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CHAPTER 21

Shit. Shit. That hurts. I put my STI on the desk, grabbed one of Al’s nice metal pens, and used that to pry the ghost bullets out of my armor. They were probably going to leave some severe little burns under there. But I couldn’t worry about that because there was still a lot of noise coming from Earl’s cell. Unfortunately, there was also a river of evil fog flowing in that direction. From the amount, there couldn’t be that many monsters left topside. The stuff was so thick and gave off such an unnatural vibe that it reminded me of the substance that had fed the Nachtmar at the Last Dragon. I really hated monsters who operated beyond our understanding of the laws of physics.

Taking a quick inventory, I still had Cazador and about a hundred rounds for it. I was down to a couple pistol mags. I didn’t know how many monsters were between me and the vault, and it was taking an ever-increasing number of bullets to put each one down. I topped off my guns and moved out. All I had to do was follow the fog stream.

The back of the archives was clear, but when I turned the corner there were a bunch of Drekavacs clustered around the corridor that led to Earl’s vault. The monsters were popping out and snapping off shots, but then having to duck back to keep from getting shredded by what sounded like a M240. Judging by the number of holes in the walls and gun smoke in the air, somebody had already run through a couple of belts to hold them off.

“You never take Melvin alive! Come at me, scrub lords! Melvin is ripped!”

It must have gotten pretty desperate down here for Trip to give our troll a machine gun.

One of the Drekavac leaned out, shot, and must have gotten lucky, because Melvin let out a startled yelp.

“It burns! It burns!” And then there was a clatter as he dropped the machine gun.

The Drekavac immediately took advantage of that lull and rushed the vault.

“Crap.” I went after them. They hadn’t seen me yet, so I popped a Drekavac in the back of the head. They’d absorbed so many lives that braining it didn’t even put it down, and the monster turned around, whipping blue fire across the wall from the exit wound where his nose had been. It shrieked. Two of its brothers heard and turned around to join it in charging me. The other dozen or so continued toward the vault.

I kept hammering the lead Drekavac with Cazador until its body came apart, but the other two were nearly on me. A sword thrust meant to pierce my guts got knocked aside at the last instant by Cazador’s metal handguard. I kept shooting from the hip, but I wasn’t going to stop the other one in time.

Only that Drekavac stumbled as it got shot in the back. Four Hunters were moving up the opposite direction, also converging on the vault. They were doing the combat glide, moving fast and smooth, carbines shouldered. So I dove for the floor to let them have a clear shot. It was more of a desperate instinct than a clear tactical decision, but either way, it was the smart play as those Hunters lit the two monsters up. Blue sparks rained on my head as the monsters twitched and jerked until they disintegrated.

“Friendly!” I shouted, even though that should be obvious since I wasn’t a glowing skeleton.

“Pitt?” It turned out to be Gutterres and his men. I wasn’t surprised to see them down here since they made no secret that they were in this for the Ward. “You hurt?”

“I’m good.” I got up and immediately started reloading. There was a bunch of gunfire and shouting coming from down the corridor. “We’ve got to protect the vault.”

“There’s another wave right behind us,” the big guy, Messina, warned. He was covering their rear with a Para SAW. “But there’s a friggin’ werewolf eating them!”

“Don’t mess with the werewolf. He’s a friendly.”

The mercs all gave me an incredulous look, but Gutterres took it in stride. “Very well.”

“Seriously?” LoPresto asked.

Gutterres shrugged. “The greatest knight in the history of the church was a werewolf.”

“Sonya’s down this way.” I pointed. Judging by the way the fog from the monsters we’d just capped was heading past the Secret Guard guys, toward that next unseen wave, instead of the ones who were already hitting the vault, any of those Drekavacs who made it past Earl were going to be really nasty.

“We’ll clear these first.” Gutterres signaled for his guys to halt. The corridor to the vault was between us. The corners the Drekavacs had just been using for cover had been chewed to bits. Melvin had done a real number on the drywall. “Warrington, LoPresto, first, then me and Pitt. Messina, watch our backs.”

“Hang on.” This part was going to be really dangerous, not from the group of monsters we were about to box in, but because we didn’t want to get shot by our friends at the other end, and we didn’t want to shoot them through the monsters. So I shouted as loud as I could, “Hunters coming in!”

