The other partner, Darrell Jackson, was a black ex-Special Forces recruit. Darrell joined the team six months ago to fill one of the unprecedented amount of openings. Agent Bosse had contacted Frank to help him recruit and he located Darrell working in the pit overseas. He was coming up on his third rotation and before he signed up again, Frank was able to convince him that his special skills could, in fact, be used in the United States to protect the innocent.
Darrell had only thought he had seen the worst with ISIS and how they behead those in the cities and towns they captured. Their reign of terror was nothing on a Nosferatu.
He had been in three operations so far—in Alabama, Louisiana and Oklahoma. No one was sure why they skipped Texas.
Darrell had never been on an op with one of the good vampires. Well, if you didn’t presume that good was equivalent to dead.
Darrell was trying to keep an open mind. Unlike the stories he had heard about Bill, this one was both talkative and hot to look at. Bill, on the other hand, was said to be large, quiet and usually destructive as hell.
Unfortunately, Bethany Anne seemed a little small. Darrell wasn’t too sure she was going to cut it.
Bethany Anne was staring into the distance when she heard the high keening behind her.
It seemed Darrell had awoken a forsaken who had been hiding during the day in a pile of detritus and rotting vegetation. By the time he had jumped back and thrown the stick to his side to grab his AR-15 in its quick-sling, his ears were ringing with the reports from Bethany Anne’s .45.
Generally speaking, most vets agreed there wasn’t a pistol that had enough terminal damage ability to stop a determined opponent. The 9mm rounds were universally castigated by the men and women in the sandpit and the Army had been looking to replace their M9s.
Regardless, Bethany Anne was able to squeeze her shots fast enough to make it sound like an automatic. Darrell’s ears were ringing. She stopped shooting, holstered her right pistol and reached into the mess to pull out a very disgusting human-looking body. Half of the head was blown off and the other eye socket was leaking fluid. Holstering her other gun, Bethany Anne took out her MKIII knife and quickly cut off the head.
Darrell just stared at her, amazed at the death and destruction he witnessed in the few seconds since he first uncovered the Nosferatu. All of his previous concerns were completely forgotten.
She turned toward him and casually tossed the head fifteen feet away. “Stupid leg-humping cock-splurt wiper. Why did you scream like a little girl?” Her smile lit up her face as she quickly reloaded her pistols and policed her brass.
He couldn’t help it. He busted out laughing at her cussing and got his shit back together. He had heard about her filthy mouth, so he decided to try his hand at giving as good as he got.
The rest of the team was laughing as Darrell had to pump ten pushups while Bethany Anne stood on his back. She made him think of a unique curse word every time he rose up. She would have had him do fifty, but they needed to get back to it and she felt it was enough to get the adrenaline worked through their system.
During Darrell’s pushups, John had been giving the command ops an update on what happened. Bethany Anne hadn’t been paying too much attention to the radio, so she reached down and put the earphone in her left ear. They stayed a little closer as a group over the next half hour. They tried to make sure no one was far from an easily accessible support person. When the sun officially went over the horizon and it was getting dark, they pulled together letting Bethany Anne have the lead position.
Two things happened at the same time. Another forsaken burst up out of the ground about thirty-five yards to her right and she could hear talk back in the op center from the drone warning they had twelve rapidly approaching tangos coming at the ops center.
Agent Bosse had been right. They were in the middle of an ambush and their help was miles away.
Back in the command ops van, Dan thought that he wasn’t going to outlive his regret for not being better prepared.
Bethany Anne realized the base was going to be screwed if she didn’t get back over there. However, she had the new Nosferatu to take care of and it had just gone into the water.
Fuck.
Agent John Grimes hated command decisions like this. He had three other agents for what he hoped was one Nosferatu. The guys back at the camp needed Bethany Anne.
“GO!”
Bethany Anne stopped looking at the water trying to predict where the Nosferatu was hiding and looked at John.
