Fic: Gods adn Devils 5/14
Told you I'd do it.
Disclaimers and previous parts can be found here.
Part Five
This was a world that Nyssa knew. This was a world where she was appreciated, and where she knew her place and her position.
Yet she was leading their worst enemy into their most vulnerable place. Nyssa was not a fan of irony.
She allowed herself the luxury of a deep breath even though she did not need it, purely to calm herself. No one had spoken to her in an unduly familiar way since Blade, save for Asad who had so long ago earned that privilege that he no longer needed to ask. It was enough to make her skin itch.
‘You need to fight it, then,’ Nyssa told herself as Blade continued to ignore her. ‘You need to shed it from your system.’
She stood stock-still, hands clasped behind her back, as Blade gave a curious look to the warehouse in front of them. It looked bland and unremarkable. A great deal of energy had gone into creating that façade.
“Where’s the entrance?” Blade asked. He sounded confused, though Nyssa would not have been able to tell even two hours before. She was beginning to read his signs. It could wind up being a worthwhile night, after all. “I don’t see any signs. No vampire glyphs.”
“No.” After the way that Blade had startled her so by obliterating any notion of personal space, Nyssa felt a certain thrill at being able to surprise him in return. She felt his eyes on her, weighing and judging, as she went on. “Because of you we have had to rethink our habits, tighten our security.” Evolve. Vampires had shed the notion of divinely ordained superiority some time before only to replace it with Darwin’s world-altering biological model. It made it much more difficult to hate Nomak with the fury that she needed in order to do her job, knowing that Nomak could be operating from the same model of cold, amoral superiority as she herself was. Rather than lingering over those dark thoughts for too long at a stretch, she pulled a pair of ultraviolet binoculars from her belt and activated them before she handed them over to Blade. His fingers touched hers as she took them. They were still very warm, and she thought that she could smell the blood beneath the surface. “Have a closer look.” Nyssa could still see the glyphs, glowing faintly against the walls, even without the aid of the binoculars. It was a strange comfort to know that Blade could not. The tales of his limitations had somehow never made it into the bogeyman stories.
“Nice,” Blade said as he handed the binoculars back to her.
They strode quickly back to the battered van where the rest of the Blood Pack was waiting for them and where Whistler and Scud were passing out weapons. “Forty-eight, thirty-five, nine millimeter,” Whistler said curtly as he passed a gun into each vampire hand and jerked away before his skin could encounter their tepid flesh for too long. Nyssa gave him a long, curious stare as she accepted her own gun. Whistler had spoken less than half a dozen words in total since they had left Blade’s stronghold, least of all to the vampires themselves. Nyssa had noticed him touching at the side of his jaw more than once, though, and saw that he was blinking rapidly in order to see in the gloom. It was pitiful, really, even stacked against the low rung that he had been standing on previously. “All foil-tipped and filled with silver nitrate.” Every vampire lip found itself curling upwards. Whistler noticed and appeared pleased before he went on. “This hyper-velocity stake gun spits out a silver stake at six thousand feet per second.” He tossed it to Reinhardt, who snatched it easily from the air, and reached into the van again. “Since you suckers don’t like sunlight, we’ve modified the guns with a UV filter.” Whistler turned a light on at the end of the gun, causing everyone save for Blade and Scud to recoil back instinctively. “Pop it open, instant UV light.” He waved the supposedly safe gun at Priest, who immediately drew his own weapon. Nyssa did notice with some satisfaction that he glanced over her way, as if he was asking for her permission, before he flicked the safety off. Whistler’s only response was to grin. “Filters on, no problem.”
“Yo, B, check it out,” Scud called before Whistler could get his neck snapped for him and the question of whether Blade could move quickly enough to slap an explosive on the back of Priest’s head, too, answered. “Our old friend EDTA. Cartridge ejects, automatic reload.” He demonstrated so that they would all understand.
Nyssa drew back a few feet and watched the gun warily, though she could probably still crack Scud’s neck within her hands like bird’s bones before he could even draw a bead on her. Blade had been hunting extensively with EDTA over the past two years. There were no further explanations needed. “When humans use biological weapons, it is called a war crime,” she told Blade.
He took the gun from Scud before he answered, though the look that he passed over her was much longer than the dismissive glances that he had been giving her before. “Show me where a vampire signed the Geneva Convention and I’ll take it under advisement,” he said.
Nyssa was still trying to decipher when she had been promoted up from ‘suckhead’ when Whistler said, “Let’s go.” He had weapons strapped all across his body, making him look like an aging soldier of fortune. It would have worked if he was not still so warm and flush with life. The blood could be heard moving through Blade’s vines, much faster than it would through any vampire’s, but he still moved enough like a predator to fool the unwary. Nyssa had set foot in the House of Pain many times before, and she knew that it would not be filled with wary soldiers. Blade was a bogeyman to them, a shadowy monster without a face, not this fit, attractive man. He could pass if they moved quickly.
Chupa echoed her thoughts by giving a disbelieving snort. “You won’t pass for one of us. No way.”
Whistler hardly glanced at Chupa. Nyssa did not know if this was meant to be carelessness, or a sign that he did not fear. “Like I give a shit.”
“No, he’s right.” Nyssa blinked in surprise to hear the concession. Blade pointed towards the top of one of the warehouses surrounding them on all sides. “Why don’t you post up on the roof over there? Cover our backs.”
There was a second, before Whistler covered it again, when his grizzled face looked as if someone had just struck him. “So the Blood Pack’s calling the shots now, huh?” He flipped a rifle down from his shoulder and into his hands. “Great.” His tone dripped with disgust as he turned away.
Pushing past Blade and towards the House of Pain, Reinhardt smirked, “Better curb that dog of yours, or we’ll do it for you.” Blade in response set the explosive on the back of his head to beeping for a few seconds before he turned it off again. Reinhardt’s jump was almost comical, and probably not as masculine as he liked to think of himself.
“Keep pushing, asshole,” Blade growled before he moved on.
Reinhardt looked at Nyssa expectantly, as if he was waiting for her to intervene on his behalf. Nyssa thought that she may even have done so, as it still made her hackles rise to watch how easily Blade could commandeer her team and treat them as if they were his property, until she remembered Blade’s unexpected bowing to Chupa moments before. One good turn deserved another. She remained silent.
It was difficult to smirk and appear disgusted at the same time, but Reinhardt was a talented man. “The Daywalker is the boss of us now?” he asked her. Reinhardt then passed that glance over her, the one that made her want to hook her nails beneath the surface of his face and peel it off with her bare hands. “Figures. That man must have a pheromone.”
As Nyssa was still troubled and uncertain by how much control she was passing over to Blade of her own volition, she was not in the mood to deal with any of Reinhardt’s sexist drivel. It took her two steps to be into Reinhardt’s personal space, into his face. He was significantly taller than she, but he still looked startled as she raised herself briefly onto the tips of her toes so that she would be even closer to him. “You make me curious, Reinhardt,” she told him in a much calmer voice than she actually felt. She wanted to shout and strike him, but that was neither how a leader nor a princess behaved in times of stress. Not if they wanted to be worthy of their title. “If I am such a weak female for not intervening on your behalf, what does that make you for needing it?” Reinhardt began to color; Nyssa pushed on before he could say anything that would cause her to knock him across the parking lot and put herself down one soldier. “I do not have time to second-guess every order that Blade gives you. I am your superior, and I am telling you to take everything that he tells you to do as if it came directly from me.” Nyssa pivoted and stalked away before Reinhardt could reply, though she could still feel his gaze resting heavily between her shoulder blades.
“That may have been unwise” Asad told her in a low voice as she caught up to him. He grimaced, as if it was paining him to admit it, before he went on. “He has a certain charisma that the others respect.”
“Demagogues ordinarily do,” Nyssa whispered back. “You and I have right on our side, though.” She pulled back so that she could give Asad one of her rare smiles. Nyssa did not do it often, though she had been told that it made her dazzling. “Are you worried for me?”
Asad touched her arm, a sign of high familiarity for him. As with her smiles, it was something that he did not make a habit of. “Even you sometimes need it,” he replied.
Nyssa crossed to the front of the group as they strode across the street and drew near the House of Pain so that she could let them all in through a cellar entrance. The smell of blood was immediate. Nyssa wondered how good Blade’s senses were, if the smell was as strong to him as it was to her. A second later, it occurred to her to wonder why she even cared. They descended down a lot set of stairs until they reached a set of heavy double doors. Nyssa paused there.
“We’re in,” she told Blade. “You’re about to enter our world. You will see things…feeding.” A day before, she would not have hesitated to speak such a loaded word. Over Blade’s shoulder, Nyssa saw Asad beginning to look concerned. “Just remember why you are here.”