I could barely hear Trip’s response over the gunfire and monster screeching. “Hurry up. Hold your fire, Melvin.” A long burst of machine-gun fire zipped between me and the Catholics. “No. Bad Melvin! Bad! Put that down.”

“Melvin sorry.”

“You’re good, Z!”

Man, I hate this chaotic part. At least the teams were color-coordinated. The Catholics were all wearing regular street clothing with just plate carriers thrown on top. MHI armor was all various earth tones. “Only shoot the blue ones.”

“Fuckin’ Smurfs,” Warrington said.

“Move,” Gutterres ordered.

His men might not have been full-fledged Secret Guardsmen, but I had to hand it to them. They knew their shit. They were quick and smooth, sweeping into the hall and immediately engaging the monsters as they moved. Because storage space was always at a premium at MHI HQ, there were a lot of boxes and crates here, and the two used those for concealment as Gutterres and I moved in next.

Trip had piled up a bunch of crap as a barricade, and the Hunters were hiding behind it. Between us there were half a dozen Drekavacs in the open. We shot them in the back. The vault crew shot them in the front. By some miracle we managed not to shoot each other. Thank you, Saint Hubert!

Ten seconds of rapid but very carefully aimed fire later, the corridor was filled with the fog of dead Drekavacs. Unfortunately, it immediately went zipping down the hall past us, past Messina, and out of sight. It must have found the next batch of monsters to strengthen, because an ungodly screech came from somewhere inside the archives.

The screeching didn’t stop. It was getting closer. And this time it sounded like it was only one voice. The might of hundreds of monsters, collected into one. And that made it so much worse. The noise suddenly ceased, but it didn’t matter. We knew it was coming for us.

“This way,” Trip said. We rushed over to his improvised barricade. It looked like he’d piled up all of Earl’s old army crates and filled them with bricks to use for cover. Now that was showing initiative.

Albert Lee raised his head over the edge of a crate. “Welcome to Fort Kickass.”

When Melvin stood up to his full seven feet of hideous, green, bumpy ugly, I had to bellow, “Hold your fire! He’s on our side,” before the Catholics could waste him.

“What the hell is that?” Messina shouted.

“It’s a troll.” Gutterres was perplexed, like werewolves were one thing, but trolls were annoying. “You’ve got a troll? Why?”

“He’s our IT department. He’s cool.”

Melvin looked at the newcomers with his beady little eyes. “Melvin cool. You cool?”

“We cool,” said Warrington, though he kept his gun at the ready, because Melvin had that effect on sane people.

I surveyed the crew of Fort Kickass. Trip and Lee appeared uninjured. Melvin was missing one hand, but trolls were pretty ambivalent about amputations since they’d just grow a new one. “Where’s Cody?”

Trip jerked a thumb at the bank-vault-style door in the back of Earl’s room. “He went inside to try one last time to figure out how to get the Ward from Sonya so we could turn it on and maybe kill all these things.”

“Silas Carver was born on Earth,” Gutterres said. “The stone has no power over him. It wouldn’t work.”

“Cody figured it was still worth a shot.”

“As long as your man doesn’t destroy it,” Gutterres said. “If we lose that stone—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, millions dead. Got it.” I pointed down the hall at where the ghost light was building. “We’ve got more pressing matters right now.”

A single Drekavac lurched into view.

As more and more power coalesced into fewer bodies, they weren’t getting any bigger, but this one was giving off an aura of sheer wickedness. It made the hair on my arms stand up. The temperature plunged. All the Hunters could see our breath. Melvin spit out the Red Bull he’d been drinking, because this thing felt evil. It hadn’t just gathered up the life essence of the ones we’d killed, but who knew how many hundreds more from above.

The Drekavac started toward us. All eight of us started shooting.

I watched in horror as our bullets shattered against the monster’s body. A weapon materialized in the monster’s hand. It wasn’t one of the tiny pistols. Oh, no. It was that damned blunderbuss that had nearly torn the roof off of our headquarters.

“Down!” Gutterres and I shouted at the same time, because we’d both seen that thing in action.

Everybody but Melvin listened.

Lightning hit Fort Kickass. I was pelted by splinters and wet troll chunks.

Melvin hit the wall. His legs were gone.

Most of us popped up and started shooting again. The Drekavac was manipulating its weapon to obliterate the rest of us and only seemed mildly inconvenienced by the dozens of bullets hitting him.

