Кейти Макалистер - Sex, Lies, and Vampires

"Good luck," she said, her chin lifting as she tried to put a brave front on her worries. "May God go with you."

"Thanks. I'm going to need all the help I can get."

It wasn't until I hit the first floor that something struck me: My mummies were gone.

"Well, hell!" I swore, looking around the hall in case someone had dumped them in a corner. "Sorry, guys, wherever you are. I'll deal with you once Adrian and I have taken care of the baddies."

It's amazing what a ring of power will do for you when it comes to escaping a forming police cordon. I had figured that there was no way I'd be able to slip out of Christian's house without being stopped and grilled by the cops, but either London's police force had been warned about coming between a Beloved and her vamp in need, or the ring had some sort of invisibility mojo going on that allowed me to walk out in plain sight of the police who had gathered beyond the rim of Nazimobiles. Blue lights flashed, sirens wailed, and occasional staccato bursts on bullhorns demanded that the supremacists surrender.

I walked down the sidewalk past two sharpshooters hiding behind a rhododendron bush. The men's eyes shifted to look at me, but neither gave me more than a glance as I walked by.

"Cool!" I whispered to myself, twisting the ring like it was some sort of talisman. The other police, everyone from a guy in a yellow jacket who was trying to convince the neighbors to go back into their houses to the incident officer in charge of the bullhorn, all clearly saw me, but I didn't seem to register on their psyches.

Which was perfectly fine with me.

I took the ring off after I figured out that its protective powers went so far as to make me insignificant to the taxi drivers gathered around a train station a half-mile down the road. By the time I found a cab and was whisked through the oddly empty streets toward the British Museum, enough time had passed for all sorts of horrible, torturous, life-ending, apocalyptic things to have happened to Adrian.

And each and every one of them paraded through my mind in glorious Technicolor and Dolby digital surround sound as we drove.

I expected there to be more guards than normal at the museum, given the events of a few hours past, but I hadn't expected to find a veritable army camped around the museum.

"Sorry, love, but this is as close as I can get you," the taxi driver said as he pulled up a block away from the museum. He nodded toward the two big black police vehicles that blocked the road. "Must be a terrorist threat or something."

"Something like that," I agreed, handing him a couple of pound coins I had bummed off Belinda. I slipped on the ring as soon as the taxi made a U-turn, smiling and nodding pleasantly at the various police stationed at checkpoints that led to the museum.

I approached the museum bold as could be, secure in the power of the ring. Police and the British Special Forces guys in ultratechy skin-tight black body armor and armed with enough firepower to blow a small country off the face of the planet filled the forecourt of the museum. Small mobile dispatch centers, command posts, and a couple of official police chemical toilets (even SWAT team members have to go sometime) stood like black monoliths amidst a sea of police on the paving stones that led to the museum front doors.

I weaved my way through the maze of vehicles and people, pausing to listen to a radioed message from a couple of guys who I gathered were crawling their way up the glass roof of the Great Court, reporting no signs of movement via their thermal night vision goggles, but picking up an odd keening sound from the ultrasensitive microphone taped to the glass dome.

The man who was listening to the report on the radio glanced toward me. I smiled at him and walked toward the front doors. When I looked back, he was frowning at the spot in which I had been standing, as if he was puzzled by something.

"I could definitely get used to this," I said aloud as I walked up the stone steps to the doors. With my fingers crossed that they would be unlocked, I strolled past a small terrier-sized camera-mounted security robot that was crawling toward the door. Obligingly, I held the door open for it to enter, following without a backward glance.

The second I entered the museum I was swamped by anger, anger so intense that it almost sent me running. Adrian's anger.

"Well, at least you're alive," I said, trying to make my feet move when Adrian was pouring wave after wave of resistance into my head. I knew he was trying to protect me, but it didn't make it any easier to ignore the compulsion that pummeled me with every struggling step forward.

By the time I made it to the center of the Great Court I was covered in sweat, my heart pounding so loudly I couldn't hear anything else, my breath as labored as if I'd run a hundred times the distance. I stopped, trying to calm my heart, doing my best to shut out the almost palpable waves of anger swamping me, but it was no good. I weighed my options, and decided that with my brand-spanking-new immortality—and a stylish ring of power—there wasn't much that Saer or Sebastian could do to me personally, so it wouldn't hurt to make my presence known.

"I get the picture, Adrian," I bellowed, needlessly cupping my hands to amplify the volume since my voice echoed eerily off the glass ceiling, rebounding off the walls, and flitting along the stairwells. "I appreciate it, but it's not necessary. The cavalry is here!"

A red pinpoint laser light skittered along my face for a moment. I looked up and saw a man's shape silhouetted against the glass roof, his laser-gun sight pausing on me for a few seconds, then moving on in a steady sweep along the floor.

Adrian's obstructionary measures ceased. I smiled ruefully to myself, knowing he was going to be one very tetchy vampire when I found him, but also well aware there was no way we were going to come out of this with our skins intact unless he allowed me to help.

"You left me the ring," I muttered as I hurried across the rest of the Great Court, heading for the stairs that led to the basement offices. "You told your sister I was the only one who could use it, and then you have a hissy fit when I come to do that very thing. Vampires! Surely the most unreasonable of all creatures. Whoa! What the—"

Halfway up the stairs from the basement, a long, thin, sticklike object flexed, flopping over into a roll. Behind it a smaller, squat, spiderlike object crawled. A truly monumental scream was building inside me, about to burst out when a horribly dry, crackling noise whispered up the stairwell. I squinted at the brown objects for a second, leaping down the stairs toward them as a misshapen blob thumped its way around the landing.

"What the hell did they do to you!" I yelled, gathering up the (animated) mummy arm and disattached hand before jumping the last few steps over the torso. "Ginger? My God, they tore you apart! Hold on, I'll get you, you don't have to try to move."

I scooped up Ginger's torso, pausing on the way down the second half of the stairs to collect both his legs (which, though separated, were working together to make their way up the stairs) and a second hand. Ginger made happy little noises at being held so close, his dried lips making a horrible sort of puckering shape that I had a nasty suspicion was his version of a kiss.

"Hold tight, I'll get you put back together," I told him as I pushed open the metal door to the basement offices. "What happened to the other… oh, no!"

The scene in the basement hallway was like something out of a deranged mummy movie. A very low-budget deranged mummy movie. I don't know if the bits and pieces that made up the other two mummies had been scattered in the hallway, but each individual piece—an arm here, a pelvis there—was crawling, kerthumping, and rolling with single-minded determination toward the door… and my voice.