Part Twelve
For someone who had not actually received several concussion-level blows to the head in a very short span of time, Whistler was certainly finding a great deal of time to act as if he had. He looked as if he was wandering an internal world entirely of his own making at the moment, the corridors so complicated that he had to furrow his brow in order to make them out. That was great for him, it really was. Deacon was sure that the internal world was going to be a hell of a comfort whenever Reinhardt killed the old fucker, but at the moment it meant that he was dealing with Reinhardt entirely on his own, and without the dubious help that Whistler might have been able to provide.
Reinhardt was in the meantime playing with Blade's sword, twirling it easily through the air and engaging the safety on the handle so that he could watch the spikes go in and out. Much as it pained Deacon to admit it, he held the sword as if he was an old hand in the using of one. Probably a part of training to be a member of the Blood Pack, becoming proficient in Blade's weapon of choice. Deacon somehow didn't see the albino bastard sparing a whole lot of time for studying the art of the samurai in between cross-burnings before he had been turned.
"Nice," Reinhardt said once he had finished amusing himself for the moment. That was unfortunate, as it left few other objects in the room that could then amuse him in its stead. The same sterile white color scheme that could drive a man mad if he spent too much time in it held sway here as much as it did elsewhere; blood would stand out against its walls. "Wonder how many vampires he's killed with this thing?"
"No idea," Deacon answered conversationally. Whistler could reboot and join the party again any time that he wanted to. "We go for quality ahead of quantity." He tugged at the cuffs so hard that he felt the skin over his wrists bruise and the blood begin to trickle down towards his fingers, but he was not in the habit of carrying a pair of lock picks with him everywhere that he went.
Reinhardt chuckled, a low, dangerous sound that immediately set Deacon's adrenal glands to thrumming in the preparation for a fight, and had the nerve to chuck Deacon beneath his chin. Deacon pulled back as far as he was able and bared his teeth. "I guess that you would know the ins and outs of Blade's sword better than anyone else." He laid a delicate stress upon the world 'sword' that would have gotten his point across even if his smile had not turned the sentence into pornography.
A few feet away, Whistler was finally beginning to show signs of life again. How good for him, just in time for Reinhardt to take those signs away. Meanwhile, Deacon could feel his mouth twisting into a sick, dangerous grin. He never knew when to keep the damned thing shut.
"Maybe," he allowed in response to Reinhardt's remark, "but you seem pretty fascinated by it yourself there."
The cocksure grin fell from Reinhardt's face, replaced by a snarl so fast that Deacon's eyes could barely follow it. Also faster than he could follow was the movement of Reinhardt's arm, arcing into a backhand so savage that it knocked Deacon back and sent him skidding a few feet towards the wall. His lower lip split badly enough to send a thick river of blood running down his chin, and he tasted salt.
Reinhardt followed him across those feet of distance, his face a mask of towering rage. He seized Deacon by the throat and lifted him partway from the ground before Deacon could do so much as think to move away or to defend himself, even if his head had not been spinning from the blow and his arms bound behind his back. "You fucking little cocksucker," Reinhardt snarled at him. Through the giddy rush that came with sudden oxygen deprivation, Deacon thought, 'Here we are, now we're getting to it. Dr. Phil deals with murderous psychopaths and their insecurities about their own masculinity, probably stemming from dick size.' "You impure piece of trash." Reinhardt's leg was pushed right up between Deacon's thighs. He was so furious that he did not even seem to realize that it was there, which was fine by Deacon. He was struggling to keep breathing as it was. "I ought to pull your head off right here and now."
Reinhardt's fingers loosened by a fraction, allowing Deacon to draw a whistling, pained breath. He took that and then another before he sneered in a ragged voice, "Unless you want to stack necrophilia up there with racism and misogyny, that's going to make it pretty hard to fuck me, isn't it? And that's what you've been obsessing over for the last two days, right?" There were so many different ways that his mouth could get him in trouble. Deacon was pleased to note that that he was at the very least sticking to the tried and true one…to the other tried and true one. Once started, he could not seem to bring himself to stop, fueled by the growing fury and panic in Reinhardt's eyes. "If I saw it, then you can bet your ass that every else did, too, but don't sweat it, cowboy. We live in a progressive age. You can always tell yourself that you spend just as much time picking yourself fucking Nyssa. Unless, of course, she's really fucking you."
"You impure fucker," Reinhardt said in a soft and nearly wondering voice, as if he had been shot to a place straight past rage and was now merely in awe of Deacon's suicidal nerve.
That was the second time in a space of mere minutes that Reinhardt had used impure as an insult. If Deacon had not already known, that certainly would have sealed the deal for him. "Oh, knock off the pureblood crap," Deacon snapped, for the first time allowing an edge of irritation to creep into what had until that point been his best silky menace. "You're as turned as I am. The only question is who did it, and why." Reinhardt's fingers clamped tight around Deacon's throat again, forcing him to squeeze out with the remaining air that he had left, "Be honest with me here, it's the only part that I still haven't figured out. What I was /I the gender of those thighs that you were kneeling between?" The hand squeezed shut, tighter than any vice, and Deacon gagged.
