Fic: Gods and Devils 6/14
Disclaimers and previous parts can be found here.
Part Six
Nyssa was so rattled that she actually obeyed Blade’s order to stay behind, the surest proof that Blade needed that something other than a little light manhandling between one enemy and another had taken place. He filed that away as something that could be dealt with later as he raced after Nomak instead. Whatever genetic cocktail had first blended and then mutated to make the vampire race even more loathsome had been kind to Nomak, Blade had to give him that. The fucker was fast. Even though he only had a few seconds’ head start, Blade was soon following him by scent alone. All of his senses were sharper than a human’s though not so sharp as a vampire’s, and Blade had to wonder how it was possible that Nyssa’s group had been forced to come to him at all, why they could not simply track Nomak themselves. Humans smelled of sweat, of blood, of shampoo and cologne and each person’s own individual scent. Vampires had a deeper, ranker smell, a wilder smell that always made Blade think of a wolf’s den, though he had never been near one to do a comparison.
Nomak had a sweet and decaying smell about him, like a room where illness had lingered for a very long time. He smelled as if he was already dying and did not have the good sense to lie down. Blade may as well have been following a trail marked with neon signs.
Whatever the House of Pain had been before the suckheads had taken it over, it was a curious mix of living and dead now. The main room downstairs had been bright and modern. The hallways had been forlorn and neglected. When Blade finally did catch up with Nomak, it was in a room that looked as if it had been started with a mind towards expanding the main structure and then abandoned midway through, so that it simultaneously looked as if it was midway through being born and through dying. Blade thought that that was fitting.
Construction dust crunched softly beneath his boots as he stepped further into the room and looked around at the piles of cement and half-finished trellises, all of his senses alert for Nomak. The vampire had hit the room and then seemed to have disappeared altogether, though Blade could see no entrances or exits save for the one that he had just used and a long row of windows with the glass still intact. Nomak was still close, though. Blade could still smell the sickroom stink hanging in the air. He kept one hand on his gun and the other on his sword, waiting.
The radio at his shoulder crackled once before Asad came on, sounding weary and as if he had been in a few fights of his own since the evening had begun. “Daylight’s coming,” he said. “You’re on your own, Blade.”
Blade glanced towards the row of windows, which were beginning to fill with pink and golden light. The dawn was not yet spreading far enough beyond the windows to make a difference in the fight. Blade stepped even further into the room and lifted himself onto the trellis, hearing it creak slightly beneath his weight. Beyond that, there was no sound. It was making Blade’s teeth itch.
The faint creaking of the trellis behind Blade made him spin around. It occurred to him that what he was feeling was nearly relief to find the fight coming to him, before he swiftly pushed it away again.
Nomak grinned at him for a moment before he spoke, as if he already knew that Blade was not going to draw the gun that he was currently resting his hand upon. His jaw made a peculiar clicking sound. “You want me so badly, Blade? Here I am.” When Blade still did not move, Nomak’s grin only grew wider. It was more obvious than ever that there was something wrong with his jaw. Human and even vampire mouths were not capable of stretching that wide.
“Why kill me?” Nomak went on. He was using a musing tone, a teacher’s tone, as if he and Blade were actually about to sit down and learn from one another. “You and I, we have the same enemy. We want the same thing.”
“Kill all vampires?” Blade said, taking his hand away from the butt of his gun. He thought of Nyssa and of Frost in the same moment. Nomak smiled as if Blade was a student who had just performed an unexpected act of brilliance. If he had been close enough for Blade to grab swiftly, then the entire fight likely would have ended with him seizing Nomak’s face and seeing if that strange quirk of his lower jaw still held sway once Blade had broken it in. “So you’ll play nice and leave the humans alone once you’re done running through the suckheads.”
The smile faded off of Nomak’s face. He looked much younger, and sulky on top of that. “They’re prey,” he said.
‘Welcome to the cattle yard,’ Blade remembered saying once. “Then we don’t have the same enemy,” he answered. Blade drew his sword and attacked. Nomak was unarmed, but he was easily as fast or faster than any vampire that Blade had ever pitted himself against before. He back-flipped easily along the wooden trellis, catching himself with his hands and dropping to the ground. Blade drew his gun and fired off several shots, all of which found their target. Nomak writhed for several long seconds, pulling his lips back from his teeth as the great, watery blisters opened up across his face and chest. Blade put the gun back into the holster. He drew the sword as Nomak then recovered less than a minute later, the blisters disappearing, and laughed.
“The old methods won’t work, Blade,” Nomak called up to him before he launched himself up to the trellis with a speed that Blade’s eye could hardly follow. Blade whipped the sword around but was too slow, and Nomak tackled him hard from the trellis. They both tumbled back to the ground amid a clattering noise and a great cloud of dust. Nomak landed on top; Blade put his boot into his stomach and levered him off. He twisted the sword around and into an attack position, but Nomak spun away before the steel could make contact. In the next second, he was wrenching a metal rebar from the slab of concrete in which it had been abandoned so that it could be used as a makeshift sword. Nomak got in a lucky strike that sent Blade reeling backwards from a glancing blow to his temple.
Blade drew his lips back from his teeth in anger and pain as he pulled back further for another chance, while Nomak grinned. “We need the same ting, Blade. You and I are only variations on the same model.” Nomak paused and tilted his head to one side. Blade wondered if Nomak could smell Frost on him, as the other members of the Blood Pack had already alluded that they could. “And you have been crossing lines for a long time.”
Blade growled without intending to. He hated it when he did that, hated how base and animalistic it sounded, and so tried to restrain it whenever he could. Frost liked it. Blade had long ago realized that there was something deeply wrong about Frost that more or less had to be tolerated, as there was no way that it could ever be fixed. Nomak was not Frost. He did not have the right to elicit that reaction. Blade growled again, feeling a hot surge of rage that he could not have quantified or controlled even if he had wanted to, and lunged forward again. Nomak blocked every blow of the sword as if he ad been born to do it. As if he had been trained to do it, as that was not a skill that one picked up in the span of three days. Remembering Frost’s words, a light went off in Blade’s mind. He would not have time to attend to it until much later.
