The Hunted

by L. A. Banks

  “It’s about four and a half feet high, but I put money on it that it opens higher a few hundred yards out.”

  They stared at Damali.

  “This is not the normal vamp-lair, because this isn’t your run of the mill, daytime smoke-a-vampire mission,” she said with authority, not looking at the team, but keeping her eyes trained on the opening she was studying. She spoke to them, half thinking out loud and half processing the variables for herself.

  “He’s going after something in jag form, so he’ll transform to match it. Male vamp, transformed into panther, is about four feet at the shoulders. Give him additional head space to lope at a full-speed run, in order to rush an attacker, he’s gonna want a place were he can slow their exit to sunlight, and feed in a safe tunnel.” Damali went to the heap, squatted, and poked in the gore with her sword and sniffed, getting a whiff of sulfur in the sickening mix. “Carlos didn’t do this, though. She probably ordered this food left at his back door for him in preparation. Not his style. It’s human. Woulda left her a buffalo carcass, something like that.” She stood. “That much I still know about him.”

  Kamal sniffed and nodded. “It’s were-demon marked. Damali is right.”

  She pulled herself up on a low-hanging branch and could make out a ledge about eight feet off the ground. She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling Carlos’s presence had been there. “Found his front door.” Damali looked down as her team assembled under her as she sheathed the Isis and began climbing.

  “What are you doing?” Shabazz asked with a bewildered expression. “Didn’t you just say—”

  “He’s not home yet,” she shot back, grunting from the exertion of lifting herself. “Today, brother is getting his rest, probably ate real good last night, and at sundown, will shave, put on his rags, track a scent, and be out. So, we’ve gotta lay some booby traps in there now, and find the corridor that leads from her bedroom to his. Dig?”

  “Damn . . .” Big Mike murmured, glancing at Shabazz, Rider, and Kamal. “Women are devious.”

  “Mike, you sure those detonators are good from this far away?” Damali glanced back at her team in the dank cavern.

  “Yeah, we cool. Holy water set, C-4, right under the marble slab, li’l sis.”

  The lair was a cakewalk. If Damali’s second sense was right, the Amazon’s crew wasn’t committed to guard it; their primary concern would be their queen. They were up top near her.

  From what she’d gleaned from Carlos’s mind, and the parts she filled in from common sense, since this was an unsanctioned vampire mission, there were no bats or messengers to contend with outside the master lair. One hundred yards into the cave from the ledge, it had gotten narrower and darker, until they had to fire lanterns to see.

  But the heavy steel door wasn’t bolted. From experience she knew they were bolted from the inside, and if nobody was home . . . Vampires didn’t worry about break-ins. Human invasion was merely dinner dropping off at their door. While they were gone, all illusion disappeared and left what they’d found—a marble slab and sharp granite walls.

  As the group moved forward, the cave widened again, and Damali halted them. The entire posse had been weaving their way past stalactites and stalagmites through the damp space, ducking at times where there were low spots, and avoiding small cave-dwelling rodents and insects underfoot along the path that she knew without knowing why she did.

  “Ammonia,” she whispered. “We got bats overhead.”

  “Here,” Kamal said quietly, “we have natural vampire bats. As long as you move slowly, don’t send them flying, dey shouldn’t attack you—but dey do, at times, carry rabies.”

  “Oh, brother,” Rider moaned as the group passed under a huge cavernous ceiling that wriggled and squeaked with the tightly packed, struggling vermin. “Why do we always have to go to the garden spots of the world, Damali? Geeze Louise,” he fussed, pinching his nose as the bats indiscriminately plopped little globs of feces combined with urine-like leather-winged pigeons.

  Dampness, sweat, and dread clung to their skins, and without ventilation in the caverns, it was insufferable. Albeit cooler in the cave than under the sun outside, the thick stillness of the air, along with the wafting bat odors and combined human team funk, was about to make everyone pass out. Water dripped in a steady rhythm from the multiple underground streams, and an echo resounded from it everywhere.

  When Damali weaved, stopped, and leaned against the wall, the team took five gladly. She mopped her throat, forehead, and the back of her neck under her locks, holding her hair off her as she wiped away moisture with a bandanna in repetitive, futile strokes. The team’s haggard breaths, and the echo of bottled-water seals breaking was the only sound to accompany the now far-off bat colony and the dripping water within the cave.

