Silver could kill him. Even he could only take one or two of those bullets, but if he was the man who killed Marcus Dresden, they wouldn’t hit him. If the fire in his stomach could make him fast enough, he could do it.
At that moment, he realized he would be a monster, if that was what it took to save his people. To fulfill his oath. David White grabbed the flame inside him and dragged it out. He fed it his fear, his rage, his desire to serve and need to protect, and let it erupt.
As Stone fell, even his nigh-invulnerable flesh broken and marred by the heavy bullets, his Commander rose from behind cover.
Chapter 42
Bullets flicked across the clear area in front of the hotel David now recognized as a killing zone, speeding over the slumped form of Stone toward him. David had no illusions about his ability to dodge bullets, but prescience made it easy to not be in the same place they would be.
“Pell,” he snapped into his radio, bringing up his channel to the pilot as he began to move toward the hotel entrance. “Level the boathouse,” he ordered.
“But the Commander—” the pilot objected.
“Is dead,” David told him flatly. “Or they’d still be shooting. Level the boathouse.”
He then ignored the channel but heard the distinctive whirr of a Pendragon’s magically quieted rotors as the gunship closed in for an attack run. He had more important things on his mind—like avoiding bullets from over a dozen machine guns.
Prescience and high-tech targeting merged in David’s movements, and he tracked his M4 across the right side of the building. Bursts of bullets lanced out, crashing through stucco to impact against the armored inner wall. Guns fell silent, and David drew closer to the front door of the hotel.
Without even checking, David knew the door would be locked, so he found a new use for the M4. He emptied the magazine into the door around the lock, weakening the lock and the wood of the doors. Then he slammed the barrel of the gun into the ground and used it as a vaulting pole to slam a pair of heavy combat boots with one pissed-off supernatural cop behind them into the center of the door.
The doors didn’t break open—they shattered, spraying wooden and metal shrapnel across the room behind them. Another pair of machine guns had been set up to cover the door, but the high-speed remnants of the door scythed through their gunners, sending both men crumpling against the rear walls in a splatter of blood.
David’s ruined assault rifle hit the floor with a clatter as he landed on his feet, dropping beneath the single burst the gunners had fired before dying. He rolled back up to his feet toward the left half of what had been turned into an armored bunker. His caseless pistol was in his hand, though he didn’t remember drawing it, and he swung it around.
Six guns faced out of the slots along the half he faced, and a gunner and a loader still manned each. Bodies were scattered by the guns where Stone’s bullets and Hellet’s fireballs had dropped them—the survivors grabbed for weapons anyway. Even from here, he knew the weapons were loaded with silver, and a few lucky shots would drop David where he stood.
David challenged that fear and channeled it into the fire that moved him. The cultists seemed to move like molasses to David as he swept the Omicron Silver up and across. If they fired, he would die. He never gave them a chance.
Before any of them had raised a weapon, he emptied the Silver. Heads and chests exploded under the heavy rounds as he cleared the side of the bunker, and then dived forward as the gun crews in the other half of the bunker found their weapons and fired.
He dropped the empty Silver—he had no time to reload—and drew his mageblade. His dive took him into the sprawl of bodies where he’d been shooting, and he grabbed up an MP5 submachine gun whose owner didn’t need it anymore.
More bullets sprayed around him as he rolled over behind the sandbags covering the machine guns in front of the door, hoping the cultists had done something to make the defenses hold up against ONSET’s weapons. The gunfire followed him and he heard bullets thud into the sandbags and clang off the guns themselves in confirmation of his guess.
David took a deep breath, allowed the gunfire a moment to slow, and then leapt over the sandbags, mageblade in one hand and MP5 in the other. Bullets kept slamming into the sandbags below him as he crashed through the air, returning fire as he went.
A bullet caught him as he landed, a different kind of fire burning through his flesh. A scream of pain escaped David’s lips, but he emptied the MP5 along the bunker, dropping the remaining cultists in a hail of silver and flame. They were dead before they realized they’d hit him and he dropped the weapon, clutching the radiating wound in his side.
His prescience gave him a flash of warning, and he ducked under the red blade of what looked like a fire ax. David dove forward and rolled around, coming to his feet in time to block another ax strike with the flat of his mageblade.
The cultist carrying the ax had come through a door from behind and was wrapped in a black robe concealing even his face. The ease with which he carried the heavy ax and the speed with which he reacted suggested he wasn’t human under the robe, and David stabbed forward with the knife.
The robed man barely parried, his defense almost enough to match David’s speed. The mageblade sliced through the metal handle of the ax like a twig. The strike was still deflected, only tearing off a strip of the black robe.
David bounced back a step and watched the robes unravel, revealing the naked form underneath the black wrappings. Dark red skin, just like Ix’s, met David’s gaze, and a pair of small horns on the top of the forehead gave an inhuman impression neatly topped by pure black eyes.
The demon snarled, and jet-black claws shot out from the gloves covering its hands. They slashed at David’s face, and his silver-inflicted wound burned as he defended himself. The strike flashed toward him in a lightning blow he barely caught with the mageblade, but when enchanted steel met unnaturally grown obsidian, the obsidian gave way.
