by Laura Taylor
There were two men below her who had made it all the way to the manor, and they were preparing to break a window to gain access to the interior. What if they hated the Noturatii just as much as the shifters did, and had been either forced or coerced into joining the organisation? Surely they didn’t deserve to die for that?
Silent as a ghost, Li Khuli dropped down on top of them. One of the men was dead before he hit the ground, his neck broken with a neat, quick snap. The other man had a split second to gape at her in terror before he, too, was dead, a knife in his throat severing an artery that sprayed blood all over a hydrangea.
Such a waste of life, Li Khuli thought as she wiped the blade on the leaves of a nearby bush and melted back into the shadows. What would it take for this war to end and the pointless loss of life to stop?
The young assassin hated fights like this. With a grimace, she grabbed a soldier by the head and slit his throat, then dropped the body carelessly on the ground. The rampant bloodshed wasn’t without its benefits, of course. Surrounded by the Noturatii, she could silence her own conscience for once, feeling no remorse about killing men who were bent on ending the shifters’ existence. But assassins were trained for stealth, for silence, for sneaking in and killing a target without ever being seen.
She spun around, grabbed one of the soldiers and used him as a shield as she shot another man coming up behind him, then shot the first man in the head. She dived to the side and rolled, avoiding a spray of bullets, then fired her gun once, twice, and the man shooting at her was dead.
There was no subtlety here, she reflected as she reloaded her gun. There was no time to plan refined strategy or put carefully honed patience and attention to detail to work. It was just a case of find a target and take him out, then find the next one.
Seeing a pair of legs through a gap in a hedge, she lashed out with both feet, satisfied when she felt something snap and heard a pained scream. Two bullets finished the job, and then she was back on her feet, seeking out her next target through the darkness.
A thud sounded right behind Baron; he and Kajus both spun around, guns at the ready, in time to see a dark shape roll into a bush. “Easy!” a gentle, female voice came back at them. “I’m on your side.”
“I don’t know you,” Baron snarled, not putting his gun down.
“I’m the Khuli,” the Khuli said, and Baron couldn’t help cursing. Of all the fucked up bloody times to - “They’ve got a meth lab. I heard them talking about it while I was on the roof.” The Khuli raised a pistol, lined up a shot and fired, the bullet somehow missing one of the civilians by scant millimetres before lodging right between the eyes of a soldier on the far side of the group. Despite his deep distrust of the woman, even Baron couldn’t help being impressed.
“We’re risking our lives to save a bunch of meth dealers?” Kajus sounded seriously pissed off, and Baron could hardly blame him -
“GRENADE!” The booming warning came from the roof, from the male assassin, and the three of them bolted for cover, Baron feeling a sharp pain along his shoulder just before he threw himself into a small pond. The explosion was blinding, even from behind closed eyelids, and he felt a surge of heat roll over the top of him. They’d made it out of the immediate blast range, but not by much. A quick check of his own injuries – negligible – and a visual check of both his teammates (it was a crazy day in hell when he could call a Khuli a teammate), and they were back to business. Through his earpiece, Baron could hear Tank calling for backup for his team, Andre’s calm response that he was moving his team closer, and he had the stray thought that he was glad Simon had chosen the waterproof model.
“What do we do?” Kajus asked him, and Baron wished his brain would stop throwing these distractions at him all the time. He’d slept with Kajus back in Scotland, and had fantasised about doing it again more than once, and now, with Kajus’s face coated with dirt and sweat, his eyes fierce, his chest heaving, he felt an urgent desire to bend him over that low wall over there, and -
“Civilians have no place in this war,” the Khuli answered. “We defend them. As we would anyone else.”
“You have a seriously fucked-up moral compass, you know that?” Baron snarled at her. Three of the men from the house were dead, and he watched as a soldier walked brazenly up to a fourth and shot him in the head. A moment later, the soldier was dead, one of the female assassins making a quick job of it.
“We’re getting hammered out here,” Mark reported through Baron’s earpiece.
“Man down,” Tank’s voice came through, cold and calm.
Four more soldiers filtered through the bushes, keeping Baron and his group occupied for long seconds, the standoff finally broken when the Khuli leapt sideways out of a hedge, taking down all four men in under five seconds. Baron hadn’t even noticed her leave. His heart lurched belatedly as he wondered who on Tank’s team had been killed.
“Man down,” Mark reported, sounding tense and breathless.
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” one of the female assassins reported, “but the civilians are all dead.”
Baron shook his head. It was no surprise, the way they’d come rushing out of the house, guns blazing, all but painting bright red targets on their chests.
“Retreat,” Caroline ordered sharply. “There’s too many of them. Team Two, get clear of the fence. I’m going to lob a grenade in your direction to cut a path out of here.”
“We’ll cover you on your way down,” Baron told her, shoving a new clip into his gun. Even with that promise, he wasn’t sure of her chances. The path off the roof had little cover and far too many guns pointed in that direction.
Down the path, Baron spotted John, who gave him a quick nod. He slunk off towards the rear of the manor where Caroline was about to pull off her fireworks act, ready to make a run for it the moment the coast was clear. The three assassins he trusted to make their own way off the property, or at the very least, to let him know if they couldn’t. So that only left Raniesha, who had been positioned at the south-east corner. He hadn’t heard from her in a while, but she wasn’t too far from where both female assassins had set up shop.
