by Martha Woods
“Alright well… let’s get on with it then. Now that we’re all on the same page.”
“We’re always on the same page dear,” He replied, mock bowing before sending his fist through the wall, “I just tend to jump a few sentences ahead sometimes.”
He tore open the rest of the wall and was in the next room before I could even think of a reply, the cut off scream and splattering of blood enough to convince me that there was no longer a problem inside. I had to admit, a few hundred years of life was definitely enough to get you good at defending yourself.
“Come on, let’s get through,” Damon said, marching in after him and firing a few shots through the next wall into the hallway. Vincent looked down and squeezed my hand before he too moved in, leaving me alone with my thoughts for the moment. I never would have considered a few months ago that this is where my life would lead me, but ever since I was small I’d been craving adventure and danger. Funny how things that you want tend to be pains in the ass when you get them huh?
“Well, this is the wonderful mess that is my life, right?”
By the time we walked up the stairs to the next floor I was almost convinced that none of us were so much as going to be scratched, though I should have remembered just where that sort of hubris always led you.
Unlike the doors previous, this one was already cracked open and waiting for us to step through, that should have been the first sign. The second was when Damon looked through and saw that there was no one standing in the hallway waiting for us, pushing the door open to step through when he heard a click that made our hearts stop completely.
“Down!”
He threw himself backwards just as I raised my hands, muscles tensed and gathering all the power that I could into my grip, forcing out a blast of concentrated energy at the doorway just as it detonated and sent shards of concrete spraying out at us. Clenching my teeth and spreading my fingers out with enough force to sprain the joints, the ball of energy expanded into a solid wall, blocking the worst of the shrapnel and pushing towards the fireball, heat rippling through the air while Joseph threw himself backwards down the stairwell. He might not have been killed by it, but being set on fire and blasted through a wall wouldn’t be a pleasant thing to go through, I don’t blame him for leaving the situation entirely.
Feeling the explosion impact with the wall almost knocked me down completely, the twisting and churning flames threatening to spill out at any moment while I tried my hardest to contain them, twisting my hands and manipulating the air around it to push and mold it into as small a shape as I could. But when I felt the first drop of blood hit my lip and saw my vision beginning to swim, that was all I needed to lose my focus for just one second, and that one second was all it took.
“Amy!” Vincent screamed out, tugging me backwards just as the balls erupted fully, taking the rest of the walls with it and almost tearing me to pieces, the flames and shockwave flying over us as we fell back down to the previous floor and landed with a bone rattling thud.
Much preferable to being ripped apart in an explosion, though at least you wouldn’t be feeling that for a few weeks afterwards.
“Fuck…” I groaned, coughing up my lungs from the impact and curling into myself. The hunters that were left had definitely been smarter than the others, or at the very least they’d had enough time to prepare themselves for our arrival, either way, it was our fault for getting so confident in our progress. “Is everyone alright?”
Damon moaned in pain, rising shakily onto his knees and staring down at his arm. “My wrist is broken, elbow too by the feel of it. Lucky that I didn’t lose the whole thing in that shitshow.”
“Quite,” Joseph answered, pulling a sliver of wood out of his leg and tossing it to the side with an irritated cluck of his tongue, “Next time I think we should inspect the door more carefully, I don’t have any desire to repeat that.”
“No arguments here…” Tapping at my back, I could feel the beginnings of bruises both inside and outside my body, but thankfully there wasn’t any sign that my insides were in the process of becoming my outsides. My nose was still bleeding however, and if that kept up I would have to start to worry but as of right now my concerns lay elsewhere.
Namely that Vincent hadn’t answered me and was refusing to look at me.
“Vincent?” I asked, placing my hand on his shoulder, “Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine Amy, just… don’t look at me just yet. I’ll be alright in a minute or two.”
“What are you talking about? Come on just look at m-” Joseph stopped me from turning him around, shaking his head at my disapproval and stepping around to look down at Vincent. The look on his face was reason enough for my heart to start pounding in worry, and his tone of voice when he started speaking wasn’t helping.
