“Sir Guy was a trusting fool, too,” said Nicodemus. “That’s why I loved him. You, however, are a disappointment even as a pawn. I’ll have to find some new toys.”
LaRoque heard the words, but he could not tear himself away from the image. As he watched the trickster opened his mouth and blew out his cheeks in a huge exhalation. But it was not air that he exhaled; instead a burst of living fire erupted from between the lips of the face of the demon in the mirror.
***
Sixty yards above the limousine the Nightbird 319 stealth helicopter hovered without lights in the endless predawn darkness.
“Target acquired.”
A voice on the radio headset said, “You are cleared to fire.”
The pilot squeezed the button and launched a Hellfire missile. It struck the car in less than one second and a massive fireball blasted upward from the hard-packed sand of the Iranian desert.
“Target destroyed,” reported the pilot, his voice bland, detached.
“Return to base,” said Mr. Church.
The helo banked left and flew toward the Kuwaiti border. The ground-based radar looked right through it as it vanished.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Two
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 6:33 a.m.
I struggled to get to my feet.
A minute ago I had thought that the whole world was sliding into the mouth of hell, but now a different kind of hell had come to this place of shadows. There were screams and Upierczi running everywhere. Flares popped in the air, painting everything in bright white light.
I took a step toward Grigor and my foot kicked something. I looked down and saw the code scrambler.
I bent and picked it up.
“Cowboy-on your six!”
It was Khalid’s voice, and I turned to see one of the vampires four feet away. I had no time to run. I didn’t want to run. As he slammed into me I buried the pistol under his chin and blew off the top of his head. We hit the ground and I lay there, Upier blood all over me. In my face, my eyes, my mouth.
I rolled over and threw up.
Grigor was still screaming. Then I heard a sharp yelp of pain and looked up to see the Upier fling Ghost aside. Ghost hit the side of a packing crate and collapsed, spitting blood onto the floor. I saw a couple of teeth, too.
That made me mad. Maybe I needed that to shake off the damage and the pain. I came out of my daze and finally the situation gelled in my mind. The Upierczi were rushing outward from me, some were seeking cover, most were rushing at Echo Team. Bunny and Top were at the foot of the metal stairs. Bunny had a combat shotgun with a drum magazine and he was firing, firing, firing. Everything that came at him died. The heavy buckshot soaked with garlic oil poisoned every Upier that wasn’t instantly killed by his blasts. The ones who took a few pellets staggered away, gagging and twitching with the onset of allergic shock.
Top was watching his back, firing a big Navy Colt automatic, the hollow points doing terrible work in the tightly packed crowd.
On the other side of the chamber, Khalid and Lydia were behind a packing crate, using it as a shooting blind to create a cross fire.
“Frag out!” Lydia yelled and lobbed grenades into the heart of the vampires.
The fragmentation grenades weren’t filled with garlic, but the blasts tore the monsters to pieces.
I saw three Upierczi running along the wall toward them, well out of Lydia’s line of sight. I raised my pistol but before I could fire the monsters went down, one, two, three, their heads burst apart by sniper rounds. John Smith, firing from somewhere I couldn’t see.
My knife was on the floor too, and I grabbed it as well. I shoved knife and scrambler into my pocket and tapped my earbud. “Echo, Echo, this is Cowboy. I have the football and I need a doorway out of here.”
“I have your back,” came the reply, but it wasn’t in my earbud. I whirled, and there she was.
Dressed all in black, splashed with blood, a wickedly curved blade in each hand.
“Violin,” I began, but she shook her head.
“No time.”
She lunged past me as several Upierczi rushed my blind side. Until that moment I didn’t understand what “gifts” the dhampyri had gotten from the cauldron of their birth. Violin was not as physically powerful, but my God, she was fast.
She met the rushing vampires, and even though I am trained to observe and understand combat at any level, I could not follow what happened. Her arms moved so fast, her body spun and danced as she threaded her way through the pack, the silver blades whipped with such frenzy that the monsters seemed to disintegrate around her. It was so fast that their blood hung in the air like mist. It was hypnotic and beautiful in the most awful way that perfect violence can be beautiful; and it was horrible because there was nothing natural about what I was seeing.
Violin was a thing born from rape, torn from a tortured mother by a monster of a father, raised in a culture of rage and humiliation. If it was possible for the concept of vengeance to be embodied in one form, then that’s what I was seeing.
The Upierczi did not understand the nature of their death. I could see that on their faces. They saw a woman-something that to them represented a thing to be taken and used and discarded-and they attacked her with the arrogance of habitual users. They expected her to fall. They expected her to be weak.
Then she spoke to them, a snarled challenge filled with hate. I don’t know what she said, or what language it was, but I caught three words. Grigor. Lilith. And Dhampyr.
The Upierczi recoiled in terror, and then she was among them, and strong as they were they fell before the precise and unstoppable fury of this daughter of Lilith.
She killed and killed and killed.
And yet, with all of that, I knew it wasn’t going to be enough. There were at least a hundred of the Upierczi in the chamber. More of them were seeded through the staff of the refinery. There were a handful of us.
