sender kills someone and the blood splatters on receiver 𖣠 from chase @sunblxdes
The back of his skull hits the wall with a wet crack, setting off an fireworks show in his vision. Dex's head lolls forward, only for the creature to catch his jaw and shove him back into the brick.
There's a way out of this. A weapon he can use. An angle he can hit. But the hand at his belt comes up empty -- his knives are still hilt-deep in the belly of one of the vamps they'd flushed out earlier. He should have grabbed them, should have grabbed anything, but there’d been no time. Through the haze of adrenaline, or anger, or whatever his misfiring amygdala is currently kicking up in spades, he thinks: Shit.
There are good ways to die. Preferable ones. He's sampled several, though none have stuck yet. But it takes little imagination to place trachea ripped out by frenzied newborn low on that list. All the downsides of death without the primary, considerable upside. It's almost funny, in some shitty, cosmic sense.
The vampire's breath is humid on his throat. Before Dex can move, its body jerks, milky eyes gone wide. And then blood sprays his face, his chest, soaking his suit dark as the fine point of a silver bolt splits through the bridge of the vampire’s nose. It groans, twitching, then slumps forward into the crook of his neck.
Dex kicks the body back and lets it drop.
The bolt’s fletching protrudes from the back of the creature’s skull. A clean shot. He knows without looking whose work it is, but he looks anyway. There: a few paces back. Familiar eyes over a familiar mask. Chase.
Dex leans back against the wall, sloughing the blood off his eyelids with a gloved hand. He’s in no rush to test his footing after his head got used like a bell clapper, and he's not about to ask Chase for a hand. When it comes to the soldier, the scales are already tipped too far out of favor for his comfort.
"Coulda let it happen,” he rasps. He should have. It made no sense, stepping in. Chase could have leveled the field without dirtying his hands. It takes more effort than usual to draw up a grin and make it look easy. “Now’m gonna start thinking you want me around."