Blade looked into her eyes and answered, “I haven’t forgotten.”
Nyssa led the group through a chilly industrial kitchen, remnants from when the structure had still been a hotel. The shadows moved in and out among the stainless steel surfaces, and a thumping of music could be heard some distance away. Priest asked, keeping his hand ready upon his gun, “What exactly are we looking for?”
Reinhardt answered, “Anything that looks suspicious.” He sounded more subdued than he had while he was outside. Whether that was due to her or the influence of her father riding behind her, Nyssa neither knew nor cared.
As they reached the far side of the kitchen, a door set into the wall began to lower automatically. The rave music that had previously only been a slight vibration in the walls and floor became deafening. People could be seen dancing, and, in a few of the corners, there were the scenes of feeding that Nyssa had warned Blade about. The victims were not moving. Nyssa did not know what Blade might have done if they had been.
He looked shocked and disgusted. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” They waded deeper into the throng. Nyssa listened to Blade as he spoke into his radio. “Scud, you read me?” He waited for Scud’s affirmative before he went on, “Whole place is a safe house. Windows painted black, once access door, two or three hundred suckheads in here.” He set a portable camera against a pillar while Nyssa found a hallway off of the dance floor and began to prowl down it.
It looked more like the hotel that it had once been after Nyssa had broken apart from the crowd of dancers, less filled with the scents of blood and sex and more shot through with a sense of aging, moldering dignity. There was still paper on the walls and molding at the ceiling and floor. Water-stained, well-worn carpet muffled the sound of Nyssa’s boots on the floor. She set a camera identical to the ones that Blade was using against the wall and kept her free hand upon one of her guns at all times. It was to her great regret that she could not afford to keep both of her hands occupied with weaponry. Should Nomak or any of his followers attack the safe house, the labyrinth of abandoned hallways off of the main floor would prove a tempting feeding ground.
Nyssa turned a corner and saw a ladder leading up into the attic that had been lowered to stand in the hallway. She was fairly certain that that was not right. The had that she had braced against the butt of her gun tightening even further, Nyssa advanced and began to slowly climb the ladder. She remained hyper-alert for any sound from above all the while.
There was a scuffing noise from further down, a hallway that she had not checked yet. Nyssa froze midway up the ladder, cast a wry glance towards the darkness above her, and then retreated. She could not shake the feeling that those very same shadows were only waiting for the moment when she turned her back so that they could reach for her.
The hallway that she had heard the noise originating from was deserted. Feeling foolish, Nyssa set another of the cameras against the wall and turned to continue her investigations.
From nowhere a hand, tepid and soft like the skin of a snake, dropped over her mouth. Nyssa choked back a scream, if that was what Nomak had been preparing for. He wrenched her hand away from her gun, but she drove her elbow back into his abdomen as hard as she was able. He made a faint oofing noise and did not release her. It was a much more effective move, admittedly, against someone for whom oxygen was a pressing issue. Nomak grabbed for her arm in response and twisted until he was on the verge of wrenching it from its socket. Nyssa cried out, finally, against the hand that was mashing her lips back. Even with her low oxygen needs, the pressure was incredible.
“Sister,” Nomak said against the side of her face, a low, rumbling growl into her skin, as if he had never spoken the word before and wanted to test it out before he committed. He inhaled deeply of her hair.
Before Nyssa could react or even process, Blade rounded the corner, his hand upon one of his own guns. It rose into Nyssa’s throat to yell at him to draw it quickly, as Nomak had shown himself to be shockingly fast, but Nomak moved his hand from her mouth to her throat. The pressure was enough to make her gag and her knees go weak. She might as well have not been there at all, for Blade pronounced Nomak’s name as if he was not shocked to see him there.
“Daywalker,” Nomak said in a cordial tone, the one that he would use to greet an old friend rather than a soldier that he would soon be fighting. He tilted his head to one side, a tightening of his hand accompanying the gesture. Nyssa made a small, wheezing sound of pain that neither man seemed to notice. “What am I to you? Is the enemy of my enemy my friend, or do we have a tedious old path that we must share together?”
Blade’s response was merely to smile as he raised his gun and fired a bullet directly into Nomak’s brain. His body spasmed backwards under the impact, causing his grip to loosen slightly; Nyssa took the opportunity to wrench free and spin away. She waited for Nomak to disintegrate away into ash, as any vampire ought to have done, only to watch him flip backwards and demolish an antique china cabinet with his weight. He jumped back to his feet again only a second later. Nyssa felt her jaw drop.
Snarling at the both of them before he went, Nomak fled down the hallway. Nyssa began to pursue him and was stopped by Blade grabbing her arm in a vise-like grip. He hurled her back against the wall so hard that her head nearly left a dent in the plaster, snarled, “Stay here!” at her without bothering to look around, and took off in the pursuit of his prey.
*
The warehouse was still and silent while Deacon was the only one within it. Funny how quickly he had become used to the sound of Scud’s welding torch, of his hip-hop and his damned cartoons. Funny how quickly he had become used to people, that was it. Sitting in Scud’s customary seat and keeping an eye upon the security system, supposedly now fixed, Deacon felt a scowl touch his face. He seemed to do that a lot. Well, he had never been one to mess with a good thing, once he had found it. He put his boots up on the desk and idly fingered the safety on the gun that Blade had given him before departing, turning it on and off. Fantasizing about putting a bullet into Blade’s kneecap was as good a way as any to pass the time, and the quiet noise was keeping him company in the stillness.
Two years before, the fantasy would have been of putting the bullet between Blade’s eyes rather than into his kneecap. If his mood was any better by the time that Blade returned, he might even tell him so.
Meanwhile, Scud had either restored the security system or done a damned good job of faking it before he had left. All of the infrared security cameras were reporting still, calm night. Deacon had the massive UV lamps turned off so as not to interfere with the heat sensors, and the remaining shadows wrapped around him like a cloak. Didn’t matter. He was still much more accustomed to shadow than he was to light. With the clicking of the gun’s safety as the only thing breaking the monotony, Deacon was on the verge of turning on one of Scud’s stupid DVDs in order to break the monotony.
Only almost, though. There were some lines that Deacon could not bring himself to cross, with or without anyone there to witness it.
Scud had roughly twenty of his infrared cameras scattered about along the outside of the warehouse and at a few select points of the interior, and four televisions set up across the desk to monitor them all. Each camera would show a few seconds of footage before moving on. It was easy to keep an eye on each one, as Deacon himself was the only red spot among a sea of inky blue.
Or he ought to have been. Deacon leaned forward and pulled his boots from the desk with a heavy thumping noise as the blue was cut, for the briefest of seconds, by a flash of deep purple. “Motherfuck,” Deacon said beneath his breath, watching intently for the flash to come around again. It had been one of the outside cameras, of that much he was certain. Now that he paused to think about it, there might be a slight problem with Scud’s practice of keeping the cameras on constant rotation, after all. God help them if it should turn out that Blade had been right all along. He could make the air itself appear smug.
Deacon hunched over in front of the computer screens. After nearly a minute had passed, he was still the solitary red silhouette amid a jungle of shadow. Maybe it had been nothing. Maybe it had only been a trace of warmth on the breeze. Deacon still flicked the safety off on the gun and tilted his head to one side so that he could listen intently.
A skittering noise, very faint, could be heard from the direction of the roof. Yeah, and maybe it was a shockingly warm breeze and a herd of squirrels. Deacon knew exactly how many people would be standing in line behind him to lay money on those odds. “Motherfuck,” he repeated with even greater conviction, and lunged to his feet. The UV lights, hell, the entire fucking security system, had been his idea. Let the damned thing do its job now. Deacon leaned over the computer’s keyboard and rapidly typed in the code that would activate the lights. He flinched backwards automatically as they flared into life, old instinct that he had never been able to bring back under his control again, and then raced for the stairs. A pistol was fine and dandy, but if he was going to be fighting alone then he had in mind something with a little more oomf to it.
Deacon was halfway up the stairs when the lights that had previously been shining brightly enough to put him in danger of retinal damage cut out, leaving him in darkness that was a living thing. He paused and felt it caressing his face as he cursed the thundering of his heart and the whistling of air in his throat. This was the humanity that he was supposed to be embracing, too. If there were hidden depths to it, then it sure came in one hell of an inconvenient package.
The sounds from the roof had stopped altogether. Ordinarily, that would be a good sign. In their world, however, not quite. Deacon swore a blistering oath, not bothering to hide it, as the hunters on the roof doubtless already knew that he was there, and double-timed his way up the stairs again. Human limitations or not, they had been crouching here for a while. He did not need his eyes.
