Like guns, trained on me.
I lounged back in my seat, keeping the Heckler and Koch nine mil out of sight, a round in the chamber, safety off, and my finger off the trigger and on the guard. I wanted to be ready, but I didn’t want to accidently shoot off a round and punch a hole in the boat. Sinking just off the dock and wading wet and dripping to shore was not the way to make an impression of being strong and in command.
I smelled Derek upwind of me, and as soon as the vamps were up and outside, they would smell my guys too. Best to get inside quickly. Auguste gunned the engine and spun us up to the dock, cut the motor, and let us drift until we touched the rubberized edge.
I tossed away the ear protectors and pushed in the earbud the instant we stopped. The night closed in around me in muggy shadows, mist, and the buzz of mosquitoes. And the chock-a-chock sound of a shotgun being readied for firing. The timing was calculated, and I laughed softly.
“Copy that, Legs,” Derek said into the com unit to the sound of my laughter. I was tied into the system.
With my free hand I tossed my card onto the dock. Muscles One and Muscles Two looked at each other in confusion. The laughter was unexpected, my relaxed posture (legs stretched out with one bent at the knee) was unexpected, my yellow glowing eyes were unexpected, and now they had to figure out how they were going to manage bending over and picking up my card.
After a long, undecided fidget, Muscles Two, who was holding two semiautomatic handguns, holstered one and knelt down, eyes on me, feeling along the wood boards until he had the card, and then stood. He stared down at it, his blood-slave enhanced vision making out the words and his lips moving with the effort. He said, “Dis here say, ‘Jane Yellowrock. Have Stakes, Will Travel.’”
“Vampire hunter? You dat Jane Yellowrock?” Muscles One asked. “Leo Pellissier’s cun—”
Without thinking, I slid my finger around the trigger, raised the Heckler and Koch and shot the guy, a quick, ticked-off two-tap. The first bullet caught him in the left thigh, high and outside, dead-on where I’d intended, in a location where one might do minimal damage but knock out an enemy combatant. The second shot took him in the left elbow. I’d been aiming at his left side, at the waist, where there were few major organs to hit. Muscles One started to fall and lost the shotgun, his breath sucking in for a scream.
Instantly, I moved the weapon to Muscles Two and caught him trying to redraw the weapon he’d holstered. Stupid. He had one still drawn. He shoulda shot me already. When he realized his error, he stopped, nearly as immobile as a vamp, one hand on the weapon in the holster, one with the gun pointed at the dock, his eyes on me, wide like a cat’s. I let a lot more of Beast bleed into my eyes and chuckled again as I gathered my weapon into a two-handed grip, pulled my boots under me, and stood. The airboat wobbled under the weight change and I made sure of my balance before I stepped onto the dock. “I don’t like that word,” I said, over the ringing in my ears.
“Throw it into the water,” I added, nodding to his gun. “Both of them.” I wasn’t leaving an armed bad guy behind me. When he had disposed of both guns, I jutted my chin at the shotgun. “That one too.”
“Herbert kill me, he will,” he said, pronouncing it A-bear, a common Cajun last name.
“And I’ll kill you if you don’t,” I lied sweetly.
Muscles toed the shotgun off into the bayou, and Herbert moaned. I wasn’t sure if he was upset over the gun being tossed, or the pain. Maybe both.
The last light went out at the house and I heard the soft schnick of a round being chambered from the front door. I grabbed Muscles and whirled him, stepping quickly behind him, placing the barrel of my weapon against his spine. Muscles went still as an oak board and it was clear that he knew he had a gun at his back and one ahead. “Think they’ll kill you to get to me?” I whispered to him over the ringing in my ears.
I was six feet, two and a half inches tall in my teal Lucchese boots, and my eyes barely peeked over his shoulder. This close, even over the stink of fired weapons, I could identify the four vamps he had fed from by their herbal signatures—wilting funeral flowers, lemon mint, sage, parsley, and something sweet, like agave. I breathed them in, learning what I could of each: gender, race, relationships. In human form I didn’t have the nose of my Beast, but my sense of smell was far better than any human’s, maybe a by-product of the decades I had spent in her form, or perhaps the result of my natural skinwalker abilities. I didn’t have another skinwalker around to tell me stuff like that.
Ahead of me, I heard more weapons schnick and chock-a-chock in firing readiness. Muscles swallowed so hard I felt it through his spine.
“Call out. Tell them who I am.”