by Faith Hunter
The helo was directly overhead, the tail rotor over the alley. Dark blobs dropped out—Derek Lee and his buddies. I wondered if Angel Tit was among them, and knew he must be, the Tequila Boys as well. There were too many men for just the Vodka Boys cadre. I wondered which one was Rick.
If I thought it was weird to have so many men I was interested in all in one place, my inner cat was just happy about it.
“Go. Go. Go,” Eli said over the com, and Bruiser, Wrassler, and I leaped from the limo. Because of his injury, Wrassler’s job was to cover the back entrance and make sure no one got away or came in to help the bad guys. Bruiser and I raced through the alley for the frontal assault, my breathing doing that whole Darth Vader wheeze inside the mask. I pulled on Beast’s speed to keep up with him. We rounded the front together, and sent two women screaming away. I had a glimpse of a sleeping baby in a backpack.
Bruiser took out the front window with a ball-peen hammer. Glass shattered and fell, the sound muffled by the ear protectors. Bruiser raked the glass out with the hammer and leaped through. I followed, glass still falling. He disappeared behind the silver velvet draperies. My first job was to yank the draperies down and let in sunlight. The velvet came down fast, along with the metal track that supported it, flooding the space with light and revealing only an entrance to a hallway that opened both left and right.
Bruiser had disappeared to my right. I entered the hallway to the left, sliding my spine against the wall. I heard nothing except my heavy breathing, smelled nothing except the filtered air, and saw even less, thanks to the mask. On the upper floor, the guys were clearing rooms: I could hear it through the communication gear. On the roof, Eli was supposed to be doing his magic and reversing the powerful AC fan to air out the gas from the building so the guys could pull off the masks and pull on low-light-vision gear, but it would take time, and every second would just be pissing off the vamps. Fortunately, I didn’t need low-light gear. I had Beast.
She rose in me like a wraith, and my vision sharpened, turning the world silvery bright. My heart pounded steadily in my ears. I moved down the hallway. There were no doors except at the ends, which was odd. I was hearing nothing. Except the radio chatter of the men. No one was on the third floor. No one at all. Again—odd.
I stepped through the doorway at the end of the hall into an open room. It looked like a reception room, and a woman was facedown at a desk. I raced over and checked her pulse. Steady, if a little slow. I secured her hands behind her back with two zip strips and moved around the desk to a door in the back. Carefully, I opened it. The room beyond was pitch-black except for tiny red and green lights, like on computers when they’re asleep, or on battery backups. But I couldn’t use my nose to smell vamp, which I hated. I was head-blind.
I pulled a flashbang and tossed it inside. Turned my head away and closed my eyes. It exploded, the flash white through my closed lids. I raced in and stopped, listening, hearing nothing. I had to get out of this headgear. As soon as I could breathe.
From nowhere, I took a blow to my chest that threw me across the room. I rolled to my feet and pulled two blades. I couldn’t fire a gun—there might be sleeping humans in the room. I felt, more than saw, movement and struck out with the blades, cutting in a figure-eight pattern. I hit nothing. And I took another blow. This one to my head. It knocked my mask askew. I took an involuntary half breath and smelled sleep-bomb and vamp. The scents were vaguely like boiled eggs and vamp-spice tea, an unpleasant combo to my Beast-enhanced nose, though the humans the vamp hunted probably liked her spicy scent. Holding my breath, I pulled the mask back in place. I yanked loose a CS canister, set it on the floor, and activated the nozzle. Hit the halogen light on my vest.
The room lit up like stadium lights and revealed a vamp right in front of me. She gripped my right arm and snapped down, around, and would have pulled me off my feet, except I knew that move and I followed her, dropping with her. I grabbed her ankle, threw it into the air. Dove under her legs. CS mist coated my mask, further depleting my view of the world. I wiped at it, smearing it worse. The halogen light bounced around the room, revealing and hiding, illuminating and throwing bizarre shadows dancing drunkenly on the walls. It was disorienting and Beast hurled more speed and her spatial awareness into my bloodstream.