There were additional lights that he could have turned on once he had reentered the living quarters that he shared with Blade, if not for the vampires that he knew must surely be entering the warehouse by now. The security system was not even putting up a pretense of doing its job any longer. If Deacon emerged from the other side of this unscathed, then he was going to give serious consideration towards not telling Blade at all. It would be better for all of them.
Deacon engaged the safety on the gun, much as it made every nerve that he had scream in unison, and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans as he crossed the room. He knew this place. That was one advantage that he could still claim over the vampires. Deacon’s seeking hands in the dark soon found an automatic rifle, which he slung across his shoulder, and, a few yards away, a sword. Though he was nearly certain that it was only one of the practice spares, he still ran his thumb quickly around the greave to be sure before he pulled it free. There was just enough light in the room to make the blade glitter, a quicksilver gleam in the gloom. In it, Deacon saw the dark shape that dropped down from the doorframe. He pulled his lips back from his teeth. The vampire was nothing more than a vibration on the air to him; to it, he must have a spotlight trained on him. Deacon twisted to rifle around so that it was lying across his back, unable to hinder his movements, and tilted the sword into a defensive position.
Seeing the vampire’s face would have been difficult even if it had been standing right in front of him. Over by the doorway, it was impossible. “You aren’t supposed to be here,” it told him, a deep male voice that carried where its appearance would not. He sounded surprised.
Good on him. “I tell myself that every day,” Deacon replied flatly, and raised the sword higher still. He twisted his mouth into his old, glittering smile, knowing that the vampire would see it. A convincing image was half the battle right there.
The shadow from the doorway moved closer to him. Deacon took a step nearer the bed, his fear mostly feigned. The glitter of fang before the vampire closed his mouth again told him that his ruse was convincing. “That’s really too bad,” the vampire told him. “This was supposed to be quiet. On the other hand, I could eat.” He rushed forward.
Deacon grinned again, and this time it was loose and unforced. A vampire moving at its full speed was nearly to fast for human eyes to follow; Deacon did himself a favor and didn’t try. The air moved and almost hummed as the vampire lunged at him. With a sword in his hand, Deacon did not need any other signal than that. He swung it in a tight, controlled arc. Deacon could not see, but he still felt the meaty sound of the blade striking the vampire’s neck and making the flesh part way, a whispering sigh as the head tumbled from the body. Everything else was swallowed by an explosion of cinder and ash.
Deacon ducked backwards so that he would not breathe any of it and listened carefully, wondering if he should be so lucky as to have to deal with only one. His own heart thundering in his ears prevented him from hearing anything else until a female voice called out in anger and shock, “You killed Rickard!”
Motherfuck. Deacon would not have sent one vampire alone to take up the task of invading the Daywalker’s headquarters, either, but he always found room to hope. “Private property, sweetheart,” Deacon drawled. He gave the sword a casual flick to shake off any ash that might be clinging to the blade. Deacon could not see his opponent’s face in the shadow, but he knew that her expression would be infuriated by the gesture all the same. Infuriated enough to make the kind of stupid mistake that Deacon needed? What the hell. There was always room for hope.
“I haven’t been human in a while,” she mused instead as she stalked forward, and Deacon realized all over again how much hope was for other people compared to how the various deities of the universe really got a kick out of fucking him over. “I could make killing you last a while, I’ll bet, if I was really motivated.”
In the States, they ran commercials advising people who owned guns to keep them unloaded until the very moment when they were needed. Obviously, those people lived in a completely different world than the one that Deacon called home. If he had been forced to pause and fumble with clips in the dark, then there was no doubt in this mind that this bitch would be fang-deep into the side of his neck before his task was even halfway completed. Instead, Deacon did not even bother for her to get close enough to deal with through the sword, diving instead for the handgun tucked into the back of his pants. The exploding sound it made going off was deafening as it echoed and reechoed around the closed space, the second sound of a vampire exploding away into nothing at all so soft as to be lost in it. Deacon put his forearm against his mouth as the air in the room became choked with soot and nearly impossible to breath, wincing. So much for any delusions of stealth. He shoved away all the thoughts saying that, to them, he might as well have had a spotlight trained onto himself ever since they had breached security. Deacon raced back out onto the balcony.
In the gloom, he could just pick out two shadowy figures moving around Scud’s computer. And what, oh what, might they be doing there? Especially since Deacon knew Scud pretty well by this point, well enough to know that he was, in a bizarre twist, a paranoid little shit when he wasn’t high. The encryption systems that he kept running on that computer were some of the best that Deacon had ever seen.
This was another one of those times when Blade was going to be absolutely insufferable. Sure, his expression would not change, exactly, but Deacon would still be able to tell. He swung the rifle off of his shoulder and peered for only a second through the nearly useless scope before he fired off two shots, so close together that the booming sounds mingled and became one. One vampire fell forward against the terminal for only a second before it was reduced to nothing at all; the other one reeled backwards and then shrieked as the silver bullet entered its arm and swiftly ate it away up to the elbow. Deacon allowed himself a grim smile as he took aim again for a final, fatal shot. He was not doing half-bad, considering that he was cattle stumbling blind through the dark. From all that he had seen thus far, this was a reconnaissance mission, not an assault. They had thought that the warehouse was empty and already knew the ins and outs of the computer and security systems as if they had designed them themselves. Anything more than four would be overkill.
Deacon had not found religion over the past two years, and would have laughed in the face of anyone who told him that the only thing left for a man with that much blood on his hands was to beg forgiveness and hope that somebody was listening. That did not, however, mean that he did not believe in a crude kind of sentient force in the universe. Their relationship was a simple, but fairly effective and straightforward one. Deacon started to relax and think that he could breathe again, and this force promptly fucked him over. It had a nice kind of reliability to it. Deacon figured that eventually he would learn.
A hand came down on the back of Deacon’s neck before he could squeeze the trigger and pull off that final shot, lifting him off of his feet as easily as if he was an errant kitten. Deacon was whirled around and thrown against the balcony hard enough to leave a throbbing stripe against his lower back. He winced but did not cry out, preferring instead to scrabble for the handgun that he had replaced against the small of his back before stepping out of the room. Wedged between the balcony and a vampire with so little free space that he could scarcely breathe, there was no room for the rifle.
The vampire knocked his hand away with enough force to make his wrist go first tingling and then numb before he reached around Deacon and extricated the gun himself. The weapon made a clanging noise as he threw it to the side. Deacon did not see the vampire engage the safety first, but the universe kept up its winning streak and would not allow the vampire to be shot even by accident. The sword and the rifle followed a few seconds later.
“Look at you,” the vampire said, leaning in close so that he could smell at Deacon’s face. Deacon wondered if he was giving off enough adrenaline to be entertaining, if he was putting on a good show. He took at a swing at the vampire, only to find both of his wrists seized and his hands quickly pinned down to the rail again. Somehow, it was more fun when Blade did it. “Little lamb trying to show its teeth. I didn’t know that you were going to be here.”
That the reconnaissance team had been filled in with enough details to recognize him on sight with not filling Deacon with ideas on how to take back control of the situation. “I’m full of surprises,” he grunted, squirming and twisting against the hands that were keeping him pinned in place. It was like struggling against iron. “It’s a vice.” The vampire was leaning close enough to him that, much as it could smell him, Deacon ought to have been able to smell a little bit of him if the vampire had been human: warmth, sweat and aftershave, a faint tang that Deacon had never been able to convince himself was not blood. The absence of any scent at all, even those which ought to have been decipherable through weak human senses, was like peering into a black hole. Deacon leaned back as far as he was able.
There was a clamoring on the stairs as the vampire that he had winged staggered up them. It was a female, and if the way that she was not even trying to cover the sound of her approach was anything to go by, then she was in one hell of a lot of pain. Much as Deacon could not bring himself to give anything that even remotely resembled a damn about that, he could not stop cursing himself for not shooting a little further to the left and taking the bitch directly through the heart.
“You stupid fuck!” she shrieked at Deacon, trying to lunge at him over the male’s outstretched arm. The male moved to block her, but one of her fists still got through, a sharp blow to the jaw that knocked Deacon’s head back and left him spinning. “What do you think that I’m going to do to you now, huh?” Her arm ended just a few inches beyond her shoulder in a charred mess of bone and muscle. Deacon could see where vampire healing was already trying to put her back together again. It almost looked as if maggots were crawling through the flesh as it twisted and rippled.
“Easy,” the male said in a weary voice, though whether he was speaking to Deacon or to the female was anyone’s guess. Deacon had still neither moved nor spoken again. “Did you get everything?”
