ONSET: Blood of the Innocent

by Glynn Stewart

  “You’re welcome!” Klein chirped over the radio, leaving David shaking his head.

  There was a reason they kept the battle Mage around. It was good to be reminded of that occasionally, given how damned annoying the man could be.

  Still shaking his head, he swept the scene with his Sight, searching for any sign of remaining defenders. Nothing moved in the night except the flickering flames as the last of the gasoline in the trucks burnt itself out.

  When he looked at the containers on the back of the trucks, however, even his Sight drew a blank.

  “We’re secure on the ground,” he told his people. “The trucks are sealed but shielded; I’m getting both lead plating and magical enchantment.

  “Just what the hell were they carrying?”

  “That’s what we’re here to answer, boss,” Stone replied.

  “Agreed. Klein, orbit at two thousand feet and link into orbital surveillance,” David ordered. “Keep your eyes peeled; I want to know the moment anyone is heading our way down this damned road.

  “Hellet, Stone, you’re with me. Time to see what the vampires tried to hide.”

  APPROACHING the trailer on the jackknifed truck, David quickly realized that however ordinary the containers looked from the outside, they were something entirely outside the norm. There were no easily accessed handles or controls for the doors, and his Sight was picking up more and more spells wrapped around and into the metal.

  “Kate, can you right this thing?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Hellet agreed.

  Tendrils of magic reached out from his Mage, wrapping themselves around the bulk of the eighteen-wheeler—and then snapping like overstretched cheap string.

  Hellet recoiled, breathing heavily as her entire body trembled.

  “Kate?” David checked in on her.

  “Security field,” she explained after a moment. “Plus, the damn thing is heavier than I thought. I tried to tighten my grip and triggered a counterspell. Give me a minute, I need to regain my breath.”

  He nodded, stepping back to examine the truck while she recovered. Hellet was far from the most powerful Mage—Klein, for example, was stronger—but she was strong enough to be a senior member of an ONSET team.

  Any spell that could completely shut her down like that was serious magic. It was quite a defense to layer into a truck.

  “All right,” she said after several minutes. “Now I know what the little fucker is going to try…let’s see what we can do.”

  This time, the tendrils of magic wove across David’s Sight to form a net around the trailer and the tractor cab, hovering ten inches away from the vehicle for several moments while Hellet assessed the situation…and then struck.

  Both pieces of the multi-ton vehicle lifted into the air, rotating gently to drop back down on the wheels with a visible impact.

  “There you go, sir. One truck, somehow still in working order.”

  All four trucks were still in working order. The vampires had invested a lot of money and resources into making sure these vehicles remained intact, from armed escort vehicles to an incredible amount of magic woven into the trucks themselves.

  It was no more obvious the doors on the back of the truck opened now Hellet had lifted them than when they’d been sideways. Shaking his head, David mounted the step beneath the doors and found himself a grip.

  “Stone, give me a hand here,” he ordered.

  Neither he nor Stone were particularly strong by the standards of supernaturals, but either could have won any strongman competition on the planet without trying. While the actual door controls appeared to be behind a locked and recessed panel, there were enough protruding parts on the door that they could get a grip.

  “One. Two. Three.”

  Both men secured their grips as best they could and yanked, exerting enough force to rip the doors entirely off their hinges. After straining for several seconds, however, they had to relax, as the truck door hadn’t even twitched.

  David studied the metal balefully with his Sight. Even from this close, he could barely make out the spells woven through the metal. Shielding and silver and lead plating had rendered much of what had been done indistinguishable.

  “I think it’s here,” he admitted aloud, tapping on what he thought was a recessed panel. “Stand back,” he ordered Stone—and drew Memoria.

  The sword had been forged by a demon from the souls of several brave men and women who’d tried to kill it. Its most notable ability was to impede regeneration, a thought that made David’s shoulder, injured a month before by a blade with similar properties, twinge with mostly healed pain—but it had others as well.

  What he needed right now was its edge, the one that could cut through magic and steel alike, and he applied it carefully. His first few attempts to gently cut open the compartment failed, however, and for a few moments, he thought that even Memoria was going to fail to get them into the truck.

  Thankfully, when he applied more force behind the sword’s impossibly sharp blade, spell and steel alike finally parted. Three slow and careful cuts later, he ripped the cover off the truck door, revealing a relatively standard-looking handle.

  After everything it had taken to get to this point, he half-expected the handle to attack him when he gripped it, but instead, it smoothly turned, pulling the lock open and allowing him to swing the door open and look into the pitch-black interior of the cargo container.

  He didn’t need light as much as most humans did, and once the shield concealing the contents of the container was gone, the auras inside provided all the light his Sight needed to see the occupants.

  The trailer had been heavily reinforced: beyond the silver-and-lead plating and the spells he already knew about, there was a several-inch-thick layer of steel armor on the interior of every surface. Anchors had drilled into the steel plating, supporting heavy chains identical to those in the dungeon-like clinic at the Golden Twilight Casino.