Nomak got in another lucky blow that rang Blade’s brain around the inside of his skull for him. Blade raised his sword in defense, only to have the growing sunlight from the window gather along the length and flash back in both his and Nomak’s eyes. Nomak snarled and spun away. Blade was left temporarily blinded and with his head still feeling as if it was trapped inside of a bell. By the time that his vision cleared, Nomak was already out of reach, fleeing by using the walls as launching points. Blade snarled again and swiped at the blood that was gathering at his temple before he stormed off to find Nyssa.
Blade had not expected that his order to Nyssa to stay put would be followed for more than a second or two after he gave it, but, unbelievably, she was still where he had left her. Nyssa took a small step forward when she saw Blade approaching, her expression warring for a moment between concern and pure, animalistic hunger. Blade saw her eyes bounce up to the blood at his temple before she could stop. Nyssa caught herself and cast her eyes back down to the floor.
“What happened?” she asked.
Blade was not sure what would have happened, back there, if he had not gotten lucky and flashed the sunlight into Nomak’s eyes. He was not accustomed to coming out of the worse end of a fight, and he saw no need to shield anyone from his ire. “Why didn’t you tell me that that thing’s immune to EDTA?” And, once that door had been opened, it was very likely that he was immune to silver and garlic as well.
A line appeared between Nyssa’s eyes. Blade did not think that she was used to being questioned all that often. That was just too bad. “I didn’t know!” she exclaimed. If she was lying, then she was the best that Blade had ever seen, and the Nyssa that he had known until that point was too entrenched in practical reality to pull that off.
“If you had known,” Blade pushed forward, “would you have told me?”
The anger faded from Nyssa like a fire abruptly running out of oxygen. She pulled herself up to her full height and became every inch the icy princess again as she informed Blade, “I think you now the truth when you hear it.”
Blade did, and that was half of the problem. The other half was the enormous mountain of questions that even that answer left behind. He made a noncommittal noise and asked instead, “Then why didn’t he kill you?”
Nyssa flinched back as if she had been struck, letting Blade know that he was only getting at something that she herself was already worrying about. She still had not collected herself enough to give an answer when they both heard a vampire begin to scream.
*
Whistler’s jaw was still aching and he could not see worth a goddamned thing in the dim, reflected glow from the streetlamps, and all of this was adding up with the stress and the strain to give him one of the most wrenching headaches that he had ever experienced in his life. He growled, a low and animalistic sound that he did not like at all, as he climbed to the top of the roof and watched the vampires below him as they scattered like ants into their nests. Even at this relatively low height, they were little more than moving forms below him, all other details lost into the shadow. The sky above him rumbled. Even with weak human senses he could still smell the oncoming rain. A second growl began to rise in Whistler’s throat. He clamped his teeth against one another hard enough to send spikes of pain radiating into his jaw, neck, and head. That was going to cease now.
On the edge of the roof, Whistler set up his gun, peered for a moment through the scope, and flipped the hood of his jacket over his head as the sky made good on its promise. The fat drops made an echoing sound as they fell down across the top of the windbreaker that made it difficult to hear any other sound. His bad leg was already starting to creak and ache from being locked in place for so long and for all of the activity that he had already put it through that day. Being human seemed like one hell of a damned treat at the moment. It was all that Whistler could do not to growl again.
He and Blade had had a working system for nearly two decades before Whistler had disappeared into his strange limbo place of being half bloodsucker and half bloodsucker’s plaything. They did not talk about vampires, they did not talk about vampiric abilities, they did not even use the word vampire when bloodsucker or suckhead would do. Blade’s abilities were what they were, and discussion of where they had come from did not mean a damned thing in the face of what they could do. Neat, clean. Black and white.
Except that now there didn’t seem to be a single person in Blade’s operation save for Scud who was not hip-deep in the vampire’s world, one of whom had been among the most ruthless of the suckheads for longer than he had been a human before that. A former vampire that Blade was actually fucking, in effect spreading that borrowed bloodshed all over himself by the mere effect of tolerating Frost in his presence. There was a time when Whistler and Blade would have had it out over that one, gone off and screamed at one another until Blade was seeing reason again. That Blade was two years removed from this Blade, though, so that Whistler did not even know where to begin. It was all that he could do not to growl again. Had a vampire walked within view of his scope, Whistler did not think that he would have been able to resist pulling the trigger, and strategy be damned.
A voice piped up in the bud that Whistler had slipped into his ear, crackling as a result of the moisture that had slipped in under the hood. “Hey, W, you got me? Tell me something. How’s the weather up there, sweetheart?”
“Walking on sunshine, Toad Boy,” Whistler growled back in a tone that was lower and rougher than his normal speaking voice. He leaned forward so that he could peer through his scope again, swearing as rain splattered against his face and then found all kinds of physics-defying ways to slide down the back of his neck and into his shirt. Whistler had lived for a long time. He had a great many obscenities at his disposal, and a wealth of creative ways to employ them.
With the rain now coming down hard against the outside of his hood and creating a vast echoing noise that obliterated all other sound. Whistler would later wonder if there was not some kind of latent sixth sense or vampiric ability that led him to hearing the soft and nearly nonexistent scuffling sound from the roof behind him. He would then kick the nearest wall so hard that his bad leg would swell up from ankle to knee and turn him into a terror for the next two days. At any rate, he heard and spun around, abandoning the gun on the stand but allowing his hand to fall down to the pistol at his hip. There was a flash of blue-gray from the corner of his eye before it disappeared.
Though it disgusted him even a second later, Whistler cast a glance back towards the rifle before he considered giving pursuit. He clamped his lips together once he realized what he was doing, put his hand on the pistol at his hip and limped swiftly after the Reaper that he had glimpsed. Might be that Blade didn’t see any problem with cradling the monsters to his bosom these days. Whistler still sure as hell did, and he remembered what their mission had been about in the first place.
The earpiece crackled, and Scud’s voice carried into Whistler’s ear. Kid sounded frantic. That was just too damned bad; Whistler had not emerged from that blood vat so that he could fix all of Blade’s mistakes over the past two years.
Any of Blade’s mistakes.
