The ONSET Agent’s prescience flashed another warning, and he sprang back to his feet and faced the door in time to watch a figure blur out of it. Silver bullets from the remaining team members splashed off body armor much like the Mounties’ own, and there was a sickening thud as the blur reached the two closest Mounties.
Both went down in a heap, and David caught a glimpse of a youngish man in black body armor over an expensive suit. Fangs protruded from the man’s mouth, and for an eternal instant, David was back in another warehouse, in another country.
Then fear flashed to rage, and he and Devereux both opened fire as the vampire sprang toward them. Bullets pinged off the body armor, leaving smears of silver behind as the vampire reached the team leader.
Devereux blocked his first strike with her MP5, but the force of it drove both of her arms back with a sickening crack as her forearms shattered. Fear flashed through David again as the woman crumpled backward with broken arms. Not fear for himself—fear for her.
Before the vampire could strike again, David channeled his fear to draw on the future and fire one carefully aimed burst. Three silver bullets punched into the back of the vampire’s exposed neck, shattering the creature’s spine and sending him plummeting forward to the ground.
David’s heart was beating fast, so fast, yet his breath seemed to come so slowly. He watched Devereux stumble backward, barely holding in a scream as she dropped her gun from her shattered arms, his heart leaping as he began to run toward her. Then his prescience triggered again as he realized he was the last cop still standing—and there was someone else in the alley.
He spun and interposed his MP5 between himself and a descending knife. With a blur, the SMG split in two under the enchanted blade—but it stopped the knife strike. David’s enhanced strength took the strike with ease, and he dodged backward.
Something woke inside him as he dropped the halves of the submachine gun and yanked his pistol out, firing as he drew. A single silver round punched through the other man’s leg before the same flashing silver knife turned the Chief’s gift into so much scrap metal.
The knife came at David again, and this time he went for the wrist holding it. The waking feeling exploded inside him, and he knew where the wrist would be, and his hand struck with lightning swiftness as the attacker seemed to move in slow motion.
He caught the vampire’s wrist and spun. The man, unarmored and dressed only in a gray suit, shifted with David, adjusting to the grip with literally inhuman speed and striking back. David caught the man’s other hand without thinking. For a moment, both of them stressed their arms to the utmost pushing against each other, and then the vampire let go.
The knife went spinning in one direction as the vampire went another and David a third. Both men hit the walls of the alley and were on their feet in moments. Fire burned through David’s muscles, searing away pain, searing away fear.
“Who are you?” the man snarled.
“Agent David White,” David snapped back. “Who the hell are you?”
“I?” the vampire laughed. “I am Marcus Dresden, and I was putting men like you in their graves five centuries before you were born. Mantled or not, you are fucked. Run,” he suggested with a cold smile.
David didn’t. The fire continued to burn through him, and the vampire seemed slow and no stronger than himself. He could win. He knew he could win. The thought terrified him.
“If I have no fucking clue what I can do,” he told the vampire quietly as the flame continued to surge inside him, “how the hell can you?”
Marcus charged, and David’s mageblade flashed out of its sheath like a spark of fire. He knew where the vampire would be and at what moment, and he struck perfectly. Nobody should have blocked it. With the fire burning through him, he knew that even Michael would have been struck.
Marcus blocked. The vampire’s hand struck out impossibly fast and struck David’s wrist with enough force to shatter concrete. Only David’s enhanced strength allowed him to survive the blow intact and still hold on to the knife, but the block distracted Marcus, and David’s snap-kick response caught the vampire by surprise. Even surprised, the ancient vampire dodged out of the way.
David struck with his free hand, a bladed strike driving at the nerve cluster at the old vampire’s right shoulder. With a snarl, the vampire blocked David’s attack and kicked low.
The Agent jumped over the kick, landing just out of reach of the monster, and the two supernaturals paused, facing each other.
“Fuck you,” the vampire spat, and attacked.
No one David had ever fought, not the vampires in the warehouse, not the priest Carderone, not even his practice matches against Michael, had moved that fast. Every strike happened at the speed of thought.
For a moment, David matched it. He rode the Sight and the burning fire within him, and parried every blow, dodged every kick. For an eternal moment, an ancient vampire attacked him with everything it had. And he stopped it.
Then he blocked a moment too slow, and Marcus Dresden slammed his fist into David’s chest. Ribs cracked and the younger man flew backward, crashing into the alley wall with a shock of exhaled air.
Pain flared through him and breathing stabbed his side as the vampire stalked toward him. He barely managed to get to his feet, and he knew in that moment that if the vampire touched him again, he would die.
All of his speed left him, the fire draining away in a spasm of pain and fear, and Marcus Dresden smiled.
“I lived before your country, and will survive past its end,” the vampire told David. “You should have run.”
The strike, when it came, was impossibly fast. No human could have dodged it.
David knew where it would strike and slid sideways. His free hand snaked out and caught Marcus’s wrist. For a moment of shock, Marcus lurched forward, drawn by his own inertia. The vampire hit the alley wall exactly where David had been a moment before, and the mageblade in David’s other hand slashed down in one stroke.