We were going to lose this fight.
In my earbud I heard John Smith say, “Mother of God.”
And then I heard him scream.
I raised my gun, searching the catwalks for Smith. I saw him.
I saw what was left of him fall.
Grigor, bloody, torn, perhaps dying, stood on the catwalk fifty yards away. His mouth was bright with fresh blood.
John Smith struck the hard stone floor in a broken sprawl. His throat was completely torn away.
“ No! ”
I heard that scream of denial fill the air. From Bunny’s throat, from Lydia’s and Khalid’s. From my own.
Before I knew what I was doing I was running with my gun held in both hands, firing, firing. Bullets pinged and whanged off the steel pipes of the catwalk, but Grigor ducked away and fled out through an open doorway.
I raced toward the stairway, but Khalid was closer and he bolted up the metal steps in hot pursuit. Seven Upierczi saw what was happening and they leapt like apes onto the pipes and climbed upward. I emptied my magazine at them. One fell away. By the time I reached the foot of the stairs I had the magazines swapped out and I ran upward. I was still hurt, still bleeding. Maybe inside, too. My chest was a furnace and it felt like it was consuming me, but I didn’t care.
As I reached the top deck, the last of the Upierczi turned and blocked my way.
I put three rounds through his face and kicked his body out of my way.
Behind me there was another massive explosion, and I lingered at the doorway, knowing that the blast signature didn’t match our fragmentation grenades. I was right.
Smoke and fire billowed out of one of the tunnels and Upierczi bodies were flung backward. Then a wave of new figures flooded in. Thirty of them. Women.
Arklight. The Mothers of the Fallen come for justice. Of a kind.
The battle below became a bloodbath.
I turned away and ran after Khalid, the Upierczi, and Grigor.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Three
&
nbsp; Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 6:37 a.m.
The corridor ran straight for a hundred feet and then jagged right, and I could hear shouts and gunfire. A Upier lay dead in the hall, his face shot away. A second limped toward the fight. I put a bullet in the back of his head and leapt over him as he fell. At the corner I skidded to a stop and whipped my gun around.
Four of the Upierczi surrounded Grigor in a defensive circle. They had muscled past Khalid somehow. They were bleeding. Grigor looked bad, but not as bad as I’d hoped. Maybe Ghost hadn’t done as much damage as I thought, or maybe drinking John Smith’s life had given his system a boost. Goddamn it.
Khalid had his gun on them, but he was seated on the floor in a lake of blood. He tried to fire his pistol, but the weapon toppled from his hand. He was alive, but they’d torn him to rags.
“Cap…” he tried to say, but blood dribbled from between his lips. His eyes were unfocused as he slumped against the wall.
I ran past him and emptied the Beretta into the crowd. The Upierczi huddled up to protect Grigor and my bullets tore pieces out of them. One went down, two, and then the slide locked back on my pistol. I don’t remember firing that many shots, but I was badly hurt and my brain was full of broken glass.
I tried to swap out the mags, but Grigor shoved one of the monsters at me. The Upier staggered in surprise, but he corrected his motion and dove at me. I drove the unloaded gun into his throat and heard the cartilage snap. His momentum carried me back, but I turned to shrug him off. I was clumsy with pain and my gun slipped from my bloody fingers.
There were two Upierczi left on their feet, but both were wounded. We all were. Bleeding and panting. They looked at me, at my empty hands, and smiled, showing me the jagged weapons that would tear the life out of me.
I whipped out the rapid-release knife and showed them my fang.
They rushed me.
In my mind was the image of Violin with her two knives, moving like a ballet dancer, elegant and balanced and wickedly fast. It was nice, but that wasn’t something I was capable of. Not at that moment.
When I rushed them it was awkward and dirty; it was rage with no finesse. But my blade was coated with garlic and that gave me my first real advantage. I slashed and chopped at them, cutting tendons, taking their eyes, punching holes in their throats. I used my elbows to knock their teeth out. I kicked their kneecaps off and stamped on their faces when they fell.
Not pretty, but it would do.
Grigor backed away from me. He was missing the pinky and ring finger from his left hand, and there were long gashes on his arms and chest and face. Ghost had tried his best.
He flicked a look over his shoulder. The exit door was fifteen feet behind him. If he made it into the refinery I had no chance to catch him. He had backup there, I didn’t. Even hurt, he could outrun me.
He should have run.
Instead he pointed at me.
“I saw you pick up the code scrambler,” he said. “Thank you for bringing it to me.”
“You want it, asshole,” I said, shifting my weight to run or fight, “come and take it.”
He really should have run. He would have won. Vox was still out there. Vox could give him another trigger device.
But Grigor’s hate was too intense. In that one way, we were alike. In that way, in that moment, hate mattered more to us than anything.
He rushed at me, once more swatting the knife from my hand with shocking speed. He punched me in the face. I tried to duck under it but the blow caught me on the forehead. The shock ruptured something in my neck and broke a bomb inside my skull. The air was filled with red fireworks that burst and did not fade.
