Battle for the Blood (18 page)

We hit the stairs, but didn’t clatter down them as I wanted to. We went quietly, listening at each level to make sure that we weren’t wrong, that the fighting hadn’t moved on. The silence was truly eerie until we hit the third floor, the one above the stalled elevator.

Hera and I listened at the door to the hallway, criminally close…at least in some states. Our eyes met when we heard the growl. It wasn’t human. Not even remotely, not even from a zombie that no longer fit that description.

It sounded like a large dog. A
pissed-off
large dog. Or maybe one that had been frightened or backed into a corner. Definitely a canine that was about to lash out in a big way. I remembered the dog down at the barricades, eating the face off a downed officer, and wondered whether we’d had some kind of cross-species contagion. Or…was this something different? Yiayia had mentioned Fergus and boils. Who knew what else might be out there. If Namtar was the god of plagues and his followers were legion, all stirred up by his rising, we could be facing as many epidemic outbreaks as there were diseases. Not all of which could be cured.

There was a crash, like something throwing itself against a barrier, and a girl’s high-pitched scream.

Hera and I burst out of the stairwell onto a scene of carnage. Before us lay a nurse, her cheerful SpongeBob scrubs torn to shreds and blood blackened. Her stomach had been torn open. Her intestines… I had to look away, beyond the body, listening for the direction of the battering.

The lights of the hallway flickered and returned at half-light, but none of it slowed me down as I headed where the noise and my precog led. My feet slid in something I didn’t try to identify, and my heart nearly fell out of my chest at the sight of a little boy in a hospital gown slumped against the nurses’ station, his legs and throat… No, I couldn’t look, couldn’t catalog his hurts. The scrubs…the child…this was the pediatric wing. Dammit, if there was something still alive down here…

The beating continued. Hera and I threw ourselves through an open doorway and drew up short at the sight of the snarling, howling and slavering beast that continuously hurled its body full-force against a closed door at the outskirts of the room. It was—or had been—a yellow Lab. Man’s best friend…a breed often chosen as service dogs because of their great dispositions. This one’s fur was matted with gore and bristled to where the beast looked twice its size. Its chest worked like a bellows, and it looked displaced inside this cheery room, walls strung with nursery rhyme figures—the cow jumping over the moon, the dish running away with the spoon, a little dog laughing. This dog was far from laughing. So were the bodies it had left littered about.

I hit the doorframe behind me to draw its attention—sure there had to be something…someone or ones behind that other door that it was trying to get to—trying to give it a more immediate target. My blood chilled as it worked and the beast turned on us with eyes that burned hot with hatred and blood-flecked spittle frothing over its muzzle.

Chapter Sixteen

Rabies.

It explained so much. Like the two adults in jeans and peppy purple T-shirts who lay practically at our feet. One was torn to shreds, beyond recognition, but the other, a woman, was still alive, trying feebly to crawl toward the mad hound, using just her arms and elbows. Her legs weren’t working. It looked like a nerve cluster at the base of her spine had been laid open, but still she was…not even inching, but centimetering toward the dog, cooing to it, as if it weren’t beyond her reach, mentally and physically. Tears poured from her eyes. On the back of her shirt, above the bloody mass, were the words,
Cuddles for Kiddies
. It broke my heart. At a guess, she’d loved that dog. Still loved. And wasn’t giving up.

There was no way she and her compatriot had brought diseased animals in to interact with sick children. I was shocked they’d been let in at all. So whatever had come over the animals must have come hard and fast. No rabies then…or not the normal kind. That had an incubation period. There were signs…

The beast started to advance on us.

I stared it right in the eyes and yelled “Freeze!” at the top of my lungs. I didn’t know if it would work through the madness. If this was rabies or a form of it, the beast’s brain might be Swiss cheese right now.

The beast froze for a second, and for that second I thought something was actually going to go our way. But then it shook its head slowly from side to side. In another instant, it was going to come back to itself, and I couldn’t let that happen.

I leapt into the air, letting my wings carry me across the distance between us, raising Cori’s sword for a massive slice. Old Yeller tossed off the last of its paralysis and reared to meet me, its deadly jaws snapping at me. I let my blade fall toward its vulnerable neck, hating myself as I did it, knowing the beast wasn’t in its right mind. My blade cut and caught, but so did Yeller’s teeth. The pain as it latched on to my arm was nothing to the surprise of it whipping me around like trapped prey, trying to snap my neck. The caught blade acted like the harness on a bucking bronco, keeping us linked and me from flying off.

The door the beast had been attacking suddenly blew open, and a figure staggered out, slamming the door shut again and demanding that someone lock it behind him. I was shocked to hear the staggering figure speak, sure at first that it would be a zombie, another attacker, but…I knew that voice.

I couldn’t focus. My vision doubled and tripled as my brain bashed against one and then the other side of my skull as the beast shook me. Then, suddenly, my blade slid free of the beast’s neck, having made no impression on it whatsoever, and my head hit the floor hard enough to knock stars across my field of vision. But he still had my arm in his jaws, and I could practically feel the poison in his bite racing through my blood.