Maybe it was the whole Chosen thing, but I could see what was happening. The ghost fire had collected around this body to strengthen and protect it. Each time we hit it, more of that energy was being used up. Each time it attacked us, more energy was expended, which was why when there was a bunch of them, they were only using the little pistols, and now he’d broken out the big stuff. Give us enough time and we’d break him, and he’d disintegrate like the rest.

Except this one had gathered so much energy that we’d be dead long before that point.

“Get inside the vault!” I shouted.

Trip rushed to the door and started opening it. Lee got there a moment later because of the bad leg. Trip spun the wheel and then the two of them started swinging the incredibly heavy thing open.

I ran to Melvin. He’d been splattered against the wall. Our troll looked down at where his body abruptly ended at the pelvis, then at me. “That is bullshits!”

“Hang on.” I grabbed Melvin by his remaining arm and dragged him toward the vault. He’d lost so much weight suddenly that I could actually do that easily now.

Trip got the door open. “Inside. Go. Go!” Only Trip didn’t go in himself. He’d hold his ground, covering the rest of us, until he was sure we were inside, and only then would he get to safety. Because that was just the kind of hero he was. Except as I went in, I grabbed him by the armor and dragged him and Melvin both inside. Heroic or not, Trip wasn’t going to accomplish shit shooting at a bulletproof monster until he got flash-fried by a lightning cannon.

The mercs were laying down fire, especially Messina with that SAW. LoPresto’s carbine went down and he immediately drew a DWX and kept shooting as they made an orderly retreat into the vault. If we survived, I was definitely going to see if these guys wanted full-time jobs.

Gutterres was the last one in. And he must have been freakishly stronger than he looked by the way he pulled that giant door closed by himself so fast. Lee was waiting and spun the wheel to slam the massive steel locking bolts. There was no way to open it from this side. We were now locked in. Lee quickly let go, which was lucky because he was one second away from possibly getting electrocuted. The whole room shook as the Drekavac blasted the door. It held.

For now.

We all stood there in the emergency lighting, breathing hard, looking at the door, kind of surprised to still be alive.

“Uh, Hunters?” Melvin said. “Where’d hole come from?”

I turned around to see what Melvin was talking about and dropped our poor dismembered troll in surprise. Ben Cody was lying on the floor, either dead or unconscious. There was no sign of Sonya. Earl’s full moon prison cell was just a plain concrete room with a drain hole in the middle of the floor, just big enough to contain a furious werewolf. Earl was like a beacon of calm compared to most werewolves, but even he turned into a bloodthirsty psycho when he transformed during the full moon, so this place was for his protection and ours. Except now the back wall was missing, and there was an eight-foot-wide earthen tunnel leading off into the darkness on the other side. And by missing, I don’t mean torn down or excavated, I mean a big circular section of the concrete had just disappeared. And it had happened so recently that the edges that had just been sheared through were still smoking hot.

“Ben!” Trip knelt next to Cody and checked his pulse. “He’s alive.”

There was a bunch of blood in his hair and beard. My guess was that he’d gotten clubbed, or maybe thrown down in such a way he’d banged his head on the floor. Had Sonya sucker punched him and bailed? Or had something else done it?

“She screwed us again.” Gutterres started toward the tunnel.

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“What else could it be?” he snapped. “She probably got a better offer again. She’s played us before.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think she knows how to do this.” I gestured at the hole, which had obviously been made by magic. Then I remembered what Franks had said before he’d run off. Lana is here. Despite Stricken’s words about trusting me to handle his mystery problem for him, he was still grabbing the stone for himself. “But I know what could. Stricken has a succubus who works for him. I saw her do something like this when she teleported him out of MCB custody.”

“That can’t work here though,” Lee said. “Julie had Tanya’s people put spells up all over the compound. None of that stuff should be able to operate on compound grounds anymore.”

“That’s what the MCB director thought about their offices too.” Except Tanya was too proud of being MHI to do a half-ass job for us like those other elves clearly had. Which meant that if Lee was right, Lana might have grabbed Sonya, but she’d have to travel on foot until they got outside the range of the elves’ enchantments.

BANG.

We all flinched and looked toward the vault door. It had just gotten hit hard. And it wasn’t the big gun either. From the amount of force, my guess was that he’d willed a sledgehammer into existence and had sucked up enough dead monsters to give himself superstrength.

BANG.

