I wasn’t altogether comfortable with gathering so many of our assets in a place that wasn’t half as well defended as HQ, but in this case, such exposure was an unfortunate necessity. If one of the magic-wielding vampires managed to crack the spell encryption on the com array, they could potentially track the radio signals back to their source. If that source was our factory, then the entire Watchdog organization would wind up in serious jeopardy. We’d have to issue an immediate evacuation order and pray everyone escaped, with the full contents of our armory and labs in tow, before the bulk of Vianu’s forces arrived to dismantle the building, steal all our weapons and research, and slaughter all the people inside.
Given how fast vampires moved, the odds were not in our favor.
So an offsite command center it was.
“Alpha Team, this is Ozark,” said a feminine voice in my ear. “What is your position? Over.”
Ozark was the code name for the command center, and the voice belonged to Geraldine Fisher, the com tech assigned to my team. The fifteen-minute mark was the first designated check-in time for all raid teams, as the bulk of our target locations were a twenty to twenty-five minute walk from the garage on Gladys where we’d set up shop. The furthest location, a house on South Andrew Lane, was about twenty-nine minutes out from Ozark, so we could expect the final countdown to the assault to begin when the clock hit thirty minutes. Everyone needed to be in position by then.
I tapped the access channel button on my headset and spoke into the short microphone that was poking me in the cheek. “This is Alpha leader. My team is on Ixby Road, roughly two blocks southwest of our target location. Estimated time to achieve planned starting formation is seven minutes. Over.”
“Copy that, Alpha leader,” Geraldine replied in her southern trill. “Expect next check-in five minutes from now. Over.”
“Understood. Over and out.” I switched my mic off again.
Pausing at the lip of the grimy alley we’d been shuffling through, I snuck a peek over my shoulder. Behind me, my nine team members, four men and five women, were lined up along the brick wall of an old bakery. It was hard to tell them apart, except by shape and size, because their heads were covered by matching black helmets and their faces obscured by tinted protective goggles. The sole exception to that rule was Indira Sanyal, who always wore bright lipstick no matter the occasion.
I would’ve been worried the hot-pink shade she’d put on today would give us away to the vampire lookouts in the area—if all of us weren’t using a powerful veil charm embedded in the buckles of our utility belts. Our best illusory magic practitioners had spent months developing this particular veil, which allowed everyone using the belts to see each other while hiding our visual presence from everyone else. The coolest thing about the spell was that it somehow worked the same way with sound. We could hear each other talk, but no one else could. (I was still trying to wrap my head around the science behind that feature.)
Like all veils though, these too had limitations. We still physically interacted with our environment, so we had to be careful where we stepped, lest we disturb a puddle or kick up dust or send a loose piece of concrete skittering down the street. With the amount of debris from the zombie attack that littered this area even now, avoiding all the obstacles in our path was no small feat.
Since faerie senses had an edge over the human variety, I always organized my team so a half-fae took every other position. That way, any of the practitioners who weren’t skilled at sensory-enhancing spells had someone whose steps they could follow.
So far, that strategy hadn’t let me down.
I could only hope my luck didn’t give out on me tonight.
With a hand signal, I instructed my team to press forward. As a unit, we crossed Ixby at a diagonal angle and then took a hard right around a vacant, overgrown lot that, according to the faded sign on the wilting chain-link fence, had once been designated for new commercial construction. When I came around the corner of the fence, I spied movement in the alley we’d just left. Odette’s team assuming our previous position.
From fifty feet away, they were nothing but black smudges in the shadows, but Odette stood out from the rest due to the gleam of her prosthetic arm. She always rolled her left uniform sleeve up to expose the forearm, in which she’d embedded what she called “quick triggers” for the large arsenal of spells she’d loaded into the conduit.
If I focused hard on the forearm with my magic sense, I could faintly see an ordered arrangement of small glowing circles, almost like a remote control. To use one of the linked spells, all Odette had to do was either “push” the corresponding button with her finger, or focus on one and mentally speak a universal activation word.
It was a pretty handy setup. No pun intended.
I gave Odette a sharp nod. She caught it and responded in kind.
Nothing amiss. Yet.
I signaled for my team to break away from the fence and head the final half block down Yancey Road, where our starting point, an abandoned bistro, awaited. Nothing of note happened on the way there, save for another check-in, courtesy of Geraldine.
After I found a clear spot on the floor of the main dining area, I jumped the empty sill that had once housed a long window, and motioned for everyone behind me to do the same. They all filed in neatly, one at a time, landing in the same place I had. Then they followed me to a good defense point behind a couple overturned tables I suspected had been used by cowering residents during the zombie invasion. It was the large brown bloodstain on the floor behind the tables that gave me the impression.
Once everyone was huddled around me, I reviewed the general raid strategy with them one final time.
“Any questions?” I asked when finished.
Everybody shook their heads.
“Who’s manning the reverse shield to trap the vampires in the building?”
The correct four people raised their hands.
“Who’s securing the ground floor?”
The correct three people raised their hands.
“And who’s coming down to the basement with me?”
Indira and a wizard named Gunner Landry raised their hands.
