by Dean Murray
It was a plan, I wasn't sure it was a good plan, but it did provide us with the element of surprise.
"What about me, Alec? What do you want me to do?"
"I need you to make sure none of the vampires get away. Hide next to the edge of the building, and then as soon as we know that we're not too badly outnumbered, jump down to the first floor and take out the two vampires they left behind to bottle us up. They'll probably be spread out between the two doors."
"Okay, I can do that."
I could hear the van's engine, laboring to pull its weight up the incline leading to the second level, but that didn't matter. It took only a couple of seconds for us all to take our positions. James had already stripped off his clothes while Alec had been explaining the plan. He shifted forms in a rush of power that was remarkably similar to what happened on the physical plane. The transformation always took place too quickly to see exactly what happened, but just like always, I got the impression that James' body exploded outward and then instantly contracted back down to his hybrid form.
James covered the distance to the outside wall in two long steps and then reached up and pulled himself out of sight, hanging from the outside of the building by nothing more than his claws and talons.
Alec likewise shed his clothes as he moved to his position, and as he ducked down between two cars another burst of power signaled that he'd shifted forms. The van was closer now and I stepped behind one of the huge cement pillars by the stairwell a split second before it rounded the last corner that had been stopping the vampires from being able to see us.
Time stretched and pulled, behaving oddly. I'd risked my life dozens, maybe hundreds of times before, but this time felt different. My pulse stuttered, speeding up and slowing down, but I couldn't tell whether that was what it was actually doing or if my time sense was just off.
Each heartbeat slammed against my chest, echoing in my ears as the van got closer. I prepared to slide around to the other side of the pillar I was hiding behind. Timing was everything, if I moved too soon or too late then they'd see me and I would ruin the ambush.
I made my move as the van passed my position, settling back against the other side of the pillar, and then suddenly the van slid to a stop.
"Samuels, go get the girl, Fiver and I will grab the briefcase."
I'd heard two doors open, not three. That meant that the driver was still inside the van. Alec and James were outnumbered at least four to two.
I looked down and realized that I'd also pulled my clothes off sometime in the last minute or two. My shirt, pants and shoes were all balled up in my left hand.
We were going to have to risk the two downstairs getting away. It was too dangerous for Alec and James to take on four vampires by themselves. I took a deep breath and started to loosen the chains on my beast as I looked around the pillar.
The first vampire was almost to the silver briefcase when Alec appeared as if by magic from behind the car that had been sheltering him. The vampire tried to get his weapon out, tried to step back out of the range of Alec's claws, but he wasn't up against a normal human. Reflexes that would have dealt with almost any other opponent weren't enough to save him from Alec.
Vampires are so fast that most normal humans wouldn't have even been able to follow the vampire's dodge let alone compensate for it, but Alec was faster still. The claws on Alec's right hand took the vampire through the neck, and the bloodsucker collapsed to the ground in a spray of blood.
James abandoned his perch on the outside of the building, dropping down onto the concrete floor with enough force that I could feel the tremors underneath my bare feet. James' target, the vampire who had been headed towards Jess, already had his weapon out, but James covered the ground between them too quickly for him to set himself.
The vampire sliced at James with a curved Japanese samurai sword, but James slapped the weapon away and sank his claws into the vampire's chest at the same time that Alec stepped forward to engage his second opponent.
"Jas, move!"
Alec's yell startled me into motion and I realized that I'd allowed myself to become so caught up in the fight that I'd frozen in place, not going to help the boys and likewise not fulfilling my original assignment.
I turned away from Alec and the others and sprinted towards the edge of the parking garage. It only took me three steps to get up to full speed and then I threw myself over the half wall and out into empty space. The ground was only twenty feet below, but that was far enough to break my legs if I didn't handle things just right. I was sturdier than a normal human, but unlike Alec and James, I couldn't shift into hybrid form at the last moment and absorb that kind of impact without risk.
Luckily I managed to generate enough momentum to hit the wall of the building next to the garage. I had a second as the rough brick tore my feet to shreds to wish that I'd left my shoes on, and then I pushed off of the wall, throwing myself into a backflip. It was like something you'd see in a movie. I'd only tried stuff like that a couple of times before and if I'd been thinking clearly I probably wouldn't have tried such a chancy maneuver, but it worked. My collision with the brick wall slowed me down and allowed me to angle my trajectory so that I landed back inside of the parking garage, now on the first floor.
I still hit hard enough that I had to roll to bleed off some of the force of my landing, but I shifted to my wolf form before I completed the second full rotation. The transformation tore through me with the familiar shadow of pain—a kind of half-agony that was over before my body could fully register what was going on.
The closest vampire had been leaning against the concrete wall that encased the stairwell. It wasn't a bad spot tactically speaking. Nobody would be able to sneak up on him and it allowed him to watch as much of the first floor as possible, but he shouldn't have leaned against the wall like that. Under normal circumstances he probably would have seen or heard any threats approaching with plenty of time to ready himself, but he obviously hadn't anticipated someone dropping down from the second story and I was on him as he was still pushing himself away from the wall.
