Chapter 3 Chapter Three

Levi

Running soon became impossible. Besides, if anyone was watching, it would draw too much attention.

Instead, I walked quickly, like a man who was late for an appointment rather than a victim fleeing from something. The hunter was still engaged in the fight behind me. I could hear it, the rhythm of punches and kicks, the grunt and sharp exhale of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

That hunter was good. Good enough to keep four werewolves occupied long enough for me to put distance between myself and the situation.

I turned a corner and kept moving.

The drug was spreading. Numbness was tingling along my spine, and creeping toward my shoulders. There was a subtle lag in my mental processing, a half-second delay between thought and execution. I was aware of the cut above my eye, the slow cold crawl of blood tracking down toward my cheekbone.

Under normal circumstances it would have already closed. For some reason it hadn’t.

What the hell had they put in that needle?

I instinctively reached for my ability to teleport and found nothing. It was like trying to open a door that had been painted shut. The handle was still there, the mechanism was still there, but nothing moved. I knew better than to force it. Forcing a compromised ability was how vampires got themselves killed.

I needed four walls and a door I could lock until whatever this was wore off.

The street I turned onto was lined with older residential buildings, many of them boarded up and abandoned. I scanned the neighborhood as I moved. There were cameras on the corner, angled toward the intersection. There was a light on in a third-floor window. At the end of the block there was a squat brick building that was dark on every floor. A torn and faded no-trespass sign on the door suggested it had been empty for some time.

I picked the lock in under four seconds and went in.

Inside it smelled like dust and old wood and the staleness of a space that had been closed up for months. I did a fast sweep of the ground floor. Nothing living there. I found a staircase, its banister loose, leading up into deeper dark.

I took it, my feet barely clearing each step.

Two hundred years of muscle memory and I was reduced to hauling myself up a staircase one hand on the wall, the other gripping the banister hard.

The second floor had been divided into small apartments at some point, the kind of cheap conversion that happened to old buildings. Most of the doors hung open on empty rooms. I pushed through them quickly — bare floors, stripped walls, windows that looked out onto the alley. The doorknobs and locking hardware had been removed entirely.

The last door on the left was closed. It still had a handle. I tried the knob. Locked.

I didn’t have the fine motor coordination to pick another lock, so I simply broke it. The door frame splintered and the door swung open.

This apartment was lived in. I stood in the entryway for a moment, reading the space. Small. Uncluttered in the way of someone who owned very little, either by choice, or by abject poverty. What they did have were books, lots of books, stacked horizontally on top of vertically shelved books. There was a desk buried under papers and a cheap refurbished laptop. Clothes were draped on the arm of a small, stained sofa, and a coffee mug that still had some liquid in it had been left on a crate that was serving as a makeshift table.

A human lived here. Young, probably. The apartment had the energy of someone moving through life too fast to organize it.

At least there was no trace of supernatural in the modest space. No immediate threat.

I moved to the window and checked the street below. The block was quiet. No pursuit, no movement. Either I’d lost them or the hunter had kept them busy long enough.

A hunter who engaged four werewolves alone to cover a vampire he didn’t know deserved some consideration, even if the consideration was just curiosity.

I reached for my phone. My fingers weren’t responding with their usual precision, each movement requiring a deliberate effort that should have been automatic. I tried Grael’s number. The call connected and dropped. I tried again.

The cold numb sensation had reached my chest.

I sat on the edge of a neatly made bed — the only clear surface in the room — and focused on breathing through it. Vampire physiology was resilient. Whatever they’d injected, my body would metabolize it and clear it. I needed time, that was all. An hour, perhaps less. I would be gone before the apartment’s owner returned.

I held the phone closer to my face, trying to force my eyes to focus. Dialing was beyond me. I switched to voice.

“Call Grael.”

What came out was something closer to “Walluh Gway.”

My phone considered this for a moment.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Could you repeat your request?”

I couldn’t.

The phone slid from my fingers and hit the floor.