by L. A. Banks
"Oh, shit," Rider sighed.
"She don't have to go there, man," Big Mike argued. "We can do this like old times, you dig?"
"No. I'm cool," Damali said firmly. "Talk to me, Kamal."
He walked a pace away from her and stood with Marlene and Shabazz. "D, how does your man think?" Kamal asked gently.
"Oh, Lord, Kamal… don't make her go there," Marlene murmured.
"The Neteru got to tell it, Mar," Shabazz said, his voice unwavering. "You and I both know that. We got thirty-three lives on the line."
"Can't be no bullshit out here," Kamal added. "D, how he think?"
"I… I don't know what you mean, for real." Thoughts slammed and scattered within Damali's head. Two older male guardians were looking at her, searching her face, but she didn't know what part of the answer they were looking for. Carlos was shrewd. Intelligent. What did they want from her? "You need to be the ones that stop bullshitting out here," she snapped, feeling the pressure from their stares. "Say it plain. I'm no child!"
Shabazz and Kamal hesitated, obviously not expecting the indignant response. All team members straightened slowly and waited, watching.
"We're trying to hit were-demon mating dens, but if she's trying to snag a master vampire, you think he would go to her, or she would come to him?" Shabazz looked at Damali, an apology in his eyes. "From what we know of male vamps, during a seduction, they have to be the ones in control. Am I wrong?"
"If he gwan take her to mate her, where would he go?" The expression on Kamal's face looked so pained, like it was the last thing he'd wanted to ask—but through her lack of quick clarity, she'd forced him and Shabazz to go there.
Damali sucked in a deep breath, and tried not to allow her gaze to leave their faces. This shit hurt so bad that she almost couldn't talk.
"He's old-school," she said, her voice flat, confident, and devoid of emotion. She used her sword as a pointer. The edge of the blade disconnecting her emotions from her body, cutting them, hacking them away like useless vines that had barred her path. Yeah, the forest floor bled when she mentally cut away the part of herself that clung, but the vines would eventually grow back. They were in the way right now.
Damali massaged her temple with two fingertips. None of her men could look at her as she spoke. She studied the cave layout. "He wouldn't take her to the top if she's throwing scent like she's ripening… I should have known. She's up there now. But by sundown, she's coming in low, will come down to meet him, to bring him deeper into her lair."
"Why, when she has da strategic advantage of mobility out in the jungle, versus inside a cave?" Kamal asked, looking at the ground. "Or why wouldn't she stay at da top and wait for him? We just have to be sure the cave isn't a death trap for us. Dat's the only reason I'm picking at this fresh scab, baby."
"Carlos, in that state…" Damali steadied herself, leaning on the Isis. "In that state, the sun would come up on him. He wouldn't risk the rays, and he knows himself well enough to protect himself. Once he gets started, time stops for him."
"Damn…"
Rider's voice haunted her. She began walking, needing the motion of pacing to keep her mind from exploding.
"If he's being turned out, and she's giving off ripe Neteru, he'd take her to somewhere he knew no sunlight could harm him. Roll up on him while he's working, though, and you'll die."
The glances that the team exchanged made her want to impale herself on her own sword. But they needed to know what they were dealing with—how volatile a situation this was. "Once ripened Neteru hits his system, he'll be more dangerous to any of us than her eleven were-jags could ever be."
She looked up and made each member of the squads look at her, using sudden silence. "If you catch him with solid red in his eyes, do him without hesitation. He will even snap my neck in that state—if I get between him and her. I'm not ripe, and I'm the Neteru—a threat to his mate. He won't be rational. He won't be Carlos Rivera, he'll be Master Vampire Rivera, two extremely different entities."
Damali glanced up at the sky as the faces of the team blurred. "I've seen it… and once you see it, you never forget it. He was strong as shit and ripped a competitive male master's jaw off with one swipe, because there was a ripening slayer nearby." She swallowed and pointed to the top of the cliff. "She's no fool. By sundown, her crew won't even have to fight us, Rivera will. Why take the bullet when the male will? Law of the jungle, just like the streets.
