of goner-for-good couldn't be his end result. Whoever made the call on these things would have to know that, unlike the lesser, he had an out.
Calming his mind, he dematerialized himself from the free fall - one moment gravity had a death grip on him; the next he was nothing but an invisible cloud of molecules that he could will in any direction he wanted.
Next door, the slayer hit the water not with the splash! of someone going off the side of a pool, or the ker-chunk of somebody working a diving board. The fucker was like a missile hitting a target, and the explosion registered in the form of a sonic cracking as gallons of displaced Hudson River shot up into the brisk air.
Tohr, on the other hand, chose to re-form himself on top of the massive concrete support to the right of the impact site. Three... two... one...
Bingo.
A head popped up downstream of the still-bubbling entrance point. No arms moving in an attempt to regain access to oxygen. No legs kicking. No gasping.
But it wasn't dead: You could run them over with your car, beat them until your own fist broke, rip their arms and/or legs off, do whatever the hell you wanted... and they would still be alive.
Fuckers were the ticks of the underworld. And there was no way he wasn't getting wet.
Tohr shrugged off his trench coat, folded it carefully, and left it nestled in the juncture where the upper part of the support met its broad, aquatic base. Getting in the drink with that on his back was a drowning recipe; plus he had to protect his forties and his cell phone.
With a couple of bounding leaps, so he could get enough momentum to put him over open water, he threw himself into dive formation, his arms pointed above his head, his palms together, his body straight as an arrow. Unlike the lesser, his penetration was elegant and smooth, even though he came at the surface of the Hudson from a good twelve- to fifteen-foot drop.
Cold. Really frickin' cold.
After all, it was late April in upstate New York - which was still a good month away from anything remotely balmy.
Exhaling through his mouth as he stroked up from the depths, he fell into a powerful freestyle. When he got to the slayer, he locked a grip onto the jacket and began pulling the undead weight to shore.
Where he would finish this. So he could go look for the next one.
As Tohr went off the side of the bridge, John Matthew's own life flashed before his eyes - sure as if he were the one whose shitkickers had left solid ground in favor of nothing-but-net.
He was on the shore, under the exit ramp, when it happened, in the process of finishing off the slayer he'd been chasing: From out of the corner of his eye, he saw something go into a fall from the great height above the river.
It hadn't made sense at first. Any lesser with half a brain would know that wasn't a good escape route. Except then everything had become too clear. A figure was standing on the lip of the bridge, leather coat billowing around like a shroud.
Tohrment.
Noooooooo, John had shouted while making no sound at all.
"Motherfucker, he's going to jump," Qhuinn spat from behind him.
John lunged forward, for all the good that would do, and then screamed mutely as the closest thing he had to a father jumped.
Later, John would reflect that moments like this had to be what people said of death itself - as you one-plus-oned the series of events that were unfolding, and the math added up to certain destruction, your mind flipped into slide-show mode, showing you clips of life as you had always known it:
John sitting at Tohr and Wellsie's table that first night after he'd been adopted into the vampire world... The expression on Tohr's face as the blood results had announced that John was Darius's son... That nightmarish moment when the Brotherhood had arrived to tell them both that Wellsie was gone...
Then came images from the second act: Lassiter bringing a shriveled shell of Tohr back from wherever he had been... Tohr and John finally losing it together over the murder... Tohr gradually working his strength up... John's own shellan appearing in the red gown that Wellsie had mated Tohr in...
Man, destiny sucked ass. It just had to barge in and piss all over everyone's rose garden.