Breathing Fire (Heretic Daughters)

by Rebecca K. Lilley

  “Your obsession blinds you!” Cam interrupted with a roar. Dom silenced his outburst with a look.

  “Your request is denied. You have much to learn about showing gratitude.”

  Cam sent me a murderous look. I mouthed, “you’re welcome,” at him. He visibly reigned himself in from reacting violently. I smirked at him, pretending to scratch my nose as I flipped him off. He had to turn away, shaking with rage.

  “These things had help learning about our magic,” Cam was saying to his Arch again. He just wouldn’t quit. He paced back and forth in front of Dom as he set up his case. “No druid would betray such things. It’s unheard of. She was in close proximity to our kind for over thirteen years. She picked up enough information about our magic to detect a circle of power. It’s obvious she picked up more than that! You can’t think it’s a coincidence she shows up days before this fight, and everything goes to hell. Would you rather accuse one of our own of betrayal than see this whore for what she is?”

  That was it, I was done. I braced myself to give the bastard the beating he deserved, but Dom beat me to it. His back was to me as he backhanded his cousin, hard. “I said enough. You do not question me in the midst of battle! I’ve heard your argument. We will settle this after the fight. The longer we stand here, the more of them we’re allowing to escape.”

  Cam sent me a scathing look as he stood, touching his bloodied lip as though I’d done it. I only wished. “Asshole,” I mouthed at him. Both of his hands clenched. Yes, I kind of enjoyed baiting enraged bears. It was one of my hobbies, and clearly I excelled at it… Just ask anybody.

  “Nice crown,” Christian said quietly as he came up beside me. “But why nab it? You have the urge to play dress up? You like to pretend to be Queen Jillian?”

  I bit my lip, embarrassed. “It was shiny.” He stifled a loud laugh that got us some dirty looks. “It has rubies on it. It’s hard to pass up rubies.” He laughed harder and I elbowed him in the ribs.

  Dom sent us a stormy look. “Back to battle!” he roared at any soldiers still milling.

  “We’re running low on explosives,” Christian told me as we set off.

  “I’m sure we’ll have no trouble improvising,” I told him with a grin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Badass Supermodels

  Our ragtag crew was advancing carefully into the next bank of houses, when a voice from the back of the ranks spoke up. “Far be it from me to slow down two badass supermodels on a mission, but we have a problem,” a male voice said wryly.

  I could see Christian out of the corner of my eye as we turned, his stance and movements almost synchronized to my own. We shared a look, our expressions almost identically similar, with arched brows and half-smiles. “What’s the problem?” I called out, scanning the faces to see who had spoken.

  “You’re a badass supermodel,” Christian muttered under his breath at the same time, taking the mature approach, as usual.

  A tall, thin man stepped forward. He wore a long, high-collared trench coat over the standard body armor. He looked more like a scholar than a fighter, with unkempt, long dark hair, and thick glasses, a keen intelligence clear in his eyes. His appearance was deceptive, though, as I saw that his hands on his impressively modified crossbow were steady and sure. In fact, just about everything about him that I could see was a contradiction. His shoulders were slumped, but his body was tensed and alert. His smile was sheepish, but his tone when he spoke was clearly wry and sarcastic, his look sardonic as he met my eyes steadily. “You’re really pretty and all-”

  I shot Christian a look. “He’s talking to you,” I told him.

  He spoke at the same time, smirking, “He’s talking to you.” Christian stifled a laugh. “Jinx,” he said, under his breath, just like a ten year old. I turned my attention back to the strange man as he continued, as though we hadn’t rudely interrupted him.

  “And I’ve seen that you have a particular talent for finding and killing things, but you might want to let me take point for this next bit.” He tipped an imaginary hat at us. “Corbin, vampire hunter, at your service.”

  “Fuck,” I said succinctly.

  “Shit on bloody shingles,” Christian swore.