Whistler paused for a moment before he began climbing down from the roof, well aware as he did so that he was walking into an unknown stretch of territory against an enemy that he was not familiar with, and with senses that he was not fully settled into yet. This only slowed him down for a second before he threw his leg over the side of the roof and began clamoring down as quickly as his bad leg would allow him. It was the kind of stupid mistake that he would have railed at Blade about for a good hour at the beginning of their working relationship. These days, Whistler figured that that made it the kind of error that was right up his alley.
Whistler kept his hand upon his gun as his boots struck the cement, the rain still falling down onto his head and muffling all sight and sound. In the downpour, it was difficult to detect any color at all, let alone the tell-tale blue that would let him know if there was a Reaper present. He strode softly, hand on his gun and his hood pushed back so that his hair and face were soaked within seconds. The rain was freezing, but he could now use his peripheral vision to its fullest. Whistler actually felt himself relaxing as he stalked quickly down what looked to be a short alleyway behind the building, moving with as much speed as his bad leg would allow. He felt almost like he had in the days before Blade, when he had been the hunter rather than merely the maker of the weapons. Felt damned good, in other words.
The clinking of metal against metal, so soft that human ears could scarcely pick it up, drew Whistler to the end of the alley and the street, where he came across a manhole that was standing open and waiting for him like a great, hungry mouth. Whistler did not think that he could have seen a more obvious trap if a sign had been posted over it that marked it as so. He did not see that eh could do anything else other than drop himself down it.
“Son of a whore,” Whistler grunted as he dropped down into the sewers. Things that he had neither the stomach nor the patience to identify rolled across the toes of his boots; his knee ached from being asked to take about three ladders too many in the space of about an hour. The rain was not present here, so that Whistler could finally hear himself think. The only problem with that was that he could now hear his feet thudding across the cement pathway that lined one side of the sewer, echoing in the closed space. There was a flashlight hooked onto Whistler’s belt. Though he craved the light, down here in which his only company was the sound of his own footsteps, Whistler’s hand did not so much as twitch in that direction. That tiny beam of light would have been pitiful, in this much darkness, almost worse than nothing at all, and would have only let the Reaper know where he was if it did not know already. Whistler’s tread softly though he could hear nothing outside of the rushing of water and…other things and the inhale-exhale pattern of his own breathing.
Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. With Whistler’s labored breathing, a product of the unexpected exertion that he had been forced to put his bad leg through, the sound was so faint that he could barely hear it. He nearly missed it when a hissing noise began to echo after him every time that he breathed out. Whistler spun, heard an animalistic shriek that was the precursor to an attack, and dropped his hand down to the butt of his gun without pausing to even think consciously about what he was doing. Neither did he pause to think again before the gun was drawn and three shots were fine, three brief points of light in the darkness and three booms that echoed and reechoed to leave him nearly deaf. The muzzle flash outlined for one second the snarling face of a Reaper rising up before him, its lower jaw splitting apart to show a double set of fangs and a long, reaching tongue. The Reaper screamed and fell backwards. With what hearing that he had left, Whistler heard the meaty thunk of three bullets striking flesh. Silver-tipped. If that didn’t put him down, then Whistler was not sure what would.
Less than five seconds later, Whistler decided that he did not know what would. There was a whining sound from the space ahead of him, like that of a wounded dog, followed by that of flesh knitting itself back together. Whistler did not think that he would ever forget that sound, having heard it as his own muscle and bone put itself back together again after the vampires were through with him. Whistler only allowed himself one second of dismayed shock before he recovered and barreled forward. He lowered his shoulder like a linebacker and felt it collide hard with the Reaper’s abdomen, felt the monster go flying sideways. It had still been making those whimpering sounds of pain at that point, and they became high-pitched squeals. The day that Whistler paused to reflect upon a bloodsucker’s pain would be the day that hell froze over and the devil himself traveled northwards to collect his debt. If he was the only member of their operation who could still remember that distinction, then so be it.
The manhole that Whistler had scrambled down in pursuit of the Reaper in the first place was a dim, glowing circle against the ceiling, hardly visible even to someone who was looking for it. It was almost enough to make Whistler religious again. He nearly flew up the ladder as could not tell later if his bad leg had protested the speed or not. It was protesting so damned much by then that it could very have been bitching about the color of the sky, too. All the while, he could hear the Reaper only a few feet back, directly behind him.
It had stopped raining at some point while he was in the sewer. Whistler’s fingers slipped on the edge of the manhole as he hauled himself upwards, but his vision was sharp and clear, the starlight throwing everything into relief that even his diminished sight could pick up on. Whistler pulled himself up and over the edge of the manhole, spun around, and kicked out hard at the cover itself with his good leg. The Reaper was already most the way out when the cover slammed down on its leg, creating a tremendous cracking noise. The Reaper shrieked again, its mouth opening to reveal that split lower jaw, and scrabbled wildly against the cement. It could not throw the manhole cover off of itself, even though that made it the weakest vampire that Whistler had ever seen. He pushed up himself up to his feet again, backed off a few paces, and put his hand back onto his gun again as he watched without speaking. The Reaper had ceased struggling for the moment and was watching Whistler sullenly without moving.
“Been a long time since you fed, hasn’t it, big boy?” Whistler asked, drifting to a place that was just outside of the Reaper’s range. He remembered the thirst, though he could not ever remember a point in which a regular vampire had been weakened so dramatically in so short a span of time. The Reaper opened its three jaws again and hissed. Whistler nodded as if that actually constituted an answer. “Think you might have blown this thing wide open for us, suckhead.” Though it made his skin crawl to turn his back on a vampire for any length of time and for any reason, Whistler broke his own rules so that he could limp from the alleyway. The rain had soaked the earpiece so thoroughly that it had ceased to issue even those intermittent crackling noises, so he had no idea how Scud had been doing for the past several minutes. Given that the kid had been locked into the nice snug van brimming with weapons while Whistler had been standing on a rooftop with nothing to protect him save for a pistol and a rifle that was bolted down and unable to be transported easily, Whistler was not feeling eaten up with concern.
