Blood Hunt (Blue Blood Babies sequel!)

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

There was a moment of quiet – beneath the piercing alarm, at least – whilst we paused, breathed, and tried to decide if I was right.

I was.

I was ninety-nine percent sure.  But I wasn’t going to believe it until Connor or Maggie, in fact, preferably Connor and Maggie told me they could smell it too.

“Shit!” Connor exclaimed.  I took that for a yes.

Maggie didn’t even bother to scold her brother for his language: another yes.

“Where’s it coming from?” she said, speaking so quietly I had to read her lips to make out her words.

We all looked around us stupidly, as if the source would suddenly spring out and wave at us.  It didn’t.  Like the alarm it hovered invisibly, but there was no ignoring it. 

“We should leave,” I said, my eyes on the same door the two women had left from.

Maggie bit her lip, looking hesitant.

“But we haven’t finished-,” she started.

“We can come back another day,” I told her. 

“But... but what if the alarm brings people?” she said.

Connor rolled his eyes, grabbed his sister’s hand and started for the door.

“Maggie, the alarm’s to tell everybody to get the hell out.  We’re not staying here and cooking alive.  I don’t care how much trouble we get in.”

We made for the exit.  I noticed as we hurried down the corridor that the smell of smoke was getting much stronger.  The air, too, seemed hazy.  And was it my imagination, or was it suddenly a lot warmer?  It got worse at the top of the stairs, and when I looked over the banister I could no longer see the ground floor.

Fire.  The screeching electronic bell was no false alarm.  The building was on fire.  Up here, we were safe just now, but the only way out, it seemed, involved descending into the heart of the blaze.  Presuming there was a blaze... but there was no smoke without it, and looking down, smoke was pretty much all I could see. 

“Maybe we should take the lift?” Connor suggested, staring below at the smoke-filled stairway.

Maggie gaped at him.

“Are you insane?  When there’s a fire, you never ever go in the lift!  Jesus, Connor!”

Connor made a face at her, but he couldn’t deny that she was talking sense.  That didn’t make going down any more appealing, though.

“You want to walk through that?” he asked scathingly.

Maggie raised one disdainful eyebrow at him.

“You want to stay here?  What happened to not wanting to be cooked alive?”

Connor stared at her for a moment, his eyes calculating, then he gazed down into the thick, choking air below.  His lips tightened and I saw him nod once to himself.

“Right,” he said.  “Right.”  Then he held out one hand.  “Maggie.”

She obediently stepped forward and placed her hand in his.  I watched him wrap his fingers so tightly round her tiny fist that Maggie flinched. 

“Alfie.”  Maggie held out her other hand for me and I took it.  It wasn’t even that the smoke was that thick, here on the upper floors at least.  More than that, I needed my grip on her just to give me the courage to make my feet move.