“Yes,” the female allowed grudgingly. She head her lips pulled back from her teeth, and her face was glistening with pain sweat. Back when Quinn had still been alive, it had seemed as if he was getting a limb cut off every other week and Deacon had never seen him act like that. Granted, with Quinn it was also possible that repetition had stolen some of the shine from amputation. “Who’s he?” She jerked her chin towards Deacon as she said it, and Deacon realized that it was definitely her first time being injured in the field, if she was either so closely sheltered a pureblood or so newly turned that she did not recognize him immediately. He had not been gone for that long. “And why can’t we just eat him?”
“We can,” the male assured her, cocking his eyebrow when Deacon’s heart rate and adrenal levels did not change in response. Deacon had known what he was in store for, barring a miracle, ever since he had felt the back of his neck being seized in that steel grip. “And he’s that one, Blade’s pet. The whore turned vampire turned whore again.” When Deacon’s heart rate finally surged, the male tilted his head to one side and said softly, “Well, that certainly seemed to hit a nerve.”
Deacon realized that he had betrayed himself and struggled to bring himself back under control as well as he was able while he was still pinned against the railing. “I suck the cock of the Daywalker, you suck the cock of the purebloods,” he responded, having noticed a faint scar on the male’s forehead, nearly hidden by the fall of his hair. “It all evens out in the end, wouldn’t you say?”
Deacon knew that he was going to be struck a second before it happened, saw it in the way that the male’s entire face tightened and his lips wrinkled back from his teeth, but there was nothing that he could do to dodge or defend himself save brace for it. The male struck him in the side of the head with a closed fist, so hard that Deacon though simultaneously that his neck was going to break and that he had been struck deaf. It was not until he slumped forward to be scooped up easily by the male and then dragged in the direction of the living quarters that he realized that he could still hear, there was just a ringing sound so loud that it had grown to swallow the entire world. He shook his head to try to clear it and tried to brace his legs against the floor to stop himself from going any further, but they did not seem to be taking commands from him at the moment.
“What are you doing?” was the first thing that Deacon heard when his head had stopped buzzing enough for him to hear again, that of the female speaking to the male in an anxious voice. Pureblood or turned, she was very young, if the idea that there were tensions between the two factions always waiting for an excuse to explode into violence was such a shock to her.
The male flung Deacon down across the edge of the bed. With his legs still consulting with the union before they decided to get back to work, Deacon tumbled with little in the way of resistance. He braced himself on his elbows and watched both of the vampires warily. Blade was not just a paranoid fucker in the field; there were weapons strewn all about the room, too. It was only a matter of Deacon being able to reach one before he was killed. Admittedly, with the way that vampires could move, that was a very big matter.
“Can’t leave him here to tell tales once we’re gone,” the male said matter-of-factly to the female. “Bad enough that the Daywalker is going to know that someone was in here in the first place.” He glanced at her, his lips quirking upwards. “How long has it been since you’ve had human blood straight from the fount?”
Mention of fresh blood erased all of the doubt from the female’s face. “Ages,” she breathed as she drew closer.
The male grinned at her. Fuck him running, Deacon was caught up in someone’s twisted idea of foreplay. “I’ll share,” the male assured her before he turned back and lunged at Deacon, his mouth open and his fangs gleaming.
If it caught him in the neck, if it pierced his jugular, then he was going to have about two minutes to finish making out his will. Deacon threw out his arm instead, instinctively, the way that a man would as he was being dragged to the ground by a larger, slavering dog. Teeth sliced through the sleeve of his shirt and into the skin and muscle beneath. The scar on his neck flared into a moment of sympathetic pain. Deacon did not make a sound, only brought up his booted foot and kicked out hard against the stomach of the vampire who had him pinned down and against the mattress. The male’s saliva burned where it had begun to work its way into his bloodstream.
The last time that Deacon had felt that sensation, he had been standing upright, had been pinned with his back against a rough brick wall and his lips still sticky, the money falling to the ground at his feet. Somehow, he didn’t think that this story was going to end quite like that one had.
Not if he could help it, anyway. Deacon wrenched his arm free, feeling the skin tear even further, and began scrabbling under the edge of the bed with his free had. If Blade’s fucking paranoia was going to fail him now, Deacon thought grimly, then they were all going to find out if ghosts as well as vampires were real, because Deacon was going to do whatever he had to to haunt Blade’s ass.
The male leaned back and off of Deacon, his chin slicked red with Deacon’s blood while the female watched hungrily from a few feet away. The male looked at Deacon in a way suggesting that he was watching a kitten scrabble after a moth for a moment before he reached out and casually caught Deacon’s wrist just as Deacon felt his hand close around hard, cool plastic.
“What’s this?” the male asked as he dragged Deacon’s arm out from beneath the bed. Deacon refused to release his prize, so what looked to the uninitiated to be nothing more than a bulky industrial flashlight was still dangling from his fingertips. Even in the dark, Deacon could see both of the vampires blanch. “Going to give us a little sunburn?” He wrenched the UV light from Deacon’s grasp.
“You could use some color,” Deacon admitted. It was hard to project an aura of control and menace after being flung backwards across a bed and while he was still bleeding profusely from his arm, but he did the best that he was able. “Look, why don’t we cut all of this short, all right? We both know that you’re showing off to get into the pretty girl’s pants.” Not that she was all that pretty, now, but she would probably be a looker once her arm grew back. Not a shock, really-vampires with rare exception tended to be good-looking. Good genes on the side of the purebloods, careful selection for aesthetics among everyone else. “So you’ve got to be all valiant and shit because you know that there’s no way that a pureblood like her is going to let you fuck her otherwise.” It was a shot in the dark, based upon little more than calculated risk and a gut instinct that he could not shake, as the female was too far away in the darkness for Deacon to see if she had any tell-tale scars other than the wound that he had given her. Over the decades, though, he had learned that his instincts were based upon something deeper than mere guesswork. “A lot of trouble for a back-alley fuck, if you ask me.” Deacon split his lips into a grin and knew as he did it that he was as likely as not to get a few teeth knocked down his throat. “We both know that a woman like that is never going to let you touch her in the light of day-so to speak.”
There was a shocked silence as both of the vampires stared at him, and Deacon fully expected for the male to reach out and casually break his neck. The male bared his teeth finally and then flicked on the UV lamp, turning it safely away from both himself and the female. In the reflected glow of the lamp, Deacon could see a muscle in his jaw jerking. “Might want to watch your mouth, bitch,” he snarled. Deacon watched his hands and prayed for the universe to cut him a break, just this one fucking break. “Chicks get all hot and bothered when you buy dinner for them.” The male let the light play across the walls and ceiling before, frowning, he leaned forward and sniffed at the beam. “Hey, this ain’t sunlight.” He grinned. The male played the light around some more before he spun it and trained it on his lady-lust, who still looked as if she had not quite recovered from the revelation that Deacon had dragged out of the dark for her only a moment before. She frowned and raised her hand to block the light that the male was shining into her eyes. “What, Frost, you wanted shadow puppets with us?”
“Something like that,” grunted Deacon, who had never stopped watching the male’s hands. He lunged from the bed and kicked out hard. Deacon’s foot caught the bottom of the lamp, jogging the male’s hand where it had been resting harmlessly against the safety. All of the sudden, the light that the female had previously only been squinting in the face of and raising her hand to block was bringing ugly, blood-filled blisters up on her palm and burning her retinas out of her head. She screamed and dropped to the floor. Deacon did not waste the brief second of shock that followed. He lunged from the bed, wrenched the lamp free from fingers that had gone nerveless, either because the male truly cared or because he realized that he was going to have to get laid somewhere else that night, and turned it upon the male. The male yelped and fell back, turning his eyes away from the light so that he would not be blinded in the same way that the female had. Warrior instincts stayed with him, and he tried to lunge upwards again and again to try to take the lamp from Deacon, but now that Deacon had the upper hand again there was no way that he was going to let it go. He stepped back out of range each time.
“No, bitch,” Deacon said in a savage voice that he hardly recognized as his own as the male’s movements became increasingly spastic and uncoordinated. “Not this time.” He was still breathing hard.
As it turned out, it took a very long time before a vampire would die of the kind of weak artificial light produced by a UV lamp. Deacon could wait.
When that was done and all that remained was ash, Deacon stepped out onto the balcony just long enough to retrieve the sword that had been taken from him. The female’s eyes had still not grown back, though she reacted to the sound and smell of Deacon drawing near to her again. Deacon had had a long time to get used to such strange sensations as pity entering him again, and he took her head quickly.
The entire room reeked of burned flesh. Deacon did not guess that there was anything that could be done about that. He staggered backwards, sank down into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, and held his wounded arm against his chest. The blood was finally starting to clot, leaving his forearm a sticky mess, and the poison was making his entire arm throb so badly that it was nearly heard as much as felt. Deacon listened to both that and the sound of his blood rushing in his ears for several long moments before he pushed himself wearily back up and went to turn on the light.