That changed when he emerged from the mouth of the alley in time to see Scud’s van go barreling past, covered in a thick blanket of Reapers that were energetically pulling at the roof and the windows. “Son of a whore,” Whistler snapped. He drew his pistol and began running forward. Not liking the idiot and wanting him to be vampire chow were two very different animals. If they weren’t, then Whistler would have seen a great many more hunters, of vampires or otherwise, put into the ground over the decades since he had slipped into the underworld.
The van slammed into a wall at a speed that made the entire frame scream and made Whistler wince in automatic sympathy. If not for the young idiot inside, hell, for the machine. Vehicles like that were not made any longer. They should not be abused recklessly. Scud had pinned several of the Reapers between the van and the wall and, as Whistler hurried forward with a gun that he already knew as not going to do a damned thing outside of pissing the suckheads off, engaged all of the UV lights at once. The Reapers pinned between the van and the wall screamed and swiftly died, while most of the others yelped and fled. A few paused and snarled at Whistler as they ran past him, but with smoke still rising from their skins they were not very interested in even a fight that they could have won.
Whistler reached the van a few seconds after the Reapers had fled and then hurled the driver’s side door open. The van was an old American-made, from way back when the frames had still been built of solid steel that guzzled gas and laughed in the face of its enemies, but at that speed Whistler still was not sure what kind of injuries he was going to be staring at when he got that door open and got inside. Scud was slumped over the steering wheel when Whistler opened the door, unmoving at first, though he lunged upwards as soon as the sound registered with him. He had a red mark spanning across his forehead from striking the steering wheel that would be a bruise by the time that the sun, now just beginning to curve over the edge of the horizon, was high in the sky. No blood, though, and no signs of obvious injury. Whistler took a quick scan of each of Scud’s pupils as the kid raised his head in reaction to the light coming in from the door, and noted within seconds that they were contracting normally. Scud had probably slumped down over the steering wheel much more out of relief than because he was actually hurt. Whistler had learned to do such second-by-second scans when Blade had been very young and the two of them had only begun their mission, though Blade would never know of them.
Did not seem that Scud would ever know about them, either, since the kid’s expression went from exhausted and wary to flat-out pissed off in roughly the same amount of speed that it would have taken Whistler to take a step backwards if he had been so inclined. Scud had not been interested in fastening his seatbelt before had gone tearing off across the lot with all of hell’s ugliest children dangling from the roof and sides of his van. It took him about the same amount of time to hop down from his seat and be up in Whistler’s face.
“Where the fuck were you, man?” Scud demanded as he planted himself mere inches from Whistler’s face. He shoved at Whistler’s shoulders, hard. Because his face was still so young and unlined, and because his voice was shaking with something that could have been anger but was most likely leftover fear that no longer had an outlet since the danger had passed, Whistler was going to allow him that one. Whistler was going to allow him only the one. “You were supposed to be my backup!” He shoved at Whistler’s shoulders again.
Whistler grabbed at Scud’s forearms before the kid could withdraw and slammed him back hard against the side of the van. Scud’s eyes widened. Geezers like Whistler were clearly not supposed to be able to move that quickly. They widened further when Whistler put his forearm across Scud’s throat and pushed down hard. “Bullets don’t do shit, you little punk,” Whistler snarled back at him. “What do you want me to do, get myself killed for the likes of you?”
Scud’s face was still furious and scared, but his grip on Whistler’s wrists first loosened and then fell away. Scud nodded, very minutely. Whistler still waited a few more seconds before he released the kid and stepped away.
“Something that I missed?”
Whistler turned and saw that Blade was standing only a few yards away from them both, having had no trouble whatsoever coming up on the two of them without a sound. He could come within inches without betraying his presence when he was really concentrating. There was blood at Blade’s temple even though the wound that it was leaking from was small and by the end of the day would be nothing more than an impressive bruise. Whistler automatically checked each of Blade’s eyes and did not relax until he was certain that they were reacting to light at the same speed, identical to the check that he had performed on Scud only moments before.
“Damn right you did, kid,” he grunted. Whistler jerked his head briefly upwards to indicate the sky. “Think you can get your pets out here to look at something?”
Blade’s facial expression did not change. Then again, it never did. Whistler did not know when he was going to become accustomed to not being able to read all of the signals any longer.
*
“Caught it trying to get down into the sewers,” Whistler said a short time later, when everyone had been assembled in the same alley where he had the Reaper trapped. He, Blade, and Scud were all standing in what little sunlight was managing to creep through the gloom. It had begun to rain again, though much more softly than before, and filtered a great deal of the sun. The vampires were clustered together in the shade afforded by the buildings. None of them looked happy to be there, though whether that was because of the rain or their close proximity to sunlight Whistler could not tell. He left it up to Blade to give a damn.
Blade crouched down on his heels a few feet outside of the Reaper’s reach. Its warning hiss was more for the sake of show than anything else. If it could have attacked, it would have.
As if he was reading Whistler’s mind, Blade asked, “Why hasn’t it thrown off the cover and disappeared?”
Nyssa stepped as close to the edge of the shadow as she dared, until her boots were actually protruding into the light. She appeared discomfited at even having to draw that close. “Its metabolism is different from ours,” she declared. If she had not ticked her head back in the direction of her people, Whistler would not have been able to tell if she was referring to them or to herself and Blade. “It cannot go a substantial amount of time without feeding.” Scud put his hand onto the UV light at his belt, so Nyssa added, “If you destroy it through sunlight, there will be no remains left. Nothing to study.”
“Not to mention that it casts certain aspersions on our alliance if you’re so trigger-happy,” Reinhardt added. They all looked to Blade for his response.
Whistler snorted. “So now we’re studying them?” he asked. “Just let me know when we start giving them baths and setting them free like those ducks that get caught in oil spills.”
Blade glowered at him. Whistler knew that he was playing a dangerous game, showing a splintered front when they were outnumbered and among such untrustworthy company. Short of pistol-whipping Blade, though, he did not see any methods of getting his attention that he had not already tried.
“We may learn something,” Blade said finally to Nyssa, who had watched the entire exchange with startled, wondering eyes. Whistler did not imagine that breaking rank was treated nearly so casually among the vampires. She nodded once.
Blade watched the Reaper die, and Whistler never ceased watching Blade.
