Benny shouted angrily from across the half-court, “Hey! That’s our ball. Give it back.”
Her eyes flashed with blue fire. She drew her right arm back, grinned mirthlessly, and offered nonchalantly, “Have it then.” Her hand blurred. The ball vanished, re-appearing as it ricocheted off Benny’s face with a loud crack like snapping wood.
Benny dropped like a stringless puppet, his head canted backward at a crazy angle, blood gushing onto the asphalt in freshets from his mouth and nose.
Hollow shock froze Dwayne’s sneakers to the court. His jaw dropped open and he stared at Benny lying crumpled on the ground. Harry moaned from behind him, and Jasper stuttered, “Nnn … Nnn … No!”
“Oh, my gawd what a waste,” stated a casual voice from the shadows to Dwayne’s right.
He jerked around, Harry and Jasper snapping around to see who was approaching them.
A slim man wrapped in a gray business suit, with narrow features, lank raven-dark hair and a broad mouth, sauntered out of the gloom and onto the court. He glanced once at Benny, lying broken on the ground, and sniffed disdainfully. “Now Carla, you know we shouldn’t be careless with our food.”
The narrow man kept walking toward them, the heels of his boots clicking over the asphalt, a slow grin curling his full lips.
They started backing away. Dwayne’s head swiveled left and right but there seemed to be nowhere to run to. Wherever he looked, one of the strangers blurred into view with inhuman speed.
The red-head circled behind them, a high giggle erupting from her throat.
The narrow man stood stock still, sucking air through his teeth while leering avidly at the boys.
Jasper and Harry both ran in opposite directions at the same time. They didn’t get far, the monsters pounced like jungle cats. They seized their throats with gaping jaws, sinking gleaming fangs into their flesh, and dragging them down to the asphalt.
Dwayne backed up a step, hesitating to run. He couldn’t leave his friends without fighting back. There was a loud crunch as the red-head tore off Jasper’s left arm and threw it casually aside.
The narrow man sucked greedily at Harry’s throat, bending his friend’s torso back over his knee. Harry’s spine let go with a sharp crack, his long legs jerking once before hanging like loose noodles.
Dwayne had seen the movies - he knew what they were - they were vampires. His teenage mind immediately accepting what an adult would have struggled to believe - vampires were real. There was nothing he could do to help any of his friends. He turned and fled for his life.
He made it to the court’s edge before a force picked him up from behind and threw him against a shelter shed. His right arm snapped against the wall, agony shooting through his shoulder. Half dazed, he turned, backing up against the cold bricks and staring into the face of the narrow man. Dark eyes as black as coal stared back with frigid and callous enmity.
The creature’s hands appeared around his throat. The vampire’s grip was steely, lifting him effortlessly up by his neck, his legs swinging, his feet dangling off the ground, a low moan of terror escaping past his lips.
The red-headed girl’s voice giggled again for a moment, then cut off into sudden silence broken only by a flopping sound of something crumpling onto the asphalt.
The narrow man’s eyes widened; his head flicked right.
Bright metal gleamed for an instant under the fluorescent lights over the court. The lights flickered for an instant as something passed beneath them. A thin ribbon of blood splashed from left to right in a line across Dwayne’s cheeks and nose.
A look of shock overtook the narrow man’s face. His grip loosened, his hands dropping away. His head fell backwards, blood jetting up in twin fountains from his throat.
Dwayne dropped to the ground, staggering away, reflexively cradling his broken right arm. He groaned with abject horror as the narrow man’s headless body jerked upright, and lurched with unnatural vitality for a moment before crumpling to the ground, finally coming to rest in a spreading pool of blood on the asphalt.
In the center of the basketball court, the red-head laid in two parts in a blot of dark blood and spilled entrails - evenly split down the middle of her body.
A tall man with a long blood-dripping sword held in his right hand, his face shadowed by a dark-gray hood, stepped casually over the decapitated body of the narrow man. He put his free hand out and stated gruffly, “You need to come with me.”
