Bruiser said, “Two old vamps DB.” The mics went silent for that one. Bruiser had taken down two very old vampires. Single-handedly. “Did not sight de Allyon,” he said. “But we did find one younger vamp, DB, on ice, true-dead.” He looked at me and grinned, teasing. “Legs? That leaves you.”
I frowned at him. Into my mic I said, “One human contained. Four old vamps contained.” The radio traffic went silent. “No injuries. Did not sight de Allyon,” I added, that important piece of info just hitting me.
“She buggered the rest of you and left us some vamps to chat with,” Bruiser said. “Janie wins the pool.”
There was a pool?
“This I gotta see,” one of the guys said.
“Not until we go over this place with a fine-tooth comb. Lock it down,” Eli said. “We want de Allyon.”
Bruiser and I quartered off the lower floor and went through it again. There weren’t many rooms, only one unisex toilet, and no closets or hiding places. It was fast work. “First floor clear,” I said into the mic. We started up to the second floor. Five steps in, I heard something and looked back. “Correction. Two coming this way.”
That was when we were hit with the second wave. Vamps came rushing out of the new, empty safe room and up the stairs with reptilian speed and grace, vamped out, screaming. Hungry. I could smell their hunger and their sickness. These were infected, and I had no idea where they had come from. The dang vault and cinder-block room had been empty.
I fired the shotgun, hitting the first one midcenter. Beside me, Bruiser stepped down two steps and took the head of the second one, the long sword in one hand, one of the lovely midsized swords in the other. Blood fountained up from her stump. I fired at the third vamp, knocking him back. Bruiser took the head of the two I had hit while I finished up the rounds in the M4. When all seven rounds were gone, I pulled the Walthers and started in with head shots, slowing them down, Bruiser to my side, finishing them off. Soldiers poured down the steps to back us up, and we took the fight down to the first floor, spreading out. And still the vamps came.
There was no grace, no finesse. It was just battle. Just blood and the stink of gunfire. I saw two of ours go down in the melee, and vamps fell on them to drink. Eli and Derek waded into them, stakes and blades flashing. I took a set of talons across one arm, a fist to the gut, and a roundhouse kick to the kidneys. It was three on one and I went down. Rule number one when fighting vamps. Stay on your feet.
I was still falling when the first vamp fell on me. Oofed out a breath it didn’t need and went flying, a boot in the air in front of my face. A short sword followed, taking off another vamp’s forearm with one swipe. Rick reached down and pulled me up, his fingers like steel bands on my unhurt arm. He swung me around and supported me with an arm around my waist until I was steady. Until I had drawn two vamp-killers. “Payback isn’t always a bitch,” he said.
I laughed. I’d saved his life a couple of times. Now he’d saved mine.
It went on and on. And when it was over, Bruiser and Rick were standing back to back, heaving breaths. Derek and I were against a wall, two downed soldiers at our feet, where we were protecting them. Three other of the men he had brought were still standing, but all were wounded. Two were dead. Derek hit 911 and called for medic.
Around us were fourteen vamps. Only fourteen? It seemed like hundreds. But none of them were de Allyon. Lucas de Allyon had not been in his base camp.
All the blood and fighting and death had been for nothing. Wasted. My eyes filled with tears that I blinked away. I wiped my face. Vamp blood was burning me. “Crap. Crap, crap, crap,” I whispered.
Near me, a man moaned. I opened my cell and called Leo. Fortunately, he was already on his way. He’d be here quickly and would heal the injured humans. I closed the cell and looked up to see six humans emerge from a wall. Not a doorway, but a wall, a hidden opening to a hidden room. It hadn’t been on the plans submitted to the planning commission. Vamps who broke the law. Imagine that. I almost started laughing until I got a whiff of the blood-servants. They all smelled of the vamp sickness.
Derek covered them and made them sit down with their hands on their heads. I thought about the sick and bleeding Asheville vamps. Here was a treatment that might save them until we figured out how Sabina had healed that guy . . . the vamp . . . the dumb pretty one whose name was totally gone from my exhausted brain. Callan! Yeah. Callan. I texted Leo. “Humans here have antibody to illness. Send to Asheville?”
Instantly he texted back “On the next plane.”
Gotta love modern forms of communication. Then I texted to Adelaide “Got treatment. Will send ASAP.” I closed my phone. And slid down a wall to sit on the floor.
Eli wandered over, his combat face still in place, looking hard and remote. He stood next to me, staring out over the battlefield, and when he spoke, his lips didn’t move, a sotto voce not even vamps could have overheard. “The marine called Cheek Sneak. I caught him taking pics and texting. I took his phone. You want I should give it to Alex?”
“Yeah,” I said, and closed my eyes. Had we finally found our other tattletale? “If you prove he’s been talking to the enemy, tell me first. Not Derek.”
Eli breathed a low laugh through his nose. “Copy that.” He meandered away.
“You’re hurt.”
I opened my eyes and looked at Rick. “So are you,” I said. He was burned and limping, and blood crusted his knuckles as if he’d hit a wall. Or maybe beat in a vamp’s face. Either one sounded like him.
“My were-taint will heal it,” he said, offhand. “But yours is bad.” He knelt, lifted my arm, and I saw that blood coated my sleeve. He peeled back the cut cloth to reveal the injury, three oozing wounds, parallel, made by vamp talons. The lacerations were about two inches across and cut into the deltoid muscle deeply enough that when he pressed it open, a tiny pulse of blood started, rhythmic and steady. A tiny artery had been severed.