by Amy Lane
Bracken was right. As random as we were, we were order, and when the bad guys were running wild, it was our job to fight them.
It was the first time I ever got pumped up for a fight by finding peace.
We parked in front of a 7-Eleven about a block from the bar, and I sent Marcus inside to mind-fuck the night clerk into watching our cars. Having once been that night clerk, I felt a little bit bad about this, but not much—if the guy wasn’t meant for this world, we had no right to drag him in with a weird-ass memory. Honestly, he was better off with a headache.
“I wasn’t the first vamp to do that,” Marcus confessed. Then I felt a little worse, but it didn’t matter. We had a plan and promises to keep, and away we rolled.
There was no party at the bar tonight—no motorcycles lined up, no loud noises, no flashing lights. Instead there were around fifteen vampires and shape-changers lined up like pawns, ready to make the first move.
Oh Goddess. I so sucked at chess.
“There’s got to be more than this,” I said to myself. Above us, behind the bar, I heard Nicky shrieking in three sharp bursts—three guards that way. Mario gave an odd sound, and when I risked a look upward I saw… well, they weren’t big bats, but judging by the way they left my guys alone, the three vampires up there must still think the Avians were really big birds.
“Three in the trees,” I said, sotto voce. Everyone behind me could hear, and I was proud that nobody else looked up.
LaMark gave a long shriek to my left, so I knew there were enough guys back there to give us some serious trouble when things got rough. Okay—I still sucked at chess, but at least I knew where my pieces were.
“Hiya, gentlemen!” I smiled gamely at the guy who came out to meet us. I was wearing a pair of baggy jeans and one of Bracken’s T-shirts—and I was sweating in them too—but it meant I had room for more than one gun in the back of my pants. “We thought we’d go in and talk to Rafael!”
“Rafael is busy right now.” The vampire was tall and apparently bought his wardrobe at Virile Vamps and Varlets—black leather trench coat, knee-high biker boots, and a silver-studded leather belt over black jeans, with no shirt. He seemed to dye his long hair and beard black too, but I could see beyond them to the raggedly thin face with pocked skin. I looked at the rest of the men, and they obviously shopped at VVV too. Jesus—those of us who were carrying guns had jeans, and those of us who didn’t wore whatever the fuck they wanted. Is there anything more annoying than a vampire in a glee club uniform?
“Rafael is being held captive in his own bar by his own people because you assholes are too busy being ‘bad’ to do the right thing,” I said equably. Goddammit, we all knew where this was going, and I was tired of fucking around! “By the way, do you guys have, like, a store or something? Because those ensembles are real fuckin’ cute.” I looked sideways at Phillip, the most vampy of our vamps. “Dude, you want me to find out where they shop? I don’t think you’ve got anything like this guy’s shoes.”
“You bitch,” Phillip thought, “don’t make me crack up!”
“No, Lady,” he said out loud. “I get my suits at Brooks Brothers, and my shoes are special made.”
“Special made?” I asked, sizing up the other guys. They were all armed with silver, which explained the gauntlets, but as far as I could tell, we were the only ones with guns. Good—because although math wasn’t my strong suit, if we counted Jacky, Katy, and Renny, running silent in the shadows, we were possibly outnumbered by more than three to one.
“His feet are proportionately large,” Marcus deadpanned.
I cracked a vicious smile. “See? Our shoes aren’t as pretty, but there’s nothing wrong with the size of our dicks.”
“You may wish you had a dick, little girl,” our snazzy dresser snarled in my face, “but you should probably leave before someone teaches you what a real twat is for.”
“Wait a minute,” I said with a playful smile. I was charging like a power plant, but my range was limited by the people at my back. I could probably take the six guys in front of me out of action, and then the battle was on. “You’re not the baby-raping pedophile, are you? Because that could explain your obsession with where to put your little dick.”
That stopped him. That stopped everybody. The nasty collection of knives and maces that had been up in battle positions were lowered for a moment, and the joker I was facing growled, “What in the fuck are you talking about?”