End Part Five
Disclaimers and previous parts can be found here.
Part Five
This was a world that Nyssa knew. This was a world where she was appreciated, and where she knew her place and her position.
Yet she was leading their worst enemy into their most vulnerable place. Nyssa was not a fan of irony.
She allowed herself the luxury of a deep breath even though she did not need it, purely to calm herself. No one had spoken to her in an unduly familiar way since Blade, save for Asad who had so long ago earned that privilege that he no longer needed to ask. It was enough to make her skin itch.
‘You need to fight it, then,’ Nyssa told herself as Blade continued to ignore her. ‘You need to shed it from your system.’
She stood stock-still, hands clasped behind her back, as Blade gave a curious look to the warehouse in front of them. It looked bland and unremarkable. A great deal of energy had gone into creating that façade.
“Where’s the entrance?” Blade asked. He sounded confused, though Nyssa would not have been able to tell even two hours before. She was beginning to read his signs. It could wind up being a worthwhile night, after all. “I don’t see any signs. No vampire glyphs.”
“No.” After the way that Blade had startled her so by obliterating any notion of personal space, Nyssa felt a certain thrill at being able to surprise him in return. She felt his eyes on her, weighing and judging, as she went on. “Because of you we have had to rethink our habits, tighten our security.” Evolve. Vampires had shed the notion of divinely ordained superiority some time before only to replace it with Darwin’s world-altering biological model. It made it much more difficult to hate Nomak with the fury that she needed in order to do her job, knowing that Nomak could be operating from the same model of cold, amoral superiority as she herself was. Rather than lingering over those dark thoughts for too long at a stretch, she pulled a pair of ultraviolet binoculars from her belt and activated them before she handed them over to Blade. His fingers touched hers as she took them. They were still very warm, and she thought that she could smell the blood beneath the surface. “Have a closer look.” Nyssa could still see the glyphs, glowing faintly against the walls, even without the aid of the binoculars. It was a strange comfort to know that Blade could not. The tales of his limitations had somehow never made it into the bogeyman stories.
“Nice,” Blade said as he handed the binoculars back to her.
They strode quickly back to the battered van where the rest of the Blood Pack was waiting for them and where Whistler and Scud were passing out weapons. “Forty-eight, thirty-five, nine millimeter,” Whistler said curtly as he passed a gun into each vampire hand and jerked away before his skin could encounter their tepid flesh for too long. Nyssa gave him a long, curious stare as she accepted her own gun. Whistler had spoken less than half a dozen words in total since they had left Blade’s stronghold, least of all to the vampires themselves. Nyssa had noticed him touching at the side of his jaw more than once, though, and saw that he was blinking rapidly in order to see in the gloom. It was pitiful, really, even stacked against the low rung that he had been standing on previously. “All foil-tipped and filled with silver nitrate.” Every vampire lip found itself curling upwards. Whistler noticed and appeared pleased before he went on. “This hyper-velocity stake gun spits out a silver stake at six thousand feet per second.” He tossed it to Reinhardt, who snatched it easily from the air, and reached into the van again. “Since you suckers don’t like sunlight, we’ve modified the guns with a UV filter.” Whistler turned a light on at the end of the gun, causing everyone save for Blade and Scud to recoil back instinctively. “Pop it open, instant UV light.” He waved the supposedly safe gun at Priest, who immediately drew his own weapon. Nyssa did notice with some satisfaction that he glanced over her way, as if he was asking for her permission, before he flicked the safety off. Whistler’s only response was to grin. “Filters on, no problem.”
“Yo, B, check it out,” Scud called before Whistler could get his neck snapped for him and the question of whether Blade could move quickly enough to slap an explosive on the back of Priest’s head, too, answered. “Our old friend EDTA. Cartridge ejects, automatic reload.” He demonstrated so that they would all understand.
Nyssa drew back a few feet and watched the gun warily, though she could probably still crack Scud’s neck within her hands like bird’s bones before he could even draw a bead on her. Blade had been hunting extensively with EDTA over the past two years. There were no further explanations needed. “When humans use biological weapons, it is called a war crime,” she told Blade.
He took the gun from Scud before he answered, though the look that he passed over her was much longer than the dismissive glances that he had been giving her before. “Show me where a vampire signed the Geneva Convention and I’ll take it under advisement,” he said.
Nyssa was still trying to decipher when she had been promoted up from ‘suckhead’ when Whistler said, “Let’s go.” He had weapons strapped all across his body, making him look like an aging soldier of fortune. It would have worked if he was not still so warm and flush with life. The blood could be heard moving through Blade’s vines, much faster than it would through any vampire’s, but he still moved enough like a predator to fool the unwary. Nyssa had set foot in the House of Pain many times before, and she knew that it would not be filled with wary soldiers. Blade was a bogeyman to them, a shadowy monster without a face, not this fit, attractive man. He could pass if they moved quickly.
Chupa echoed her thoughts by giving a disbelieving snort. “You won’t pass for one of us. No way.”
Whistler hardly glanced at Chupa. Nyssa did not know if this was meant to be carelessness, or a sign that he did not fear. “Like I give a shit.”
“No, he’s right.” Nyssa blinked in surprise to hear the concession. Blade pointed towards the top of one of the warehouses surrounding them on all sides. “Why don’t you post up on the roof over there? Cover our backs.”
There was a second, before Whistler covered it again, when his grizzled face looked as if someone had just struck him. “So the Blood Pack’s calling the shots now, huh?” He flipped a rifle down from his shoulder and into his hands. “Great.” His tone dripped with disgust as he turned away.
Pushing past Blade and towards the House of Pain, Reinhardt smirked, “Better curb that dog of yours, or we’ll do it for you.” Blade in response set the explosive on the back of his head to beeping for a few seconds before he turned it off again. Reinhardt’s jump was almost comical, and probably not as masculine as he liked to think of himself.
“Keep pushing, asshole,” Blade growled before he moved on.
Reinhardt looked at Nyssa expectantly, as if he was waiting for her to intervene on his behalf. Nyssa thought that she may even have done so, as it still made her hackles rise to watch how easily Blade could commandeer her team and treat them as if they were his property, until she remembered Blade’s unexpected bowing to Chupa moments before. One good turn deserved another. She remained silent.
It was difficult to smirk and appear disgusted at the same time, but Reinhardt was a talented man. “The Daywalker is the boss of us now?” he asked her. Reinhardt then passed that glance over her, the one that made her want to hook her nails beneath the surface of his face and peel it off with her bare hands. “Figures. That man must have a pheromone.”
As Nyssa was still troubled and uncertain by how much control she was passing over to Blade of her own volition, she was not in the mood to deal with any of Reinhardt’s sexist drivel. It took her two steps to be into Reinhardt’s personal space, into his face. He was significantly taller than she, but he still looked startled as she raised herself briefly onto the tips of her toes so that she would be even closer to him. “You make me curious, Reinhardt,” she told him in a much calmer voice than she actually felt. She wanted to shout and strike him, but that was neither how a leader nor a princess behaved in times of stress. Not if they wanted to be worthy of their title. “If I am such a weak female for not intervening on your behalf, what does that make you for needing it?” Reinhardt began to color; Nyssa pushed on before he could say anything that would cause her to knock him across the parking lot and put herself down one soldier. “I do not have time to second-guess every order that Blade gives you. I am your superior, and I am telling you to take everything that he tells you to do as if it came directly from me.” Nyssa pivoted and stalked away before Reinhardt could reply, though she could still feel his gaze resting heavily between her shoulder blades.
“That may have been unwise” Asad told her in a low voice as she caught up to him. He grimaced, as if it was paining him to admit it, before he went on. “He has a certain charisma that the others respect.”
“Demagogues ordinarily do,” Nyssa whispered back. “You and I have right on our side, though.” She pulled back so that she could give Asad one of her rare smiles. Nyssa did not do it often, though she had been told that it made her dazzling. “Are you worried for me?”
Asad touched her arm, a sign of high familiarity for him. As with her smiles, it was something that he did not make a habit of. “Even you sometimes need it,” he replied.
Nyssa crossed to the front of the group as they strode across the street and drew near the House of Pain so that she could let them all in through a cellar entrance. The smell of blood was immediate. Nyssa wondered how good Blade’s senses were, if the smell was as strong to him as it was to her. A second later, it occurred to her to wonder why she even cared. They descended down a lot set of stairs until they reached a set of heavy double doors. Nyssa paused there.
“We’re in,” she told Blade. “You’re about to enter our world. You will see things…feeding.” A day before, she would not have hesitated to speak such a loaded word. Over Blade’s shoulder, Nyssa saw Asad beginning to look concerned. “Just remember why you are here.”