"Let's move." Damali began walking again; her chest was getting tight as she spoke and they followed just listening. "Plus, she'll definitely need her strength to take the body blows and the siphon, especially if he doesn't love her. I was lucky that way, then. If we kill her early, and I happen to survive… he'll come for the next available female with the nearest scent that's driving him crazy—me. But he'll be very, very disappointed and angry, because I'm not ripening… so when he's done, what's left of me when he wakes up and needs to feed—"
Marlene's gasp behind her carved Damali's insides out. The fact that Big Mike had stopped walking for a minute hurt her through and through. Her biggest brother was shaking his head and repeating a mantra, "Oh, damn," low and quiet as he walked much slower. Kamal had so much pain in his stricken expression as he mouthed "I'm sorry," that Shabazz put a hand on his shoulder. Rider simply stopped, found a large bolder, and sat on it hard, crushing small stones with his foot. Dan had also stopped and was leaning against a tree like someone had punched him in the stomach, and Jose just looked off into the distance with JL, watching the vultures circle, not moving. But they had to know. More important, they had to keep walking. It was about survival.
"Gentlemen, let's move out," she ordered, and brought the team together in a forward progression once more, looking for potential lair entry points as she tried not to think too hard. But that battle was lost the closer they got to the base of the mountain. Her mind wouldn't let go of the thing that hurt her the most and it cut her deeply.
Kamal's team might act swiftly, having no prior knowledge of Carlos as anything but a vamp. They'd see him and do him. Point blank without blinking or stuttering. But her guys were in danger. Her guys would hesitate. Her guys would hold out for hope. Her guys would think of her heart. Her guys didn't understand what went through her hands the night before and terrorized her mind. And, before, she'd been the only Neteru in Carlos's nose. Her scent was dominant. Her cycle changes had been the only ones he followed like the natural phases of the moon.
When her guys saw him flip out, Carlos didn't have two competing priorities confusing him, enraging the beast within him. The Neteru guardians had been on Carlos's side before, the side that was protecting his interests—a ripening slayer. Now they'd be on opposing sides, as their squad attempted to get between a jacked up-male vamp and his cycle-ready female. Not good.
Their horror notwithstanding, her guys had to suck it up, and dealùor die. Like Kamal and Shabazz had both told her, "Shit happens fast."
"When Carlos wakes up, hungry and… When he wakes up. He'll take her to his place, or somewhere he can corner her and keep her till she goes out of phase, or her phony scent wears off. You won't be able to get to her then, because he won't even sleep in the daytime. As long as it's dark where he is…"
She stopped and looked up, sensing for a good entrance point and trying to think like a master vampire would. Damali's voice trailed off, needing a moment to say the words in her mind before she could form them on her lips and push them out of her mouth. The team stopped near her and hovered, their eyes hungry for understanding, but pure grief flickering within them.
"You can't even go into his lair during the day," she said plainly in a strong voice. "If she's in there, still in phase, he will be making love to her night and day as long as the lair stays dark. Do you follow?" She shot her glance around at the faces that just stared at her in disbelief. "He'll be ravenous."
"But, he's gotta feed," Marlene finally murmured. "Replenish his blood supply to regenerate."
&
nbsp; "We've always gone after the vamps in their lairs during the day, right guys?" Rider glanced toward the others who nodded in confusion. "Damali, maybe because you're so caught up in this thing, you're exaggerating the—"
"No, Rider, everybody. I'm trying to tell you what I know from experience. You've only dusted lower generations in-lair, but this stuff is like PCP. Even the legendary vampire hunters don't have experience with this substance, because the masters they were hunting didn't have Neteru in their systems. But it will keep a master vamp up… you know what I mean."
She rubbed her hand over her face and sighed and began cutting away foliage. Each pair of available hands began clearing a path to the unknown, blindly following her. She'd tried to explain over breakfast that ripe Neteru would keep a master vamp awake, intermittently feeding and making love, until the object of his desire burned out of cycle or the phony scent evaporated. Then he'd drop.