End Part Six
Part Six
Nyssa was so rattled that she actually obeyed Blade’s order to stay behind, the surest proof that Blade needed that something other than a little light manhandling between one enemy and another had taken place. He filed that away as something that could be dealt with later as he raced after Nomak instead. Whatever genetic cocktail had first blended and then mutated to make the vampire race even more loathsome had been kind to Nomak, Blade had to give him that. The fucker was fast. Even though he only had a few seconds’ head start, Blade was soon following him by scent alone. All of his senses were sharper than a human’s though not so sharp as a vampire’s, and Blade had to wonder how it was possible that Nyssa’s group had been forced to come to him at all, why they could not simply track Nomak themselves. Humans smelled of sweat, of blood, of shampoo and cologne and each person’s own individual scent. Vampires had a deeper, ranker smell, a wilder smell that always made Blade think of a wolf’s den, though he had never been near one to do a comparison.
Nomak had a sweet and decaying smell about him, like a room where illness had lingered for a very long time. He smelled as if he was already dying and did not have the good sense to lie down. Blade may as well have been following a trail marked with neon signs.
Whatever the House of Pain had been before the suckheads had taken it over, it was a curious mix of living and dead now. The main room downstairs had been bright and modern. The hallways had been forlorn and neglected. When Blade finally did catch up with Nomak, it was in a room that looked as if it had been started with a mind towards expanding the main structure and then abandoned midway through, so that it simultaneously looked as if it was midway through being born and through dying. Blade thought that that was fitting.
Construction dust crunched softly beneath his boots as he stepped further into the room and looked around at the piles of cement and half-finished trellises, all of his senses alert for Nomak. The vampire had hit the room and then seemed to have disappeared altogether, though Blade could see no entrances or exits save for the one that he had just used and a long row of windows with the glass still intact. Nomak was still close, though. Blade could still smell the sickroom stink hanging in the air. He kept one hand on his gun and the other on his sword, waiting.
The radio at his shoulder crackled once before Asad came on, sounding weary and as if he had been in a few fights of his own since the evening had begun. “Daylight’s coming,” he said. “You’re on your own, Blade.”
Blade glanced towards the row of windows, which were beginning to fill with pink and golden light. The dawn was not yet spreading far enough beyond the windows to make a difference in the fight. Blade stepped even further into the room and lifted himself onto the trellis, hearing it creak slightly beneath his weight. Beyond that, there was no sound. It was making Blade’s teeth itch.
The faint creaking of the trellis behind Blade made him spin around. It occurred to him that what he was feeling was nearly relief to find the fight coming to him, before he swiftly pushed it away again.
Nomak grinned at him for a moment before he spoke, as if he already knew that Blade was not going to draw the gun that he was currently resting his hand upon. His jaw made a peculiar clicking sound. “You want me so badly, Blade? Here I am.” When Blade still did not move, Nomak’s grin only grew wider. It was more obvious than ever that there was something wrong with his jaw. Human and even vampire mouths were not capable of stretching that wide.
“Why kill me?” Nomak went on. He was using a musing tone, a teacher’s tone, as if he and Blade were actually about to sit down and learn from one another. “You and I, we have the same enemy. We want the same thing.”
“Kill all vampires?” Blade said, taking his hand away from the butt of his gun. He thought of Nyssa and of Frost in the same moment. Nomak smiled as if Blade was a student who had just performed an unexpected act of brilliance. If he had been close enough for Blade to grab swiftly, then the entire fight likely would have ended with him seizing Nomak’s face and seeing if that strange quirk of his lower jaw still held sway once Blade had broken it in. “So you’ll play nice and leave the humans alone once you’re done running through the suckheads.”
The smile faded off of Nomak’s face. He looked much younger, and sulky on top of that. “They’re prey,” he said.
‘Welcome to the cattle yard,’ Blade remembered saying once. “Then we don’t have the same enemy,” he answered. Blade drew his sword and attacked. Nomak was unarmed, but he was easily as fast or faster than any vampire that Blade had ever pitted himself against before. He back-flipped easily along the wooden trellis, catching himself with his hands and dropping to the ground. Blade drew his gun and fired off several shots, all of which found their target. Nomak writhed for several long seconds, pulling his lips back from his teeth as the great, watery blisters opened up across his face and chest. Blade put the gun back into the holster. He drew the sword as Nomak then recovered less than a minute later, the blisters disappearing, and laughed.
“The old methods won’t work, Blade,” Nomak called up to him before he launched himself up to the trellis with a speed that Blade’s eye could hardly follow. Blade whipped the sword around but was too slow, and Nomak tackled him hard from the trellis. They both tumbled back to the ground amid a clattering noise and a great cloud of dust. Nomak landed on top; Blade put his boot into his stomach and levered him off. He twisted the sword around and into an attack position, but Nomak spun away before the steel could make contact. In the next second, he was wrenching a metal rebar from the slab of concrete in which it had been abandoned so that it could be used as a makeshift sword. Nomak got in a lucky strike that sent Blade reeling backwards from a glancing blow to his temple.
Blade drew his lips back from his teeth in anger and pain as he pulled back further for another chance, while Nomak grinned. “We need the same ting, Blade. You and I are only variations on the same model.” Nomak paused and tilted his head to one side. Blade wondered if Nomak could smell Frost on him, as the other members of the Blood Pack had already alluded that they could. “And you have been crossing lines for a long time.”
Blade growled without intending to. He hated it when he did that, hated how base and animalistic it sounded, and so tried to restrain it whenever he could. Frost liked it. Blade had long ago realized that there was something deeply wrong about Frost that more or less had to be tolerated, as there was no way that it could ever be fixed. Nomak was not Frost. He did not have the right to elicit that reaction. Blade growled again, feeling a hot surge of rage that he could not have quantified or controlled even if he had wanted to, and lunged forward again. Nomak blocked every blow of the sword as if he ad been born to do it. As if he had been trained to do it, as that was not a skill that one picked up in the span of three days. Remembering Frost’s words, a light went off in Blade’s mind. He would not have time to attend to it until much later.