Random chance made Deacon glance over Reinhardt's shoulder and at Whistler, who had lost every trace of his earlier disorientation. His stare as he returned Deacon's gaze was sharp, focused. If he was remembering what had happened the last time that they were in the same room with one another while the scent of blood had been thick in the air, then he was disciplined enough not to allow it to show on his face. Whistler's shoulders moved; it took Deacon a moment to realize that he was working at the cuffs that held his wrists behind him.
'You had better be doing what I think that you're doing, old man,' Deacon thought in Whistler's direction. 'I would hate to think that I was getting myself killed for nothing.'
After cutting off Deacon's air supply and watching him struggle and gasp for a few seconds, Reinhardt lifted Deacon p and slammed him back against the wall behind them, his grip so tight that there would be black marks driven into Deacon's flesh later, if he survived long enough to experience a later. Rather than flying into a rage as Deacon had expected him to, as he knew that he would be able to manipulate, Reinhardt was still balanced in that eerie place that was beyond anger. That was worse.
"I told you that I'd find something for you to do with your mouth that didn't need teeth, didn't I?" Reinhardt asked him in a low voice, his tone pleasant enough that Deacon knew that he was about to be in a world of pain. "Congratulations, pretty. The day of reckoning has arrived." He drew his fist back.
As long as he was not dead, there would still be room to fight and to enact his revenge. It could be a lot worse.
Those were all really easy things to say when he had not yet felt Reinhardt's fist impacting his mouth. Deacon braced himself for the taste of his own teeth on his tongue, already making a list of all of the things that he intended to do to Reinhardt in revenge, when Whistler called out sharply, "Hey, Fritz."
"Not ready to deal with you yet, Poppy," Reinhardt said without ever taking his eyes away from Deacon. "Wait your turn."
Whistler grunted. "As much as I would love to watch the two of you whisper sweet nothings to one another, I think that I would have to kill myself before you get the chance."
Reinhardt made a frustrated noise and slammed Deacon back against the wall hard enough to make his head spin. "Never let it be said that I don't respect my elders," he grunted. "You got it, Gramps," Reinhardt called over his shoulder as he allowed Deacon to fall down to the floor. "I could use a little foreplay." He picked up his rifle and walked towards the place where Whistler knelt and watched his approach.
"I'll bet you could," Whistler answered. Even though he was hunched over and struggling to convince his lungs that, no, he had not been turned again and, yes, he did need to breathe, Deacon did not miss the gleam of sudden calculation that lit up Whistler's eyes.
---
Nyssa's fist alternately clenched and released around the edges of her father's ring, over and over again, an action that she could not control and that she in truth scarcely even noticed that she was doing. Her palm was soon sticky with blood, as her father did not abide by soft things and the edges of the gemstone were sharp. The cuts themselves had healed up again within seconds, but the blood remained.
Apparently, she respected that fact much more than she did her father. They were going to his study, he told her, the same place where she had drawn such comfort upon waking. There they would speak of her duties as a princess and as his daughter. 'Do not cause a commotion here,' her father's eyes told her as he led her past familiars and underlings alike. 'Do not jeopardize my rule by making it appear as if I am too weak to maintain control over my own family.' Nyssa was shocked that he would even think her capable of such actions. She was dismayed to find herself wondering, even for a second, if he might be right.
Nyssa restrained herself until they were in the elevator and no one would see her give in to a moment of lamentable weakness, of emotion that was terribly close to human, before she burst out, "How could you do such a thing?"
Her father only glanced at her for a second, but his eyes were writ large with disappointment that she should both fail to gauge the intent behind his actions and that she should defy him in the first place. Nyssa shrank back by an inch or so before she steeled herself. "I did it for our blood, daughter," he told her in a tired voice. "When you have aged as far as I have, you will be able to view such larger issues with a seasoned eye rather than allowing yourself to be led astray by ill-advised…" He threw a look at her, his eyes suddenly cold. "Entanglements."
He thought…Nyssa drew in her breath sharply, recognized it for a human gesture that she must have picked up from Frost at some point over the previous two days, and was so angry that she could not bring herself to care. "That…" She could not of a word that fully conveyed what a defilement, what a betrayal Nomak's very existence was to everything that being a vampire and that the purity of their blood actually stood for. Nyssa so had to clamp her lips together tightly for a moment before she was able to come up with even a pale echo of what she meant. "That monstrosity is an insult to our blood." She thrust out her hand, palm facing upwards, and uncurled her fingers so that her father could see his ring glittering a dull ruby from where she had bled across the gold. It did not have that same oxygen-rich semblance of life when it was coursing through her veins. "All of my life, you have told me about how our house has weathered the centuries when others have failed, that nature selected us for greatness by whittling away at us until we were strong. You told me how dangerous the upstart impure are, because they want to lay claim to that which they have not earned and that they do not understand discretion, and now you tell me that you are creating them? For the good of our race?"