“The guy? The guy Rafael was supposed to turn over to me? The one your whole kiss is ready to die for? Isn’t anybody curious as to why we want to talk to him?”
“Don’t listen to her, Soto. Man, she’ll say anything to take over our turf!” Beside me, Bracken grunted, and I shifted my shoulder back to touch his. This could be our scumbag.
“Trey, you know what he’s like!” Soto looked honestly dismayed—and not shocked. We touched shoulders again. Nope. Not our scumbag. Rafael had pretty much told us that this guy had promised to stop and then fucked up, and now we knew he had apparently hidden inside while the rest of us were going to do the bleeding.
“I could give a flying pig-fuck about this craptacular piece of real estate,” I spat. I was sweating down my back, and I had red dust in all my crevices, and I totally meant that. Someday—in the winter—I might learn to like Redding, and even take a trip to see the big-assed volcano that had loomed over us the whole trip, but right now it was the sphincter of the universe and I couldn’t wait until it shit us out and flushed us home.
“All I want,” I continued, “is to blood with the motherfucker who’s been making baby vamps and setting them loose on their families—”
“You blood with your kiss?” Soto sounded shocked. “How is that even possible?”
“Does it matter? I want the baby vamps to stop. Do you people know what happens to kids when they get brought over?”
There was an awkward silence and some shuffling. Apparently they did, and it was sweet that they felt bad and all, but it didn’t stop the huge electric power ball from sizzling in my chest. For a moment it almost escaped me. For a moment I remembered that I could kill them all, and the people in the building behind them, and I and my lovers and the people we cared for would all be okay.
But Andres was in there, and Orson, and Rafael, who had only tried to do right by his people, and that budding moment of being a mass-murdering fuckhead died aborning—for the moment, at least. I still kept the power charge, though—I certainly wasn’t going to trust their remorse now. Trey, bless him, rewarded my skepticism in a big way.
“Well, that’s our problem, bitch. You got no say in how we handle our problems!”
I blinked. “I’m your queen, motherfucker. I’m the ultimate resolution to your problems. Now, you can hand over your baby-raping buddy, and we can call this good, or this can go down a whole other way and a lot of people can get hurt—”
Apparently that speech wasn’t going to fly. Soto blurred forward and his hand shot out to grab my throat, and that’s when the battle went down.
He’d barely made skin contact when I called his mark, and in addition to the other battle ruckus, there was the sound of his scream as the lines of the twisting-vine amalgam of leaves and limes ripped its way through the skin on his arm, his bared chest, his face. As he fell to his knees and howled in pain, I took all that power shrieking at my skin, held my arms wide, and slammed as many guys as I could grab hold of up against the wall of the bar, hard enough to crumple their skulls. They fell to the ground, leaving red smears behind them—down for the count but not out, I was pretty sure.
And then the fun really started.
Two shape-shifters jumped Bracken—one from behind—and fell to the ground without their hearts, leaving my lover dripping in gore and laughing gleefully, daring anyone else to come try him. We were immediately surrounded by vampires with knives, and we stood back-to-back as I pulled power balls from my anger and sent them spitting lightning at whoever got too close. I only had
to do that a couple of times before they became wary of me and started throwing their knives. One big-assed machete came about two inches from Brack’s shoulder before I slammed down my shield and shouted, “Shoot these fuckers now!”
“Jesus,” one guy screamed as Max and Teague broke out the hardware, “that bird took my knife!”
“But don’t hit Nicky!” I hollered. Brack and I kept up our back-to-back circle warily, watching as the knives bounced off the shield like toothpicks off a tin balloon.
Bam! Teague had brought the pump-action shotgun, loaded with silver, and the bad-ass in front of me blinked in surprise as his chest peeled back like an onion to reveal his black, fragmented heart. He pitched forward, leaving his blood to spatter on my hissing shield. Max double-tapped his victims—one from each gun—and I blessed the time the three of us spent at the shooting range together. And still, in spite of the threats from the outside, the majority of the bad guys were facing us, hurling their fucking knives at us or rushing the shield like, I don’t know, maybe it was showing signs of weakening.