  Each side of the truck held five ten-point tie-downs made with some of the heaviest chains he’d ever seen, wrapped around the wrists, ankles, throats and torsos of surprisingly ordinary-looking people. The ten occupants varied in age, ethnicity and gender, ranging from a Japanese man who had to be eighty to a blonde teenage girl who couldn’t have been much over seventeen.

  All of them were…ragged. Their clothes were dirty and torn, and their auras were wrong.

  David stepped over to the closest, the ancient Japanese man, to check on him. As he approached, the man’s eyes snapped open, and something in them sent atavistic shivers down the ONSET Commander’s spine.

  The man lunged forward, teeth flashing in the light from the fires outside as he tried to bite David, only to instantly come up against the limits of the chains with a horrendous sound of straining metal. Nonetheless, he continued to struggle, trying to somehow reach and sink his half-grown fangs into David’s flesh.

  The noise awoke the others, all of their eyes opening and focusing a feral hunger on David. Every instinct he had as both a human and a cop told him to get the hell out of there, and he was only half-conscious of his step backward.

  He stopped himself before he fled the trailer, focusing his Sight, making sure he understood just what they had found. Their auras confirmed the only answer that made sense, the only answer that tied together the dungeon, the clinic and the heavily escorted trucks with deadly logic.

  All ten of the truck’s occupants were freshly turned vampires, feral with the mindless hunger of beings who understood nothing, comprehended nothing…except that they were hungry and blood smelled like food.

  5

  “Sir? Commander White?”

  Stone voiced the concern clear on both of David’s subordinates’ faces as he half-stumbled out of the truck, his entire body trembling with nerves.

  “Fledglings,” he told them. “The trucks are full of just-turned fledglings. That’s why the doctors, the medical care—but also the chains. Even vampires can’t stop them trying to e
at everything that comes near them.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Stone replied. “That’s… Fuck. So, we basically just shot up a convoy full of the vampires’ version of nursemaids?”

  “Nursemaids to feral, homicidal, people-eating ‘kids’,” Hellet noted. “We don’t have the antivenom with us, sir, but we can probably get it air-lifted out…”

  “Too late,” David said grimly. “They’re all too far gone to be brought back; they’re vampires now. I just don’t know what to do about them.”

  He looked around at the trucks. Assuming the other three were the same, he now had forty prisoners. Prisoners that couldn’t be negotiated with, couldn’t even be spoken to, and would try and eat anyone who came within ten feet of them.

  “What do we do?” Hellet asked plaintively. The description of the convoy as “nursemaids” might have struck a chord with the ex-teacher, but David didn’t have an answer for her.

  He stepped farther away from the trucks, shaking his head.

  “You know our standing orders,” he said softly. The vampiric virus was highly infectious, deadly to well over half of those infected, and incurable past a certain stage of progression. A fledgling vampire was a mindless killing machine, and an adult vampire was a murderous, powerful supernatural.

  Standing orders treated vampires of any stripe as literally rabid dogs, to be put down by any means necessary.

  “I have to call it in,” David concluded. “I…I can’t just walk in there and shoot a bunch of chained-up people who don’t even understand what’s going on.”

  That was what the standing orders required of him, but he wasn’t sure he had the stomach for it. Walking away from the wrecked convoy into the darkness, he tapped a series of commands on the controls for his helmet and reached out to Command.

  “Warner here,” a crisp female voice answered him after a moment. Major Traci Warner was the commander of the ONSET Campus and the overall second-in-command of ONSET. “What’s going on, White? Is the convoy secure?”

  “It’s secure,” he said grimly. “They had more military gear they shouldn’t have had, antiaircraft missile pods. I didn’t recognize the design, but I suspect it’s not supposed to be mounted on a pickup truck.”

  “Any losses?”

  “No. My team is fine; we have contained the situation and broken open the trucks. They were heavily protected and sealed.”

  He swallowed, trying to work out how to phrase the explanation.

  “White,” Warner said slowly. “You just scored an epic coup over the Familias Romanov, shattering one of their key remaining facilities and seizing whatever it was they tried to sneak away…but you sound like you just lost your dog.”

  “Ma’am…the convoy was carrying fledglings. Forty of them, chained up to make them safe for transport.”

  The radio channel was silent.

  “That adds up, doesn’t it?” she finally said. “The Golden Twilight would be where they concentrated the poor bastards they turned until they could transport them somewhere more remote. I’m told it takes a year for a fledgling to regain their mind.”

  “We don’t know where they were going now, but, ma’am…what do we do?”

  “What you have to, Commander,” Warner said grimly. “They’re an infection vector. Burn it out.” She paused. “I know what I’m asking, White. I’d suggest using the helicopters to incinerate them from a distance, but if they’re as protected as you say…”

  “I’m not sure even the Hellfires would take these out,” David admitted.

  “We cannot allow forty mindless vampires loose, Commander,” she told him. “We have no capacity to handle them, no process or procedure to cure them. There’s only one mercy left you can give the poor bastards.

  “Understand?”

  “I understand, Major,” he replied, swallowing hard. “I understand.”

  DAVID WALKED BACK to his people with a leaden step, shaking his head as Hellet looked at him questioningly.

