by John Conroe
The road began to curve toward the northeast, which put me on an almost straight path toward the direction the elemental was coming from. But I wasn’t worried about that problem just yet. No, my destination was visible, easily visible, as it was the tallest thing in the entire city—the Stratosphere.
Towering almost eleven hundred fifty feet above the desert floor, it stood like some 1950s rocket ship, ready to launch for the stars. The monster behind me roared again, his anger a force of nature. The police helicopter was back, keeping its distance but lighting him up for the shooters to keep pounding little .223 bullets into him. I made a mental note to talk to the Vegas police chief after this was done about proper weapons for monsters.
A hundred yards… seventy-five… fifty… twenty-five. At fifteen yards, I jumped as hard as I could. My Lightened body lifted two stories up and Clung to the side of the building. Looking back, I saw my pursuer pounding right at me. Time to climb.
Vampires have a tremendous advantage over werewolves in climbing. The unique ability to harness energy in odd and useful ways lets them basically run up the side of a building while weres have to climb, which, no matter how powerful they are, is slower. And I share that energy trait with my vampire team members, so I simply ran up the building, my feet feeling the moment Dragan’s massive form hit the structure hard enough to shake it.
Weres can’t Cling. So they have to dig massive claws into cracks and crevices to climb. Dragan just jammed his steel-hard talons into the concrete of the building and started to race up after me. Not as fast as I could go, but pretty damned fast. Then he started to bound, leaping twenty-foot jumps straight up, and our gap began to close.
After running the equivalent of two football fields straight up, I could see my first target, the Skyjump platform that sits over eight hundred feet above street level and provides the jumping off point for adrenaline junkies to do a controlled free fall.
I angled my climb, moving closer to the observation deck. A massive form shot past me and jumped to the heavy cables that guide jumpers to the ground below. Dragan was now ahead of me but dangling. I looked at the cable where it met the metal framework. Dragan looked where I looked, then back at me, before bursting into a climbing frenzy. He had seen what I had—that if someone cut the cables with, say, mono-edged aural blades, he would plummet eight hundred feet. No matter how tough he was, he wouldn’t survive that.
But it was a head fake. I didn’t even try to get to his cables. Instead, I waited for him to start up and then cut back away, climbing past the observation deck windows and right up the top where the Big Shot ride blasts riders straight up like a rocket launching into space. The top was deserted, the results of asking the most powerful computer in the world to do whatever it takes to evacuate it. I have no idea what he did. Falsified texts from corporate headquarters, fake phone calls from the police, or maybe a good old-fashioned fire alarm.
The end result was that I had the whole thing to myself, at least for twenty seconds or so. Then a massive, black-furred arm came up over the edge and Dragan hauled himself out onto the roof.
The helicopter circled the building, working to find us, the powerful light finally lighting Dragan up.
Frankly, he looked like shit. His arm was still torn up, his fur all matted and ripped, and he was huffing like a steam engine. He must have been shot a dozen times and while those rounds couldn’t get the job done, they still wore away at him. It left him just the way I wanted him… on his last dregs of energy.
He stood up and I was on him. I aimed high but dropped low, throwing a side kick into his knee, followed by an uppercut to his groin, and then another snap kick to the same free-hanging target.
His knee creaked but didn’t break. His nuts, though, must have felt like a pair of trains hit them because his body jackknifed forward.
Doesn’t matter if you’re human, were, vampire, or demon—a nut shot will always make you flinch. So my jumping knee met his lower jaw, snapping it shut hard enough to break a fang.
An arm bigger than my leg swung out and clipped my shoulder, moving way faster than anything that big should. It knocked me across the roof into the side of the control shed for the Big Shot ride, claws ripping my flesh.
I spar with Awasos. He stands over twelve feet high and weighs about three times what Dragan weighs and he’s damn near just as fast. Riding out a paw swing was standard fare for a fight with something that big. Stand in place and you’ll be crushed into paste, no matter how tough you are. Gotta go with the flow. So I landed lightly, feet on the control booth wall, body horizontal, flesh already starting to heal.
“Getting weak. What’s the matter, Beast? Not enough dinner?” I asked. He growled at me, slitted eyes yellow but now cautious.
Weres burn calories at enormous rates, especially when they’re in animal or beast mode. Even more than I do. He was running a serious deficit, and it showed in his slowed healing and general exhaustion. If he had stopped to snack on a pedestrian or two, he’d be okay, but my flight with his goody bag hadn’t left him the luxury of pausing for a bite to eat.
His anger had diminished to the point where his intelligence could restart. He was exhausted and wounded while I appeared more rested and unharmed. I stepped casually off the booth wall and down onto the roof. He grew cautious, yellow python eyes wary. Like he thought there might be a trap. But although Carnizhop was ancient and undying, as Dragan he was less than six months old… not enough time to know the world, study history, or see any of the movie classics… like, say, King Kong. Geez, wasn’t the helicopter and its spotlight enough of a clue? He stood in a big pool of harsh white light, his ears lifting up to hear and his head starting to turn.
