“I’m going to need some help,” I said, grabbing his arm and dragging him back toward the door.

“What?” His eyes bugged out. “Are you crazy? I’m not going back in there!”

“I’ll protect you.”

“Yeah, right!” He jerked back. “You got a rifle with no bullets, a handgun and some grenades. And let me tell you something about the grenades—”

“They don’t work too well in close quarters.”

“They don’t work at all!” he said, pulling back as hard as he could—which was pretty damned hard. “Not against those things. They just keep coming! And then you’ve got pieces and blood and ooze and—augghh!”

I’d dragged him to the door and kicked it open, in preparation for shoving him through, but he’d grabbed one of the nearby wooden support beams and was holding on for all he was worth. “No! No, no, no! I’m not—”

“Listen to me! I just need your help for a minute. Then you can hide while I go get Radu.”

“Radu?”

“He’s trapped in the basement. That’s why I need to get down there. Then I can—”

“Do nothing,” Ray said savagely. “’Cause then you’ll be trapped, too, in a basement full of—what the hell. Why don’t we call ’em what they are? They’re freaking zombies! Vampire zombies, which doesn’t even make sense—I mean, who does that?”

“A necromancer. A powerful one.”

“No. Uh-uh. They try to co-opt babies when they can, or they used to anyway, but this is different.”

“Because the guys in there are masters?”

“Because the guys in there are dead! I told you, DEAD dead. And you know how fast our bodies decay. We make terrible zombies! Everybody knows that. We’re falling apart within hours.”

I blinked, because something had finally made sense. “Yeah. But what if someone doesn’t need hours, or at least not many of them? You’re also a lot stronger, and faster, than a human.”

“But zombies take a lot of power to create, like a LOT of power. You gonna throw that away for a couple hours?”

“If the prize is big enough.” I just didn’t know what the prize was supposed to be. This was a working base, not a treasure house. And even if it had been…the Senate practically defined revenge. What was here that was worth that kind of risk?

“Look, whatever, okay?” Ray said. “Point is, there’s a ton of them down there. You’ll never even get to Radu, and if you do, you’ll never get—”

“There’s also a portal,” I told him.

He stopped struggling. “What?”

“You’re the portal king. You must know about it.”

“Know about—wait. What?”

“The Senate’s portal—”

His eyes widened. “The big boy is here?”

“What big boy?”

“What big boy?” Ray stared at me like I was slow. “It’s only the biggest damned portal in existence! Connects to I don’t even know how many lines! And you’re telling me that it’s been here all the time?”

“I don’t know about—”

“Wait. That can’t be right.” His eyes narrowed. “They’d need a ley line sink for something like that, and they don’t got one here. That’s why everybody always assumed it was at the consul’s place upstate.”

“Which it probably is!” I said, exasperated. “I didn’t say they had that portal, I said they had a portal. It connects Central to the consul’s residence in case of an emergency.” And if ever anything had qualified…

“But—” He looked outraged. “Those slimy sons of bitches! They told me they didn’t have one here! Said it was for security reasons!”

I gave him a look, and dragged him off the pillar. “Would you tell you it was here?”

Ray thought for a second. “Okay, point.” He looked at me and his demeanor became more businesslike, as if talking about something he understood had calmed him. “But that don’t matter, ’cause you’re not gonna get to it.”

“I will once I get to a weapons locker.”

He shook his head. “That won’t do any good. They’re behind wards.”

“What kind?”

“The kind that shocked the crap outta me when I tried to break in. They need a guard’s touch to open. And there ain’t any more guards. Or if there are, they’re being real quiet. I hadn’t heard anyone for maybe fifteen minutes when you—why are you still dragging me in there?”

“I have an idea.”

“Oh, great.” He looked heavenward. “She has an idea. Have you been listening? They’ll kill us!”

“Not if we kill them—” I began, only to cut off when a sudden rushing noise filled the air. And Ray grabbed my gun and went ballistic on something on the wall over our heads.