Nomak got in another lucky blow that rang Blade’s brain around the inside of his skull for him. Blade raised his sword in defense, only to have the growing sunlight from the window gather along the length and flash back in both his and Nomak’s eyes. Nomak snarled and spun away. Blade was left temporarily blinded and with his head still feeling as if it was trapped inside of a bell. By the time that his vision cleared, Nomak was already out of reach, fleeing by using the walls as launching points. Blade snarled again and swiped at the blood that was gathering at his temple before he stormed off to find Nyssa.
Blade had not expected that his order to Nyssa to stay put would be followed for more than a second or two after he gave it, but, unbelievably, she was still where he had left her. Nyssa took a small step forward when she saw Blade approaching, her expression warring for a moment between concern and pure, animalistic hunger. Blade saw her eyes bounce up to the blood at his temple before she could stop. Nyssa caught herself and cast her eyes back down to the floor.
“What happened?” she asked.
Blade was not sure what would have happened, back there, if he had not gotten lucky and flashed the sunlight into Nomak’s eyes. He was not accustomed to coming out of the worse end of a fight, and he saw no need to shield anyone from his ire. “Why didn’t you tell me that that thing’s immune to EDTA?” And, once that door had been opened, it was very likely that he was immune to silver and garlic as well.
A line appeared between Nyssa’s eyes. Blade did not think that she was used to being questioned all that often. That was just too bad. “I didn’t know!” she exclaimed. If she was lying, then she was the best that Blade had ever seen, and the Nyssa that he had known until that point was too entrenched in practical reality to pull that off.
“If you had known,” Blade pushed forward, “would you have told me?”
The anger faded from Nyssa like a fire abruptly running out of oxygen. She pulled herself up to her full height and became every inch the icy princess again as she informed Blade, “I think you now the truth when you hear it.”
Blade did, and that was half of the problem. The other half was the enormous mountain of questions that even that answer left behind. He made a noncommittal noise and asked instead, “Then why didn’t he kill you?”
Nyssa flinched back as if she had been struck, letting Blade know that he was only getting at something that she herself was already worrying about. She still had not collected herself enough to give an answer when they both heard a vampire begin to scream.
*
Whistler’s jaw was still aching and he could not see worth a goddamned thing in the dim, reflected glow from the streetlamps, and all of this was adding up with the stress and the strain to give him one of the most wrenching headaches that he had ever experienced in his life. He growled, a low and animalistic sound that he did not like at all, as he climbed to the top of the roof and watched the vampires below him as they scattered like ants into their nests. Even at this relatively low height, they were little more than moving forms below him, all other details lost into the shadow. The sky above him rumbled. Even with weak human senses he could still smell the oncoming rain. A second growl began to rise in Whistler’s throat. He clamped his teeth against one another hard enough to send spikes of pain radiating into his jaw, neck, and head. That was going to cease now.
On the edge of the roof, Whistler set up his gun, peered for a moment through the scope, and flipped the hood of his jacket over his head as the sky made good on its promise. The fat drops made an echoing sound as they fell down across the top of the windbreaker that made it difficult to hear any other sound. His bad leg was already starting to creak and ache from being locked in place for so long and for all of the activity that he had already put it through that day. Being human seemed like one hell of a damned treat at the moment. It was all that Whistler could do not to growl again.
He and Blade had had a working system for nearly two decades before Whistler had disappeared into his strange limbo place of being half bloodsucker and half bloodsucker’s plaything. They did not talk about vampires, they did not talk about vampiric abilities, they did not even use the word vampire when bloodsucker or suckhead would do. Blade’s abilities were what they were, and discussion of where they had come from did not mean a damned thing in the face of what they could do. Neat, clean. Black and white.
Except that now there didn’t seem to be a single person in Blade’s operation save for Scud who was not hip-deep in the vampire’s world, one of whom had been among the most ruthless of the suckheads for longer than he had been a human before that. A former vampire that Blade was actually fucking, in effect spreading that borrowed bloodshed all over himself by the mere effect of tolerating Frost in his presence. There was a time when Whistler and Blade would have had it out over that one, gone off and screamed at one another until Blade was seeing reason again. That Blade was two years removed from this Blade, though, so that Whistler did not even know where to begin. It was all that he could do not to growl again. Had a vampire walked within view of his scope, Whistler did not think that he would have been able to resist pulling the trigger, and strategy be damned.
A voice piped up in the bud that Whistler had slipped into his ear, crackling as a result of the moisture that had slipped in under the hood. “Hey, W, you got me? Tell me something. How’s the weather up there, sweetheart?”
“Walking on sunshine, Toad Boy,” Whistler growled back in a tone that was lower and rougher than his normal speaking voice. He leaned forward so that he could peer through his scope again, swearing as rain splattered against his face and then found all kinds of physics-defying ways to slide down the back of his neck and into his shirt. Whistler had lived for a long time. He had a great many obscenities at his disposal, and a wealth of creative ways to employ them.
With the rain now coming down hard against the outside of his hood and creating a vast echoing noise that obliterated all other sound. Whistler would later wonder if there was not some kind of latent sixth sense or vampiric ability that led him to hearing the soft and nearly nonexistent scuffling sound from the roof behind him. He would then kick the nearest wall so hard that his bad leg would swell up from ankle to knee and turn him into a terror for the next two days. At any rate, he heard and spun around, abandoning the gun on the stand but allowing his hand to fall down to the pistol at his hip. There was a flash of blue-gray from the corner of his eye before it disappeared.
Though it disgusted him even a second later, Whistler cast a glance back towards the rifle before he considered giving pursuit. He clamped his lips together once he realized what he was doing, put his hand on the pistol at his hip and limped swiftly after the Reaper that he had glimpsed. Might be that Blade didn’t see any problem with cradling the monsters to his bosom these days. Whistler still sure as hell did, and he remembered what their mission had been about in the first place.
The earpiece crackled, and Scud’s voice carried into Whistler’s ear. Kid sounded frantic. That was just too damned bad; Whistler had not emerged from that blood vat so that he could fix all of Blade’s mistakes over the past two years.
Any of Blade’s mistakes.