  We weren’t the only ones cursing. Soft and not so soft cursing could be heard from our strange little crew for several moments while we processed the information. If a vampire hunter wanted to take point, that could only mean one thing. He sensed vampires. I hated vampires. Everyone did. Everybody hated necros, too, but necros were easy, clean kills, for the most part. Vampire kills were never easy, and never clean. They rested in nests, and swarmed like insects the second any of the others in their Kiss were threatened. If it was a small Kiss, and you had a hunter with you, it was still usually a messy business, but larger groups of them just sucked, no matter how you planned it. Yes, I used the word sucked to describe vampires. So?

  What was almost worse than the messy kills was the fact that you couldn’t just kill them on sight, like necros. The damned fair-minded druids, always wanting to give everyone a shot before they named them rogue, actually required the hunters to have a warrant that justified killing any of the monsters. Innocent until proven guilty, blah, blah, blah. Of course, that meant that humans died, usually a lot of them, before a vampire got the stake it deserved.

  Vampires were a lot like witch-hags, in my mind, when it came to going rogue. It was always only a matter of time.

  Corbin ignored all of the cursing, used to it, I was sure. He spoke into the tiny radio clipped to his chest. The radios had been issued to all of us, back at the meet-up point. They’d been silent since before the battle started, which was a good sign. You only used the radio during a fight like this when the shit hit the fan.

  “We’ve got a vampire Kiss. Need permission to take it out.”

  The response was quick and succinct. “You are cleared to take out any damned thing you find in there.”

  Corbin’s eyebrows shot up into his messy bangs. “Is it my birthday or something?” he asked the crowd at large.

  Christian shot me a smirk. “I like this one. He speaks our language.”

  I had to agree. “He does seem like our kind of people.”

  Corbin heard us. “Now, now, I’m not pretty enough for all that, but I’ll do my best to keep up.”

  I smiled at him. He was quickly growing on me. “Give us the head count, and the plan, Mr. Personality.”

  He sighed, growing slightly more serious and less sarcastic. “It’s not good.” He pointed to one of the larger buildings. It looked like a large house with a lot of windows. It was very out of place in the spartan compound. “They’re all in there. And there are too many of them for me to place.”

  Another round of quiet cursing rocked the crowd. He waited patiently before continuing. “I would say we need backup, but I’m pretty sure that most of them are newborns, because every single one of the bastards is sleeping. And here’s the kicker.”

  He paused for a dramatic moment, smiling a very grim smile. I knew he was good at his job, just by that smile. You earned a smile like that. It was a little scary. We were right about him. He was our kind of people.

  “The Master is sleeping. I don’t understand it, given that it’s the middle of the night, but he is definitely dead asleep at the moment. That leaves us with two very unpleasant choices. We can try to stealth in there, quick and quiet, and take the master before slaughtering his flock. If they’re newborns, as I suspect, they’ll go down real easy, with their master dead. That’s option A.”

  He let us process that, studying the crowd intently. “Option B is an almost guaranteed bloodbath, but with more favorable numbers for us. We risk losing our advantage to wait for some heavy druid backup, which will take god only knows how long. I’ll put it up for vote, but I’ll tell you now, I strongly favor option A, though I’ll need a few bloodthirsty volunteers for that one.” He looked at Christian and I as he said this. I wasn’t surprised that he’d meant us.
We were more experienced, by far, than the rest of our little company.

  “A sleeping Master is the best-case scenario when it comes to killing vamps, I can attest, but let’s vote on it. Raise your hand for option A.”

  All but one raised their hand. The one was me. Ah, hell, I raised mine, too. Everyone looked at us as they voted, knowing that they were all as good as volunteering us. I sighed. I supposed I’d rather go get messy than watch the rest of them get sucked dry in a bloodbath later. Most of them were just humans, really, with a little supernatural talent thrown in. Christian and I were, at least, born pure Other, and hard as all hell to kill. Vampire hunters were born Other, as well, with blood no more human than Christian’s, and would be just as hard to take out.