The big bullet hit him a full second before the sound reached our ears. A giant gout of black blood erupted from his right rib cage as Arkady’s .50 BMG round tore through the demon’s hybrid body. Amazingly, he still stood upright, even after over seven hundred grains of bullet, an ounce and a half, had just smashed its way through his body with over two tons of energy after traveling a thousand yards or more. Arkady was situated at the top of the nearest skyscraper office building, watching through the powerful scope of one of our Barrett rifles. Watching and firing again, as moments later, a second round tore through Dragan’s hips.
His cold, yellow-slitted eyes finally showed some emotion besides anger—desperation. The realization that I had suckered him into a position that left him without victims to eat and put him in the crosshairs of one of my team members. A team member with proper ordinance.
Demons aren’t team players. Oh, they’ll fight as groups and in armies, but it’s still every Hellspawn for themselves. So it was difficult for him to conceive of the idea that I might lure him into my own team’s killing ground. Mr. Deckert’s men were always saying that the ultimate winner of hand-to-hand combat was almost always the first guy to have a buddy arrive with a gun.
Arkady, for all of his sword wielding, ancient warrior schtick, was a gifted sniper. Eagle vampire eyesight, complete control of his muscles and body, along with an innate feel for windage and bullet drop. Not to mention that he’d been around for the entire history of the firearm.
Dragan had just fallen victim to Arkady’s skill, as his demon-powered, supernatural vitality was blasted from him by John Browning’s heavy machine gun round. He teetered for a moment, then I hit him mid-body in a diving tackle that drove us both right off the building and out into space.
He clutched at me, clawing to hold on, but I broke his hold with swift, powerful strikes to his hands, shoving him further away so he could only stare up at me as we fell twelve hundred feet.
Vegas at night, from the top of the Stratosphere, stretches the lights of man as far as the eye can see, and the sky above is almost always clear and littered with stars. It’s like Heaven’s foyer. Hard not to feel the hand of God as the wind whistles by you and infinity stretches above.
Dragan was staring straight up, first at me, and then just before t
he end, over my shoulder at the stars above. Do demons ever think of God? His glare softened, for just a moment, a flicker. Then he snarled in defiance as the ground raced closer.
I Lightened my body and Pushed my energy off Dragan, driving him even harder into the ground while slowing my own descent. His body smashed into the asphalt of the Boulevard, shattering it for six feet in every direction, while I landed relatively softly five yards away, folding my legs to absorb the kinetic impact. Crouching for a second before straightening up… and noticing the crowd that came rushing in.
Cops and cop cars formed a perimeter fifty or sixty feet away, but the rest of the onlookers were vacationers, casino dealers, hotel staff, taxi drivers, and reporters—lots of reporters—with cameras. They flinched as my gaze passed over them, and I realized that Grim was still at the helm, peering out of my eyes.
A glance back at the massive body embedded in the broken blacktop assured me Dragan was dead. I have no idea of the force with which he hit the ground. Wait… I got this.
“Omega, how hard did he hit?” I muttered under my breath.
“Approximating his mass, cross sectional area, drag coefficient, as well as the estimated air density for this location and weather conditions, I estimate his terminal velocity was approximately fifty meters per second, or roughly one hundred eighty kilometers per hour,” Omega said. I didn’t do well converting metric to English in my head. Something must have shown on my face, something he picked up on one of the dozens of cameras currently recording my every flinch and flicker.
“That would be approximately one hundred and twelve miles an hour. Approaching three hundred and seventy thousand foot-pounds of energy, Chris.”
“Ah, thanks,” I muttered, inspecting the carcass closer. He was completely shattered, and the black pool of his tainted blood was spreading by the second. The police moved aside to let a few people through. Nathan Stewart and the ever-present Adine Benally. I met both their gazes for a moment, then bent over Dragan’s body and speared my knife hand straight through his crushed sternum. With death, whatever demonic protection he had from my aura was long gone, as my hand slid though his muscle and bone like a laser scalpel.
It took a second of rummaging around, a second that brought the sounds of my audience’s disgust to my sensitive ears. Not for prime time, kiddies—this shit’s graphic in nature.
Ah, there it was. With a grasp and a yank, his rock-hard, over-sized heart ripped and tore free of the chest cavity. Gagging sounds were followed almost immediately by the sounds of at least one onlooker losing their expensive Vegas dinner.
Ignoring the crowd, I stepped back and held my black-coated hand high over my head. >Kirby< I called, never opening my mouth.
A small aircraft ripped through reality and flapped giant wings directly over my head. The down draft blew black blood all over my torso and I suddenly recalled that I was shirtless. Water-bottle-sized talons plucked the lump of demonic cardiac tissue from my hand and with a screech worthy of a pteranodon, Kirby blinked out of existence.
With a flick of my arm, most of the demon crap snapped right off my hand. “We gotta burn all this blood,” I said to Stewart.
