by John Conroe
She snorted. “You haven’t seen mush. Ask Lydia about dead horse paste if you want to see how lightly you got off.”
“Yuck. Doesn’t sound appetizing at all. I’ll stick with ice cream,” I said, heading toward the galley.
I ate, then took a nap. It was four in the afternoon when I got up. Over the next half hour, the others gradually staggered out to the main lounge.
When everyone was present we, briefed them. Stacia even provided a sample of the vampire girl’s blood.
“Not Peter’s get. I don’t recognize it,” Tanya said after sniffing the vial.
“Is Arlen’s,” Arkady said. “I have met him.”
We all digested that. “Why would Arlen kill President Garth?” Lydia asked. No one answered.
“To disrupt Demidova Inc.? To distract someone? For a bet?” Nika brainstormed.
“Distract someone? There’s maybe something to that, but I don’t know what,” Tanya said.
The room got quiet again. Declan was lining up his steel orbs in the air in front of him, picking up each ball and setting it to float in empty air, just hanging there.
“Now you have four balls,” Lydia noted, matter-of-factly, still looking tired and not at all alert.
“Walk with pride,” I muttered in my best Scottish brogue.
Everyone looked at me.
“It’s the punchline to a joke,” I said. They still just stared. “You know—the Scotsman moves to the United States. He goes to his first baseball game but doesn’t understand it. When a runner hits a ground ball, he watches the crowd yelling for the player to run. When the next player does the same thing, he joins in. Then the next guy gets up to bat and the pitcher throws three balls and a strike. The last pitch is a ball and the batter drops his bat and starts to walk to first base. The Scotsman, completely confused, jumps up and yells ‘What are ya doing? Run it out, laddie!’ A guy in the stands explains it to him: ‘He doesn’t have to run; he’s got four balls.’ So the bewildered Scotsman yells out, ‘Walk with pride, lad, walk with pride.”
Declan flashed a quick grin and Stacia might have snorted, but that was it.
“No humor in your souls,” I said, shaking my head.
“Joke’s not bad. Your accent sucks though,” Lydia said.
“It so does not,” I said.
“Soooo, we’re heading to Vegas, right?” Tanya asked, bringing us all back on point.
“You are fueled and the captain has finished her preflight. The tower was instructed to give you priority on takeoff clearance,” Omega said.
“Thanks Omega. What’s our estimated flight time?” Tanya asked.
“Three hours and forty minutes, depending upon headwinds.”
“So, we are landing at a secluded city in the desert, with a hostile demon and witch on one side and what will likely be hostile Master vampires on the other. We need to plan,” Tanya said.
“Da,” Arkady said. “I have been thinking of this very thing. Omega?”
The wall monitor flashed on to show a detailed map of Vegas.
“Airport here,” he said pointing at the map. “Painted Horse here, dah?” He touched a spot west of the airport. At our dutiful nods, he moved his finger between the two points. “Darkkin headquarters under here,” he said, pointing to a famous casino that rhymes with cand-do-hay ray.
“Really, they live under the casino?” Declan asked.
“Not live. Just offices. Deep, deep under casino. Now pay attention vedmak,” the giant vampire said. “Is best to fight opponents one-on-one, this we know. Also best to fight on battlefield of our choosing, not theirs. Lots of people in casino and horny boys in strip club. Both bad places for fights. We must bring them to places we pick, da?”
“I, for one, don’t feel like prying that witch out of her shell,” Stacia said. “But how do we bring them out?”
“What, I have to do all the work?” Arkady asked, eyebrows raised in mock outrage.
“We have three days to formally present ourselves to the Masters of the city. We could stir up a whole lot of attention in three days, especially with our own version of Copperfield,” Tanya said, studying Declan with a thoughtful expression.
“True, true,” I said. “You did make this whole plane disappear, and Vegas is the city of magic acts.”
“Aunt Ash would kill me,” he protested. “Can’t we just mess with the slot machines instead?”
“What do you mean?” Lydia asked, suddenly more alert.
“I don’t know; they’re machines. We can make machines do anything we want. How about everybody in the casino wins for ten minutes or something,” he said, looking a little desperate.
“You sure you could do that?” Tanya asked, sharing a glance with her devious little vampire in crime.
“Ah, hello? Nuclear codes? In fact, I don’t even need to impose on Omega. Hell, I could do this myself, probably while riding ‘Sos with all you super strong types doing gymnastic flips over us and shit,” Declan said in a big rush.
He was exaggerating, but it was my turn to match raised eyebrows with my blue-eyed vampire. Vampire acrobats? I thought at her.
“The Cirque shows have a few vamps in them, but the stuff they do is simply mind-blowing, not humanly impossible. The audience doesn’t know that they’re not human. But if we did something, something big, it would demand attention,” Tanya said.
“Don’t you think Peter and Arlan will be tipped off as soon as we land?” Nika asked. “They’ve gotta have the airport covered with informants.”
“That’s absolutely right. We may have a welcoming committee and based on what happened to the young vamp, we should consider it hostile,” Tanya said.
“I consider them all hostile,” Arkady rumbled.
