by J. C. Diem
“I guess I won’t have to throw the stick for him anymore,” Violet said with a wry grin.
Mark put his tablet away and patted her on the shoulder. “Believe me, playing fetch gets very old very quickly,” he murmured. Zeus heard him and shot him a dirty look. His annoyance evaporated as soon as the vampire sent the branch hurtling through the air again. With a hollow bark of joy, he raced after it.
~~~
Chapter Twenty-Five
~~~ Lexi’s World ~~~
King Rho surreptitiously stared at the strange beasts that kept watch over Loki. More of them had arrived and there were now nearly a hundred of them standing guard. Loki had disappeared for a short while and he suspected his ally had made a breech in the dome to let them in. He’d sent his shamans out to search for it, but he’d managed to hide it from them somehow.
He could see his plans slipping through his fingers with the arrival of these monsters. He’d made a secret bargain with General Kretu. They’d planned to turn on Loki after they’d conquered this world. With the Asgardian out of the way, they’d intended to split up the seven billion humans equally.
Of course, Rho had no intention of keeping his bargain with the Frost Giant. Kretu had no idea just how powerful, or how numerous Rho’s shamans were. He wasn’t going to relinquish any of the humans to his ally. Instead, he and his sorcerers would use their magic to annihilate the giants. He would personally destroy the portals that had been sent to Jötunheim to prevent any of their kin from coming to their rescue.
His intention was to have both Earth and Asgard beneath his control, but that was just the beginning. His ambition was every bit as grand as Loki’s. Thanks to the portals that his ally was right now busy altering, it would be possible for the Grimgorg to swarm over every planet they could find. What the Asgardian didn’t know, was that they’d already located and spied on hundreds of worlds. Nothing would be able to stop Rho from snatching Loki’s dream away from him and becoming the supreme ruler of this version of the universe.
But his dreams could now very well be in tatters. While the shapeshifters were making no move to attack the humans, they glowered at Loki’s allies. Unfamiliar with the animals of this planet, he wasn’t sure what types of creatures they were. He only knew they were highly dangerous and that they would guard their master with their lives.
Surrounded by a variety of werecats, weredogs and even some wererats so far, Loki was pleased that his command for the shifters to come to him had worked. It would take time for them all to arrive, but he would soon have an army of them. Their supreme alphas, Lexi and Reece, would turn the tide for him once they appeared. With them beneath his control, he would no longer need to fear betrayal from his allies. It had been a simple matter for him to slip away and create a small hole in the dome. His beasts would follow his mental directions to find it. With his skill at creating illusions, it would be very difficult for any of the Grimgorg to locate the breech. Even to his eyes, the dome was unblemished.
Stroking a wereleopard as he infused the next portal with his magic, Loki flicked a glance at Rho and Kretu. They were huddled together next to the lake of ice, whispering plans that seemed to exclude him. The Frost Giants had stopped melting once the sun had disappeared from the sky, but they still returned to the palace frequently to recharge.
Growing weary of his numbingly repetitive task, Loki stood and stretched his back to get the kinks out. He turned and walked away without bothering to inform his comrades of his plans. Las Vegas had many towering buildings and each one was more opulent than the last. Choosing a casino that wasn’t quite as gaudy as the others, he entered the foyer. To his left, strange machines made a raucous noise, trying to attract the notice of people who no longer cared about throwing their money away.
Heading to the elevator, he rode it to the top floor. It suited him to stay in the penthouse where he could watch as the chaos unfolded below. Striding over to the door, he could sense people huddled inside. He unlocked it with magic and entered. Gold was the predominant theme. The white marble floor was threaded with the stuff. Columns of gold rose to support the golden ceiling high above.
Lips twisting that this place reminded him of his home on Asgard, he crossed to the man and two women who were huddled at the gigantic window. They didn’t see or sense him as he approached. He peered down over their heads at the Glitter Strip below. From here, he could see the ice palace.
“If I run into the crazy man in the golden helmet who brought these aliens here, I’ll blast a hole in his head so big I can fit my fist inside it,” the male said with false bravado. Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved, white button up shirt, a large gun was nestled in a holster on his right hip. He appeared to be an affluent man with his two daughters standing on either side of him.
Taking in their scantily clad bodies, Loki revised his thought that the females were his offspring. Their clothing was provocative and it was highly likely that they were hired escorts. “Well then, now is your chance,” he said in a jolly tone.
The two women shrieked and tried to hide behind the man when they spun around to face him. Seeing the helmeted alien he’d just been talking about standing mere inches away, the gambler almost lost control of his bladder. He reached for his gun only to find it was no longer in its holster.
“Are you looking for this?” Loki said. He held up the weapon that he’d deftly pickpocketed from the unsuspecting human.
The gambler’s face turned almost as pale as his shirt. “What do you want?” he asked in a breathless voice.
“I want you to leave,” Loki replied in an ominous tone. He would skewer the man if he didn’t comply, but doing so would leave a nasty stain on the floor. It would also make the women even more hysterical. Sidling away from him, the gambler scrambled towards the door.