He was fast, faster even than the vampires from up above, and his instincts were good. He didn't waste time trying to get at the longer weapon I was pretty sure he had concealed underneath his shirt. Instead he went straight for the dagger up his left sleeve, but even that wasn't something he could get into action fast enough, at least I didn't think he'd be able to get it out fast enough.
The truth was I wasn't positive, but it was too late to do anything about it one way or the other, I was already airborne, already arrowing towards his throat. The collision as I knocked him back into the concrete behind him, my jaws closing around his throat, was the most welcome thing I'd felt in a long time because it meant that I'd beaten him to the draw.
Being knocked back into the wall should have messed up his draw, but all of the stories agreed that vampires were tougher than normal humans, so I didn't leave anything to chance. As soon as my feet touched down I planted and whipped him to the right as hard as I could.
The violence of the action probably would have broken the neck of a normal person, or barring that ripped out their throat, but my opponent managed to get his left hand up and grab a handful of fur around my neck. He couldn't kill me with such a weak hold, but it was enough to let him offset some of the force as I whipped him back the other direction.
It also let me feel that there wasn't anything in his wrist sheath anymore, and I hadn't heard the clatter of metal on concrete so that meant that he still had ahold of his knife. I slammed him back into the wall hard enough that I practically saw stars, but I wasn't rewarded with the sound I was after.
The vampire tried to get his feet underneath him at the same time that his left arm tensed up, and I desperately tried to switch direction again. I threw him to the right again, mustering every bit of strength I had, but all I managed to do was throw off his aim a little.
Instead of sinking home between my ribs, the knife skip
ped off the large bone in my shoulder. It hurt, but it wasn't immediately life-threatening. A part of me debated releasing his neck and trying for a better hold, but that went against thousands of years of instincts, instincts that it turned out were right in this case.
The snap as his legs shattered against the bumper of an old Dodge pickup truck was music to my ears. The pain was too much for him and he dropped his knife at the same time that he relaxed his grip on my neck. A second later his neck snapped and I dropped his lifeless body to the ground.
The entire fight had taken no more than two seconds. The other vampire had drawn his sword, a short stabbing weapon, and headed towards me, but he was still more than a dozen yards away.
A multitude of sounds washed over me as I started towards the second vampire, angling myself so that by the time we met I'd have plenty of room. Up on the second level weapons clashed against hybrid claws and metal crunched as someone was thrown into a car with enough force to crumple the hood. That was probably a good sign. None of the vampires could possibly be strong enough to throw a hybrid like that and Jess was probably fast enough to avoid coming to grips with anyone she didn't want to fight.
Down here, on the first level I could hear the steady drip of my blood onto the concrete floor. It served as a kind of morbid counterpoint to our paired footsteps as we slowly closed with each other. If I'd been a normal human I would have been worried about leaving so much blood at the scene of a double homicide, but shape shifter blood wasn't stable in the same way that human blood was.
We can benefit from human blood, I've had plenty of transfusions of human blood, but our own blood breaks down incredibly quickly once it leaves our body. Unless someone arrived to take samples of the blood on the pavement in the next fifteen minutes, it was going to be virtually impossible for them to get any usable DNA out of it.
The vampire took another step towards me and I forced my mind back to the situation at hand. My new opponent was obviously nervous. I'd hoped he might think that I'd merely been lucky in taking down his friend, but he wasn't acting the least bit over-confident. He feinted with his sword, a lightning-fast jab that I had to honor as potentially being a real attack.
I twisted to one side as the blade passed within inches of me. I snapped at his arm and apparently I was even faster than he'd expected because he almost didn't get out of the way in time. I still got a piece of him but I didn't get a good enough grip to turn it into anything useful. I felt a slight tug against my fangs and then they tore through the muscle of his arm and he was spinning away from me.
I expected the vampire to renew his attack, but he backed away, buying himself room to analyze what had just happened. That was a very bad sign. Normally I would have said that the waiting game would favor me. He was injured and the blood oozing out of his arm would eventually make its way down to his hand and interfere with his grip. That all went out the window though if I was fighting someone who was good enough to adjust his tactics on the fly.
It was unlikely—most people couldn't do much more than regurgitate the blocks and strikes that they'd had drilled into them—but every once in a while you ran into a true weapons master, someone who understood how to improvise, someone capable of creating an entirely new method of fighting if given enough time and a compelling reason to do so.
I couldn't take that chance. Besides, Alec and James might not survive without my help. I needed to finish off this fight now.
I moved towards the vampire and then planted and changed direction at the last second. His blade missed me again, but this time I felt it disturb the hair on my back. He was getting closer and my jaws snapped shut on nothing more than air this time.
I charged him, relying on speed to close before he could recover, but I almost wasn't fast enough. I ducked down as his sword darted towards me again. This time it skittered off of one of my ribs, tearing a long, bloody furrow across my back.