Dwayne hesitated for a brief moment.
The tall man flicked the sword in a blur of movement, the blood fleeing the blade in a thin spray. The magnificent sword flashed in the over-head lights like something magical or holy - a weapon destined to kill monsters. Something black and shiny gleamed in the hilt. A surreal detail capturing his attention amongst the grief and carnage. It was a pearl, a black pearl resting like a mark of God in the handle of the sword.
Dwayne took a short step forward and grasped the stranger’s hand. The man’s grip was firm and strong around Dwayne’s hand, and he promised, “I’ll keep you safe.”
In his heart, Dwayne knew he would.
His memories were thirty years in the past. Dwayne pushed his cleaner’s cart into the nearest toilet block off the hanger floor. Now he served as a willing agent deep within enemy territory. A man on the inside awaiting the moment he could assist the man who’d irrevocably changed the course of his life so many years ago. A man whose life purpose - the destruction of vampires - he’d embraced with all his heart.
He’d overheard the conversation between the vampire general in a suit and the base commander. His trained mind had missed nothing. An attack was imminent. The base was on high alert. The vampires had arrived in force to protect the Panopticon. He checked the individual toilet cubicles, determining that he was alone. Turning his head away from a nearby camera he tapped the right corner of his jaw three times, just below his right ear, activating a hidden implant.
He took a brush and began scrubbing a perfectly clean toilet bowl, then flushed it - holding the button down to take advantage of all the water in the cistern.
He whispered sotto voce, his voice trembling with emotion, “Arthur. General Maze has arrived with sixteen praetorians and forty-eight day guards. They know you’re coming. You’re walking into a trap. Abort the mission. Abort!”
The communicator thrummed helplessly beneath his ear. Arthur Slayne was out of range; he couldn’t be warned of the flood of reinforcements that had just arrived at the fortress.
His old friend was walking into a death trap and there was nothing Dwayne could do to warn him.
* * *
“We’re half-way there. Take a fifteen minute break. Drink, eat, rest, and refuel,” Arthur Slayne stated.
The Mirovar force team had emerged from the river onto a sandy bank that ran back another twenty yards to a rock wall dotted with more caves. There were three tracked drones sitting in the middle of the underground beach loaded with locked boxes. Each drone was surmounted with a powerful lamp that faced up to the ceiling of the cave, showering the beach with light. Everyone killed their LEDs and removed their Order nightglass goggles. Arthur opened the first locked box, handing out bottles of water and self-heating ration packs to the team members. He then moved to a second box filled with fresh rebreather units and began unpacking them for the team.
Chiara set a fifteen minute timer on her Order nightglasses. She wanted some forewarning for when she was expected to be ready to leave. She had a mission in mind: Anton Slayne.
Anton, Peter and Li had broken away from the rest and sat on the beach next to the river. She joined them, everyone ate and drank with little conversation for about five minutes. The only remarks directed at the stunning vision of stalactites descending from the ceiling above the inky depths of the subterranean river.
Her friends finished their meals. Peter offering to take the empty packs back to the drones. Li went with him, opening a discussion on potential weapons that could be used by the fortress
defenders.
Anton looked across at her. His lone eye lingering on her bare skin. They’d stripped down to their underwear for the expected four hour swim through the river. She was wearing a black bra and panties, and Anton had a short pair of tight-fitting dark-blue trunks that left little to the imagination. The river water had mostly dried on his skin, a few drops here and there. His dark hair was still plastered to his scalp. His piercingly blue eye locked on hers. She glanced back at the caves disappearing into the cave wall, and tilted her head quizzically.
Anton took her hand, and she went with him. Disappearing into the shadows of the nearest cave facing onto the beach. He whirled her around, lifting her off the ground with ease. His lips hot against hers. Her heart thudded, she wanted him, she needed him. She would have him.
