What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

  The smoke had absolutely no effect on humans but caused major irritation to a vampire’s eyes, throat, nose, and lungs. A flash bang and smoke grenade combo had been proven to disorient vampires for up to two minutes, significantly slowing their reaction times and giving us a chance to attack them before their speed overwhelmed us.

  When I finished my dry run of the door-busting spell, I made eye contact with Indira and Gunner in turn. Both gave me curt nods to indicate they were ready. Tapping my mic button, I said over the team feed, “Breach group two, are you prepared for operation start? Over.”

  The breach group leader, Barton, replied, “Affirmative, Alpha leader. Over.”

  I chewed on a few words of encouragement for a moment, unsure if anything I could say would adequately prepare us petty mortals for the horrors that might be lurking inside this building. But my struggle turned out to be a moot point, because Saoirse came over the general feed right before I opened my mouth.

  “All raid teams, be advised,” she said in her most assertive tone, “final countdown begins now. One hundred twenty seconds to operation start.”

  Tension thick as syrup filled the air around me, and my muscles wound up in anticipation of confronting the brutal enemy waiting just behind those bent metal doors. I raised one hand to focus my force blast and placed the other near my utility belt, ready to grab whatever weapons I required. Both my handguns were holstered at my thighs, pointless to use unless a vampire was already on the ground, where I could drive a modified bullet into their brain and set off the spell inside that would blast their skull to pieces.

  Across from me, Gunner clutched his rifle with the hand not holding the grenade, the spells embedded in the barrel glowing a dim green beneath the faint shimmer of his veil.

  As rear support for our little group, it was Gunner’s job to obliterate anything that tried to outflank us. He’d been given what R&D had dubbed a “fireball launcher,” a rather wimpy-looking rifle whose bullets exploded into massive fireballs when they passed the suppression spell at the end of the barrel. The fire spells flickered out quickly after activation, to avoid the kind of widespread fire damage suffered during the zombie attack, but anything that took a direct hit from the fireballs basically disintegrated.

  Indira had no need for a gun that launched fireballs, since she herself was a master of fire magic. She was half lesser Seelie, and according to the gossip I’d heard before I recruited her to the Watchdogs, a bit of a pyromaniac. I hadn’t yet had the chance to see her go all out with her magic, but tonight could be the night, if there were too many vampires in the office to defeat with more conservative tactics.

  “Alpha leader, this is Delta leader,” came Odette’s voice in my ear. “Can we proceed to breach formation? Over.”

  I hit my mic. “Yes, Delta leader. You can. Over.” I switched to my team channel. “Breach group two, commence scouting protocols to assist Delta team. Over.”

  “Copy that, Alpha leader,” said Barton. “Over.”

  With a finger, I pointed first to Indira, directing her attention to my left, then to Gunner, directing his attention to my right. They each turned to once again comb the area for hostile activity while Odette’s team made their final preparations to assail the building’s upper levels. I kept my own attention on Bowler and Sons, repeatedly scanning the windows on each floor for movement that indicated a vampire attack was imminent.

  Yet again, there was no noticeable response from our adversaries.

  Are we just so good that they haven’t spotted any of us coming, I wondered, or do they just not care we’re about to attack? If it’s the latter, why aren’t they concerned? Do they know something we don’t? Do they—?

  “Sixty seconds to operation start,” said Saoirse between crackles of static. “Fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven…”

  I put a stop to the cascade of paranoid thoughts before they threw me off my game, and reassured myself with the firm knowledge that we’d literally planned this raid operation over the last twenty-four hours, in an extremely fragmented fashion. The only people who knew all the details about the operation were Saoirse, Odette, and me. So even if the vampires had somehow caught wind of the fact we were planning to make some kind of move against them, there was no way they’d managed to gather enough intel to build the whole picture and prepare adequate countermeasures.

  There is no way, I repeated like a mantra. They don’t know what’s about to hit them.

