Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Keeping his guns up, he went silently over to the emergency exit. Sidestepping the door that had been blown out of its hinges, he leaned around the jamb and assessed the stairwell. It was dangerous to go up it, but he was as ready as he would ever be for that scarred vampire who was after him. On the ascent, he was careful to remain as quiet as possible—but he didn’t know whether that was his mind being smart, or his body making decisions for him.
He was hoping it was the latter as the autopilot thing was probably better at keeping him alive.
Or… less dead?
Whatever, whichever, who the fuck cared. He just kept going. At the first-floor landing, he paused and glanced at the big 1 that had been painted on the concrete wall. This fire door had had a limited breach, just the lock blown, the black blast ring localized by the bolting mechanism. Taking a deep breath, he pulled the panel hard, the hinges resisting because of the warping from the explosion, and he jumped out once again.
The lobby was still dim, and as he rounded the corner, he looked to that oily trail that led out from that fucking elevator.
His body paused, even though he told his feet to keep walking. As his head turned from side to side, he saw nothing out of place, nothing lurking, nothing… anywhere. The only difference was that the plywood panel that had been blown off the entrance had been put back on somehow.
The scarred killer had left. Evan could feel it.
Now he moved fast, but he still kept things as silent as he could, putting his new high-performance boots down carefully because there was debris and cracked mirrored glass that would be loud if he walked on it. At the building’s entry, he stopped for a moment. When nothing pinged his instincts, he used the side of the door that had stayed in place. The last thing he needed was the other plywood sheet falling in again.
As soon as he was out, his head jerked left. Right. And up.
Reholstering one of the guns, he fell into yet another run and retraced the path he’d taken the night before, shooting out onto Market, dodging cars that honked at him, ignoring pedestrians that looked his way. He felt nothing of the cold, and still no hunger or need to take a piss. He had plenty of anger, though, and it seemed, like his physical abilities, to be getting stronger by the moment.
Maybe it was just an effect of the toxic shit in his veins.
He didn’t care.
Up ahead, the blue glow of Bathe was like a semicircular rainstorm that misted out into the street, and he avoided the illumination by sticking to the opposite side of things, skirting the edge of the light show. The alley on the far side of the club was what he was after, and he jaywalked at a run and shot down into its shadows.
The side entrance to the club, which led into the VIP lounge, was smack in the middle of the building’s long wall, and he continued past it.
In the rear, there was a shallow parking lot, with wedges of dirty snow framing the beaters that were parked with all the organization of dropped Legos. In another couple of weeks, the available spaces were going to be taken up by even more of the plow’s work, those brown-and-black piles growing like tumors.
But not everything was out of order. There was a pair of vacant spaces set in the midst of the mess, and they had been properly cleared of ice and snow, and salted with a heavy hand, to the point where the spots’ yellow lines even showed on the ground.
Evan tucked himself into a fan-shaped shadow created by one of the security lights being out. Fishing a hand into the pocket of the black coat he’d stolen, he took out one of the suppressors. Even with his eyes forward on the back lot, his hands found the end of his gun’s barrel without any inefficiency, the rims of the two pieces joining as if they were something you clicked into place instead of screwed—and then, as he rotated the extension until it locked in, he heard the nearly imperceptible metal-on-metal sounds in spite of the bass that reverberated out of the club, and the whistle of the wind, and the loud whrrrring of the HVAC system.
No smell, still. But God, his hearing.
From his hideout, he watched a lone man stroll down the sidewalk. The guy’s clothes were high-class club, but he looked out of it, like he’d scored something that hit him a little hard. And then there was a car that passed by, a junker.
Overhead, a plane came in very low, and as he glanced up, he wondered if it was about to crash into the bridges—