Page 187 of Vampire so Virtuous
And, if she ever got the chance, she promised herself she’d work with Eve to rediscover the magic of witches. Belle had said witches hunted vampires in times past, and damn, but she could get behind that.
Flames licked at the windows of the dojang before they’d even reached Minh’s car. She stared at his back as she was dragged along behind him, and made herself another promise.
I won’t rest until you’re a greasy smear on the ground.
Forty-three – Antoine
Antoine landed on the roof of the Kensington building, his shadows collecting around him, and stared up at the top of Ritz-Carlton South Tower—Gabe’s condo.
It may have been dark, but the shadowy figures crawling up the building’s sides were hard to miss. He’d never known thralls to climb like that.
Even as he watched, they scaled the walls like phantoms, flitting from sill to sill, clinging to the smallest gaps in the façade, as if the sheer surface posed no challenge at all. A dozen of them, at varying heights, moved with eerie grace. Each of them wore little more than rags, their limbs skinny and malnourished, their bodies so gaunt it was impossible to even tell their sex, as though they’d been half-starved.
At least they would be difficult to spot with the dark and the height, especially when chattel rarely looked up.
From the Kensington’s rooftop, the Ritz-Carlton’s roof still seemed too far to leap. Or it would have, in the pre-Minh, pre-Cally days. Now… Antoine took a couple of steps back and launched himself from the edge.
Yep, still too far.
He slammed into the side of the building around ten floors below the roof, surrounded by thralls scrambling around him. But they weren’t his focus. As he slid down the glass of a window, desperately searching for something to grab, the image of a fly on a windshield came to mind.
It wasn’t graceful, but it would be worse if he fell. Swooping down fifty feet was one thing; plummeting four hundred was another.
His boot slipped. For one heart-stopping second, he thought it might push him away from the building. But he stretched both arms out, and his fingertips scraped the top of a window. He hung there, not twelve feet from the nearest thrall, which turned toward him and hissed.
With fangs.
They weren’t thralls at all. They were vampires. And he was surrounded.
Adrenaline surged, pushing him up to the sill above. From there, heleaped to the next. He was still stronger and faster, and likely older, judging by the look of the spawns. These were young vampires, all of them near-feral, their gums pulling back as they hissed. One lunged at him from above. In its desperation to feed, it threw itself down at Antoine, its long, thin arm wrapping around his neck.
The strength of the attack surprised him, and for the second time in as many heartbeats, he nearly lost his purchase on the building. He held on with one hand, reaching back instinctively as his other shoved the creature’s head away, its teeth gnashing less than an inch from his neck.
Just one taste of his blood, and this new spawn would triple its power and strength.
Antoine didn’t have the leverage to pull him off, but the top was almost within reach. He gathered his legs beneath him, the tips of his boots pressed against the sill of a window, and leaped again, carrying the spawn with him like a sack over his shoulder. His palm slapped down on the flat concrete lip of the building, and he vaulted over it, twisting mid-air to land on both feet.
Antoine ducked forward, now able to reach back with both hands. Grabbing the feral vampire by the neck, he hurled it over his head and onto the concrete floor. A quick stamp of his boot crushed its skull, and the creature twitched once before going still.
The rooftop stretched before him, a flat expanse rimmed by a low concrete wall, cluttered with hulking HVAC units, mechanical penthouses housing machinery, and scattered antennas. Amid it all, three dozen figures fought—most of them thralls, with a few of the zombie-like, feral vampires mixed in, sinewy and strong with rags hanging from their bodies.
The ground was littered with fallen figures, most in the clothing of thralls, with only two bearing the shredded clothes and gaunt forms of the ferals. Blood painted every surface, and all those fighting bore wounds.
Gabe’s thralls were on the defensive, grouped in twos and threes, their backs to each other, armed with anything from lead pipes to baseball bats to silenced pistols—one even wielded a katana. The thralls attacking them clearly lacked skill, but made up for it with superior numbers and blind enthusiasm. Around them danced the feral vampires, leaping in without caution whenever they saw an opening, risking injury to seize the opportunity to feed. One feral leaped onto an HVAC unit, using the height to pounce on a thrall’s back, chomping on his neck while his comrades desperately struck at its body. The creature was knocked away, but not before tearing a chunk from the thrall.
Somewhere on this rooftop was the entrance into the building—thepenthouse where Cally waited. Antoine had to reach her before any of these creatures could get close.
The ferals were closing in, the thralls struggling to maintain their ground. Antoine’s pulse quickened. The door had to be near, but the path to it was blocked by too many enemies.
And then, through the chaos, he spotted it—gray, heavy-duty metal, tucked into the side of a small rooftop access structure. A simple push-bar handle and keypad gleamed dimly in the light.
But even as he saw it, his attention flicked to the figure nearby. Gabe. Blood streamed from a shoulder wound, the torn flesh unmistakably a bite mark. Despite it, Gabe was still fighting—but he wasn’t going to last much longer at this rate.
In the time since Antoine had arrived, two of the ferals had turned toward him, hissing with jaws unnaturally wide, arms extended, hands like claws. A thrall spun too, bringing his pistol up and firing twice, then pulling the trigger again to the click of an empty chamber.
Antoine dove aside, the shots going wide, rolled to his feet, and closed the gap to the thrall. A quick twist of his hands snapped the man’s neck. An instant later, both ferals were on him, stronger and faster than any thrall.
Two at once wasn’t his idea of fun. He threw his mind-stun at one, and though his aim was slightly off, the feral still reeled, momentarily disoriented.
