In moments, Rowan was there, already dressed, holding an assault rifle across his chest. Had he been awake, or did he sleep like that? "What is it?" he asked in a voice so calm he might have been chatting with friends.
Jay bolted past, running for the high ground, where Casey had fixed the two heavy machine guns earlier. From that height, they'd have an overlapping field of fire on the plain leading to the headlands and airfield.
Angie pulled her pants and boots on, leaving the laces untied. "I don't know exactly, but I know we're in danger."
"Okay," replied Rowan. "But you’re gonna have to give me more to go on."
"Who's on sentry?" Erin interrupted.
Even with the starlight and almost full moon, Angie could only make out shapes. Erin and the Seagraves no doubt saw with perfect clarity. Angie grabbed at the pack she had taken from the church and removed her NVGs, slipping them over her face and turning them on. Her vision jumped into sharpness, revealing the doubt on Rowan's features.
"Casey's on," Rowan answered. "Talk to me, Angie. Tell me something."
Tec joined them, followed a moment later by the two elves. Wyn Renna held her hexed saber bare.
"I ... someone warned me in a dream," she said, hating how stupid she sounded. "You have to trust me."
"Someone?" Tec asked.
"Ephix. Ephix Lamia."
"Wait," said Rowan. "You dreamed of a vampire? Angie…"
Tec gripped Rowan's biceps, making the other man meet his gaze. "Listen to her. Lamias are not just vampires. They can enter the dreams of others, even feed on them in their dreams. It's not as crazy as it sounds."
Rowan sighed but nodded. "Okay. It's about an hour before sunrise. We'll stand to defensive positions and wait until then. After that, we move out."
Wyn Renna's posture stiffened. "My mother—"
Rowan shook his head. "We can't wait."
"On it," Tec said and then trotted away, followed moments later by the two elves, leaving Angie with Erin and Rowan.
Tavi stumbled forward, also wearing her NVGs. Her sub-gun hung near her hip from its sling, but she had drawn her hexed cavalry saber, and its blade flashed in the moonlight. "What is it?"
"Not sure yet," Erin said. "Be ready for anything."
Angie exhaled, now starting to doubt herself, feeling as if she had just made a huge mistake. "I …"
Rowan squeezed her shoulder and spoke reassuringly. "It's cool. Just ’cause you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you aren’t being followed. Stay with Erin—and do up your boot laces before you trip." With that, Rowan hurried away, climbing the embankment to join Casey and Jay with the heavy machine guns.
Angie faced Erin. "I know how this sounds."
"Nobody's accusing you of anything. Life has been too weird lately for that. Come on, let's go up top with the boys…" She glanced down. "But Rowan's right. Do up your laces."
Angie giggled, a nervous, forced chuckle. "Put some pants on."
"Later."
"I'll stay down here," Tavi said.
"Stay close to Tec," Angie told her, but the other woman had already turned away to join the others. So be it, Angie thought. She's a Brujas Fantasmas combat mage. She doesn't need me to tell her how to fight.
Angie quickly tied her laces then followed Erin up the embankment to where her brothers were observing the open field below. Casey and Jay lay prone, each behind a machine gun as they peered over the iron sights.
Rowan knelt beside Casey, peering intently at the wooded hills more than a kilometer to their west. "You see anything while you were on sentry?"
"Not even a squirrel," the larger man answered. "How sure are we something's up?"
"Pretty sure," Erin answered before Angie could say anything. Angie smiled at her friend. Erin always had her back.
Casey grunted. "Well, sis, I'm not too proud to admit you've got the best eyes in the family."
Erin raised her scoped rifle to her shoulder and peered through the telescopic sight. She scanned the low ground, beginning from the forested hills to the flat plain leading to the headland, moving from right to left, the opposite of how most people scanned their surroundings, so that she’d be more likely to notice something unusual. Angie had learned a lot more tradecraft in the last few weeks traveling with the Seagraves than she’d ever imagined possible.
"Nothing," Erin said softly. "I'm not seeing—oh shit, we've got movement. Multiple supernaturals coming in fast from the south and west."