The claws clattered to the ground, separated from the demon’s hand. The demon froze for a moment, and that was enough. As the demon hesitated, David struck again. The mageblade flashed out like dark lightning and drove into the demon’s chest. With a grunt of effort, David tore the knife upward, ripping the creature’s torso open from sternum to shoulder.
The demon’s black gaze met David’s for a moment, and then the creature burst, dissolving into black ichor before his eyes. The ONSET Agent stared at the pool of goo for a moment, breathing deeply.
He let the heat go. The flame receded into the hidden part of him it had come from, leaving only the burning fire radiating from the silver round embedded in his hip, and David looked around him at the bodies he’d strewn across the wreckage of the ex-hotel’s front room. Machine guns and sandbags lay askew everywhere, toppled onto bodies and covered in blood.
It took the former cop a minute to take it all in, and then he promptly threw up. Clearing his mouth grimly, he stepped further into the building.
The object of his search was the wooden door the demon had come through to attack him. It hung half-open, never closed behind its last user. David stepped carefully across the bloodstained carpet and through the door.
Whatever the inside of the building had once looked like, it didn’t look like a hotel now. The interior of the structure had been gutted at some point. The front chunk of the building had been turned into the bunker he’d already fought through, and he could see by glancing back that there were still two floors of rooms behind him, but the rest of the walls and floors had been removed.
Heavy industrial equipment supporting catwalks had replaced them. David recognized a smelter, and a forming press that looked like it was designed for bullets, but much of the equipment eluded him.
He could guess at its purpose from what he could recognize. This was a munitions factory, churning out the hundreds of thousands of silver bullets the Church of the Black Sun had loaded into its heavy machine guns to hurl at officers of the United States Government.
#
As soon as he was sure the building was clear, David checked on Stone. The big man had turned entirely back to flesh at some point after going down, which made it a lot easier for David to find a pulse.
Both of the younger man’s legs were shattered, but he was still breathing and his heart was beating—for now. He looked up to see Walsh and Hellet walking toward him and Pell’s Pendragon sweeping slowly back toward them from the shattered and burning ruins of the boathouse.
Stone was wounded, but McDermott and Lynch were still dead. That left David in command and responsible for reporting in. With a nod to the two women, he hit his radio.
“This is ONSET Thirteen,” he said grimly, taking responsibility for the entire team for the first time. “Target is neutralized. We have three down, two fatalities, one in need of immediate evac.”
He cursed under his breath as Hellet decided to take advantage of his distraction to sneak up on him and cut the silver bullet out. He gasped in pain, but then the radiating fire from the wound vanished.
“Understood,” Major Warner’s voice said over the radio, her tone strained. She wasn’t supposed to be answering coms, David knew, yet somehow, he wasn’t surprised to hear her voice.
“Be advised that our evacuation resources are tied up with teams in worse condition,” the Major continued grimly. “You’ll have to move your wounded and dead with your own helicopter.”
“Understood,” David confirmed softly. “Pell, bring the chopper down,” he ordered.
Pell slowly brought the gunship down next to David, on the killing field in front of the hotel’s shattered front façade. The machine animist made a gesture barely visible in the cockpit, and a hatch popped open, revealing a collapsible stretcher.
“Let’s load him up and leave this disaster for a cleanup crew,” the pilot suggested.
“Hellet, can you stabilize Stone?”
“I can make sure he stops bleeding and stays asleep, yeah,” the Mage replied. “Not much else.”
“All right,” David said calmly, drawing from some inner source of control he didn’t think he had to ignore his fear and rapidly healing wound. “You two load Stone up and see if you can find McDermott’s and Lynch’s bodies,” he ordered, his voice gentle but firm.
“Control, this is Thirteen Deuce,” he linked back into the channel to ONSET HQ. “The Solis Niger building was a munitions factory. They were manufacturing silver bullets here in massive quantities.”
“That makes sense,” the response came after a minute. It was Major Warner again, and ONSET’s second-in-command sounded exhausted. “Every team walked into a meat grinder, White. Every single team. Even teams that got your abort call in time got nailed before they could pull out. These bastards knew we were coming. They knew when, they knew how, and they shouldn’t have known anything.
“Get your people back here, David. We have bigger problems than where the bullets came from.”
“Understood, ma’am,” David confirmed.
#
Vanessa slumped in her chair in mixed horror and relief. Unlike David, she’d been in a position to track the progress of Operation Sun Net across the country, and the brutality of the violence had stunned her.
She was no soldier, no cop, but even she suspected that her warning had saved lives. Without it, so many of these brave people would have walked into a trap they didn’t even know existed and died before they even knew they’d been trapped.
Even with her warning, so many had died. Hundreds were dead, thousands injured. She’d blown her own cover, and was more than half-expecting a knock on her door at any minute, but she thought she’d made a difference. She just wasn’t sure.
Her phone rang. She looked at it, and it rang again. As it rang a third time, her connection to the ONSET network suddenly terminated, the icon telling her that the connection had shut down.
