Which left only the one possibility.
He turned from staring upwards to pummeling the hell out of the brick wall beside him, because he couldn’t pummel the thing he so despised. And because it was either that or lose his goddamned mind! His hand was shielded, and the wall was relatively soft and crumbly. But it was the sheer, overwhelming rage ripping through him that allowed him to literally punch his way through the side of a building.
And to keep on doing it, driving into the brick, feeling it give way like broken bones, over and over and over and over—
“Did you kill her? Did you kill her? Goddamnit, tell me you didn’t fucking kill—”
His fist was caught by a giant-sized hand.
He was about to protest—memorably—when he came back to himself a little. Enough to notice the circle of staring vampires, the tiny old woman with a bun and a broom, peering out of the wreckage of what John belatedly realized was her home, and the massive vamp with a crease between his eyes holding him back. John stared at Zheng, but it all seemed unreal, irrelevant.
Everything did, next to the thought of what he might have just done to Cassie.
And was still doing, he realized, as he felt another tiny surge of power pulse through the bond. The last fucking one, he thought savagely, shutting down the connection so abruptly that it staggered him, and then severing the link. He immediately felt the loss: isolation where there had been companionship, cold where there had been warmth . . .
Warmth. His desperate mind snatched at the thought like a drowning man grasping a life line. She had felt warm.
Perhaps he hadn’t killed her, after all.
For some reason, that thought hit him even harder than the first, sending him stumbling back against what remained of the wall. Because he knew exactly what that felt like. The horror of what he had done to his wife had warred with the strength and vitality surging through him that night, leaving him feeling physically perfect for days afterward, almost like a teenager again.
And allowing him to experience the mental anguish of what he’d done with vivid clarity.
This . . . was not the same. He felt healed, but like a battery that had run down and needed recharging. As if his demon had taken enough life energy to sustain him, but had been stopped before it could finish the job.
But there was only one way to know for certain.
He caught sight of a phone in Kong’s back pocket and went for it, but the damned creature moved too fast.
“Give it to me!”
“Go to hell!”
“Which one?”
“Okay, let’s slow this down,” Zheng said, right before being clobbered by battle granny with the broom.
He sighed. Took the broom away. Waved progressively larger sums of cash in front of the wizened old face until she finally grabbed it and went back inside, muttering across her newly cut threshold.
Then he turned his attention to John, who by then had acquired Kong’s phone.
“How did you do that?” Zheng asked, confused, probably because he still had John’s left hand imprisoned in his fist.
John didn’t answer, being too busy trying to place a call. He was frantic to check on Cassie, but the damned phone didn’t work. “What’s wrong with it?” he demanded, but the owner did not appear cooperative.
Perhaps because he was still levitating upside down, courtesy of the shake down spell John had cast.
It was usually used to frisk subjects who might have lethal traps hidden about their persons, or who were merely too combative to be bothered with. That last described Kong perfectly, who was swearing up a storm whilst the spell shook him vigorously up and down, despite the fact that it had already cleaned him out, raining change, a wallet, several guns, and a wicked looking chopper—a large machete-like knife popular with the triads—onto the ground. Along with the phone that John thrust in his face.
“Unlock it!”
Kong said something that did not sound helpful.
“He say it already unlocked,” the temple dancer informed John. “He also say he going to gut you when you let him down.”
John immediately let him down.
Zheng sighed some more, and grabbed his vampire before he could attempt to make good on his promise. And kept hold of John, so he couldn’t do likewise. He said something to Kong, which did not appear to help, then to several of his other servants, who moved forward to restrain the obviously livid vamp. Zheng finally let go of John’s hand, but only so he could take his arm.
“Walk with me.”
“Let go of me! I have to—”
“None of the phones will work.”
“Won’t work? Why?” he looked at the useless block of metal in his hand. “What are you—”
“I’m about to show you.”
Chapter Thirteen
T he vamp led him down the alley to where it let out onto a wider street. From the shadow of some kind of flowering vine, John could see part of an area of shops and cafes that ran down a slight hill. It should have been an attractive spot, on the cusp between the Japanese and Korean areas of the city, where enclaves of immigrants had created a colorful mishmash of styles: upturned roofs of red and yellow tiles, windows decorated with big-eyed anime figures, and a tiny bibimbap hole-in-the-wall that competed for customers with a squid-on-a-stick cart parked cheekily outside. It was the kind of place where you could easily spend an afternoon shopping, eating and exploring the city.
But not today. Today, chaos reigned. And rained, because the torrent was now pounding down hard enough to turn the small, cobblestone street into a river and to send items spinning away from makeshift storage facilities overhead.
In the skies above, lightning flashed in brilliant bursts, strobing the landscape. Clouds gathered so thick and dark that they turned afternoon into a decent approximation of night. And the wind howled with gusts that threatened to pick up the squid cart and throw it down the hill, adding fuel to the fire that was already consuming a building.
It didn’t succeed, but it did grab a string of orange-red paper lanterns, sending them spiraling upward like an out of control kite.
Yet it wasn’t the landscape that drew John’s eye.
“The hell?”
“What’s the matter?” Zheng asked. “Did you think you got them all?”
John didn’t answer. He was too busy staring down the street, to the point where it crossed a large avenue. And where the battle in the sky was being reflected in the brilliant bolts of energy sizzling between triad members and corpsmen. Hundreds of them.
“You told the tong they’re enthralled,” Zheng said. “Was it true?”
“Of course, it’s true!” John snapped, feeling the tromp, tromp, tromp of all those boots in his skin. “The Corps doesn’t go around attacking civilian cities!”
“Well, they’re attacking this one. The tong had reports that they’ve spread out to every quarter. Question is, what are you going to do about it?”
John stopped staring down the street long enough to stare at the big vampire. “What am I going to do?”
“You’re a war mage.”
“And you’re a senator! You must have resources—”
“Yeah, six of them,” Zheng hiked a thumb back at his men. “And not my best fighters. I brought investigators—”