On a Darkling Plain by Unknown Author Page A

find a place to put her groping feet and he had to climb back up and guide them for her. After a few minutes she said, “I wouldn’t have believed it, but this is starting to be fun.”
    He decided that she was right. Long ago, he’d enjoyed climbing, swimming, riding, fencing and the martial arts, but in recent years he’d nearly forgotten the pleasure of pitting himself against a physical challenge. Or the joy of outwitting a band of enemies, leaving them bewildered and humiliated.
    He began to smile, then heard a muffled crash overhead. The would-be ambushers had gotten tired of waiting for the Toreador to emerge from the office and had broken in to find them. Hoping that, with all the windows closed, the enemy wouldn’t realize where he and Rosalita had gone, Elliott said, “If you’re getting the hang of mountaineering, now would be a good time to pick up the pace.”
    “I’ll try,” Rosalita said grimly. She began to move faster. Then one of Nicoll’s office windows opened. A creature stuck its head out.
    The newcomer’s countenance was as hideous and asymmetrical as a visage encountered in a nightmare. Framed by oversized, pointed ears, the face had two eyes, positioned one above the other, on the right side, and one, milky as if sealed with a cataract, on the left. Half its scalp was bald, while the other half sprouted stiff gray spines resembling a porcupine’s quills. Its broad, flat nose had three nostrils, and crooked tusks jutted from its diagonal slash of a mouth. Trails of dark drool streaked its chin.
    When Elliott saw it he realized why he hadn’t detected the enemy sooner. The thing was surely a Nosferatu, a member of the loathsome Camarilla clan whose members were monstrously deformed. Many of the bloodline possessed powers of invisibility so effective that even a Kindred with heightened senses had difficulty penetrating them.
    For one more instant, Elliott dared to hope that the Nosferatu wouldn’t see him or Rosalita in the gloom. Then, its three eyes widening, the freakish Kindred screamed, “They’re down here!” in a high, female voice.
    Several other windows shattered as the hideous vampire’s companions smashed them. Shards of glass showered on
    Rosalita and Elliott, nearly knocking them from their perches, and crashed on the street below. Other Nosferatu, their features altogether different but just as misshapen as those of the first one, leaned out into the night and aimed their guns at the Toreador. The weapons flashed, barked and chattered, and bullets ricocheted whining off the wall.
    Elliott looked down. He and Rosalita were still about forty feet above the street. A fall that far onto hard pavement would kill or at least cripple a mortal, but two preternaturally agile vampires might survive it intact. Certainly it seemed preferable to leap now, of their own volition, rather than wait a moment for the enemy to shoot them off the wall. Clambering out from under Rosalita to keep her from landing on top of him, he yelled, “Jump!” and thrust himself into space.
    Though he knew the fall could only be taking a second, he seemed to plummet for a long time. Then, abruptly, his feet slammed down on the sidewalk midway between an overturned trash barrel and a graffiti-covered newspaper box. He tumbled into a roll to soak up the shock of impact, and emerged from it scraped and bleeding but essentially unharmed. Ragged, grubby mortals, already in the process of fleeing the barrage of gunfire hammering the street, gaped at him in amazement.
    A split second later, Rosalita smashed down on the pavement. Elliott heard a sharp crack, and then she pitched forward on her face.
    “Are you all right?” he asked, crouching over her.
    “My leg’s broken,” she whimpered, breathless with pain. “Something’s hurting in my chest and back, too.”
    Since she’d survived the moment of impact, her injuries couldn’t kill or permanently incapacitate her. She’d recuperate in a matter of