Blood Work Read Online Free PDF Page A

me, pinning my arms to my sides. His head reared back,
ready to slam his forehead into my face. I pulled to the side,
caught his blow on my shoulder. It flared with an intense pain I
was going to feel later, if I even had a later, that was.
    I was trapped,
held tight to the wall, and now that he had a hold on me, his
superior strength became a benefit. Didn’t mean I had to give in. I
kicked and thrashed and howled, the berserker inside me let
completely loose. But then I felt something that froze me for a
split second.
    Two sharp
points against my neck.
    He was trying
to bite me. No fucking way.
    I’d been
trapped like this before. The vampire had fed on me that time, and
I’d vowed never again.
    Just what I
could have done is beyond me. Thankfully, my lack of coherent
thinking didn’t kill me.
    A dark blur
flashed in from my right and the vampire was gone. Vanished.
    Released from
the pressure of the vampire’s hold, I hit the floor, still trying
to catch up to current events. The only possibility that came to my
anger-addled head was that the vampire had been carried away by
something faster than it. And there was only one thing faster than
an immature vampire in my experience—a mature one.
    I spun around,
looking for the vampires, but they were long gone. With the
immediate threat over, the rage inside cooled somewhat. Not
completely, but enough to let a few higher brain functions through
to the front. I had to keep hunting, protect the humans, and to do
that, I needed my weapon.
    The Eagle was
under a pile of broken wall, undamaged as far as my quick
inspection went. I fired it to make sure the water hadn’t buggered
it up. A splot of green paint hit the wall and dribbled down
rapidly in the wet.
    By feel I
ejected the mag and inserted a new one even as I closed my eyes and reached for Mercy. She was fighting a couple of the
vampires, not far away. The remains of the berserker rage still
bubbling through my blood, I headed toward her.
    The maze
wasn’t as daunting in the steady, white light and after a half
minute or so, the sprinklers switched off. I turned a corner and
found a pool of post-vampire slaying gloop. Mercy had bagged one.
Around another bend, a bigger splattering of ooze. Two, or maybe
three small ones. Six or seven down. Go team.
    Mercy was on
the move, ahead of me and accelerating. The need to hurt something
was lingering in my body like an overdose but there was nothing for
me to take it out on. My partner was obliterating the young
vampires without pause. I raced past three more execution sites in
quick succession, then a familiar sound hauled me up so quick I
nearly got whiplash.
    “Help!”
    These vampires
weren’t old enough to have mastered much more than crude
vocalisations, certainly no words. It was human.
    Twisting
about, I headed down a side-corridor, around another corner and
into a dead end.
    Five people
were crowded into the narrow space, pushing back into what had to
be a solid wall because with their weight and desperation, a
movable one would have been kindling by now. They were mostly kids,
like the first girl, dressed for a game of laser-tag. In front,
protecting them, was a man probably around my age, narrow across
the shoulders, slightly saggy around the waist, part Aboriginal by
the shade of his skin and shape of his nose. He wore a shirt with a
rudely fluorescent logo, ‘Surf Wars!’. The game attendant.
    Between him
and me, a vampire.
    She was lean,
with the broad shoulders, narrow hips and long, long legs of a
swimmer. Sun-bleached hair kept short was a shaggy mess around her
face. A couple of weeks ago, when she was still human, she would
have been tanned. Now, she was a sickly shade of brownish-yellow,
heading for the white of a creature of the night. She, too, had
learned tonight just what she was now. There was blood smeared
around her mouth, streaking her hands and splattered across a
T-shirt proclaiming ‘In case of emergency, Break Dance!’.
    The