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FOUR FLOORS LATER the section of Mishmar that was lifted from a hotel ended. We took the stairs, squeezed through a gap in the wall and suddenly the carpeted hotel hallway was gone, replaced by the hardwood floors and open plan of a modern apartment. The walls changed from beige to polished glossy red, rich like the color of arterial blood. The dark gray furniture stood intact, the couch and chairs arranged as if waiting for a party to begin. Even the pots still hung from a baker’s rack above the range. Now how did my father manage that? How does one pick a chunk of a building and set it on top of other buildings without the furniture sliding around? Maybe someone put it all back together after it became a part of Mishmar?
I tried not to think about the sheer power required to sever several floors of a building and lift them hundreds of feet in the air without disturbing the contents. It broke my mind.
We tiptoed across the hardwood. Modern art hung on the walls, a collection of strategically placed streaks of red and white. An open suitcase, half filled with men’s shirts, lay in the middle of the floor, just by where the door should be. A long brown streak stretched across the polished wood toward the missing door. Dried blood.
The wererats checked the hallway beyond, slinking forward.
“Clear,” Thomas called.
“Not exactly,” Ghastek murmured.
I felt them too, behind us, above us, to the right . . . More than twenty now. The vampire horde kept growing, like a snowball as it rolled down a snowy hill. I didn’t know if these were new vampires or if the ones we left behind somehow found a way around the deadly flowers. I didn’t even care. I just wanted out of Mishmar.
We pushed on into the hallway. Fatigue was slowing me down and I dragged myself forward, each step an effort as if an anchor was chained to my legs. I wanted to lie down, but taking a nap wasn’t an option.
“An elevator shaft would be nice right about now,” Jim said.
“Keep dreaming,” Curran told him.
A wide gap severed the floor of the hallway. Robert dropped to all fours and stuck his head into it, bending down so much that half of his body disappeared. By all rights, he should’ve tipped over. “I don’t see anything moving.”
“Any undead?” Curran asked Ghastek.
The Master of the Dead looked at him. “Pick a direction, I’ll tell you how many.”
“Is there a direction in which there aren’t vampires?” Andrea asked.
“No.”
Curran glanced at me.
“Down is as good as any,” I said, and pulled my saber out. It didn’t feel like Slayer, probably because it wasn’t Slayer. Slayer lay broken in Curran’s pack.
“Down it is.”
The two wererats dropped into the gap, and Curran followed. I jumped after him, and he leaped up to meet me, caught me in the air, and landed on soft feet.
“Fancy,” I told him, scanning one end of the room, while he peered at the other. This floor appeared to be a high-end gym, filled with rows of ellipticals and treadmills.
“Trying to impress, baby.” Curran set me on my feet, caught Ghastek, and handed him off to Jim none too gently. We started moving. The machines stood in a single row to the left and in another two rows with a path between them to the right. Above them flat screens, now dull and dusty, mourned the passing of the tech age on their swivel mounts.
The multiple points of undead magic shifted, streaming toward us.
“Incoming,” Ghastek said. “Moving fast. They probably found a point of entry to this floor.”
We backed away.
A gaunt, skeletal shape squeezed through a crack in the wall near the ceiling and sat there, fastened to the wall with huge talons, the two red eyes like burning coals.
“Above and to the right,” I murmured.
“I see him,” Curran answered.
Another undead squeezed out of the gap and crawled next to the first one. This one was clearly older. The ridge of bony protrusions along his spine rose at least three inches, and his jaws looked like a bear trap. Across from us a third vampire crawled out of a dark crack in the other wall. This one felt old, too. A long ragged scar marked its face, trailing down over its chest past the point I could see. A cannibal vampire. The two words didn’t even go together. What’s next, zombie pirate Viking ghosts?
A shape flickered across the corner of my eye, dashing behind the treadmills. Another moved in the corner. Six vampires had entered the room, and they were stalking us. This wouldn’t be pretty.
“There are many vampires,” Christopher reported.
“Shhh,” I told him. “Keep moving.”
Vampires reacted to prey that ran, so we didn’t run. We moved quietly and steadily toward the back of the room.
The ancient vampire on the right wall slunk down. Behind us, an undead leaped onto the treadmill and perched there, like some mutated hairless cat. More undead eyes glared at us through the gaps in the machines.
Not good.
Something clanged ahead. I glanced that way. Thomas had found a huge metal door.
“Locked,” he called out quietly.
Nice. Beating on it would definitely provoke the vampires.
The undead moved toward us, two on the ground, two on the walls, one across the tops of the treadmills. I braced myself. If I had to kill them, so be it.
Andrea raised her crossbow.
The leading undead leaped. The ancient bloodsucker with the scar dashed across the gym and disemboweled the first vampire in midleap. Undead blood hit the floor, and Scar jerked a chunk of vampiric spine out of its opponent. The injured bloodsucker dropped like a stone. Scar leaped, spinning like a corkscrew, its talons opened wide, and sliced two other vampires, carving their flesh down to the bone. Two clumps of spongy dry lungs with bloated hearts hit the floor.
I closed my mouth.
The three remaining vampires, two old and one with its spinal ridge just beginning to develop, trotted over to us, crossing each other’s paths, their heads down.
I turned. Ghastek stood on his own feet, his face pale, his eyes determined. The younger vampire twisted upright and picked up the Master of the Dead. The two ancients perched on the floor, Scar on the left and the other, large vamp, so pale it looked completely white, on the right, moving in perfect unison.
“You may want to break the door down,” Ghastek said from four mouths, three vamps’ and one his own, in the familiar dry voice I remembered. “The rest of the undead will smell their blood. We don’t have much time.”