“Raniesha, which way are you headed?”
There was no reply. More gun-fire sounded from the far eastern side of the property where Mark’s team was making its stand.
“We’re headed to rendezvous site four,” Silas’s voice told him, sounding tinny and tired, and Baron immediately wondered if he’d been injured. “We can’t make it across to Team Two.”
“Copy that,” Baron replied, making a mental note to let Luna and her crew know. There was a total of six potential pick-up sites, designed to provide an easy exit no matter where on the property the shifters ended up fighting. He only hoped no one was injured so badly as to suffer with the necessary delay in rounding everyone up. “Raniesha, do you copy? What’s your location?” Still no reply. “Raniesha?” Silence. “RANIESHA!”
“Raniesha’s dead,” an assassin reported. “We’ll bring her body and see Caroline down safely. Get the hell out of here.”
Why the fuck was everyone so calm!?
“Copy that. Retreat in progress.” Baron’s voice came out smooth and even.
“We’re clear,” Tank reported, the leader of Team Two. About ten seconds later, a booming explosion ripped through the rear of the property.
“Let’s go,” Baron told Kajus, the pair of them making a hasty retreat around the side of the building. The Khuli was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Dawn was a cool haze in the eastern sky when Melissa finally stepped out of her car. The battle had been shorter than she’d anticipated; given that they were attacking the shifters’ home, she’d expected them to stand their ground come hell or high water, but less than half an hour into the battle, they’d blown a crater in the back lawn and simply vanished. Leon’s initial report to her, long before he’d allowed her out of the car, was that they’d lost a significant number of men, and by e
arly estimates, about half the shifters had escaped. It wasn’t what Melissa would have called a brilliant success, but if they’d successfully tossed the survivors of the pack off their home base, at worst they’d spend months, if not years struggling to regroup and rebuild, and at best, they might just pack up and move to another country. That would still leave Melissa with the other, more reclusive pack to deal with, but she could still claim it as a major victory for the British division, a prize to be waved under the noses of her colleagues for years to come.
The gravel beneath her feet crunched with the particular crispness that only came with the pre-dawn hours. The world was still quiet, no cars, only the occasional chirp from an over-eager bird, and she paused to button up her coat as her breath misted in the air in front of her.
“They knew we were coming,” was the first thing Leon said to her, his grim frown making him look older in the grey light. Some of the team had regrouped at the gate, wounds being treated at a makeshift medical station, while others combed through the manor or shared reports in the main garden courtyard. This was the dull, monotonous side to war, the stiff calculations of losses, both theirs and their enemies’, the talk of strategy, the reflections and muttered regrets, clear as crystal in the glaring window of hindsight.
“They knew we were looking for them,” Melissa pointed out, not at all concerned by the defences they’d encountered. “And a hundred troops showing up isn’t exactly subtle. If they had some sort of high tech early warning system, then it makes sense they’d be able to mount a quick defence.”
Leon shrugged, making a non-committal sound. “I’m heading back inside in a minute, but I thought you’d want to see the progress so far.” He led her up the drive, the evidence of the battle clearly displayed in shattered ceramic pots and splatters of blood across the garden beds. Up near the house, a wide section of the lawn was taken up by bodies covered in white sheets. “These are ours,” Leon said, pointing to the larger section slightly down the hill, “and those are theirs.” Melissa paused to take in the sight, but her anticipated sense of triumph faltered when she saw there were only six bodies lying in the shifters’ section.
“Why are there only -?” she started to ask, but a sudden shout from the manor interrupted her.
“Excuse me, sir! We have a problem.”
Leon turned around, seeing one of the soldiers standing at the front door looking agitated. “I’d better go check this out,” he told Melissa, then yelled “Wilson!” at the group of soldiers standing in a nearby courtyard. A tall man with a sub-machine gun slung over his shoulder marched over. “Wilson will be your acting bodyguard until I get back. Have a look around. Appleby and Norris are the team leaders, if you have any questions.”
With that, he was gone, disappearing inside the house with the other men. Feeling a little miffed, Melissa smiled patiently at Wilson and received a stern nod in reply, along with a taciturn “Ma’am.” Surrounded by a dozen or more soldiers, she hardly thought a bodyguard was necessary, but she’d learned not to argue with Leon on such matters.
It looked like a sizable group of men had gathered in the courtyard, so Melissa headed over to see what they were up to. A garden table sat in the middle of the group – one that had had blood hastily wiped off its surface – and they were peering at a collection of photographs taken from the Noturatii’s files.
“I saw this one,” one of the men said, pointing to a picture of the tall, blond man who had once been a captive of the Noturatii.
“And this one,” another man added, pointing to a hand-drawn sketch. “Couldn’t kill him, though.”
“I’m not surprised,” one of the higher-ranking soldiers said. “He’s an assassin. The shifters’ version of our own Satva Khuli.”
“Damn,” the soldier muttered. “Glad I didn’t get too close, then.”
“Some of them were wearing masks,” someone else pointed out.