  “We’ll do it,” Christian told Corbin, without consulting me. He sounded way too chipper about it, too. I liked a good fight as much as he did, but hated messes more. Christian didn’t mind the messy so much. It had been awhile, but I could remember clearly the last time we’d gotten mixed up with vampires, and I sure as hell didn’t want a repeat performance. Of course, we hadn’t had a vampire hunter with us that time. It had just been Christian and I with some unfortunate humans, in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’d emerged from battle victorious, but we’d been bitten and stabbed and none of the humans had survived it, despite our best efforts, and that had been a small Kiss of the blood-suckers. The memory still pissed me off royally.

  I sighed. There was really nothing else to be done. At least we wouldn’t be trying futilely to protect mortals, this time. I hoped. “Yeah, we will,” I finally agreed. “Let’s get to it, then. What’s the plan?”

  Corbin gave me an almost fond smile. “You’re not at all what I expected. Guess I should know better than to listen to the rumors.”

  That soured my mood. Of course he’d heard of me. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the reminder of my spotty reputation was, as always, a mood killer.

  Except to Christian, of course. The punk actually laughed. “You want to stay on her good side, my good man, and that’s not the way to do it.”

  Corbin grimaced, smacking his hand to his forehead. “My bad. Didn’t think before I spoke.”

  I waved a hand at him, brushing it off, since that was the only productive thing to do. “It’s old news. Druids think I’m the anti-christ, and they like to spread that opinion around. I don’t have to wonder what you’ve heard about me, and I don’t have the time or the patience to disprove any of it, so let’s just move right along. The plan. Please.”

  His face got real serious. “The three of us will move in together, real quiet like. I’m assuming, from what I’ve seen from you both so far, that you guys can each handle a room full of newborns, once the master is dead.”

  We both just nodded.

  “You’ll scout the house with me, and I’ll put you where you need to be when the master goes down. You guys can use those fancy weapons of yours to behead the bloodsuckers, which will put them out of commission long enough for me to come and do my whole stake thing.”

  I didn’t bother to mention that we’d dealt with vamps before, and that we knew the hunter staking routine. He wasn’t exactly long-winded. And his quick, to the point, explanations might be helpful to the crew waiting outside, if the shit really hit the fan, and the mess spilled out to them.

  “What happens if the master wakes up?” I asked. I didn’t want to ask. It wasn’t my fault I only saw in worse-case scenario vision. I was born that way, honest.

  Corbin gave me his grim smile. “We start swinging, and hope we win.”

  I smiled back at him, my own grim, scary smile. His answer was only what I had expected.

  Christian rubbed his hands together, giving me a toothy grin. “Let’s do this.”

  I smacked him in the back of the head. I swear it was barely a tap.

  He sent me a disgruntled look.

  “Don’t wish for it all to go to hell. That makes you crazy. And crazy gets you smacked.”

  He gave a half-shrug. “I am what I am,” he said with a smirk.

  I rolled my eyes at him.

  “Right this way, Barbie and Ken,” Corbin said, heading resolutely towards the house.

  “Okay, Buffy,” I murmured to his back. He’d started the name calling, after all.

  He stifled a laugh. “Guess I asked for that,” he said, his voice pitched-low.

  “That round went to Barbie,” Christian added, helpful as always.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Barbie And Buffy

  We fell silent, wise-cracks and all, as we got close to the eerily silent house. It had a bad feel to it, which was understandable, but I thought I would have felt a chill up my spine even without a vampire hunter there to tell me what was inside.

  Corbin opened the front door without a sound, easing it open agonizingly slowly. He disappeared inside, and I followed next. Christian brought up the rear, closing the door as quietly as it’d been opened.

  There were street lights on outside, but they were dimmed, and we had been fighting in negligible light for most of the night. That didn’t bother me. My eyes had adjusted just fine. It took just a second for my eyes to adjust to the even darker interior of the house, but when I did, I froze, my eyes going wide in dismay as I looked up.

  The ceiling was covered in the creatures, this one room alone holding more vampires than I’d ever seen in one place before. Their bat-like wings were wrapped around them, hiding their hairless, slimy bodies from view. It was a mercy, that. Vampires were hideous looking creatures, when they weren’t using glamour, and only the strong master’s even had that ability. How the monsters had turned into modern day sex symbols, I would never understand. The depictions of hideous nosferatu were much closer to the real thing than brooding teenagers with over-styled hair.