  “Delta team is in breach formation,” Odette confirmed. “Ready, Alpha leader? Over.”

  I inhaled deeply, lungs soothed by the frigid air. “Ready, Delta leader. Over.”

  “Thirty,” Saoirse continued, her voice overpowering all others. “Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…”

  Indira, Gunner, and I shared a meaningful look, with which we wished each other the best of luck for what may very well have been the most daring assault on a vampire coven in the history of the Earth.

  We didn’t have the full force of a massive military behind us, like the US government at the height of the purge as they laid waste to age-old vampire strongholds. We didn’t have the raw magic strength of the full-blooded sídhe, who could simply destroy everything in their path, fast-moving monsters with fangs included.

  We were a ragtag group of brazen mortals armed with hard souls and a host of cool toys, and if we were victorious tonight, if we proved that “mere” mortals could actually win a major fight against creatures as powerful as vampires…we could change the course of humanity’s future.

  “Five, four, three, two, one…” Saoirse inhaled sharply. “Go!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The doors imploded with a mighty clang that resounded through the entire building, each panel breaking free from its hinges and tumbling down the pitch-black hall. One panel slammed into an old folding table, which collapsed under the force of the impact, while the other bounced into an empty room off to the right and collided with something that sounded distinctly like flesh.

  The instant the doors were out of the way, Indira and Gunner spun around and lobbed their stun weapons down the hallway. The flash bang clattered to a stop at the stairwell door at the far end of the hall and ignited with a bright flash and an earsplitting screech, both of which were stifled by the spells embedded in my helmet and goggles. The smoke grenade, on the other hand, went off in midair, blasting a cloud of thick gray smoke into every open space. The smoke mingled with the frosty trail my force spell had left behind and produced a chorus of quiet hissing that serenaded us as we stormed into the building.

  I marched straight down the hall toward the stairwell door, while Indira and Gunner repeatedly peeled away from my sides to clear each room we passed. In the last room on the right lay a single vampire, who appeared to have been walloped in the face by the flying door before the flash bang scrambled his senses and the smoke grenade choked him out. He was curled up in a ball, coughing uncontrollably, hands clutching his bloody head. It was hard to tell with so much of his face obscured, but he struck me as a young man. A legitimately young man. One of Vianu’s newest fledglings, who wasn’t quite as adept as his seniors at utilizing his vampire abilities to the fullest extent.

  If he’d been an older vampire, he’d have evaded the door and probably escaped his fate.

  As it was, I sent a hand signal to Gunner, who spun on his toes without hesitation and pulled the trigger on his rifle. A five-foot-wide fireball expanded from the narrow barrel and shot into the room, consuming the vampire’s entire body. The fire was so hot, it burned the vampire to ash before the man even had a chance to scream. When the flames winked out a second later, there was nothing left but a human-shaped shadow charred into the floor.

  At the sight of that scorch mark, a wave of self-loathing rose like bile in my throat. But I swallowed it down. When humans were forcibly turned into vampires, they were practically indentured to their creator through some combination of compulsion and a sire bond, the latter of which gradual
ly eroded a person’s individual will and built in its place an undivided loyalty to that creator. As far as anyone knew, there was no way to stop this brainwashing process. So none of these innocent citizens who’d been turned by Vianu, not a single one, could be salvaged. They were all doomed to serve Vianu until the end of time.

  Unless we killed them and set their souls free.

  I pulled my gaze from the burned floor and set my sights on the stairwell door.

  One way or another, I promised myself, I’m going to destroy that smarmy bastard.

  Once Gunner fell in behind me again, I threw a second force spell at the stairwell door. It blasted out of its frame, hit the guardrail on the landing, and spun end over end as it plummeted into the basement. A single flitting shadow was all the warning I had before the three vampires who’d been standing just out of sight lunged from the stairwell to rip me limb from limb. With a shouted command, I activated one of my shield bracelets, and the vampire in the center of the group rammed headfirst into the blue pane of energy.

