Fangtastic (19 page)

Yes, Eric—still clutching his machine to his chest, still right where he'd fallen. He took in the situation in an instant and reached out to Pyro's partner, flipping a switch on his machine. I watched as the thug went as stiff as a board, and then relaxed by degrees as all his vitality seeped out of him. When he'd sagged, Eric took his hand back, set his machine down, and lifted me and my dead weight right off him like he'd suddenly become Superman. Whatever had kept him down, it seemed that Pyro's partner's energy had temporarily counteracted it.

“Nelson?” he asked.

“The Feds have the place locked down. He'll be fine until we can steal him away.” I thought about the facility Eric had shown me … “For now. But we have to get out of here.”

“I can't leave him here.”

On the floor above us, it sounded like they were moving furniture … or bodies. Someone else would be coming our way any second.

“Well, I can,” I said. “You can either fight the Feds on your own and lose, or you can fall back with me and live to fight another day. Even as strong as you are now, you can't take all of them.”

He looked up, as if he could see through the furiously creaking floorboards. “Let's go.”

We ran, but not without his precious machine. Never that.

We were all the way to the lobby of the Tower before I realized it wasn't going to be as easy as making a quick getaway. If the Feds had any sense at all—and, sadly, they did—they were going to be watching entrances and exits. We were parked right out front. There was no safe way to go back to the Camaro, as sweet as it was. How, then, were we getting away? How were we even getting out? I might be able to ghost … maybe, if it didn't take strength and concentration, which I was fast running out of … but that wouldn't do a thing for Eric.

“Eric, you're going to have to save yourself,” I told him. “I'm trapped until night.”

“There's no way you can hold out that long. They'll capture you.”

“No, they won't.” But it was a knee-jerk reaction. I didn't really have a plan. We'd left the schematic up on Very Scary's computer. There was no place I could hide where the Feds couldn't find me. Unless … “Eric, do you have one of those photogenic memories?”

He looked baffled. “You mean photographic?”

“Yeah, whatever. Potato, potah-to. Do you?”

“Yes, but—”

“Can you tell me where the Tower stores its kegs?”

His face cleared of confusion and he quickly sketched out where I should go.

“Give me a sec to get away,” I ordered, “then launch a barstool through one window as a distraction and get out through another. Stay away from anywhere the Feds might think to look for you, and get in touch with … ” Crap, what was Marcy's undercover name? Stacy … Stacy … “
Santos
, that's it! Look up Stacy
Santos.
She hangs with the steampunk crowd here. You'll probably have to leave her a message. Have her round up whoever she can and meet me here as soon as possible after dark. We're going to get your nephew back.” And take down the Feds' hospital of horrors while we were at it.

“I'm coming too.”

“Whatever floats your boat.”

Footsteps sounded like they were coming through the ceiling. Our time was up. “Go!”

16

I
didn't see Eric escape or the Feds tearing the place apart. It had been all I could do—at five foot nothing and a hundred pounds dripping wet, with daylight draining my vamp strength—to roll one of the empty kegs over to the others that hadn't yet been tapped and to ghost inside. Going solid again all pretzeled up hadn't exactly been comfortable, but I'd only been aware of it for seconds before sleep knocked me over the head and dragged me off to its dark lair of oblivion.

I jerked awake as usual at sunset, panicking at the enclosed space, feeling myself back in the grave, in my coffin, having to fight my way out. But then my brain caught up with me. I remembered the keg and the chaos … and the ghosting. It had been for real, then. I'd finally found my superpower. Go me.

I was still weak from being drained by the killer kids and unnaturally active by day … not to mention all the action I'd seen. It took everything I had to ghost out of the keg, smelling like an entire brewery. I was totally craving the blood of a caffeine addict, but I didn't have time to go hunting and was still worried about feeding out of need. If I got through this, I was going to have to set myself on some kind of diet regimen. Regular meals. Spare blood I could down like an energy drink. I licked my lips and ended up grazing my tongue on a fang.

Darn it, I had to
focus
.
My backup would be here soon. I needed a plan, and I needed weapons. The Feds had tossed the taproom pretty well, looking for me, but it wasn't until I moved into the main part of the club that I saw how thorough they'd been. The windows Eric had smashed to escape were still open to the night, letting in sticky-humid air. But those weren't the only ugly holes dotting the walls. The Feds had made a few of their own, probably where they'd sensed hollow spots. Furniture had been displaced, overturned, or even ripped into. Chairs were belly up, legs in the air like dead bugs scattered across the floor.