The vault door shook. Little cracks formed in the reinforced walls around it.

“They’re getting away,” Gutterres said. “Let’s go.”

“Give us a minute to get our wounded to safety.”

“There’s no time, Pitt. That stone is more important than any one of us.”

There was no way I was going to leave Cody. And yes . . . even Melvin. “You’ll get lost without us.”

Gutterres glared at me, but he was a man on a mission. “Stick around if you want. I’ll pluck that Ward out of the shape-changer’s corpse if I have to.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Trip said.

“Test me and find out.” Gutterres entered the tunnel. His men shared an uneasy look, but they followed.

A moment after the Secret Guard were out of sight Melvin said, “What’s got up his ass?”

“He’s just trying to save millions of lives. Pressure makes you cranky. Are you okay?”

“Melvin will grow new legs. Old ones had rash anyway.”

BANG.

“We can’t stick around here though,” Lee said. “We’ve got to follow them.”

“Hang on.” The thing that Gutterres didn’t realize was just how much of a maze the old tunnels beneath the compound were. If the Vatican Hunters didn’t pick up a trail, they’d probably take the wrong path. Lana—or whoever had broken Sonya out—had a few different tunnels she could choose to get out and if we didn’t know which one she’d taken, we’d never catch her in time.

SCREEEECH!

A glowing blue sword point slowly punched through the vault steel. The Drekavac had given up on smashing his way in, so he was cutting his way in. The tip was glowing like a plasma arc. It had to be using up a ton of the Drekavac’s remaining power, but he was shearing through the locking bolts.

“There’s too many tunnels to cover even if we split up, and we’ve got two wounded to carry.” I checked my radio, but still got nothing but static. Not surprising, considering the source of the distortion was on the other side of the door.

“We’ll just have to pick a route and hope,” Lee said.

Cody was a big guy, but even missing three limbs, Melvin still weighed more. So I scooped up our troll. “You’re going to have to ride piggyback.”

“Melvin’s ego not fragile.”

Trip and Lee dragged Cody to his feet and each of them got one of his arms over their shoulders. That Drekavac was making unnervingly steady process. The door was dripping molten steel. An incredible amount of heat was coming off of the metal. It wouldn’t hold for long, but at least whatever was left of the Drekavac would have been weakened by such an expenditure of energy. We were about to make a run for it when the sword tip suddenly disappeared. There was a muffled crash and a crunch on the other side. For twenty seconds we heard the sounds of violence but couldn’t really tell what was going on. The Drekavac screeched, but that sound was abruptly cut off.

Whatever had just taken out the Drekavac must have known the exterior combo, because a moment later the wheel began to spin. The door swung open.

Earl Harbinger staggered into the room. He was human, or at least mostly human, but still in the process of turning back. His body had been savaged. He was covered in so many rapidly healing bullet holes it looked like he had the chicken pox. One eye was still werewolf yellow; the other was filled with blood. He’d burned so many calories regenerating that all his still twisting bones were visibly poking through his skin. The blood-soaked figure made it a few halting steps into the cell, and then slowly sank to his knees.

“Damn, man,” I said. “You look like shit.”

“That’s the last of them,” Earl gasped, exhausted. He was so tired he sounded drunk. Then he looked past his battered Hunters and saw the hole in the wall. “The fuck you do to my room?”

“Sonya’s been taken. I think by Stricken.”

“Oh . . . ” Earl said as the fog of the last Drekavac he’d just taken out swirled by him, past my legs, and flew down the tunnel out of sight. “Thought we were done, but that slime’s going somewhere.”

The Drekavac wasn’t stupid. He hadn’t sacrificed all of his thirteenth form against us. He must have left a body hiding somewhere in the compound to fall back to, and it had collected who knew how many monsters’ worth of power. Lana was going to carry Sonya right into that thing’s arms.

Earl tried to stand up, but then flopped over on his side, too injured to keep going. “Gimme a minute.” Then he promptly passed out. Which was saying a lot about how badly he’d been torn up, because Earl Harbinger was a tank.

I dropped Melvin again, who made a very disgruntled noise when he hit the floor. “Lee, stay with Earl and Cody.”

Trip knew what was up. We were Sonya’s last chance. “Better. Get to the intercom, alert the others, then stay with these guys.”

“Will do. Good luck.”

At least I wouldn’t be here when Lee found out that I’d had a gunfight in his library.



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