Her father looked shocked for a moment as he stared down at the ring and saw how she had injured herself before his face closed to become a blank and unyielding mask again. "Nyssa," he said. He might not have noted that he did not call her 'daughter', but Nyssa did. "There are certain truths that you are long past knowing. The Daywalker is a genetic freak, an accident of nature that was created in the blink of an eye, yet he is stronger than any of us. It is time for the virus that created us to mutate again."
The virus. Nyssa had never known her father to be violent to either her mother or herself in her entire life, though before her mother had died she had been told tales of the warrior that her father had been when he was young. Nyssa was a warrior herself, and an able one, but she still did not see her father's hand move until he had seized her by the throat and thrust her back against the wall of the elevator hard enough to bounce her head against the metal. Her father's eyes burned with fervor as he leaned close to her; it was frightening. "I care about a great many things in this life, daughter." With his hand about her throat like that, the return to the old endearment was hardly the comfort that it ought to have been. "But I care about the strength of my people more than I do anything else, including the old rules of nature, and including family ties." Though her entire body had gone numb with shock, Nyssa still found room within herself to close her fingers again around her father's ring, lest she drop it and lose it forever, as the first germ of a terrible idea entered her mind. The elevator came to a gentle stop at last, and the doors dinged open behind her father. He smiled, whether in sadness or because he saw something in her face that he chose to take as acceptance Nyssa could not say. She was finding that she could not read him as she had once been able to do so easily. "I was hoping that our talk would end on a more genial note, daughter," he said to her before he cupped her cheek with the hand that was not currently wrapped around her throat. It was only the fact that she had nowhere else to go that was keeping Nyssa from pulling away, "I trust that you have a great deal that you feel you must reflect upon." He released her and strode out, leaving the doors to glide closed with only the very softest of sounds behind him.
It was not the influx of air into her lungs where there had been none before that caused Nyssa's knees to unhinge and forced her to brace her hand against the wall of the elevator in order to avoid falling. The virus that created us, her father had said, and Nyssa wondered for the first time why she had lungs at all, when she did not use them for anything other than reflexive actions. Surely there were other ways to communicate that did not require sound: nature, that Bible that she had been taught since birth had selected her for perfection by virtue of her blood, was littered with such examples. Surely, as strong and as fast as her people were, they did not need to resemble the humans in order to hunt them, if the races really had arisen from two distinct sources.
Nyssa stared at her father's ring balanced in the center of her palm, smeared with blood that it had wasted no time turning to a bright human red the second that it hit the air, and shivered in the grip of revelation.
---
He was losing blood in greater quantity and at a much greater speed than even he could withstand without suffering ill effects, and it was making his head swim and his senses thick and sluggish. It was also making it hard for him to guard his tongue. Blade caught himself whispering, "Nomak."
"What about him?" Kounen asked. He abandoned the podium and its controls so that he could step close and then lean over him, as if he genuinely wanted to hear what Blade had to say. Blade doubted very much that Kounen would have dared to do that if Blade had not been restrained by the spikes that had been driven through his wrists and thighs, if he had not been so damnably weak through the loss of blood.
Blade tested this theory by shifting against these spikes as much as he was able to before the wave of violent pain forced him to be still again, and Kounen immediately jerked backwards and out of Blade's potential reach again. "He wants revenge on the people who created him," Blade continued, struggling to bring Kounen's face into focus around him as the world around him grew dizzier still. He could feel that he was paying for the reckless movement by losing his blood that much faster, and he felt as if he had been plunged into ice. Thinking of how Kounen's neck would feel as he squeezed it between his fingers and brought it to the point of breaking kept him conscious.
His vision was still clear enough so that he could see Kounen's smirk as the man pulled away. "You may be right. But, fortunately for us, he does not know this location."
The only sense that had not faded was Blade's sense of smell. The reek of pheromones in his nose was nearly overpowering, and nearly sweet all the same because he knew that Kounen could not smell anything at all. Blade split his lips into a grin. The look of confusion and apprehension that crossed Kounen's face as he took another step back was fairly sweet, as well.
"Now he does," Blade whispered.
The alarms began to scream at that exact moment, lights flashing and all. Kounen spun towards the monitor placed high up within one corner of the room, his mouth falling open in shock. The smell of his fear added a new tang to the stale adrenaline that dominated the room. Meanwhile, Blade closed his eyes and struggled to stay conscious.
---
Reinhardt's slow, slinking advance upon Whistler was halted by the sudden screaming of the alarms, complete with the flashing of lights, until the whole place looked like a cheap eighties dance club. Whistler paused as the cuffs finally gave free beneath the efforts of his picking and sprang open. He watched Reinhardt carefully, but Reinhardt was too busy spinning towards the security monitors to keep tabs on what his prey was doing. "What the fuck?" Reinhardt muttered as he stepped closer to the screen.
Whistler met eyes for a moment with Frost, who was still kneeling on the far side of the room and struggling to get his breath back. The red stripes of Reinhardt's fingers were already beginning to fill with spilled blood beneath the surface and would be nearly black before the night was over, and he looked pale to the point of resembling a vampire, as if he was scarcely keeping himself together even up until that point. Given the very personal way in which Reinhardt had been threatening him before he had been distracted, Whistler could not say that he altogether blamed him.
