The woman wore the green fatigues of the Border Patrol. I recognized her as the one in charge at the highway checkpoint, the officer who had mysteriously let us pass.
The helicopter doused its lights and accelerated into a wide orbit above us.
“You owe us a loud and sincere thank you.” King Gullah swung the cane toward the bedlam in the canyon. “If it wasn’t for Antoine, me, and the rest of my undead team, you and your merry band would be ass deep in bad trouble.”
“Thanks then,” I replied. “But you could’ve clued us in.”
“Not while Phaedra has you as target numero uno. Consider our silence as operational security.”
“How did you know the convoy was on its way here?” Jolie asked.
The border patrol officer tugged at her shirt collar to show off the insignia. “We have family on the inside. We got these guys shooting at each other. That fight you see is fratricide gone amok.”
“So Cress Tech is off our back for now,” I said. “I can’t imagine the load of reinforcements that’s going to follow this shitstorm.”
The agent sneered. “You’re giving the federal government too much credit. Cress Tech’s operation was buried beneath layers of deniability from the get-go. Ain’t no one copping to this disaster.”
“Which gives us till morning,” Gullah noted. “Cress Tech located Phaedra in the Chaco ruins. Once we got a fix on her,” he said, pointing his cane at the circling helicopter, “we’ll shoot so many Hellfire missiles up her ass she’ll explode like a piñata.”
“As much as I enjoy the visuals, you can’t do that,” I countered. “She’s taken Coyote hostage.”
Gullah set his lips into a hard line. He looked at the border patrol agent and she looked back at him. “Considering all that we’ve sacrificed,” he said, “and all the vampires Phaedra has killed, we have to take advantage of our firepower while we have the opportunity.”
Carmen’s aura flushed with anger and erased any sign of her impaired condition. “If you mean writing off Coyote as collateral damage, that is not going to happen.”
Gullah raised a finger. “Sacrifice one to end this calamity, I say that’s a bargain. If that bothers you, I’ll feel guilty enough for the both of us.”
Carmen started toward him, but I held her back. As distasteful as Gullah’s proposal was, I had to consider it. If Phaedra was betting the last of her chips and using my friend as a shield, then we had better be ready to double-down and live with the consequences.
The border patrol agent grasped the radio mike attached to her shoulder and barked an order. The Blackhawk banked and descended. She and Gullah backed away toward where they had been dropped off.
Carmen broke free of my grasp. For a vampire in such a debilitated state, she remained surprisingly strong. “We won’t do Phaedra’s dirty work. I’ll rescue Coyote on my own.”
Gullah and the agent kept backing away. Carmen kept after them. “Promise me that you won’t harm Coyote. I need your word.”
“You have my word that I’ll do what needs to be done,” Gullah said. “While you were in outer space, she was annihilating the Araneum. She tortured vampires in ways that would’ve made Vlad the Impaler cringe. When this is long past, feel free to look me up and give me hell.”
The Blackhawk slowed and swooped low. Gullah and the agent turned and sprinted toward the helicopter. They leapt and glided to the open cargo door. The Blackhawk continued in its swooping arc and climbed. The lights clicked on once, then off as if to say goodbye.
Carmen’s aura roiled in distress. “You don’t agree with them, do you?”
I didn’t answer. Jolie averted her eyes and returned to the Humvee. She understood the weight of difficult choices. Years ago she had been sent to execute me. Duty was a heavy burden. Carmen knew that, too.
Let Carmen forever condemn me, but if Phaedra thought she could hide behind Coyote, she was mistaken. If necessary, we would have to sacrifice one pawn to get the queen.
Carmen brought a hand to her head and knees buckling, she reached for the Humvee to keep from falling. She whispered, “Phaedra.”
From inside the Humvee, Jolie exclaimed, “The diviner’s really lighting up.” The glow from its crystal lit up her face.
What was Phaedra doing?
The turbines in Gullah’s helicopter hiccupped and that answered my questions. I sprang from the Humvee and looked up. The Blackhawk rocked and yawed violently. I imagined Antoine and Gullah and the others inside writhing as Phaedra’s mental ray hammered their brains. She could only use her psychic powers on one vampire at a time, but she could whip the ray from mind to mind, scrambling their thoughts into pudding.
