“Tell her when she comes up from the wing. She’s needed where she is.”
Julian’s eyes hold mine for half a beat longer than the operational exchange requires. He nods.
I stand. The messages sit on the screen, unsent.
Peachwood’s campusat night is an exercise in civilian architecture. Open pathways designed for foot traffic. Sight lines interrupted by ornamental landscaping that would provide concealment for an approaching force but none for a defending one. Exterior lighting positioned for aesthetics, creating pools of visibility separated by stretches of dark that a vampire can cross between heartbeats.
I cross the campus in under a minute.
Carson’s lab is on the third floor. The lights are on. Through the exterior windows, a man moves between workstations. Late forties. Thin in the way of a man who forgets meals.
Three figures at the edge of the quad. Still outside the building. Sullivan’s gamble bought time, but I don’t know how much is left.
I enter the building through the service entrance and take the stairs to the third floor.
The corridor is institutional. Fluorescent lighting in ceiling-mounted panels. Tile floor that carries sound in both directions. Four structural columns at intervals down the length of the hallway. A fire extinguisher mounted on the wall between the second and third columns.
I let my shadows go.
They spread across the floor, climb the walls, and swallow the fluorescent panels one by one. The corridor goes dark. The only light left is the strip spilling from under Carson’s lab door behind me.
I stand beside the last column. The space is mine. Every inch of it mapped. Every angle covered. The dark doesn’t just fill the corridor. It answers to me.
I wait.
Four minutes.
They come up the stairwell. Three vampires. Moving with the coordinated quiet of operatives who have done this before.
The stairwell door opens. The lead operative steps into the corridor and stops. His head turns left, then right. His weight shifts backward, toward the door he just came through.
Four seconds of hesitation in a hallway that should be fluorescent-lit and empty.
I take him from the left. My hand closes around the back of his head from behind and I drive his face into the column. Before he drops, I tear his head from his shoulders. He doesn’t make a sound.
The second enters with a blade already drawn. Better instincts. He drops into a defensive stance, sweeping the blade in a horizontal arc designed to create space.
I let the blade pass. Then I step inside his guard.
My shadows close around his weapon arm and tighten on his wrist. He makes a sound of confusion because nothing he can see is touching him. I use the half second to catch the falling blade and drive it through his heart. He drops.
The third hesitates at the stairwell door. His weight shifts back toward the stairs, then forward. The moment between self-preservation and commitment.
He commits. He rushes me.
Pressure builds behind my ribs before my body can respond.
The fire extinguisher. Mounted on the wall behind me.
I’m not touching it. I’m not looking at it. But the mounting bracket shears off and the canister rips free and launches down the hallway at a speed I didn’t choose and couldn’t replicate with my hands.
It hits the third operative in the chest and drives him into the stairwell door. The door buckles off its hinges.
The operative drops. The canister clatters to the floor. He’s not dead. Stunned. I cross the hallway and finish it.
The hallway goes still.
I stand among them. Three bodies. A fire extinguisher I didn’t touch and a stairwell door I didn’t intend to break.
