And make sure that it never got out.
After a few more moments, his breathing evened out, his heart rate fell back into slow, even beats, and the room stopped pulsing vividly around him.
John Pritkin finally got dressed.
Chapter Twelve
J ohn awoke to a feeling of déjà vu; he didn’t know why.
Then he figured out why, when he was slung off a massive shoulder and onto something hard. It was painful enough to make him wince, or maybe that was the bucket of water that was thrown in his face a second later. A bucket of very cold water.
He came up like surfacing from the deep, shaking his head and spluttering, feeling like he was drowning on dry land. Only to hear somebody say something in Cantonese. Something that, judging by subsequent events, was probably “hit him again.”
“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” a second voice said.
Somebody hit him again.
John yelled at the second shock of liquid cold, his eyes coming open and blowing wide. Allowing him a perfect view of the fangs on the creature above him. And on a half dozen more who were crowding him round, who were holding him down, who were trying to keep him—
From doing that, he thought, jumping up with a yell and blowing his shields outward like a bubble, slamming the vampires against the sides of a narrow brick alley.
And then almost falling back on his ass, when the world went swimmy.
“Told you not to wake him that way.”
That time, John identified the voice. It was that damned Zheng, the one who had carted him here and dumped him on a bench, and who was now sitting on an overturned bucket, yet managing to look like a king on a throne. John scowled, and tried to look like he wasn’t bracing against the wall.
“Where . . . the hell . . . are we?” he panted.
Zheng gestured around. “What does it look like?”
It looked like a bloody alley. One plastered with vampires who, John realized, he hadn’t bothered to release yet. He still didn’t because he didn’t know what was going on, and because the nearest one was fighting with the bubble of John’s shields. The others were splayed against the rough bricks like fanged butterflies on a pin, but not this one. His fists punched the air, his feet kicked and flailed, and his mouth, despite being squashed almost flat, was nonetheless trying to bite.
“That’s Kong,” Zheng said. “I’d let him down if I were you. He’s, er, excitable.”
John did not see that as a good reason to let him down. But the increasingly swimmy feeling in his head was a different story. If he had to fight the bastard, better now than when he was about to pass out—again.
Retracting his shields was such a relief that he barely reacted when the creature hit the ground, bounced up, and was in his face in less than a second. John had the vague impression of the other vampires recovering with substantially less fanfare, but the one half an inch away and breathing like a bull in winter held most of his attention. The two of them stayed like that for a long moment, until John got bored. Along with tired, pained and generally over the bastard’s shite!
“Do you want to go back up again?” he inquired curiously, and Zheng said something sharply in Cantonese.
It probably had to do with the hand his creature was trying to thrust through John’s body, but without success. Because John hadn’t dropped his shields. He had simply drawn them back against his skin, thus greatly reducing the power drain.
Leaving the vampire poking at his abs as if in admiration.
Go without sex for a century and you, too, can be ripped, John thought dryly, thinking of the hours he’d spent at the gym. And then he shoved the idiot’s hand away. “Sit down before I put you down.”
That did not appear to go over well, judging by the flood of words being aimed at Zheng.
“He say you should die for all the vamps you kill,” the cutie pie on John’s left bicep informed him, while filing her nails. “He say you bastard and murderer and—” she paused, and waved the nail file at Zheng. “What English for po kai?”
Zheng shrugged. “Asshole?”
“Yes. He say you asshole man.”
“It’s been said before,” John rasped, and then he stopped dead.
So did the surrounding group of vampires, and rather more convincingly, but John barely noticed.
Something was wrong.
He could see his little stowaway because one shoulder of his sweatshirt was missing, along with most of the sleeve. The cuff still clung to his wrist, but it was black and crumbly, as if it had been grazed by a passing spell. One that must have hit him after his shields had failed.
Yet the underlying skin was fine.
A narrow, dirty window was the only reflective surface around, but it was enough. John strode across the alley and shoved his face into it, searching his appearance through dust and dirt and a spray of dried mud, the latter of which was fast turning liquid again as rain began pelting down. But he could nonetheless see his reflection staring back at him, his very whole and uninjured reflection, despite the blood still smeared about.
The fearsome injury Zheng had given him, which had swollen his jaw to the point that it had made speech difficult and had turned his nose into a cauliflower, was simply gone. The cut above his right eye, which had probably come from the bastard’s ring, and which had been cascading blood down his face with the enthusiasm of all head wounds, was a faint pink mark. And his busted lip, which had made him feel like a society matron with one too many fillers, was back to its usual, humorless line.
And it wasn’t just his face. His muscles now moved freely, with barely a twinge, whereas he should have been hobbling about like a pensioner. And although his head was still a bit light, that was likely due to the abruptness of his awakening rather than to blood loss, because his breathing wasn’t labored and he felt strong and healthy.
What have you done? he thought, shock eating its way through his system. What have you done?
There was no answer from the thing inside him, not that he needed one. Not with the memory of the body swap still fresh in his mind, along with the emotion it had triggered. Emotion that he’d been unable to repress, no matter how hard he’d tried. Emotion that, even in memory, had allowed his demon to tap into Cassie’s power through the conduit between them, which had never been closed after Wales.
And steal a feed that John didn’t want and she couldn’t afford!
“Did you kill her?” he yelled, staring at the sky because he had no way to look inward. “Goddamnit, did you kill her?”
“Er,” Zheng said, as John waited for a reply, for information, for anything.
Nothing came.
His heart lurched, to the point that he thought he might pass out again. He grabbed hold of the dirty bricks beside him, digging his fingers into the stone, trying to ground himself. Because, for a moment, he didn’t know where he was: a rainy alley smelling of kimchi and wood smoke, or a darkened bedroom in a farmhouse outside Stratford, clutching a dead woman in his arms.
Someone was saying something, but he couldn’t understand, didn’t care. This couldn’t be happening again. It couldn’t!
But the power singing in his veins said otherwise.
And it wasn’t because his demon had used its own power to heal him. The way his strange, hybrid body worked, his demon could amass power but only John could decide when or if to use it. So, this hadn’t come from his creature.