There was a silence. Jessie started handing out headsets. “One of the biggest risks in any extraction exercise is shooting friendlies,” she said. “So check your targets.” She looked at her feet, then at the board, then around the room. “Get your kit.”
• • •
Val stared at the man. He felt petty, like he should be in a position to stare down, but Ginger was a giant. Over six feet without shoes, shoulders broad like he was used to pulling carts or the bodies of the dead across battlefields. Hard eyes, topped with orange — bright orange — hair. It was the very size of him that made Val want to stare down, to—
We are Alpha.
—be in charge. He crossed his arms. “So, uh.”
“You the werewolf?” Ginger said. Like it didn’t matter. Like it was a story he’d heard. One he wanted to be true.
“Jess,” said Val, shooting a look at Jessie. “Jess? The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club.”
“It was me,” said Rex, looking for all the world like a five-year-old with his hand in the cookie jar. “I didn’t think we would be able to get through this with anything less than the truth.”
Val raised an eyebrow. “You’ve always had trouble with the W-word.”
“That’s because it’s stupid,” said Rex. He put his hands in his pockets. “God damn werewolves.”
Val turned back to Ginger. Looked up at Ginger. Goddamnit. “I’m a werewolf, yeah.” It still felt—
We are the Night.
—weird saying it out loud.
Ginger cracked a huge grin. “Hell. I mean, hell.”
Val blinked. “I expected a little more disbelief, if I’m being honest.”
Ginger clapped a huge hand on Val’s shoulder. “After what we’ve been through … you see a few things.” He scratched his nose. “You hear about whole PMCs disappearing after a contract going wrong, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I know,” said Val, “because I was there.”
“Story said,” said Ginger, “that there was more than one werewolf.”
“There is,” said Val.
“How many?”
“More than one,” said Val. “Not a whole lot. I’m not trying to be evasive. Yesterday, I thought there were only two of us left. Today, I’ve found out there’s at least one more.”
“Not a limited edition anymore?” said Ginger.
“More that the third one’s a raving psychopath,” said Val, “who tried to kill me.”
“That’s rough,” said Ginger, amiably enough. “I hope you guys sorted that out.”
“Huh,” said Val. “I’m curious. How would you sort that out?”
“Hire him,” said Ginger, not a hint of hesitation in his voice. “It’s what I did with Brindle. Guy was trying to kill me. Kidnapped by cultists or something. They told him I was going to end the world.”
Val looked at Ginger’s posse, with that eye-of-the-storm look he’d seen in Jessie before the action hit. Calm. Professional. Ready to rock, or whatever term they used. “Which one’s Brindle?”
“Dude who looks like he doesn’t want to meet your eyes.” Ginger pointed to a clean-shaven man with a guarded look. “So he comes at me with all kinds of stuff, guns, knives, the whole thing. Tried to blow up my house, too.”
“All at once?”
“No, this was over a few weeks. First time I was drunk. Didn’t kill him because I passed out, I think. After that it became a habit not to kill him.” The big man shrugged. “End of the second week, I tied him to a chair to find out what I’d done to him. He explains that I’m supposed to be this big hombre who’s going to end the world. So I tell him, not unless someone else is paying, and we get talking about what a cult is. Then we go to that place where he was living. They’d brainwashed him. Taken him as a child, made him into some kind of assassin.”
“Right,” said Val, thinking, if I’d heard this story ten years ago, I’d have thought it was all made up, but here we are. About to go into a vampire nest, with my werewolf girlfriend at my side. “What’d you do?”
“Killed those motherfuckers, of course,” said Ginger. “Look, Jessie’s — sorry, Major Pearce — she’s told me the plan. We’re going in, and we’re going in loud.”
“Yeah. She’s … my gig isn’t attack strategy.” Val flexed his hands. “More of an immediate problem-solver. She tell you these guys are fast?”
“She did,” nodded Ginger. “I think we’re going to address that problem through superior ordnance delivery.”
“You what now?”