When Angie and the Seagraves had served in the Home Guard, there had been long-established standard operating procedures—SOPs—for dealing with all likely threats, including the Fey. But because the Fey were so different, it was impossible to prepare for everything, so they used the threat-descriptor "supernaturals" to describe everything from a naked winged nymph to a nine-foot-tall armored troll. But even with her NVGs, Angie saw nothing moving on the field. She closed her eyes and cast out her life-sense ability, instantly picking up on the others, as well as numerous small animals, but nothing else within her range of about two hundred meters. Whatever Erin saw, it was too far away for Angie.
"I got 'em," Rowan said. "Vamps." He raised his voice enough for the others to hear. "Heads up, people," he said with the detached calm of a lifelong professional warrior. "We've got multiple vamps, five hundred meters out and coming in on our ten o'clock to our two o'clock."
"Call it," Casey said, reaching forward and adjusting his iron sights.
"Light 'em up, brother, but don't stop shooting until they're ash."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Casey answered. "Teach your mother how to—"
"Keep telling ya, same mother, dipshit." Rowan’s teeth flashed in a smile.
Because vampires were so hard to kill—and because no one wanted to get close enough to try their luck with a wooden stake—the Home Guard's SOPs had been to lay down enough lead from a distance to destroy the vampires’ heads, which was pretty much the same thing as a decapitation. Sadly, this was one of those unproven SOPs that sounded great in theory but had never actually been tested.
Until tonight.
There was a third way to kill a vampire, Angie knew—with magic. She could destroy their bodies with a powerful blast of Shockwave. But to do that, she'd have to be much closer, and she had no idea how much mana she still had. The last time the Shade King had consumed a life force had been in the underground temple of Zolin days earlier. She’d have absorbed trace amounts of mana from the atmosphere, but she had always been far weaker than other mages that way.
She was probably running on empty or close to it. Shit, shit, and triple shit.
Casey began firing first, the retort of the heavy machine gun impossibly loud, and Angie covered her ears. Barely a moment later, Jay began shooting as well, easily handling the weapon with one hand. Red tracers, every fifth round, zipped across the field like angry fireflies. Empty casings and discarded machine gun links flew out of the weapons, piling up on their right sides. Smoke hung in the air, thick and powerful.
There was an art to good machine gun firing, and both Casey and Jay were as good as anyone she had ever seen, better than most. Their fire was steady and accurate, the bursts short. Just the same, the barrels soon glowed with heat.
Both men covered their predetermined arcs of fire, making sure they didn't engage the same targets. Angie couldn't see the vampires they were shooting at, but where the tracers hit, they started small fires in the dry grass that glowed green in her NVGs. Then Angie saw shadows dart across the terrain, moving impossibly fast toward them—the vampires. There were dozens of shapes now, the ground exploding around them under the impact of heavy machine gun fire. She hated and feared vampires and always had, but she forced herself to breathe, to be calm, to do her part if the vampires reached them.
When the vampires reached them.
The vampires, illuminated by the burning grass, sprinted faster than horses, but Casey and Jay must have understood how to lead them now, and their bullets began to hammer
into the vampires. The attackers faltered and fell. Some were cut in half, others were thrown back dozens of paces, and still more shattered under the impact of the high-caliber ammunition. When the vampires stumbled or fell, the brothers focused their fire, hosing them down until their bodies turned to ash.
Son of a bitch, Angie thought, the SOPs work.
"Changing barrels," Jay yelled. Rowan helped, using a cloth that had been set nearby to grip the red-hot machine gun barrel. In seconds, they had it off and were attaching a spare, but the vampires had closed the distance to just under two hundred meters.
"Running low on ammo," Casey yelled just before his heavy machine gun ran dry. Angie knelt beside him and inserted another box of linked bullets. By now, Jay was firing again. She glanced up to see the vampires were much closer, close enough for her to make out their pale faces.
The head of one of the vampires exploded into gristle as Erin fired her sniper rifle. She worked the bolt, loading another bullet, and then calmly fired again, taking out a second vampire. But many more were coming.
"God damn, that's a lot of vamps," Casey said in wonder. "Must be really pissed with us."
