by L Ann
A brief and mocking chuckle followed his question. “My hospitality extends only so far, young prince. And, believe me, the fact that your situation has not worsened is a testament to my restraint.
“But I will do this for you. I promise you will live for another few hours. One, maybe two days at most. Unless you upset my soldiers.”
“Soldiers?” Taz caught himself short of snorting. “Children. Babies, if you want to get technical. What kind of man are you and what do you hope to accomplish by turning a bunch of –“
“Ah ah, Your Highness,” the man-in-the-shadows gave the crate’s upper edge a warning thump. “I would choose my words carefully. These children, as you call them, are very sensitive concerning their self-image.
“They are, indeed, soldiers. The perfect breed, in fact. Loyal. Courageous. Ferocious. And, as to what kind of man I am. A man at war. A war whose time is long overdue. And a war I do not intend to lose.”
A brief spate of silence ensued. And then Taz felt the touch of his host’s hand, stroking his head as though he were a caged pet.
“Enjoy your stay, Prince I’Ane. We will meet again, soon,” said the Master. And then he was gone.
~*~
When Morgan returned to the sitting room an hour later, the two elders had gone, leaving a manila folder on the coffee table. Picking it up, she flicked through it, pausing at the grainy CCTV stills of various boys – young, the eldest only thirteen by her estimates. She signed, remembering the last time she’d gone up against a Master and his rabid pack. It hadn’t been pretty, and she had had nightmares for months after the kill. Throwing the folder back down, she walked over to the window, gazing without seeing down at the busy road below and rolled her shoulders against the sudden ache in them.
It was odd, she mused, how quiet the suite was without Taz in there. Odd how she’d become accustomed to his presence in such a brief time, of being aware of him. She frowned, the ache in her shoulders turning into a dull throb and reached around, first with one hand and then the other, to knead them. When that didn’t help, she stretched, turning back to face the room. Her eyes fell onto the folder once more and, with a mental shrug, she returned to her room, pulled on a jacket and holstered her pistols before setting off to catch up with Taz at Pike Place.
~*~
The scent of blood was strong when she arrived outside the address they’d been given earlier by Zuron and Hamish.
“Guess this is the place,” she muttered, looking around, her eyes falling on the bloody hand-print smeared on the wall where a victim had tried to stop themselves from being taken inside. “The police always seem to miss the clearest of signs.”
She checked her pistols were loaded, flicked the safety off and then tucked one back into the holster on her right hip and the other on the left, then opened the car door, exited, and headed toward the warehouse entrance.
Leaning forward, she pushed the doors open with a murmured “let’s do this,” then cursed softly, cupping a hand over her mouth and nose as she entered the warehouse’s near-dark, dank interior and her senses kicked into high gear – smell being first and foremost. Stopping just inside the doorway, she pulled out a strip of cloth from a pocket and wrapped it around the lower half of her face, twisted her hair into a knot on the top of her head and looked around, noting the door that was slightly ajar at the opposite end of the short corridor. She moved slowly toward it, drawing one of her pistols as she did so, then reached for the door handle and eased it open. Silence greeted her.
Morgan waited for a couple of seconds before entering, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness. For humans, dark was dark, but for both vampires and, to a lesser extent, Necuno, there were different layers of darkness and, given time, both could see well enough in areas that would give humans trouble.
The silence was unnerving. From the smell, Morgan knew the pack had been here, and yet the place seemed empty. Had Taz been and already left? She wondered, then dismissed the thought. She reached up to rub one shoulder again before catching herself and frowning. Something wasn’t right. She knew it, but couldn’t say why. She walked through the silent warehouse, letting her instincts guide her way and found herself outside another door, a faint light showing through the gap at the bottom.
Closing her eyes, she focused on blocking out the beat of her heart and the soft sound of her own breathing, and she pressed her ear to the door and listened. At first, she thought the room was empty, then she heard a grunt and a curse. Lifting her gun, she kicked the door open and took aim.