He was experiencing a moment of actual sympathy for a former suckhead-for a former suckhead that had, more to the point, tortured him, even though Whistler could not remember which one of had bitten him in the end. As if he did not already know that the whole damned world had been flipped onto its head just for fun.
"Do something already," Frost mouthed at him before he jerked his head in Reinhardt's direction, as if there was any room whatsoever for Whistler to doubt what he meant.
Whistler scowled. Maybe Frost was genuinely invested in their operation now and maybe he was only a leech that was going to hang from Blade's neck and continue taking blood as long as Blade would allow it, but either way Whistler had been doing his job for more decades than Frost could claim years among the human race. He did not need a punk kid telling him how to do it. While Reinhardt was still transfixed by the screen, Whistler allowed the cuffs to slide over his fingers until they made a makeshift pair of brass knuckles.
Vampires could be hurt. It was their damnable tendency to pop back up again like one of those Whack-A-Mole games that made them so hard to fight. Reinhardt ceased staring at the screen and the dark figure that was wreaking havoc across the security system, and Whistler did not even wait for him to get all the way turned about before he was putting his fist, enhanced by the cuffs, straight into the delicate place where Reinhardt's cheekbone and eye socket met and made friends. There was first a crack and then a wet popping noise, as if something that Reinhardt could not particularly afford to lose had given way like an overripe grape. Whistler could not tell if it was Reinhardt's eye, as the cuff's caught the skin and created a tear that immediately began to bleed copiously, but he could hope.
Whistler was not feeling a great deal of compassion for his fellow man at the moment. He pulled his fist back and struck Reinhardt in the face again and again, until the vampire dropped to the ground with his face covered with both weeping wounds and freshly blossoming bruises. That would not keep him down for long, and in the meantime they still had a great deal to do. Whistler dropped the cuffs and swooped up the rifle before Reinhardt could reach it. Not a moment too soon; Whistler's fist had scarcely retreated from Reinhardt's flesh before he popped back up again and lunged, snarling. Goddamn Whack-A-Moles. Whistler doubled the speed of his hands across the rifle, brought it up to his shoulder, and put a bullet into Reinhardt's kneecap. That one was for Blade. The bullet that Whistler put between his eyes next was completely for him. The bullets were not silver-tipped, so while Reinhardt slumped back down to the ground as bonelessly as a marionette whose strings had just been cut, he did not explode away into that satisfying puff of cinder and ash. More was the pity.
Whistler turned away from Reinhardt, more unsettled by those staring eyes than he ever cared to admit, and said urgently, "That ain't going to put him down for long. We gotta move."
"We do, do we?" Frost asked, watching Whistler closely as if he thought that Whistler was a half-feral animal that might turn on him at any moment. The feeling was mutual.
Whistler registered for the first time the delicate stress that Frost had put on the word 'we' and realized what he had, the man who had tortured him kneeling before him in handcuffs and deep within enemy turf, with no other witnesses to contradict anything that Whistler decided to tell Blade afterwards. If Whistler were Frost, having done the things that Frost had done, he would be feeling a damned sight nervous to see Whistler standing in front of him with a gun.
"Turn around," Whistler told Frost brusquely.
Frost's face did not grow any paler; he had at least that much going for him. "You gonna kill me, old man, face me while you're doing it."
"It would be better than what you gave me," Whistler grunted before he continued, his tone impatient. "That suckhead ain't going to be long before he's in fighting shape again, you really want to waste what time we have? Turn around so that I can get the cuffs off of you."
The look of surprise that crossed Frost's face was one of the more satisfying things that Whistler had seen all day. He nodded and turned so that he could present his wrists to Whistler, though the tightness that ran through his shoulders and the back of his neck said that he was about as pleased to be turning his back on Whistler as could be expected. Whistler was all kinds of broken up about that. He took Frost's wrists into his hand, fought back the urge to dig his thumb into the dense cluster of nerves on the underside until he had made Frost scream, and instead began to pick the cuffs. Frost stayed very still, his head lowered either in pain from the beating that Reinhardt had administered to him or from sheer exhaustion, and acted as if he fully expected Whistler to change his mind and put a bullet into the back of his head at any second. It wasn't as if the thought was not still crossing Whistler's mind. He kept one eye on Reinhardt, dismayed to see that the flesh was already knitting itself back together, and the other upon his work. When he did not have to do it by touch alone, the lock-picking went much more quickly. It was mere moments before he had the cuffs popping open.
Frost started to shake off the circles of metal, only to be stopped by Whistler's hand clamping around them both before he could escape. "Old man," he began in an aggrieved tone.
"The way I see it, the traitor was punished about an hour ago," Whistler told him, leaning close over Frost's should so that there was no way that Frost could mistake the deadly steel in his voice for anything other than what it was. Frost turned his head slightly so that he could meet Frost's gaze. His eyes were chill and hard enough to remind Whistler that Frost was likely not even his real name, that more often than not vampires who were turned were granted a name by their sires that reflected some aspect of their personality or appearance. Frost's true name was probably lost to everyone who was not himself. "That don't mean that I won't be watching you very closely."