There were two thuds as Marcus’s remains hit the alley’s dirty concrete.
#
Moments after the vampire was down, David was on his knees as the adrenaline left him and he gasped for breath, for oxygen, for the cool air of the river city. He slowly raised himself up despite the pain in his chest and met Devereux’s eyes. They were the eyes of a competent fighter who had seen the supernatural for years.
And those eyes stared at him in awe, shock, and fear. He knew how she felt. He felt it himself. Fear and shock at his own speed. He had no idea what had just happened, but he’d won. His body felt burnt and his chest hurt, yet he knew that he would be fine. What was he? What kind of monster could do that?
“You need to call in,” Devereux told him. “I can’t. We need a medic.”
Pain as well as shock marred her voice and shattered David’s shocked reverie. He hit his radio immediately.
“This is Agent White,” he said softly, expecting his voice to somehow show the fire that had just burned through his flesh, “Epsilon team got hit—hit hard. We need medical help now.” He paused. “Confirmed two vampires down,” he finished finally.
He then grabbed the med kit one of the team had been carrying and pushed past his own pain to perform first aid on the worst of the wounded. Epsilon team was hit bad, and David could not—would not let them die. He threw every ounce of strength he had left into trying to save them. Trying to save all of them.
He’d bound up the worst of the wounds and was trying to immobilize the fractured neck of one of the men the first vampire had taken out when a heavy hand suddenly settled on his shoulder.
“The medics are here,” Michael said gently. “Let them do their jobs.”
David slowly backed away as the white uniformed paramedic took over, setting the poor man’s neck in a professional immobilization collar. Michael’s hand remained on his shoulder, and David was impossibly grateful for its reassuring weight and strength.
“Do you know who that man
was?” Michael asked, gesturing at the decapitated corpse nearby.
“He called himself Marcus Dresden,” David replied. The pain was gone, and only fear burned through him now. Fear of himself. Fear of what he’d just done.
“The Father Dresden himself,” Michael affirmed in a soft tone. “I’ve lost two entire teams to that bastard. He’d disable our best two or three men with darts loaded with aqueous silver and then annihilate the rest. Usually leaving the one or two most senior men alive. He founded the Familias in America, David.”
“What?!” David exclaimed, startled. He knew the vampire had been strong, had been fast—faster and as strong as David himself. He hadn’t known that the vampire had been that strong.
“You just took down a five hundred and eighty-something-year-old vampire who was Infected during the end of the Hundred Years’ War in the fifteenth century,” Michael told him gently. “A man who defeated me twice.”
David looked back at the body of the vampire, then looked around at the wounded from Epsilon squad. Hearing from Michael’s mouth just what the vampire he’d killed had been drove away his guilt at killing the thing, but not the other guilt. Not the guilt of still standing when others were not. Of having failed to find that fire sooner—of having failed to save them.
“Not fast enough,” he said softly.
“We’re downloading the video from Devereux’s and your tactical helmets,” Michael told him softly. “But I doubt it will suggest anything I can’t see from the aftermath. There was nothing you could have done to keep Epsilon any safer than you did, and you stopped one of the most wanted fiends in the world from escaping.
“Well done, Agent White. Well done indeed.”
Chapter 22
David paused outside the hospital door the next morning, uncertain of himself. The hallway of the military hospital at the Canadian Forces Base Montreal gave him no relief from his own mind. The walls were white, and with this entire wing of the hospital cordoned off to hold the casualties from the warehouse raid, there were few people in sight.
Barely twenty hours had passed since the raid had concluded, and everyone involved, including the American team, had been restricted to this base hospital. David hadn’t seen Michael since they’d arrived in these stark hallways and he had joined the rest of the team in collapsing into dreamless sleep.
Nine of the RCMPP officers hadn’t been lucky enough to make it to sleep. They’d either died in the fight or died after arrival. He knew that elsewhere in the building, grim-faced doctors still fought for the lives of some of the strike team’s wounded. Of the sixty Mounties that had assaulted the warehouse, twenty-one Canadian officers had been standing at the end, fewer than half unwounded.
Since then, he’d walked these corridors in silence, staying carefully out of the way of the Canadian Forces doctors and nurses who were attending to the RCMPP officers. None of ONSET Nine’s members were injured, but the Canadians seemed to be intent on keeping everyone involved in the incident under complete lockdown.
He’d checked in on the members of Epsilon team to learn that though some were still critical, most were stable, except for one who the nurse had gently informed him had been dead on arrival—his chest ripped apart by the Familias’s claymores.
David made a point of learning the name of the dead man: Jean Charquest. Somehow, he’d needed to know the name of the man who’d died because he’d failed to warn them fast enough. He had known the door was about to blow. He hadn’t spoken fast enough.
Checking on Epsilon’s team members had been easy, as none of them had been conscious and it had simply been a matter of asking the nurses. A minute ago, however, one of the nurses had found him and told him that Sergeant Devereux was awake.
“I thought you’d want to know,” the young uniformed man had told David before whisking off to deal with another patient.
