And again I smelled it, a faint flicker of ozone, like the first lick of an approaching storm. I told myself I was imagining things. It had rained lately, after all. But, slicked with sweat, I froze in the darkness, muscles locked and singing with strain as icy panic gnawed at my spine.
Another smash of crates, which was close enough to send splinters into my boots, brought up my other small problem: I might not be able to move, but I also couldn’t stay where I was. My usual choice when backed into a corner is to attack everything in sight, but since there was nothing in sight, I decided I might have to try something else. The trashing of Benny’s office had blown out the lights, so the only illumination was the dim starlight filtered through some grimy windows near the ceiling. Acting on the hope that whoever was out there couldn’t see me any better than I could see them, I backed away from the exit toward the forklift I’d noticed earlier.
I kept near to the wall as the area closer to the door was systematically wrecked. One nice thing about all the noise, I didn’t have to bother being quiet. I finally made it to the metal monster and climbed aboard. I was not, of course, going to try to drive it. Forklifts weren’t likely to be able to outrun even a fit human, and if it was mages with magically enhanced speed, weres or vamps after me, I’d really be toast. It would, however, provide a nice distraction if I could get it to work. I put a couple of Benny’s disruptors on the floorboard, emptied the rest of the case’s contents into my new coat’s roomy pockets, started the engine and jumped out of the way.
When the invisible hand smashed the thing to bits a few seconds later, I was already halfway across the floor running full out for the front door. I’m as fast as all but the oldest vamps when I want to be, and knowing what would happen when the disruptors went off gave me the best incentive I’d had in a long time to break speed records. I was still inside the building when the explosion came, but just barely. The blast picked me up and threw me against the sliding door, which buckled and then tore off its track. The crumpled metal sheet and I went for a wild ride across the parking lot, striking sparks off the pavement, skidded past a group of dark figures and careened into an SUV.
I rolled underneath the chassis of the vehicle but didn’t stay there long. A set of powerful hands grabbed me and hauled me out the other side, about the same time that pieces of the warehouse began to rain down all around us. So much for having to worry about disposing of Benny’s body, I thought, as I brought a knee up to connect with my captor’s groin. He let out a curse, which I barely heard, being temporarily deaf from the blast, but a flaming crate landed almost on top of us at the same moment and I got a glimpse of his face. Uh-oh.
“Dor-i-na.” The syllables were like three strokes of a lash. “I have been looking for you.”
I swallowed and gave a sickly smile. Ashes and fire continued falling all around us, like a vision straight out of hell, but I barely noticed. Who cares about the setting when you’re already looking at the devil? “Uncle.”
Chapter Nine
“It is a simple enough bargain, Dorina.” Drac sat in his suite at the Bellagio and smiled at me. It might have been more effective if the expression hadn’t completely missed his cold, dead eyes. “I would expect even you to understand.”
All vampires are technically dead, of course, but most manage not to look like it. Drac didn’t bother. There was no reason at all to forget that the slender body draped comfortably over the armchair was, in fact, stone-cold dead. He didn’t breathe, blink or swallow. His skin was a matte white a geisha might have envied, and his eyes were a flat, opaque green like the glass on a beer bottle, with no spark whatever in their depths. The smile, the only expression on his face, was so completely without meaning that it could as easily have graced a department store mannequin, except it would have made the customers very jumpy. I was feeling a little like that, too.
“What part of the conversation did you not comprehend?” Drac was speaking Romanian, I suppose because he felt like it. Or maybe he didn’t want his goons to overhear. Either way, it wasn’t making me happy. My memories of the old country compose a large percentage of my nightmares, even though I haven’t been back in almost three centuries.
“The part about me retaining my ‘miserable life’ in exchange for helping you,” I replied. I spoke in English. If he didn’t like it, good.
“You think I would betray you?”