"Voyeurism's not a kink that I would have figured for you," Frost quipped as Whistler released him so that he could rub at his wrists. "You're not my type." He sounded distracted, as if he was sassing Whistler more out of habit than out of any real investment, while all the while he had eyes only for Reinhardt.
Frost could work on his revenge fantasies later. Whistler turned away, figuring that even Frost would be hard-pressed to find trouble to get himself into in the thirty seconds that it would take Whistler to set the rifle to the side and pry up the grate that had been set into the center of the floor. What sort of blood and fluids Reinhardt had expected to send spiraling down that drain Whistler did not care to know.
He finished with the grate and turned to see that Frost had used the eerie silence with which he moved to cross over to the other side of the room and drive his boot with a piston-like force into Reinhardt's side. From the look on his face, even if he was strong enough to break Reinhardt in half with the force of a single kick it would still not be strong enough. That was fine-shit, from what Whistler had witnessed that was even understandable, in another one of those eerie moments of empathy.
While Whistler did not see the deep intrinsic value of whaling the shit out of a suckhead, the wound in Reinhardt's head was sealing itself up again faster than Frost seemed to realize. Reinhardt made a clumsy grab for Frost's ankle and missed; the gleam of awareness in his eyes said that he would not miss when he tried again. Whistler lunged forward, grabbed Frost by the bicep, and dragged him backwards hard. Rather than appearing grateful, Frost instead looked as if he was on the verge of hitting Whistler.
Whistler would dearly love to hit back, for that matter, but they did not have the time. He released Frost's arm and said, "Pick your battles, kid."
Frost let out a shaky and slightly ragged laugh. "Kid," he echoed. "I'm probably older than you are." He followed Whistler to the vent in the floor and hopped down ahead of him. Whistler paused and glanced back once at Reinhardt before he entered the darkness himself, and cursed fate for not granting him a silver-tipped bullet, just one. That was all that would have been needed to put that light out in Reinhardt's eyes once and for all.
He could spend most of the night wondering about how different things could be, Whistler realized, up to and including wondering if Frost had not been transformed back into human, if Whistler had never been bitten, if vampires had never climbed out of the muck along with the human race in the first place. There were better uses for his energy than fruitlessly chasing might-have-beens.
The vent was deep enough for someone to kneel comfortably, but not to stand. Whistler dragged the vent back down over the opening, pulled his rifle back into a ready position, and snapped, "Frost, if you've wandered off, I ain't attaching a leash to you."
"I'm still here." Frost rose into the slanted light that was able to come down through the vent, his face still deathly pale, his eyes glittering, and his lower face smeared with blood. Whistler's finger tightened around the trigger of the rifle and nearly took Frost's head off before he stopped himself. Frost saw Whistler's expression and drew back before he realized what the triggering factor was and touched lightly at his chin. He rubbed his fingers against one another and said softly, "It's all mine."
"I know." It would still be easy, so powerfully easy, to put a bullet in Frost's head and tell Blade that it had been Reinhardt's own doing. Whistler took a deep breath through his nose, relaxed his finger from the trigger, and turned. It made the skin between his shoulder blades itch, having his back turned towards Frost for that long. "They've probably got Blade this way."
"You've been here before?" Frost's voice echoed up from behind Whistler, sounding curious.
"No." Whistler paused and tried to dredge up a usable memory from two years of haze. It was very possible that he had been brought here, so that Damaskinos could view the carrots that he planned to dangle from a string. "Not that I remember. Nomak told me where the labs were." Frost wisely fell silent after that, save for the quiet rustling of his clothing as he followed Whistler.
Whistler had been feeling the last traces of his vampiric senses trickling away from him over the past two days, and he had not been sorry to see them go. It was thus even more troubling when, as he rapidly approached the area of the building where Nomak had said that Damaskinos kept his labs, speaking with a weariness suggesting that he had spent many unpleasant hours there himself before affecting his escape, he swore that he smelled the copper-sweet tang of fresh blood. Making it worse was the soft hitch of Frost's breath behind him as he, too, picked up on the same scent. In order for the human nose to pick up on the smell of blood, especially at any distance greater than a few feet, there had to be a cataclysmic amount of it. It was only a small comfort when Whistler came across the sound of someone speaking rapidly into a cellular phone only a few seconds later. He signaled rapidly for Frost to remain silent as he came to a halt beneath that room's own vent and did not need to look around in order to see that Frost was giving him a look that succinctly and eloquently stated, "No shit, Sherlock." Flipping his middle finger back was nearly a reflex.
Frost made a muffled sound that might have been either surprise or amusement, and the conversation that was taking place over their heads paused for the barest of seconds before Kounen seemed to convince himself that that danger at least was imaginary and moved on. The alarms had been turned off without any kind of all clear being given; it gave the air a dangerous, pregnant silence that picked up every sound and carried it far beyond its usual distance. Even the noise of their twin breathing seemed too loud.