  Damali lifted her head within the large expanse of cavern where they’d paused, listening past the team guzzling water, their breaths, the water of the drips . . . where was the drip . . . where was the drip? The bats weren’t squeaking.

  “Battle stations,” she whispered. “Full metal jacket.”

  One by one the team passed the word, and each warrior slowly got his weapon readied, putting down his water carefully as though it were a bomb. Damali took a bottle cap from Shabazz and flipped it like a coin into the next tunnel opening, and immediately a hail of arrows was returned.

  “Open fire!”

  Ducking behind rocks and narrow ruts between boulders, her team sent rapid machine gunfire into the open tunnel where the arrows had been released. But soon she held up her hand, realizing that there was no return fire. Turning quickly to look behind them, the team froze, staring up at eleven low-crouched entities on cave ledges bearing fangs.

  Green-gold eyes glistened in the darkness twenty feet above them. The lanterns exploded, putting the team in instant darkness. JL lit a flare, and it was summarily shot out of his hand by a blow dart. Then the eyes disappeared. The team drew in, standing back to back, aiming into the blackness, not knowing even if their own team members were before them.

  Two eyes opened almost twenty-five feet out, a man yelled, his screams turning to shrieks, bones snapped, flesh ripped, the team fired. It became dead silent again.

  Damali patted Mike for a grenade. “Light it up in here, Mike.”

  Hurling a series of holy-water bombs, the room flashed blue light, and then fast-rising plumes of yellow, fetid smoke gassed the team, choking them, blinding them, obscuring their vision. Kamal’s men drew back.

  Marlene shot a glance of concern and she dropped her voice to a tense whisper, close to a hiss. “Oh my God. They can’t take the grenades, D. Kamal, you should have told us! They have an intolerance for what comes up from the demon pits, because of their human hybrid DNA that fights full turns. Get ’em out of here now! There’s too much sulfur—”

  “Do whatchu gotta do,” Kamal yelled, still backing up and wheezing. “We normally fight them in the open, it’s just da cave . . .”

  “This is fucked up—we didn’t know, man.” Shabazz caught Kamal under his armpit as he stumbled and helped him to his feet. “But y’all ain’t expendable. Get these men out of here.”

  “Just guard the Neteru,” Kamal argued, clinging to Shabazz for support before he righted himself to lean against a wall. “We go all da way as one squad.”

  Damali glanced at Kamal’s struggling team, and pushed herself off the wall. An adrenaline kick of pure frustration and rage jolted her forward through the sulfur, making her cut at nothing as she climbed on a high flat rock. Not another one of her men. Not one!

  “You call yourself a warrior,” she yelled, coughing and sputtering from the toxic fumes. “Then come out and fight!”

  She had to get her now, well before sundown, well before things got crazier. The smoke was lifting, which meant they’d come in for another attack. All she could hope was that Kamal and his men had enough human-side to make them impervious to the demon sulfur that their other spiritual weapons would unleash. �
��Stand ready, guys!” The smoke was lifting, their barrier was burning off, and every warrior had to come out shooting and swinging.

  As soon as Damali gave the order, a huge white jaguar parted the haze of smoke before her, lunging right at her. Damali dodged the lunge, getting a good slice in the shoulder section of the beast. It turned where it landed, let out a furious snarl, but it was positioned upon a jutting ledge in a way that would put Damali in the line of gunfire. Its angry glare swung from Damali to Marlene. From the corner of Damali’s eye, she could see the other big cats had taken a position within tunnel openings overhead.

  “This is your girl, Marlene,” Damali said loudly, over her shoulder.

  “I know,” Marlene shot back, fast. She looked at the injured cat. “You wanna do this the hard way, or the easy way—seer-to-seer, bitch?”

  The demon were-jag was off the ledge in the blink of an eye. Marlene backed up, circling with it, her prayer-reinforced stick in hand as she maneuvered herself and the stalking cat into a clear space. The jaguar hissed and swatted, tilting its head to get a good angle on Marlene’s extremities, but Marlene was swift on her feet, her stick lethal.

