Ilona Andrews - Magic Breaks

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.”

THE DOOR OF the gym opened to a half-ruined restaurant. Then followed a room with vampires and Ghastek got to use his new undead, while I got to use my substitute saber. It still wasn’t Slayer, but it did okay enough to get me from one end of the room to another. We slammed the door shut and had ourselves a run across another hallway to a staircase. Down we went.

Filthy rooms, crumbling chairs, floors that made no sense, one moment a luxury high-rise, the next a ruin, then a hospital . . . Sometimes icy cold, sometimes sweltering hot. One room housed a pile of rotting corpses slithering with huge snakes. Another had an imaginary floor. The floor was there, we could see it, but when Thomas stepped on it, he went completely through. Robert caught him and pulled him out, but not before the rat alpha got a glimpse of what was under the floor. He wouldn’t say what it was. He just had this wild look on his half-rat, half-human face, backed away, and took off in the same direction we had come from. It took us ten minutes to catch up with him.

At one point we’d reached a hole in the side of the building and one by one stuck our heads out of it. The breath of cold, fresh air was like manna from heaven. We were high above the ground. I saw a piece of a sky, a distant field of snow, and then a giant reptilian-looking bird swooped down and tried to claw my face off with its talons. Thanks, Roland. Much appreciated.

Curran pounded on the wall for a few minutes trying to break us free. The wall held, but even if we did manage to break through and start climbing down, the birds would pluck us off.

We’d clustered around that hole for a while, not wanting to leave, but eventually we had to move. Down and down, picking up more stray vampires as escort. They were everywhere now, a constellation of filthy magic sparks moving along with us, always trying to close the distance.

“Maybe this hellhole has no end,” Andrea growled, as we opened yet another door.