On a Darkling Plain by Unknown Author Page B

minutes or hours. But for the moment she wouldn’t be able to run fast enough to get away. Stifling a curse, moving with superhuman speed, he tore the Fouquet off his belt. The canvas bundle w j as now shapeless

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    rather than rectangular, since the fall had smashed the frame. For once thankful that art and beauty no longer captivated him as they once had, he chucked the package into the street.
    “No!” Rosalita croaked. “The frame broke, but the picture may still be all right!”
    “I can’t carry it and you both,” Elliott replied. He picked her up, draped her over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and ran. Bullets pounded the sidewalk like hail.
    Zigzagging, he made it across the street and around the corner without getting shot. Now the gunmen in Nicoll’s office could no longer see him, but he didn’t dare slow down, He was certain that they had comrades stationed on the ground.
    He sprinted on toward his rented LeSabre. He and Rosalita had left it three blocks away, in the nearest legal parking space; they hadn’t wanted to return to it only to find it that it had been towed away, or immobilized with a boot. It had seemed like an intelligent decision at the time, but now it could cost them their lives.
    Elliott began to feel the strain of sprinting at superhuman speed while carrying a hundred-pound woman. He wasn’t growing tired or winded in the way a mortal would, but the exertion was burning the vitae in his system like flame consuming gasoline.
    Something whispered through the air above his head.
    He frantically peered upward. For a moment he couldn’t see anything, but then he glimpsed the three-eyed Kindred who’d spotted him and Rosalita when they were clinging to the wall. Naked, her white, chancrous breasts and crooked legs as ugly as the rest of her, the Nosferatu was riding the night wind on winglike flaps of skin extending from her wrists to her knees. Evidently, when the Toreador had run out of gunshot range, she’d swooped from NicolFs office in pursuit.
    Unlike the shapeshifters of the Gangrel clan, who could assume the forms of huge bats, the Nosferatu was gliding precariously, not flying. She couldn’t have aimed a gun and remained aloft. But she could, and did, drop the small, round object in her right hand.
    Elliott dove to one side. He lost his grip on Rosalita and she tumbled off his shoulders. The grenade exploded as soon as it hit the street, peppering the Toreador elder with shrapnel. The boom spiked pain through his hypersensitive ears.
    Staggering to his feet, grateful that the blast hadn’t crippled him, Elliott snatched out his Beretta and aimed it at his attacker. The Nosferatu snarled and hurtled down at him.
    Elliott squeezed off three shots. Two hit the Nosferatu in the chest and one in the cheek, but the hideous undead kept coming. He spun out of her way.
    Or at least he tried. Perhaps his wounds were slowing him down, or perhaps she possessed a touch of the supernatural quickness that only those of Toreador or Brujah blood ordinarily possessed. In any case, her gnarled, taloned hand shot out and grabbed his forearm, and her momentum jerked him off balance.
    The two combatants tumbled to the ground and rolled over and over, grappling. The Nosferatu’s fetid body odor, the same stink Elliott had smelled in the office building, filled his nostrils as she clawed and bit at him. He could feel that she was far stronger than he was, strong enough to tear him apart. Butting and gouging, using every infighting trick he knew, he barely managed to fend her off until he could point the Beretta at her midsection and fire two more shots.
    The Nosferatu convulsed. Blood, black in the moonlight, gushed from her misshapen mouth. Elliott scrambled out from underneath her and pointed the automatic at her head.
    “Who’s attacking my people?” he demanded. “What’s it all about? Talk, or I’ll kill you.”
    The Nosferatu’s arm flopped like a fish lying in the bottom of a