I staggered backward, suddenly blind in one eye. Blood poured from my nose and I could feel it in my ears. Grigor came at me again, clamping his mangled hands around my throat. Even with fingers missing he was immensely powerful.
And yet… it was the wrong thing to do.
I dropped my chin as hard as I could, pinning his thumbs against my sternum. It wasn’t enough to stop him-he was way too strong for that-but it was enough to slow him down, to buy me maybe ten seconds more life. My heart was banging around all wrong, so I figured ten seconds was probably all I had left.
I only needed five.
I whipped both arms over his and boxed his ears with full-power blows of cupped palms. The sudden inward pressure burst his eardrums, and he screamed and let go, reflexively grabbing his pounding head. I kicked him in the groin as hard as I could, channeling everything I could muster into the blow. I thought of Lilith and the Mothers and every wretched thing they had endured. I thought of the threats he made against my sister-in-law, Jenny. I thought of all the women the Upierczi had tormented. I took all of that and kicked him with the tip of my steel-toe shoe. Over and over again. Without mercy. Without stopping. The impact shattered the underside of his pelvis, pulping any tissue that was in the way. His shriek went ultrasonic and he froze, eyes goggling in their sockets.
Nice targets.
I used my thumbs on those.
He fell screaming to the floor. I stood swaying over him. He was blind, broken. But as deeply as I looked inside myself I could not find a single splinter of mercy. Inside, a black voice howled from the cold furnace of my soul. The sounds of gunfire and screams echoed down the hall.
I bent close to Grigor and whispered in his ear. “A bunch of women are chopping your master race to pieces. Bet that really fucking stings.”
I straightened.
“This is for the Mothers of the Fallen.”
And I stomped him to death.
Somewhere along the way I went crazy. Broken things inside me shifted and there were bursts of color and walls of darkness. I could hear myself laughing every time a bone shattered under my heel. While I was in that bad, bad place, the damage in my chest and the damage in my head caught up to me. I coughed and spat blood on the wall.
I reeled away from Grigor and went toward the sound of the battle, but I kept hitting the walls.
I heard a woman’s voice. Familiar.
“Grace!” I yelled.
That’s what I thought I said, what I tried to say. But my words came out slurred as I wandered sideways on feet that no longer understood their purpose. I made it as far as the metal stairs, but when I tried to step down I forgot how my feet worked. I fell. Rolling, tumbling, hitting the metal, spilling and sprawling as the cavern swirled around me.
I don’t remember landing.
I thought I heard voices. More knights? No… was it the cold voice of Mr. Church speaking in the meaningless language of the knights?
My dead mother smiled at me from behind the stacked crates, her eyes weeping blood.
Rudy whispered in my ear, “I was so sorry to hear that you died, Joe.”
I said, “No!”
But the darkness said, “Yes.”
I fell forward into its embrace.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Four
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 6:43 a.m.
I heard someone calling from the other side of a wall. The wall was a million miles high and made of darkness.
I thought I heard a woman speaking. She was close, kneeling beside me, whispering in my ear, but her words made no sense.
Then silence.
A moment later…
“Cap’n? Jesus, Cap’n… are you dead?”
I knew that voice. Male, gruff. Filled with emotion. But I had no label to hang on it.
Dead?
“No,” I thought, or perhaps I said it aloud.
Then there were hands on me. Another vampire? I screamed and tried to fight them off.
“Watch!” barked another voice. “Hold his arm. Hold him.”
My wrists were caught. One, two. Held, though I fought against it.
“Hold him!”
“I am holding him, Farmboy!”
“Christ, he’s a mess.”
&n
bsp; I tried opening my eyes, but the world was filled with lights that were too bright to look at. Then someone forced my eyelids open and let the burning sun blast me.
“Look at his eyes!”
“They’re hemorrhaged. Concussion… might be a skull fracture.”
I wondered what that was. I knew that I should know.
More hands on me, under my arms, lifting. Pain was a defining characteristic of the whole universe.
“Watch his head.”
I heard a dog barking. Funny. I used to have a dog when I was a kid, but he died. How could he be barking now?
“He’s coming out of it… watch, watch!”
“Top, hurry the fuck up. They’re coming!”
A rattling sound. Loud pops. Some screams too. I wondered what movie we were watching.
“Warbride… get those cocksuckers!”
Pop! Pop! Pop!
I had the weirdest sensation, like I was floating along on just the toes of my boots. Gliding.
More pops and bangs.
“Go- go! I’ll hold them here. Get him out of here.”
No, I tried to say. I wanted to see the movie. I tried to pull away.
“Don’t let him go!”
“Juice him, damn it. Give it to me. I’ll do it, give it to me.”
There was a pinpoint of cold heat on the side of my neck.
And then nothing again.
This time the nothing was wonderful. If it was death, then I liked it.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 7:49 a.m.
I woke up in a truck that smelled of diesel oil and fertilizer. The first thing I was aware of was pain.
Everything hurt.
Every.
Single.
Thing.
The worst was my head. It felt like the Hindenburg after the fire started. Even my eyebrows hurt.
I opened my eyes but everything was a pale and uniform white. No details at all.
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