“Ah, where do we stay while we’re there? We have to have someplace safe when the daylight comes, don’t we?” Stacia asked.
“Lydia?” Tanya asked.
“We have three safe houses in the area. Two in Vegas itself, one further out near the desert,” Lydia said.
“You have three houses in Vegas? Won’t the other vampires know about them?” Declan asked.
“Hideaways and bolt holes are as much in vampire blood as you witches and your need to fortify your homes with wards and spells,” Stacia said.
“Wolf girl is right,” Arkady said. “Our secret homes are legion.”
“Creating stockpiles of assets, weapons, and safe houses is probably the premier vampire hobby,” Tanya told him. “We use extremely complicated methods of keeping the titles clear and untraceable. And virtually no electronics are used to keep track of them.”
“Sounds pretty paranoid. I like it,” Declan said. No wonder. The kid had already gone on the run from powerful forces and had been trained from birth to keep his identity hidden.
“So what do we do to get everyone’s attention?” I asked.
“That’s easy. We just be our normal selves… with maybe a few tweaks,” Lydia said, a smile on her face. It wasn’t a regular happy smile, but more of the mwaa ha ha ha ha smile of a super villain. Suddenly I felt a little bad for the vampires whose city we were about to invade. Then I remembered the dead vampire in the box and my sympathies fell off a cliff and died.
Chapter 13
Lydia made some calls to find out in which of the casinos the vampires of Vegas had stakes. I pointed out the inherent irony of using the word stakes in regard to vampire holdings, but none of the vampires on my team found it amusing. Declan laughed though, so at least I had one person with a sense of humor nearby.
Turns out that there were only a small handful of very small businesses that they didn’t have some sort of interest in, which made the first part of our plan pretty simple. But first we had to get off the airfield. Upon landing, the tower directed us to the private aircraft terminal, where our jet was assigned a parking spot. The terminal employees rolled a stairway up to our door as we opened it to the cool Nevada night. Right on cue, a black Mercedes sedan pulled up on the tarmac and
disgorged a handful of vampires in black suits. I had argued for an aggressive approach—me jumping from the open door of the plane, using energy skill to blur down and land soft as a feather on the hood of their car. Arkady and the kid were all for it, but no, the women all thought it was all crude and rude. So instead we opted for a smooth glide down the stairs, Arkady first, then myself followed by Nika, then Tanya and Lydia, Stacia, Awasos in bear mode, and finally Declan.
The leader of the five-some looked like he was Turned in his mid-thirties, but my ability to sense vampire ages told me he had spent the last sixty years or so looking that way. That age would mean he was likely a lieutenant in the local coven’s hierarchy, someone who has learned enough decorum and experienced enough of Darkkin society to be useful. Unfortunately for him, that was still too young.
“Tatiana Demidova? You will come with us to explain your presence to the Masters of Las Vegas,” he said. His hair was dark and his features told me he had some Italian heritage.
Tanya moved out from behind Arkady and me, her baby bump on serious display in a tight white stretchy shirt. “You are?” she asked.
All five vampires were focused on her stomach, but the leader had enough composure to speak. “Stefano,” he said.
There was a blur and a smack and Stefano slammed into the ground from the bitch slap to end all bitch slaps. Arkady leaned over him and spoke softly in his ear. We all heard, possibly even Declan who was using some hearing spell he’d developed at Arcane.
“You will address her with a civil tongue or lose the need to speak at all,” he said. Arkady was centuries old and a power in his own right. He had chosen to be a warrior and a bodyguard, and so much younger vampires often missed the fact that he had more power than many Masters. This group had just re-learned that little nugget of truth.
With one hand, the giant lifted Stefano to his feet and shook him once before setting him down. Stefano’s companions had all taken a step back and their hands had reached for hidden things about their persons. Grim sensed watchers in the dark corners of the hangar lot. I can feel their backup, I thought to Tanya. I feel them too, was her reply. Of course, Omega had already told us about them before we left the plane. It seems the vampires loved cell phones as much as modern teenagers do.
“Try again,” Arkady rumbled. Stacia was showing something she’d typed on her phone to Declan. He was nodding and typing back. Suddenly I felt Omega’s freaky data feed information and knew that there were twenty vampires and humans with guns around us, some acting as workers, others tucked into the shadows.
“I am Stefano, ma’am,” Stefano managed to utter although he still looked surly.
“Well Stefano, I won’t be coming with you. We have three days to present ourselves and we haven’t even seen the famous Strip yet,” my vampire said. “Although you should inform your superiors that a very powerful demon has taken up residence in the Painted Horse club.”
“They know that, ma’am. But the Masters demand your presence now,” Stefano said, an edge to his voice.
Tanya leaned close. “They know about the demon, yet you are here accosting us. Your masters are being unaccountably rude. Go back to them and tell them we are insulted,” she said. While they talked, I saw Declan take his chalk baton out of his bag and begin walking around the plane, drawing his circle.
“The Masters want an explanation of why he is here,” his eyes darted to me for the first time. “And why you think you can come here without prior introduction. You, and you alone, will accompany us now. Ma’am.”
