“Move!” he snapped at Kate, but she was already in motion. The door was open and she dove out, weaving an invisible shield that deflected the second and third shots.
They took cover behind the taxi for a moment, feeling the heavy metal chassis move as more bullets slammed into it.
The now-dead driver had driven them into the middle of a warehouse, pitch-black in the late Vegas evening and a lack of lights.
“At least one sniper; won’t be just one,” he said quickly.
“Full court?” Kate asked and David hesitated. They were allowed to use the full suite of their supernatural abilities in self-defense, but it was discouraged unless necessary.
Then he felt magic flare in the dark and it was not Kate.
“Move!” He grabbed her and ran, dragging the Mage with him as more bullets smashed into the ground around them—and a bright blue fireball incinerated the taxi and where they’d been hiding.
“Right,” Kate gasped as he dropped her next to a wall. “Mage. Guessing vampires. Full court.”
“Cover me,” David told her as he pulled out his phone and hit a very specific four-digit sequence without unlocking it. Dropping it to the ground, he stretched into the future…and then dropped to the ground as a heavy silver bullet ripped through three full crates of potato chips to cut through where his head had been.
“Help is on the way,” he said softly. “We just have to stay alive!”
“I CAN’T STOP silver bullets for very long,” Kate warned him. “And I bet you anything you care to name they’re already moving more shooters around.”
“Agreed.”
There was no telling how long it would take the closest ONSET team to respond to his emergency signal. Assuming they were at the Nevada base and not tied up in another call, it could be as little as twenty minutes…but if the team was at one of the other state bases or was already in action, it could be a lot longer.
Another heavy bullet slammed into the crates they were hiding behind, losing enough of its velocity that Kate’s shield stopped it cold, silver or not.
“They’re trying to keep us pinned down,” David noted. “Let’s…see about that.”
The Omicron Silver held twelve rounds, but as a caseless automatic, it was capable of firing a three-round burst—a mode most of its users couldn’t use. David, on the other hand, was far stronger than most of the Silver’s users and had the bulk to use that strength to absorb the recoil.
When the next shot echoed through the warehouse, he spun out from behind the crates in a perfect two-handed shooting stance and opened fire. Two three-round bursts slammed into the catwalk the sniper was firing from, and someone shouted in pain as a rifle fell and clattered to the ground.
The response was roughly as David expected: four shooters that had been trying to sneak up on them returned fire, assault-rifle fire echoing in the open space—and allowing Kate Mason to localize them. A blue inferno tore across the floor of the warehouse, and the assault rifles were silent.
Rejoining Kate behind their somewhat worthless cover, David met her gaze silently as he switched the Silver back to single-fire. He wasn’t carrying any spare clips. The six rounds left in his gun were all he had and he wasn’t carrying a blade of any kind.
“We need to get out of here,” he told her.
“Taxi came in that way,” she pointed. “I’m not betting on us being able to make it, though. Probably closed.”
“That won’t stop me,” David replied. “But bullets might.”
“I know. We have to do something.”
He nodded.
“Cover me?”
“Always.”
Fire flared from her hands, a ball of white light rising up to light up the whole room. She couldn’t duplicate the power of the sun that would endanger the vampires, but she could certainly light up the room so no one could hide.
Hoping they were blinded by the flash, David set off for the door. No mortal human could match his speed…but vampires weren’t mortal humans.
Four of them emerged from the darkness with blurring speed, intercepting him in the middle of the warehouse floor. Two of them charged him with long knives while two others opened fire with submachine guns—and others began to pepper Kate’s cover with assault-rifle fire to keep her from taking out the ones charging David.
He shot the first vampire to come at him with a knife, the heavy fifty-caliber silver slug ripping out most of the creature’s chest and sending it flying back. The second managed to close to knife distance, forcing him into a delicate high-speed dance of bullets and blades as his friends opened fire into the melee and David tried to take him down.
In a knife fight, even his prescience cut down to fractions of a second, enough to live but not enough to necessarily win—but unfortunately for the vampire, David had been trained by the inhuman Sages ONSET used as combat instructors.
It cost him three of his remaining five bullets, but the vampire went down—and the last two bullets shattered the skulls of the vampires shooting at him.
Several of the rifle-armed shooters on the roof were down, Kate flinging efficiently deadly bolts of fire at her attackers, and David left her to it—she certainly didn’t need his protection. Dropping his pistol, he charged for the door again…only to find his path cut off by a wall of blue fire.
“No, Commander, you don’t get to run today,” a calm male voice said behind him.
His prescience spiked and he dodged to the side as a bolt of blue flame cut through where he’d been standing. The Mage approaching from behind was floating an inch or so off the floor, a Victorian-style burgundy cape flaring out over a black modern designer suit.
The man held a silver-topped walking stick in his right hand, which he pointed directly at David.
“No sword, no gun, what’s left, Commander White, but the man? And however strong, a man is no match for a Mage.”
The vampire wasn’t wrong, though David was hardly going to simply give up just because he happened to be unarmed. He sidestepped the vampire’s first burst of flame, charging the Mage with his fists clenched.