“Bullets,” said Ginger. “All of them, at once.”
“Okay,” said Val.
“It’s sensible,” said Jeremy. He was standing a safe distance back from the door. Too much sunlight out there. “We can move fast, but there’s limits. You’ve seen The Matrix?”
“I’ve seen—” started Val.
“Wait, hold up,” said Ginger. “Is this … is this tall glass of water here a, a fucking vampire?”
“‘Tall glass of water?’” said Jeremy.
“Uh, yeah,” said Val. “We’ve got him on as a, uh, consultant.”
“‘Consultant?’” said Jeremy.
“That’s fucking cool, man,” said one of Ginger’s posse. Val thought his name was Sawyer Diego. Diego’s face was all smiles. “Fucking. Cool.”
Jeremy gave Val a where did you find these guys look. “There’s a … look, it’s more of a wrinkle than anything, but I figure it’s worth mentioning.”
“Shoot,” said Ginger.
“Well, and like I said, it’s more of a wrinkle, but unless your guns fire sunlight, we’re going to have a problem.”
“How so?” Ginger’s face had turned business-like, all humor gone. Ah, thought Val, here’s the professional soldier.
“You’ll probably just piss them off,” said Jeremy. “We’re already dead, right, so if you shoot us, we’re not going to get more dead. We’re just going to get angry-dead, and I can assure you that’s not a thing you want.”
“What about,” said Ginger, “if we use more ordnance.”
“More?” Jeremy frowned. “You got a portable wheat thresher there? I think if you put one of us through a mulcher it’ll take a while to come back, but last time I checked you couldn’t fire those.”
“Explosive rounds,” said a woman in Ginger’s posse. Finch, her name was. Abigail Finch. Val had tried to shake her hand and she’d shouldered past him saying don’t touch me. “Airborne mulcher, problem solved.”
“With a lot of bullets,” said a gloomy man Val was sure had introduced himself as Mallory but don’t worry about remembering it we’re all going to die. “I’m thinking belt-fed. Take us from no chance to barely a chance.”
“Fuck it all,” said the other woman — Emily Lindle. “I hate carrying around the M249. It’s heavy.”
“If it helps,” said Jeremy, “you can leave body armor behind.”
“Why’s that?” Lindle squinted at Jeremy, suspicious. “Just the kind of thing a vampire spy would say to make it easier to kill us.”
Jeremy shrugged. “You can do what you want, but it won’t make a difference.”
Val nodded. “I’m with him. Won’t make a difference. Armor will slow you down, not them.”
Ginger nodded, slow and steady, like he was considering rather than agreeing. “I’ve never seen a werewolf fight. What are you going to take?”
“My sunny personality,” said Val. “Jeremy?”
“Yo,” said the vampire.
“Can I have a word?”
“I was waiting for it,” said the vampire, his eyes glinting like mirrors.
• • •
They were in the garage, the blown wall letting cracks of light through around some crates they’d pushed against it. Long-term repairs seemed a bit meaningless at this stage. Val ran a hand through his hair, then said, “I think you should go.”
The vampire looked at him through the gloom. Not that the
low light was a problem for either of them, but the vampire had mirrored eyes that made Val feel exposed, like he was looking—
We are what we are, but not yet what we can be.
—at himself more than anything else. “I do something wrong?”
“It’s not that,” said Val. “I can’t … I said I’d find you a cure. I can’t do that. So I can’t ask you to come with us into a den of vampires on some fool’s errand. To save a couple of friends of mine.”
“Huh,” said the vampire. “You’ve only just worked that out?”
“What?” said Val.
“You’ve only just worked out that there’s no happy ending,” said the vampire, “for any of my kind.”
“I’m still working on it,” said Val, “but—”
“It’s okay,” said the vampire, the mirrors of his eyes falling away. Leaving just the man behind. Jeremy rubbed at his face. “I’m not okay with it.”
Val nodded. It’d be harder without the vampire on the team, but he needed to be here for the right reasons. “I understand.”