"Or thirsty," yelled Erin as she reloaded and raised her rifle to her shoulder, firing again. This time she missed the head, but the impact knocked the vampire back ten feet, where Jay ripped it apart with a burst of machine gun fire.
Tec and the others below were also firing now, the sharp crack of an assault rifleshot and much smaller retort of a sub-gun echoing in the night. They didn't aim for the heads—probably having decided they were too small a target—but when their bullets hit the center of the visible mass, the vampires’ bodies, the bullets slowed the vampires for Jay, Casey, and Erin to shoot. Ash drifted in the air as the vampires died.
Then Angie felt Wyn Renna cast a spell, another one she didn't know. Darts of blue energy shot from her fingers to strike the closest four vampires, barely twenty paces away. When the blue energy hit the vampires, they froze in mid-step like statues. The others shot them in the head, shattering their brains, and their bodies turned to ash, leaving empty clothing to fall to the ground.
The last of the vampires, at least eight of them, were too close for the heavy machine guns now and almost on top of Tec and the others down below.
"Hand to hand!" Rowan yelled, rising from where he knelt next to Casey and sprinting for the path down.
Angie followed and saw Tec advance on the vampires, firing short bursts with his assault rifle as he closed the distance with them, hitting them with unnatural skill. Just for a moment, her heart clenched in fear. She drew Nightfall, the runes along its black blade glowing with blue fire, just as Tec dropped his assault rifle and drew a bayonet in each hand. He slammed into the closest three vampires, matching their intensity and strength. Two others came at Tavi, but her shade created a shield, blocking their attacks. Wyn Renna joined the fight, casting Shutter to flash beside Tavi and behead one of the vampires. Deldin Gar, armed with his short sword, attacked another vampire, but Deldin Gar was no mage and had no shade to shield him. Vampire and elf went down together in a frenzied tangle.
Rowan ran down the embankment, firing at the vampires. His rounds didn't kill them, but he did slow them enough to help Tec, who leaped into the air, spun about, and beheaded one of the vampires with a bayonet.
"Don't die," she whispered, her fear a rock in her gut.
Two vampires tackled Tec. Rowan, unable to shoot without hitting the other man, moved around them, looking for an opening, but one of the vampires wrapped his long, pale arms around Tec's waist while the other drew his head back to bite into Tec's now-exposed throat.
Angie cast Shutter, transporting herself the last twenty meters and appearing right behind the vampire trying to bite Tec. Nightfall was a dueling rapier, intended for stabbing, not cutting, but she put her weight into the swing, holding the side-sword's elaborate hilt in both hands. Her blade caught the vampire under his pointed chin, and the moment it made contact, she drew it back, inflicting a savage cut. It wasn't nearly enough to decapitate the vampire, but it did give Tec the chance he needed, and the man kicked the wounded vampire away while he fought the one holding him around the waist. Rowan launched himself at the injured vampire and began hammering at its head with the butt of his rifle.
Another vampire, a young woman, leaped at Angie, her fingernails slashing at Angie’s face. The Shade King created a shield to block the vampire attack, but the shield was much weaker than it should have been, barely even there.
She was running out of mana.
Angie used Nightfall to cut at the vampire’s hands, slicing through clawlike fingers. Then she took a chance and stepped forward and shoved her free hand against the vampire’s chest, just over her heart. Once before, the Shade King had taken a vampire's life force. The problem was that she never understood how or why the Shade King consumed some lives when she touched an enemy’s skin but left others. Sometimes it felt arbitrary. Go on, she screamed in her mind, take it! The vampire hesitated, staring in confusion at Angie. When the vampire’s life force flowed into Angie a moment later, her body turned to ash. The Shade King had fed after all.
Power surged through Angie. Rowan and Tec were beating down the other vampire, so she looked about for more enemies. Wyn Renna and Tavi fought a vampire with their swords, keeping it at bay, but sparks flew where the vampire's fingernails struck their shields.
She stepped between the women from behind. "Make a hole!"