“Die! Die! Die!” he screamed, emptying the clip and causing spent shells to rain down all around us. And okay, maybe I’d been wrong about the calm thing. Because he was just standing there, trembling and panting and staring—

At the air-conditioning vent that he’d just shot the crap out of.

“—first.” I took my smoking gun out of his limp fingers and patted him on the back. “See? That’s the spirit.”

Chapter Twenty-six

“Oh, good. That’s…Yes,” Ray said, slumping against the wall as the shield protecting the cabinet dropped.

I felt a little light-headed, too, because there were actual weapons in the weapons case. Not a lot—somebody had been here before us—but anything was better than we had. “Get rid of it,” I told Ray, passing over the loathsome thing we’d used as a key.

“You’re inhuman,” he told me. And snatched it.

And as soon as he was out of sight around the corner, I let my head fall onto the cool, shiny metal of the cabinet for just a second. I could still vaguely feel it squirming in my palm, like its body was doing on the lobby wall. I tried to tell myself that the guard who had provided the handprint—and the hand—we’d needed would have approved. The creature that had taken him over wasn’t him, and if he’d been here, he’d have wanted us to do what was necessary to avenge him.

I knew vamps well enough to know that, even if I hadn’t known him.

But my brain kept wondering who he’d been. Or if I’d met him before. Or about how I’d feel if someone had just sawed off part of Louis-Cesare in order to fool a stupid—

I shuddered in visceral horror all over, hard.

And looked up to see Ray staring at me.

He didn’t say anything and neither did I. I just licked my lips and went back to work, because weakness right now was not fucking okay. I started searching through the cabinet looking for something better than the damned .22—why the hell did they even have a .22?—that someone else had rejected. Someone else who was probably dead, because whatever they had picked hadn’t been good enough.

And that went double for what they’d left. I grabbed a couple clips for the .45, shoving them in my pockets. And then just stood there, lusting after my favorite shotgun—a sweet, double-barreled 10-gauge loaded with three-and-a-half-inch shells. Every time I pulled the trigger, it was the equivalent to four blasts from a standard 12-gauge or a nine-second burst from a submachine gun.

It was glorious.

Only for this, I would have liked two. Or three, in case I ended up breaking one over something’s head. What I found instead was a sad little .410, all alone in the back, because nobody hunted zombies—much less freaking vampire zombies—with a rabbit gun.

Nobody except me, since there was no alternative and I was out of time.

I flung it over my shoulder, grabbed all the ammo that would fit it and turned to Ray. He’d given me the layout of the lower floors, and helped distract the guy we’d used for a key long enough for me to do what had been necessary. If I got out of here, I owed him a lot.

“Keep your head down,” I told him. “I’ll send help as soon as I’m out.”

He just stared at me. I didn’t have time to figure out what his problem was, so I just clapped him on the shoulder. And took off for the bank of elevators.

They were to the left of the reception desk, in a little alcove of their own, but still plenty close enough to the main room for my purposes. In fact, things were looking about as good as they could under the circumstances, until I caught sight of one of the elevator panels. I got out and checked the other elevator, but it was the same story.

Son of a bitch.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Ray demanded, sticking his head in the door.

“There’s only twelve lower levels,” I told him.

“What?”

“There’s only twelve, but Radu said he was on fourteen.” I looked up. “Why would he say that?”

“Who the hell cares?” Ray looked at me like I was crazy. “You can’t use the elevator—are you nuts?”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” The lights flickered, and he waved his arms. “That’s why not! What if you get stuck between levels? What if they hear you coming? What if—”

“They’re supposed to hear me coming.”

“What?”

“This is just a diversion,” I told him, looking at the main lobby. And at the gory creature that was still stuck to the wall. “To draw some of the vamps away from the stairs.”

“And how does that help? You’ll still have—”

“And to blow a bunch of them up. I’ve rigged a trip wire across the door. They fight their way into the elevator, and our odds will get a whole lot better.”

Ray’s forehead wrinkled as he stared down at the complete absence of any such wire. “But I don’t see—”