The blood demons were clearly struggling to control the big man, but, even without her EQ, they seemed to be having no effect on her beyond a small mind massage—the massage that perfected their beauty in her eyes. As Nichols kept her distance between the circle and a growling Daniels, she finally had a split second to remember Mahasona’s reaction to his sexual assault on her. He had recoiled with seeming revulsion.
She knew that was important. Now all she had to do was somehow escape Daniels, the blood demons, and every terrorist in the surrounding two hundred miles, and she might be able to do something about it.
She returned her full attention to Daniels, who seemed to be struggling more with himself than with her. He had first attacked like Frankenstein’s monster, giving her time to get her bearings. She trusted him enough to know what should be coming next—that is, if he still was managing to hold off the infection from taking complete hold. It was worth a chance.
He came at her again, arms outstretched, and she seemed to dodge, but let one arm swing back just a little too much. Daniels grabbed it, and, sure enough, used it to throw her through the air like a rag doll—right over the nearest terrorists.
She landed on her feet and ran directly at the blood demons. The circle of terrorists broke and came after her just as Mahasona stepped back. But Tajabana smiled. At that moment it felt as if they had reached into Nichols’s head and clamped their fingers deep into her brain as if it were pizza dough.
Nichols dropped to the ground on all fours, panting, just as the nearest terrorist was about to plunge his knife deep into her back. But then meaty hands grabbed him and threw him into the tree. He smashed into the tree trunk with a wet thud, making Mahasona take another short step away—lest he be splashed with the man’s sweat.
But Tajabana remained, head lowered, lips frozen in her knowing smile, as Daniels grabbed Nichols by the hair and neck. He then threw her back to where they had started as the terrorists stumbled and began to scatter. The brunette looked sharply at her master, who snapped at the terrorists.
“Back! Back to your places, dogs!”
The men began to do as ordered while Daniels stomped toward a rolling Nichols, who came up lightly on her feet, peering at her adversary. The Daniels she knew was all but gone. She could just make out a silver sliver deep in the back of one eye before he grabbed at her.
“No muscle,” she remembered Key telling her. “If you use female muscle against male muscle, you’ll lose. Use their muscles against them. Use their aggression against them. You just help them defeat themselves by redirecting their energy back to them.” Then he had showed her how to do that.
Daniels grabbed at her. Nichols curved herself under his attack and placed her arm under his, her palm under his bicep. Having avoided the strike, she let his momentum carry him forward. Then all she had to do was cross his off-balanced ankle with her balanced one, and he somersaulted forward, smashing down, back first, with a ground-shaking boom.
Daniels’s back was to her. Without hesitation, she dove forward, all her strength and energy lancing from her toes through her body, then into her right forefinger’s second knuckle—which she had curved into an arrowhead. She landed perfectly, in the tender spot behind his earlobe, to cut the blood from his brain just long enough to render him unconscious.
She had done it better than she ever had before. It was as close to a perfect “phoenix eye” attack as she could imagine, so she was already moving forward to take on every terrorist from the circle who got near her.
Then she stopped from no fault of her own. Stunned, she looked back to see Daniels, sitting up, barely conscious, gripping her left ankle in both his meaty paws.
The phoenix eye hadn’t worked. The contagion had become more powerful. His blood flow was clearly compromised.
Nichols felt her heart breaking because she knew what she had to do. She couldn’t let Daniels become their slave. Nor could she let herself be killed by him. Rather than struggle to free her ankle, she stepped back with her free foot and swung the pinky-side of her right hand like a scythe—directly into the side of Daniels’s head just above where his jawbone met his skull.
Even if she had used half her power, the tiny, vulnerable connecting bone there would break, even shatter—flooding the rest of his skull with blood, drowning his brain. She heard this was what had killed Bruce Lee as well. But she didn’t use half her power. She used everything she had left.
Daniels’s fingers snapped open. Nichols jumped back, ready to spin and fight. But, while still turning in the air, she fought the lump in her throat and the tears coating her eyes. She never thought it would end this way. Just the opposite, in fact. She always thought it would be Daniels who wound wind up crying over her mortally wounded body.
No time now, she yelled at herself. First things first! She had to get away from the blood demons.
This time she ran in the opposite direction, ready to eviscerate any terrorists in her way. She was only feet from them, but even then she saw they were smiling, not preparing for battle. A moment later she found out why.
She felt Daniels’s meaty paw clamp around her neck from behind. There was no mistaking it. A moment after that, she felt herself being launched high off the forest floor, the grip not weakening. He used her head like a sledgehammer, throwing her down as if trying to bury a stake in the ground. If she hadn’t been enhanced and gone totally limp, her skull would have cracked like an egg and her neck would have snapped like a twig.
Even as it was, Corporal Terri Nichols crumpled onto the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. She moaned, twitching, astonishingly grateful she could do either. But then Daniels’s knee plunged into her stomach and his left claw clamped to her throat. When she looked into his eyes this time, there was no Daniels there.
Then he looked up, away from her. Her eyes rolled to see him staring at Tajabana like an obedient pet. Mahasona smiled with consummate pleasure, then started toward her while reaching for his pants.
