Chapter 787: Coming

"Where are you?" Alex asked.

The answer disappeared beneath another blow against the door.

Vesa held the response clear until the speaker managed to name a storage building west of the treatment route. He had heard Dorian’s soldiers outside earlier. His group had stayed hidden because two of them could barely move.

Now one of those two was tearing through the door.

"Get everyone away from it," Alex said. "We’re coming."

He stood, and the wound in his side pulled beneath its bandage. Mingyue was already moving toward the street.

"Thepes stays here," she said to Vesa. "Keep his voice available."

Thepes turned his head toward them. "You’ll need more than my voice if you start cutting them apart."

"Then tell us something useful before we have to," Mingyue said.

She left without waiting for the argument he seemed ready to make.

Alex followed her into the street. Dorian was returning from the perimeter with the gray-haired loyalist, and Alex pointed them toward the storage building.

"Keep people off that road. We have living vampires losing control of their strength."

Dorian’s expression darkened. "More of that thing’s raised bodies?"

"Living people who answered us. We haven’t seen what happened yet."

Dorian turned immediately, calling two soldiers away from the arrivals. The gray-haired man went with him, his hand resting on his sheathed weapon.

Alex reached the storage building as a section of the outer door broke free.

A man stumbled through it with blood running from his nose. He tried to turn back, but a red line struck the wall beside his head and cut a groove through the stone.

Mingyue caught the next line on her sword. Frost spread along it toward the doorway.

"Behind me," she said.

The bleeding man obeyed.

Inside, someone screamed for her brother to stop.

Alex moved past the broken door. A heavy storage rack lay across the floor, trapping three people in the smaller space at the back. Beside the rack, a woman knelt with both hands pressed between her knees. Blood rose from her fingers in thin, shaking threads.

A broad man stood between her and the entrance. His shirt had split across one shoulder, exposing swollen veins that shifted under his skin as he drew more blood outward.

He turned toward Alex.

"Stay away."

The blood struck before Alex could answer.

Alex caught it inside a short rune boundary. The impact pushed against his palm, far weaker than Thepes’s attacks had been. He closed the space around the moving blood and drove the man’s arm against the wall with his other hand.

When the man tried to bite him, Alex pressed his forearm below the man’s jaw and held him there.

Outside, Mingyue stopped another red thread from reaching the street. It had come from the kneeling woman.

"Hands down," Alex told her.

"They are down!" she cried.

She opened her knees enough for him to see. Her fingers were dug into her own legs, keeping her hands pointed away from the people behind her.

The next thread cut her trousers and struck the floor.

Alex changed his judgment at once. She was hurting herself to avoid aiming at anyone else.

"Mingyue. Hold her hands apart from the others. Leave her room to breathe."

Ice rose between the woman and the overturned rack. A second layer enclosed the space around her hands without crushing them against her thighs.

The broad man drove a knee toward Alex’s stomach.

Alex turned his hip into it and forced him lower. The movement hurt his own wounded side, but the man could not break his grip.

"Look at me," Alex said. "Stop fighting."

The man stared at the blood soaking through the edge of Alex’s bandage, then tried to reach it.

Alex struck him across the jaw and turned him to pin both wrists behind his back. The man sagged for a moment before trying to turn again.

The man’s eyes followed him, but Alex could not tell whether he couldn’t stop or wouldn’t. He kept both wrists pinned.

Mingyue crossed the room and fixed the man’s ankles and wrists in ice. Alex put a boundary around the blood spilling out of his skin, keeping it from reaching the other people.

Only then did he release the man’s wrists.

"Get them out," he told a woman still behind the rack.

She hesitated, looking at the prisoner.

"He’s my brother."

"Then tell me what happened while they move."

Mingyue lifted the fallen rack enough for the three trapped people to crawl past it. The sister helped the first one up, but stayed close enough to keep watching her brother.

"He couldn’t hold a cup this morning," she said. "When the voice came, he stood. He said he could feel everything again."

Her brother jerked against the ice.

"He tried to help move the rack. Then his arm changed, and he struck Tomas. We thought it was an accident."

"Was it?"

"I don’t know."

Alex looked toward the door. The man bleeding from his nose was sitting against the outside wall while a soldier held cloth to his face.

He was alive, and Alex meant to keep him that way. Whatever his attacker had been like before the call, he couldn’t be allowed to hurt anyone else.

"Go with them," he said to the sister. "You can stay outside."

She swallowed, then followed the last person through the entrance.

The kneeling woman’s breathing had become shallow.

Her blood kept striking Mingyue’s ice from inside. Each failed movement made the veins farther up her arms swell.

Alex crouched where she could see him.

"What’s your name?"

"Mara."

"Can you stop gathering it?"

"I’m trying. When I push it back, it comes out again."

"Don’t push for a moment."

The movement slowed, then struck the ice again without any visible change in her hands.

Alex watched the pulse run from her wrist toward her elbow. It crossed one place smoothly and stumbled at another, where older scar tissue covered the inside of the arm.

His Cognitive Matrix helped him follow the visible pulses. One failed attempt was not enough to tell him how everything connected beneath the scars.

"Vesa," he said through their connection. "Tell Thepes she has two movements crossing in the forearm. The slower one breaks when she tries to pull everything inward."

The answer came in Thepes’s voice, carried by Vesa.

"Is she using the part near the skin to drag the rest?"

Alex asked her.

Mara nodded quickly.

"It’s the only part I can feel clearly."

"That’s what tears it," Thepes said. "Tell her to leave the deeper part alone."

Alex studied the woman’s arm again.

"You can’t see it," he said.

"Then describe what changes. You asked me because mine answered them."

The irritation was familiar, but Thepes kept speaking.

"When you froze the blood outside me, I had to stop dragging the damaged flesh with it. I could still move what was underneath. If she’s pulling both with the same part, she’ll keep opening it."