Whistler paused for a moment before he began climbing down from the roof, well aware as he did so that he was walking into an unknown stretch of territory against an enemy that he was not familiar with, and with senses that he was not fully settled into yet. This only slowed him down for a second before he threw his leg over the side of the roof and began clamoring down as quickly as his bad leg would allow him. It was the kind of stupid mistake that he would have railed at Blade about for a good hour at the beginning of their working relationship. These days, Whistler figured that that made it the kind of error that was right up his alley.
Whistler kept his hand upon his gun as his boots struck the cement, the rain still falling down onto his head and muffling all sight and sound. In the downpour, it was difficult to detect any color at all, let alone the tell-tale blue that would let him know if there was a Reaper present. He strode softly, hand on his gun and his hood pushed back so that his hair and face were soaked within seconds. The rain was freezing, but he could now use his peripheral vision to its fullest. Whistler actually felt himself relaxing as he stalked quickly down what looked to be a short alleyway behind the building, moving with as much speed as his bad leg would allow. He felt almost like he had in the days before Blade, when he had been the hunter rather than merely the maker of the weapons. Felt damned good, in other words.
The clinking of metal against metal, so soft that human ears could scarcely pick it up, drew Whistler to the end of the alley and the street, where he came across a manhole that was standing open and waiting for him like a great, hungry mouth. Whistler did not think that he could have seen a more obvious trap if a sign had been posted over it that marked it as so. He did not see that eh could do anything else other than drop himself down it.
“Son of a whore,” Whistler grunted as he dropped down into the sewers. Things that he had neither the stomach nor the patience to identify rolled across the toes of his boots; his knee ached from being asked to take about three ladders too many in the space of about an hour. The rain was not present here, so that Whistler could finally hear himself think. The only problem with that was that he could now hear his feet thudding across the cement pathway that lined one side of the sewer, echoing in the closed space. There was a flashlight hooked onto Whistler’s belt. Though he craved the light, down here in which his only company was the sound of his own footsteps, Whistler’s hand did not so much as twitch in that direction. That tiny beam of light would have been pitiful, in this much darkness, almost worse than nothing at all, and would have only let the Reaper know where he was if it did not know already. Whistler’s tread softly though he could hear nothing outside of the rushing of water and…other things and the inhale-exhale pattern of his own breathing.
Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. With Whistler’s labored breathing, a product of the unexpected exertion that he had been forced to put his bad leg through, the sound was so faint that he could barely hear it. He nearly missed it when a hissing noise began to echo after him every time that he breathed out. Whistler spun, heard an animalistic shriek that was the precursor to an attack, and dropped his hand down to the butt of his gun without pausing to even think consciously about what he was doing. Neither did he pause to think again before the gun was drawn and three shots were fine, three brief points of light in the darkness and three booms that echoed and reechoed to leave him nearly deaf. The muzzle flash outlined for one second the snarling face of a Reaper rising up before him, its lower jaw splitting apart to show a double set of fangs and a long, reaching tongue. The Reaper screamed and fell backwards. With what hearing that he had left, Whistler heard the meaty thunk of three bullets striking flesh. Silver-tipped. If that didn’t put him down, then Whistler was not sure what would.
Less than five seconds later, Whistler decided that he did not know what would. There was a whining sound from the space ahead of him, like that of a wounded dog, followed by that of flesh knitting itself back together. Whistler did not think that he would ever forget that sound, having heard it as his own muscle and bone put itself back together again after the vampires were through with him. Whistler only allowed himself one second of dismayed shock before he recovered and barreled forward. He lowered his shoulder like a linebacker and felt it collide hard with the Reaper’s abdomen, felt the monster go flying sideways. It had still been making those whimpering sounds of pain at that point, and they became high-pitched squeals. The day that Whistler paused to reflect upon a bloodsucker’s pain would be the day that hell froze over and the devil himself traveled northwards to collect his debt. If he was the only member of their operation who could still remember that distinction, then so be it.
The manhole that Whistler had scrambled down in pursuit of the Reaper in the first place was a dim, glowing circle against the ceiling, hardly visible even to someone who was looking for it. It was almost enough to make Whistler religious again. He nearly flew up the ladder as could not tell later if his bad leg had protested the speed or not. It was protesting so damned much by then that it could very have been bitching about the color of the sky, too. All the while, he could hear the Reaper only a few feet back, directly behind him.
It had stopped raining at some point while he was in the sewer. Whistler’s fingers slipped on the edge of the manhole as he hauled himself upwards, but his vision was sharp and clear, the starlight throwing everything into relief that even his diminished sight could pick up on. Whistler pulled himself up and over the edge of the manhole, spun around, and kicked out hard at the cover itself with his good leg. The Reaper was already most the way out when the cover slammed down on its leg, creating a tremendous cracking noise. The Reaper shrieked again, its mouth opening to reveal that split lower jaw, and scrabbled wildly against the cement. It could not throw the manhole cover off of itself, even though that made it the weakest vampire that Whistler had ever seen. He pushed up himself up to his feet again, backed off a few paces, and put his hand back onto his gun again as he watched without speaking. The Reaper had ceased struggling for the moment and was watching Whistler sullenly without moving.
“Been a long time since you fed, hasn’t it, big boy?” Whistler asked, drifting to a place that was just outside of the Reaper’s range. He remembered the thirst, though he could not ever remember a point in which a regular vampire had been weakened so dramatically in so short a span of time. The Reaper opened its three jaws again and hissed. Whistler nodded as if that actually constituted an answer. “Think you might have blown this thing wide open for us, suckhead.” Though it made his skin crawl to turn his back on a vampire for any length of time and for any reason, Whistler broke his own rules so that he could limp from the alleyway. The rain had soaked the earpiece so thoroughly that it had ceased to issue even those intermittent crackling noises, so he had no idea how Scud had been doing for the past several minutes. Given that the kid had been locked into the nice snug van brimming with weapons while Whistler had been standing on a rooftop with nothing to protect him save for a pistol and a rifle that was bolted down and unable to be transported easily, Whistler was not feeling eaten up with concern.
