by John Conroe
“He’s best off without a weapon. Not a bad shot, just more effective with his mojo,” she said, pulling off her bandolier and handing it to him as well.
“So you’re going to…” was as far as he got before she pulled her shirt off. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. He turned his head but the image was already burned onto his retinas.
The shirt went to the kid, who tucked it into his bag, waiting for her to strip off the tights. Buck kept his eyes to the front, figuring security was most important. It wasn’t like he was conflicted about wanting to watch Stacia strip naked. Not like he’d be able to explain it to his wife; not to mention the chance of either offending her or her scary witch boyfriend.
Crunching, popping sounds came from just behind him and the hair on the back of his neck rose. He couldn’t help it; he turned to watch as she grew to a full seven feet of twisted muscle and claw, white fur, and fang. Her eyes, now the size of tangerines, were bright yellow and narrowed.
“It hurts, even for her and she’s the absolute fastest there is,” Declan told him casually. “So she’s usually a bit touchy. Best to avoid eye contact.”
The monstrous beast that had just been a beautiful girl growled and strode forward, between them. It knocked into Declan and sent him flying; or at least would have if a long white-furred arm hadn’t caught his left bicep in passing and held him upright.
“She’s also a bit of a bully in this form,” Declan said, stepping back as the hand-paw that had just held him now became a backhand swing. “Likes to beat up on people half her size,” the kid continued conversationally.
The massive head swiveled around and one glaring yellow eye locked on the tall witch. “Yeah, yeah, pain and retribution are headed my way, blah blah blah. You just focus on the path ahead,” Declan said, his voice calm.
She turned back to the front, her body crouching in the tight headspace, leaning forward on long arms to place her knuckles on the ground gorilla style.
She sniffed the air and then tilted her head to the left. Her left paw tapped four times on the floor.
“Four persons that way, which should be Hollis and the last of his people,” Declan translated.
Her head tracked to the front and paused. The same left paw reached forward and tapped the ground four more times, but with different levels of force. A hard first tap, an even harder second tap, a soft third, and just the brush of knuckles for the fourth.
“That wounded were is probably just ahead, followed by the alpha. I’m guessing he’s in combat form?” he asked. Her headed nodded slightly. “Then the witch and finally the last one who seemed like a child to me.” The giant white were grunted agreement.
“So the kid? An innocent off the street, or their own child?” Buck asked, amazed at how these two understood each other.
“Not sure. Either way, we got a kid up there to worry about,” Declan said. “HOLLIS? There’s a kid up there with them,” he yelled.
Stacia slapped her paw-hand on the floor. Declan noted it and nodded.
“And an animated body. If you see your missing man, throw salt on him. Lots of salt,” Declan said, loud enough for the rest of the team to hear.
“ROGER THAT,” came the reply, echoing in the steel jungle.
“You ready?” Declan asked Buck. “You comfortable with her shotgun?”
“I’m going to stick with mine unless I need it. No way am I going to switch to an unknown weapon in the middle of combat,” Buck said.
“Yeah, good choice. I’ve heard that exact rule from no less than half of Demidova Incorporated security at one time or another. But if you need it, here’s the safety and then you have two fast shots before you need to pump. Think of it as a double-barreled backup.”
“Roger that.”
“Alrighty then. Let’s roll out,” the kid said softly.
Chapter 34
The kid kneeled down and drew in the dust on the floor. He pointed at Stacia and made a dot on the drawing next to a circle that Buck guessed was the big floor-to-ceiling pipe immediately ahead.
The finger drew a circular path around the column of the pipe. Then it drew four dots up ahead of Stacia. Next, a second dot representing Declan himself. And a third, which was Buck, because he pointed at Buck. With a couple more passes of his finger, the whole of the simple plan was clear.
Stacia would lead around the corner. The wounded were was likely the first obstacle. Declan would step around just after the white werewolf and fling his balls of death at the wolf. Stacia would move forward to engage the Alpha. Buck needed to finish off the wounded wolf, which was probably Tacchino. Declan would concentrate on the witch. The animated dead body was an unknown. It had no heartbeat for wolfish hearing to track, just a stench of death. They would have to handle it on the fly and also keep an eye on the rest of the DOAA team, when and if they entered the fray.
It was a silent briefing, preventing the enemy from hearing its details. The plan was cold stone simple, allowing for change to accommodate Murphy’s law of combat.
At Buck’s nod of understanding, Declan tapped Stacia’s massive, muscled back and she slid silently forward. Just like that, the assault was underway. No time for nerves, no time to second guess, just instant commitment.
It wasn’t just training that made these two so effective. There were massive amounts of raw combat talent here that made this almost easy for them. They’d been trained, that was clear, but the rest was just instinct. Buck had seen other natural soldiers and warriors before, but none that could double their own mass and grow claws and fangs or burn down a building with a gesture.