“Excellent. So nobody’s going to get lost this time, right?”
All eyes fell on Gunner, who had in fact gotten lost in a building on our team’s first mission. He narrowly escaped getting eaten by a trio of vampires by jumping out a window into a dumpster filled with a toxic cocktail of rancid trash. He’d smelled like a compost heap for two days afterward.
We were never going to let him live that down.
Gunner hung his head, cheeks flushed. “Right, Lieutenant.”
“Good to hear.” I turned from him and addressed the whole group. “Take a minute to review your applicable spells and ensure all your gear is in working order. We move the second the countdown starts.”
“Yes, sir,” they all murmured.
As they got to work, I peeked over the rim of a table and scoured the street for any signs of vampire habitation.
All was quiet in the gloomy neighborhood.
Our informants in this area hadn’t picked up any additional intel since the confirmation report on the Bowler and Sons building came in yesterday evening. That could mean that the vampires were simply lying low and trying to avoid attention in the sparsely inhabited neighborhood. But it could also mean they’d made one of our informants and had taken measures to obscure additional information about their operational status.
We had to assume the worst awaited us inside that building. We always did.
These were vampires, and they didn’t play games.
Switching on my mic again, I adjusted the channel to reach Saoirse directly. “Captain, any sign of the horsemen near our target locations?”
There was a delay before Saoirse replied, “Negative, Vince. Looks like they completely rearranged their patrol routes a few hours ago, in a way that ‘coincidentally’ bypasses all our areas of interest. Your buddies at City
Hall really came through.”
“Wouldn’t call them my buddies. It’s more of an ‘enemy of my enemy’ situation.”
“Well, give your not-buddies my gratitude next time you see them.”
“Will do.” I half turned and gave my teammates a quick scan. No one looked out of sorts as they assessed their gear or practiced spell invocations under their breath, so I returned my attention to the empty road outside the bistro. “With the dullahan out of the way, I assume our new wide perimeter strategy has been successfully implemented?”
“It’s a work in progress,” Saoirse said beneath a sharp screech of static, “but it’s going well so far. We’ve got seven defense sergeants reporting their groups are in position, and the other five claiming their groups will be ready by the next check-in.”
“Any malfunctioning shields or veils?”
“One dud shield charm, but it’s already been swapped out for a spare.”
“Better than I anticipated, considering how fast some of those were put together.”
“You’re telling me.” She let out a dry laugh. “I started getting seriously worried after three different bracelets blew up during testing in the lab this morning and sent a witch to the infirmary. But it looks like R&D managed to streamline the production process after a few hours of tinkering. Those practitioners really do come through for us, Vince. I don’t know what we’d do without them.”
“Die,” I said.
Saoirse sighed over the feed. “Yep. That’s exactly it.”
“And hey, we still might die anyway. This plan could go belly-up before it even gets off the ground.”
“Don’t remind me,” she grumbled. “We really need this to work.”
“If it doesn’t, you can always blame the failure on me. It was my idea after all.”
Since we couldn’t count on the dullahan to defend our perimeters and head off any vampires who escaped our clutches during the raid operation—thanks for that, Colonel Jackass—I’d come up with a stopgap strategy to slow down any runners:
Our precision strike teams, which largely consisted of snipers, had been seeded into key positions just outside the perimeters of each target area. Our emergency defense teams, meanwhile, had taken the place of the horsemen on the perimeters. The defense teams were armed with the best defensive charms Watchdog R&D had to offer. Which could hopefully delay any fleeing vamps until the strike teams were able to rain hell down upon them with their magic-enhanced rifles of doom.
There was, however, one caveat to this plan. The Watchdogs didn’t have enough emergency defense personnel to provide full coverage of the perimeters. Consequently, we’d had to supplement our numbers…by “borrowing” uniformed officers from the regular Kinsale PD.
I’d told Saoirse last night to contact Captain Drew at our old precinct and inform him of our manpower predicament. Right under the nose of the cowardly Commissioner Tinsley—who had of course sucked up to McCullough from day one—Drew had managed to rope in five more captains who were amenable to the idea of pushing back against the creeping vampire incursion.
The captains had spent the morning quietly recruiting volunteers. There had been so many volunteers, to our surprise, that we’d actually turned some of them down. (Much to the relief of R&D, who’d had to produce a large number of defense charms in just a few hours in order to meet the increased demand.)
With the additional personnel, we had everything we needed to win this fight. Theoretically.
But theory and reality were very different beasts. Between the apocalyptic urban environment rife with hazards, the possibility of magic use by some of the fledgling vampires, who’d been under Vianu’s tutelage for months, and the sheer scale of this operation, there were a great many things that could go catastrophically wrong. If any of those things came to fruition, we’d be facing a nasty death toll. And if we lost more people than we freed from the vampires, we could kiss the entire Watchdog organization goodbye. McCullough would rip us to pieces, and we’d have no grounds on which to object.
“Next check-in is thirty seconds out,” Saoirse said, dragging me out of my thoughts. “I need to start my final prep work now.”
“Switching off your channel then. See you on the other side, Captain.”