After a moment, Kounen went on. "No, I want to know where the breach occurred." Pause. "I don't care about your protocols. No, I'm trapped in here with a very volatile weapon, if you want me to finish the harvesting-"
Harvesting. Whistler did not wait to hear if Frost gave the same stunned, enraged exhalation, though it might have allowed him some clue as to how invested a leech Frost actually was. He moved without being aware of his actions at all, grabbing the grate above his head and wrenching it to the side with one hand even as he struggled to bring the rifle up to his shoulder with the other one. The grate made a clanging sound as it struck the floor behind him, and Kounen's head whipped around in Whistler's direction. That was just fine by Whistler, as it meant that he now had a clear view of the bastard's face.
The first bullet went a shade lower than Whistler had wanted, so that it wound up taking Kounen threw the throat rather than turning his gleaming, smarmy teeth into splinters of bone. It was a fatal shot either way, and Whistler could have stopped there. Instead he found his finger spasming on the trigger and filled Kounen with at least three more bullets as the piece of scum fell, and a few more besides that went wild and wound up embedding themselves within the ceiling and walls. It was not until the weapon clicked empty that Whistler took a deep breath, realized that his ears were ringing for reasons that had nothing to do with the gunfire, and scrambled hastily up from the vent. He could hear Frost doing the same behind him before Frost said in a soft, shocked voice, "Oh, you fuckers." It was the most sincere thing that Whistler had heard him say yet. It still nearly got him socked in the mouth, as the thought of Frost and Blade carrying on anything with each other that was more than an exchange of goods and services was nearly enough to make Whistler sick.
"Kid," he said instead, and went to the table where Blade had been laid out like a specimen for vivisection. There were deep tunnels carved into the surface of the table for Blade's blood to flow, though God and Damaskinos were probably the only ones who knew where it was being taken. Whistler touched lightly at each of the spikes driven into Blade's flesh, trying to figure out a way that he could tear them loose without hurting Blade further, and could not. It was impossible to tell whether or not Blade was conscious, as he was responding to neither Blade's voice nor his hand.
Frost took one long look at Blade, his face unnaturally still with whatever it was that he was struggling to hold back, and went over to the podium that presumably controlled the table rather than going to Blade himself. He studied the controls carefully before he pushed a few of them; Whistler could hear him holding his breath from where he stood. They both winced when the table began to whir, as if expecting it to eat Blade rather than set him free. Whistler did not like to accord even a fraction of the relief that he felt himself onto Frost when the spikes retracted instead, but now that he found himself within that position he could seem to make himself stop again.
Blade stirred and let out a soft moan of pain as the spikes disappeared back into the table. Whistler caught himself sighing in spite of himself. Prior to that, not only had he not known whether Blade was conscious, but he had not been able to convince himself that Blade was even still alive. Unfortunately, once Blade was moving again and without the spikes to moderate the flow, he began to hemorrhage that much faster.
"Okay, kid," Whistler said to Blade. Frost had abandoned the podium and come closer to the table again, though he still maintained a bit of distance, as if he was afraid of intruding upon a conversation that was not his in which to interfere. Whistler noticed that he deliberately stepped on Kounen's cellular phone as he did so, cutting off the squawking voice on the other end with a sharp crackle of plastic. "You're a fighter. It ain't the time to stop fighting yet." When that got no response, Whistler felt something rising in his chest and had to struggle to push it back down before he was able to continue. "Come on, now. Don't leave this old man to fight a war all by himself."
Frost drifted a few steps closer to the table, slowly and as if he was having to force his feet to obey him at all. He looked as if he expected Blade, Whistler, the table, or a combination of all three to leap up and bite him at any moment. "Come on, you stubborn son of a bitch," he told Blade. His voice was unusually subdued until he caught Whistler's eye and realized that he was being given an incredulous look. Frost straightened, glared back, and continued in a firmer tone, "You don't get to take the easy road out. I swear to God, if you do, I'll go back to slitting throats within a day." Whistler did not know if Frost meant that to be a threat or a plea, and would be surprised if even Frost himself could tell the difference. While there was a deep note of strain catching in his voice like a burr, his face was as still as plastic, letting anyone read any emotion that they wished onto its surface. Whistler would have bought it, had he not heard Frost's voice first, or seen the way that he had held his hand clenched at his side.
Blade's eyes cracked open the tiniest slit, letting scarcely more than a glimmer of brown to shine through. It was one of the most welcome sights that Whistler had ever seen, marred only slightly by the fact that he was pointing it towards Frost. When Blade formed a weak approximation of a reproving glare, Frost's face twitched. "That's what I thought," he said.
Blade's eyes rolled back in his head to show nothing but the whites. Whistler sucked in his breath sharply and grabbed for Blade's shoulder, digging his fingers in until his knuckles ached. Blade focused on Whistler's face again, looking as if it was costing him some struggle to do so. "Thought we already said that you couldn't go anywhere."