“We need samples first,” he said.
I felt my face harden. Before I could answer, another voice interrupted. “I can handle it,” Declan said. He was standing off to one side.
“What are you doing here? What about Tanya and the babies?” I asked. Whispers and mutters started instantly. I might have said that too loud. And maybe a little harshly.
“Locked up tighter than a frog’s butt. Arkady is headed back there, and I warded the bejesus out of it. So to speak,” he said with a grimace as he realized what he just said.
“Frog’s butt?” I asked, suddenly fighting a grin.
“They’re waterproof,” he said with a shrug. Then he flicked a hand in Dragan’s direction and the pool of blood flashed with heat, frying to powder in a heartbeat before blowing away in a sudden wind that probably wasn’t coincidental. Dragan’s fur was burnt and the broken asphalt was now melted and gooey looking.
Stewart sighed. “We could have analyzed that,” he said. “At least we have the body.”
I exchanged a look with Declan. Stewart noticed. “No, we…” he said, but it was way too late because a wave of heat blasted out from the corpse. The fur was the first to burn, flaring up into flame and greasy smoke that rose and hovered above us. A light formed in the center of the huge carcass, orange and yellow, then white, the glow spreading to encompass all of Dragan. My skin felt the heat as if standing in the full desert sun—in the center of a dozen mirrors.
Our audience had to look away and cover their faces, but then the light winked out and the demon werewolf of Las Vegas was gone. A breeze lifted the heat away and cool Nevada night air flowed over us. The blasted tarmac was oozing and slumping back almost flat.
Declan stood, hands in the pockets of his jeans, face tight with something, some emotion, then he saw me looking and the expression was gone, smoothed out to a studied nonchalance. It took a second for my brain to identify the first expression—fear. But of what? Himself?
“We got places to be,” he said with a nod at me. After a moment, I realized he wasn’t indicating my blood-spattered chest but rather the cord straps of the blue string bag. He reached into his magic bag and pulled out the missing shard of stone.
“We need to intercept Yellowstone and keep it away or all this will be wasted,” he said. “I stopped by the borrowed safe house to get this.”
“Just you and me?” I asked.
“Yeah. Stacia’s with that bridal girl at the hospital. The rest of the gang is locked up snug in the plane. This is just a two-man road trip,” he said.
“With digital supervision,” Omega said in Declan’s Bluetooth earpiece.
“Of course,” the kid said, shrugging.
But of course.
Chapter 28
His ever-handy bag provided me with Clorox wipes and while I was cleaning the demon blood off, he pulled out a black t-shirt.
He noticed my curious expression. “We were watching on TV. Tanya handed all this stuff to me on my way out. The babies are really cute, by the way,” he said.
“Babies?” Stewart asked. “There’s more than one?”
“Twins,” I said. I’d only seen them for mere moments and I really, really didn’t want to be here but there… holding them, looking at them, absorbing them.
Declan watched me. “This won’t take long. Maybe a few hours or so,” he said with assurance. How the hell did he know how long it would take to placate a monster fire elemental with the power to tear North America in half?
“It probably just wants its name back so it can get back to looking at its fiery navel or whatever the hell it does for thousands of years at a time,” he said. The damn kid was getting too clever at reading me by half. Also, when did he become the responsible one?
“You talk about yours like they have personalities,” I said.
“‘Cause they do. They’re babies. This thing is millions of years old. I doubt it even knew humans existed before today,” he said.
“What’s to stop it from ridding its continent of those pesky humans?” I asked.
“God’s traffic cop… and an elemental whisperer,” he said with a cheeky grin.
I sighed and turned to Stewart. “We gotta go. Work’s not done.”
“More world saving?” he asked, nodding at the stone in Declan’s hand.
“Yeah, I guess,” I muttered as we headed for the encircling crowd. I paused to figure out what to do with the bloody wipes in my hand. Declan smacked my open hand from underneath and burned the wipes as they flew up.
“Here. Cover up; you’re causing heart palpitations and much swooning amongst our audience,” he said, handing me the t-shirt.
There were dozens, if not hundreds, of phones and cameras pointed at us, matching faces wide-eyed with adrenaline and fear. Suddenly, a familiar female reporter shoved
through, daring to approach closely.
“Babies? You said babies, Mr. Gordon?” she asked.
“Hey Brystol, when’d you get here?” Declan asked her.
Brystol Chatterjee, reporter of the arcane, frowned at him. “Like forty minutes ago, no thanks to you and your woman. Could’ve given me a heads up, D,” she said.
“Nope. We’ve talked about this. Operational security comes first,” he said, grinning.
“Where’s your shadow? Shouldn’t she be here snarling at anything female that comes near you?” she asked him.
It’s kind of fun, her mostly ignoring me to talk with the kid. They were closer in age and he doesn’t have my freaky off-putting eyes, so she could interrogate him and spare a few glances at me. Plus, I knew she had a friendship with Stacia. Her nerdy camera man was behind her, recording everything in High-Def.