The light hit the vamp in the face. She was vamped out, two-inch-long fangs and pupils like black saucers. Her face was bleeding. Her eyes were bleeding and watering. She took a breath and started coughing, the action so unexpected to her that she fell to her knees. She looked up at me, her face shocked. I wondered how many centuries since she’d had to cough. The CS was working in ways I hadn’t expected. The vamp rolled to her back, breathing and coughing, clutching her throat. I pulled one of the special stakes and stabbed downward with both hands. The stake was way longer than my usual ones, at thirty inches. I rammed it into her belly. Blood sprayed up, but not the fountain I sometimes saw. I had missed her descending aorta. Caught on her belt buckle. I put my back into it.
The stake had a silver cap on the sharp end with a steel tip that I drove into the floor, pinning her down, poisoning her blood on the way through, in addition to the silver spraying into the air. She wasn’t true-dead, and she might even survive, but she was in a lot of pain. She wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon.
Over the com gear, I learned that one of the rooftop teams was entering the second story. They had already secured three humans, all of whom were starting to wake up. I also heard heavy, steady breathing and the sound of blades clashing.
Clicking off the halogen light, I moved on through the room and out another door, into a larger room, maybe half the total square footage of the bottom story. The open area was dim, lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Bruiser was already in the room. Part of the panting I heard over my com channel was him. He was fighting two very old, and very strong, vamps, one armed with a long sword and one bare-handed, claws extended.
I could barely follow the moves, the swoosh of afterimage giving it all a filmlike speed. Bruiser was fighting with a midsized blade in each hand and it was almost beautiful, poetry in motion. I had given him the blades two months ago, after I took them from the body of a vamp I’d killed. Bruiser had been mesmerized by them, calling them something Asian, in a language I didn’t recognize. He had obviously been practicing, and even more obvious—he was no novice. With the vamp-blood in his system, he was a master work of art. He flew through the moves, the blades an extension of his will and his mind. The vamps were bleeding. And Bruiser had removed his mask. I yanked mine off and it fell to the end of the flex strap to dangle behind me out of the way. I took an exploratory breath and smelled the egg-stink, but felt fine.
On the other side of Bruiser, a door opened and three more vamps entered. They were far closer to Bruiser and his fight than I was. Bruiser was good, but not one-on-five good. I ran right at them, screaming in challenge, a big-cat scream of rage. I pulled and tossed a flashbang and a CS canister at them. Shouted, “Flash!” hoping Bruiser would understand. I leaped right at the closest vamp, sliding my hand around the stock of the M4 in midair. Tucked my feet out of the way, and fired, closing my eyes.
The flashbang and CS went off. I opened my eyes just in time to land. I kicked laterally into a vamp’s knee joint. Heard the crunch over the ear protectors. He was falling down and away, coughing, his blood spouting from neck and chest, bubbling from the silver shotgun wounds. He was one of the vamps with acidic blood. It burned where it splattered on my exposed knuckles. I staked him in the belly, low down. Flipped him over and secured his hands with three zip strips, knowing they weren’t made for a vamp’s strength, but hoping the injuries and the silver he was breathing would weaken him enough to hold him for a while. He was coughing like he had a bad case of pneumonia or had just been pulled from the water, drowning. So were the other two vamps who had come in with him, both on the floor coughing and bleeding from the eyes, the silver mist in the air burning their skin. They looked like
they both had really, really bad sunburns. Just to make sure they stayed down, I staked them both in the lower bellies and secured them with zip strips. I’d have to get some silvered strips. Yeah. Why hadn’t I thought about that before now?
I clicked off the light and turned to see Bruiser finish off the two he’d been fighting. He stabbed, twisted, and slid the blade out of one. That vamp fell to his knees. Bruiser cut across a biceps of the last one, hitting bone, and caught the long sword the vamp dropped. Using the new blade, he took the vamp’s head, whirled, and took the head of the other one.
“There can be only one,” I murmured, and started laughing. Bruiser turned to me so fast I felt the air blow past my face. He swung the long sword back to attack. Beast slammed into me and I leaped away, across the room, landed, and pulled both Walthers. “Bruiser? It’s Jane.”
