Sell you a Bridge chapter 77

Mirror House August 7th 2010 8:45 PM EDT

Turns  out vampires are real. Which shouldn't be a huge shock with all the  other shit I've seen but...vampires? They were pretty stereotypical  vampires too. Pale skin, dark hair and frilly gothic clothes. It should  have looked silly, they all seemed pretty young it should have been like  watching some goth social club from a local high school, or a bunch of  drama kids letting their inner Poe out. It should have been all of those  things, but it wasn't. Vampires, even stereotypical looking goth kid  vampires are not funny.

It's  something about the pale thinness and the catlike grace. Vampires don't  look like poser goths, even when they dress like them. They look like  hungry creatures PRETENDING to be poser goths. Like seeing a black mamba  in a wig. It should be hilarious, but black mambas are fucking  terrifying, so the comedy isn't there, just the overwhelming sense that  this thing isn't pretending to be something it isn't for any other  reason than to get close enough to tear your fucking throat out. The  unnatural lightness that floated them safely to the ground to surround  the stage and The Dealer on it was spooky.

At  the head of the pack of vampires surrounding everyone was woman. Long  cascading red hair the actual color of blood draped over pale flesh  wrapped in a dress the same color that clung to a body that put Jessica  Rabbit to shame. But once again I wasn't aroused. First of all my  girlfriend was hotter, and second of all the woman, while gorgeous and  graceful and clearly on the prowl was so obviously predatory it was  impossible to be attracted to her. It was like looking at a tiger. Sure,  they're pretty, but you don't want to fuck a tiger. This woman was too  dangerous to be sexual,all I wanted was to get away.

Jim  cursed off to one side and I turned to give him a questioning look,  which he didn't see because of the gas mask but still obviously picked  up on. He hesitated for a second in embarrassment. "That's Mary Seward.  Who goes by the name Mary, Queen of Blood. She was a...one time paramour  of mine. She is extremely powerful and not entirely stable I'm afraid  to say. It seems she is also here for something specific so we need not  worry just yet." He paused, cocking his head. "Though I recall she and  Teth-Adam have a less than cordial relationship. Which may bode poorly  for our health."

I  stopped gaping at the vampires out of the corner of my eye to focus  completely on mt boss. "Seriously? Are there any attractive, evil, and  or immortal women over the age of thirty you haven't slept with? Also  does that mean she's stronger than you? Because having seen you throw  down I don't find that comforting at all." It was mind boggling to me  that my urbane, stuffy mentor was such a ladies man. Jim had so many  ex's it was insane. I knew the man was two hundred years old but still.

Jim  coughed in embarrassment. "A gentleman does not kiss and tell. But yes,  she and I were lovers. As for her being stronger than me." He held out a  hand, sawing it back and forth in a yes and no gesture. "Teth-Adam is a  bruiser, and my own talents are ill suited to combat him. Mary, while  similarly focused on physical combate, also uses a variety of vampiric  abilities as support. That skill set is much more in my wheel house so  to speak. I'm confident in my ability to face Mary, where Black Adam  would be too much, and Mary would do better against Adam himself than  I." He shrugged. "Think of it like a game of roshambo if that helps."

Despite  the severity of the situation I head Zee giggle at the old fashioned  terminology and had a hard time holding back my own laugh, but I  suspected that was partially hysteria and I shook it off fast. "So what  the hell should we do? Fight? Flee? Shut up and lay low? You know this  woman better than we do, what's most likely to get us out of this  alive." After realizing this was some kind of test this entire  clusterfuck, though probably unplanned rankled infinitely more than it  would have mere minutes ago.

On  the one hand I suspected that we could put up a decent fight, less me  than the girls. My shadow and physical combat powers would probably be  less that useful against vampires, but their heavenly punishment  lightning was probably damn effective. The issue here was that they  probably didn't have the power to effect someone who could bang it out  with Black Adam in a fist fight, and if they offed a few small fish and  pissed off the shark we were fucked.

Jim  paused for a moment then jumped a bit as a realization hit him, he spun  to Reggie. "Reginald can you start swapping us with the people at the  edges of the crowd? If we use your translocation to get to the edges we  may be able to slip away undetected before-" There was a loud crash and I  winced and turned to look. The stage in front of the dionesium had been  shattered by a black clad form. A mountain of a man with dark skin and  slicked back black hair, his features aristocratic and in some ways  almost elfin, glared down at the redheaded vampire with open malice.

Around  his wrists he wore what looked like shackles of gold with no chains,  and he had a gold sash around his waist. A single gold lightning bolt  streaked down from his collar to the middle of his broad chest and his  eyes crackled with dark promise and command as he sneered at the  approaching vampiress. "Leech." His voice boomed around us, cracking  through the air at a volume I found shocking but without any sign of him  actively trying to raise it. He wasn't yelling. He just wanted to be  heard, and so he was. Teth-Adam, Black Adam in caper circles, stood  before us radiating menace like an unsheathed blade.