There was nothing for me here. I went to Very Scary's office to check the schematic, hoping for a place helpfully labeled
arsenal
, but the Feds had, of course, raided the room and taken the computer. With nothing better to do at the moment, I conducted my own search of the office. I could make myself brass knuckles out of paperclips, but that was about all they'd left me. Or … wait. I came up with a silver letter-opener shaped like a dagger. It was tiny, but I tucked it into my cleavage. It might come in handy … if I ever needed to fight something smaller than a breadbox.

I hoped the others arrived better armed and with enough to share.

I didn't have long to wait.

We're here
,
Bobby said in my head—I guess so they wouldn't startle me with their arrival. I met him at the first floor bar area, amid the devastation.

Before I could even take them all in, Bobby grabbed me and held me to his very nice chest. I was happy to stay there for a minute, running my hands over his back and just breathing in his scent. He'd been in such a rush, he hadn't taken a shower before coming to my call. It made sense—kick butt first, shower later. Beating on baddies did tend to get your hands dirty, not to mention the rest of you. The point was that he smelled good … he smelled like
him
.
There was a spicy, tangy scent to the blood roaring through his veins that made me want to take a bite out of him and then let him return the favor. I nuzzled the pulse point of his neck, teasing him with just the tips of my teeth, which had, of course, grown at the smell of him.

“Now
do you believe me?” I asked, not totally able to let it go.

Bobby gazed down at me like he was a dying man lost in the desert and I was a sudden oasis. “Always. I never seriously doubted you. I just had to wrap my head around it. And when Sid and Maya declared you public enemy number one … I knew whose side I was on.”

Then my brainy boy ran out of words and used his lips to show me exactly which side that was, sipping from me like I was that oasis and he'd been days without drink.

Then two hands yanked us apart and Eric stood there glaring. “Can we maybe save my nephew first, snog later?”

Bobby's eyes were blue flame and still on me. “Later,” he promised.

“You'd better believe it.”

Reluctantly, I put off the idea of riding off into the sunset for a moonlit makeout session and turned to the others.

My heart almost gave out, which wouldn't, for me, have been that catastrophic, but I kinda wanted to keep it for moments like this. I had minions! Like,
seriously
.

It wasn't just Marcy, who I'd been expecting, although … maybe not dressed just like
that
.
It was Brent and Eric too. But Marcy was the one who demanded my attention. She looked like the bastard love child of Rambo and a retro Miss America, except that her sash was a bandolier or whatever you called those things you always saw crisscrossing the hunky hero's chest in action movies. It was fully loaded with ammo. Her dark, stick-straight hair was pulled back into a sleek club at the base of her neck. She looked beautiful and deadly. From the expression on Brent's face, that was a pretty potent combo. In fact, he looked so shell-shocked I wondered if she'd already field-tested her ammo.

“What are you wearing?” I asked.

“My doomsday dress! Do you like it?” She spun and stopped with one leg cocked, striking a pose to offer up her most flattering angle. Stomach in, chest out. “We finished it last night, though I made some modifications on my own.”

She unhooked a piece of hardware from her sash to
show me.

“Is that a grenade?” I asked, not daring to touch it.

“A live one,” she answered proudly. “All you have to do is pull the pin—”

“Don't!” Eric and Brent said at the same time.

She pouted. “Spoilsports.”

I turned to Brent, giving him the hairy eyeball and waiting for him to flinch. “What about
him?
He's one of them. How do we know we can trust him not to turn on us?”

Marcy's hand and Brent's magically found each other and held tight. “Because I said so,” she answered, giving me a stink-eye all her own. Girlfriend could
glare
like the setting sun off a rearview mirror.

My lips twitched.
About damn time those two figured it out.

“Good enough for me.
But
,”
I said, not yet ready to release Brent when I had him on the hook, “if you betray us or hurt my friend in any way, you die a horrible death. Got it?”

He smiled and kissed the hand he held, giving Marcy a look hot enough to burn the place to the ground. “You don't have to worry about me.”

“Fine,” I said, finding I actually had to swallow around a lump in my throat. “Do we have a plan?”

As it turns out, we did.

We loaded up into the
olds
mobile Eric had managed to secure. Bobby, with his long legs, was riding shotgun, and I was crammed in the back on the hump between the two love birds, who were about to light the car on fire with their smoldering glances. It was hard to hold on to the feeling of being badass while sitting in the kiddy seat, feet propped up on the center bump and knees almost to my chin.