The room went still. Bruiser’s face was emotionless, a mask. No recognition, no warmth. He hesitated for a space of three heartbeats. He advanced on me, stepping fastfastfast.
“Don’t make me shoot you,” I said, backing away.
One of the vamps I had staked and secured kicked out at me, drawing Bruiser’s attention. That was all I needed. I dove at him, swinging, knocking his head with the butt of the gun in my right hand. Not a nice way to treat a handgun, not to mention a head. They hit together with a satisfying thud and Bruiser dropped, catching himself with his open sword hand, holding the long sword with only a finger and thumb. When he looked up, he shook his head. “Jane?”
“Yeah. We’ll talk about this later. Six vamps down. Weapons fire from upstairs.” I pointed across the room. “We need to check that.” That was the old bank vault and the specially built safe room to its side.
We moved slowly across the open space to the room. It was built from cinder block reinforced with rebar and concrete. It had its own roof, flat and smelling of tar paper, about three feet from the warehouse ceiling. My eyes had acclimated to the dimness of the windowless place, but the inside of the room was blacker than pitch. I pulled the halogen light from my belt and shined it into the room.
The room was twelve feet square, with a six-foot-across circle in the middle made of salt. There was no pentagram, no runes, no magical elements to guide a witch in a working. But there was a body. A recently dead body. She was hanging from the rafters by a rope, her big toes barely touching the floor. She was naked. With a stake in her heart. Her fangs were small, marking her as, maybe, a hundred years old.
“Sacrifice,” Bruiser said.
“Yeah. And her blood smells funny.”
“One of the sick ones.”
“I’d say so,” I said, turning for the old bank vault. I shined my light inside. The metal shelves were bare. Whatever had been planned for this room either hadn’t been finished or had been carted out already.
“Report,” Eli said into my earpieces.
The fighters upstairs started reporting in. “One old vamp DB. Two humans contained. No injuries. Did not sight de Allyon.” In the shorthand Derek used for ops, DB meant dead body, contained meant uninjured and restrained. No injuries referred to the men under Derek’s command. Not de Allyon meant the vamp wasn’t the one we were after.
“Danced with three humans, now contained. They were waking up and we had to hurt ’em some. No injuries. Did not sight de Allyon.” It sounded like Tequila Blue Voodoo, proving that Derek had brought a mixed party of his men.
“One young fanghead DB, two humans contained. We’re beat all to hell and back, but don’t need anything except beer,” Angel Tit said. “Did not sight de Allyon.”
“One vamp, age indeterminate, DB, two injuries. Medic needed for John. Not life-threatening. I need a couple of stitches,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Did not sight de Allyon.” I thought it was El Diablo, who I had last seen feeding a vamp on the field of battle.
Eli said, “One old sucker DB. I’ll be joining you for those stitches and that beer.” The men chuckled. “Cheek Sneak and I did not sight de Allyon.”
“No vamps encountered,” Rick said. “Three humans contained, no injuries, did not sight de Allyon.
Bruiser said, “Two old vamps DB.” The mics went silent for that one. Bruiser had taken down two very old vampires. Single-handedly. “Did not sight de Allyon,” he said. “But we did find one younger vamp, DB, on ice, true-dead.” He looked at me and grinned, teasing. “Legs? That leaves you.”
I frowned at him. Into my mic I said, “One human contained. Four old vamps contained.” The radio traffic went silent. “No injuries. Did not sight de Allyon,” I added, that important piece of info just hitting me.
“She buggered the rest of you and left us some vamps to chat with,” Bruiser said. “Janie wins the pool.”
There was a pool?
“This I gotta see,” one of the guys said.
“Not until we go over this place with a fine-tooth comb. Lock it down,” Eli said. “We want de Allyon.”
Bruiser and I quartered off the lower floor and went through it again. There weren’t many rooms, only one unisex toilet, and no closets or hiding places. It was fast work. “First floor clear,” I said into the mic. We started up to the second floor. Five steps in, I heard something and looked back. “Correction. Two coming this way.”