Blade looked into her eyes and answered, “I haven’t forgotten.”
Nyssa led the group through a chilly industrial kitchen, remnants from when the structure had still been a hotel. The shadows moved in and out among the stainless steel surfaces, and a thumping of music could be heard some distance away. Priest asked, keeping his hand ready upon his gun, “What exactly are we looking for?”
Reinhardt answered, “Anything that looks suspicious.” He sounded more subdued than he had while he was outside. Whether that was due to her or the influence of her father riding behind her, Nyssa neither knew nor cared.
As they reached the far side of the kitchen, a door set into the wall began to lower automatically. The rave music that had previously only been a slight vibration in the walls and floor became deafening. People could be seen dancing, and, in a few of the corners, there were the scenes of feeding that Nyssa had warned Blade about. The victims were not moving. Nyssa did not know what Blade might have done if they had been.
He looked shocked and disgusted. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” They waded deeper into the throng. Nyssa listened to Blade as he spoke into his radio. “Scud, you read me?” He waited for Scud’s affirmative before he went on, “Whole place is a safe house. Windows painted black, once access door, two or three hundred suckheads in here.” He set a portable camera against a pillar while Nyssa found a hallway off of the dance floor and began to prowl down it.
It looked more like the hotel that it had once been after Nyssa had broken apart from the crowd of dancers, less filled with the scents of blood and sex and more shot through with a sense of aging, moldering dignity. There was still paper on the walls and molding at the ceiling and floor. Water-stained, well-worn carpet muffled the sound of Nyssa’s boots on the floor. She set a camera identical to the ones that Blade was using against the wall and kept her free hand upon one of her guns at all times. It was to her great regret that she could not afford to keep both of her hands occupied with weaponry. Should Nomak or any of his followers attack the safe house, the labyrinth of abandoned hallways off of the main floor would prove a tempting feeding ground.
Nyssa turned a corner and saw a ladder leading up into the attic that had been lowered to stand in the hallway. She was fairly certain that that was not right. The had that she had braced against the butt of her gun tightening even further, Nyssa advanced and began to slowly climb the ladder. She remained hyper-alert for any sound from above all the while.
There was a scuffing noise from further down, a hallway that she had not checked yet. Nyssa froze midway up the ladder, cast a wry glance towards the darkness above her, and then retreated. She could not shake the feeling that those very same shadows were only waiting for the moment when she turned her back so that they could reach for her.
The hallway that she had heard the noise originating from was deserted. Feeling foolish, Nyssa set another of the cameras against the wall and turned to continue her investigations.
From nowhere a hand, tepid and soft like the skin of a snake, dropped over her mouth. Nyssa choked back a scream, if that was what Nomak had been preparing for. He wrenched her hand away from her gun, but she drove her elbow back into his abdomen as hard as she was able. He made a faint oofing noise and did not release her. It was a much more effective move, admittedly, against someone for whom oxygen was a pressing issue. Nomak grabbed for her arm in response and twisted until he was on the verge of wrenching it from its socket. Nyssa cried out, finally, against the hand that was mashing her lips back. Even with her low oxygen needs, the pressure was incredible.
“Sister,” Nomak said against the side of her face, a low, rumbling growl into her skin, as if he had never spoken the word before and wanted to test it out before he committed. He inhaled deeply of her hair.
Before Nyssa could react or even process, Blade rounded the corner, his hand upon one of his own guns. It rose into Nyssa’s throat to yell at him to draw it quickly, as Nomak had shown himself to be shockingly fast, but Nomak moved his hand from her mouth to her throat. The pressure was enough to make her gag and her knees go weak. She might as well have not been there at all, for Blade pronounced Nomak’s name as if he was not shocked to see him there.
“Daywalker,” Nomak said in a cordial tone, the one that he would use to greet an old friend rather than a soldier that he would soon be fighting. He tilted his head to one side, a tightening of his hand accompanying the gesture. Nyssa made a small, wheezing sound of pain that neither man seemed to notice. “What am I to you? Is the enemy of my enemy my friend, or do we have a tedious old path that we must share together?”
Blade’s response was merely to smile as he raised his gun and fired a bullet directly into Nomak’s brain. His body spasmed backwards under the impact, causing his grip to loosen slightly; Nyssa took the opportunity to wrench free and spin away. She waited for Nomak to disintegrate away into ash, as any vampire ought to have done, only to watch him flip backwards and demolish an antique china cabinet with his weight. He jumped back to his feet again only a second later. Nyssa felt her jaw drop.
Snarling at the both of them before he went, Nomak fled down the hallway. Nyssa began to pursue him and was stopped by Blade grabbing her arm in a vise-like grip. He hurled her back against the wall so hard that her head nearly left a dent in the plaster, snarled, “Stay here!” at her without bothering to look around, and took off in the pursuit of his prey.
*
The warehouse was still and silent while Deacon was the only one within it. Funny how quickly he had become used to the sound of Scud’s welding torch, of his hip-hop and his damned cartoons. Funny how quickly he had become used to people, that was it. Sitting in Scud’s customary seat and keeping an eye upon the security system, supposedly now fixed, Deacon felt a scowl touch his face. He seemed to do that a lot. Well, he had never been one to mess with a good thing, once he had found it. He put his boots up on the desk and idly fingered the safety on the gun that Blade had given him before departing, turning it on and off. Fantasizing about putting a bullet into Blade’s kneecap was as good a way as any to pass the time, and the quiet noise was keeping him company in the stillness.
Two years before, the fantasy would have been of putting the bullet between Blade’s eyes rather than into his kneecap. If his mood was any better by the time that Blade returned, he might even tell him so.
Meanwhile, Scud had either restored the security system or done a damned good job of faking it before he had left. All of the infrared security cameras were reporting still, calm night. Deacon had the massive UV lamps turned off so as not to interfere with the heat sensors, and the remaining shadows wrapped around him like a cloak. Didn’t matter. He was still much more accustomed to shadow than he was to light. With the clicking of the gun’s safety as the only thing breaking the monotony, Deacon was on the verge of turning on one of Scud’s stupid DVDs in order to break the monotony.
Only almost, though. There were some lines that Deacon could not bring himself to cross, with or without anyone there to witness it.
Scud had roughly twenty of his infrared cameras scattered about along the outside of the warehouse and at a few select points of the interior, and four televisions set up across the desk to monitor them all. Each camera would show a few seconds of footage before moving on. It was easy to keep an eye on each one, as Deacon himself was the only red spot among a sea of inky blue.
Or he ought to have been. Deacon leaned forward and pulled his boots from the desk with a heavy thumping noise as the blue was cut, for the briefest of seconds, by a flash of deep purple. “Motherfuck,” Deacon said beneath his breath, watching intently for the flash to come around again. It had been one of the outside cameras, of that much he was certain. Now that he paused to think about it, there might be a slight problem with Scud’s practice of keeping the cameras on constant rotation, after all. God help them if it should turn out that Blade had been right all along. He could make the air itself appear smug.
Deacon hunched over in front of the computer screens. After nearly a minute had passed, he was still the solitary red silhouette amid a jungle of shadow. Maybe it had been nothing. Maybe it had only been a trace of warmth on the breeze. Deacon still flicked the safety off on the gun and tilted his head to one side so that he could listen intently.
A skittering noise, very faint, could be heard from the direction of the roof. Yeah, and maybe it was a shockingly warm breeze and a herd of squirrels. Deacon knew exactly how many people would be standing in line behind him to lay money on those odds. “Motherfuck,” he repeated with even greater conviction, and lunged to his feet. The UV lights, hell, the entire fucking security system, had been his idea. Let the damned thing do its job now. Deacon leaned over the computer’s keyboard and rapidly typed in the code that would activate the lights. He flinched backwards automatically as they flared into life, old instinct that he had never been able to bring back under his control again, and then raced for the stairs. A pistol was fine and dandy, but if he was going to be fighting alone then he had in mind something with a little more oomf to it.
Deacon was halfway up the stairs when the lights that had previously been shining brightly enough to put him in danger of retinal damage cut out, leaving him in darkness that was a living thing. He paused and felt it caressing his face as he cursed the thundering of his heart and the whistling of air in his throat. This was the humanity that he was supposed to be embracing, too. If there were hidden depths to it, then it sure came in one hell of an inconvenient package.
The sounds from the roof had stopped altogether. Ordinarily, that would be a good sign. In their world, however, not quite. Deacon swore a blistering oath, not bothering to hide it, as the hunters on the roof doubtless already knew that he was there, and double-timed his way up the stairs again. Human limitations or not, they had been crouching here for a while. He did not need his eyes.