“Oh that’s… yes, that’s not exactly pleasant to look at, that’s very clear.” Looking back at me, he raised his hands in his idea of comfort and shook his head. “Don’t worry Amy, he’s telling the truth, he’ll be fine. But right now, I don’t think it will do you any good to look at him.”
“The door handle hit me in the face, very hard actually. I don’t have much of a cheek right now and it’s going to take a moment for it to grow back.” Reaching behind himself and taking my hand after a few seconds of searching, he ran his finger over my knuckles and laughed gently, “Eventually you’ll see me be ugly, but I don’t want that day to be today.”
“What the hell is going on over here?” Damon asked, walking up to us and tossing his shotgun off to the side. Evidently he hadn’t heard any of what we were talking about, too focused on trying to assess his own injuries and keep a watch out for hunters to notice. “Vincent, did you get hi- Jesus Christ!”
“You’re very comforting Damon,” He replied, eye roll very audible, “Thank you very much. Let’s just continue on, this will fix itself.”
“Yeah…” Damon said, pulling out a pistol and racking the slide under his armpit, “If they were looking to piss me off this does a pretty good job of it, let’s go show them why that’s a bad idea.”
That sounded like a good enough plan to me, though I was going to be entering before Vincent did until he was fully healed, even if I wasn’t going to look at him there was no need to force him to keep babysitting me after he’d just saved my life. He may be a vampire, but he’s not a god, he’ll get tired like anyone else would.
“Hey! You didn’t kill us you pricks!” Damon yelled at the top of his lungs, firing a shot at the first hunter that he saw and slamming them back against the wall. The doors to each of the rooms kicked open in response, hunters and their weapons filing out into the hallway and aiming right at us. Joseph was about to run in front of us to take the majority of the shots when I held him back, shoving Damon down to the ground with my free hand and standing in front of us all. I saw the first muzzle flashes as I extended my hands out in front of me, ignoring the blood flowing down my face as I thought back to the primal instinct that had blocked the explosion, feeling and then seeing a wall of pure energy rise in front of us just as the first bullets left their barrels and sailed our way.
I pushed with all my might, flexing my fingers and curling them towards myself as I manipulated the air and the energy, taking it from pure destructiveness to an almost… gentle aura, soft enough to flex but strong enough to keep its shape, capturing each of the rounds that had been aimed for our heads and our hearts, dozens of them, soon hundreds in what felt like no time at all, the pounding in my skull so loud and so piercing that I almost didn’t hear the clicks of their empty chambers and the calls for grenades.
“Oh shit,” I said, throwing my eyes open and looking at the small orbs in their hands clutched in a death grip, “I’ve had enough of grenades.”
Acting fast, I screamed so hard I could feel my throat tearing apart and the muscles in my arms starting to burn with pure fire, shoving with all my might and sending that wall right back towards them, bullets and all. A few of them
saw what was coming and dove back into their rooms, but some had already pulled the pins and readied their arms for throwing. When the wall hit them they were thrown backwards into their rooms, grenades flying from their grips and following them back all the way, their screams and shouts of alarm covered up by the thunderous crashing of hundreds of bullets tearing the walls and ceiling apart.
Dropping to the floor and covering my ears, my chest still rattled with the concussive impact of each of those grenades going off behind the walls, the possibility of whether any of those men who had been in the rooms were still alive not looking very good. I don’t think I could be fully blamed for that, but my hands were hardly clean either way. Besides, there was no time to think about it anyway, not when Joseph and Vincent rushed past and crashed through a wall on either side of the hallway, making their destructive descent on whoever was unlucky enough to be in their way, and judging by the screams coming from Vincent’s side his face hadn’t fully healed up yet.
“Amy, are you alright?” Damon asked, hefting me up with his free hand and making sure I could stand, “We’re almost at the end of this, they’re right above us.”