The memory of how Carlos functioned stripped her just as brutally as she was slashing back the vines. It was simple. She'd told them, but in their hearts they just didn't want to believe what she knew. It was false hope. After that marathon, he'd seriously need to feed. Would eat whatever was within reach. Her team had to forget about hope. It was basic vampire instinct that they were trying to paint as a pretty picture. But the reality was ugly.
He'd keep whatever female was in his lair fed, just so she wouldn't die from the abuse—because he'd want her to live so she'd be able to respond under him. Damali hacked at the vines harder, needing to use up her rage on something. At night he'd hunt and drag the kill back to the lair, feed her, and start the process all over again. Jesus, don't make her explain this shit to them in more detail than she already had before…
Finally able to reach the cave wall, she walked ahead of her team around the base of the cave, unable to cope with her knowledge. He'd told her what to expect, but she hadn't understood until Carlos showed her with the images, let her feel them for herself. Firsthand experience. Completely primal. A hunger so profound that it was unfathomable. If what she'd seen was just a fantasy, then common sense extrapolated that vision into something real that was so much worse. She wanted to weep, but again could not. Her team was trudging behind her. The purging of information had left her hollow, and yet oddly unafraid. An Amazon arrow in the center of her chest wouldn't hurt as badly, and might put her out of her misery, she thought.
But she was not trying to endanger anyone else. Part of this was her personal battle, but most of it was a common battle for a common good. Her gaze narrowed, survival the singular goal.
"Found a portal," she said, flatly pointing to an opening that was low to the ground, and covered by a heap of dead human flesh.
"You have got to be kidding me." Rider glanced around and everyone shrugged. "Go through that disgusting pile on our hands and knees? Gimme a break."
"It's about four and a half feet high, but I put money on it that it opens higher a few hundred yards out."
They stared at Damali.
"This is not the normal vamp-lair, because this isn't your run of the mill, daytime smoke-a-vampire mission," she said with authority, not looking at the team, but keeping her eyes trained on the opening she was studying. She spoke to them, half thinking out loud and half processing the variables for herself.
"He's going after something in jag form, so he'll transform to match it. Male vamp, transformed into panther, is about four feet at the shoulders. Give him additional head space to lope at a full-speed run, in order to rush an attacker, he's gonna want a place were he can slow their exit to sunlight, and feed in a safe tunnel." Damali went to the heap, squatted, and poked in the gore with her sword and sniffed, getting a whiff of sulfur in the sickening mix. "Carlos didn't do this, though. She probably ordered this food left at his back door for him in preparation. Not his style. It's human. Woulda left her a buffalo carcass, something like that." She stood. "That much I still know about him."
Kamal sniffed and nodded. "It's were-demon marked. Damali is right."
She pulled herself up on a low-hanging branch and could make out a ledge about eight feet off the ground. She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling Carlos's presence had been there. "Found his front door." Damali looked down as her team assembled under her as she sheathed the Isis and began climbing.
"What are you doing?" Shabazz asked with a bewildered expression. "Didn't you just say—"
"He's not home yet," she shot back, grunting from the exertion of lifting herself. "Today, brother is getting his rest, probably ate real good last night, and at sundown, will shave, put on his rags, track a scent, and be out. So, we've gotta lay some booby traps in there now, and find the corridor that leads from her bedroom to his. Dig?"
"Damn…" Big Mike murmured, glancing at Shabazz, Rider, and Kamal. "Women are devious."
"Mike, you sure those detonators are good from this far away?" Damali glanced back at her team in the dank cavern.
"Yeah, we cool. Holy water set, C-4, right under the marble slab, li'l sis."
The lair was a cakewalk. If Damali's second sense was right, the Amazon's crew wasn't committed to guard it; their primary concern would be their queen. They were up top near her.
From what she'd gleaned from Carlos's mind, and the parts she filled in from common sense, since this was an unsanctioned vampire mission, there were no bats or messengers to contend with outside the master lair. One hundred yards into the cave from the ledge, it had gotten narrower and darker, until they had to fire lanterns to see.