“David, catch!” Kate suddenly shouted, and he flung his right hand out, unseeing, to grab whatever she’d thrown him.
The bolt of fire seared into his skin for a moment, and then adjusted to a gentle warmth—while a blade of icy blue fire flashed up from his grip and lit up his face as he grinned coldly at the vampire.
“That’s when it’s nice to have friends,” he told the Mage—and charged.
THE VAMPIRE MIGHT HAVE BEEN SURPRISED, but there was nothing wrong with his reflexes. David knew how fast he was, but the Mage brought his walking stick up to parry the flaming sword Kate had conjured. White light flared around the stick and David bounced away, thrown by the vampire’s magic.
More bolts of fire lit up the floor, but he was already moving, the blue sword arcing around at waist height—only for the vampire to leap above the sword and smash downward. Even with his prescience, David only barely dodged the heavy silver top of the cane.
“You die tonight, White,” the vampire told him, casually hovering in the air four feet up. “My Lord wills it, and so it shall be done.”
David leapt into the air, slashing coldly as the vampire dodged back, losing his balance and falling off whatever spell levitated him. The Mage crashed to the floor on his back and David landed and charged at him again.
The vampire crab-walked backward, a motion that even David couldn’t replicate, and then leapt back to his feet. The cane flashed out in the light Kate had summoned, and his cape billowed, power flaring around him as he channeled magic.
Unfortunately for him, David was faster. Blue flame slashed through the gorgeous burgundy cape, barely missing the vampire as he abandoned his spell, dodging David’s strike…but that much power couldn’t be easily grounded.
Especially not when someone else was around to use it.
The aura of power that David had Seen the vampire gather stayed with him as
he dodged…but he was no longer in control of it and it took him a moment to realize what had happened as the magic locked onto him, freezing him in place for several precious moments.
“Friends are very important,” Kate Mason said sweetly—and then fired her revolver into the trapped vampire’s head just as he shattered the spell.
The warehouse was suddenly silent and David realized that while he’d been fighting the vampire Elder, Kate had been methodically eliminating the rest of the ambush.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
“Thank you,” she replied. “I couldn’t have dealt with his guards and him at once.”
David glanced around, shaking his head.
“I guess I didn’t need to call for backup,” he noted.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Kate said grimly. “Do you want to bet there wasn’t a second string to their bow?”
He sighed.
“One Elder versus both of us? No, there’s something else in play.” He grabbed his phone.
“This is Commander White, emergency status is still active,” he said into it. “We’ve been ambushed and cut off; we are expecting incoming vampires or other hostile supernaturals in short order. What’s the status on our backup?”
“This is Commander Wu,” a voice with a faint Chinese accent replied. “ONSET Sixteen is inbound. We are at least five minutes out—but we have surveillance-satellite tasking approved. We’ll have overhead in fifteen seconds, linking in Leitz to keep you updated.”
“Cynthia, good to hear from you,” David greeted his control. “How much trouble am I in?”
“I don’t know yet; how bad was it?” she answered.
“One Elder, fifteen-to-twenty troops. Could have been worse; I’m just worried about the rest of it.”
“That’s fair,” she replied, her voice suddenly distracted. “Commanders, I have a major aetheric event triggering outside the warehouse. I don’t know what’s going on, but you need to get out there and stop it.
“Now.”
THE VAMPIRES HAD CLOSED the front door that the taxi driver had entered the warehouse through, but the corrugated metal tore and lifted easily when faced with David’s superhuman strength. What he saw on the other side, though, made him realize the vampires had bitten off far more than they could have chewed.
Six pots marked the corners of a hexagon, each of them spewing smoke that he could smell contained blood and sulfur and other, less identifiable things—and power.
Magic arced from pot to pot, smoke weaving together with energy, and the familiar scent of ichor began to waft from the ritual circle. David’s Sight warned him as reality tore, black slime dripping through onto the concrete and beginning to take humanoid shape.
Kate squeezed his hand, restoring the flaming blade as she stepped aside to open her line of fire.
“Wu, Leitz, the bastards opened a rift through the Seal,” David reported into his phone. “Get here. I don’t have Memoria; I can’t seal this.”
“Three minutes,” Wu replied. “Hold the line.”
David tossed the phone aside and advanced on the forming demons with the flaming sword.
“Easy enough for him to say,” he muttered. Four minor shadow demons had managed to come through already, and the ichor continued to drip onto the ground from the other side.
They sensed his approach and turned to the attack. Black claws appeared out of nothingness, slashing out as they charged at him. The flaming sword cut the first one in half, then David ducked under the second while Kate vaporized the third.
He caught the fourth with a backhand blow from the conjured blade, but the second was coming back around as four more spawned into reality.
Black claws stabbed into his flesh as even his prescience wasn’t enough to dodge every attack. The last of the first wave came apart, the flaming blade slicing it in two even as its claws tore into him, cold seeping through his body as the ichor tried to poison him.