  “Stay with her, Mar,” Shabazz called, frantically aiming and following Marlene’s motion to cover her.

  Kamal was crouching, moving, a semi in his hands and holding the creature in his sights, but he repeatedly called off fire, too, frustrated by the hazards of a deadly ricochet from solid rock. Damali was easing forward, the cats above on the ledges moving nearer to peer over it.

  The white were-jaguar backed up, Marlene took a stance to prepare for a lunge, her stick a ready-made stake to spear the soft underbelly of the beast. Her team followed the moving forms, unable to get a clear shot that wouldn’t imperil Marlene or Damali or cause a ricochet.

  But unexpectedly, the thing circling stopped, transformed, and became human form. Marlene stopped, and remained in an Aikido stance.

  “I should have finished you in the first ambush!” the albino warrior yelled, instantly sending a dark-blue electric current from her hand to Marlene’s chest.

  “No!” Shabazz hollered, but Kamal held him and Damali rushed to his side.

  Marlene calmly closed her eyes and lowered her walking stick parallel to the ground as her crystal breastplate absorbed the energy. The current being sent into Marlene became weaker and weaker as the albino warrior screamed her discontent, fury drawing her fists into a ball. Marlene’s eyes snapped open as the warrior rushed her. Marlene’s knees bent, and the walking stick returned a bluish-white line of pure energy, knocking the albino on her back. Marlene was on her in seconds. It happened so quickly the creatures above couldn’t lunge to save their comrade.

  “Is that all you got?” Marlene said with disdain, immediately staking the creature before it could even sit up.

  Struggling against the stake, a black-blood geyser spurted from the wound. Piercing shrieks of garbled warrior cries mixed with guttural were-demon howls filled the chamber as the thing at Marlene’s feet bubbled and turned into green slime. Retrieving her stick, she joined the safety of the team crouched behind the rocks. Kamal slapped her five, Shabazz pounded her fist, and Damali hugged her fast.

  “Mar, you took out their nerve center—they’re blind, now. There’s no top adviser. Plus, we wounded one outside. But we can’t forget that the main one is a seer, too, unless she’s totally gone into this Neteru wannabe bag.” She looked at Kamal, trying to send her condolences through a firm squeeze on his arm. “Who did we lose? Your man, what was his name? I’m so sorry.”

  Kamal just shook his head. “Dominique . . . nineteen. No family. We were it. I’ll bury whatever I find.”

  “I’ll help you carry your man, if we get out,” Shabazz murmured.

  Damali moved forward when the eyes above disappeared. “They wouldn’t have pulled back unless they’re using too much energy to fight us as jags in the daytime. We’ve got a short window. Like less than an hour. The primary nerve center is gone, we’ve wounded one, but we could do this all night—we’re trading one for one. It’s an even match.” She sent her gaze around the team. “We’re not losing any more of our men, especially with the sun dropping. We’ll seal this joint with C-4 and blow this whole damned piece. Let it implode. Fuck it.”

  “Or, we can save the cave and all the innocent creatures in it,” a smooth, female voice said from above, “and do this the old-fashioned way.”

  The team looked up fast, their gaze darting around the perimeter of the cave ledges above. Eleven stunning women with tall, proud carriages, skin hues that ranged from deep copper to highly polished black marble, stood above them with bows, battle-axes, blow darts and machetes in hand. One was badly wounded, her shoulder ragged and bleeding black blood. Had to be the one the crossbow snipe got. Yet, there was no other way to describe the magnificence of their presence, other than to admit they were awesome.

  Each possessed a regal countenance. Their hair, eyes, skin—radiant. They glowered down at the huddled warriors with disdain and lifted their chins ever higher, their athletic carriages rippling with the readiness to strike.

  “I don’t want to blow the cave and jack with the ecosystem,” Damali shouted, coming to the clear area and holding up her hand as her team protested with their eyes. “You took one of our men, rushed him, we had to do one of yours.”

  The queen stepped forward, her eyes flickering green and gold with controlled rage. “That was my mother-seer!” she yelled, pointing at the ground where only ooze remained.