John had only seen Bethany Anne in fun moments or at least non-stressful situations. The woman looking back at him with the red eyes and fangs glistening made him start for a second. Realizing that there was intelligence behind the feral face, he told her again. “Go! We got this one wanking spunk-butler. Help the team back at ops!”
Bethany Anne grinned at him. A weird situation when you have fangs, he decided and then suddenly disappeared. “Holy Shit!” The other men were professional enough to continue watching their quarters and ignored his outburst.
“OK guys, let’s take this one down so she can take care of business.”
Eric finished the thought. “Yeah, four of us against one Nosferatu. Bethany Anne against twelve Nosferatu. Seems fair.”
“Well,” Scott added, “We wouldn’t want her to think we gave her the easier task because she’s a girl, right?”
Darrell just grinned and added, “I wouldn’t let her hear you say that.”
“Fuck no!”
They all laughed at that response.
10
Everglades, FL, USA
Bethany Anne arrived on the docks where she had originally boarded her Jon boat. It was the safest place to transport to, she reasoned.
The command ops area was a battlefield. She could see two Nosferatu with enough holes in them that they should be down. One agent was being dragged, screaming, back towards the weeds behind the tent and the cargo van had four Nosferatu beating on it.
She decided to get their attention. She pulled her .45s and shot each Nosferatu in the head.
“Come. Try. Me. You. Eye. Less. Ass. Bashers,” her words punctuating each shot. That was actually a pretty poor cussing effort. Good thing no one heard her.
TOM, how much energy?
The portalling took a little over half your energy.
Gott Verdammt! I can’t suck energy out of these creatures, can I?
Well, as a last resort probably. Their Nanocytes might cause you problems we don’t need right this moment.
You got that fucking right.
Bethany Anne went into super speed and raced after the Nosferatu she had seen pulling the agent away. She had eight of them from all over the camp trying to catch her while she went after him.
This was going to be a challenge. She jumped in the air and shot two of them, emptying her pistols, and twisted back around before landing. She never broke her stride.
She made the corner and could see the Nosferatu looking over his shoulder. The moment the Nosferatu realized she was coming for it, it dropped the agent’s leg and turned towards her.
It wasn’t even a contest. Bethany Anne holstered her right pistol and grabbed her knife. She impaled the Nosferatu in the skull and used the knife to twist its head around as she ran past. The Nosferatu dropped to the ground like a rag doll.
Five down, six behind me, one missing and my guys have another. Shit.
She hoped she could take them all, but she didn’t have a handy werewolf to grab and drink from. Well shit, she hoped werewolf blood wasn’t an acquired taste. Was it only a few weeks ago that even the thought of drinking blood made her queasy? Now she was joking about it while she ran from six Nosferatu.
Honestly, the running was starting to piss her off. She finally spotted a sapling with a three-inch diameter trunk. That was perfect.
She ran by the tree, punching it hard. It shattered and dropped but she kept running hard to up the distance a little. She needed them to kee
p following her. Finally, she stopped and turned around. She was about a mile from the tree. Waiting for the ravenous horde of Nosferatu she stood there with her thumbs tucked into her belt. As they got close, she raised her right hand and gave them the finger. Then, she disappeared.
The Nosferatu started keening in frustration. They ripped at the ground trying to get a scent. Twenty seconds later all hell broke loose when Bethany Anne, eyes glowing red, came running back on the same trail they had just come from with a seven foot long, three-inch in diameter pole and tore into them. Her first swing took two Nosferatu heads. They exploded in gore.
The tree was almost wrenched from her hands when it connected with the Nosferatu. It felt really good to get her mad on. It was four against one now and she tossed the tree straight up ten feet, pulled her reloaded pistols, shot two of the Nosferatu in their heads, re-holstered her now empty pistols and caught the tree as it came down. Grabbing it like a spear she threw it into the chest of the Nosferatu on her right. Running at the last Nosferatu she dropped, sliding under it and grabbed its legs causing it to fall face first into the mud. She turned around and jumped, kneeing the Nosferatu in its head and crushing it, spilling brain matter all over her right leg.