“I know,” I said, “Tristian and… and Rick.”
“He made his choice Amy, just remember that. You gave him every chance to go the other way, and he chose not to take any of them. Whatever happens here, whatever the outcome, you’re not responsible for any of it.”
“I’ll try and remember that.” I smiled sadly, pushing forward and keeping my eye out for danger. “I’ll probably fail but… I’ll try and remember that.”
“Good,” He said, “Good. Now let’s get this over with, I’m sick of looking at this shitty hotel.”
We walked forward, Joseph and Vincent doing such a good job of dismantling the remaining resistance that they were keeping pace with us even through the walls. The only sign of any form of danger presenting itself to myself and Damon was one bloodied hunter stumbling out with his rifle firing into the floor, a problem quickly solved with a bolt of lightning to his stomach and a slug to his chest, before he was tugged back inside and greeted by Joseph with a swift death. He was efficient, I knew that if he were so inclined he would be capable of taking hours with each one of them, but this whole scene had definitely shown me one thing clearly if nothing else: My greatest ally was just someone who wanted to look out for his fellow vampires, and happened to like fighting just a little too much. He was not, however, a monster, far from it, in fact I would say that compared to many of the humans that I’d met over my life… I’d say he’s probably one of the best people that I know.
“Phew,” He panted, wiping a bloodied hand across his brow and stepping out into the hall, “This is a lot of hard work isn’t it? I’m going to need a drink after all of this.”
“I thought that you’d been doing nothing but drinking tonight?”
“Of course, but this is all swill, nothing but beer and packets of rations. There’s no substance.” He looked over at Damon, winking and staring at the various cuts adorning his body. “Now see, this is someone with flavor, that’s very plain to see. But you’ve given yourself to indulgences, good food, good love, all the things that make life sweeter make blood sweeter. I’m rather jealous of Vincent honestly.”
“I haven’t fed from him,” Vincent answered, stepping out with a mercifully intact face, “I want his permission before I do that.”
“Ok, this is definitely a conversation that can wait for later,” Damon said, shaking his head fondly and replacing the magazine in his pistol, “Tristian is waiting up there… he’s waiting for me. I don’t think we should keep him waiting, do you?”
“No sir, no I do not.” Joseph stepped away from the stairs, gesturing upwards and bowing slightly. “After you.”
Our footsteps echoed off the walls like thunderclaps, the weight of what we were about to do resting squarely on our shoulders and threatening to press us into the ground. This was it, the end of everything that had been a source of conflict for us over the last few months, over the past few years for some, to think that it’s all coming to a head in such an awful situation like this… I wouldn’t cry for anyone involved here, there was no need for it but… I couldn’t deny the complete tragedy of the events, the loss of brotherhood, the loss of our loved ones, the loss of something that we had belonged to for most of our lives. I wouldn’t cry for anyone here, absolutely not. But I would cry over the rest of it all.
It was easy to see that Damon was having one of the hardest times out of all of us, one hand wrapped around the handle on the door and the other hanging limply at his side, both equally unwilling to pull the handle and set in motion the last act of our story. It wasn’t until I stepped forward and placed my hand on his, with Vincent volunteering his own shortly after, that he found the will within himself to continue.
With a creak that I would hear in each of my nightmares for the rest of my life, the door opened up into the top floor penthouse and tapped against the wall, baring all to us and welcoming us into its prison.
“Damon,” Tristian said from on the other side of the room, lounging lazily in a chair with a rifle at his side, “I was wondering when you were going to get here. It took you longer than I thought you would, the rest of them must have been holding you back. Or maybe you’re just getting sloppy.”
“Better sloppy than whatever it is that you became,” Damon replied, stepping forward with his gun at the ready. He wasn’t going to take any chances, not tonight if he saw one movement that he didn’t like he was going to fire. “You really went off the deep end didn’t you partner? All that shit about defending people was just that, wasn’t it? Shit.”
