Page 37 of The Elementalist
Crystal, naked as a forest nymph, stood beside me with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. “Sometimes, I forget how damn fast they are.”
I couldn’t help but stare. Her body looked far too good to be true. Perfect chest, perfect hourglass waist, perfect hips, perfectskin. “My dear, you are going to get me killed.”
“You don’thaveto stare at me.”
“That’s like saying fire doesn’thaveto consume oxygen.”
She flashed a coy smile while padding over to her clothes, and motioned to what was left of the burning vamps. “Speaking of fire. Please don’t let the house catch. We might need to go through this place with a fine toothed comb. Lots and lots of missing people’s remains might be here. Plus, overgrown as it is… it would surely set off a big forest fire.”
While she dressed, I concentrated on containing the flames, enough to burn the vampires without letting any of the dried-out wood ignite. Once she had her clothing back on, Crystal swiped the vampire’s large hunting knife off the floor and examined it with a mild frown of disapproval.
“Something wrong?”
She tossed it and caught it by the handle. “It’s a cheap knife with no balance. I prefer throwing knives as they let me keep some distance. Now that I think about it, I should really pick archery back up. Assuming I could find wooden arrows somewhere.”
“Pick itbackup?”
“College sports.”
“Oh. Thought it might’ve been a fey thing.”
She smiled. “No, the fey thing is the attraction to knives over guns.”
The flames engulfing both vampires died down, leaving black ash piles. Even their bones had disintegrated to powder. Only fragments of their shoes remained. When I no longer sensed any active combustion, I turned my attention to the stairs.
“How many do you think there are?”
She cocked her head, one ear toward the stairs in silence for a few seconds. “Three or four more… plus some humans.”
“You can tell that by listening? Humans I mean?”
“Vampires wouldn’t be begging someone to let them go and not kill them.”
“Dammit. Let’s go!”
Chapter Twenty
Reinforcements… Almost
I ran up the stairs, both forgetting entirely about the ice I’d covered them with and also not affected by it. Interesting… I’m walking on ice and not sliding because I don’t want to. Crystal enjoyed no such relationship with slipperiness. She does, however, evidently have claws—which she used to hold on to the wall and banister.
And yeah, something was definitely switched in me. This girl’s fingernails have become four-inch daggers and seeing it didn’t freak me out at all. She still looked like an angel who’d gotten into a deadly situation way over her head, only the nervous fear I saw in her wide eyes wasn’t actual fear. It came purely from me interpreting her normal appearance that way. Nothing about her body language said she had the least bit of fear. If anything, it said she’s pissed at me for leaving the ice on the stairs.
She did have a point there. If we needed to make a quick exit, going face-first down the stairs would be inconvenient.
I dispelled the inch-thick layer into fog. She emitted a nearly inaudible sigh of thanks. When I reached the top, the glow from her will-o-wisp lights let me see a fair distance into the corridor. Predictably for a boarding house, it had a ton of doors. The second and third floor are likely all bedrooms. Though, a portion of the third floor could be a full apartment for the owner. This place ceased operating as a boarding house before I was born.
Soft thumping came from the ceiling along with murmuring voices too faint to make out words. Sounded like people on the third floor. An eerie mist hovered above the dark blue carpet leading down the second floor hall, the smell of rotting meat so strong I could scarcely take a breath without gagging. Following the sound, I continued up to the third floor.
When I’d reached about three-quarters of the way to the top, Crystal appeared out of thin air on the stairs in front of me, once again in her birthday suit. A loudclickof teeth came from behind me. I whirled around and jumped at the sight of a vampire hugging her empty shirt, having chomped down on nothing.
Before I could even think ‘burn it,’ Crystal tore a four-foot-long piece of banister off and threw it over my shoulder like a spear, piercing the vampire’s chest and pinning him to the wall at the bottom of the stairs.
“Ooh!” She fumed and stomped—putting her footthroughthe old step. She had the grace and reflexes to not fall over, or even stumble, or even look like she hadn’t expected it to break out from under her. “That issorude. Grabbing a lady from behind like that.”
The vampire hung from the banister pinning him to the wall, gripping it in both hands and struggling to pull it loose. Her shot had dipped too low to hit him in the heart, but it didn’t seem like he’d be going anywhere soon. Not bothering to wait and see if he could free himself, I did the only reasonable thing a guy could do in this situation.
I lit him on fire.