Gah, that was disgusting.
The impaled Nosferatu was trying to pull the tree out of its chest while Bethany Anne reloaded the last of her ammo. Calmly, she walked up to the struggling Nosferatu and blasted it into oblivion.
She had one fully loaded pistol and one pistol with only three rounds. Checking with TOM didn’t give her a good handle on how much energy she had left so she couldn’t teleport through the etheric back to the command base. She started running, putting everything she had into it.
Where was that last Nosferatu?
John was second-guessing his decision to have Bethany Anne leave. The one Nosferatu had somehow turned into two and they were playing with John and his team.
They were completely screwed.
That’s when Eric got involved. “Come get me, you ginormous shit eater! Hey, spanky love nuts and your friend fudge slapper maximus over there!”
The men started grinning. If Bethany Anne wasn’t there, then Eric was channeling her spirit. The men gripped their rifles and closed any gaps.
They might go down, but dammit they would go down as Bethany’s Anne’s team, not as a group of ‘Stupid leg-humping cock-splurt wipers.’
John took command. “On the count of three, Scott I want you to keep fucktard number one over in the bushes busy. Eric, you and Darrell turn around and let’s try to light up fuck-nut number two over here. If we can get one down, we just increased our chances of living a million percent.”
“One… two… three!”
Bethany Anne heard the staccato burst of gunfire shatter the quiet as she was running back to the command center. Her team, her men, were in a battle. She feared she knew where the final Nosferatu had ended up.
Gott Verdammt! She raced to the campsite trying to figure out a way to get to them. The Jon boats were not only too slow to help her get to them in time, they weren’t even at the ops center anyway. They were still out in the Everglades.
Coming into the camp, she could see the men in defensive positions. One of them started firing at the unexpected appearance of Bethany Anne, assuming that anything suddenly appearing wasn’t human. It took a second for the man to hear the cease-fire and by then Bethany Anne had moved thirty yards away.
She found the man she was looking for, one of the two medics that Agent Bosse had mentioned. Looking like a horror show with all of the blood, guts and brains on her plus the intensity of her gaze as she feared for her team it wasn’t a surprise the medic was speechless. “Do you have any bagged blood?”
He just continued to stare.
“Look, snap out of it! Where is the blood, my team needs it!” OK, technically she needed it to help her team but the guy didn’t seem like a clarification was going to help him right then. He turned and pointed back to a van next to the bigger cargo van.
“Over there, white insulated box. You can find it behind…” He realized she was already gone. He shook off his confusion and got back to helping Agent Flores in front of him.
Bethany Anne ripped off the van door, grabbed the chest and put it on the ground. She opened the lid and pulled three packages of blood. Ignoring the people around her, she ripped the first bag open and started drinking. She finished that bag, threw it on the ground and started on the second. She was halfway done with it when the people watching her were stunned. She had disappeared.
Everglades, FL, USA
The fight was violent. The men had clipped the second Nosferatu pretty good but it allowed the one Scott was trying to distract to almost get to them before the men got their shit together.
The Nosferatu, an old geezer when he was alive but considerably more mobile and dangerous now that he was changed, feinted left and then took off right. Darrell was unable to get a bead on him and he cut across, pushing Darrell back into Eric behind him and grabbing John who was trying to get his gun on target.
The Nosferatu grabbed his gun arm with both hands and broke it. Then he backhanded John with his right hand causing him to lose focus and the Nosferatu grabbed John’s knife and stabbed him hard. He landed over ten feet away.
Without John to worry about, the Nosferatu didn’t have a chance as all three of the team opened fire. The Nosferatu jerked from bullets slamming into him and finally lost his footing and flew back into the ground. Scott walked up unloaded his pistol, demolishing his head.