“What? No, no, no,” said Jeremy. “You don’t understand. I’m not okay with being a vampire. It’s not a thing you really understand when you sign up, if you’re even given a choice.” He started pacing. “Look, it’s been a … it’s been a good long time since I’ve had a beer, or seen the sunlight, or thought about parties as anything other than a movable feast. It’s … time for this to end.”
“There’s got to be a cure,” said Val.
“Well, two immediate things come to mind,” said Jeremy.
“Shoot.”
“First up is, do you think there’s a cure for being a werewolf?” Jeremy held a hand out to Val, as if saying here’s exhibit A. “I get it’s not the same thing, but there’s some kind of supernatural fuckery at play that took you from being some random guy with a video game habit—”
“John’s the gamer,” said Val. Then felt sick for having said it, because it reminded him that John wasn’t here.
“—and into a sometime monster, sometime savior,” said Jeremy. “Second, though, is more important. I’ve … I’ve killed a lot of dudes, Val. Murdered people. A lot. It … doesn’t sit well with me, and I’d like to go.”
“I … right,” said Val. “Do you want to talk to Adalia first? She knows where the dead go when they die.”
“Not really,” said Jeremy. “It won’t be here, and it won’t be Idaho, and that’s a two-for-two win.”
“Nothing wrong with Idaho, but I get you,” said Val. “Are … is there anything I can do?”
“Oh, man.” Jeremy turned and looked at him, really looked at him, and smiled. “Don’t you see? You’re doing it.”
• • •
In the end, it was simple. Two teams. One to make sure they had an escape route. That would be Danny, with Ginger and his team. The other to infiltrate the nest, get John and Adalia, and get the fuck out to the escape team. No explosives this time — Sam had cringed at that, because of the eye-watering expense, but Jeremy had assured him that there’d be another time. No explosives wasted, just deferred, but the important point — Jeremy had stressed this — was not to put explosives next to the people you wanted to save. With a touch of luck they’d get a chance to kill the head vampire and save the world, but the priority was getting their—
Pack.
—friends back. It was difficult choosing who went where — Danny wanted to be the one going in, and Jessie had explained that was exactly why she shouldn’t. She’d do something stupid because it was her daughter in there, something that would get them all killed, and that would be the worst outcome.
That was probably the hardest part of planning: explaining to a desperate werewolf why she couldn’t go where she wanted.
Ginger’s team were packing light machine guns, big black hunks of metal that put a lot of bullets into a target. Apparently they jammed a lot too, which is why they all had one. Emily Lindle and Sawyer Diego were also carrying flamethrowers after the we can turn into a cloud of locusts comment from Jeremy. Carlisle had waved the big guns off, sticking with her sidearm, but had grabbed a second sidearm — this one a smaller gun with a drum on the bottom. She’d said I hate Glocks but picked it up anyway. Jessie had — a little reluctantly, Val had thought — stowed her usual rifle in a box and was hefting one of the machine guns, belts of ammunition worn around her like macabre scarves.
Rex had arrived back after dropping Sam and Charlie off — somewhere safe, he’d said — and was picking through the weapons. He’d ended up selecting two — a shotgun and a grenade launcher — because, as he said, two is better than one, especially when you can’t hit shit.
It was all going to be easy from here on out, right?
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT
This wouldn’t do at all. Not at all.
Maks looked out over the city with all its little people, the tiny humans doing their tiny things, repeating the same stories, the same mistakes, over and over. It was a tragicomedy of the highest order, and he felt like he — Maksimillian Kotlyarov — was the prime actor. Front and center, and everyone was watching. To see him rise, or fall, on this last great performance.
And that scrabbling whelp had come and taken the Universe from him. Dragomir had asked him to guard her, but this was more than that. Adalia was the woman with the green hair and he’d been looking for her his entire life. He just hadn’t realized it. She’d been whisked from this room. He touched his lips where he felt the burn of her first kiss, and imagined he could still taste her. No matter that the whelp claimed to be her father by choice. What did fatherhood matter? Maksimillian had been father to a thousand damned souls, and had ended them all. Better that than the fate that awaited them at the end of a vampire’s kiss.