"Blood," Blade whispered instead of answering Whistler directly. The bruises spread across his skin were still a deep, ugly purple and the cuts gaping, when they long ago should have closed up and healed away.
"Yeah, stud, you're kind of covered in it," Frost said. He was still hovering a few feet away from the table as if he was afraid to come closer to it, his face still that blank canvas of calm that jangled hard against the rest of his body language. Whistler thought that he would have long since run form the room, if Blade had not been exerting such a powerful global pull in order to keep him there.
"Give me a hand," Whistler said quietly.
Frost hesitated for several long moments before he finally stepped up flush against the table. In that moment, he was more like a skittish deer than a predator. It was a jarring comparison. "He needs more than either one of us can afford to give," Frost said. He still sounded subdued, still sounded as if he was undergoing a struggle that he did not want Whistler to see.
Whistler's lip curled before he could stop himself. "I wasn't expecting you to offer," he snapped, barely registering the narrowing of Frost's eyes before he said, "We'll need to defend him." 'He can't do it by himself,' was the unspoken sentiment, as terrible as that sounded. "Help me carry him, we'll get him out to that fountain that Damaskinos has set up."
"A pureblood actually being good for something," Frost muttered, almost below his breath. "Wonders and fucking miracles." He held his hand out for Whistler to give him the rifle.
Whistler snorted. "Don't hold your goddamned breath." Being willing to tolerate Frost's continued existence as a living creature on this planet was a far cry from actually being willing to put a weapon into his hands.
"I know how to use a gun," Frost told him testily, keeping one eye upon the security monitor as he did so. A dark shape flitted in front of the camera, trailing something behind it that looked like blood. Frost frowned.
"And who do you think taught Blade?" Whistler answered. He helped Blade sit up from the table and dropped one of his arms across his shoulders. Blade mumbled something unintelligible. Whistler shushed him without realizing what he was doing. "Give me a hand with him." When Frost paused, Whistler added, "He's not going to bite you."
"Funny." But Frost still came closer, still took Blade's other arm so that he could drape it across his own shoulders. He looked tenser than ever, and almost ready to jump from his own skin as he scrutinized Blade's face so close to his own. "Come on, stud," Frost said. His voice was pitched low enough to make Whistler think that he had not been intended to hear that at all. "You've been laying down on the job for long enough."
Between the two of them, they were able to haul Blade up and to his feet in spite of the fact that they were both covered in enough bruises to make them look more like a pair of chessboards than actual human beings. Blade's legs worked against the floor, but he carried next to none of his own weight. Whistler did his level best to ignore the trickle of blood running down his shirt from Blade's punctured wrist. Nomak had given him a general layout of the lair while he was whispering to him. He knew where to go.
Getting to the fountain, granted, would have been much easier if a bullet had not pinged off of the catwalk the very second that the three of them began to limp their way across it. Frost swore and ducked backwards, while Whistler allowed a few choice words to slide by beneath his breath as he steadied Blade so that he would not fall. A second shot followed, if anything coming even closer than the first. Frost took a peek out and swore again. Man had quite a mouth on him.
"It's Reinhardt," he said grimly, though Whistler was sure that he would have been able to figure that out entirely on his own. He guessed that there were so many people out in the world who would not pas sup on the chance to shoot at any of the three of them that Frost had felt the need to elaborate. Sounding nearly amused, Frost went on, "His head's nearly healed, too. He might be impure, but he's definitely old."
"That just makes the whole world shine, don't it?" Meant that Reinhardt would heal damned near everything that they could do to him as soon as they did it. They needed Blade. "Push through, kid."
"That nickname's not going to get old," Frost muttered as he complied. Much as Whistler supposed that much of his motives had to deal with getting Blade's bloodied, reeling form off of himself as soon as possible, he wondered. "Try a little variety, Gramps."
"When you've walked around with an actual pulse for as long as I have, then you can make the rules." Whistler shifted Blade into a steadier position and heard Blade's breath hitch as if the movement pained him. "Let's go. Not going to get any more than one shot at this."
For all that Frost seemed to enjoy running his mouth purely for the sake of hearing his own voice, Whistler was willing to, however grudgingly, admit that he knew when to shut up, duck his head, and get the job done. They half-sprinted and half-staggered as they dragged Blade across the catwalk, listening to bullets as they pinged off the metal. Reinhardt's face was grim, his expression set as he fired the gun at them. A machine would have shown more animation.
It seemed like a better plan than ever to not allow Reinhardt to come within anything that approached arm's length of them.
At one point a bullet came close enough to make Frost gasp, but they were nearly over the fountain, and Blade was beginning to wake up as the heady smell of blood reached him. He pulled away from the both of them so that he could quickly climb the catwalk railing, his movements more hurried and rushed than any that Whistler had seen from him before, and launched himself over the edge. What began as an awkward fall through the air changed as Blade gained further awareness closer to the blood, and ended as a swan dive so graceful that he disappeared beneath the water with scarcely a ripple. Whistler and Frost hurled themselves down to the catwalk to avoid the bullets that were still cutting the air all around them.