In  her defense the vampire queen didn't seem overly intimidated. She  sneered right back at him, her crisp british accent cracking the air  like a whip as she spat. "Thug." She sounded actively pissed off at his  very existence, and countered his cool disdainful royal bearing with a  sort of punkish devil may care attitude that made it hard not to like  her. "Move your giant arse or I'll turn you into a pincushion. We have  need of that metal." I'd expected her to be aristocratic and prim but  she came across just as wild as she looked when she spoke.

Black  Adam however, just laughed. "Little beast, I stood against your  progenitors when they walked this world. You are far from Lilith's  equal, never mind a match for the first murderer. I stand vigil in this  place, and you will not take that which I protect. Attempt it at your  peril, for only death awaits." He seemed genuinely amused by the threat  which didn't bode well. "To think such a child would call herself a  queen. Royalty is not something you are infected with wretch. A queen is  born, not made. Your delusions of grandeur have made you arrogant,  allow me to educate you on the truth."

Black  Adam hurled himself forward so fast I couldn't even track it, and I was  glad for the wards keeping us from sight, because I didn't want that  monster to look at me. The vampire should have been meat paste, but  whatever claims the old monster in black and gold may have made, Mary  Seward was no pushover. As he hit she shifted into a cloud of bats,  scattering into the wind in a dozen directions before reforming behind  Adam. Her hands were claws when she reappeared and she lashed out at him  with the razor sharp appendages.

But  Black Adam wasn't a worldwide threat on the level of Superman for  nothing. He turned and caught her wrists with a speed and coordination  that made it seem like she had been moving in slow motion. Rather than  looking scared or angry however, Mary shot him a triumphant grin. Black  Adam seemed as confused as I was by the expression, snarling as he  released one hand, letting it scratch at him undeterred as he reached  his freed appendage out toward Mary's head with all the deliberate  menace of an executioner.

Menace  that was cut short unfortunately, by a rumble in the ground. The stage  collapsed, imploding beneath them as some kind of shaped charge dropped  the pedestal and the jar of magic metal on it into the depths below the  theater. Black Adam turned in surprise to see what had happened and as  he did Mary shifted into mist and with a ringing laughter reminiscent of  a witch's cackle the mist flowed into the tunnel and out of the room,  followed quickly by the other vampires in a similar form.

Adam  roared with outrage and hurled himself into the tunnel after them, but  even for someone like him catching a dozen vampires made of identical  mist flowing in a dozen directions was going to be borderline  impossible. Jim whistled. "Well, that was certainly clever. I taught her  a few tricks when we were together but that was unexpected." Reggie had  been getting ready to swap us out of the line of fire but it seemed  unnecessary now. Black Adam was gone, as were the vampires. As I had  that thought it gave me an idea. I shifted into my shadow form when  everyone was distracted.

I  slipped through the wards easily, the magic didn't understand what I  was, my powers making me an actual living shadow and casting a shadow  through this particular ward was more than possible. I flowed across the  room as fast as possible, easily avoiding notice in the chaos and  damage. This was stupid. I was being stupid. But Zee was right, that  BRZK formula was horrible and if I could get it I had to. I couldn't  live with the thought of what Zee would go through if someone used that  on her dad, or hell on her if she decided to do the hero thing.

Plus  I admit, part of me just wanted to make my girlfriend happy. She had  been so upset. Jim taught me to always take advantage of an opening and  while stealing from this place might be suicide normally with this much  chaos flooding it a vanishing vial would just be treated as something  the vampires picked up. We'd need to leave right after and we would miss  the rest of the auction but with all this madness we would hardly be  the only ones to go. I managed to snag the thing with my shadow form and  slip back to my boss and friends, wincing as I burned way too many  points speeding myself up.

I  was gasping by the time I got back, I'd never forced myself to move  that fast before. I was down to eighty points, which boggled my mind  since it was easily four times more draw from that power than I had ever  seen before. I activated my tracelessness power to remove and video  footage that may have captured me then grabbed my girlfriends hand. I  mutter a vague explanation to Jim, not secure in our privacy even inside  these wards, then dragged Zee behind me as we all bolted through the  crowd of panicking supervillains in gas masks.

Most  the the wards had been broken by fleeing people, much as ours was as we  bolted through it to head for the exit. No one bothered us other than a  few people who got in our way, but Reggie took care of them, swapping  himself for anyone who got in front of us then lagging to the rear again  in preparation for a repeat. My friend was a huge asset to a retreat.  Finally we got outside of the theater, stumbling into the alley and up  to our car. We climbed in and high tailed it out of there. The last  thing we saw in the rear view mirror was a column of golden lightning  smashing right through the center of the building. I pulled off my mask  and stared wide eyed at my friends. Well, that had happened.