That was when we were hit with the second wave. Vamps came rushing out of the new, empty safe room and up the stairs with reptilian speed and grace, vamped out, screaming. Hungry. I could smell their hunger and their sickness. These were infected, and I had no idea where they had come from. The dang vault and cinder-block room had been empty.
I fired the shotgun, hitting the first one midcenter. Beside me, Bruiser stepped down two steps and took the head of the second one, the long sword in one hand, one of the lovely midsized swords in the other. Blood fountained up from her stump. I fired at the third vamp, knocking him back. Bruiser took the head of the two I had hit while I finished up the rounds in the M4. When all seven rounds were gone, I pulled the Walthers and started in with head shots, slowing them down, Bruiser to my side, finishing them off. Soldiers poured down the steps to back us up, and we took the fight down to the first floor, spreading out. And still the vamps came.
There was no grace, no finesse. It was just battle. Just blood and the stink of gunfire. I saw two of ours go down in the melee, and vamps fell on them to drink. Eli and Derek waded into them, stakes and blades flashing. I took a set of talons across one arm, a fist to the gut, and a roundhouse kick to the kidneys. It was three on one and I went down. Rule number one when fighting vamps. Stay on your feet.
I was still falling when the first vamp fell on me. Oofed out a breath it didn’t need and went flying, a boot in the air in front of my face. A short sword followed, taking off another vamp’s forearm with one swipe. Rick reached down and pulled me up, his fingers like steel bands on my unhurt arm. He swung me around and supported me with an arm around my waist until I was steady. Until I had drawn two vamp-killers. “Payback isn’t always a bitch,” he said.
I laughed. I’d saved his life a couple of times. Now he’d saved mine.
It went on and on. And when it was over, Bruiser and Rick were standing back to back, heaving breaths. Derek and I were against a wall, two downed soldiers at our feet, where we were protecting them. Three other of the men he had brought were still standing, but all were wounded. Two were dead. Derek hit 911 and called for medic.
Around us were fourteen vamps. Only fourteen? It seemed like hundreds. But none of them were de Allyon. Lucas de Allyon had not been in his base camp.
All the blood and fighting and death had been for nothing. Wasted. My eyes filled with tears that I blinked away. I wiped my face. Vamp blood was burning me. “Crap. Crap, crap, crap,” I whispered.
Near me, a man moaned. I opened my cell and called Leo. Fortunately, he was already on his way. He’d be here quickly and would heal the injured humans. I closed the cell and looked up to see six humans emerge from a wall. Not a doorway, but a wall, a hidden opening to a
hidden room. It hadn’t been on the plans submitted to the planning commission. Vamps who broke the law. Imagine that. I almost started laughing until I got a whiff of the blood-servants. They all smelled of the vamp sickness.
Derek covered them and made them sit down with their hands on their heads. I thought about the sick and bleeding Asheville vamps. Here was a treatment that might save them until we figured out how Sabina had healed that guy . . . the vamp . . . the dumb pretty one whose name was totally gone from my exhausted brain. Callan! Yeah. Callan. I texted Leo. “Humans here have antibody to illness. Send to Asheville?”
Instantly he texted back “On the next plane.”
Gotta love modern forms of communication. Then I texted to Adelaide “Got treatment. Will send ASAP.” I closed my phone. And slid down a wall to sit on the floor.
Eli wandered over, his combat face still in place, looking hard and remote. He stood next to me, staring out over the battlefield, and when he spoke, his lips didn’t move, a sotto voce not even vamps could have overheard. “The marine called Cheek Sneak. I caught him taking pics and texting. I took his phone. You want I should give it to Alex?”
“Yeah,” I said, and closed my eyes. Had we finally found our other tattletale? “If you prove he’s been talking to the enemy, tell me first. Not Derek.”
Eli breathed a low laugh through his nose. “Copy that.” He meandered away.
“You’re hurt.”
I opened my eyes and looked at Rick. “So are you,” I said. He was burned and limping, and blood crusted his knuckles as if he’d hit a wall. Or maybe beat in a vamp’s face. Either one sounded like him.