The Blackhawk bucked like a gaffed fish and rolled onto its back. The helicopter nosed straight down and smashed into the ground, disintegrating and exploding into a monstrous shower of flame and sparks.
We stared slack-jawed at the fiery deaths of our doomed friends. Just like that, Phaedra had evened the odds.
Move. Counter-move.
The burning wreck settled against the ground and pointed down the canyon. Crows emerged from the darkness and flowed toward the ruins like pools of oil.
A glowing light with swirls of red, yellow, and green, materialized between us and the ruins.
Phaedra.
Waiting.
***
Chapter Forty-nine
My neurons fired at super speed as I calculated how to put a bullet through Phaedra.
Air … calm. No need to adjust for windage.
Range to target … five hundred meters, give-or-take. The .45-70 wasn’t a long-distance cartridge. Compensate for the bullet drop by aiming way over her head.
Jolie bolted from the driver’s seat, M4 at the ready.
I was pulling the carbine to my shoulder when Phaedra’s psychic blast thundered into my head. Clenching my teeth, I tensed to withstand the attack.
To no avail. The blast crashed against my kundalini noir and ricocheted down my spinal column. Megawatt jolts of pain charged through my arms and legs. My mind flipped left, right, upside down, and all went black.
I woke face down in the dirt. My consciousness swam through a cesspool of nausea and pain. Round one of this battle and Phaedra had kicked my ass. Even with supernatural strength I’d need a minute to recover. As my thoughts cleared and I regained control of my limbs, I pushed up from the ground to see what more damage that witch Phaedra had inflicted on us.
Jolie lay beside me, on her back, squirming like a poisoned bug. Second by second, her aura morphed from red to orange. She rolled onto her belly, and the string of curses coming out her mouth assured me that she would survive.
Carmen had advanced a few steps and stood, fists against her sides, her posture rigid as she absorbed the full brunt of Phaedra’s barrage. Carmen’s posture eased, and I figured Phaedra had backed off from her attack.
An image projected into my brain. Coyote lay heaped on the ground inside a cramped enclosure, a small underground room.
I have him. Phaedra’s voice echoed in my skull. And he’s going boo hoo hoo. Oh woe is me.
The image dissolved into a gray noise of dull pain. Queasy and weak, I reached for the Marlin from where I had dropped it. I brought my knees under me and leaned on the carbine to rise to my feet.
Phaedra retreated down a trail to where tumbled adobe walls marked the edge of the Chaco ruins. My brain was still stuck in neutral and by the time I raised the Marlin for a shot, she had disappeared into the zigzag maze of the ruins.
Jolie hadn’t fired either, and we used this intermission to collect our marbles.
She, Carmen, and I occupied a draw in the sloped escarpment of the southern mesa. The escarpment flattened into the sandy wash at the bottom of the canyon. A dry creek meandered down the middle of the wash.
The Humvee idled fifty meters behind us. To the north and beyond the smoldering wreck of Gullah’s helicopter, smoke from the Cress Tech ambush rose over the ridge and unspooled across
the stars in a crimson film. Gullah and Antoine hadn’t attacked alone, but I had no way of communicating with the rest of their forces. Even if I tried the radio in the Humvee, who would I contact?
Behind Phaedra, the canyon opened around Chaco ruins. Crumbling adobe structures filled the space between the cliffs of the northern mesa and the remains of the circular kivas. The tumbled walls were lined up like rows of weathered tombstones. Coyote could be locked up anywhere down there.
Along the creek bed and the trail, red auras burst among the shrubs and rocks. Eight, nine, ten humans formed a line two hundred meters away, between Phaedra and us. She had used this recess to deploy her human minions through psychic portals. Up until now, Phaedra had only used vampires. And these humans had come armed. Moonlight glinted off their pyschotronic disruptors.
Shaking from Phaedra’s mind blast, Jolie fired out her magazine as she fell. Tracers blasted from the gun’s muzzle and streaked through the air.
Psychic waves hammered my brain, punching from different directions like I’d been jumped in a barroom brawl. I dropped, but the pain halted because I had landed behind cover and out of the line of fire from the disruptors.
