skull bounce on the asphalt, and the body collapse, twitching and gasping, in the gutter. At first, I thought it was dead, or at least dying.
Then, I realized it was laughing.
“Nice. Bloodbag’s either too drunk to live or has gone right off the deep end,” Jackal said, in what would’ve been a conversational tone if his fangs hadn’t been showing through his gums. “I don’t know whether to laugh or put it out of its misery.”
At his voice, the human raised its head, regarding us with eyes that were as blank and glassy as a mirror. It was a woman, though it had been difficult to tell at first. Her hair had either been cut or torn out, as the top of her head was sticky with blood. Long gashes ran down both sides of her face, bleeding freely over her skin, but she didn’t seem to notice the open wounds.
I resisted the urge to take several steps back. “Are you all right?” I asked, ignoring Jackal, who snorted. “You’re hurt. What happened?”
The woman stared at me a second before her face contorted in a gaping, laughing scream. Baring bloodstained teeth, she lurched to her feet and charged me, swinging her arms. I leaped aside, and she ran headfirst into a cement wall, hitting the bricks with a muffled thump and reeling back. Shaking her head, she turned, spotting me through the curtain of blood running down her face, and shrieked with laughter.
As she lurched forward again, I drew my sword. At the sight of the weapon, she paused, still giggling, and suddenly clawed at her face, tearing open the already bleeding scars. More dark blood oozed down her cheeks.
“Is it … someone new?” she rasped, making my skin crawl. “Someone new, to make the burning stop?”
“What the hell—?” Jackal began, just as she lunged again, howling. Again, I dodged, but she followed me this time, swinging and flailing in complete abandon.
“Back off!” I snarled at her, baring my teeth. But the sight of fangs seemed to incense the human further. With a screech, she leaped, swiping at my face. I ducked her wild slashing and drove my sword hilt between her eyes, knocking her off her feet.
The human fell backward, her skull giving a faint crack as it hit the pavement again. She twitched, moaning, but didn’t get up. Stepping past her body, I shot Jackal an evil look.
“Thanks for the help,” I growled, and he smirked back.
“Hey, I am forbidden to kill any more bloodbags.” Jackal crossed his arms and peered down at me, enjoying himself. “You were the one who told me to stop killing indiscriminately. I’m just following orders, here.”
I bristled. “You can be such a—”
The woman screamed and, this time, I reacted on instinct, spinning around. As the human lunged for me, my blade sliced through ribs and out the other side, nearly cutting her in two. The body struck the curb with a wet splat, and though it thrashed and spasmed for a while as we watched it warily, it did not rise again.
Jackal and I exchanged a look as the body finally stopped moving. The night seemed deathly quiet and still.
“Okay.” My blood brother nudged the corpse’s leg with the toe of his boot. It flopped limply. “That’s something completely new. Any guesses as to what that was all about?”
I peered down at the body, though I certainly wasn’t going to touch it. “Maybe a rabid got in somehow,” I mused. “Maybe that’s why they shut down the city.”
Jackal shook his head. “This wasn’t a rabid. Look at it.” He nudged the body, harder this time, flipping it over. He was right, and I had known it wasn’t a rabid from the beginning. The rabids were pale, emaciated things, with blank white eyes, hooked fingernails and a mouthful of jagged fangs. This wasn’t a rabid corpse. It looked perfectly human, except for the deep gouges down its cheek, and the wild, bulging stare.
“Smells human, too,” Jackal added, taking a slow breath before wrinkling his nose. “Or at least, she doesn’t smell dead. Not like they do. Though she must’ve been pumping herself full of something good, the way she put a hole through those bricks.” He nodded at the cement wall, where the cracked indentation of a human skull sat in the middle of a bloody smear. “What did the crazy say to you? Something about making the burning stop?”
“Jackal,” I growled, lifting my sword again. My blood brother looked up, following my gaze, and his eyes narrowed.
Across the street, two more humans shambled from a skeletal building, heads and faces torn, bright mad gazes searching the road. They muttered in low, harsh voices, garbled nonsense with only a few recognizable words. One of them held a lead pipe, which he banged on a line of dead cars as he crossed the street. Glass shattered and metal crumpled with hollow booms, ringing into the silence.
And then, another human emerged from an alleyway, followed by a friend.
And another.
And another.
More torn, bloody faces. More glassy eyes and mad, wild laughter, echoing all around us. The mob of humans hadn’t seen us yet, but they were steadily drawing closer, and there were a lot of them. Their raspy voices slithered off the stones and rose into the air, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Vampire or no, I did not want to fight my way through that.
I snuck a glance at Jackal and saw that, for once, he was thinking the same. He jerked his head toward a building, and we quickly slipped away, ducking through a shattered window into the gutted remains of an old store. Dust and cobwebs clung to everything, and the floor was littered with rubble and glass, though the shelves were bare. Anything useful had been ripped out and taken long ago.
Outside the windows, the mob shambled about aimlessly. Sometimes they yelled at each other or no one, waving crude weapons at things that weren’t there. Sometimes they shrieked and laughed and clawed at themselves, leaving deep bloody furrows across their skin. Once, a man fell to his knees and beat his head against the pavement until he collapsed, moaning, to the curb.
“Well,” Jackal said with a brief flash of fangs, “this whole city has gone right to hell, hasn’t it?” He shot me a dangerous look as we pressed farther into the building, speaking in harsh whispers. “I don’t suppose the population was like this when you were here last, were they?”
I shivered and shook my head. “No.”
“Nice. Well, if we’re going to pay a visit to old Salazar, we need to hurry,” Jackal said, glancing at the sky through the windows. “Sun’s coming up, and I don’t particularly want to be stuck here with a mob of bat-shit-crazy bloodbags.”
For once, I agreed wholeheartedly.
Silently, we made our way through the Fringe, ducking into shadows and behind walls, leaping onto roofs or through windows, trying to avoid the crowds of moaning, laughing, crazy humans wandering the streets.
“This way,” I hissed, and darted through a hole into an apartment building. The narrow corridors of the apartments were filled with rock and broken beams but were still fairly easy to navigate. Being inside brought back memories; when I’d lived here, I’d often taken this shortcut to the district square.
A moan drifted out of a hallway, stopping us. Sliding up against the wall, Jackal peered around a corner then quickly drew back, motioning for me to do the same. We both melted into the shadows, becoming