But the heavy steel door wasn't bolted. From experience she knew they were bolted from the inside, and if nobody was home… Vampires didn't worry about break-ins. Human invasion was merely dinner dropping off at their door. While they were gone, all illusion disappeared and left what they'd found—a marble slab and sharp granite walls.
As the group moved forward, the cave widened again, and Damali halted them. The entire posse had been weaving their way past stalactites and stalagmites through the damp space, ducking at times where there were low spots, and avoiding small cave-dwelling rodents and insects underfoot along the path that she knew without knowing why she did.
"Ammonia," she whispered. "We got bats overhead."
"Here," Kamal said quietly, "we have natural vampire bats. As long as you move slowly, don't send them flying, dey shouldn't attack you—but dey do, at times, carry rabies."
"Oh, brother," Rider moaned as the group passed under a huge cavernous ceiling that wriggled and squeaked with the tightly packed, struggling vermin. "Why do we always have to go to the garden spots of the world, Damali? Geeze Louise," he fussed, pinching his nose as the bats indiscriminately plopped little globs of feces combined with urine-like leather-winged pigeons.
Dampness, sweat, and dread clung to their skins, and without ventilation in the caverns, it was insufferable. Albeit cooler in the cave than under the sun outside, the thick stillness of the air, along with the wafting bat odors and combined human team funk, was about to make everyone pass out. Water dripped in a steady rhythm from the multiple underground streams, and an echo resounded from it everywhere.
When Damali weaved, stopped, and leaned against the wall, the team took five gladly. She mopped her throat, forehead, and the back of her neck under her locks, holding her hair off her as she wiped away moisture with a bandanna in repetitive, futile strokes. The team's haggard breaths, and the echo of bottled-water seals breaking was the only sound to accompany the now far-off bat colony and the dripping water within the cave.
Damali lifted her head within the large expanse of cavern where they'd paused, listening past the team guzzling water, their breaths, the water of the drips… where was the drip… where was the drip? The bats weren't squeaking.
"Battle stations," she whispered. "Full metal jacket."
One by one the team passed the word, and each warrior slowly got his weapon readied, putting down his water carefully as though it were a bomb. Damali took a bottle cap from Shabazz and flippe
d it like a coin into the next tunnel opening, and immediately a hail of arrows was returned.
"Open fire!"
Ducking behind rocks and narrow ruts between boulders, her team sent rapid machine gunfire into the open tunnel where the arrows had been released. But soon she held up her hand, realizing that there was no return fire. Turning quickly to look behind them, the team froze, staring up at eleven low-crouched entities on cave ledges bearing fangs.
Green-gold eyes glistened in the darkness twenty feet above them. The lanterns exploded, putting the team in instant darkness. JL lit a flare, and it was summarily shot out of his hand by a blow dart. Then the eyes disappeared. The team drew in, standing back to back, aiming into the blackness, not knowing even if their own team members were before them.
Two eyes opened almost twenty-five feet out, a man yelled, his screams turning to shrieks, bones snapped, flesh ripped, the team fired. It became dead silent again.
Damali patted Mike for a grenade. "Light it up in here, Mike."
Hurling a series of holy-water bombs, the room flashed blue light, and then fast-rising plumes of yellow, fetid smoke gassed the team, choking them, blinding them, obscuring their vision. Kamal's men drew back.
Marlene shot a glance of concern and she dropped her voice to a tense whisper, close to a hiss. "Oh my God. They can't take the grenades, D. Kamal, you should have told us! They have an intolerance for what comes up from the demon pits, because of their human hybrid DNA that fights full turns. Get 'em out of here now! There's too much sulfur—"
"Do whatchu gotta do," Kamal yelled, still backing up and wheezing. "We normally fight them in the open, it's just da cave…"
"This is fucked up—we didn't know, man." Shabazz caught Kamal under his armpit as he stumbled and helped him to his feet. "But y'all ain't expendable. Get these men out of here."
"Just guard the Neteru," Kamal argued, clinging to Shabazz for support before he righted himself to lean against a wall. "We go all da way as one squad."