Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(50)

They looked up at our appearance, dropped dinner, and dove at us. These had feasted well and they were fast, nearly as fast as a normal fanghead. I whipped the vamp-killers in a scissors move and took out the one near me, cutting her in two. Bruiser took out the man with a clean beheading. The first two crumpled, dead again.

Eli hesitated as a child dove at him. Fangs flashing. Eyes empty and wild. A child vamp. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. He hesitated. Bruiser stepped in and took her head.

The act was necessary. Completely essential. Yet the ease with which Bruiser moved shocked me. There was no hesitation. Just a fluidity of motion that was like death on the wing.

Eli’s mouth opened as the child’s head flew and spun into a puddle. He got a strange look on his face, as if he’d seen a ghost. Or was reliving something from his past. Yes. That. He stood, there, frozen, weapons down. Vulnerable. I knew, through personal experience, that being taken to water this morning had brought him closer to his past, his memories, his own private hells, the ones he’d lived through courtesy of Uncle Sam. And they had risen up and attacked him all at once.

Bruiser gripped his own bloodied blades in one large fist and grabbed Eli’s jacket. Rain slicked his face as he shouted over the downpour, “Not a child. She looked like a child, but she wasn’t. Her name was Joan Bennett and she stood only four feet nine. She was staked and beheaded in nineteen forty-three for killing two humans.” He shook Eli. “Not. A. Child.”

Eli focused on Bruiser. Took Bruiser’s hand in his and pushed it away. But he wasn’t back yet. He was somewhere else, someone else. Emotions locked down. Feeling nothing. Remembering everything. It was the first time I’d seen evidence of the PTSD symptoms that probably helped end his career in the Rangers. I didn’t know what to do to help.

“She had her head back,” I said to Bruiser over the downpour.

“All of them do, and all were beheaded at their deaths,” Bruiser said, his tone grim. “We have to—”

A gust of icy wind blew the lantern over with a clatter. Battered us. Sudden dark enveloped us and I pulled hard on Beast’s night vision. Inside me she growled low. I stumbled against the wind, a howling banshee, and regained my footing. The rain, which had come in waves all day, again pounded down so hard it threw up a white mist as the droplets shattered on impact.

Over it were strange scraping sounds, like flesh against stone. Revenants poured out of the cracks and crannies and rushed down the walkways. Blind eyes zeroed in on us. Seven revs. Bruiser stepped close, placing Eli between us, his back to me. I turned and faced away too, my partner in a safe place until he got his head together. Revs weren’t built for wind. Three slipped and I dispatched two of them. Bruiser took a third one.

They were on us. I stabbed and cut, but they were too close. I tried to pull on the Gray Between, but I couldn’t find it, the place I reached for inside myself empty. And for the first time today, there was no lightning. No way to take them down from outside of time. I stabbed and cut, stabbed and cut. It wasn’t enough.

One latched on to my elbow, getting a mouthful of armor and silver. She wasn’t deterred. Her mouth smoked. The stink of burning vamp rose against the beating rain. I dropped my longer blades and drew the short ones. Stabbing, aiming at heads, cutting across eyes. The female on my elbow pulled me down. I landed on one knee, feeling something wrench. This was going to end badly unless Eli got himself together. Beast screamed in rage, the sound tearing my throat.

I smelled Edmund.





CHAPTER 10


    Their Heads Should Loll Over and Bounce as They Walk



Long blades flashed. Edmund took down three vamps, moving so fast and lithe it was like watching water slide down a rock face. Bruiser matched his stance to Edmund’s and suddenly the revs were all down. We were standing in ankle-deep water and vamp entrails and remarkably little blood.

Edmund turned to me. “You will never leave me out of a fight, mistress. Do you understand?”

“You were hurt. You nearly died, you idiot.”

“I am well.”

“Yeah.” I raised my voice over an icy gust of wind that whistled through the mausoleums. “Who attacked you?”

Ed’s face twisted in something that might have been self-anger. Or indigestion. The words seemed to drag out of him when he said, “I do not know. I did not know the scent of their blood. I did not see their faces.”

Lightning struck, hitting close by. The light was shocking, brightening the entire St. Louis Cemetery Number One. The water around us carried the electric charge, zinging up our bodies. Finally, if a little late to help in the fight, I bubbled out of time. The female vamp’s head was still attached to my arm, and so I used the blade of the knife and worked it between her jaws. She had been a freshly turned vamp before she died the second time, and her four small fangs hadn’t penetrated the leathers, the silver, or the plastered interior armor. The jaws finally released and the head fell away from my shoulder and the bubble of time. Then it just hung there.

Beast sent me a memory of a dog she had seen once. The reddish dog had a half-rotted rabbit in its locked jaws, foam and spittle all over the rabbit. The dog was moving in faltering circles. Rabid and dying. Beast had hated the smell and had moved far away and out of the dog’s territory. I sniffed. That smell wasn’t present here, so that was one good thing.