If the tip of his blade had been angled just a couple of degrees further down he would have impaled me, but it hadn't been and I crashed into him with enough speed to knock him over. He tried to roll back to his feet, but I grabbed hold of his lower leg and whipped him to the side.
There wasn't anything solid close enough to slam him into, which meant that it was only a matter of time before he recovered enough to skewer me. He hit the concrete floor hard, but he kept his chin tucked so that he didn't lead with his head. I heaved, whipping him back the other direction, but he was heavy and the concrete where we were standing was smoother than where I'd fought the first vampire.
My front legs started to slip out from underneath me, and I had to let go in order to stop from being knocked over. It proved to be for the better though because a second later his sword stabbed down through the space where I'd been standing.
He was bleeding from two places now, just like me, but none of our wounds were serious enough to affect the balance of the fight, in the timeframe that we were dealing with. He rolled back to his feet as I started circling him.
I needed an opening, but if anything I seemed to be losing ground to him. He was getting better and better at anticipating my attacks. I feinted to the left and then writhed away as his sword licked out again. He obviously expected me to grab his arm again, but instead I launched myself up over the top of his blade. He was good, but he'd let his weight shift too far forward in an attempt to counter another of the peripheral, low attacks that I'd been using until now.
My aim was true and a split second later, my jaws closed around his throat. Alec was the martial artist, he was the one that had told me that any punch was supposed to stop two inches behind its true target. Some things didn't transfer between fighting as a human and fighting as a wolf, but that did.
I didn't jump with the aim of just getting my fangs on the vampire's throat and then dropping straight down, I jumped with enough force to carry myself well past him. I hadn't been able to do that with the first vampire because of the wall behind him, but I wasn't under that kind of restraint this time. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Chapter 3
Alec Graves
George Town Banking Sector
George Town, The Cayman Islands
It was done. The first batch of cash had been deposited at the Cayman National Bank.
Everyone but Jess had been bleeding from at least a couple of spots, but we'd turned James' shirt into a set of improvised bandages and then gone into a fast food restaurant a few blocks over and taken turns cleaning up in the bathroom.
I would have donated my shirt to the cause as well, but I didn't want to draw any more attention to myself than I absolutely had to when it came time to deposit a billion dollars into the account I'd just finished setting up the day before.
Planning, or possibly luck, had won out and nobody had given me any problems when I'd asked to see the branch manager. Apparently my contacts hadn't been kidding when they said that the Cayman banks were used to having people in jeans and a t-shirt show up out of the blue and make extremely large deposits.
James and the girls had waited just outside of the bank as I was conducted back to a private room. Once I pulled out the first fifty-million-euro bond I was promptly taken down to the vault, and fifteen minutes later the bonds were the bank's problem rather than mine.
It was obvious that Jasmin wanted to go back to our hotel and lick her wounds. It was hard to say exactly what was going on with her, but she'd definitely lost some of her edge.
It was bad timing. I would have liked to give Jasmin a few weeks to unwind. She deserved at least that after everything we'd been through over the last month, but unfortunately that wasn't an option right now. Instead of letting her go back to the hotel, I'd ordered her and everyone else back to the Deutsche Bank branch while I went back to the hotel to get our rental car.
Jasmin had been almost ready to rebel when I gave her the order, but she knew I was right. We couldn't afford to leave an old, extremely powerful vampire mentalist in place at the bank. Not
if we wanted to be able to make the next money transfer safely, not if we wanted to make sure that the vampire population at large didn't find out about us.
I'd been ready to try and scent-track the mentalist through the city, but we got lucky. James and the rest checked the front and back doors and the secure loading dock that was used whenever the bank needed to physically move anything high-value. There wasn't any trace of the vampire having left the bank while we were dealing with his lackeys. He could have still left via the loading dock, assuming that he was in a vehicle at the time, but the odds against that were pretty heavy—unless the vampire had gotten more out of my mind than I'd thought.
I hadn't been able to smell the vampire while I'd been in the bank, so I was pretty sure that our vampire worked in the back of the bank somewhere. My money was that he'd eventually leave via the back door, but we wouldn't know for sure until he actually exited the building. A brief storm had swept through the city a little while before I'd gone to the bank the first time around, so there weren't any old scent trails that we could follow back to the vampire's apartment.
I'd always wanted to be the one calling the shots, but now that I was out from under Kaleb's thumb I was finding that I didn't like how big the stakes had gotten. There wasn't any two ways about it, the vampire who had invaded my mind needed to die, but I didn't like the fact that bringing him down might cost me the life of one or more of my friends.
It was nearly six p.m. before James broke the silence on our four-way conference call. "He just left the building, guys."
"You're sure it's him, James? We can't afford to follow the wrong guy."
"Yeah, I'm downwind of him and he smells old, older than any of the other vampires I've ever run into. He's either our guy or there's more than one vampire holed up inside of the bank."