There were additional lights that he could have turned on once he had reentered the living quarters that he shared with Blade, if not for the vampires that he knew must surely be entering the warehouse by now. The security system was not even putting up a pretense of doing its job any longer. If Deacon emerged from the other side of this unscathed, then he was going to give serious consideration towards not telling Blade at all. It would be better for all of them.
Deacon engaged the safety on the gun, much as it made every nerve that he had scream in unison, and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans as he crossed the room. He knew this place. That was one advantage that he could still claim over the vampires. Deacon’s seeking hands in the dark soon found an automatic rifle, which he slung across his shoulder, and, a few yards away, a sword. Though he was nearly certain that it was only one of the practice spares, he still ran his thumb quickly around the greave to be sure before he pulled it free. There was just enough light in the room to make the blade glitter, a quicksilver gleam in the gloom. In it, Deacon saw the dark shape that dropped down from the doorframe. He pulled his lips back from his teeth. The vampire was nothing more than a vibration on the air to him; to it, he must have a spotlight trained on him. Deacon twisted to rifle around so that it was lying across his back, unable to hinder his movements, and tilted the sword into a defensive position.
Seeing the vampire’s face would have been difficult even if it had been standing right in front of him. Over by the doorway, it was impossible. “You aren’t supposed to be here,” it told him, a deep male voice that carried where its appearance would not. He sounded surprised.
Good on him. “I tell myself that every day,” Deacon replied flatly, and raised the sword higher still. He twisted his mouth into his old, glittering smile, knowing that the vampire would see it. A convincing image was half the battle right there.
The shadow from the doorway moved closer to him. Deacon took a step nearer the bed, his fear mostly feigned. The glitter of fang before the vampire closed his mouth again told him that his ruse was convincing. “That’s really too bad,” the vampire told him. “This was supposed to be quiet. On the other hand, I could eat.” He rushed forward.
Deacon grinned again, and this time it was loose and unforced. A vampire moving at its full speed was nearly to fast for human eyes to follow; Deacon did himself a favor and didn’t try. The air moved and almost hummed as the vampire lunged at him. With a sword in his hand, Deacon did not need any other signal than that. He swung it in a tight, controlled arc. Deacon could not see, but he still felt the meaty sound of the blade striking the vampire’s neck and making the flesh part way, a whispering sigh as the head tumbled from the body. Everything else was swallowed by an explosion of cinder and ash.
Deacon ducked backwards so that he would not breathe any of it and listened carefully, wondering if he should be so lucky as to have to deal with only one. His own heart thundering in his ears prevented him from hearing anything else until a female voice called out in anger and shock, “You killed Rickard!”
Motherfuck. Deacon would not have sent one vampire alone to take up the task of invading the Daywalker’s headquarters, either, but he always found room to hope. “Private property, sweetheart,” Deacon drawled. He gave the sword a casual flick to shake off any ash that might be clinging to the blade. Deacon could not see his opponent’s face in the shadow, but he knew that her expression would be infuriated by the gesture all the same. Infuriated enough to make the kind of stupid mistake that Deacon needed? What the hell. There was always room for hope.
“I haven’t been human in a while,” she mused instead as she stalked forward, and Deacon realized all over again how much hope was for other people compared to how the various deities of the universe really got a kick out of fucking him over. “I could make killing you last a while, I’ll bet, if I was really motivated.”
In the States, they ran commercials advising people who owned guns to keep them unloaded until the very moment when they were needed. Obviously, those people lived in a completely different world than the one that Deacon called home. If he had been forced to pause and fumble with clips in the dark, then there was no doubt in this mind that this bitch would be fang-deep into the side of his neck before his task was even halfway completed. Instead, Deacon did not even bother for her to get close enough to deal with through the sword, diving instead for the handgun tucked into the back of his pants. The exploding sound it made going off was deafening as it echoed and reechoed around the closed space, the second sound of a vampire exploding away into nothing at all so soft as to be lost in it. Deacon put his forearm against his mouth as the air in the room became choked with soot and nearly impossible to breath, wincing. So much for any delusions of stealth. He shoved away all the thoughts saying that, to them, he might as well have had a spotlight trained onto himself ever since they had breached security. Deacon raced back out onto the balcony.
In the gloom, he could just pick out two shadowy figures moving around Scud’s computer. And what, oh what, might they be doing there? Especially since Deacon knew Scud pretty well by this point, well enough to know that he was, in a bizarre twist, a paranoid little shit when he wasn’t high. The encryption systems that he kept running on that computer were some of the best that Deacon had ever seen.
This was another one of those times when Blade was going to be absolutely insufferable. Sure, his expression would not change, exactly, but Deacon would still be able to tell. He swung the rifle off of his shoulder and peered for only a second through the nearly useless scope before he fired off two shots, so close together that the booming sounds mingled and became one. One vampire fell forward against the terminal for only a second before it was reduced to nothing at all; the other one reeled backwards and then shrieked as the silver bullet entered its arm and swiftly ate it away up to the elbow. Deacon allowed himself a grim smile as he took aim again for a final, fatal shot. He was not doing half-bad, considering that he was cattle stumbling blind through the dark. From all that he had seen thus far, this was a reconnaissance mission, not an assault. They had thought that the warehouse was empty and already knew the ins and outs of the computer and security systems as if they had designed them themselves. Anything more than four would be overkill.
Deacon had not found religion over the past two years, and would have laughed in the face of anyone who told him that the only thing left for a man with that much blood on his hands was to beg forgiveness and hope that somebody was listening. That did not, however, mean that he did not believe in a crude kind of sentient force in the universe. Their relationship was a simple, but fairly effective and straightforward one. Deacon started to relax and think that he could breathe again, and this force promptly fucked him over. It had a nice kind of reliability to it. Deacon figured that eventually he would learn.
A hand came down on the back of Deacon’s neck before he could squeeze the trigger and pull off that final shot, lifting him off of his feet as easily as if he was an errant kitten. Deacon was whirled around and thrown against the balcony hard enough to leave a throbbing stripe against his lower back. He winced but did not cry out, preferring instead to scrabble for the handgun that he had replaced against the small of his back before stepping out of the room. Wedged between the balcony and a vampire with so little free space that he could scarcely breathe, there was no room for the rifle.
The vampire knocked his hand away with enough force to make his wrist go first tingling and then numb before he reached around Deacon and extricated the gun himself. The weapon made a clanging noise as he threw it to the side. Deacon did not see the vampire engage the safety first, but the universe kept up its winning streak and would not allow the vampire to be shot even by accident. The sword and the rifle followed a few seconds later.
“Look at you,” the vampire said, leaning in close so that he could smell at Deacon’s face. Deacon wondered if he was giving off enough adrenaline to be entertaining, if he was putting on a good show. He took at a swing at the vampire, only to find both of his wrists seized and his hands quickly pinned down to the rail again. Somehow, it was more fun when Blade did it. “Little lamb trying to show its teeth. I didn’t know that you were going to be here.”
That the reconnaissance team had been filled in with enough details to recognize him on sight with not filling Deacon with ideas on how to take back control of the situation. “I’m full of surprises,” he grunted, squirming and twisting against the hands that were keeping him pinned in place. It was like struggling against iron. “It’s a vice.” The vampire was leaning close enough to him that, much as it could smell him, Deacon ought to have been able to smell a little bit of him if the vampire had been human: warmth, sweat and aftershave, a faint tang that Deacon had never been able to convince himself was not blood. The absence of any scent at all, even those which ought to have been decipherable through weak human senses, was like peering into a black hole. Deacon leaned back as far as he was able.
There was a clamoring on the stairs as the vampire that he had winged staggered up them. It was a female, and if the way that she was not even trying to cover the sound of her approach was anything to go by, then she was in one hell of a lot of pain. Much as Deacon could not bring himself to give anything that even remotely resembled a damn about that, he could not stop cursing himself for not shooting a little further to the left and taking the bitch directly through the heart.
“You stupid fuck!” she shrieked at Deacon, trying to lunge at him over the male’s outstretched arm. The male moved to block her, but one of her fists still got through, a sharp blow to the jaw that knocked Deacon’s head back and left him spinning. “What do you think that I’m going to do to you now, huh?” Her arm ended just a few inches beyond her shoulder in a charred mess of bone and muscle. Deacon could see where vampire healing was already trying to put her back together again. It almost looked as if maggots were crawling through the flesh as it twisted and rippled.
“Easy,” the male said in a weary voice, though whether he was speaking to Deacon or to the female was anyone’s guess. Deacon had still neither moved nor spoken again. “Did you get everything?”
