Ahhh,I thought. “Put down your weapons and we’ll leave in peace,” I said, urging his momentary indecision.Shoot us and we’re all dead.Didn’t say that.
The woman at the Flayer’s side began to bleed in a scarlet stripe down her left side. I realized that the flaying of the vamp’s flesh was the result of the Flayer of Mithrans using her brain. He took his title from the act of using his magic.What a peach.
Beast pawed to the front of our minds and peered out at her.Is not fruit.Woman vampire smells ugly. Like smell of sick flashlight. Same as vampires killed in snow at sweathouse.
Bad batteries. Acidic. Yeah. Though I’m not sure what it means or if we can use that.
Shimon, his eyes locked onto Molly’s face, waved a negligent hand. His vampires’ weapons disappeared. Their hands reappeared in front of them and clasped together, like some bizarre synchronized dance of parade rest.
Edmund’s hands twitched too. I wondered if Shimon had left a listening/control bug in Edmund’s brain.Crap.
The Truebloodhedgefell in a showy shower of red sparks. The lizard flashed through the air to Gee’s shoulder and curled his striped tail around the Mercy Blade’s neck. Bruiser staggered.
“Have your people call my people,” I said, somehow pulling off the ironic, mocking tone I was going for. “We’ll do dinner. Parley. Talk politics. Religion. Killing people. The usual.”
Shimon and the bleeding woman laughed together, sounding eerily exact.
Gee carrying Ed, Evan steadying Bruiser with a hand on his arm, Molly breathing hard and fast, we backed out the door and into a blowing, black night, storming with sleet. The city power grid went off, leaving us in total darkness for too many heartbeats. It flickered on and off a few times, and steadied in the on position. Lightning lanced across the sky. The wind and ice cut through my pelt like frozen knives.
Shaddock eased up to my honeybunch and offered his sliced wrist to the drained Onorio. Bruiser took the wrist in shaking hands, pulled the MOC’s wrist to his mouth, and drank. I turned my attention to my partner and listened in.
“Say again,” Eli said into his mic. He cursed, soft, succinct, savage. To me, he said, “Our transport is in a ditch. We’re on our own.”
“How does a transport vehicle end up in a ditch?” I asked, because I knew Eli and Shaddock had planned for all eventualities.
“Apparently the driver had a snort of liquid warmth and drove off the road. His backup is—was—a pair of four-by-fours and they’re buried beneath a ton of plowed snow, for which we can thank the city of Asheville’s snowplows.”
Do not like sleet!Beast thought.
In the distance I heard the sound of snowplows, brining trucks, and the fainter sound of a police siren. Then more sirens, closer to us, and I feared for a moment that the vamps in the Regal had called the cops. Even in North Carolina it would probably result in days of paperwork to have so many weapons on hand and dead bodies in the hotel, but the units turned away.
Eli said, “Follow me,” and ducked into the driving storm. We trailed him. Eli tapped his mic and went onto a private channel for a discussion with someone, likely the Huey pilot, and oddly, he left me out of the loop. As we raced across the street into the protection of a covered doorway, I thought about being left out for a good dozensteaming, ragged breaths, my small clouds swept away by the icy wind. I’d been sick for months. Eli had, in the way of command structure, moved on. I was proud and sad and jealous and angry all at once, so I kept my mouth closed on any of the things I might have said. We huddled in the doorway, the sickly smell of Ed’s blood making my insides crawl. My primo was asleep, and hopefully not suffering. Bruiser leaned against a wall, looking like a broken doll, his eyes closed, his face pale, even after sipping on vamp blood. He seemed to be having trouble catching his breath.
Brute eased up beside Bruiser and sat, pressing his shoulder and his wolf-warmth against the Onorio.
Shaddock leaned in to him and said, “You’ll feed from my wrist every evening as long as I’m here. No argument, young’un.” I could have kissed the MOC. Bruiser murmured his thanks.
Eli said, “Master of the City. Can you offer us safe haven?”
“Can’t do much about the weather or the lack of power, but I can call my people and get us to the restaurant. I can start a wood fire and feed you reheated barbeque,” Shaddock said with a very human grin, “and bed you down on the floor in the kitchen, but there’s no power, and it’s on the other side of town. Gimme a little time and I’ll roll or bribe a tow-truck driver to get us there, but it’ll take a while.
Eli tapped the mic back to the public channel and then off. To Shaddock and me, he said, “Rock meet hard place. All the hotels are filled. All the B and Bs within walking distance are filled. There’s no vacancy anywhere. No readily accessible, defensible, empty buildings to take over and hunker down in. The city shelters are unprotected against fanghead attack and are too far off site to reach them on foot in the storm.” He swept his eyes over the buildings and up and down the street.
Shaddock said to me, “I can commandeer a snowplow or steal a car. You just say the word, but again, that takes time and the storm is getting worse by the second, Jane.”
“Sitrep,” Eli said, and I gave a chin jut to show I was listening. “Anyone not evac’d out will bivouac in a hostileenvironment. Freezing to death or being attacked by enemy vamps is no better than the possibility of crashing in the helo. It’spossiblefor the Huey to take off into a sleet storm, but that will mean the choice of either flying through the sleet and risk icing up, or flying above the storm in the warmer inversion layer to get out of the bad weather, and that risks the weather change at each altitude transition.
“He hasn’t made a decision on whether he’s willing to risk it, but if he decides to make a run, he’ll carry a maximum of seven passengers. In the event he does decide to transport you, his flight plan and altitude will depend on a lot of factors, like the position of the storm, wind speed, the altitude of the inversion layer compared to our current altitude, and the altitude of the inn. And he might have to alter everything at any moment.”
“So it’s wait out the storm here together or split up and it’s gonna suck on board. Got it. Where did the storm come from?” I asked.
Eli gave his barely there twitch of a smile, knowing what I was asking. “Not magic. We’ve been keeping an eye on two weather fronts. We’re currently right on the edge of both, giving us this,” he pointed up.
He turned his attention to Moll and Evan. “The helo’s upgraded deicing systems are the same currently in use on Marine Hueys. The pilot will go through a deicing process before taking off, and the helo has ice meters that tell him how much ice is building up on the frame of the helicopter while in flight. But any ice accumulation on the rotors doesn’t just mean they’ll be heavy; it means they warp, in which case he lands fast or you crash. I’ve seen the bodies of people who crashed. It isn’t pretty and there’s no walking away from it.”
Molly shivered and exchanged that silent communication common between old married couples. She nodded and frowned, thinking. Evan studied the sky. Eli scanned the streets again and back to us. Lightning ripped across the sky and thunder boomed like distant cannon.
“No matter how bad it gets here,” Eli said, “I’d rather you stick it out on the ground. It’s safer.”