  Corbin moved forward silently, and I followed closely behind, Christian a steady presence at my back.

  The house was bigger than I would have guessed, and we made slow progress, through room after room, most of them empty, thank the gods. Corbin finally stopped at the bottom of a set of narrow stairs. He addressed Christian. “Fall back to the first room. Jillian and I will head upstairs.”

  Christian nodded, disappearing without a word. Corbin didn’t have to mention that the master had to be upstairs. We had combed every inch of the first floor, so it was a given.

  I followed Corbin very carefully up the stairs, trying hard not to make the old steps creak. We had just reached the top when Corbin froze, his entire body going stiff. I moved around him to see his face, rather than making a noise. I wasn’t reassured by what I saw.

  His eyes glowed red, his face suddenly all harsh bones and angles. His mouth hung open, sharp fangs now protruding, dripping saliva. He took off his glasses and sniffed the air. He looked vaguely like a human version of a bloodhound on a scent. This was bad. He hadn’t gone all scary on me just for the hell of it. This was a vampire hunter’s reaction to being near a vampire. A vampire that wasn’t sleeping.

  A deep voice called out from somewhere down the long hallway. “Helsing. I feel you. You cannot hide from me.”

  “Fuck,” Corbin said around all of those sharp teeth, and broke into a blindingly fast sprint, heading for that voice.

  I followed, pulling my axe from it’s shoulder holster as I moved.

  All hint of the harmless scholar was gone as Corbin rushed into a room down the hall, so fast I couldn’t keep up. That was what I hated most about vampires. They were so freaking fast. I was fast, but they moved in a blur, even to me, finding a place to sink their fangs before you knew what hit you. And if they were real hungry, the place they found was usually your throat, right before they ripped it out. I’d be real salty if I got my throat ripped out tonight.

  Corbin was moving vampire fast as he charged at the master, who met him in a loud clash, halfway into the room. I had barely rounded the doorway when they collided, snarling, into a furious brawl.

  “The
room down the hall,” Corbin barked at me. “Hurry, we don’t want any newborns escaping.”

  I tore out of there, searching each room I passed, his description of my destination leaving something to be desired. In his defense, he had been a little preoccupied at the time.

  I had passed three empty rooms before I found a nest of new vamps rising from the ground, blinking away their deep sleep. The master had arisen, and his whole nasty flock had just joined him. I cursed. The last few stragglers dropped from the ceiling, climbing slowly to their feet, confused and disgruntled at being disturbed. There were fourteen of them in the spacious room, and they were obviously disoriented from sleep. I struck.

  I swung my axe in a large circle, using it’s weight as momentum to increase my speed. They scattered dizzyingly fast. Newborns were much weaker than the older ones, but unfortunately, they were just as fast. I only caught one on my first attack, clipping the hairless thing in the chin, then pushing forward to cut it’s head in half. Regrettably, it was the wrong half to cut, and I had to move into another broad swing to sever it’s head from it’s neck. All of this gave at least some of the vampires enough time to swarm me, pushing me onto my back.

  I felt fangs sink into my wrist at the same time a pair ripped into my thigh, going right through my heavy cargo pants. I screamed, equal parts rage and pain. I was pissed.

  My hand still gripped my axe even as another bloodsucker attacked that wrist with gusto. Hmm, hands useless. I tried to kick, but both legs were pinned, as yet another ugly bastard latched onto my other leg. Legs out, too. That effectively eliminated my options for both hand-to-hand and weapons. I was pissed enough not to even care. When all else failed, I always had fire. I took a deep breath.

  Vampires, fortunately, had no immunity to fire. One latched onto my neck even as I breathed out, reigning blue fire onto all of the beasties directly in front of me. My hand let go of the axe even as I reached out, feeling for a grip of anything slimy. I gripped a slimy head in one hand, a cheek in the other. It wasn’t even a thought so much as an instinct to burn everything I touched. All of the creatures near me began to scream in agony, and I knew that every part of the skin that they touched burned them. I was fire.