“No,” said the brunette, her hand lightly on her master’s arm. “Let him kill her.” She turned her overwhelmingly soulful eyes to his. “For me.”
Nichols could not recognize the emotions that were crashing over the blood demon’s handsome face. They went too quickly and were too confusingly contradictory. But she recognized all too well the last emotion that settled on his countenance. It was the look of any emperor about to give the thumb down.
“Very well,” he said with a hungry, anticipatory, smile. “For you.”
The blood demons turned back to their unwilling gladiators and waited with satisfaction. Daniels looked back at Nichols like she was a pinned specimen. His fist rose, ready to plunge into her face until there was nothing between it and the ground.
In that split second, Nichols used her arms, legs, feet, hands, knees and elbows to rain a flurry of blows all over Daniels’s body. But not one seemed to have any effect on him. And, by the way he was straight-arming her throat, she just couldn’t reach his eyes.
He wouldn’t talk, and she couldn’t talk because of the way he was strangling her, so she mentally said what she figured were her last words.
Maybe I’ll suffocate before he smashes my bones and brains.
She closed her eyes, and didn’t die.
What’s with the high-pitched, barely audible whine? Did imminent death give me dog’s hearing?
Terri Daniels opened her eyes and saw the terrorists scattering. She looked up to see a frozen Daniels staring blankly off toward the tree where Mahasona and Tajabana had been standing. The blood demons were no longer there. Instead, there was an astonishing aircraft hovering two feet above the forest clearing.
It was a small, camouflage-colored plane with advanced helicopter rotors attached to its fuselage just above its dual cutting-edge jet engines. It looked like a metal hummingbird had mated with a spaceship and given birth to a chopper
-jet. It all but screamed “Gonzales,” and, as Nichols watched, the side door flew open.
She saw the lightning gun first, and then that it was being held by Faisal Safar, who pulled the trigger to give the full blast directly into Daniels’s face and chest. The sergeant twitched, jerked, shuddered, and shook at the same moment another figure came leaping out, carrying a net gun in each hand.
Nichols saw Josiah Key, with what looked like a serious case of acne afflicting his face, pump one net over a recoiling Daniels, then, before the big man had even stopped rolling, hit him with another. By then retired General Charles Lancaster was already gathering Nichols up and hustling her back to the aircraft.
“What?” Nichols managed to choke out as Lancaster launched them inside while Safar ran to help Key collect Daniels. “How?”
“Later,” Lancaster grunted, jumping into one of the cabin’s six seats.
“Strap in!” Gonzales yelled from the cockpit. “We got to be gone as fast as we came.”
Nichols managed to find a seat and click the restraints in place just in time to hear the cabin door slam. She looked to see, incredibly, that everyone, including a heavily netted Daniels, was back on board. It had been a hit-and-run surgical strike deep within enemy territory. Even so, she couldn’t even begin counting the international laws they had somehow circumvented or rocketed under.
Then she felt something she hadn’t experienced since her first takeoff from an aircraft carrier. She imagined it was something similar to what astronauts felt when leaving the launch-pad. She couldn’t breathe for a minute, but it was better than being dead.
When the pressure on her chest, and the ripples stretching her facial skin, finally subsided, she took her first full breath since leaving the blood demons’ cavern. She opened her mouth to ask every question that was demolition-derbying inside her mind, but then saw gray creeping into the corners of her eyes.
Oh, no, she thought. You have got to be kidding.
But then she remembered everything she had just been through, cut herself some slack, and let her body and brain collapse.
Chapter 30
Nichols couldn’t decide whether she was having a nightmare, dream, or something in between. But by the time she saw Cerberus Chinese Versailles Headquarters out the aircraft’s window, she knew things she hadn’t known before Daniels had hurled her headfirst into the Hindu-Kush ground.
“Welcome to my latest, greatest baby,” she could’ve sworn Gonzales had told her. “S.H.E. Silent Helejet Extreme. What the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency couldn’t perfect, Cerberus did. Part spaceship, part chopper, really fast, and all but silent.” He shook his head, sheepishly realizing he was talking like a fanboy geek. “High speed vertical takeoff and landing, rotors retractable into an aerodynamic spoiler, and an airspeed of more than—oops, got to go. Autopilot disengaging. Sleep tight, we’ll be back in no time.”
She lost him after that, and the next thing she remembered in her dream-state was Key’s pock-marked face. Her own hand came into her vision, seemingly attempting to touch the man’s visage, which looked dotted with freckles made of popped, scabbed-over, pimples. He gently caught her hand in mid-reach and sympathetically put it down by her side.
“Not what it looks like,” she remembered him grimacing quietly. “Got head-butted and body bumped by a pincushion.” He grinned grimly. “You should see the other guy, though. Which you will, in time. But for now, rest, recover.”
Finally, when she rose momentarily from her stupor, she saw Lancaster sitting by her, looking on with paternal concern. When he saw her eyes were open, his expression changed to understanding. “You asked me ‘how,’ remember?” he told her quietly. “Well, I take ‘no one left behind’ very seriously, so you don’t think I’d send you into the field with only traceable earpieces, do you? No, Corporal. You’ll get full details when we’ve time, but for now, rest assured that if you’re findable, Cerberus will find you.”