“Your car is too crowed already. There is no room for her,” Lydia said.
“We have plenty of room for her,” one of the lesser vampires said, proving stupidity is universal across all species. “She can even ride on my lap.”
So, these products of vampire incest were gonna take my vampire, who was carrying our unborn children, to some trumped-up Master wannabes? Hmmm, let me think about that. Ah, no. I let Grim off his leash.
The car tore in half as Grim ran me right down its middle, a violet plow blade of aura tearing it in two. Gas and oil turned to inert sludge as the wave of purple energy blasted outward in a circle that expanded for fifty feet. My arms came down as I passed the halfway mark of the car, the mono-edges of aura lining my hands, forearms, and triceps cutting the automobile halves into quarters.
It took less than a split second and left everyone standing frozen, even the workers and pretend workers nearby. Sixty-thousand dollars of car now just four pieces of scrap. Declan was the first person to move, continuing forward to close his plane-sized chalk circle.
“You sure there’s room? ‘Cause it looks like even you fellas are gonna be hard pressed to get back in that,” I said, voice Grim rough. “I can help with that, though—getting you all in.”
The five vampires looked at each other. Stefano must have signaled them because they all reached for weapons at the same time. Awasos, Lydia, Nika, and Arkady crashed into them like a tidal wave. Two fell to the girls while two of them had an intimate, personal lesson in close quarters combat from a five-century-old warrior vampire. The lesson was very brief. It involved two massive fists moving at pistol-caliber speeds to unhinge jaws and crack thick skulls. The last vampire, Stefano, met ‘Sos, who switched forms in mid-stride, hitting the vampire as an eighteen-hundred-pound Kodiak. Stefano flew fifty feet and smashed into the block wall of the nearest hangar.
Around us, the hangar lot came alive as vampires and their wannabe lackeys responded. My team split up, disappearing into the night. The kid touched his circle, said his words, and the plane disappeared. Grim took over, my mind expanding to encompass a three-sixty-degree mental view of the battlefield.
Three of the chunks of Mercedes left the ground, thrown by a mental toss of the boy warlock. They landed amid different groups of hostiles, the vampires easily able to dodge the massive missiles, the humans having more difficulty.
Little Lydia met one of the dodgers, kicking his knee backward, then climbing his body like a monkey, wrapping her legs around his head and spinning till his neck snapped and his body twisted up off the ground.
Nika found another vampire, who was still dodging car parts, in mid-Matrix-style backbend when she executed a perfect ax kick up and over, and slamming her heel down into his face.
Arkady grabbed the last piece of car and ran forward with the six-hundred-pound bundle, slinging it at his own threesome of vampires. One wasn’t agile enough and got crushed, one ran head-first into the giant’s boot, and the last turned to run. An invisible hand grabbed him and pulled him back into Arkady’s clutches, where his neck was promptly broken. The big Russian vampire waved at the kid, who was now focusing on shielding himself and his seven-foot, white-furred werewolf girlfriend from bullets even as she ripped the arm from one vamp and slashed another’s neck almost completely through with four-inch claws.
My vampire, pregnant with twins, danced among six of Vegas’s finest Darkkin fighters, moving faster than anything they had ever experienced before, her kicks breaking backs, arms, and legs, while her delicate-looking hands crushed scapulas, shoulders, and at least one head.
Grim took us into the fray. A sword-bearing vampire spun out of the darkest shadows, his three-foot blade a streak of silver death. Grim blocked it with an aura-lined arm and the blade snipped itself in half, cut as if by laser. An open-handed slap removed the vampire’s head from his shoulder as we spun and jumped over another vamp with a naginata, a Japanese spear.
The slashing blade of the spear zipped through the space I had just occupied, but now I was flipping over the spear wielder’s body, my hands reaching down to grab his head in passing, the spin of my body twisting his skull completely around twice. I landed against the block wall of the nearest hangar, standing horizontal to the ground, and immediately ran up the side of the building. A sniper in his blind discovered my presence when my hand grabbed the hot, hot barrel of his .338 Lapua just long enough to drive the gun butt first almost all the
way through his chest. When Grim let go, the vampire sniper fell back, his rifle sticking straight up out of his body.
Below us, Awasos chased four vampires into a hangar. They ran in through a human-sized opening in the massive overhead door; him created a new opening in the corrugated steel that you could drive a Fiat through. A roar shook the building, a vampire screamed, and then came the thunking sounds of a sledgehammer hitting a melon—repeatedly, then a crunch of bones, another scream, and an arc of blood spraying out the round opening onto the tarmac, and finally silence. ’Sos reappeared in the round door, big head swinging back and forth as he looked for more enemies to crush.
There were none.
I jumped down to the ground thirty feet below.
“911 calls have been rerouted for the moment to delay first responders. Our rental SUV is being brought over from the rental car building, and most of the airport missed the excitement. Omega is wiping the cell phones of those around us who were just witnesses,” Declan told me, looking up from his phone. “The local TSA and airport security had already been instructed to ignore any commotion over here, so we don’t have to worry about them.”