It took one second to clear the arc of the pipe, and then they were in a broader area. A massive black wolf, its head a scabby mess of burnt black and blood-red tissue slid out of the shadows, crouching to leap. Stacia simply leaned low and to her right, her weight on one arm and her squatting legs as the three steel silver death balls shot over her left shoulder and hit the wolf in its forehead, left shoulder, and right leg. It collapsed forward and Buck shuffled forward, carefully stepping heel-to-toe, just enough to line up his sights on the broad cranium and stroke the trigger.
A boom and a flash of muzzle fire, the skull bulging at the intrusion of an ounce and a quarter of silver slug.
Then he was pulling back and pumping his gun’s action as a roar filled the space and a giant, dark-furred form leapt from a catwalk above.
The falling form was immense, bigger by a third than the white monster that was Stacia, and it was dropping fast, claw-tipped arms widespread, jaws opened wide.
Stacia jumped backward, her left arm clotheslining Buck back with her. He hit the ground, clutching his gun and feeling the DP-12 imprint itself on his spine. Awkwardly, he squirmed and scrambled until he got his feet under him and stood up.
The Alpha had missed Stacia and him both, thanks to her speed, but it had somehow managed to get its feet under it as it landed, which left it ready to meet Stacia’s lunge.
The white wolf was badly outsized, a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, but she didn’t hesitate as she shot for the bigger beast. They both roared and came together.
Buck expected raw fury and unrestrained violence. That was certainly the impression that the Alpha gave off. But Stacia’s attack was more studied and less frenzied. She took a blow to one shoulder that would have decapitated a man, shrugging it off as she slid in to get her own arm under the bigger monster’s, and then executed a hip throw that could have come directly from an army MACP combatives course.
Werewolf reflexes are faster than human and the Alpha, even taken by surprise, was able to twist his body and land with one leg under himself. Stacia was even faster still, noticing the leg and instantly dragging the bigger wolfman backward as her right fist clutched at his throat.
Unable to get leverage with the posted leg, the Alpha pushed off it, adding a little to the backward momentum, twisting his upper torso as he did, pulling his throat away from her claws.
Givin
g up on a quick kill, Stacia grabbed a fistful of brown fur with her displaced hand and shoved the Alpha in the same direction as he was pushing, adding to his own momentum and driving his skull into a giant steel funnel-shaped tank hard enough to dent it in. She added a left hammer fist to the side of his skull and simultaneously slashed the back of his right leg with her right claws.
A massive hand flung backward, a wild desperate reverse swing that still had the power to throw Stacia across the floor.
Another figure moved out from the darkness, this one human-shaped and sized, but shambling. The bloody DOAA uniform was a dead giveaway, Declan thought, snorting at his own pun. He drew the little Ruger revolver and fired three fast shots, two center of mass and one to the head, the way he’d been taught at Arcane.
The revenant that used to be Agent Kinte jerked to a stop, frozen in place by the garlic-oil-and-rowan-wood-filled plastic CCI capsules. Made to hold snake-killing birdshot, the little plastic cylinders worked fine with Declan’s anti-evil mixture.
But the revenant was still standing there, so the young witch threw a handful of salt on it with his left hand while holstering the revolver with his right. Then he plucked the combat tomahawk from its sheath and stepped closer.
With a quick, practiced motion, Declan poured two arcs of salt, forming a down-and-dirty circle around the motionless body. Then he moved around behind it and found what he suspected he might find… a long incision on the corpse’s back. It cut right through the uniform, and the bloody material made it clear the cut had happened while Agent Kinte was still alive. Pulling apart the sliced cloth, Declan could see the hasty stitches that bound up the long slice just to the left of the spine.
With a quick slice of his ax head, he reopened the wound. Flipping the haft in his hand, he stroked the spike on the tomahawk down through the wound. It came away with a bundle.
The brain and heart of a small animal, surrounded by small bones and a mix of herbs that he couldn’t identify in the gloom. It was all bound together with long, bloody strips of skin, likely cut from the young agent himself.
He shook it clear of his ax, stepping back as the vile thing splatted on the concrete. With a gesture, he burned it, then threw more salt on the ashes.
As he stepped away, the body fell to the ground.
Behind him, the fight was raging back and forth although Declan felt Stacia had the upper hand, as the large male’s leg was still wounded.
Movement to his left caught his eye and he turned to see gun barrels come poking out of an opening between pipes and vats. The DOAA team had made it to the party. All four assault rifles opened up, mostly on the Alpha as he scrabbled across the floor, pulling himself with his arms as much as he pushed with his legs.
The bullets tracked across the face of the giant funnel vat, trying to catch up to the huge wolfman that was crawling faster than an Olympic sprinter could run. The armor piercing rounds tore a dark, jagged smile in the metal of the tank, failing to catch up to the monster that lunged at Stacia.
Declan threw up a shield over the combatants and himself, afraid the agents wouldn’t stop their fire for Stacia’s sake. Sure enough, a dozen bullets froze in mid-air, two feet from the writhing furball of brown and white.