  The shield splintered down the middle, and the impact sent me reeling backward. But I kept my footing, activated my second shield just as the first collapsed, and mentally invoked a spell. A hundred ice spikes formed before me, and I launched them all at the vampire who was still staggering as she struggled to recover from her shattered skull. Every single ice spike hit home, driving themselves deep into her flesh—and then I willed them to shatter.

  Ice shrapnel tore the vampire to pieces, shredded her muscles, split her tendons, crushed her bones. She went down with a garbled shriek, blood spurting from her mouth as her sheared blood vessels drowned her from the inside out. The moment her knees hit the floor, I pulled one of my guns from its holster, strode up to her, jammed the barrel against her temple, and pulled the trigger. Her head exploded into a rain of gore that painted the floor with pinkish gray mush.

  Behind me, Gunner shouted in alarm. I swiveled around to find the vampire who’d gone after him had broken through both his shields and was scrabbling to rip his throat out. The vampire couldn’t see Gunner’s body, thanks to the veil, so he kept slightly missing the mark as Gunner thrashed beneath him. But Gunner’s luck wouldn’t hold forever. The vampire would eventually stumble upon Gunner’s exposed neck, and then it would be over in milliseconds.

  I grunted out the invocation for a high-level telekinesis spell, something I’d only started practicing recently, and tried to grab the vampire’s entire body. I only succeeded in taking hold of his upper half, which I wrenched to the side as hard as I could with a push of will. The vampire, insanely strong, fought the pull of the telekinesis. But the distraction allowed Gunner to yank a conflagration charm off his belt and slap it against the vampire’s chest.

  The charm discharged into the vampire and turned him into a bonfire. He shrieked at the top of his lungs and recoiled, trying to bat out the flames as they ate him alive. But this vampire had no magic of his own. He couldn’t put the fire out in time. As his skin started to blacken and boil, peeling away in sheets from his shriveling muscles, I raised my gun and shot him in the face. His head went the way of the first vampire, and his body collapsed.

  Gunner rolled onto his knees and gave me a nod of thanks. Then he whispered a word and snuffed out the fire before it could spread to the floor.

  As the firelight faded and the hallway fell back into darkness, a pink glow caught our attention.

  We both turned to find Indira in a small room to the left, the last vampire pinned beneath her. Indira’s cheek was bloody, where the vampire’s fingernails had raked her skin. But even as rivulets of blood ran over her lips, staining her lipstick a much more insidious shade, she didn’t flinch. One hand on the vampire’s forehead, the other on his chest, she rapidly invoked a spell in Hindi that burned the vampire to death—from the inside out.

  The vampire was whole and healthy one moment, and a pile of ash the next.

  Indira staggered to her feet and ran her fingers down her shredded cheek.

  “Need first aid?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Cuts aren’t deep. I’m fine. Let’s go down.”

  We advanced on the stairwell, spells at the ready.

  When we were five paces from the doorway, the roar of a fireball launcher sounded off on the other side of the building. A sign that breach group two had encountered their first hostile. Not a second later came the sounds of Odette’s team engaging with vamps on the upper floors. Pistol shots. Deafening booms. Shattering glass. The bellow of flames.

  Somewhere above us, a wide swath of flooring groaned in a disconcerting fashion, and the entire building seemed to tremble as the support beams struggled under the strain of a damaging battle.

  My group pressed on. I pulled up a shield as I slipped into the stairwell and quickly spun three-sixty, scanning every inch of the dark space for vampires lying in wait. Finding no one, I waved Indira and Gunner forward. The former took a position behind me, her focus on the gap between the winding flights of stairs, ready to burn any vampires who leaped up from the basement. The latter brought up the rear, facing backward, his rifle pointed up the stairs in case a vampire rushed us from above.