Eric parked almost exactly where I'd had Hunter park before. We traveled through the tall grass toward the “closed” clinic as silently as we possibly could. It made sense that's where the Feds would have taken everyone—the vamps at the very least—to be strapped to beds and bled. At least they weren't in possession of Eric's machine. He'd rescued that. But they knew about it. I doubted they'd simply let it walk away. Or its creator. But Eric had apparently become one of my people, and I wasn't going to let him get got.

In short order, we stood approximately where Eric and I had met the other night. He'd already told the others about my spankin' new power, and thus I was totally the lynchpin of the plan they'd worked out. If I didn't do my part, no one else could do theirs. I gave Bobby a good-bye-for-now kiss, a lingering one. He nipped at my lower lip, and all I wanted to do was stand there forever with him, but I pulled back before Eric could clear his throat or otherwise give us away. I had to step apart from Bobby to focus on being insubstantial, invisible, untouchable. Otherwise, I'd stay too aware of my body. It took an extra second or two before I felt all ghostly. I heard Marcy gasp in awe. Maybe someday with enough practice I'd learn to pull this off with my eyes open. I'd love to have seen the expression on her face.

I rose like hot air until I could sense the top of the fence from the way the breeze now seemed to strike me from a new direction. The others were going to give me until the count of three before they started their diversionary mayhem to pull the guards away from their posts so that I could materialize inside the facility to wreak my own havoc, disassembling the security system so they could storm the clinic. I floated across the grounds, going from memory toward the clinic, hoping to enter at just the right place.

I felt the explosions outside the wall begin, like shock waves ripping through me, threatening to scatter me to the wind.

Then the unthinkable happened. Some kind of security measure triggered, and suddenly I was thrown back into physical form and pinned to the ground by daylight. No, that couldn't be possible. It was full night. But … oh crap, these weren't searchlights that had come on.
They were sunlamps
.
My vinyl dress didn't so much go up in flame as begin to melt into me, searing into my flesh as if it would become my new candy coating. Guards rushed past from inside—two, four, more—and I held my scream to stay unnoticed. My only hope was to get through those doors before they closed behind the guards. I couldn't do that if I was being tackled and shackled.

I used the pain, the fear, the burning, everything I had to motivate myself into overdrive. The world was a blur as I flew into action, diving at the doors and skidding on my belly through them as they closed. I left a smear of vinyl. My dress tore, but it was the least of my worries. Heedless of anyone who might be watching, I rolled momentarily on the cool tile, extinguishing the flames. My boots had all but melted, the black soles leaving more streak marks behind on the tile. Served them right.

I was in the emergency room foyer. I'd gotten that much right. Getting to my feet, body crying out with every movement, I saw that my minions had done their jobs with the grenades. The surveillance post was deserted. I hoped my peeps were out of reach of the horrible light and prayed my part wouldn't come too late to save them if not.

I pulled the cell phone–sized device Eric had given me from my cleavage, the only place I'd had to store it. There were three silver buttons on top of its matte black exterior that had to be hit in the right sequence. He'd shown me, and I did it now, placing the device on the ledge of the security window and cringing away as if it might hurt me, even though Eric promised it wouldn't.

It sent out a pulse that I felt almost the same way I
felt Bobby's powers. It seemed to echo through my blood and bones.

And then everything went dark.
Everything
.
All the lights, inside and outside, the screens behind the security desk. Everything that ran on electricity. Eric had called the device a portable electromagnetic pulse—EMP—transmitter, sure to knock out any electronics within a small sphere like this building.

Now that full darkness had returned I could think clearly again.
Lights out
was the signal for the others to move in. They'd know instantly that Eric's mini-machine had worked. It was time for part two of the plan … free the vamp body that Nelson was trapped in, along with all the other vamps the Feds had collected from the Tower. Bobby and the rest of my teammates would keep the guards busy and secure our escape route.

With the electronics fried, there was no way to open the inner door, and the glass of the security window was sure to be bulletproof. The only way in was
through
.
It had been freaky enough the times I'd stupidly almost fallen through objects, like the stairs back at the Tower. I'd felt dense, heavy, like something else's mass was combining with mine. I had a horrible fear that if I lost focus … or maybe gained it, even for a second … I might not get sorted out again. I mean, machine parts were all well and good for Iron Man, but for me … Well, hey, if I became a clockwork girl, at least I'd be a shoe-in for the Burgess Brigade.

Anyway, I had no choice. I grabbed hold of my sense of self and concentrated on being
me
,
but less physical. Me as a spiritual being. My old gang would laugh themselves silly at the thought. But the joke would be on them, because I was lighter than air, lighter even than a carb-starved supermodel.