Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(36)

My every instinct said attack, but my instincts always say that. And right now it wouldn’t be smart. On my own, two was doable, even two masters. But I wasn’t on my own. And a fight would allow the rest of the family time to zero in on our location.

There was some muffled foul language from the duffel. I gave it a poke. “Settle down!”

“Let me out! I’m suffocating in here!”

“You don’t have lungs.”

“I’m going to puke in this thing.”

“You don’t have a stomach, either,” I told him, steering the body over to the wall. I unzipped the bag and a big nose popped out. “Gah! What the hell have you been carrying in this thing?”

“It’s my gym bag.”

“It smells like something died in here!”

“If we don’t get out of here soon, something might,” I told him grimly. “The main exits are guarded. Tell me you’ve got a secret way out.”

“Do you have any idea what those cost?”

Of course. I would decide to kidnap the only vamp dumb enough to skimp on the necessities. “A back door, then!”

“There’s a courtyard behind the bar, but it’s just a space between buildings. There’s no exit that way.”

“There’s about to be.”

We booked it back across the club, wove through the five-person-thick crowd around the bar and pushed through a door. The storeroom proved to be a claustrophobic brick rectangle, with no windows and only a narrow aisle between shelves. But a small breeze drifted through a slightly ajar back door.

I pushed it open and found myself in a narrow courtyard containing broken pallets, bags of garbage and a couple cats. Their eyes glowed at me for an instant before they scampered up a fire escape to safety. On every side, buildings rose tall and dark, hemming us in, as Ray had said. The shortest was three stories, and while I might have scaled it on my own, I couldn’t do it towing a half-dead vampire.

It looked like the only way out was the one the cats had taken.

I tugged on the pull-down ladder, wondering how I was going to get Ray’s well-padded ass up four flights. And then I wondered if I’d get him up at all when the structure shrieked in protest and refused to budge. Decades’ worth of rust clung to my hands and sent a cloud of red flakes into the air. The ladder probably hadn’t been touched since the building was erected, maybe a century ago.

It finally came down, but it wasn’t wide enough for me to haul anybody up alongside me, and I doubted it would hold the weight of two adults anyway. So I sent the body up first. Its coordination was about what you’d expect for someone without a head, and it didn’t help that the stairs shuddered with every step. But amazingly, they looked like they might hold.

Of course, the universe wasted no time in punishing me for that nanosecond of optimism. Halfway up the second landing, a scream of overstressed metal echoed around the courtyard and a hail of old bolts came rattling down. The fire escape tore away from the building on one side and sagged out into the air.

The body stopped, quivering in fear, and one look at Raymond’s face showed why. The two parts were obviously in some sort of communication, or it wouldn’t have been able to move. But the only thing being communicated at the moment was terror.

So I slapped him.

Furious blue eyes swiveled up to mine. “Wasn’t beheading me enough?”

“Move. Or you’re going to be headless permanently,” I hissed.

Ray’s eyes swung back to his body, which had slumped over like the corpse it was, causing my jacket to begin to slide off. I moved forward to catch it, and thereby narrowly missed being skewered by a spear of metal that fell off the building. It took out the awning over the back door instead, crumpling the heavy aluminum like paper before slamming into the paving stones.

Ray gave a startled yelp, but the near miss got his body moving again. And this time, he wasn’t messing around. Freedom was a few steps away, and he went for it, taking the last few flights with the fire escape collapsing under him. He leapt into the air on its final shudder and grabbed the edge of the roof next door, dangling there precariously.

I didn’t wait around to find out if he made it. Rusted metal rattled down the old bricks and exploded against the paving stones, flinging shrapnel everywhere. Along with it went a crashing cacophony of sound loud enough to wake the dead—and that included the dead searching for us.





Chapter Eleven


Grabbing the duffel, I headed back across the courtyard at a run, leaping over fallen pieces while trying to dodge the ones still raining down. Something hit my right shoulder like a hammer blow, but I couldn’t waste time seeing how bad it was. I charged back through the storeroom and burst through the door—just in time to see half a dozen vamps converging on it.

I ducked back inside and slammed it behind me. It was sturdy old oak—probably a relic from the club’s original incarnation as a factory—but that would buy us seconds at best. Maybe they hadn’t seen us, I thought hysterically, before doing a Ray and throwing the lock.

“Did you see that?” Raymond sounded vaguely awed. “Did you see what I did?”

“What’s on the other side of this wall?” I asked breathlessly.

“I was like . . . like Superman or something! I almost flew—” He broke off as the door shuddered under a heavy blow. So much for hoping they hadn’t seen us.