That changed when he emerged from the mouth of the alley in time to see Scud’s van go barreling past, covered in a thick blanket of Reapers that were energetically pulling at the roof and the windows. “Son of a whore,” Whistler snapped. He drew his pistol and began running forward. Not liking the idiot and wanting him to be vampire chow were two very different animals. If they weren’t, then Whistler would have seen a great many more hunters, of vampires or otherwise, put into the ground over the decades since he had slipped into the underworld.
The van slammed into a wall at a speed that made the entire frame scream and made Whistler wince in automatic sympathy. If not for the young idiot inside, hell, for the machine. Vehicles like that were not made any longer. They should not be abused recklessly. Scud had pinned several of the Reapers between the van and the wall and, as Whistler hurried forward with a gun that he already knew as not going to do a damned thing outside of pissing the suckheads off, engaged all of the UV lights at once. The Reapers pinned between the van and the wall screamed and swiftly died, while most of the others yelped and fled. A few paused and snarled at Whistler as they ran past him, but with smoke still rising from their skins they were not very interested in even a fight that they could have won.
Whistler reached the van a few seconds after the Reapers had fled and then hurled the driver’s side door open. The van was an old American-made, from way back when the frames had still been built of solid steel that guzzled gas and laughed in the face of its enemies, but at that speed Whistler still was not sure what kind of injuries he was going to be staring at when he got that door open and got inside. Scud was slumped over the steering wheel when Whistler opened the door, unmoving at first, though he lunged upwards as soon as the sound registered with him. He had a red mark spanning across his forehead from striking the steering wheel that would be a bruise by the time that the sun, now just beginning to curve over the edge of the horizon, was high in the sky. No blood, though, and no signs of obvious injury. Whistler took a quick scan of each of Scud’s pupils as the kid raised his head in reaction to the light coming in from the door, and noted within seconds that they were contracting normally. Scud had probably slumped down over the steering wheel much more out of relief than because he was actually hurt. Whistler had learned to do such second-by-second scans when Blade had been very young and the two of them had only begun their mission, though Blade would never know of them.
Did not seem that Scud would ever know about them, either, since the kid’s expression went from exhausted and wary to flat-out pissed off in roughly the same amount of speed that it would have taken Whistler to take a step backwards if he had been so inclined. Scud had not been interested in fastening his seatbelt before had gone tearing off across the lot with all of hell’s ugliest children dangling from the roof and sides of his van. It took him about the same amount of time to hop down from his seat and be up in Whistler’s face.
“Where the fuck were you, man?” Scud demanded as he planted himself mere inches from Whistler’s face. He shoved at Whistler’s shoulders, hard. Because his face was still so young and unlined, and because his voice was shaking with something that could have been anger but was most likely leftover fear that no longer had an outlet since the danger had passed, Whistler was going to allow him that one. Whistler was going to allow him only the one. “You were supposed to be my backup!” He shoved at Whistler’s shoulders again.
Whistler grabbed at Scud’s forearms before the kid could withdraw and slammed him back hard against the side of the van. Scud’s eyes widened. Geezers like Whistler were clearly not supposed to be able to move that quickly. They widened further when Whistler put his forearm across Scud’s throat and pushed down hard. “Bullets don’t do shit, you little punk,” Whistler snarled back at him. “What do you want me to do, get myself killed for the likes of you?”
Scud’s face was still furious and scared, but his grip on Whistler’s wrists first loosened and then fell away. Scud nodded, very minutely. Whistler still waited a few more seconds before he released the kid and stepped away.
“Something that I missed?”
Whistler turned and saw that Blade was standing only a few yards away from them both, having had no trouble whatsoever coming up on the two of them without a sound. He could come within inches without betraying his presence when he was really concentrating. There was blood at Blade’s temple even though the wound that it was leaking from was small and by the end of the day would be nothing more than an impressive bruise. Whistler automatically checked each of Blade’s eyes and did not relax until he was certain that they were reacting to light at the same speed, identical to the check that he had performed on Scud only moments before.
“Damn right you did, kid,” he grunted. Whistler jerked his head briefly upwards to indicate the sky. “Think you can get your pets out here to look at something?”
Blade’s facial expression did not change. Then again, it never did. Whistler did not know when he was going to become accustomed to not being able to read all of the signals any longer.
*
“Caught it trying to get down into the sewers,” Whistler said a short time later, when everyone had been assembled in the same alley where he had the Reaper trapped. He, Blade, and Scud were all standing in what little sunlight was managing to creep through the gloom. It had begun to rain again, though much more softly than before, and filtered a great deal of the sun. The vampires were clustered together in the shade afforded by the buildings. None of them looked happy to be there, though whether that was because of the rain or their close proximity to sunlight Whistler could not tell. He left it up to Blade to give a damn.
Blade crouched down on his heels a few feet outside of the Reaper’s reach. Its warning hiss was more for the sake of show than anything else. If it could have attacked, it would have.
As if he was reading Whistler’s mind, Blade asked, “Why hasn’t it thrown off the cover and disappeared?”
Nyssa stepped as close to the edge of the shadow as she dared, until her boots were actually protruding into the light. She appeared discomfited at even having to draw that close. “Its metabolism is different from ours,” she declared. If she had not ticked her head back in the direction of her people, Whistler would not have been able to tell if she was referring to them or to herself and Blade. “It cannot go a substantial amount of time without feeding.” Scud put his hand onto the UV light at his belt, so Nyssa added, “If you destroy it through sunlight, there will be no remains left. Nothing to study.”
“Not to mention that it casts certain aspersions on our alliance if you’re so trigger-happy,” Reinhardt added. They all looked to Blade for his response.
Whistler snorted. “So now we’re studying them?” he asked. “Just let me know when we start giving them baths and setting them free like those ducks that get caught in oil spills.”
Blade glowered at him. Whistler knew that he was playing a dangerous game, showing a splintered front when they were outnumbered and among such untrustworthy company. Short of pistol-whipping Blade, though, he did not see any methods of getting his attention that he had not already tried.
“We may learn something,” Blade said finally to Nyssa, who had watched the entire exchange with startled, wondering eyes. Whistler did not imagine that breaking rank was treated nearly so casually among the vampires. She nodded once.
Blade watched the Reaper die, and Whistler never ceased watching Blade.
End Part Six