[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

chest. He staggered, but didn't go down.
I sighted on that round, skeletal head. His white hand came up and slashed the air. And impossibly, I felt
like some invisible claw had slashed my arm. I fired, but my aim was a little off. The bullet grazed the side
of his face.
He slashed at me again, and I saw blood start to drip down my hands. Scare tactics. It didn't hurt that
much, not nearly as much as it would hurt if he got his hands on me for real.
Page 192
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
A second gun sounded, and Janos staggered as a bullet took him in the shoulder. Larry was behind him,
gun out.
My vision faded, as if fog was rolling in behind my eyes. I lowered my aim to the larger target of his
upper body and pulled the trigger again. I heard Larry's bullet go high and wide into the wall behind me.
A startled, "Hey!" let me know Jason was still back there.
I saw Janos go for the door, like watching slow motion through a fog so thick I could barely see. I fired
twice more and knew I hit him at least once. When he was out of the room I fell forward onto all fours,
and waited for my vision to clear. Hoped it would clear.
Through my ruined vision I saw Jean-Claude still lying motionless in a pool of his own blood. The
question that came into my head was, Is he dead? A stupid question about a vampire, but it was still the
first thing I thought of.
I glanced behind me and found Jason scattering bits of the two female vampires around the floor. He
was tearing at them with his bare hands, cracking their bones and throwing them far away from each
other, as if by sheer destruction he could wash away what they'd done to him.
Bruce lay on his back by the wall. Blood had soaked into his tuxedo. I couldn't tell for sure, but he
looked dead. Ivy and Kissa were nowhere to be seen.
Larry was still standing across the room, gun extended, as if he didn't realize that Janos was gone. He
was frowning. Everybody was up, everybody was moving except Jean-Claude. Shit.
I crawled towards him, not trusting myself to stand with my vision so spotty. It seemed to take a long
time to reach him, as if more than my eyesight wasn't working quite right.
My vision was mostly clear by the time I got to him. I knelt in a thick pool of his blood and stared down
at him. How do you tell if a vampire is dead? Sometimes he didn't have a pulse, or a heartbeat, or didn't
breathe. Shit, again.
I holstered the Browning. There was nothing here right now to shoot, and I needed my hands. I bled on
my shirt and looked at my hands for the first time. It looked like fingernails had scraped down both of
them, a little deeper than normal, but they'd heal. Probably wouldn't even be a scar.
I touched Jean-Claude's shoulder and the flesh was soft, very human. I rolled him over onto his back.
His hand flopped against the floor with a bonelessness that only the dead have. Some trick of the night
had made his face beautiful again. The most human I'd ever seen it, except for the fact that no one was
that pretty.
I checked for the big pulse in his neck. I held my fingers against his cooling skin, and felt nothing.
Something like tears welled against my eyes, and my throat was tight. But I wouldn't cry, not yet. I wasn't
even sure I wanted to.
When is dead, dead for a vampire? Is there such a thing as CPR for the undead? Hell, he breathed some
of the time. He had a heart, and it beat most of the time. Not beating couldn't be a good thing.
I positioned his head, pinched his nose closed, and blew a breath into his mouth. His chest rose with it. I
tried two more breaths, but he didn't breathe on his own. I unbuttoned his shirt and found the spot above
Page 193
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
his breastbone, and pressed, one, two, three, four, all the way to fifteen compressions. Two breaths.
Jason staggered over to me, then collapsed to his knees. "Is he gone?"
"I don't know." I pumped with everything I had in me, hard enough to break ribs on a human being, but
he wasn't human. He lay there, his body moving only when I moved it, as loose and boneless as only the
dead can be. His lips were half-parted, his closed eyes edged with the black lace of his thick eyelashes.
His curling black hair still framed his pale face.
I'd pictured Jean-Claude dead. I'd even thought about killing him myself once or twice, but now that his
death was a fact I didn't know how to feel. It didn't seem fair somehow. I'd brought him here. I'd asked
him to come, and he came. And now he was dead, well and truly dead. And it was partially my fault,
partially my doing. If I killed Jean-Claude, I wanted to actually pull the trigger and watch his eyes as he
died. Not like this.
I stared down at him. I thought about no more Jean-Claude. This beautiful body rotting at last in the
grave it so richly deserved. I shook my head. I couldn't let that happen, not if I could save him. I only
knew one thing that all dead respected, craved. Blood. I tried to breathe life into him one more time, with
one difference. I smeared my blood on his mouth first. My lips touched his, and I tasted the sweet,
metallic taste of my own blood.
Nothing.
Larry knelt beside us. "Where did Janos go?"
He hadn't been able to see through the fog, but I didn't have time to explain. "Watch the door; shoot
anything that comes through."
"Can I let the girls go?"
"Sure." I'd forgotten about the girls. I'd forgotten about Jeff Quinlan. I'd have traded them all for
Jean-Claude to blink his eyes at me. Not if the choice had been offered to me as an either-or, but just
now they were strangers. He wasn't.
"More blood, maybe," Jason said softly.
I looked at him. "You offering?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]