Something struck at the dog. I knew because it opened its jaws to go for the new threat and I had enough presence of mind to rip myself away, draw my legs into myself and scuttle back on butt and hands. My sword had fallen and my head swam, but I closed my eyes and counted to two, all the time I could spare, before opening them again, hoping my vision had returned. I had to find that sword. Had to help Hera and whoever had come out of that room, because he’d sounded like…

Nick.

Nick had apparently struck the dog with a metal chair to take its attention from me and now stood fending it off with his one good hand, wielding the chair like a pointy shield. Bandages still covered half of his face and more than that of his chest. He wore only drawstring pants and his fury. All three of him, occasionally resolving into only two. My vision was still a mess, and my thinking was just as fuzzy.

“Hold his attention,” Hera told him unnecessarily. “If I can just get close enough!”

I reached for my fallen sword and caught it somewhere along the blade, which sliced roughly into my hand. I drew back with a hiss and carefully felt around for the hilt, keeping my eyes on the fight, waiting for the figures to resolve so that I’d know where to aim my blows.

I hit the hilt, wrapped my hand around it and gave a great “Hi-yah!” that nearly split my head open as the beasts finally resolved into one and I aimed right for it.

Hera spun out of my way, leaving the beast directly in my path. My blade hit home and cut deep. The beast howled in pain, its hate-filled gaze swinging up to meet mine, gathering itself to lunge and then…it froze, stock-still. A strange gray patina swept over the beast and its eyes deadened to…stone.

In an instant, the monster was nothing but a statue, frozen in place. No longer alive.

I stared at it, unable to take it in. Too stunned to believe…

Until Hera looked at me in something like awe and Nick—amazing, glorious,
alive
Nick—said, “Tori, you’re bleeding.”

I looked down at my arm, thinking he was talking about the dog’s bite, considering rabies and how quickly it might set in. Then the blood dripped from the hilt of my blade onto my foot and I realized he was talking about where I’d cut my palm on the blade…the same one that had turned Old Yeller to stone. Had my blood done that? Gorgon blood from one wound or the other? I couldn’t see any other explanation.

My legs nearly gave out, and Nick was suddenly there to catch me, but I didn’t give in to it, not with the burns over a good part of his body and him barely standing as it was. Collapsing into him was not an option. I locked my legs and caught myself with a hand to his good shoulder. We looked into each other’s eyes—
eye
, in his case—and seemed frozen there.

A knock at the door Nick had shut behind him broke the spell, and he ran to it, giving some kind of counterknock. It opened just a crack, and a tiny elfin face appeared, peering out with one brown eye.

Nick squatted at eye level. “It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s—”

She flung the door open and threw herself into his arms, and he caught her, heedless of what it would do to him. I heard him grunt, but that was all the indication he gave of the pain. Then there were other arms around him, and it was like a puppy pile, only without the frothing at the mouth.

One older boy hung back, looking from Hera to the frozen dog to me, gaze catching and holding on my wings. “Who’re you?” he asked. And then, “
What
are you?” At least, I thought that was what he said. The words were tight and hard to hear through his wired jaw. He looked like he’d been in some kind of terrible accident.

“We’re friends, and we’re here to help,” I said.

He just snorted.

I looked to Nick, who was turned away from me, still wrapped in his embraces. He finally stood, arms loaded with the little elfin girl, hair done in a dozen little braids, with colorful beads on every end and dark bangs falling across her even darker eyes. She had a death grip on Nick’s neck. I could see what it cost him to let her hang on so tightly, but he didn’t say a word. My heart broke at the sight. At the completely selfish and unbidden thought of what our children might have looked like if…

“Did you find Amanda?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, looking away, trying to pretend my voice hadn’t just cracked. “There may be other pockets like this one, people holed up safely, but the place seems mostly deserted. What happened here?”

“I couldn’t take it anymore and went looking for Amanda myself, and I heard the snarls and screams—”

“He saved us!” the elfin girl piped up.

“Lacy, this is Tori. Tori, Lacy. She was bashing the bad doggie with her crutches when I got here. And winning, weren’t you, sweetheart?”

That was when I noticed the full leg cast she was wearing, all the way up the thigh.

“I’m a warrior princess,” she announced, hugging him. The pain he was in must have been excruciating, but it only flashed across his face before he got it under control.

“So brave,” I said, infusing my voice with all of the warmth I could muster when my heart was breaking. “Can we talk for a second?” I asked Nick.

Hera huffed. “We don’t have time for a ‘talk’. We don’t know how many more of these things might be out there or what else we’re facing.”

I shot her a look. That was exactly what I’d wanted to talk about…without impressionable young ears listening in.

Nick looked around—for Lacy’s crutches? For someone to pass her off to? No way could she walk on her own with that cast.