The two mages slipped to the sides just as Angie extended her left palm and hit the vampire with Shockwave, sending it flying more than a hundred feet to tumble along the ground. Days earlier, she had cast a Shockwave spell so powerful it had disintegrated the vampire she had cast it at, literally shredding its body. That was something else she had no control over: how powerful her spells were. The vampire rolled along the ground and then rose once more, staring at Angie in stunned fear. It turned to run, but before it could take three steps, Wyn Renna lashed out with her hand, sending a red ribbon of light snaking around the vampire's throat from behind. As she yanked her hand back, the ribbon decapitated the vampire, turning its body to ash.
"Next time, do that first," Angie said.
"Doesn't work too close," Wyn Renna answered.
Then Erin, Jay, and Casey were there, each holding a rifle as they leaped onto another vampire, beating it down and smashing its skull in with their rifle butts. More ash drifted through the air. Angie looked about for more enemies to fight but saw Tec and Rowan drag the final vampire from Deldin Gar. It had been drinking the elf’s blood. The elf stared with dead, open eyes. Rowan wrapped his arms around the thrashing vampire, holding it in place as Tec beheaded it, literally sawing its head off with one of his bayonets. Angie looked away as the last vampire turned to ash.
Silence settled over them.
"God damn, that was a lot of vamps," Casey said, his voice filled with excitement.
Angie, breathing heavily, stared at him in wonder. She'd never understand werewolves.
"You guys smell that?" Erin asked, her face reflecting her distaste.
The field was burning with scores of small fires lit by the tracers. The fires were washing out Angie’s NVGs, so she removed them. She sniffed the air, finding it heavy with smoke and cordite and more than a little bit of vampire ash, but then a harsh stench assaulted her nose, and she almost gagged. "Something's wrong. That's no vampire."
"New contact front!" Casey yelled, lifting his rifle into his shoulder. "Something big." He began firing, quick aimed shots.
Angie stared out over the field, seeing a dark form rushing through the smoke. It was far too large to be a vampire, bigger than a horse. It thundered across the field, displacing smoke in its wake. The others began firing now as well, the air crackling with rifleshots. She knew there was no way they were missing it—every single one of them was a crazy good shot—but the dark form didn't slow. Then two large, leathery wings snapped out to either side of its hug
e frame.
"We've got a flyer," Erin yelled.
The dark shape rose into the air, whistling toward them impossibly fast, its giant wings flapping. It struck the ground hard enough to send them reeling. Angie fell to a knee and looked up to see a nightmarish hybrid of a bat and monster. It was larger than a bear, with heavily muscled arms and legs, all covered in night-black fur and scales. Its tree-trunk-like legs were bent back like a goat’s and tipped in gleaming black claws a foot long. The powerful leathery bat wings grew from its back. Its long claws were curved and wicked sharp. Its head was a monstrosity, its maw split in three jaws, two on the bottom, one on the top—all filled with rows of needlelike teeth. Its nostrils were slits of fire, and the same fires burned in its small eyes. It opened its three-part maw and screeched in rage. The air stank of sulfur and brimstone.
"Demon!" Tec yelled in warning.
Another demon? Fear rooted Angie in place.
Gouger of Faces had been so powerful it had taken everything they had to defeat it, including the help of Ephix. Now they faced another—and this one was even larger. The demon's gaze fixated on Wyn Renna, and it took a thundering step toward her. "Elfling, time to come with me," the demon rasped, its voice like a thousand locusts.
Wyn Renna’s mouth fell open, and her saber dropped from nerveless fingers.
"Fuck you," said Casey, stepping in front of the elf and opening fire point-blank with his assault rifle, shooting it right in the face.
The others fired a moment later. The air crackled with gunshots, but the bullets ricocheted away from the demon. The horses screamed in terror, pulling free from their ropes and bolting past—Patches among them—knocking Tec down as they fled.
The demon lashed out at Casey with a powerful blow of an arm, sending him flying. Angie, terrified now for Casey, rose to her feet and hit the demon with Shockwave. The spell hammered into the demon, knocking it back, sending it flying head over wings.
But a moment later, it picked itself up. "You dare? I’ll crush you to jelly."
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