Free Die For You by A. Sangrey Black Page A

smears of squashed slop on the bricks, or right back in the untenable position from which they'd just escaped, exposed in the open.
    Jensen immediately shifted into vampire mode, shoving back with his own considerable might. Finally frustrated with a useless push-pull situation, he turned glowing gold eyes on Gage.
    “When I make my move, run !” he hollered, and with a wildcat scream, leapt upward as if his feet were on springs, landing on top of the nearest dumpster with a clang that echoed so loudly through the alley, even the demons paused in their assault. Jensen roared again as he rose to his full six foot two, brandishing his broadsword like an avenging angel.
    Man, that gave Gage the most inappropriate hard-on he’d sported since his hot ninth grade English teacher dressed up as Abe Lincoln to give the Gettysburg Address.
    Wrong, painful erection or no, Gage had to back Jensen’s plan and move. No fucking way he was going to run, of course, and leave Jen behind to fight alone. If they went down in a stupid, ill-advised battle, they were going down together. Gage shoved his lean form through the center of two dumpsters, and started emptying his shotgun uselessly into the hide of the closest demon. An impotent move that accomplished little more than pissing it off and distracting it from joining its partner’s attack on Jen, but it was something. Gage didn’t dare look up to see how Jen was faring; he just had to trust that the vampire was holding his own.
    Mereg poison would kill a human fast, but it had varied effects on other species. No one was quite sure what that meant for a vampire. None that had tangled with a Mereg had ever recorded the experience that he knew of. Learning that vampires actually could catch certain blood-borne diseases and were affected by many poisons really hadn’t gone a long way toward building Gage’s security in his partner’s ultimate safety, considering his penchant for throwing himself in front of the proverbial bus for others.
    Gage didn’t have time to concentrate on that. He was out of rounds in his shotgun, and now he was left emptying his Glock. It was like spitting at the damn Mereg, and Gage’s spit wasn’t nearly as painful as the demon’s. Every time a bullet made a nick in the Mereg’s armor, all he managed to do was get himself splashed with acid. He tried ducking, rolling, and jumping like a frog in a frying pan even as he fired to the end of the clip, but it was no good. The beast shrieked and ran at him, talons extended at the end of a ridiculously long reach, and there was nowhere left for Gage to run. He felt the claws pierce his armored vest and shred the skin above his heart.
    Then he was falling, a numb sensation washing through his torso, respiration like breathing glass, muscles gone molten and weak as he hit the poisoned ground hard. Gage lay there watching as Jensen finished off his own opponent, and with a scream of bestial rage, beheaded the thing that had just gored Gage. All he could do was watch the gruesome scene of his partner’s revenge. Jensen was caught in a blood fury, hacking the bodies of both Meregs into sloppy chunks until there was no way they could regenerate or produce any more poison than what was already pouring out of their corpses onto the slimy tarmac. Gage’s vision grayed in and out. Jen bolted toward him at full vampire speed, hauled him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry away from the poisoned ground, and propped him up against the wall as close to the mouth of the alley as he could get.
    Gage tried to talk, tried to reach out to touch his partner, to say something in the last seconds of his life, but only a choking gurgle came out. His limbs wouldn’t work at all. Fuck, he was dead. He was never going to get the chance to tell his amazing vampire friend how much he fucking loved him, goddamn it.
    “Shut up,” Jen admonished him. “Just stay still. I’m going to drink the poison out.”
    Gage would have fought