Tim Lebbon - 30 Days of Night - Fear of the Dark

As if in answer to that thought, gunfire rattled in the distance, reminding him of the police station slaughter. Duval didn’t even pause in his search. Bindy smiled at Marty before starting to look as well, and he realized that it was she who would turn him in the end.

Joining them had not been an invitation.

Rose ran behind a plinth, ducking low as bullets scarred shards of granite from the other side, UV light banging from her hip. When the shooting paused, she made a dash for a wide arch leading into the next hall, but realized the shooter’s intention as the firing commenced again. They weren’t out of bullets at all .

The bullets caught her across the left hip, shattering the light and driving her against the wall. The impact knocked a fire extinguisher from its mount and she tried running again. Another burst took her across the chest. She slid motionless to the floor, analyzing the pain, curious at the sensation rather than panicked. She had never been shot before.

She could feel each hot bullet folded in the grip of her cool flesh. Two in her side, three in her chest, each of them a distinct star in the cold vacuum of her undead body, and she already sensed her vampire flesh starting to fill in around them. Two of the rounds in her chest had ricocheted from her ribs, one passing through her right lung and lodging against her spine. Cracked ribs fused. Shredded lung tissue closed together. She writhed slightly, uncomfortable now rather than in any kind of agony, and stared across the floor as the figure approached.

It was a woman, tall, clad in black leather and cradling a very big gun. As she walked, she ejected the magazine and inserted another clumsily, having to pause and prop the gun’s stock against the floor to do so. She was breathing hard and fast, and her scent gave off a sexual excitement. It also spoke of her addiction, currently being fed; stale sweat and the rankness of bad, chemical-filled blood.

The woman stood again, and Rose tensed to move. The instant the barrel came around for the head shot, she would be on her. A quick snap of the neck, and then away. No blood. No feeding.

But the woman seemed to appreciate the melodrama of the moment, because she wanted to talk first.

“How’s that feel, bloodsucker?”

Rose chuckled, a noiseless grumble deep in her chest.

“Funny?”

“You? Yeah.”

The woman stopped five steps away and aimed at Rose’s stomach. “I blow your guts out, you won’t be laughing then, eh?”

“I like the leathers. Very Underworld .”

A quick burst into Rose’s stomach, three bullets, and at this range they passed right through. She groaned and rolled in fake pain—that’s what the woman wanted, after all—but in reality the impacts had felt little more than punches. They did not wind her, because she had no breath.

“Oh, yeah,” the woman sighed, shifting her weight back and forth from one leg to the other.

“Getting off on this?” Rose asked.

“Believe it.”

“What did they promise you?”

“Everything. All the things you weaklings are too afraid to be. You’ve got the fucking world at your fingertips, and—” As the woman talked, the gun barrel drifted until it was pointing at Rose’s throat, and that was that.

Rose threw herself from the wall, a shadow through the air, knocking the gun aside and straddling her attacker as she fell onto her back. The weapon clattered across the polished floor. The woman’s wide, startled eyes rolled slightly as her head struck hard, and when she brought a knife up in her left hand, Rose snapped it at the wrist, twisting her hand three times until it came off with a wet, grinding noise. The woman’s mouth opened, the pain so bright that the scream was locked in shock.

Rose grabbed the woman’s ponytail and pulled her up, bending, mouth open, tugging the bound hair down now so that her pale throat was exposed—

The suit’s startled eyes, involuntary sexual excitement, that gush of living blood that had come to mean so much …

Rose held back. The hunger was rich and burning, every fiber of her body craving the warm rush, but something in her altered mind still gave her pause. Something, she supposed, that maintained a portion of her humanity. The Humain part of her.

The woman whined. She was actually smiling . “Holy shit, you poor deluded bitch,” Rose said. She rested the back of the woman’s neck on her free arm and pulled hard on the ponytail, snapping her spine. The woman tensed for a second, then her whole body fell loose.

Rose checked her heart. One final, weak beat and she was dead. Gone. But her blood was still…

She bit out the woman’s throat and started drinking.

Warm.

Down in the basement of the British Museum, the darkness felt so much more threatening. It was deeper, for a start, and the Humains hadn’t allowed Lee to use his light. There was some background light, provided by faint yellow emergency lighting which he guessed was on all the time, though the glow did not reach very far. But there was also something else: a sense that this darkness was occupied, and that down here the rest of the world mattered little.

Gunfire sounded far off, a rapid crackle. Lee froze and grasped the .454 in his hand harder. Connie nudged him.

“Move on,” she said. “They’re doing their job, we need to do ours.”

Patrick rushed past them and paused twenty steps ahead by an open door. He ducked into the room and emerged again almost immediately. “Dead guard.” As they passed the door Lee was not tempted to look in, but he smelled the devastation done to the man.

They reached another staircase, and he saw that they’d been in a subbasement, a place of offices and storage, but not where the majority of items not on display were kept. That explained the lack of room numbers.

It was one long flight down, and then he could smell the past around them. It was not only the must of old things, packaged away and perhaps not opened for years or decades. It was the smell of gathered time, artifacts from all of human history brought together to bear witness to the passage of time, whatever that was. Sometimes the ten years since he’d left the SIS felt like ten days, and other times he couldn’t remember ever having worked for them at all. Time messed with him. He wondered what it felt like for someone all but immortal.

They stalked down one corridor and entered another, doubling back on themselves and finally reaching room number seventy-two. He paused, nodded at the door, and Patrick tried the handle. It was locked. The vampire twisted harder, shoved, and the door gave with a brief shriek of broken metal.

A sound came from somewhere else in the building, a hollow boom. Lee felt subtle vibrations transmitted through his heels, but he couldn’t tell where it had come from. It might have been a door slamming in the next corridor, or a cannon firing up in one of the great display halls.

“We might not have very long,” Connie whispered, coming close to do so. Her pale face hovered before him, but there was no hint of warm, stale breath. Instead, only a smell that reminded him of the rest of these basements: time, confused.

They entered the large room, and neither Humain objected when Lee snapped on the overhead fluorescents. Patrick pushed the ruptured door closed as much as he could and stood guard, ear pressed to the opening.

“What are we looking for?” Connie asked.

“You don’t know?”

“I thought you were the expert.”

Lee chuckled dryly. “And that from a vampire. Well, I guess we’ll know when we see it. From what I could glean from Richards’s blog, she’d never even opened the package again. So it’ll be wrapped, packed away, addressed to her at her home, Otter Street. She brought it here soon after, hid it away.”