Eric told the other two to finish off the first Nosferatu and went to John. The knife was embedded pretty deeply in his right pectoral.
“John, I got to tell you, no more tattoos on your chest—they just aren’t going to look good with the scar you’re gonna have.”
John moaned and looked up at Eric. His every breath was wheezing as the knife had pierced his lung. They didn’t have anything out here to help him, and he wouldn’t make it back to the command center. “Have I told you you’re a real prick lately?”
Eric grinned. “What did Bethany Anne tell you about lousy cussing, huh? She’s going to make you do fifty pushups.”
John looked over Eric’s shoulder and smiled a little. “I don’t know, why don’t we ask the little rectal-hole dictator herself?”
Eric turned around to see a very messed up Bethany Anne behind him. She was holding two bags of blood, one full and one just half full. She smiled at John. “So, you have to almost die to finally get the point, is that it, John?” She kneeled down next to him.
“Yeah, that white light has a way of focusing your creativity.” He coughed hard.
“Do you trust me, John? I can heal you but I can’t explain, we don’t have time. Will you trust me?”
John looked up at her and realized he wasn’t looking into a monster’s eyes, but rather hope, compassion and concern, wrapped in a package of blood and guts and the smell of gunpowder.
Scott and Darrell were keeping watch over the area. You could hardly see farther than ten feet without the flashlights.
It was eerily quiet.
John nodded his head yes. Bethany Anne grabbed the knife in his chest. “I’m going to pull out the knife, cut my wrist and you have to suck as much of my blood as you can, do you understand me?”
John didn’t open his eyes, but nodded again.
Bethany Anne looked at Eric. “I need you to uncover that wound. Get the vest and his shirt ripped or anything you can do to access it while he’s taking my blood.”
Eric nodded. “Is he going to turn into a vampire?” He voiced the concern all of the men were having.
“No. My blood will heal him. It would take a bunch more to turn him. Enough talk, let’s get ready.”
On the count of three, she pulled the knife out of his chest, slit her wrist and, as he gasped in pain, stuck the wrist to his mouth reminding him to suck on it. She had to cut it twice more because it kept healing on her.
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Eric was able to get the vest off of the wound and cut away his shirts with his own knife. John stopped sucking on her wrist and dropped his head back down and to the side. Some of her blood dripped back out of his mouth.
“Gott Verdammt John, that shit is priceless!” She slit her wrist one more time and let it drip into the hole in his chest, forcing it down with her finger. She lay back, willing it to work faster. She grabbed the full bag and started drinking it. The half full bag had fallen over and spilled on the ground.
She was a little overcome with the fighting, teleporting and now bloodletting. She lay back just to close her eyes.
Eric, Darrell and Scott had pulled out their flashlights and while two were pointed out into the Everglades, Eric watched in fascination as Bethany Anne’s fangs disappeared while she slept and then as the knife wound in his best friend and their team’s lead started closing up right in front of his eyes.
Scott had been talking to the guys back in the ops center. It was still a major mess over there. Agent Bosse had contacted Frank who had inbound medical support and additional agency support for cleanup. No one at the little island knew what to tell them yet about John. If anyone found out what had gone on and John died, they feared what might happen to Bethany Anne. They decided to say that they were getting John prepped and would be back in thirty minutes.
Fifteen minutes later, John opened his eyes. He closed them quickly as Eric had pointed his flashlight at him. “Dammit, Eric. Shine that light out there where the bad guys are for fuck’s sake.”
“Good to hear your voice, you pain-in-the-ass.” Eric smiled, but he moved the light out into the Everglades. “Wouldn’t want an alligator smelling all of the blood and come for the buffet.”
“What happened?”
Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set One: Books 1-7, Death Becomes Her, Queen Bitch, Love Lost, Bite This, Never Forsaken, Under My Heel, Kneel or Die (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets) Page 30