Page 188 of Vampire so Virtuous

The other lunged for his arm, using it as a lever to swing onto his back. It hooked its legs around Antoine’s waist, clinging on while one clawed hand tried to force Antoine’s head to the side, jaws opening to sink fangs into his neck. Antoine dropped his chin, then drove backward, slamming the feral into the side of the elevator hut. Metal crumpled with the impact, and the feral jerked loose, stunned. Antoine punched back over his shoulder. The blow didn’t have enough force to do real damage, but it was enough to shake the feral off. He pulled away just as the second feral recovered and launched itself through the air, arms spread wide.

Antoine side-stepped, meeting the feral with a rising uppercut, snapping its head back, its jaws forced shut with a clack loud enough to cut through the noise of the fight. It flipped in midair, landing stunned at Antoine’s feet. One swift stomp shattered its skull.

More ferals had reached the lip of the building. Antoine leaped away, flying over the heads of battling thralls to land beside Gabe. The other vampire was busy choking the life out of a feral, grimly clinging to it with an arm around its throat while holding its clawed hand away from his face.A snap marked the feral’s neck giving in, and Gabe shoved it away, his face twisting in distaste.

“Minh controls a shitload of thralls,” he said by way of greeting.

“Roberto is his sire.”

“Yeah. Cally told me. Nice girl, by the way.” He grimaced, nodding to a feral. “We weren’t doing too badly until these things showed up. He’s controlling them somehow. How else could they be this sentient?”

“There’s another dozen on the way,” Antoine reported grimly.

“Fuck. They’re going to tear through my men.” His eyes went vacant as he communicated with his thralls, and all over the rooftop, men abandoned their positions to converge on Gabe and Antoine.

Ferals crawled over the edge of the building. One leaped for the closest thrall—not one of Gabe’s—and the man went down with a gurgle, his throat torn out. The remaining enemy thralls backed away, watching the ferals more than Gabe’s men, but it didn’t help them. The ferals attacked anything that offered blood, and in a flurry of claws and teeth, the rest of the enemy thralls fell, their bodies churned to little more than red oozing slabs of meat.

Some of Gabe’s soldiers raised weapons, firing what few bullets they had left into the ferals. One skull exploded, the feral thrown back, but strikes into their torsos did little to slow them. Then the ferals sprang across the rooftop, leaping onto the clutter of mechanical infrastructure and from there, onto Gabe’s forces.

One launched itself straight at Antoine, bloody mouth open, fangs bared. He took a step forward, meeting it with a driving punch that sent it flying back, half its skull caved in. But others carved bloody swathes through Gabe’s thralls. Men fell by the second, torn to shreds, and Gabe cried out as a feral on his back sank its teeth into his neck.

Antoine spun, lashing out with a well-timed strike to the feral’s head, knocking it away, but not before it took a chunk from Gabe. The vampire winced as he clutched at the bloody wound.

“There’s too many of them, Antoine.”

In the few seconds since the ferals’ arrival, half of Gabe’s men were dead or dying, while only six or so of the ferals had been brought down. Antoine threw a mind-stun at the nearest feral, the strain of using so much mental energy hitting him immediately. He’d have a headache, but that was a worry for later. He grabbed another by its hair to stop it from sinking its teeth into a thrall, holding it still as a man stabbed it through the chest with a large dagger.

“Go for their heads!” Antoine shouted, dropping the wounded feral to befinished off. He caught the arm of the one he’d stunned, swinging it in a wide circle to smash it with all his strength into a sharp corner of steel infrastructure. Its chest exploded in a spray of blood and gore. Antoine let the arm fall from his hands, disgust curling in his gut as he turned to the next threat.

He blocked the blow from another feral with his forearm, barely catching its snapping jaw in his palm. The force behind the strike sent a flicker of realization through him—they were getting stronger. The thralls’ blood had made them more formidable, and if they fed on him or Gabe… Yet, even as the feral pushed against him, Antoine still drove it backward, slamming its head into an HVAC unit. The back of its skull was caved in, and it left a sizable dent in the frame. Air conditioning might be in short supply for the near future.

Gabe wasn’t doing so well. He knocked away a feral but stumbled back from two more. The first recovered swiftly and sunk its teeth into his thigh. Gabe screamed as two thralls tried to pull the feral off, but a second later one of them was torn apart.

Antoine’s path was choked with ferals, and the few thralls still standing were far too occupied to help. He couldn’t reach Gabe in time. He leaped anyway, but a feral met him in midair, wrapping its arms around him, and together they crashed down amid the thralls. Antoine fought to disentangle himself, knees and fists flying, and for what felt like an eternity, he was buried beneath bodies, almost as if entombed.

The thought gave him a boost to his strength, born of desperation. He came up fighting, punching away the feral clinging to his back, but not before it sank its teeth into the side of his neck and ripped.

Pain lanced through him as hot blood gushed down the inside of his collar and spilled over his chest. The wound was large, the bleeding extensive. But he had a grip on the feral, its neck crushed in his hand.

The vampire spawn was still alive, and it was more instinctive than deliberate to bring it to his mouth, to extend his fangs, to bite.

Hot, fresh blood ran over his tongue, down his throat—and it tasted foul. Yet there was power in it even so, and as soon as he’d swallowed, his wound began to knit back together. It reminded him of Minh’s blood, which only confirmed that these were his spawns.

A flicker of thought crossed Antoine’s mind: What would the Curia think of siring so many spawns, leaving them to turn feral, and then unleashing them as weapons? How was that ‘staying in the shadows’?

Behind him, Gabe screamed, two ferals sinking their teeth into him,feeding.

Antoine snapped the neck of the feral and flung it away. His heart skipped a beat as he thought he’d misjudged his strength so greatly that the feral would clear the side of the building, falling to the street below. But it landed just shy, crashing into the low rimming wall.

He leaped again, this time landing unimpeded beside Gabe. The first feral he ripped off him, and a chunk of Gabe’s arm came with it, the wound raw and open through his jacket. Antoine grasped the feral’s head in both hands and crushed it, his strength swelled with the new fresh blood, and the feral dropped, its legs twitching.

That left one more, and Antoine plucked it from Gabe’s back by the scruff of its neck, pinning it against the wall next to the entrance door Gabe had been defending—and the route to Cally.

Gabe staggered, collapsing to the ground, his thigh shredded into bloody ribbons, a vicious wound gaping at his neck, another jagged tear slashed across his shoulder. His once-pristine white silk shirt was now a blood-soaked ruin, clinging to him in tattered strips. He cradled his arm to his chest as if it were too heavy to move.

“Feed, Gabe.” Antoine held the thrashing feral tight. “It’ll heal you.”

Gabe stared up at him, dazed, his eyes unfocused, mouth agape.