Remembering the way that Frost had gasped, Whistler asked brusquely, "You hurt?"
Frost looked stunned to even hear the question. He checked the sleeve of his shirt, noticed the neat hole that had been pierced through the fabric, and exhaled on a shaky sigh. "No. Just missed." He cut Whistler a sideways glance, as if still waiting for the other shoe to drop, before he leaned over the edge of the catwalk again. A whining bullet made him jerk back quickly. "Persistent bastard," Frost said in a calm tone that suggested that being shot at was simply a matter of course.
Whistler ignored Frost's own act of caution and poked his own head over the edge, watching and waiting anxiously for Blade to emerge from the pool. He did not know how susceptible Blade was to drowning. They had never tested it. Did not mean that every second where Blade did not emerge was another where Whistler felt his nerves rising and his mood sinking to even fouler levels.
Blade began to emerge from the blood, finally, just as Whistler had been about to leap down from the catwalk himself, and Reinhardt be damned. Beside Whistler, Frost exhaled. Blade strode up from the pool slowly, methodically, as if he had not mere moments before been more desperately short of blood than Whistler had ever seen him. The stigmata that had been punched into his wrists and thighs were already closing up. The composed, carefully controlled fire in his eyes belied the sedate way that he was moving-for the moment.
Reinhardt had thrown his gun to the side, presumably out of bullets, and had been stalking towards the pool when Blade had finally begun to emerge. Likely he had had designs on pulling the corpse out and claiming it as a trophy. Really, there were not enough words in the universe to detail how sorry Whistler was that that plan was not working out for him. The initial startled, even wary look that had crossed Reinhardt's face upon discovering that Blade was very much among the living faded into a slow smile as his borrowed familiars fanned out behind him. Their tasers crackled as they turned them on. After the brutal way that the tasers had been used against him before, Whistler was surprised that Blade did not reach out and snap every single one of their arms off at the elbow.
Blade and Whistler must have been sharing the same thought, as when the first familiar came at Blade, Blade drove his boot into the man's shoulder so hard that it would be a miracle if he ever managed to raise his arm again without surgery. The crack of the bone giving way, and of the man yelling, echoed and reechoed while Blade took out the second and then the third, dodging each of the tasers that they tried to jab at him with a catlike and nearly lazy ease. On the fourth, he grabbed the man's wrist and turned him into a creative method for fighting the fifth by using the man's own taser against him before he took it in his hand and began to electrocute anything that came within striking distance. Trained or not, the familiars stood no chance against Blade, not in the mood that he was standing in. When all of the familiars had collapsed around him, most of them were unconscious and not a few of them had tendrils of smoke rising from their bodies.
Blade gave his neck a long, leisurely crack, a few stray drops of blood sliding down his neck. The gesture said more than any possible words.
"Well," Reinhardt said as he circled back towards Blade. "As my Daddy said right before he killed my Mom-" He drew out Blade's sword, the sword that he had no right to have and that Frost and Whistler had not been able to grab before they had leapt down into the vents. It glittered in the fluorescent lights. "You want something done right, you got to do it yourself." He gave Blade's sword a lazy twirl, way too comfortable with the weapon in his hands. "He also said-"
They never found out what other pearls of wisdom that Reinhardt's father had to share with the world. Reinhardt twirled the sword lazily a few more times to either side of his head and then brought it down in a mighty arc that would have cleaved Blade from the top of his head to his collar or lower, only to have Blade catch the sword between his palms before it could get within six inches of his face. Reinhardt grunted, curled his lips back from his teeth, and struggled to force the sword down towards Blade's face rather than tugging it free and trying for another swing. Blade held on, and the tension that both men were exerting upon the weapon was so great that the metal actually began to hum.
"Can you blush?" Blade snarled at Reinhardt before he twisted and drove his booted foot squarely into Reinhardt's chest. The force jarred Reinhardt back far enough to let Blade jerk the sword free, snap it through the air, and cut Reinhardt's head from his shoulders in one smooth and almost lazy gesture. Pureblood or impure, the way that Reinhardt exploded away into ash was the same.
With the fighting done for the moment, Blade bowed his head and seemed for a moment to even be on the verge of staggering, reminding Whistler of how much blood he had actually lost, even if a great deal had been replenished in the pool.
"Kid," Whistler called, leaning over the railing. Blade turned his head up and towards the sound of Whistler's voice, and Whistler threw him the sunglasses that he had scooped up while he was being handcuffed. Blade caught them from the air, slid them on, and then jerked his head slightly in the direction of Damaskinos's display of embryos before he walked away.
Beside Whistler, Blade snorted. "Bossy son of a bitch," he muttered. "I've never thanked you for teaching him that."
"Teach nothing," Whistler shot back. "He came up with that on his own." They made their way down to the bottom floor, where Frost scooped up Reinhardt's spent gun without delay.
"Let's get on with it," he said grimly, and swung the butt of the gun against the first of the jars. The smell of chemicals immediately became heavy in the air as Frost and Whistler, anomalies themselves, began the slow and methodical work of destroying the monsters.
End Part Twelve