“Not you two,” Loki said, barring the women’s way with his arm. “I have need of your…services.” He said this with the charming grin that tended to win over most females. Exchanging a look, the escorts knew what their fate would be if they spurned him. Sensing their terror, he took one of the beauties by the chin. “You have no need to fear me. I do not abuse women. I will not do anything that will cause you harm.” Not while they were in his bed anyway. Once he was done with them, they would join the other captives below.
His shifters had taken up station in the lobby and around the building. More were arriving by the minute. With his link to them, they would warn him if danger approached. For tonight, he would have all the time he wished to satiate his needs. While bedding humans was repugnant to him on one level, he didn’t have much choice. He’d relinquished his home world to King Rho, so earthlings were all he had left to consort with. From what he’d seen on the other worlds that he’d visited, his choice of attractive bed partners was sorely limited.
“I will just have to make do with the best this world has to offer,” he muttered to himself as the two women led him to a bedroom. He could smell the scent of recent sex wafting from the bed. Wrinkling his nose in distaste, he tugged the coverlet up over the soiled sheets. He had no fears that he would catch anything from these prostitutes. His body would reject any foreign presences that might try to infect him.
Removing his armor, he placed his sword within reach and stood naked between the two women. Their trepidation was gone, and had been replaced by professional detachment. This would be just one more job for them. Whatever passion they appeared to feel would only be a sham. He didn’t care, as long as they performed their task well. He was under no illusion that either of these females could hold any affection for him. He’d learned long ago that love wasn’t real.
He allowed himself to be led over to the bed and sat down. One of the girls knelt between his legs and ran her hands over his thighs. She looked down at his obvious readiness to copulate and a genuine smile graced her face. The second woman pushed him back so he was lying down. She bent over him, offering him her breast. His mouth found her nipple as her companion’s mouth closed over his h
ardness.
Closing his eyes in enjoyment, he decided he wouldn’t get rid of these two escorts come morning after all. They were highly skilled and they were obviously willing to do anything to remain in his good graces.
~~~
Chapter Twenty-Six
~~~ Lexi’s World ~~~
Natalie’s stomach couldn’t actually rumble, but she was too hungry to ignore her needs any longer. When the guards returned from flicking their blood on the graves, she motioned for one of them to approach her. The startled man looked at Mark and braced himself when Agent Steel nodded. Trepidation poured off him as he came to a stop in front of the vampire.
Once again, Mark took his tablet out to capture the moment. Natalie stared into the guard’s eyes for a few seconds until he fell beneath her spell. A dreamy look came over him and he offered her his neck. She angled his head to the side and her fangs descended. Rather than tearing into his flesh, she bit into a vein almost delicately. She drank a few mouthfuls of his blood before releasing him.
“Is that it?” Violet asked. She sounded almost disappointed.
“Yep,” Nat replied. “Even when I was a fledgling, I never felt the need to maul my meals.” The guard came out of his daze quickly and moved to stand with the other PIA employees. He showed no signs of fear now that he’d survived the feeding process without coming to harm.
Green fog had begun to gather while the graves were being marked. Lexi could sense the dead waiting for her to call on them. The PIA agents had broken back down into the same state they’d been in before she’d called on them last. Her death magic swelled and the fog became dense as she unleashed her necromancy. “Rise!” she commanded. Her power was so strong that every former agent was fully formed and was in perfect condition when they surfaced. Their clothes had long ago rotted away and most of them were naked. They would need clothing and weapons, which would be easy to fix.
“Incredible,” Violet said as she gazed at the army of zombies. Each one stared at their mistress expectantly.
“They’re abominations,” Elijah muttered. He knew it was necessary to use the animated corpses, but everything inside him rebelled at their very existence. Working with a vampire was bad enough. Now he had to consort with mindless zombies as well.
Violet knew he wasn’t talking about her, but she flinched anyway. That word had been used to describe her more than once. Nat caught a flash of her pain and surprised the younger woman by putting an arm around her shoulder. “You’re no more an abomination than any of us,” she said quietly. “You saved your version of Earth, and mine from being overrun. Now you’re going to help save Lexi’s. No matter what your origins are, you’re a champion of Fate. Never forget that.”
Lexi had heard every word and moved to join them. “I hate it that I’m not going to be able to face Loki myself, but there’s no one I’d trust more for the job than you two.”
Feeling a sudden kinship with them both, Violet pushed aside her momentary feelings of inadequacy. She wasn’t a scared sixteen-year-old kid anymore. She was almost nineteen and she’d been through too much to believe that she wasn’t up to this task. “We won’t let you down,” she vowed.
“We’ll kick Loki’s butt for you,” Nat added with a grin.
“I know you will,” Lexi said with full confidence that they wouldn’t fail. “Can you tell how many Frost Giants and Grimgorg we’ll be facing?”
A look of regret came over Nat. “Nope. I lost that ability when I left my dimension.”
“I think it’s safe to assume there will be tens of thousands of each,” Violet said. “The sooner we get in there and take Loki and his two sidekicks down, the better.” The longer it took them to achieve this, the more aliens would swarm through the portals.
Reece ambled over to join them. “We need to try to connect with the vampires.”