“You damn well better, Lieutenant.”
My feed went silent for half a minute, until Geraldine checked in right on cue, and I sent her confirmation that we were in our designated starting position. Right after Geraldine cut out, Odette came over the feed. She said her teammates would be ready to take their rooftop breach positions by the time the final countdown started. I told Odette my team was ready on the ground, then radioed back to Geraldine right at the twenty-eight-minute mark and informed her we were prepared to attempt breach formation.
“You have a go, Alpha leader,” Geraldine replied after a consultation with Saoirse, who I briefly heard in the background. “Godspeed.”
I switched off my mic and said to my teammates, “Time to go, guys. You ready?”
A series of solemn nods swept the group, and Indira said, “Born ready, sir.”
I rolled my eyes, capitalizing on our last chance for humor. “Mark your words, Sanyal. Mark your words.”
With that, I gave the signal for the shield group to exit the bistro and move into position around the looming ruin of Bowler and Sons. One after the other, the four brave souls jumped the window frame and hustled across the street. When all of them reached the opposing sidewalk, I gestured for the remaining people in the bistro to visually, and magically, search the neighborhood for vampire activity. While they looked everywhere except Bowler and Sons, I kept a close eye on the exposed shield charm operators.
As the shield group split up to head to their four configuration points, time began to lag. Seconds felt like minutes, minutes like hours, each person appearing to jog in slow motion. My focus kept drifting to their boots. I examined each footfall intently, a spell sitting heavy on my tongue in case one of them made the slightest misstep and gave themselves away. I knew the vampires were lurking in the darkness just inside the office windows. I knew they were searching for us with just as much fervor as we were searching for them.
But, to my immense relief, no one made a mistake. No rocks went flying. No dust rose. No water trembled.
The shield group reached their configuration points unimpeded, and each one confirmed over the com feed that they were ready. Ready to cast the dome-shaped reverse shield that would trap the vampires inside Bowler and Sons while the rest of my team, and Odette’s entire team, engaged them in a very bloody battle royale.
Time snapped back into its normal flow, spurred by a rush of adrenaline through my veins.
I raised my hand again and made a series of gestures that equated to instructions for Indira and Gunner to glue themselves to my side, while the remaining members of the team formed an additional trio. After one last inspection to ensure everyone, including me, was where they were supposed to be, I hit my mic button. Over the team feed, I said, “Shield group, hold steady. Breach groups”—moment of truth, Vince; don’t you dare fuck this up—“proceed to breach formation.”
Breach group two filed out of the bistro ahead of mine and cut a wide arc around a large pile of charred debris in the road to reach the south side of the law office. On the south face sat the main entrance, two sets of glass double doors that had been smashed to pieces years ago, the metal frames rusted over and hanging loosely on their hinges.
As I leaped over the windowsill, Indira and Gunner on my tail, I watched the other breach group take up strategic positions around the black void of the entryway. Two of them plastered themselves against the wall on either side of the doors, and the third situated herself in front of the doors by squatting behind an overturned dumpster.
I glanced between the three of them several times, paranoid that they’d disappear or die after each blink, before the northwest corner of the building blew past me and I lost sight of them altogether. Chest tight wi
th apprehension, I ignored the urge to raise them on the feed and concentrated on the task at hand. I led my group around the rubble of a half-collapsed brick wall and deep into the darkness that obscured the back exit of the building.
My fae senses cut through the shadows easily, as did Indira’s, but I heard Gunner’s stuttering breaths, tiny gasps of fear, as his human eyes began to fail him. He’d laid on a basic sight-enhancing spell before we set out, but he wasn’t particularly skilled at that type of magic. His construction was woefully inefficient, so he’d have to pump more energy into the spell to increase its effectiveness. But he wasn’t allowed to use more than a pinch of energy. Not yet.
Too much magic energy could compromise a veil’s integrity. And we needed to remain invisible to the vampires until we were right on top of them.
I looked at Indira and motioned with my chin toward Gunner a few paces behind her. Understanding, she backtracked and grabbed hold of his arm to guide him the rest of the way to the doors. Gunner basically plastered himself to her, stepping exactly where she stepped to avoid chunks of brick and piles of loose plaster.
I nearly had a heart attack when he followed her lead to duck underneath a piece of rebar jutting from the damaged wall. Because Gunner was six inches taller than Indira, and the top of his helmet almost smacked right into the metal. He missed it by a hair.
Thankfully, there were no further close calls.
Indira and Gunner caught up to me just as I reached the back exit, a set of durable metal doors that appeared to have been recently dented in several places by someone intent on breaking the rusted locks. I knew the doors had been damaged recently because several of the dents were shaped like human hands. Irritated vampires had a tendency to leave handprints on otherwise sturdy materials.
Like the other breach group, Indira, Gunner, and I fanned out on three sides of the door, with me taking the position directly in front. As I mouthed the spell I was planning to use to blast in the doors, Indira removed a magic-enhanced flash bang from her belt, while Gunner selected a smoke grenade whose powdered potion payload had been designed by Tori Melville.
What Dawn Demands Page 13