“I take my duties seriously Damon, you know that more than most.” He stood, taking his rifle by the barrel but keeping it at his side, not enough of a threat yet in Damon’s eyes to warrant firing. Tristian was slippery though, that could easily go from being at his side to being at his shoulder in no time at all, but he was having trouble of his own with the shoulder that I had wounded earlier. Against all odds, it seemed like they were relatively equal tonight.
“I always made the hard decisions, I decided when we had to leave someone behind and I decided when someone was worth losing a few guys over, not you.” He stepped closer, letting us really see the bags under his eyes and the fire in his gaze. “While you were content getting chummy with whoever we saved and hopping in the beds of whoever offered, I was staying up at night having to reconcile being the reason some of us didn’t make it back, do you have any idea what that’s like?”
“Yeah, I do. Are you forgetting about all the times that you just left us to track down your own leads? Are you forgetting that the war doesn’t stop just because you decided you didn’t want to fight it at the moment?” Damon chuckled, the sound more bitter on his tongue than anything else he’d tasted lately, “You were a great leader, once upon a time, but you could never see anything that didn’t directly involve you. You were just so… blind to everything else that it felt like I was cleaning up after a little kid sometimes, a little kid with little tantrums, and I never thought that I’d be stepping in here tonight and feeling all of that again.”
“A tantrum? That’s what you would call this?” He paused, looking around the room at the makeshift barricades and the rifle magazines strewn around at various places. He saw all this, before throwing his head back and laughing, I think maybe for the first time that I’d ever seen him do so, “A tantrum, yes, maybe that’s what this is after all. But it doesn’t matter, either way this will be the last one, whichever one of us is still standing after this.”
I couldn’t hold myself any longer, something had felt wrong since the moment that we’d walked in and I’d finally worked out what it was. “Where is Rick? Why isn’t he here with you?”
“I don’t know where he is, him or his little pet cop. They came in with us and then they vanished seemingly without a trace, from all the heat that he brought with him he was more trouble than he wa
s worth in my opinion.” He shrugged, shifting his hold on his rifle to the pistol grip. “Now, as for this situation on our hands… I think it’s only fair that you stand aside and let me and Damon handle this, don’t you?”
“What? Why would I-”
“Amy, please...” Damon looked back at me, his expression already bordering on pleading, a sight that I wasn’t expecting nor was I ready for. “This has honestly been a long time coming, and I… we both owe this to each other, things may not have ended the way we wanted but we were brothers for years, we fought at each other’s sides and we were prepared to die for the other. I can’t just throw that aside and watch Joseph or Vincent tear him apart like it all meant nothing. I need to do this.”
I wanted to fight him on this, we’d been so careful coming up here and he was in no condition to fight on his own, but I couldn’t deny him this one very basic chance, the chance to have his old partner, his old brother go out with a feeling of glory, to prove to each other that the best had won. As much as I thought he was an idiot for doing so, I wasn’t going to be the one to say no, so with my heart heavy and my breath coming in quick bursts, I nodded my head and stepped back.
“Don’t you die like an idiot, you hear me?” I tried to put as much care and love into my tone as I could, but the only result was a mixture of irritation and worry. “I want to be able to lay in bed with you after all of this, to just let the next few weeks pass us by like a memory. Don’t take that away from me.”
“Don’t worry Amy,” He said, stepping away from us and gesturing for us to step behind one of the many pillars standing around the room, “I’ve come too far to die here, I’m not going to give up so easily.”
“Ugh, all you do is talk,” Tristian groaned, pulling the charging handle on his rifle and chambering a round, “Hurry up! Let’s get to it already!”
Damon started circling him, making his way to the nearby cover in case things went south quickly. “You’re sure you want to do this?” He asked, eyes flicking between Tristian and the overturned table covered in discarded kevlar. “It’s not too late to give this all up, we can just walk right out of here...”