Lexi’s brow furrowed slightly as she frowned. “We had to use a circle of seven alphas to pull it off the last time.” Unfortunately, their allies had been called to Loki and that wasn’t an option for them this time.
“Can you tap into my power?” Nat asked.
“Well, you are something like an alpha vampire,” Lexi said. “I guess we could try it.” Nat wasn’t from this world, but that could be a good thing in this instance. Who knew what sort of boost they could get from her?
Nat had never attempted to give anyone any of her power before. Lexi and Reece took her hands and she just stood there for a few moments. They weren’t connected to her in any way, so she knew it would be up to her to take the initiative. Slipping into their minds, she found their link to their inner vampires and tried to enhance their powers.
Lexi and Reece gasped when they felt every vampire in the country inside their heads. Reaching for her zombies’ minds, Lexi sent them a mental command. Knowing the location of every vampire, she sent her undead minions out to retrieve them. As one, they sank into the ground. It took a few trips, but soon all five thousand vampires were gathered on the lawn. Lexi and Reece both had absolute control over them. They stood there like silent statues, waiting for orders.
Kala inspected them and fought to keep her cougar under control. The undead were abhorrent to all shifters. From Zeus’ silent snarl, he felt exactly the same way. “Well, they’re all here,” she said and did her best to hide her distaste. “Now what?”
Mark checked his watch and exchanged a look with Kala’s mate. Philip was the most highly trained soldier in their team and he deferred to his expertise. “We need to recon the city before we send in all of our troops,” the ex-soldier decided.
“V and I can go in and spy on them,” Nat offered. “I need to check whether the sewer system is the same in this reality anyway.” She didn’t want to leave anything up to chance.
“Good idea,” Mark agreed. He could have run a search for blueprints of the sewers beneath Las Vegas, but it wouldn’t hurt for them to look in person.
“Are you ready for this?” Nat said to Violet.
“For what?” Violet said dourly. “Slogging through knee-deep human waste? Sure. Bring it on.”
Nat smirked and clapped the kid on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit!”
Kala sniggered at the pair, silently wishing she could go with them. It would be too dangerous for her to get close to Loki, so she would have to stay behind with the rest of her shapeshifting friends.
“I wish to accompany you,” Ava said suddenly. Mark shot her a concerned look. “I am technically a shapeshifter, but I existed long before Loki was born,” she added. “He will have no power over me.”
Nat flicked a look at Violet and they both shrugged. “You can come if you want,” Nat said. They knew very little about the nagi and they had no idea what she could do yet.
“Don’t even think about it,” Lexi said to Mark before he could offer to go with them as well. “We need you to help us strategize.”
“You can put the camera on me if you want,” Nat offered. She’d used the same tactics on her world to spy on her enemies from a distance.
Mark wasn’t happy about Ava going on such a dangerous mission, but he knew she could handle herself. They trotted back to the main building and waited for the zombies to file inside and find clothing and guns in the armory. When they were all suitably equipped, they gathered on the lawn.
“Can you take us all back to our base in Colorado?” Mark asked Natalie. He would rather perform his surveillance back in the place they all thought of as their home rather than in the PIA headquarters.
In the blink of an eye, Nat teleported the Shifter Squad, five thousand vampires and a thousand zombies back to their base.
~~~
Chapter Twenty-Seven
~~~ Lexi’s World ~~~
There wasn’t enough room for all of the vamps and zombies inside the building, so most of them remained outside. Kendricks and some of his men followed the others inside. The vampires would have to make burrows beneath the ground to hide from the sun when morning came. They all wore
filthy, tattered clothing and had stringy, unwashed hair. Personal hygiene wasn’t high on their list of priorities. They were so heavily bamboozled by Lexi and Reece that they weren’t capable of complaining about it. Lexi intended to keep them mentally docile until it was time to unleash them on her enemies.
Since Nat had been to the sewers beneath Las Vegas before, she knew what to expect. She waited until they were inside before speaking. “I don’t want to ruin my pants or boots,” she said, looking down at her leather trousers and calf-high leather boots. She didn’t have replacements for either of them. “Do you have a ratty pair of pants and sneakers that I could borrow?” she asked Lexi.
Lexi arched a brow at Violet and received a nod that the younger girl also wanted to borrow some clothes. The teen’s feet were smaller, but only by one size. Lexi headed upstairs to rummage around in her closet with Violet right behind her. Mark took the camera from Kendricks and attached it to the collar of Nat’s leather jacket. When he was done, she headed upstairs.
Lexi gave the girls sneakers and camouflage cargo pants that had seen better days. They retreated to their rooms to change and emerged a short while later. They were all roughly the same size and the borrowed clothing fit them well enough. “Let’s do this,” Nat said. She was a good three inches shorter than Lexi, so she had to roll her pants up a bit. Violet was only two inches shorter and she didn’t bother.
Ava had also taken the opportunity to change. Instead of wearing a suit, she now wore more casual clothes of jeans and a t-shirt. She was nervous, but she was determined to go with them. All three warriors trusted their instincts and they had a feeling the nagi was going to play an important role in their battle.