“Yes,” the female allowed grudgingly. She head her lips pulled back from her teeth, and her face was glistening with pain sweat. Back when Quinn had still been alive, it had seemed as if he was getting a limb cut off every other week and Deacon had never seen him act like that. Granted, with Quinn it was also possible that repetition had stolen some of the shine from amputation. “Who’s he?” She jerked her chin towards Deacon as she said it, and Deacon realized that it was definitely her first time being injured in the field, if she was either so closely sheltered a pureblood or so newly turned that she did not recognize him immediately. He had not been gone for that long. “And why can’t we just eat him?”
“We can,” the male assured her, cocking his eyebrow when Deacon’s heart rate and adrenal levels did not change in response. Deacon had known what he was in store for, barring a miracle, ever since he had felt the back of his neck being seized in that steel grip. “And he’s that one, Blade’s pet. The whore turned vampire turned whore again.” When Deacon’s heart rate finally surged, the male tilted his head to one side and said softly, “Well, that certainly seemed to hit a nerve.”
Deacon realized that he had betrayed himself and struggled to bring himself back under control as well as he was able while he was still pinned against the railing. “I suck the cock of the Daywalker, you suck the cock of the purebloods,” he responded, having noticed a faint scar on the male’s forehead, nearly hidden by the fall of his hair. “It all evens out in the end, wouldn’t you say?”
Deacon knew that he was going to be struck a second before it happened, saw it in the way that the male’s entire face tightened and his lips wrinkled back from his teeth, but there was nothing that he could do to dodge or defend himself save brace for it. The male struck him in the side of the head with a closed fist, so hard that Deacon though simultaneously that his neck was going to break and that he had been struck deaf. It was not until he slumped forward to be scooped up easily by the male and then dragged in the direction of the living quarters that he realized that he could still hear, there was just a ringing sound so loud that it had grown to swallow the entire world. He shook his head to try to clear it and tried to brace his legs against the floor to stop himself from going any further, but they did not seem to be taking commands from him at the moment.
“What are you doing?” was the first thing that Deacon heard when his head had stopped buzzing enough for him to hear again, that of the female speaking to the male in an anxious voice. Pureblood or turned, she was very young, if the idea that there were tensions between the two factions always waiting for an excuse to explode into violence was such a shock to her.
The male flung Deacon down across the edge of the bed. With his legs still consulting with the union before they decided to get back to work, Deacon tumbled with little in the way of resistance. He braced himself on his elbows and watched both of the vampires warily. Blade was not just a paranoid fucker in the field; there were weapons strewn all about the room, too. It was only a matter of Deacon being able to reach one before he was killed. Admittedly, with the way that vampires could move, that was a very big matter.
“Can’t leave him here to tell tales once we’re gone,” the male said matter-of-factly to the female. “Bad enough that the Daywalker is going to know that someone was in here in the first place.” He glanced at her, his lips quirking upwards. “How long has it been since you’ve had human blood straight from the fount?”
Mention of fresh blood erased all of the doubt from the female’s face. “Ages,” she breathed as she drew closer.
The male grinned at her. Fuck him running, Deacon was caught up in someone’s twisted idea of foreplay. “I’ll share,” the male assured her before he turned back and lunged at Deacon, his mouth open and his fangs gleaming.
If it caught him in the neck, if it pierced his jugular, then he was going to have about two minutes to finish making out his will. Deacon threw out his arm instead, instinctively, the way that a man would as he was being dragged to the ground by a larger, slavering dog. Teeth sliced through the sleeve of his shirt and into the skin and muscle beneath. The scar on his neck flared into a moment of sympathetic pain. Deacon did not make a sound, only brought up his booted foot and kicked out hard against the stomach of the vampire who had him pinned down and against the mattress. The male’s saliva burned where it had begun to work its way into his bloodstream.
The last time that Deacon had felt that sensation, he had been standing upright, had been pinned with his back against a rough brick wall and his lips still sticky, the money falling to the ground at his feet. Somehow, he didn’t think that this story was going to end quite like that one had.
Not if he could help it, anyway. Deacon wrenched his arm free, feeling the skin tear even further, and began scrabbling under the edge of the bed with his free had. If Blade’s fucking paranoia was going to fail him now, Deacon thought grimly, then they were all going to find out if ghosts as well as vampires were real, because Deacon was going to do whatever he had to to haunt Blade’s ass.
The male leaned back and off of Deacon, his chin slicked red with Deacon’s blood while the female watched hungrily from a few feet away. The male looked at Deacon in a way suggesting that he was watching a kitten scrabble after a moth for a moment before he reached out and casually caught Deacon’s wrist just as Deacon felt his hand close around hard, cool plastic.
“What’s this?” the male asked as he dragged Deacon’s arm out from beneath the bed. Deacon refused to release his prize, so what looked to the uninitiated to be nothing more than a bulky industrial flashlight was still dangling from his fingertips. Even in the dark, Deacon could see both of the vampires blanch. “Going to give us a little sunburn?” He wrenched the UV light from Deacon’s grasp.
“You could use some color,” Deacon admitted. It was hard to project an aura of control and menace after being flung backwards across a bed and while he was still bleeding profusely from his arm, but he did the best that he was able. “Look, why don’t we cut all of this short, all right? We both know that you’re showing off to get into the pretty girl’s pants.” Not that she was all that pretty, now, but she would probably be a looker once her arm grew back. Not a shock, really-vampires with rare exception tended to be good-looking. Good genes on the side of the purebloods, careful selection for aesthetics among everyone else. “So you’ve got to be all valiant and shit because you know that there’s no way that a pureblood like her is going to let you fuck her otherwise.” It was a shot in the dark, based upon little more than calculated risk and a gut instinct that he could not shake, as the female was too far away in the darkness for Deacon to see if she had any tell-tale scars other than the wound that he had given her. Over the decades, though, he had learned that his instincts were based upon something deeper than mere guesswork. “A lot of trouble for a back-alley fuck, if you ask me.” Deacon split his lips into a grin and knew as he did it that he was as likely as not to get a few teeth knocked down his throat. “We both know that a woman like that is never going to let you touch her in the light of day-so to speak.”
There was a shocked silence as both of the vampires stared at him, and Deacon fully expected for the male to reach out and casually break his neck. The male bared his teeth finally and then flicked on the UV lamp, turning it safely away from both himself and the female. In the reflected glow of the lamp, Deacon could see a muscle in his jaw jerking. “Might want to watch your mouth, bitch,” he snarled. Deacon watched his hands and prayed for the universe to cut him a break, just this one fucking break. “Chicks get all hot and bothered when you buy dinner for them.” The male let the light play across the walls and ceiling before, frowning, he leaned forward and sniffed at the beam. “Hey, this ain’t sunlight.” He grinned. The male played the light around some more before he spun it and trained it on his lady-lust, who still looked as if she had not quite recovered from the revelation that Deacon had dragged out of the dark for her only a moment before. She frowned and raised her hand to block the light that the male was shining into her eyes. “What, Frost, you wanted shadow puppets with us?”
“Something like that,” grunted Deacon, who had never stopped watching the male’s hands. He lunged from the bed and kicked out hard. Deacon’s foot caught the bottom of the lamp, jogging the male’s hand where it had been resting harmlessly against the safety. All of the sudden, the light that the female had previously only been squinting in the face of and raising her hand to block was bringing ugly, blood-filled blisters up on her palm and burning her retinas out of her head. She screamed and dropped to the floor. Deacon did not waste the brief second of shock that followed. He lunged from the bed, wrenched the lamp free from fingers that had gone nerveless, either because the male truly cared or because he realized that he was going to have to get laid somewhere else that night, and turned it upon the male. The male yelped and fell back, turning his eyes away from the light so that he would not be blinded in the same way that the female had. Warrior instincts stayed with him, and he tried to lunge upwards again and again to try to take the lamp from Deacon, but now that Deacon had the upper hand again there was no way that he was going to let it go. He stepped back out of range each time.
“No, bitch,” Deacon said in a savage voice that he hardly recognized as his own as the male’s movements became increasingly spastic and uncoordinated. “Not this time.” He was still breathing hard.
As it turned out, it took a very long time before a vampire would die of the kind of weak artificial light produced by a UV lamp. Deacon could wait.
When that was done and all that remained was ash, Deacon stepped out onto the balcony just long enough to retrieve the sword that had been taken from him. The female’s eyes had still not grown back, though she reacted to the sound and smell of Deacon drawing near to her again. Deacon had had a long time to get used to such strange sensations as pity entering him again, and he took her head quickly.
The entire room reeked of burned flesh. Deacon did not guess that there was anything that could be done about that. He staggered backwards, sank down into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, and held his wounded arm against his chest. The blood was finally starting to clot, leaving his forearm a sticky mess, and the poison was making his entire arm throb so badly that it was nearly heard as much as felt. Deacon listened to both that and the sound of his blood rushing in his ears for several long moments before he pushed himself wearily back up and went to turn on the light.
End Part Five