It irked Maksimillian that the whelp could become the Night at will, that he didn’t have to die—
You have ever tried to tame me with your madness.
—to become what Maksimillian had earned the right to be. No, this wouldn’t do. Maksimillian was the Alpha. Maksimillian was the head of his Pack.
Pack is more than one.
“Molchi,” he said.
Better to tame the wind than ask for my quiet.
“What would you know? Thousands of years and all you’ve been is a scratching tick at the back of my mind. Pochemu ty ne ostavish' menya v pokoye?” Volk scratched nails against his face, felt tears of blood trickle and stop almost at once. No, not Volk. He’d said that name was dead, hadn’t he? Gone, gone forever, after he had promised.
What had he promised? What had the great Maksimillian Kotlyarov promised?
You want to stop the hurt. We suffer, you and I.
“I made no such promise. We deserve it.” He pressed a hand against the glass, leaned his forehead against it. Felt the cool of the city outside this window, fifty, a hundred floors below. If he jumped, he wouldn’t die. It would hurt for a little while, and Volk would walk away, would—
Maksimillian. Kotlyarov. He must remember his name. The woman with the green hair — he could always remember who he was when he was with her. He hadn’t known it, but he’d been looking for her for thousands of years. He closed his eyes, and said, “Adalia.” That was it, not Ady like a cheap toy, a friend for Barbie boxed in pink. Adalia, with her green hair and her easy smile and her knowledge, but not understanding, of everything.
You will make the Night new again.
“I will … make the Night new again,” he said. “Why? Why would I do that?”
The silent forest.
Yes, yes, he’d forgotten. So many things he’d forgotten, but he’d fought the she-wolf, mother of the woman with the green hair, by tooth and claw they had fought, until her muzzle was wet with his blood. She’d thought him dead, but it took a lot to kill the great Maksimillian Kotlyarov. The silent forest had watched as he’d clawed his way out, what was left of him slipping into a small town. He’d fed, and healed, and hid.
And promised.<
br />
Because it wasn’t supposed to be like this. That was it — he remembered now, the night that Volk had been born. The night he’d killed his own Pack, every one of them, taken by the vampire swarm. He’d saved them. He’d killed them.
He’d lost them.
We killed our own Pack. We suffer, you and I.
“Then we must get her,” said Maksimillian — Maksimillian, again, for the moment. “So we can finish what they started.”
• • •
Maksimillian Kotlyarov (10:32): I am hunting.
(10:33): I would welcome you at my side.
Val (10:35): Who is this?
Maksimillian Kotlyarov (10:36): You know me, whelp.
Val (10:37): Volk?
Maksimillian Kotlyarov (10:38): Volk is dead. Your mate killed him. I am Maksimillian Kotlyarov, and I will find the woman with the green hair.
Val (10:39): You can’t fix what you’ve done.
(10:40): What we’ve done.
Maksimillian Kotlyarov (10:45): She can. She will.
Val (10:46): And you and I will have a reckoning.
Maksimillian Kotlyarov (10:47): I welcome it. Maksimillian Kotlyarov will see you at the end.
• • •
Now we hunt.
His feet were silent as he walked the city. The sun was bright, the air clear, and there would be no stopping him. He had sent his last messages, threw his phone into a passing trash can. The act gave him a momentary pang — teaching the thing to not autocorrect Maksimillian Kotlyarov to Malayan Lakewood had been a thing requiring much patience and time. Time: he had plenty before, and not enough now.
He knew where their nest was. The Garden. These Amerikantsy had the best names for things, as if calling an arena where man fought man something poetic would change its fundamental nature. He knew of the obvious entrance, the one where they sold those fashionable neck ties for busy men who attended many meetings. He would not use that entrance, because being obvious was not something Maksimillian Kotlyarov liked to be.
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