Despite its remarkable hovering abilities, Nichols’s enhanced senses felt SHE touching down near their Chinese Versailles, and, rather than make sure her dream-like visits were true, she got up from the reclining seat ready to help Key and Safar move the netted and wrapped Daniels into the isolation unit. The work they still had to do was far more important than any confusion she might still have.
As soon as they entered the warren of electrically conductive polymethylmethacrylate cubes, Key motioned Nichols toward Dr. Helen as he and Safar started securing Daniels in the electric chair even more stringently and strongly than they had for Craven. When Nichols hesitated, Key insisted.
“Got to make sure you’re a hundred percent,” he reminded her. “Or, at least fifty. We’re not anywhere close to out of the woods yet. None of us.”
Nichols nodded, quickly telling them all how Mahasona had recoiled during his assault on her. “And, even without my EQ, they didn’t seem to have much power over my brain.”
Key looked pointedly at Dr. Helen, who started typing, until Safar stopped her, motioning around the room to let them all know the automatic translator was on.
“It is possible,” the calm, disembodied voice said in English as Dr. Helen spoke Mandarin, “that your brains have already, and automatically, adjusted to protecting your mind’s wavelengths that the blood demons have attacked.”
“Or, they are getting weaker as we continue to frustrate their plans,” Lancaster suggested.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Key grumbled as he strapped in Daniels’s legs with all his strength. “Nor start from that assumption.”
“Of course not,” Lancaster agreed, taking up his place in front of a wall of monitors. Ever since they had been distracted by the Liberty Bell alert, he saw to it that there were command centers in virtually every major room in the HQ. “Not when they still have hundreds of our soldiers being turned into God-knows-what.”
“Your God has nothing to do with it,” said a voice that was obviously Mahasona.
Every member of the team froze where they were, then started looking for where the voice could be coming from. Key placed his left ear near Daniels’s still covered head and mouth. Safar started reprogramming the translator furiously. But Lancaster pressed his forefinger into his own ear, then waved at the others before pointing to his auditory canal.
“Yes, yes, naturally,” Mahasona told them all through their ear-comms. “While I crushed the devices that blocked your minds, I saved one communication device for just such an occasion as this.”
Everyone looked to Key, who looked only at Daniels. “White flag, Dr. Dearden?” he asked simply. He and Lancaster were certain the blood demon would know the meaning. The tradition had started as far back as the Han Dynasty and Roman Empire just a hundred years after Christ’s crucifixion.
They all heard the blood demon smile patiently. “White flag, Major Key. And please, don’t call me by my assumed name. I don’t suppose you’d consider calling me ‘Master.’”
“Not yet,” Key immediately replied.
Everyone, maybe even Daniels as well, was amazed and riveted by the civilized conversation, as well as what seemed to be the blood demon’s subsequent chuckle. “Oh, save me from the man with a sense of perspective and humor,” the creature said. “That’s been the problem all along, you see. I’ve spent too much time dealing with the likes of Craven, Logan, and—well, we’ll just leave it at that.”
“Good idea,” Key replied drily, knowing that the creature was about to include Rahal in his list. “What can I do for you, Dearden?” He stressed the name, putting an end to the question of monikers. He would not call him “master” in any form.
They all heard the creature sigh. “I was thinking of asking you the same thing, Major. It seems we’re at something of a—what do you racist Americans call it? A Mexican standoff.”
Key was unfazed by the baiting comment. “How do you figure that?” he
immediately retorted.
“Oh, come now.”
“No, I have ideas,” Key interrupted. “I just wanted to hear your take.”
The creature sighed again. “Oh, very well. I suppose that’s the cost of establishing communication between our races. I believe the term ‘Mexican standoff’ started in the seventeenth century when a bandit told a tourist that he would take his money but spare his life. Over the eons it has come to be thought of as a situation in which no one in a confrontation can safely advance or withdraw. I believe that is what our little conflict has become.”
Key and the others played out all the variations in their minds. Cerberus’s position was severely hampered by the hostages the blood demons had, as well as their shape-shifting and infection abilities, no matter how weakened. However, the blood demons had suffered setbacks, no matter how minor, with every direct contact with the Cerberus team.
“Well,” Key shrugged. “As contactor, you have the right of first offer. What do you propose?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“Rather not.”
They all heard another big sigh. Lancaster looked to Key, but he was still staring at Daniels’s covered head. Realizing that the team leader needed his full concentration, Lancaster looked to Nichols instead, but she only stared at Key.
“You cannot destroy us,” Mahasona told them. “We have existed for millennia. It is too late. There are too many of us.”
“Not what I heard,” Key retorted flatly.
“Consider your sources,” the creature suggested smoothly. “This—skirmish—is only our latest rise and fall and rise again. Through the centuries, our kind has fed on your kind. And there were many years when they—we—stole essences—leaving your kind alive, but soulless.”
Blood Demons Page 23