Carmen remained in the open. Flames of agony enveloped her aura. Not only was she absorbing the focus of Phaedra’s power, she stood in the intersecting blasts from the disruptors.
Helpless against the disruptors and Phaedra’s psychic mojo, I kept my body flat on the ground. I’d felt like this before in Iraq when the enemy rained mortar shells on my position. Like then, my mind clawed for a way out. But I couldn’t jump up and run or crawl out of this escarpment without getting mowed down.
I knew what was next. If Phaedra used the psychic portals to deploy the humans, then she’d soon dispatch her vampires. I drew my carbine close and waited. My reflexes, normally quick enough to steal cheese from a mousetrap, now creaked at rusty, blunt-tooth speed.
Carmen’s knees weakened. The crossfire of psychic blasts was beating her down. The final attack was about to commence. When the vampires appeared, the humans would advance behind them and give covering fire with the disruptors. Phaedra’s weapon of choice was undead suicide bombers, and she’d probably groomed her most devoted martyrs for this knockout blow.
Death was so close its icy fingers caressed my kundalini noir. If Phaedra won, all of our heroics had amounted to nothing. I would die. Jolie would die. Carmen. Coyote. All of us undead would be vanquished.
Our only option was to die fighting. Nothing glorious about our situation. The enemy would storm us until they wiped us out.
The ground stirred as if it were coming alive. Crows darted between the clumps of grass and sage. They moved like drips of inky black syrup, practically invisible in the gloom even to my vampire eyes. I saw them collect in twos and threes, then assemble in larger groups as they oozed over the ground in mass toward the humans. They walked around me. Over me.
I raised my head just enough to see what they intended. The humans had no idea the crows were marching on their position, and apparently, neither did Phaedra.
On some secret signal, the crows lit their auras and sprang upward in gouts of flaming red and orange. They swarmed over Phaedra’s minions, cawing and pecking. The humans screamed, dropped their disruptors and tried to fight them off.
I took my chance. I raised my carbine and hunted for Phaedra. But she was gone. So I drew a bead on a human covered in crows and sent him to minion Valhalla.
Jolie slammed a fresh magazine into her M4 and dropped two more humans.
Orange blobs of light erupted from the ground between us and the humans. Phaedra’s vampires had at last arrived. They wore suicide bomb vests and rushed us.
Another wave of crows roiled from the ground, a fountain of auras melding into a fiery smear. Raucous cawing blared through the night air. The crows descended on the vampires, enveloping them in a tsunami of feathers and beaks.
A vampire blew himself up. Pieces of crow spun past me. A second vampire exploded. More shredded crow. And a third vampire went boom. I levered the Marlin and fired, triggering another vampire explosion. Jolie and I panned our guns from vampire to human to vampire to human until we had run out of targets. The growl of explosions faded up the canyon. The air stank of spent ammo and burnt meat. Smoke corkscrewed from the muzzle of my carbine. The barrel of Jolie’s M4 glowed cherry red. I fished cartridges from my pocket and fed them into the Marlin.
Smoldering craters marked where the vampires last stood. The few surviving humans dragged themselves along the ground, whimpering and bleeding. Flocks of crows glided to the earth, darkened their auras, and retreated into the gloomy crevasses of the canyon floor.
Nerves primed, my vampire senses swept the darkness for more enemy. I headed toward Carmen and stepped over the smoking remnants of crows. As much as I disliked the feathered bastards, I had to acknowledge that they had saved our butts. The crows joined our attack because they had suffered as much as vampires under Phaedra’s hand, and apparently, they were just as eager to settle the score.
When I propped up Carmen, I felt the trembling of her maimed kundalini noir. I brushed a curl of sweat-matted hair off her forehead. She grimaced, then clasped my wrist and held my hand against her face. Sobbing quietly, she leaned into me. I couldn’t imagine the ordeal she had endured. If it had been me, I would’ve broken and we’d all be toast.
Jolie tossed her carbine aside and drew her .45s. “Let’s finish that bitch.”
Carmen let go of my hand, straightened and whispered, “Pity party over.”
