Death's Rival

Bruiser took out the front window with a ball-peen hammer. Glass shattered and fell, the sound muffled by the ear protectors. Bruiser raked the glass out with the hammer and leaped through. I followed, glass still falling. He disappeared behind the silver velvet draperies. My first job was to yank the draperies down and let in sunlight. The velvet came down fast, along with the metal track that supported it, flooding the space with light and revealing only an entrance to a hallway that opened both left and right.

 

Bruiser had disappeared to my right. I entered the hallway to the left, sliding my spine against the wall. I heard nothing except my heavy breathing, smelled nothing except the filtered air, and saw even less, thanks to the mask. On the upper floor, the guys were clearing rooms: I could hear it through the communication gear. On the roof, Eli was supposed to be doing his magic and reversing the powerful AC fan to air out the gas from the building so the guys could pull off the masks and pull on low-light-vision gear, but it would take time, and every second would just be pissing off the vamps. Fortunately, I didn’t need low-light gear. I had Beast.

 

She rose in me like a wraith, and my vision sharpened, turning the world silvery bright. My heart pounded steadily in my ears. I moved down the hallway. There were no doors except at the ends, which was odd. I was hearing nothing. Except the radio chatter of the men. No one was on the third floor. No one at all. Again—odd.

 

I stepped through the doorway at the end of the hall into an open room. It looked like a reception room, and a woman was facedown at a desk. I raced over and checked her pulse. Steady, if a little slow. I secured her hands behind her back with two zip strips and moved around the desk to a door in the back. Carefully, I opened it. The room beyond was pitch-black except for tiny red and green lights, like on computers when they’re asleep, or on battery backups. But I couldn’t use my nose to smell vamp, which I hated. I was head-blind.

 

I pulled a flashbang and tossed it inside. Turned my head away and closed my eyes. It exploded, the flash white through my closed lids. I raced in and stopped, listening, hearing nothing. I had to get out of this headgear. As soon as I could breathe.

 

From nowhere, I took a blow to my chest that threw me across the room. I rolled to my feet and pulled two blades. I couldn’t fire a gun—there might be sleeping humans in the room. I felt, more than saw, movement and struck out with the blades, cutting in a figure-eight pattern. I hit nothing. And I took another blow. This one to my head. It knocked my mask askew. I took an involuntary half breath and smelled sleep-bomb and vamp. The scents were vaguely like boiled eggs and vamp-spice tea, an unpleasant combo to my Beast-enhanced nose, though the humans the vamp hunted probably liked her spicy scent. Holding my breath, I pulled the mask back in place. I yanked loose a CS canister, set it on the floor, and activated the nozzle. Hit the halogen light on my vest.

 

The room lit up like stadium lights and revealed a vamp right in front of me. She gripped my right arm and snapped down, around, and would have pulled me off my feet, except I knew that move and I followed her, dropping with her. I grabbed her ankle, threw it into the air. Dove under her legs. CS mist coated my mask, further depleting my view of the world. I wiped at it, smearing it worse. The halogen light bounced around the room, revealing and hiding, illuminating and throwing bizarre shadows dancing drunkenly on the walls. It was disorienting and Beast hurled more speed and her spatial awareness into my bloodstream.

 

The light hit the vamp in the face. She was vamped out, two-inch-long fangs and pupils like black saucers. Her face was bleeding. Her eyes were bleeding and watering. She took a breath and started coughing, the action so unexpected to her that she fell to her knees. She looked up at me, her face shocked. I wondered how many centuries since she’d had to cough. The CS was working in ways I hadn’t expected. The vamp rolled to her back, breathing and coughing, clutching her throat. I pulled one of the special stakes and stabbed downward with both hands. The stake was way longer than my usual ones, at thirty inches. I rammed it into her belly. Blood sprayed up, but not the fountain I sometimes saw. I had missed her descending aorta. Caught on her belt buckle. I put my back into it.

 

The stake had a silver cap on the sharp end with a steel tip that I drove into the floor, pinning her down, poisoning her blood on the way through, in addition to the silver spraying into the air. She wasn’t true-dead, and she might even survive, but she was in a lot of pain. She wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon.

 

Over the com gear, I learned that one of the rooftop teams was entering the second story. They had already secured three humans, all of whom were starting to wake up. I also heard heavy, steady breathing and the sound of blades clashing.

 

Clicking off the halogen light, I moved on through the room and out another door, into a larger room, maybe half the total square footage of the bottom story. The open area was dim, lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Bruiser was already in the room. Part of the panting I heard over my com channel was him. He was fighting two very old, and very strong, vamps, one armed with a long sword and one bare-handed, claws extended.

 

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