In moments, clothing was moved aside. He backed up against the cave wall. She splayed her knees wide while he held her against his hard-muscled body and entered her. He held her close and tight, his hands dropping to support her hips.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him hard. Her hands rose to the sides of his head. It was impossible to get too much of him. She’d get all she could, while she could. They could both be dead before the day was out.
She held him as tight as possible and rode him to mutual climax.
She held him afterwards, panting over his shoulder as aftershocks throbbed through her body.
Her skin tingling, she arched back and faced him. “Anton,” she admitted. “I love you.”
He stared at her in the shadows, his hands gently tracing the lines of her face, but the words she wanted to hear didn’t come.
“Chiara,” Anton said, “I feel you…”
“But?”
“I’d die for you, but what you just offered I can’t match.”
She whispered, “What does that mean? Can’t you love me?”
Anton pulled her in tight and offered, “You’re beautiful … beautiful … stunning. I’m in awe of who you are. The world needs to know who you really are, but … I’m not in a good place.”
“Anton?” she whispered.
“I’m driven by vengeance, hate and death. I know that now. You offer me love, and I fear to accept it.”
“Be brave Anton, be brave,” she urged. His heart thudded opposite hers. She reached up to his face and discovered his right cheek was wet with tears. She held him tight, a pair of tears tracing thin tracks down her face. He was filled with turmoil. No one understood how much he’d gone through in the last few months. He’d been certain he’d understood his life, and then the vampires had arrived in his world and torn it apart. A destruction that mirrored her own recent experiences. Only a few short months ago, she’d been certain of her mission and her faith in her father’s purpose. Certainty and faith that had been torn to shreds during the debacle at the Maine safe house, and then annihilated on top of the cliffs above the town of Whitby.
Anton felt unworthy of love because he was driven by vengeance, hate and death. She had her own knowledge of such things, and he didn’t need to be concerned. She was the one person in his life who could truly understand him. He wasn’t ready to commit in the same way that she was. He was willing to die for her. She didn’t doubt that. It went with the territory of being a vampire hunter, and she would do the same for him.
For now, Anton only had room for one obsession in his life, and that was vengeance against Armitage and Crane.
Chiara released him and stepped back. She’d give him time. The fact he wasn’t in the same place she was, didn’t change that she’d fallen for him. She was in love. She was madly in love.
Anton Slayne was the breath of her life, and nothing was going to change that.
Nothing at all.
* * *
Anton emerged from the underground river.
Water sluiced from the barrel of his H&K 416 short-barreled special-forces assault rifle as he sighted along it with his good eye into the darkness of the cave. He cleared the river, mounting the gray stone of the bank. He dragged off the nearly exhausted re-breather unit and tossed it aside. The only way out was forward, and he wouldn’t be coming back this way. Their alternate escape route had been cut off and the only way out was through the fortress, and they’d have to fight for their lives to take it.
He was okay with that. He’d been fighting for his life since the fateful night two days after his eighteenth birthday. He waited a moment, and Peter’s red hair emerged from the swirling waters, quickly followed by the rest of him as he rose in near nakedness from the underground river.
Peter hefted a pair of oversized waterproof backpacks filled with gear onto the bank and stepped past them with a quiet oath, “How the hell did I end up with two?”
“Because you’re twice the size of everyone else,” Li suggested with a smirk, stepping from the water behind him.
Peter raised an eyebrow, glancing over his shoulder at her and said, “Only where it counts.”
“Ha, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Well, whenever you’re ready.”
Li just grinned at him, arching her chest and sweeping her wet hair back over her scalp. She was dressed in her underwear; everyone had left most of their clothes at the subterranean entrance to the river to ease the long underwater journey to this part of the cave.
The journey had consumed the morning, taking more than four hours to navigate the river with their packs of equipment. There had been times when they could emerge onto lonely stone shelves, the light from their nightglass goggles reflecting off majestic limestone galleries unknown to the world. They’d take a short break to rest, eat, and drink from supplies pre-stocked by his grandfather, before reentering the tepid ink-like water of the river.