His regeneration repelled it almost instantly, the wound closing as fast as it had formed as he charged into the growing swarm of demons. Kate conjured a wave of blue fire that wrapped around him, blasting half a dozen of the little horrors into chunks…but more remained and he could feel something larger coming through.
The flame sword sliced through the smaller demons, clearing a space around David even as their numbers grew. The portal was expanding, with more and more of the minor demons coming through, and a sinking feeling took hold in David’s stomach.
A rift was a nightmare when he had a sword that could seal it and an entire team backing him. With just him and Kate, this could get very, very bad.
“Break the smoke pots!” Kate shouted. “It won’t break the rift, but it should stop it growing!”
David took a deep breath and charged into the swarm. Claws slashed at him and shadowy hands tried to grab him as he twisted and turned through the demons to reach the rift itself. The flaming sword lashed out, collapsing one of the smoke pots as he kicked another over.
Then the rift spat out the next level of demon, a man-sized abomination of ichor and black flame. A whip of black fire slashed through the sword Kate had conjured, shattering the spell and leaving David unarmed, surrounded by lesser demons, and face to face with a low-court demon warrior.
Then the demon exploded as a chain gun walked its fire up the creature’s torso and several air-to-surface missiles exploded across the field. Ichor scattered across the warehouses surrounding him as the missiles blasted the smaller demons to pieces, and then the chain gun walked across the remaining smoke pots.
“Mason,” Wu’s voice bellowed over the Pendragon’s loud speaker. “Close it!”
Power flared in the Nevada evening as Kate Mason channeled magic and slammed it past David into the rift. For a moment, the tear in reality glowed a bright blue, and then it finally collapsed.
David stood in the middle of a scattered puddle of slime, the gentle warmth of his regeneration rippling through his skin and dealing with the scratches of being even near to a missile strike as he breathed heavily, looking up at the circling helicopter and giving Wu a calm, even salute.
17
“Most people go to Vegas looking for a party, Commander White, not a knife fight with vampires and demons in a warehouse.”
Standing in the Major’s office on the Campus, there wasn’t much David could say in response to Major Warner’s caustic commentary, so he simply shrugged and waited for her to get it out of her system while he studied the Rocky Mountains through her windows.
“I can’t even ask what you were thinking,” she continued, “because it’s not like you did anything wrong, so far as I can tell. What the hell happened?”
“I’m not certain,” he admitted. “But I would guess that there was a call out to taxi drivers known to do such things that they’d get paid for delivering us to that warehouse.”
“Given that the footage from ONSET Sixteen’s helicopter includes what might be the half-melted wreckage of a taxicab, I’m guessing that didn’t end well for the driver,” Warner replied.
“No. They shot him.”
“And then tried to open a rift in Las Vegas.” ONSET’s second-in-command shook her head. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” David told her. “Commander Mason is in the Campus hospital, but even she just picked up scratches and a few burns. I was a bit worse off, but…” He shrugged.
He needed to be careful to not think of Commander Mason as Kate here. For now, that part of what happened in Vegas was going to have to stay in Vegas.
“But you healed,” Warner finished for him. “The vampires seem to have put you high on their list of most wanted, Commander. That will probably help with one of the big concerns being placed in front of the board.”
“Ma’am?”
“You’ve now met and spoken to two senior vampires without fighting them,” she reminded him. “The circumstances made sense both times, frankly, but that’s still twice more than the vast majo
rity of our agents. The suggestion that you have been compromised has been floated with a certain degree of seriousness.”
“I see,” David replied, swallowing his initial response of a string of curses. “And do you believe so, ma’am?”
“Hardly,” she chuckled. “There’s too much of an iron stick up your ass, David White, for you to be compromised.”
That was a vivid mental image.
“That the vampires clearly think you’re someone they want dead, at almost any cost, is still reassuring. I’m not sure how they knew you were in Vegas, though. I would have expected you to be keeping a low profile.”
He sighed.
“We tried, but something came up,” he admitted. “We…kept it low-key, but we certainly weren’t invisible.”
Warner leveled her gaze on him, and he had the sudden impression of a gun turret bearing down.
“What did you do, Commander?” she asked.
“We won ten point five million dollars in one of the high-roller lounges,” he confessed.
The Major’s office was very quiet for several seconds, then Warner sighed.
“If you were anyone else, Commander, I’d assume you’d decided to break the rules to get rich, hoping we’d let you keep some,” she said dryly. “But given the iron stick up your ass I mentioned earlier, I assume you had a reason.”
“We had an opportunity to purchase intelligence on the Arbiter,” he told her. “Ten million dollars, but we had to move quickly.”
“So you did,” Warner sighed. “And did you manage to close said deal before the Familias tried to summon demons into Las Vegas?”
He pulled the metal USB stick from his somewhat-scorched jacket and dropped it on the table.
“Such a small thing,” he said softly. “For ten million dollars.”
“I’m guessing there’s still half a million dollars or so of casino chips in your room?” Warner asked, looking at the USB stick like it was a venomous snake.
ONSET: Blood of the Innocent Page 12