In the process of trying to loosen the ropes around his wrists above his head, Taz froze as the door slammed against the wall and he didn’t know what it was – maybe it was the way Morgan was framed in the doorway, or the way she was pointing her gun at him – but seeing her threw his mind back into the memory of the weekend they’d spent together in Vegas.
After their first frenzied bout of lovemaking, he’d asked for her name.
She had hesitated and Taz knew whatever she answered with wasn’t going to be the truth.
“Call me Anna,” she’d said, eventually. But when he’d offered his own name, she shook her head and covered his lips with one hand. “I don’t want to know your name,” she told him.
They’d made love again, slower this time, exploring each other’s bodies and, afterwards, lying in his arms, she’d told him that she wanted to spend the weekend with him, but there were rules.
Taz had laughed and asked what rules she had.
“You don’t tell me your name,” she raised her head from where she’d been resting against his shoulder and smiled. “And we don’t sleep. Once we sleep, it’s over.”
He’d agreed readily, without needing to think it over, already fascinated by her and they’d spent the entire weekend in the hotel room. They drank, talked, shared secrets and made love.
By the time the sun had set on Sunday evening, Taz knew he wanted to see more of her. He’d watched from his position on the bed as she returned from the en-suite, towel wrapped her still-damp body and opened his arms to draw her down into his embrace.
“I want to see you again,” he told her.
She shook her head. “We can’t.”
“Let me give you my cell number and my name.”
“No.” She pushed out of his embrace and stood. “I think it’s time you left.”
“Anna, my name is Taz. I want you to know who I am. We’ve got something good here.”
“I said no!” She had her SIG out of the drawer and aimed at his heart before he realised what she was doing. “Get out.”
Taz blinked in surprise. “What?”
“I said get out.” Her voice was steady as she flicked off the safety on the gun.
With an amused smile, Taz sat up. “There’s no way that’s loaded.”
Shifting her aim to the right, she squeezed the trigger. The bullet clipped his arm as it shot past and embedded itself into the wall. “Is that right?”
Taz’s smile had wavered only slightly, despite the stinging gouge across his upper bicep and he’d shrugged. “I would never argue with a woman holding a loaded gun.”
He was dressed in just over a minute and paused with a hand on the doorknob. “We could have had something good together, Anna,” he said, and with that he was out of the door.
“Taz?” Morgan repeated his name, watched him blink and refocus and then his lips curved up into a smile.
“I know why you shot me,” he told her and chuckled at her confused frown.
“You’re tied up in a warehouse and you’re thinking about why I shot you? There’s something seriously wrong with you,” she said, holstering her gun and crossing the room to look at the ropes knotted around his wrists.
“Not like I had anything better to do,” he replied. He watched as she drew a knife and reached up to cut through the rope. “How did you know where to find me?”
“I followed you to Pike Place.” She paused and looked at him. “Didn’t you drive
here? I couldn’t see a car.”
Taz shook his head and explained what had happened, enduring her laughing when he told her how he was taken.
“I was annoyed, okay?” he snapped, when she paused for breath. “So, we’re in the warehouse the Old Man told us about?”
Returning to her task, Morgan nodded. “Seems to be deserted now, though.”
“It’s not, they’re here somewhere. If they let you in, then they did it for a reason.”
“No doubt about it.” She stepped back as the rope finally gave and Taz’s arms dropped to his sides. As he rolled his shoulders to ease the muscles, Morgan found her hand rising to rub her own shoulders, and she frowned, wondering if it was the bond she was feeling. “Ready to leave?”
Taz nodded and Morgan handed him one of her pistols, a second clip and a strip of cloth like the one she was using. “You’ll need that.” She waited while he wrapped it around his face, then pushed open the door.
“Motherfu—“ Taz cursed, gagging, and stopped to readjust the covering over his mouth. At his nod, they stepped forward and into the storage area beyond the room. Keeping to the shadows, Taz took a moment to look around, noting the size of the area and the feeling of emptiness. Signalling to Morgan, he moved a single step and then froze as a soft sibilant whisper started up, too low to make out the words but loud enough to grate on his nerves and make his teeth ache.
