I slammed into the ground. A heavy weight on top of me.
And then I was flying. Rushing. Away from the fight.
Pain. Claws digging into my arms.
I had a single moment of clarity. A vamp had dropped onto me from the far side of the car. Picked me up. Leaped away. I was being kidnapped.
“I smell it upon you,” the vampire said in heavily accented English. “Give it to me.”
In midair, I wrapped my energies around him from the potted tree I still held. His power felt different from other vamps I had fed to the earth. Less maggoty and more like deep cold water. Icy water. The vampire tree grew a vine two feet long. It wrapped around his neck, stuck thorns into him. And sucked his energies down. The vamp staggered. Slowed.
He crashed to the earth in a heap.
I rolled off his undead body. Breathing too fast in fear, in shock, my heart thumping hard.Hunger.Putting my hand to the ground, I drained his undeath.Hungeras if the land starved, rose, and rushed through me.
“Stop,” I whispered to the tree and to the land. I wrapped my fingers around the vine and tore it free of the vamp’s neck. A trickle of vamp blood fell from each thorn. Thorns that hadn’t been there only moments ago. Thorns on a vine that hadn’t been there either.
My ownhunger, the land’shunger, fought to take all of him. To feed him to the earth. Fighting my own need, I took him to the very edge of true-death. Stopped before the vampire was true-dead. Still undead by a hair.
Breathing hard, I placed my hand to the earth. I didn’t want to claim Ming’s land. Didn’t want to make it mine. But the land wanted what I could offer, what I could give it. The land wanted the body and blood and soul of the vampire beneath my hand. The earth alwayswanted.
I pulled my palm away. Realized I was crying and wiped my tears and snot away. Breathed slower, or tried to. Found myself. Found my own desires and needs. We had been attacked. We could legally respond.
I shoved my conscious thoughts through the ground and up into the sleeping trees. I found an owl who was watching the battle and, trying something new, gently entered its consciousness. The fight scene was crisp and clear as if lit by bright lights.
Carlos stabbed Yummy. She fell. I yanked Carlos’ undeath, pulled the icy cold energy to me through the ground, a gray green energy that looked like no soul I had ever seen before. I yanked it into the tree. Which was now far too large for the small pot. Vines were growing as it tried to reach the ground.Tried to take root and claim the land for itself. For the Green Knight. I grabbed them and held them to me.
Feeling everything through the land, seeing it all through the owl’s eyes, sharp and harsh and detailed. Rick was snarling, fighting the duel’s second. Aya staked the vampire he had shot. He hadn’t used silver rounds. Why?
Aya aimed at the vampire fighting with Rick.
Ming appeared at the fight scene. Popped there. Vamp-fast. She beheaded the vamp at Aya’s feet. Grabbed Rick by the scruff of the neck and threw him across the lawn. With a single flash of steel, she took the head of the second. “Finish him,” she demanded of Yummy, the sound so loud my own ears ached.
With a single flashing swipe, Yummy took her opponent’s head.
Ming bent and cut off the vampire’s fingers, then placed them in Yummy’s hands.
My stomach turned.
The owl fluttered its wings at the blood and focused in closely.
Ming rifled the vampire’s pockets and handed Yummy more stuff. And then yet more from the vampire at FireWind’s feet.
“Cai,” Ming said, the single word arrogant; she was accustomed to being obeyed.
The man in his underwear lifted and carried something from the front door. It was a naked human body, blood smeared all over the clear plastic it was wrapped in. Duct tape held the wrapping closed, and there was no trail of blood. Either vampires had drained it totally dry or it had been dead long enough not to drip.
The body we were called here for in the first place.Hours of wackadoodle and a violent attack ago.
The owl lost interest and launched from the branch. It flew along the road and I got a view of two white vans, the kind used in package delivery in neighborhoods, vans tall enough to stand up inside, big enough to hold many people. The vampires’ transportation. The owl flew farther, seeking a place to hunt. I dropped away and I was back inside my body, in the dark, with a near-true-dead vampire.
Four pawed, Rick trotted through the undergrowth. Stuck his muzzle out at me and sniffed.
“I’m okay, boss,” I said softly, the words painful in my bruised throat.
Rick whined an interrogative.
“I didn’t kill him. If Ming wants a prisoner to question, this one is still undead. But he cut me with his nails, and the land isn’t happy with him.”
