with the tip of one finger. “Healing was a bitch, of course, but Hector let me have one of the children who wasn’t useful anymore. Just to be sure, I drank him all down.”

  She tried to hide her fury, but Giselle saw it anyway and gave her a victorious smile. Lindy reminded herself that just as Giselle knew her pressure points, she knew Giselle’s. “So how are things going with you and my brother?” she asked, painting a bright smile on her face. Instantly, Giselle’s expression clouded over.

  “It’s fantastic. Better than it’s ever been,” she said coolly. Then she climbed onto Lindy’s lap, straddling the much older shade and leaning forward so her ample breasts were in Lindy’s face. “Of course, there’s always room for improvement. Or for extra participants.”

  Ew. “Grow up, Giselle.”

  Giselle just gave her a wicked smile. “Oh, I did grow up, Sieglind. I’ve learned so much since Eradication.” She hopped off Lindy’s lap and drew the falchion, the metal singing as it came free. “Don’t worry; I’m going to show you.” Hitching her hip on the left side of Lindy’s chair, Giselle let the tip of the blade rest at the hollow of Lindy’s throat, savoring the moment. For Giselle, it had been a long time coming.

  There was a crash from just outside the room, and men’s voices began shouting. Giselle’s triumphant smile flickered. She glanced toward the door, and Lindy saw the best chance she was going to get. With every bit of power available to her, Lindy wrenched her right forearm, making no attempt to be quiet or subtle. The metal caught, and then with a scream the entire arm of the reclining chair broke off.

  Giselle tried to react, and up against a younger or less experienced shade her reflexes would have been enough to dodge. But Lindy was the second-oldest vampire on the planet, and she clubbed Giselle across the side of the head with the metal chunk hard enough to throw Giselle backward, dropping the blade.

  Right in Lindy’s lap.

  She grabbed the falchion, slicing her fingers a little, and managed to twist it in her wrist so she could force it across the zip ties on her left arm. The blade made a long, shallow cut as it went, but Lindy paid no attention. Giselle staggered up from the floor, leaning against the wall for balance.

  “You bitch,” Giselle screamed, but Lindy ignored her. She was carefully cutting the looser zip ties holding her neck to the back of the chair. Giselle darted toward her, but Lindy reversed the falchion in her hand and managed to stab Giselle in the shoulder before the other shade lurched back again. Giselle let out a bellow of frustration, turned, and leapt through the window behind her.

  The side door of the clinic led to a tiny hallway that opened straight into a large, relatively open room in the middle, where there had once been hygienists’ desks and file cabinets. This large space was surrounded by smaller chambers and hallways that the patients would have used for examinations. Alex had guessed that the shades were keeping the kids in the patient rooms and using the open space, which had the added benefit of no windows, for a makeshift lab. He’d been right about that, but by the time he and the six agents behind him entered the room, the shades had all heard and sensed them coming, and done the logical thing, from a tactical point of view: they’d cut the lights.

  Alex skidded to a halt inside the tiny hallway, holding up a fist for the team to stop with him. Behind him, there was a little light from the street lamps. In front of him, the darkness was absolute. Alex was pretty sure if he’d taken two more steps into the room, the shades would have picked him off.

  “Bureau of Preternatural Investigations,” he bellowed into the darkness. “You’re under arrest!”

  No one flipped on the lights, but about eight feet to either side of him Alex heard low, insidious chuckles. That was enough for him. “Hadley, sticks,” he ordered, and behind him, Agent Hadley reached into a pocket and pulled out a handful of industrial-size glow sticks, breaking the wad of them with both fists. Alex sensed movement to his right as one of the shades darted forward to stop her. He reflexively fired a low burst that caused a high-pitched scream. Hadley threw the sticks, sending just enough light into the room for them to make out the figures advancing on them.

  Alex started shooting, stepping forward into the room so the other agents could fan out a little and get clear shots. The noise from the weapons was deafening, but all around him, Alex could still hear muffled young voices crying for help with renewed vigor. They were in the patient rooms, just as he’d anticipated. Unfortunately, between their cries and the gunfire, he could no longer hear the shades.

  One of them popped up just in front of him, and Alex and the agent at his shoulder—Simonson was his name—fired. The muzzle flash illuminated two other shades behind that one, and for a moment it was a shooting gallery. The shades seemed to race toward them in stop-motion speed, or like those old zoetropes. They were so fast, and the bullets flew so thickly, that Alex prayed the doors trapping the teenagers were strong. Then a shade leapt at him from above—Christ, they could jump—and Alex couldn’t get his sidearm up in time. The shade hit him with its full weight, slamming him into the floor.

  He landed on his back with the shade scrabbling at his helmet, trying to get to his neck. Alex tried to bring up the gun but the shade—a male, bigger than him—slapped it out of his hand, where it went skittering into the darkness. Pinning him, the shade ripped off Alex’s visor and lowered his head—and then he was suddenly, simply, gone. Alex blinked and sat up. Just behind him, his team was crowded together, blocking the exit and trying to pick off shades. Hadley crouched and reached out a hand to help Alex up.

  “Where did he go?” Alex shouted.

  “Who?”

  Just then, the room flooded with light.

  Chapter 16

  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 Ts. 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 wa
ll.

  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.