“Maybe you should stay here,” I suggested.
Her aura bristled. “Fuck you.”
Jolie handed her one of the .45s. Carmen brushed it away. “When it comes time for me to kill Phaedra, it’s gonna be done old school.” Her fangs shined bright as polished daggers, and the talons sprang from her fingertips, menacing as straight razors.
I took the pistol and again offered it to Carmen. “Let’s not let pride get in the—”
“What did I just say?” she snapped.
“Fine, you win.” I slapped the .45 back in Jolie’s hand. “Let’s do this.”
We advanced down the center of the draw, Carmen in the middle, Jolie to her left, me to the right. Out the corners of my eyes, I saw columns of crows snaking along the ground toward the ruins.
Phaedra could appear behind us, but then who was left to guard Coyote? I doubted she kept a force in reserve. Once she thought she had us trapped, she would’ve thrown everything in her arsenal at us. Thanks to the crows, we had kicked the props from under her plan.
A green light dazzled my eyes and a fresh wave of psychic pain knocked me back a step. I gathered my strength to stand fast. But fighting against the mind blast was like trying to stay on your feet while getting smashed by a Mack truck.
The pain eased and it was Jolie’s turn to stagger backwards, then Carmen’s. I brought the Marlin up for a quick shot at Phaedra but her psychic wave whipped me once more.
When my vision cleared, I saw at the far end of the ruins, two auras rushing from the creek and darting behind the walls. Doña Marina and El Cucuy. As reinforcements.
“Watch your fire,” I warned Jolie. “Doña Marina and El Cucuy are here.”
“I’m glad they got off their asses to do something,” Jolie replied. “Phaedra can’t defend herself against all of us at once.”
That and El Cucuy could absorb her blasts and wear her out. That would let Jolie and me maneuver close for one quick shot.
The crows rose from the ground and lit their auras. They formed two orange, twisting pillars, one on Phaedra’s left, another to her right. The scream of the birds echoed against the mesa walls with immense fury, announcing their savage desire for revenge. They arced toward Phaedra like the jaws of giant pincers and clamped around her.
Her aura pulsed and the envelope of crows burst into a cloud of torn feathers and dust. The debris sloughed around her feet.
Another wave of crows pour
ed over Phaedra. And again she pulsed her aura and hundreds of the birds vanished in clots of feathers and dust.
The auras reappeared from behind the ruins and sprinted back to the creek. Doña Marina and El Cucuy, who carried Coyote in his arms. Doña Marina hadn’t arrived to help us. No wonder she had agreed to my demand that she remain behind. She had conspired with El Cucuy to use our attack as a diversion to rescue Coyote. While I was willing to sacrifice Coyote to destroy Phaedra, Doña Marina was willing to sacrifice us to save her son. With centuries of practice, she was the master of playing one side against the other.
If Phaedra had figured out what Doña Marina had just done, she didn’t get the chance to act on it because another wave of crows attacked. They shrieked in hatred, rising and descending in a tsunami of wings and beaks and claws.
I yelled to Jolie, “Here’s our chance.”
I aimed the Marlin at the middle of the boiling mass of birds—certain that I could’ve drilled Phaedra—when crows swooped low to knock the Marlin aside. They fluttered around my head and Jolie’s, cawing angrily.
Carmen shouted, “They’re claiming dibs on Phaedra.”
And again, Phaedra pulsed her aura and dozens more crows died. She raked us with another psychic ray. When we recovered, she was retreating into the ruins, running away like a cowardly thief instead of the once mighty and self-proclaimed Queen of the Vampires.
Dazed crows limped on the ground, heads down, wings and tails drooping. One glanced up at me as if to say, Okay vampire, your turn.
Having lost Coyote as a hostage, I was certain Phaedra might try to escape through a psychic portal. Yet I saw her dash through the ruins as if she were searching for a place to hide.
Mule deer appeared around the perimeter of the ruins.
Jolie shifted weight from foot to foot and flexed her grip on the .45s. “What gives?”
A buck circled behind us. It dissolved into a blur that stretched into the weird ungainly shape of a skin-walker.
Rescue From Planet Pleasure Page 30