David had wanted to know, he realized after the nurse had told him. He’d wanted to know about Devereux more than any other member of her team. That thought had surprised him and made him uncomfortable. As surely as he’d saved her life, he knew she’d saved his by stopping the first vampire getting to him. Whatever had followed, at the moment that they’d killed that vampire, he hadn’t been ready to fight it hand to hand.
And now he stood outside the white hospital door with its plastic mounted tray containing manila folders and its tiny, closed window. Part of him wanted to run away, to never see Devereux or any of her men again, to forget entirely.
He knew that was cowardice, however, and faced the door squarely for a long moment, while facing a surprising thought inside his own mind just as squarely: he did not want to leave without seeing her.
David knocked. “Come in” was the immediate response, and with a deep breath, he opened the door and stepped into the hospital room.
The small room was no less stark than the rest of the military base, with sterile white walls surrounding a functional set of basic medical equipment. A full suite of medical monitors and IV leads were attached to the wall on the far side of the bed. The nearer side was occupied by a sink and a counter running along the wall. The entire room was gently lit by the afternoon sunlight streaming in through a window with pale yellow curtains, an unusual spot of color in the sterile military hospital.
“Hello, Agent White,” the room’s occupant greeted him, and David turned his attention to the central feature of the room: a large reclining bed currently raised just enough for Devereux to see around the room.
“Good afternoon, Sergeant Devereux,” he replied. The formality sounded stiff and trite in his ears. They’d fought alongside each other and saved each other’s lives, but he really knew nothing about the woman in the bed.
She smiled up at him from the bed, half covered by a blanket and covered the rest of the way only by a flimsy hospital gown. Her blond hair, now undone from its tight braid, sprawled around her on the covers, framing her face like the sun. Both of her forearms were visible on the bed, encased in beige plaster casts. He suddenly felt guilty, to see her so vulnerable when he was the cause of her injury.
“Please,” she said finally, breaking the silence, “call me Angela. It seems silly to call each other by our ranks when we’re alone.”
David’s heart jumped, and the adult part of him told it to stop acting like a teenager. He had no idea where the spark fueling this idiocy had come from, but this brave woman deserved better than to be gawked at.
“Then you should call me David,” he replied, and was almost surprised at how little of that lurch of his heart showed in his voice.
“Have a seat,” Angela told him, her fingers—and only her fingers—gesturing to a chair by the bed. Wordlessly, David obeyed, pulling it up next to the top of the bed. “You weren’t hurt?”
David shook his head. “No”—he coughed to clear his throat, and then continued—“none of the ONSET people were badly hurt.”
Now that he thought about it, that lack of injury seemed odd. Michael, he knew, had charged a vampire-led breakout attempt that had almost made it out in the face of machine guns before he intervened. He knew Kate had acquired some minor injuries dealing with another vampire, and the rest of the team had been supporting, not in front, but Michael should surely have picked up something.
For that matter, he’d thought he’d cracked a rib or something when Dresden had hit him, but the nurse who’d examined him said all he had was minor bruising.
“You were lucky,” Angela replied, and David winced.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I should have been faster—I knew the door was going to blow.”
“Prescience, right,” the blonde in the bed replied, and shook her head fiercely. “Prescience be fucked,” she continued. “You had what, half a second? A second? Even if you’d managed to say something, we couldn’t have got back from the door in time. And you’re the only reason any of Epsilon survived. I think we got off lightly.”
David paused, unable to respond, and Angela continu
ed.
“We only had one man dead, and that’s because you stood over our wounded and fought harder than I thought any man possibly could, even an Empowered,” she told him, and her eyes flashed in a way that made David uncomfortable. “You saved my men’s lives—my life. I won’t forget that.”
Overwhelmed by the fierceness of her response, David raised a hand to slow her tirade. She truly believed he’d saved them. While a part of his mind continued to scream “my fault, my fault,” the rest of him was familiar with the concept of survivor’s guilt. Angela’s determination that he was not at fault might not have salved everything, but it certainly made it easier.
“Thank you,” he said finally. “It was…hard, being the last one standing.”
“The rest of us lived because you were,” she replied, and her voice was firm. “Conversation done, over.”
“Just like that, huh?” he asked.
“Exactly like that,” Angela replied, and her smile made David’s heart ache. “When are you folks heading out?”
“I’m not sure,” David admitted. He suspected that Michael’s absence was because the werewolf Commander was trying to free his men, but he didn’t know for sure. “Your government seems to be trying to bury us all.”
“The Ministry of the Paranormal doesn’t like to admit that it exists to itself,” Angela told him wryly. “They won’t hold on to you guys too long, but they’re going to spin this mess to the press as hard as possible.”
David nodded, but there really didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, and as he remained silent, he felt a touch on his hand and looked down. Angela had shifted her hand over onto his, and her fingers touched his softly.
“You have any family, David?” she asked.
“Not really,” he admitted. “Two cousins by an aunt who moved away from Charlesville—it was a great scandal when she left, and I don’t know them well. My parents died in a car crash the year after I became a police officer.”
ONSET: To Serve and Protect Page 20
