Will saw the creature when it rushed forward, falling on Tailtiu’s frail body. It was the body of a man, heavy-set and bald. As his head leaned down, Will both saw and felt the fangs pierce Tailtiu’s flesh. A moan sounded behind him, and a second form rushed forward from the darkness to latch onto one of her legs. Seconds later and the darkness of the warehouse was alive with the sounds of running feet. The others were coming to feed.
Sickened, Will fought to escape the sight, and for a moment he panicked. Several terrible seconds passed before he regained his wits and thought to send his focus elsewhere. Janice. The world shifted and changed, and then he was once more back in his bedroom.
Janice still watched over him, though her expression seemed to have calmed. Will stared at his body and rushed toward it, feeling resistance as he tried to enter. It might have delayed him under other circumstances, but his desperation was too fresh, too raw. Driving inward, he felt his flesh solidify around him, heavy and warm.
Sitting up suddenly, Will tried to stand and promptly fell over, collapsing onto the rug at the foot of the bed. Janice grabbed his shoulder to stabilize him as he began clambering to his feet, heedless of his lack of balance. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“They’re feeding,” he blurted out. “We have to go. Now.” He was upright now, though still unsteady as he started for the door.
Janice held onto his shoulder. “Wait, let’s think about this—”
He jerked free and kept moving. “There’s no time. She’s at the warehouse. They’re going to kill her, and then they’ll be everywhere.”
She chased after him as he stormed down the stairs to the ground level of the house. “Why?”
“Because her blood is a drug to them. It will send them into a frenzy. They’ve lost control.”
“The sun’s already down,” she protested. “There’s nothing we can do about it. If we go out into the streets, we’re liable to become victims too.”
“Stay here,” he told her. “It’s a big city and there probably aren’t enough for them to come this far. Actually, go to one of the buildings. Find some sorcerers.”
He passed Blake on his way to the door. “Where are you going in such a hurry?”
“She’ll explain,” said Will curtly, throwing open the door. Rob stood outside, his hand raised to knock, an expression of surprise on his face.
“Will! I found out—”
“Sorry,” said Will as he pushed past his friend, breaking into a run.
“You aren’t even wearing your armor!” shouted Blake from the house, but Will ignored him. He had his brigandine vest on, and that would have to be enough.
Focusing his turyn, he increased his stamina and speed, allowing him to sprint across the campus at an impressive rate. He took note of his surroundings as he ran. It was dark now, the sun was down, and dusk was almost done, leaving only the faintest hint of light on the horizon. The sky was clear, though, with a crescent moon and plenty of stars. He adjusted his vision to take full advantage of the available light.
His brain worked through the situation as he traveled. Janice was right—as usual, he should wait, make a plan, prepare himself. At the very least, he should stop and spend the ten or fifteen minutes necessary to change out of his clothes and put on his armor.
But he couldn’t.
Every time the thought of stopping entered his head, he saw Tailtiu’s broken body, heard the sick slurping noises, remembered the pain of their teeth, and then his legs pumped faster. At a normal walking pace, it would take twenty minutes to reach the warehouse. That was too long. Running, he could probably get there in ten.
The school gate came into view, and when he was within twenty yards he shouted for Tiny’s benefit. “She’s in the warehouse!”
The school guard looked up in alarm and puzzlement as Will ran past without slowing down. “Where are—”
Will never heard the rest. He was too busy repeating his shout to Tiny. “They’re killing her!” From the periphery of his vision, he spotted the big warrior leaning against the wall to the right of the gate. He won’t be able to keep up with me, Will realized. Even without armor, Tiny was simply too ponderous to keep up with him at a full run. Fully clad as he currently was, his friend would be exhausted in a very short span of time. “Catch up with me as quickly as you can!”
He put his head down and poured on the speed until it was all he could do to maintain his balance. Mentally, he reviewed the spells he had prepared earlier. Ethelgren’s Illumination and a wind-wall, he told himself. Good choices, but he would need a force-lance to get through the door.
Will had continued practicing steadily over the past year, and he knew his limits. He could manage keeping two spells prepared and a third in his hand. At the risk of falling, he constructed the force-lance, but rather than hold it, he pressed it into his chest, to rest beside the two other spells. Without thinking about his actions, he formed a fourth spell, another force-lance, and kept it in his hand.
Idly, somewhere in the back of his mind, he realized he’d passed another milestone, having three spells prepared and still being able to cast another, but he couldn’t spare the energy to congratulate himself.
Despite his general level of fitness, the pace was beginning to wear him down. All his usual turyn was focused on improving his endurance, leaving nothing to address the shortfall now that his body was using more energy than he could draw. So he began to pull, expanding his outer shell and concentrating his turyn more compactly within it. It was something he had only done once before, at the dam.
Arrogan had told him it was a more advanced technique, but he had no idea what the drawbacks might be. Would he exhaust his will and injure himself again? How long could he keep it up safely? He had no answers, but he tried to keep the intensity of his pull down to a lesser level than what he had used at the dam.
He only needed a little extra, not his absolute maximum. Will’s lungs worked like a bellows as he ran, drawing in air to feed his burning muscles. The extra turyn flowed through him, and the burning began to recede as his body and turyn settled into a new equilibrium.
There were still quite a few people on the streets and most looked at him in alarm as he blew past, easily dodging them in the dim light between the streetlamps. Many swore as he passed by, but he ignored them all.
Pounding headlong down the streets, Will reached the warehouse in just under seven minutes from the time he had leapt up from the bed in his home. As it came into view, he slowed only enough to keep from slamming into it. At twenty feet, he unleashed the first force-lance, neatly blowing away the door handle, part of the door, and the bar behind it all. Now moving at a jog, he threw his shoulder into it and then he was inside.
Even to his night-adjusted eyes, it was too dark to see, but he was adjusting his vision already, switching to heart-light and causing the world the shift into a colorless world of grays and blacks. He knew the vampires were cold, but that only meant they wouldn’t shine like beacons as living people did. They would still be visible.