J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [301]
He caught them by grabbing arms and shoulders. “Get in the patient rooms! Lock yourselves in! Lock those damn doors!”
“No locks!” someone hollered. “And they’re taking patients!”
“Damn it.” He looked around and saw a sign. “This medicine closet have a lock?”
A nurse nodded while she unclipped something from her waist. With a shaking hand she held a key out to him. “Only from the outside, though. You’ll have . . . to lock us in.”
He nodded over to the door that read, STAFF ONLY. “Move it.”
The loose group shuffled over and filed into the ten-by-ten room with its floor-to-ceiling shelves of medications and supplies. As he shut the door, he knew he would never forget the way they looked, huddled under the low ceiling’s fluorescent lights: seven panicked faces, fourteen pleading eyes, seventy fingers finding and linking together until their separate bodies were one solid unit of fear.
These were people he knew: people who had taken care of him with his prosthesis issues. People who were vampires like him. People who wanted this war to stop. And they were being forced to trust him because at the moment he had more power than they did.
So this was what being God was like, he thought, not wanting the job.
“I will not forget you.” He shut the door on them, locked it, and paused for a second. Sounds of fighting were still coming from the registration area, but everything else was quiet.
No more staff. No more patients. Those seven were the only survivors.
Turning from the supply closet, he headed away from where Z and Rehv were in battle, tracking a pervasive sweet scent that led in the opposite direction. He ran down past Havers’s lab, down farther by the hidden quarantine room Butch had been in months ago. All along the way, smudged prints left by black-soled combat boots mingled with the red blood of vampires.
Christ, how many slayers had gotten in here?
Whatever the answer to that was, he had an idea where the lessers were headed: the evac tunnels, likely with abductions. Question was, how did they know to go this way?
Phury busted through another set of double doors and stuck his head into the morgue. The banks of refrigerated units and the stainless-steel tables and the hanging scales were untouched. Logical. They wanted only what lived.
He went farther down the hall and found the exit the slayers had used to get out with the abductees. There was nothing left of the steel panel into the tunnel, the thing blown apart just like the back entrance and the elevator roof had been.
Shit. Totally clean op. In and out. And he was willing to bet this was just the first offensive. Others would be coming to loot, because the Lessening Society was medieval like that.
Phury hotfooted it back toward the fighting out in the registration area in case Z and Rehv hadn’t already taken care of business. On the way, he put his phone up to his ear, but before V answered the call, Havers stuck his head out of his private office.
Phury hung up so he could deal with the doctor, and prayed that V’s security system had been notified when the alarms had been triggered. He thought it likely had been, as the systems were supposed to be linked.
“How many ambulances do you have?” he demanded as he came up to Havers.
The physican blinked behind his glasses and held out his hand. In his rattling grip was a nine-millimeter. “I have a gun.”
“Which you’re going to tuck into your belt and not use.” Last thing they needed was an amateur’s finger on the trigger. “Go on, put it away and focus for me. We have to get the living out of here. How many ambulances do you have?”
Havers fumbled to get the Beretta’s muzzle into his pocket, making Phury worry he was going to shoot himself in the ass. “F-f-four—”
“Give me that.” Phury took the gun, checked that the safety was in place, and shoved it into the doctor’s waistband. “Four ambulances. Good. We’re going to need drivers—”
The electricity cut out, everything going to pitch-black. The abrupt darkness made him wonder if the second shift of slayers hadn’t come down the shaft.
As the backup