By Blood We Live Read Online Free PDF Page B

Hollywood, all three of them attacked at once. Four rounds from the nail gun hit me in the shoulder, buloke bullets, two of which went straight through; the other two set my heart’s klaxon off again.
    Nonetheless sly joy warmed me. Because they had no idea, these over-equipped hopefuls. They had
no idea.
    Wrong.
    I
had no idea.
    The dark girl went past me towards Justine, and my lunge to intercept her took me off-balance. There ought to have been plenty of time. We ought to have been operating according to the usual farcical discrepancy. (I watch humans trying to kill me the way McEnroe watched Connors trying to play him in the ’84 Wimbledon final, with a sort of incredulous pity.) But that’s not the way it was. The way it was was that whoever these three were someone had used them to take combat training to a new level. I got the dark girl off her feet, yes, but not before taking a deep cut across the chest and four more rounds in my left leg. She got, kicking, away from me. I could smell Justine behind me. I ducked under the redhead’s sword and broke her left femur with a single chop (a
haito uchi
, to be precise. It was good to feel my assault options wide awake, restive; briefly brought back Atsutomo’s training compound in Kikaijima, the damp hot mornings, the mountains like slumped heavyweights themselves.) Her odour was delicious: adrenal sweat and apricot hand cream and the fatigues’ whiff of clean canvas. Also, bizarrely, incense. Her breath said tuna Niçoise less than five hours ago. She went down in silence, mouth open. The lamplight caught her eyelashes. The guy’s hand gripping a stake whipped past my face. He was heavy but fast, with experience deep in the muscles, a useful familiarity with violence. AB negative, my nose reported (shrugging, doing its duty) fried onions, coconut Radox shower gel and roll-up smokes—and, again, incense. The hand holding the stakewas broad-fingered, with discernible dark hairs. It would look dashing, Rolexed, coming out of a crisp white cuff.
    The redhead speed-rolled away, still holding the sword. She had an intriguing Celtic face, broad-cheekboned and wide-mouthed, and the milky green eyes like a flash of faerie. Meantime I head-butted the guy from underneath, a sharp drive upward that cracked his bottom jaw (I heard the absurd clack of his teeth hitting each other) and snapped his neck back into his shoulders. He didn’t fall, but it was all the time I needed. I wrenched the stake from him and jabbed it hard and fast into his throat, felt the trachea’s cartilage split and three or four internal carotids rupture. The incorrigible bloodstink touched me, lewdly, but I was still full from Randolf. It brought a note of disgust, and in any case to drink again so soon would be dangerous. (Stake through the heart, beheading, fire—and overdose.) All the while some backroom boys of consciousness were going through the motions of wondering who these people were, but without much conviction: You’re a vampire. Someone’s always trying to kill you. After a while it doesn’t matter who or why—only
that.
The dark girl had got out of my sight. I let go of the guy, who dropped first to his knees then onto his side, both hands around the stake in his throat. He was making a depressing soft gargling sound. I was thinking—above or below or alongside the combat-maths—that Justine and I would have to use what remained of the night to Get Rid Of The Bodies and proof the room against the real world’s satirically unglamorous CSI squad. I turned to make sure she was all right—and a lignum vitae bolt hit me in the chest.
    Not the heart. But this time less than an inch away. The dark girl had got behind one of the Thomasvilles and lined me up in the crosshairs.
    The heart, in shock, went still.
    It sprang a lock in me. I leaped, took the armchair and the girl twenty feet across the floor to crash against one of the stacks. Books toppled and fell. I pulled her out by her