One of those breaks had been especially memorable. Chiara continued to surprise him with the depth of her passion. She was an alloy of brutal ruthlessness allied with gentle beauty and heartbreaking vulnerability. It tore at him that he was the only person in the world who really knew her. She was too good not to be seen, but could Francis and Jay deal with the truth, or would they simply try and kill her. Anton knew that he’d never be able to allow that to happen. Yes, Chiara had made mistakes, but none worse than anyone else. The true agent of Juliette and Yvette’s deaths was Armitage, not the young woman who was drawing ever closer to Anton’s heart.
Chiara’s future was an enigmatic puzzle still to be worked out. One thing he was sure of, he didn’t want to drag her into his quest for vengeance against Armitage and Crane. The world had whipped a hundred and eighty degrees since the arrival of his grandfather. He’d never been seeking justice. That was just a story he’d told himself to avoid admitting ownership of the cold vengeance living in his heart. That pretense was gone. He knew full well what he wanted and who he was, and it wasn’t fair or right to drag anyone else into his own vendetta.
Anton sighed, and set his rifle down on the cave floor, before wiping his hands down his face. It was good to be finally out of the river, it’d spooked him. One moonless night, he’d almost drowned in a river as a five-year-old before being saved by his mother. He’d breathed water and lost consciousness, he’d almost died. Water was not his element - especially dark water. He didn’t do water if he didn’t have to. He’d spent much of the time within the river with that old memory digging its cold claws into his soul.
He turned away from Peter and Li, arched his broad shoulders and dropped off the waterproof backpack that his grandfather had provided to him at the entrance to the river. He swung the sack to the stone floor of the cave and unzipped it. He pulled out a towel and a dry set of clothes. The rest of the Mirovar team emerged from the swirling waters at the edge of the river. In moments they were all removing fresh sets of towels, clothes, combat boots, webbing, tactical gear, weapons and ammunition from the personalized waterproof backpacks Arthur had provisioned at the entrance of the underground river.
Anton was quietly impressed. His grandfather had completed a mountain of work
for this mission. He must be a demon for planning and preparation, more so than anyone he’d ever met. He strapped combat webbing over his perfectly fitted urban-camouflage fatigues, and slotted a half dozen fragmentation grenades and fifty round clips of caseless ammunition for his rifle into position across his chest. He reached up and removed the nightglass goggles, and fitted his eye patch and a standard pair of Order nightglasses. He flicked the nightglasses’ tiny but powerful LED lamp on, a broad cone of light opening up in front of him. He fitted earbuds into his ears. They wirelessly linked to the tactical network embedded in the nightglasses.
Li’s voice whispered in high-definition clarity in his ears, “How’s the tactical link?”
“Super,” Anton said, quickly followed by everyone else’s answers.
“Everyone ready?” Francis asked, walking around the team, checking equipment and offering encouragement.
Peter closed the final ties on his battle vest. His twin bladed battle-axes strapped to his broad back were mirrored on the front of his deep chest with four tri-bladed throwing axes laced with silver. A multiple grenade launcher loaded with half a dozen 40mm fragmentation grenades, dangled just above his hips from a strap over his shoulder. He wore a belt with a pair of MP7 sub-machine guns and sets of spare magazines riding around his hips, and a bandolier with another six 40mm grenades for the MGL.
Jay had his katana at his hip, and a H&K 416 assault rifle with an under-barrel 40mm grenade launcher loaded with a 40mm HEAP grenade. Spare magazines and fragmentation grenades filled his combat webbing. He drew a darkly gloved hand down his face, and then flicked the safety off his weapon.
Li adjusted the fit of the Green Dragon at her waist. She carried a FN P90 sub-machine gun slung with a strap over her shoulders. Spare magazines lined up in a diagonal row across her chest.
Chiara carried a second FN P90, her katana strapped across her back, the handle jutting up over her right shoulder. She stooped for a moment to check a pair of silver-laced throwing daggers attached to the outside of her calves.
The Crane War Page 11