  “I’ll need your spare clips for the Silver,” he told her quietly. “Then you and Stone pull back to the helicopter.”

  He might hate this, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask anyone else to do it for him. The caseless nature of the Omicron Silver sidearm meant that it carried more rounds than a fifty-caliber pistol had any right to, but that was still only nine rounds per clip, and he only had two spares.

  He didn’t even have enough bullets for the damned job.

  His Mage looked like she was going to protest, then sighed and handed over her two spare clips. He dropped them in a pocket and shook his head.

  “Go,” he ordered. “This is a shitty enough part of the job; I’m not making you watch.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His two subordinates retreated to where the Pendragon was waiting, probably with more speed than was appropriate—but he couldn’t blame them. None of them had signed up for this job to shoot people who’d been chained to the side of a truck, not that letting the vampire fledglings go would exactly help the situation.

  David’s own approach to the already-open truck was nowhere near as enthusiastic. He understood what needed to be done and why, but that didn’t mean he was okay with it, let alone okay with doing it.

  “Commander,” Klein’s voice suddenly cut into his ear. “I understand what’s going on and why, but you may want to get Hellet and Stone back. You have incoming.”

  “What?” David snapped, clicking back to reality at the Elfin Warrior’s words. “What kind of incoming.”

  “Fast, black and expensive—and followed by a trio of Land Rovers,” Klein replied. “And when I say fast, I mean the lead car just broke two hundred miles an hour and is maybe five minutes away from you.

  “I’m not betting on them being random passers-by or friendly. Do you need me to rain fire from on high?”

  “We don’t know who they are,” David replied, grateful for the distraction. “Veil your chopper; be ready to act on my command.

  “Hellet.” He turned back to his own team. “You do the same. Veil McCreery’s chopper, then you and Stone take cover. I’ll play greeter.

  “Like Klein says, nobody does that speed in this kind of situation without a reason, but let’s not assume that so hard, we start blowing things up without being certain.”

  THE CAR that came screaming out of the night looked like it belonged in a Batman movie. Unless David missed his guess, the black sports car probably cost more than he could ever afford…and the USA’s supernatural cops were very well compensated.

  It was still going well over a hundred miles an hour when he spotted it, before slamming on the brakes and turning, sliding into a perfect stop five feet in front of David. If he hadn’t been prescient, the stunt would have been damned intimidating.

  The arrival and the timing were strong suggestions as to just who the vehicle belonged to, but the windows, tinted far beyond any legal limit, were the final clue for him to be certain. Whoever was in the car was a vampire.

  At a guess, a Very Important Vampire.

  They hadn’t actually tried to hit him, however, so he was willing to at least let them speak.

  The driver’s side door opened and a tall, gracefully athletic woman with shoulder-length black hair, clad in a black bodysuit similar to his own armor, emerged. Her aura screamed vampire at him, but she was unarmed, so he waited to see what she would do.

  As he met her gaze, she bowed and stepped around to the other side of the car to open the passenger door.

  David barely needed his Sight to feel the Power that radiated from the individual who stepped out. The stranger wore what looked like the robes of a Catholic prelate but in a far darker red than David had ever seen on the priests of his family’s faith.

  His head was shaved, his eyes glittered black in the headlights of the stopped truck and, like his escort, he was unarmed.

  The stranger spread his hands as he faced David and bowed.

  “Commander David White,” he said softly in a thic
k, strange accent. “I will warn you now that the veils your Mages have raised are insufficient. I know where your people are hiding.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No. I am not here to make threats,” the vampire told him. “You may call the me the Arbiter.”

  “And why, Mr. ‘Arbiter’, are you here?” David asked.

  “I am here to negotiate the release of my charges,” the Arbiter replied, gesturing to the trucks. “The failures and sins of the Familias Romanov are many and known to me, but these teknon are innocent of their progenitors’ crimes.”

  “They are also feral maneaters,” the ONSET Commander noted. “A state you vampires don’t seem to rise above very easily.”

  The vampire winced.

  “My kind is very old and very bitter, Commander,” he said, “but I will not argue their crimes. I will argue that the teknon in these trucks are innocent of them. Yes, some may have killed, but they do not understand what they have done.”

  The red-robed vampire shook his head.

  “You have the concept of criminal insanity in law,” he pointed out. “Any action these children have taken would fall under that state. They have lost their minds. It falls to me to bring them back.”

  “And then they would become Romanov foot soldiers. I cannot permit that,” David told him.

  “Commander, have no illusions,” the Arbiter replied calmly. “You cannot defeat me. I don’t believe I could kill you, either, but I could certainly leave you impotent while I wipe out your team, destroy your Pendragons and kill your Elfin allies.”

  “You would not be the first vampire to think I could not defeat them,” David said quietly.

  “I am far, far older than even Marcus Dresden. I will secure the safety of my charges, Commander, but I am sworn to nonviolence except in the defense of the teknon.”

  A pacifist vampire? If the Arbiter was telling the truth, he was something entirely outside of Omicron’s understanding of vampire society. They’d understood Marcus Dresden to be the oldest and most powerful vampire in North America…but if this Arbiter was older…