  This very, very was good. The delusion had set in. This horrifyingly beautiful demon actually thought she was the Neteru. Just like Carlos had shown her. Yeah, keep that crazy bitch in the fantasy. Make her fight on the terms of a Neteru, not a were-jag.

  With her Isis, Damali motioned to Marlene. “That is my mother-seer. Yours went after her for no reason and began this conflict. You went after my moms, so now it’s on!”

  The Amazon nodded. Her warriors snarled and backed up. Damali could feel them ready to pounce, but then the injured one dropped. The Amazon ran to her fallen warrior’s side, crushed her to her chest, dropped the body, and swallowed hard as it began to bubble.

  “You owe me another body,” the Amazon said through her teeth.

  “All this bullshit over a man? What, are you crazy?” Damali asked, knowing that no female wanted to admit that she’d lost perspective or pride over a man, especially not a five-hundred-year-old warrior.

  Damali glanced around at the warriors behind the older female demon who were exchanging gazes of confusion. “It didn’t have to be all this,” she yelled. “You could have come to me, told me who you were, then we coulda worked something out.”

  “You lie! You would never negotiate!”

  “No, you lie! You’re the one who lives in Hell, the zone of the silver-tongued devils. They already tricked you once. I’m a huntress, and a warrior, and do my shit out in the open. Now you’re trying to front like you’re something you’re not—a Neteru!” She narrowed her gaze on the thing that was snarling. “Did you tell your demon girls that you were wearing Neteru, not to attract him so you could hunt and kill the master vamp in this territory blocking your feed zones, but that you’d plan to do him tonight . . . even left food at his lair door?”

  The demon on the ledge screamed and raised a bow and arrow and pulled back hard, training it on Damali who didn’t budge.

  “Look at this shit. Punk bitch can’t even come down here and take the Isis from me like a woman—’cause you know it’s mine, by right!”

  An arrow flew; Damali dodged it with a swift fake to the left, and caught it in her right hand. Her team bristled, but nobody opened fire. The group behind the Amazon narrowed their gazes, but Damali could feel an energy shift ever so slightly. Dissension was in the air. A memory of the old way was in the offing. She remembered what Shabazz had said, if you’re weaker, be strategic. She remembered what Marlene had said, and watched the Amazon’s eyes.

&nbs
p; Damali folded her arms over her chest. “Your girls remember what it was like to protect a Neteru, don’t they? By rights, you should be protecting me. I’m the real, living Neteru. But you’ve stolen the ancient Neteru’s trademark, and you’ve tricked your own fellow guardians, too.” She sent her glance to the Amazon’s team. “She promised you your Neteru would resurrect, didn’t she? Your seermother did some twisted shit and it didn’t work.” Then she smiled. “Or, maybe it did. Since I’m here five hundred years before my time—early, and have the Isis as proof I’m a Neteru.”

  Several demon eyes shared nervous glances up on the ledge, opening an opportunity for Damali to press her point.

  “You and I share the same history, are of the same people . . . different eras. Believed in the same things. Then something happened to you, and you went south on us, literally. If you have nothing to hide, tell your girls to ask Carlos which Neteru authentically ripened first on his watch in this era—a master would know.”

  She could see them all hesitate, and the leader become concerned by their confusion, so Damali pressed on messing with their heads just like the best of mental seduction had taught her. She dropped her voice to a low, calm tone and looked at the weaker members of the group. “She’s getting ready to cross realm boundaries and do a vamp because her potion didn’t work. She led you to the pit, and left y’all hanging. Ask her.”

  The older warrior backed up, her gaze steady, but with her team not quite intact. “That is not true! We have never been from the same tribes. You come with your machines and filth that—”

  “Take a look,” Damali said, her pupils opening. “Marlene, Kamal, give a couple of her girls a view.”

  The two guardians stood by Damali, locking in with the ancient rogue guardian and her two top warriors that flanked her. Silent tears of memory streamed down the Amazons’ faces. The one on the left turned away and breathed deeply, unable to take the images Marlene sent. The one on the right of the Amazon queen simply nodded and raised her hand to Kamal to request that he stop, and then conferred with the others behind her for a moment. Damali blinked, and took a deep breath, removing the Isis from the shallow plunge where she’d planted it into the rocky cave floor.