Panting, Dawn crawled to a better position, limbs liquid. She noticed Breisi trying to maneuver her arms from behind her back down to her feet, where she leveraged her sneakers against the rope to get the binding off.
Dawn couldn’t help her. She had just enough presence of mind to notice that Frank had taken down another Guard in midflight before the last three crashed to the trailer’s floor, shaking it. They rose in their stop-motion heartbeat rhythm—ba-ba-boomp, ba-ba-boomp—and leveled their red eyes on the team.
We could be fucked, she thought, pushing off of the floor.
One of the vamps flashed out its long tail, accidentally catching Dawn’s weapon as it went for Frank’s gun. Her revolver flitted to the ground. The Guard slammed away her dad’s weapon, too, spinning it over to one of its partners.
The other red-eye opened its jaws, catching the revolver between its iron teeth, then crunching the weapon to debris.
So fucked.
For some reason, the three Guards didn’t flick open their machete tails, and Dawn couldn’t say she missed the show of steel-edged blooms. Instead, the red-eyes merely tracked her and Frank with their gazes. The one nearest Dawn tilted its head as if it recognized her. Didn’t they all by now?
Not giving up, she dove for her revolver, grasping it.
A red-eye spit at her hand, and she instinctively flinched from what she knew would burn.
On her belly, she just stared at her abandoned weapon—so close.
Wasting no time, she started to reach for a crucifix in her jacket but a second blob of flying spit changed her mind. It barely missed her, too.
“What’re they doing?” she asked, hoping her dad was aware enough to answer.
While the Guards waved their tails in Frank’s face and hissed, her dad stood with his hands up in surrender again.
“Maybe they’re thinking of all the fun ways they could use our bodies for Play-Doh?” he muttered.
Breisi moaned against her duct tape, wiggling around as if she knew the answer. She probably did, the brain.
“Eva,” Dawn said. “She wouldn’t have brought us if she knew the Guards might kill us. And if we’re captured? No problem. She wants us Underground anyway. Maybe these red-eyes have been instructed not to ever harm the family of Little Miss Master’s Favorite.”
Frank laughed harshly. “I’ll be damned if we get taken.”
Something awful occurred to Dawn. “If we’re protected, then what about…”
She glanced at Breisi. At the same exact time, Frank seemed to realize the danger his girlfriend was in, too.
He reached into his man-purse and pulled out another gun, but this one was longer, the nozzle flared. What the—?
He pulled the trigger. Fire scorched out of it, consuming the Guard nearest to him in one swallow.
Dawn and Breisi both hurled themselves away, taking shelter behind seats and fallen tables as the Guard screeched and flailed, running, going nowhere but the dirt as it dove off the side of the camper.
With a sick sucking sound, it moaned into a charred memory.
As a seat caught on fire, one Guard yelped away from the flames, using its machete tail to slash the conflagration off the camper.
Meanwhile, the third one attacked Frank, and Dawn reached into her pocket, whipped the velvet cover off her throwing stars, grasped one and used the motion of her body and wrist to flick it outward. The holy-water-covered silver blade swooped through the air, embedding itself into the red-eye’s neck.
At the same time, Frank aimed his weapon at the other Guard—the fire scaredy-cat. The ticked-off freak easily cuffed the gun away from her dad, then wrapped its tail around him.
Concentrating, Dawn flicked another blade at her own red-eyed attacker, grunting as it swicked into the Guard’s temple.
Slowly, it reached up to the wound in its neck, then its head. It bared its iron fangs. Shook its head.
Y-ah. Dawn grasped another star.
But then the Guard went stiff, dropping to its knees and banging face-first to the floor.
Convulsing, its head smacked the ground over and over again until its forehead turned to mash.
One sucking instant later, it was air, a victim of the silver plus the holy-water poison.
That really pleased Frank’s Guard. It got feisty, opening up its tail to full extension, the blades coming just inches from Frank’s surprised face as it raised him aloft.
Whick, whick, whick.
Blade after blade, it revealed a bouquet of machetes, screeching, body flickering with its ba-ba-bomp movements.
As the creature fixed on Dawn, she grabbed her revolver from the floor, targeting the heart.
In defiance, it lifted up both hands—throw down, bitch!—and basically unwrapped, then flicked, Frank out of its tail.
Right away, her dad jumped toward Breisi, then whisked her into his arms, holding her as if she was all that existed for the quickest, longest moment he could probably manage. He put his face against her hair, and she pressed against him.
Then he prepared to jump to the ground with her.
Dawn should’ve known it was too easy.
A hurricane seemed to fly down from the black sky, crying bloody murder.