“You promised,” Julie said next to me in a small voice.
“Settle down. I’m not going to fight him.”
Ghastek’s voice rolled through the Mole Hole. “All teams, take him down.”
• • •
I CROSSED MY arms. “It’s been fifteen minutes.”
“Sixteen,” one of my vampire babysitters said in a female voice. “Ma’am.”
That didn’t exactly make things better.
The question of whether the host’s body affected the giant’s power had been answered. Lago had survived nine years as a merc. He was damn fast. The vampires sliced at him, but he caught them, broke them, and tossed them aside. They regenerated, and he broke them again.
Glossy metal scales had begun to form on his legs, slowly climbing their way up. They were midway up his thighs now.
Something fell off the giant and lay in a heap. It looked like a human-sized pale maggot. I squinted at it. It was a vampire. Normally gaunt, it had swollen to ridiculous proportions, as if someone somehow had gotten the Michelin man from the old commercials and turned him into an undead monstrosity. As if the vampires weren’t already revolting enough.
The vampire next to me opened its mouth. “Strike Leader, we have a one-twenty-eight in progress. Permission to retrieve?”
“Permission granted.”
The vampire sprinted across the glass crater toward the undead maggot thing.
“What’s wrong with it?” Julie asked.
“Too much blood,” one of the navigators said through another bloodsucker. “It’s an almost never-seen phenomenon, but it’s been observed in a controlled study in a lab environment. It takes an average of forty-eight liters of blood consumed in a continuous stream, or the blood of roughly 1.28 Holstein cows, to induce this state in a vampire.”
The giant had too much blood and he was regenerating. They couldn’t drain him fast enough. I couldn’t use a power word on him, but I could do something.
The vampire that left us picked up the bloated undead, slung it over its back, raced back across the glass, and dumped the abomination beside us. The vampire’s eyes had turned dull.
“Ew.” Julie shuddered. “Ew.”
“Ew” didn’t even begin to cover it. Its skin looked ready to rupture. “Why is nobody piloting it?”
“It won’t be able to move for another hour,” the male navigator explained.
“Please relay a message to Ghastek for me,” I said. “Your way isn’t working. Let me help.”
The vampire dutifully repeated the words.
“He says, ‘The situation is under control.’”
“Tell him, no, it’s not. You can’t contain it now. What happens when the metamorphosis is complete?”
“He says, ‘Your concern is duly noted.’”
Argh. “Asshole.”
The undead opened his mouth and paused as the navigator caught himself. “Should I . . . ?”
“No,” another navigator told him. “You shouldn’t.”
A caravan of black SUVs clogged the street leading to the Casino. The SUVs pulled up in a semicircle around the Mole Hole and disgorged Ghastek and a flock of journeymen. I recognized two Masters of the Dead: Toakase Kakau, a dark-eyed woman of Tongan descent, and Ryan Kelly, a large Caucasian man who looked the corporate shark in every way, except for a very long purple mohawk.
The journeymen and the Masters of the Dead thinned out, forming a loose ring around the Mole Hole. A journeywoman next to Ghastek raised a large horn to her lips and blew a sharp note.
Vampires dashed into the crater. A journeyman could pilot one; a Master of the Dead could control two or in Ghastek’s case three. There were about twenty people around the Mole Hole and probably thirty vampires below. Each was marked with a bright smear of fluorescent paint in a dozen colors, some with a cross, some with a ring. Something really weird was going on.
The vampires swarmed Lago, climbing up his legs to his chest and stomach. He roared, throwing them around. They landed on the ground, some on their feet, some in a broken heap. The scales were up to his waist now. His feet began to glow. The glass under him would melt before long.
Ghastek raised his hand. The horn screamed in response.
In my mind, the dull red smears of magic that were the thirty vampires in the Mole Hole turned bright red.
Dear God. They had turned the vampires loose.
An unpiloted vampire went into an instant rage. It would slaughter until nothing with a pulse remained. If the PAD found out, nobody would be arrested. They would shoot everyone here out of principle. This was insane. Now I understood the paint—they’d marked the bloodsuckers so they could quickly grab them again without getting confused.