It wasn’t.
“We could do this all night, fuckers!” Bracken taunted. “Why don’t you just let us in the goddamned bar!”
“Careful, beloved,” I cautioned. “You’re starting to sound like me.”
“Osmosis—fuck, that one was right at my face.”
Outside our circle I could hear various howls, yowls, and growls as the enemies who strayed too near the shadows got picked off by Jack, Katy, and Renny, or got fried to a crisp by Lambent. As strategies went, it was pretty awesome—I just wished I could take some credit for the enemy’s stupidity, because I hadn’t planned on it at all.
A knife went over our heads, and Kyle managed to dodge it. The guy he was hand-to-handing didn’t, and as the bad guy’s head rolled like a soccer ball, Kyle let out a whoop and howl of triumph that got him suddenly besieged by combatants. Max and Phillip flew in low and took out two a piece, smacking them headfirst into the bar, where they may have sustained too much damage to get up again. Ever.
“Ya know, Brack, I don’t like being left out of the action,” I said, realizing how helpless I felt when it came to protecting anybody else but the two of us.
“You got anything in mind?”
“Yeah.” I did. “When I give the signal, start ripping hearts.”
“Heh-heh-heh.” My Goddess, that was an evil laugh. “What’s the signal?”
I started clenching against my ginormous power dump, and the leftover energy electric-cockroach crawled over my skin. Good. My shield felt hard and brittle—so I went with that, tightened my stomach, squat-thrust with the mind muscle that was controlling the power itself, and exploded my shield into power shards that went whipping through anyone standing within fifteen feet of the shield. Men went down clutching at nothing in their chests while their flesh split open and ripped itself on the power fragments, and Bracken screamed vicious joy into the night while our entire world turned red as all of that available blood came splatting toward us.
“Blargh!” But I had one of my guns in my hand as I said it, and I managed to pick off a vampire running for Renny before I even cleared the blood from my eyes.
Bracken howled again, and I backhanded another round of knives out of the air, taking out two guys just because they were still where they had stood when they threw them. There was a sudden scream from above us, and a vampire I didn’t know came plummeting out of the air in a dive designed to take me out—but I did another backhanded power swat, and in an explosion of cinder block he went shooping right through the wall of the bar instead. I heard a crash and a scream, and I wondered if maybe that alone wouldn’t give the captives in the bar some incentive to fight back.
And like my wishes were commands, Andres stepped into the hole in the bar, two big-assed machetes in his hands.
“’Bout time, my lady!” he called, then started advancing through the bad guys using those machetes like a pro. He carved a way through them, leaving bleeding, reeling, and twice-dead vampires in his wake until he took his place back-to-back with Bracken and me.
“We got here as soon as we could,” I gasped, admiring his fighting style. Hell, there was nothing wrong with fucking deadly as a technique, right?
“Well, it’s good to know you didn’t stop for a quickie on the way!” he snapped, and I risked a glance at him.
Healing silver burns on his neck gave me a clue as to how they had managed to keep him still while we’d been fighting outside.
“Naw, sweetie.” I sent a power ball through a fucker who’d been aiming his gun at us, and he looked in puzzlement at the smoking hole through his torso before he fell. “We save the quickies for after the battle.”
Andres reached out and slashed an arm off a guy coming at him with a knife. “So all that wait was to make an entrance?”
“Entertainment,” I gritted, sighting another fucker going for our people in the trees. “Anything to get your attention. Fuck.” This one was mammoth—the guy must have weighed 350 at the inside, and when he morphed into a bear getting ready to ride Jack’s ass without a saddle, I screamed, “Teague—open here!”
Teague was about twenty feet away, but he swung around and without panicking, locked and loaded to defend his beloved, and together, while Brack and Andres kept our backs clear, we started blasting silver into that big fucking brown bear.
We didn’t stop it completely, but it stood on its hind legs and turned instinctively toward us to leave Jack alone as we continued to blow through ammo.
