There was nothing I could do. I had all the mobility and martial capability of a soggy sponge and the same magical ability as he did—that is, none whatsoever. He must have picked up only one of his guns, because I heard him begin to crawl in my direction and the gun made a clacking noise at odd intervals when his hand came down. He grew closer and closer, and the sound reminded me of that final sequence of The Terminator where the robot dragged itself after Sarah Connor. Except that she could move a little bit and had some handy machinery around to crush her pursuer.
“Ahh, there you are!” I stretched my neck, looked to the end of the aisle, and saw Werner Drasche peering back at me. His eyeballs gleamed abnormally white and mad in a puffy red face with little pinpricks of blood dotting it and plenty more smeared around where he had tried to shoo Ferris away. The ink of the alchemical tattoos still remained, but the magic infused with them was gone and he still didn’t realize it. He knew from experience that he couldn’t leech any energy from me, so he truly didn’t know what had been done to him except that it had hurt. “Lying defenseless in a pool of your own blood. I kept telling Theophilus that gunning you down was the simplest solution. How delightful to be proven right.”
“That’s not his real name, is it?” I asked. “Theophilus. That’s some kind of nickname he thinks is clever.”
Werner Drasche laughed at me. “You think I would ever tell you that? I would—”
He cut off abruptly as a squad of shouty, armed men burst into the theatre and demanded that he drop the gun now. He looked back over his left shoulder, but since he was flat on the floor the result was that I saw the very top of his head for the first time. He had a Rose Cross there instead of an alchemical symbol. Strange.
“Ah, sustenance!” Drasche said, grinning as he twisted to face the officers. He didn’t move his right hand with the gun but rolled a bit onto his right side so that he could stretch his empty left hand back at them, clutching at the air. He was trying to leech energy from the officers, first to heal and then to pump himself up to finish me off, but it didn’t work, and the shouts got more insistent. Every second he held on to that gun increased the chances that he would be shot himself. But Drasche was stubborn and perhaps a bit slow to realize his predicament and just remained still, straining to do something he no longer had the power to do. The police converged, pointing their weapons at him, fingers on triggers, and eventually kicked away his gun. It skittered down the aisle as they grabbed his arms and yanked them behind him. Drasche finally realized he was a regular, powerless human, and his carefully cultivated arrogance evaporated. Being manhandled like the criminal he was caused him to lose his shit. He shouted curses in a mixture of German and English and struggled to free himself, but they had him cuffed in short order.
That’s when I called for help and got it. “He shot me,” I said weakly, and that’s all I had to do. Drasche would go to prison after some cursory medical treatment, unless one of his vampire friends came to bust him out in the night. Regardless, he was simply human now, and I knew that would be a fate worse than death for him after centuries of preying on people.
Saying “he shot me” was all I could do, anyway—I was fading fast. I had been able to take care of single bullets on a couple of other occasions, but I’d also been able to access the earth’s power when I did so. Five rounds and no juice meant I was completely dependent on modern medicine. Paramedics probed me and asked me questions that I tried to answer but succeeded only in spewing out an unintelligible verbal slurry. They gave me plasma as I was trundled into the ambulance and whisked away to a hospital somewhere.
The ride was almost absurdly short—a block away, it seemed—but during the ride it occurred to me that I’d certainly be staying the night in the hospital, most likely sedated, and if Drasche knew where I was and managed to make a call, he could summon his vampire buddies not only to spring him but to take me out. Even if the police posted a guard on my room for some reason, a vampire would simply charm him or her and walk on past, ripping out my throat while I slept.
As I slipped into unconsciousness before reaching a surgeon, I mouthed a prayer to the Morrigan that I’d get to wake up.
CHAPTER 6
With Loki’s mark dissolved, I feel simultaneously free but hunted—like prey, in other words. I can go wherever I want, with the proviso that someone could be (and probably is) watching. Surveillance-state London, in other words, but instead of the government tracking my movements, it’s anyone with a talent for divination.