She answered the phone.
“Vanessa.”
“Vanessa, this is Charles,” a gravelly voice brogued at her. “Ye’ve gain a long way and annoyed a lot of people, girl. Not many of those tracking ‘Majestic’ would have expected this, would they?”
“You know,” she said flatly. It wasn’t a question.
“Ai run net security for Omicron,” the brogue replied. “Ye realize, girl, that one phone call, and you’re headed for a cell? The FBI would love to get their paws on ye.”
“Why are you calling me and not them?” she asked. The FBI, the Pentagon, a few of her former employers…a lot of people would like to see the world’s foremost professional black hat hacker behind bars.
“Because we think ye saved a lot of lives, girl,” the gravelly voice responded. “So, we’re prepared to offer an alternative. Are ye prepared to listen?”
Vanessa Loring, also known at the hacker Majestic, blinked in surprise and considered. She did not doubt that they could be calling the FBI right now, even as this Charles kept her occupied on the phone. Somehow, though, she thought their offer of an alternative was honest.
“I am,” she said quietly. She’d see what they had to say.
Besides, it wasn’t as if she had any illusions about her ability to escape Omicron now.
Chapter 43
The flight back to Campus was deathly silent. The four remaining conscious members of ONSET Thirteen said nothing to each other. Pell was focused on getting back as quickly and safely as possible, and Hellet was sitting next to Stone, trying to keep the big gunner alive.
McDermott and Lynch received no such attention. Hellet’s magic had succeeded in dredging the two ONSET agents’ bodies up from the wreckage of the boathouse, but no one could doubt they’d died long before it had been destroyed. David’s momentary glimpse of the massive ugly wounds on his Commander’s body had driven that point home.
Part of him knew that he was now in command of these people and should say something to these people about their fallen friends, but the thought of speaking was ashes in his mouth.
Three times he had unleashed what was inside him, and he knew now why he’d had so many issues doing it intentionally. He was afraid, and only a greater fear had been able to drive past the barriers he’d subconsciously erected around the core of power that dwelled within him.
David was afraid of becoming more. He went over his memories of the Solis Niger building, the horror he’d unleashed in there. One man had walked into a building with dozens of armed enemies who knew he was coming, and killed them all.
It sounded like something out of a Greek myth or a dark superhero comic. He was a killing machine, a weapon able to be turned against any enemy. Magic and blood had made him terrifyingly efficient at it, and it scared him.
That fear had solidified inside him somewhere and locked that power away, that ability to be a walking weapon of war. He’d broken through it three times now, and that meant he knew what it was.
The helicopter drove on through the night, returning the survivors of the team home, and David White faced down his own demon, the monster inside of him he was so afraid of that he’d locked it away.
#
The bodies had barely been unloaded from the helicopter under David’s painstaking supervision before a hand tapped his shoulder and a throat cleared behind him. The night mountain air was brisk and cold, and David felt the cold in his bones as he turned to face whoever was trying to get his attention.
The man standing behind ought to have been freezing in the dark and cold but looked completely unbothered by standing out on a Colorado mountain in an unmarked uniform. David recognized the man as one of Major Warner’s shadows who seemed to be around whenever she left her office. This one was dark-skinned and -haired, and looked almost Arabic to David’s eyes.
“Commander White,” the man greeted David flatly. David winced, realizing that, yes, he was now the commanding officer of ONSET Thirteen.
“What is it?” he asked slowly.
“Major Warner sends her apologies for dragging you away from your team, bu
t she needs to see you in her office immediately,” the suited agent replied.
David turned helplessly to Hellet and the other two, and the matronly Mage met his gaze firmly.
“I’ll get them inside and fed something warm,” she said firmly, taking the other two by the shoulders as if they were her old kindergarten charges. “Go do your part of the job.”
“Thank you,” David told her, surprised by the degree of gratitude that welled up inside him. He turned to Warner’s messenger. “All right, let’s go.”
The agent gestured toward the main administration building. “If you’ll follow me, sir,” he said calmly.
#
Even well into the middle of the night, and with two men now well known to the security on the Campus, both David and Warner’s bodyguard were given a full ID check both on the ground floor and when they reached Warner’s floor.
The bodyguard peeled off at the door to Warner’s office, joining his fellow guard, both back in uniform here on the Campus, standing at the door. David stepped through the unimposing wooden door and onto the familiar blue carpet in Major Warner’s office.
Michael was already in the room, in one of the comfortable stuffed chairs, looking rather the worse for wear. The werewolf gave David a nod as he entered but otherwise remained silent.
“Have a seat, David,” Warner told him, the tiny Mage gesturing to the second of the chairs. David took the proffered chair, wondering what was going on.
“I’m sorry to drag you away from your teams at a time like this,” she told the two men, “especially you, David. Being an Acting Commander is hard enough without what I’m about to do to ONSET’s Nine and Thirteen.”
“What’s that, Traci?” Michael demanded. “One of my people is in critical condition, and I don’t even have a damned chopper right now.”
ONSET: To Serve and Protect Page 34