The Alpha was trying to use his greater mass and strength to crush and control the lighter, smaller Stacia, but Declan actually felt better now that they were ground fighting. He knew, from deep, personal experience, just how skilled the blonde girl had become at Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Although, truth be told, her grappling skill had been carefully morphed away from traditional competition jiu-jitsu, becoming something much more brutal and deadly. Tanya and Chris had foreseen exactly this type of scenario when designing her training, and so her claws ripped and tore as much as they gripped and twisted while her bear-trap jaws snapped shut on anything he offered. It wasn’t one-sided though, as her snow-white fur was stained red with her own blood in dozens of places.
The DOAA team had run out of ammo and was changing magazines, moving closer as they did. The bizarre smiley face on the vat was now dripping black fluids that were spreading across the floor. Declan almost ignored it, caught between watching the fight, looking for the witch, and making sure his allies didn’t shoot his friend.
But something made him look back at the black flow now pouring from the crippled vat. It was dark, but his spelled vision showed him the truth. What was dropping in clumps and clods from the tank wasn’t fluid. It was bugs. Insects. Cockroaches. Hundreds of thousands of cockroaches falling from the vat and spreading across the floor, seeking, searching.
In a flash, he understood. She had bred them. Fed them on carrion, probably the bodies of the unfortunate recruits who failed to reach a biological truce with the LV virus that the Alpha had introduced to their bodies. There could be millions of them, and like everything else in this cursed mill, they would be twisted and bent far from nature’s path.
The flowing horde was closest to the furry fury on the floor, but they had run into Declan’s bullet shield, which stopped them cold, leaving the combatants free to continue their twisting, jaw-snapping fight. The flood of bugs flowed along the shield’s edge, moving closer to Declan, Buck, and Draco while another, larger flow streamed toward the DOAA team, pouring over the body of Agent Kinte and covering it in a black, squirming blanket.
You must burn them, Father, Omega said in his earpiece. The sentient AI had stayed curiously quiet throughout most of the battle across the mill, but now there was a certain note of concern.
I calculate that the volume of that vat exceeds one thousand cubic feet. Assuming two adult insects per cubic inch, you are looking at approximately three-point-four-five-zero million carnivorous insects. Burn them, Father.
The flood continued, and now the bugs were piling up against his shield and flowing closer to his group as well as the DOAA team. The body on the floor had become a skeleton wrapped in threads of cloth.
“Draco, burn those please,” he said, pointing at the closest bugs. The little dragon had been watching the horde with increasing agitation and now it immediately pulled back its head, took a breath, and blew a streaming cone of orange fire across the floor.
The agents jumped back at the flare of fire, but it wasn’t directed their way. The light of the flames did do a fine job of illuminating the mass of insects almost at their feet.
“Hold still,” Declan yelled to them, waving his right hand in a tight, precise manner. Two of the agents had shotguns and began to pump round after round into the mass of insects, killing hundreds with each shot and having no effect whatsoever on stemming the tide.
Unlike his dragon, Declan didn’t bother with visible flames. Too much lost heat, too inefficient. He couldn’t spare any power on showy spells that he might otherwise have chosen if supplemental heat sources were nearby.
Instead, his gesture threw an invisible wave of focused thermal energy across the front ranks of the bug army, withering thousands of black bodies into crispy little piles of carbon. As many as he burned, more flowed forward, unimpressed with the loss of their cousins and siblings, dropping in waves from the source: the massive funnel vat. Declan studied it even as he pushed heat into the pool of bugs spread across the floor. The air grew hot and he harvested some of the waste heat, recycling it back into his beam of infrared energy.
His left hand dipped into the messenger bag and rummaged through the contents, finally bringing forth a squat, round container.
“Draco, clear a path,” he said, pointing to the vat, but when the little dragon took a breath, a blast of air came up hard on them both, pushing with implacable force into their faces, removing Declan’s ability to breathe and making it impossible for Draco to loose his fire. Instinctively, Declan dropped to one knee and turned his head back to find enough of a break in the wind to draw a breath. The wind blew even harder, blasting air past him too fast to breathe in.
It was hardwired into Declan to avoid using his very limited abilities with Air around other
witches. Most figured out his dual affinity for Earth and Fire, but there were no records of a witch having a third affinity, no matter how weak. So it was his hidden edge. Now there was no choice. There was no other option; his lungs were frozen tight and he was getting dizzy. With a wave of his left hand, he parted the gale force blasting his face and took a deep breath. Then he lifted his head and stared across the open space to the one part of the room where dim daylight shone through. A figure stood outlined in the pale light—small, slight, but with female curves. Long hair and shadow hid her face, but he knew she was staring straight at him, her head and neck pulled slightly back in what he read as surprise.
Still kneeling, he touched his right hand to the ground and pushed. The concrete floor shook hard, bouncing bugs, agents, the skeleton, and even the two fighting werewolves a foot into the air. It also knocked the witch off her feet, disrupting her concentration and ruining her spell. Almost instantly, the wind died and Draco loosed a fiery cone of concentrated flame that burned through the bugs and pushed toward the witch.