The teen boy with the wired jaw saw what was going on and recovered a crutch from the floor. I saw the other, but it was under the body of one of the Cuddles for Kiddies volunteers, and I left it alone.

Nick set Lacy down gently with her one crutch and asked the boy if he’d take care of the others for a minute and make sure no one was hurt. He nodded, but not like he didn’t know he and the others were being sent away.

“I don’t know,” Nick said, his voice lowered. “When I pulled my IV and made it to the hallway, the hospital was already in chaos. People and dogs blew past me. I’m sure there were cats as well. There usually are. We’ve been in there for what seems like hours with that dog beating tirelessly at the door. I don’t know what set the animals off.”

“Or what possessed people to have a visit during all this. I thought the place was quarantined,” Hera said.

“That’s what’s so terrible about all of this—Jeff says they thought the kids needed the comfort now more than ever, especially with some of their parents…” he trailed off, looking toward the door where the children waited. “I guess they got special permission. And then…”

“And then this,” I finished for him. “But what are we going to do with them? I don’t know what happened while you were locked away, but it really is a ghost town, except maybe—”

“The second floor,” Hera cut in. “There’s an elevator locked down on that floor, which means something’s blocking it. It doesn’t necessarily mean survivors, but…”

“We have to check it out,” I finished.

He looked from me to Hera to the kids. “We can’t just leave them. If something’s really gone wrong, there’s no one here to care for them.”

“Delegate,” Hera ordered. “Put the boy in charge until we can see what we’re dealing with and come back for them.”

The unbandaged side of Nick’s face went through contortions. It went against everything in him to leave them behind, I thought. If anything happened to them while he was away, it would destroy him. Far more than the fiery serpent he’d fought in Greece. But taking them into danger was even more counterintuitive. He gave one single nod and turned back to the kids, drawing the older boy—Jeff?—aside for a minute.

Lacy must have heard, though, because she stumbled toward Nick with a wail of “But I want to go with you!”

Nick hugged her to his good side and chucked her chin with his finger. “I’ll be back, princess, I promise. You just keep this handy.” He gave a nod toward her single crutch. “I might need you to protect the others. But you keep this door locked and you should be just fine until I get back. Jeff is great, but I’m going to need you to keep the others calm, okay?”

She couldn’t have been more than seven or a very tiny eight, but she nodded with a seriousness that belied her years, the beads on the ends of her braids clicking with the movement. Nick gave her a quick kiss on the forehead and told her again, “I’ll be back.”

She grabbed his ears and held him there for a moment, staring him dead in the eyes. “You’d better,” she told him. Then she let him go and turned away before he could see her lip quiver. So strong. I wondered if I’d been half that at her age.

Nick was barely out the door when Jeff closed and locked it behind him. It felt weird to have Nick back at my side. Nostalgic and yet not…not given the circumstances.

“Onward?” he said.

“You sure you’re up for it?” I asked belatedly.

He gave me a dirty look out of his single eye and picked up the metal chair he’d wielded like a champ. “You gonna stop me?” he challenged.

“No,” I said, turning for the stairwell.

It hurt less to turn my back on him. Maybe that’s how he’d felt about me when he’d left the breakup note with the hotel concierge in Delphi.

I crashed down on that thought. Now that the third floor was quiet, I could hear the banging coming from below us. And banging. And banging.

At the stairwell I paused to listen, but it didn’t sound like the pounding was coming from the stairwell itself. When I pushed the door open and stepped out into it, it was even clearer that it was coming from the second floor. It wasn’t exactly rhythmic…every time the pause would go on too long. I’d strain, waiting to hear, and then give a mini jump when it would come again. My precog wasn’t in full-on alarm mode, but it was goosing up my adrenaline and directing my attention, as if to say,
“Hey, you may want to watch that.”

Hera and Nick followed me into the stairwell. The closer we came to the second floor, the more the pounding seemed to go right through me and my heart wanted to unsync with it.

When we hit the door to the second floor hall, we could see it bow in with each bang, but there was no window, no peephole to the other side to give us an indication of what we were facing. But it didn’t sound like multiple bodies. If it was just one…

Without thought, I put the sword to my healing hand and swept it along the cut again, slicking the blade in my blood. It scared me that I was becoming more gorgon, less and less human. Later, if we saved the world, I’d get back with the Grey Sisters and see what could be done. For now, I didn’t have any choice but to go with it.

I looked back at the others. “Do I try the door or do we just leave it? Go back for the kids and get everybody out?” I asked.

“Out where?” Hera asked back. “They’re safe for now. Can we say the same anywhere else?”

“Besides, Amanda is still missing,” Nick reminded me.

That was good. Not that Amanda was still missing, of course. That was terrible. But that they didn’t want to just take off. Adrenaline was still flooding my veins. The last battle had gone too easily. I was spoiling for more. It wasn’t just Lyssa setting me off. She wasn’t here, which meant Namtar was riling up more than just demons…or that I had demon blood, as Apollo had speculated. I didn’t want to think about it.