“It’s masking their movements.” Taz felt, rather than saw, Morgan come up behind him.
“It’s like nails down a blackboard,” he ground out. “Sets my teeth on edge.” Her hand came up to rest on a point between his shoulder-blades and it seemed to ease the effect the noise was having on his concentration to a more bearable level.
“They level it at a pitch that just borders on the side of uncomfortable for your hearing frequencies,” she told him.
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Not in the same way as you. A human wouldn’t hear it at all, my hearing is better than theirs, yours is better than mine. This is directed at you, not me.” She dropped her hand, and the noise returned in force, making him hiss.
Grabbing her arms as she stepped forward, he pulled her beside him. “Touch me again.”
“Christ, you really do have a one-track mind, don’t you?”
Taz forced a laugh. “Usually, yes. But in this instance…” he placed her hand on his chest and took in a breath. “Yeah, when you are touching me, the sound drops off. It’s still there, but nowhere near as bad.”
“Weird.” She could feel the warmth of him beneath her palm and the slow, steady beat of his heart and she discovered that in the midst of a warehouse full of who knew what waiting to kill them, she wanted nothing more than to rise up on tiptoes and… she snapped off that thought and snatched her hand back, wincing in sympathy as he sucked in a sharp breath.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed, “but we can’t stand here holding hands all night.”
“So eager to die,” a voice spoke out above the whispers. “it’s almost a shame it has to be this way. The scrape of a foot dragging on the floor snapped Morgan’s head to the left, trying to see through the darkness.
“Did you hear that?” she asked Taz, but one quick glance at him showed Morgan that the whispers were doing their job of incapacitating his hearing. Making sure her gun arm was unhindered, she curved her left hand around his bicep. “Taz, try to focus.”
“I’m trying, believe me,” he ground out. Until this moment, he hadn’t realised just how much he relied on his superior hearing.
“Touching,” the voice came again, this time from the right. “I don’t quite understand why you have chosen Taz I’Ane for your mate, Morgan, although I can see why he would pick you. Your appeal is more than clear.”
“Thank you, I think,” Morgan replied, attempting to get a lock on where the voice was coming from.
“I wouldn’t bother, if I were you,” the voice now came from ahead, causing Morgan to raise her gun. “I was only dropping by to ensure you got here safely. Now I will leave you to my children’s tender care. I would say until next time, but truthfully, I don’t think there will be one.”
“Taz, they’re mov—“ Morgan’s words were abruptly silenced, her voice chopped off in mid-sentence by the sudden impact to Taz’s legs and upper torso. He wound up sprawled on his back, weighed down by a pair of grappling bodies. One, a young girl of eight or nine years, straddled his chest, her small hands clutching fistfuls of his hair while slamming his head against the warehouse’s dirty concrete floor. While the one below straddled his lower hips, gripping him at the knees in a restraining tactic.
“Kill you. Kill Kill Kill killyou killyou!” the girl screeched, her high-pitched voice rising eerily higher with each hammering thud of Taz’s head against the pavement. And, with each strike, Taz rolled closer and closer to unconsciousness.
Morgan reacted out of pure instinct, gun rising, aiming, firing once... twice… almost of its own accord, bringing the shrieking and head-slamming to a sudden end and she bent down and grasped Taz’s arm, hauling him up.
“Guess that bad boy charm of yours doesn’t work on girls under sixteen, huh?” she remarked, even while she checked his head for damage.
“Blondes,” Taz shook himself, with a quick glance to the bloodied body a few feet away. “They always did go straight to my head.”
Another set of shrieks turned them back toward the aisle of crates at their front and left and a literal horde of approaching child beasts.