“On your left!” Teague called, and I turned to take out the vampire coming for me—and oh shit, I was out. Teague fired two more rounds as that huge-assed werething screamed at us and died. I reached behind me for the other gun, but fuck it all, I was too slow. The vamp charged me, so hyperquick I didn’t even have time to throw up a shield, although I did catch him in the face with a round from the Glock—but the damage was done. He might have been twice dead, but he was still hauling ass with enough velocity to knock me out of the circle and change the dynamic of the fight.
The sudden pressure on my chest knocked the wind out of me, and the quick trip and sudden stop on my back finished the job. I scrambled to my feet before I could breathe, while Brack and Andres were still back-to-back. I was alone, and now that Jack was out of danger, Teague’s attention was focused on me.
It gave the vampire swooping down on him just enough leeway to grab him under the arms and start hauling him up before anybody could get off a shot.
Jacky stood up, a naked, vulnerable young man, and Katy sat on her haunches and howled—and even though we had been winning, the entire battle stalled as I looked to the sky and screamed Teague’s name.
And then Soto, who had recovered from the skull pulping I’d given him, blurred behind me, wrapped an arm around my chest, and held a knife to my throat, then pushed me forward away from the bar and toward the middle of the parking lot, leaving Bracken and Andres bereft and alone at my back.
“You see that, bitch?” Soto growled. He shook his head, and blood from the emerging mark on his face added to the dripping mess on my body. “You think you can just come into our nest and take one of our own? You want to know what it feels like to watch one of your own die for no other reason than someone wants it? That could be arranged.”
“Teague’s got a soldier’s honor,” I said, my anger boiling in my chest and my mind darting between possibilities. “Your guy leaves the helpless to kill and die.” They were going to drop him—I knew it. I could save him, I could, but the knife at my throat….
“Green?” I asked.
His voice in my head was close to panic, but not over the edge.
“I don’t know. Please, don’t try it.”
“It’s Teague, Green.” Teague, who was so like Adrian and me. Teague, who deserved a happy ending.
“I could give a shit!” Soto spat, and I growled.
“Of course you could, you honorless pussy. If you had any balls at
all, we could have worked this out like men.” “Green, I can’t see them anymore. The fall will kill him. Tell me you can do this from far away.”
“Dammit, beloved, don’t make me test this now!”
“Green, it’s Teague!”
“Let’s see how much honor you’ve got when your manwhore’s guts are splattered at your feet.”
What an asshole. I ignored him—he was twice dead already. “Bracken—when I give the signal, you know what to do.” “Beloved, no!”
“What’s the signal?” Bracken asked breathlessly even as Soto jerked my head back. I was still carrying my gun—these vamps weren’t used to humans in a vamp fight. They weren’t used to guns.
“What’s happening up there?” I asked, not answering Bracken. I was pretty sure he’d know what the signal was, but I was speaking to disguise the jerk of my shoulder as I positioned the gun downward toward Soto’s thigh. I heard Jacky whine and a shout from above us, and I knew they’d dropped Teague, even though I couldn’t see his body flailing helplessly through the darkness yet. I couldn’t move too soon, I couldn’t—but Jack didn’t think I was moving at all, and he screamed and fell to his knees, hugging Katy’s neck as she howled.
“Don’t worry, Jacky,” I promised desperately, wondering how much time I really had. “I’m going to make this right.”
“I trust you, Green.”
“How you gonna do that, bitch?” Soto rasped.
“Corinne Carol-Anne, I’m not the Goddess…. Luv, please.”
I said, “Like this.” And, “I love you, Green.” Then I pulled the fucking trigger and jerked against the knife as Green screamed “Goddammit, no!” in my head.
I was bleeding—I was bleeding a lot—and I could feel Green, smell him, as he worked frantically from inside my body to bind up the nick in my jugular. It would have been a lot deeper if I hadn’t shot the fucker first, and I trusted Bracken and Andres behind me to take care of him as I stepped forward into the night and reached all my power up to catch Teague.
