The Black God - Page 58/187

She smiled and tucked the phone into her backpack. Brandon's ability to sense minds was getting stronger and stronger. A year before, he hadn't been able to sense who was in the adjacent apartment let alone across town.

She assessed her way up the side of the building. Tonight was a night of pure athletic ability, no questions asked. Rested after her four days off, energized after a good dinner, she was ready to test her luck against five vamps.

With a deep breath, she used speed and strength to scale the side of the wall, vaulting from the nearby dumpster to reach the lowest window, then twisting, pulling, leaping and contorting to reach the sturdier boards on the neighboring window. Ashley played the deadly game, maneuvering in midair, scaling the building with the agility and fearlessness of a spider on the ceiling.

When she reached the window that wasn't boarded up, she paused in her movement to rest briefly, uncertain what awaited her. She launched upwards with her legs and pulled with her arms, landing lightly on her toes on the windowsill.

The window slid open. The room beyond was dark, and she drew a baton before dropping silently to the floor. Her instincts took over. A chair here, a box there …she moved with disciplined quiet through the storage room to the door located on the opposite side of the window. Placing her ear against it, she listened for the sound of the predators she expected to find without hearing anyone.

Buildings were harder to navigate quickly than the open bay of a warehouse. With her senses engaged, she explored the floor she was on before determining there was no one on it. She moved to the upper floors and explored each before finally shifting to the floor beneath the first.

Movement was on this floor. The vamps were divided, two on this floor and possibly three on the floor below. Disappointed she wouldn't get to test herself against all five at once, Ashley crept up on the two vamps nearest her.

One didn't have time to react. She cracked the baton onto the back of his head. He dropped silently. The second whirled but was soon unconscious as well. She knelt to search them and collected their two phones, tucking them into a pocket at the small of her back.

Exhilarated by her quick wins, she went to the floor below. One vamp was present, and she knocked him out and stole his phone, too, before confronting the other two on the ground floor.

When she was done, Ashley returned to the window she'd used to enter the building and worked her way down the wall fast. She dropped beside her backpack and stripped off the mask before depositing the three cells she'd collected into it.