“We’re too close together. Let’s split up. Give them separate targets,” Taz suggested, moving even as he spoke. He turned to meet the herd on the left, catching the second weapon - a Glock 31 with laser sight - that Morgan threw toward him and waited until the sight’s red dot lined up on the forehead of the first rushing beast – less than a foot away from him, before cutting loose with both weapons. In the aisle’s confined space the noise was like rapid fire thunder, drowning out everything but the shrill cries of the mortally wounded.
Mortally wounded… bullet-riddled kids. Children. Or at least what had once been children. Now they were little more than animals in a child’s façade, robbed of their innocence by a thirst for blood that erased any semblance of rational thought, of right and wrong, of humanity, leaving nothing but confusion, anger, the feral compulsion to inflict pain, and the homicidal desire to feed.
Within seconds, Taz had expended both clips. He stood, almost knee deep in the bloodied bodies of his young vampire attackers – himself splattered with the arterial spray of their punctured flesh – and barely had time to reload before the aisle filled with the next wave of shrieking pubescent hellions.
“Anna, I think there’s more of them than we have ammo for!” Taz called out, reeling back to avoid the flailing kamikaze blitz of a massive young bruiser whose forward momentum dropped him within inches of Taz’s right foot.
“Then stop rapid-firing,” her dry response came through a lull in the noise. “It’s not like we can retreat now.”
Taz’s head came up, searching through the darkness. She hadn’t said anything but something… something in her voice told him she was hurt.
“And this ain’t skeet shooting,” he fired back, taking a moment to put down a trio of teen males who attempted to sneak at him across the tops of the crates at his left. “They’re not coming at us one at a time.”
Taz danced back toward her voice in an effort (and gain the time needed) to check her for injuries. A moment later, his left bicep exploded in a flare of searing pain, wrenching his attention downward to the shard of jagged metal embedded there. What followed was numbness, from bicep to the tips of his fingers, causing him to drop his Beretta.
“Gun gun… get it!” a gravelly adolescent voice rang out and a pair of blurs moved in his peripheral vision. Teeth clenched against the bolt of subsequent pain, Taz pivoted left and brought the Glock’s laser eye up in barely enough time to pop off two shots. One struck home in the throat of a
young black child; the second creased the shoulder of a redheaded girl in orange bib jeans.
“Fuck!” Morgan’s hiss sounded close to his back. “Move backwards. “ He did so and felt a hand touch his back and froze. “It’s me. We need to find somewhere with better cover.”
Taz shot off another two rounds before replying. “Easier said than done. Are you okay?”
“Fine. One of the little bastards got close enough to bite me.” She inched forward. “Move to the left, there’s a wall there. As soon as we reach it, protect your eyes and cover your ears.”
“Why?”
Her laugh was bitter. “I came prepared.”
Although the wall was only a few feet away, it felt like miles as they inched toward it, wondering if each shot fired would be their last. As Taz slipped the last clip into his Glock, he felt his shoulder press into brick and stopped. Morgan stumbled against him and Taz reached out to steady her with his left hand, resulting in a bitten off curse as pain exploded through him again.
Morgan reached into her belt and pulled out a flash bang – lifted it and threw it into the middle of the approaching pack, then turned and buried her face against the wall, hands flattened against her ears. The resulting noise and light stunned everyone, giving Morgan and Taz a few seconds break to make a run for it.
“Go up!” Taz pointed toward the row of crates ahead of them. “If we can get a topside view, we might see a way clear.”
Morgan nodded, not bothering to waste breath replying and threw herself at the bottom row of crates, finding handholds and hauling herself up. Taz wasn’t far behind, adrenalin taking away the burn of pain from his arm – something he knew he’d pay for later. Three levels of crates up, Morgan dropped to her knees panting. Taz couldn’t say anything considering the sweat he’d wiped off his own brow as he threw himself down beside her.
“They’re going to have a weight and speed advantage once they stop being light blinded,” Morgan whispered. “It won’t take them long to get up here with us.”
“How many clips do you have left?”
“Two clips and two maybe three rounds – then I’m out.” Morgan eased over the side, scanning the darkened warehouse floor. “I can’t see or hear anything moving down there.”