  As I headed down the stairs, my attention kept drifting to the concrete steps and walls. Many places were cracked and uneven, worn down from years of neglect. Not only could this structure collapse if we put too much weight on the wrong place, but any of the practitioner vamps could’ve set up trap wards to demolish the stairs in the event of a raid.

  Concerned, I heightened my magic sense until my head started to throb and scrutinized every chip in the walls, every groove in the steps, every scuff on the rusty handrails, hunting for the tiniest hints of magic energy.

  Oddly, I found nothing of note. The only energy in the stairwell was residual. A practitioner had come through here in the past few days and done something that gave off a magic signature, but they hadn’t left any wards behind.

  You’d think after going through so much trouble to abduct dozens of people, Vianu and company would try their absolute hardest to prevent anyone from liberating their new blood supply assets. So why is this building’s security so lax? The wards are nonexistent, and those vampires we just fought went down so easily, they couldn’t have been more than a couple weeks old.

  Anxiety prickled across the back of my neck, raising damp hairs.

  Maybe my earlier paranoia wasn’t so paranoid.

  I stopped cold at the bottom of the stairs, mere feet from the door that opened into the basement. Dread brewing in my gut, I dragged my gaze from wall to wall, corner to corner, floor to ceiling, searching for anything out of place, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

  When nothing set off a mental alarm, I focused on the door—only to realize the door itself was the object out of place. There was something wrong with the way it lay in the frame, as if it had been removed at some point and poorly reinstalled at a later time. Whoever did the refitting had bent several of the interlocking hinge knuckles, causing the door to sit slightly out of alignment.

  Through the tiny sliver of a gap between the top of the door and the frame, I spied a section of the hallway wall, which had a strangely clean and new-looking object attached—

  Gunner gasped, and his rifle spit out two fireballs in quick succession. Just as I whipped around, a vampire dropped onto the railing of the last flight of steps from somewhere high above. One of the fireballs seared all the skin off her right arm, but she jerked her body out of the flame’s path before she was set ablaze and kicked Gunner in the chest. Gunner’s ribcage imploded with a sickening crack, and he went flying off the stairs, over my head, and straight into the door.

  The hinges of the improperly secured door broke apart with a screech of metal, and Gunner’s momentum carried him and the door into the basement hallway beyond. Gunner hit the wall so hard the cinderblocks cracked. He slumped bonelessly to the floor, a wet, choking noise passing between his lips.

  Indira immediately leaped
into action, lashing out at the vampire with a wide wall of pink flames that the woman couldn’t sidestep in the confined space of the stairwell. The vampire chose to go up instead, and vanished in a blur as she practically flew two whole stories and clambered over the stair railing.

  Indira, not one to give up, paused her flames in midair, and with a series of dancer-like hand motions, re-formed the wall into a snakelike shape, complete with a flicking tongue. She sent the fire funnel spiraling up to where the vampire had shielded herself. A moment later, the vampire cried out as the fire hit home.

  I didn’t know if the vampire died from the attack, and quite frankly, I didn’t care.

  Because a fledgling vampire was the least of our concerns.

  Heart pounding, I took three slow steps toward the basement doorway so I could view the section of the hall where Gunner now lay dying. The object I had glimpsed above the closed door turned out to be a rectangular black box someone had bolted to the wall. The box had a smooth exterior, and with the blinking blue lights on either side, looked very much like a piece of high-tech electronics that had been in use before the collapse.

  But the box’s looks were deceiving. The black casing was a heavily warded shell that held back a large amount of highly compressed magic energy, and the eight blue lights represented a countdown.

  The object in question was a bomb powerful enough to blow up this entire building.

  I knew that, for certain, because Watchdog R&D had designed it.

  We’ve been betrayed. The holding locations are a trap. All of them.

  One of the blue lights winked out.

  I slammed my fist into my headset and shouted across the general feed, “All raid teams, this is Alpha leader. Abort mission now. I repeat, abort mission! Initiate RTP protocols and get the hell away from the target locations. The buildings are rigged to blow.”