“If some of them know they’re not on our database, they probably want to keep it that way. Gotta watch these animals, man. They’re smarter than you’d expect.”
“I killed a young man,” one of the soldiers said, fresh enough that he was probably only a few months out of his training. “Probably in his early twenties. Looked that way, at least,” he added, seeing the glare on Melissa’s face. “I don’t know how animals like that really age, when compared with humans.”
Melissa let the anger melt away, to be replaced with coy approval. She’d made it clear on numerous occasions that these abominations were not to be discussed as if they were human. They were not ‘men’, not ‘people’, but animals, defects of nature, ‘creatures’ at best. They were worthy of neither pity nor empathy.
“I killed one who was a black woman in her human form,” another man boasted, “but her picture’s not here, and I couldn’t find her afterwards. They must have taken some of the bodies with them.”
Well, that was something of a relief. The tally of six bodies lined up on the lawn had been acutely disappointing, but if the wolves had been taking their dead with them, there was hope that plenty more had been killed.
“This one was definitely here.” The calm statement came from an older man, no doubt a seasoned soldier, and Melissa peered over his shoulder at the photograph… and then felt her heart skip a beat. He was pointing to the leader, the big brute with the beard. “I shot him. Just before the grenade went off,” the man continued. “Saw him flinch.”
“Is he dead?” Melissa blurted out. The leader of the pack! The mastermind behind so many failures on their part. If they’d managed to kill him...
“Don’t know,” the man admitted. “After the explosion, I didn’t see him again. Maybe check the bodies?” He nodded towards the white shapes on the lawn.
Reminding herself not to get too excited – the wolves had taken some of the bodies with them, after all – Melissa headed in that direction. A small team were currently snapping photos of the six dead shifters and making notes about their injuries and identities. The bodies would be examined thoroughly back at the base, of course, but it was worth taking a few preliminary details now.
Melissa lingered nearby, eager to see who had been killed, but not wanting to interrupt their work. There had been many a time when she’d been in the middle of something important and a nosy superior had disrupted her by asking inane questions, and she didn’t want to repeat the error.
“Tattoos on the left arm,” one man was reciting dutifully. “A dragon, a skull and… looks like some kind of demon.” He replaced the sheet over the body and moved onto the next one. When he pulled the sheet back, it revealed a face that was half melted off by the grenade blast, and from the way he recoiled, the smell was as bad as the sight. “Bloody hell.” The man swallowed hard, shook his head, then pulled himself together and got back to work. “Male, dark hair, short beard… hang on…” He stepped back and peered at the man from a wider angle, tilted his head to check out the less-damaged side of his face. “Is this… this isn’t the leader, is it? Hey, Simms! Get that photo of the leader over here. I think I’ve got him!”
“Let me see,” Melissa demanded, darting forward to have a look. She needed no photograph to identify the body; she’d seen that brute up close and personal, and even half-burned, she’d recognise him anywhere. She turned the head to see the unburnt side, not caring that she was getting blood on her fingers, and took a good, long look, calling up the image in her mind of the way the leader had glared at her back in the lab...
“It’s not him,” she said with a sigh of disappointment, stepping back and wiping her hand on the sheet. Now that the men’s progress had been interrupted anyway, she took a moment to peer beneath the rest of the sheets. Miller didn’t seem to be among the dead, either, nor Mark, nor the assassin or the warrior woman she’d seen back in the lab. No one, in fact, of any significance, was to be found here.
“Ma’am,” Leon said suddenly, as he came out the front door again, and his tone in speaking that single word was enough to g
et her attention. “A word, if you would?”
Mutely, Melissa followed him to a quiet spot where they were not likely to be overheard.
“We have a problem,” Leon said, casting his gaze over the house with an uncharacteristic apprehension. “This is not the shifters’ estate.”
A slow frown settled on Melissa’s face. “What do you mean? There were shifters here. You heard the men; they recognised some of them from the photos. They had sub-machine guns and grenades. Normal people don’t just have those lying around! Of course this is the shifters’ estate!”
But Leon shook his head, looking as aghast as she felt. “No, it isn’t. My men and I have searched the house thoroughly. There are two German shepherds in a kennel out the back – dead now, they were caught in the second grenade blast – but there’s no sign of any canines ever having been inside the house. No water dishes, no food bowls, no dog beds, not even any fur lying around on the carpets.”
“Maybe they’re just exceptionally clean -”
“There’s no high-tech security other than an alarm on the front door. There are no ancient books – we know they keep a few of those around, histories and genealogies and so forth. We’ve even got a few in our own collection back in Germany that we’ve lifted from them over the years. But there is nothing on this estate to support the idea that shifters live here. What there is,” he went on, when Melissa opened her mouth to object again, “is a commercial-size meth lab and clear evidence that whatever nefarious organisation was running it hired some serious muscle to guard the thing. Those six men lined up on the driveway? My guess is they’re not shifters. They’re human security guards employed by a major drug ring.”
“That makes no sense,” Melissa protested. Even with the lack of evidence, the clues that they’d been sent in entirely the wrong direction… “The shifters were here! How did they know to be here if it’s not their estate?”