Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “John MacDougall and Kyle Lawrence, gentry, and Tamara Roxeville, nightmare,” Talus introduced them to me. “Meet Jason Kilkenny, our scout on this operation and a trusted friend of mine—changeling.”

  The noble glanced around. “Where’s Frankie?” he asked.

  “Right here,” a voice said from right next to me, and the air next to where I was strapping on the flak jacket blurred, like a mirage, and a tall man suddenly stood there, dressed in camouflage greens.

  He offered me his hand with a grin as I jumped in surprise at his sudden appearance.

  “Frankie Mckenny,” he introduced himself. “I’m what you call a green man; I blend in with everything. You’ll want this,” he finished, handing me a black cylinder sized to go on the barrel of my Uzi—a sound and flash suppressor.

  “All right, now we’re done playing games,” Talus said repressively, “can we all gather around?”

  The three men, three women and I gathered around Talus and Shelly at the table. I could see that the papers were, in fact, blueprints of the hotel. Two floors and a basement: it wasn’t much of a building.

  “This is our target,” Talus told us, gesturing at the plans. “There are a limited number of exits and entrances, and it appears that the vampires are using the front door, here.” He pointed at the lobby of the hotel. “There are secondary exits that they can likely use here, here and here.” He indicated each one in turn.

  “My biggest worry at this point is keeping the feeders bottled up,” he explained. “I see that we can position snipers opposite this door and this door”—he pointed at the two in question—“and cover all the exits. O’Malley and MacDougall, that’s your role in this mess,” he told the two gentry. Both of them had already acquired large, ugly-looking rifles from the cabinets around them.

  “The rest of us go in through the front entrance—we sweep the building, post a guard—probably you, Tamara—at the stairs here, where you can cover both sets on this side of the building.” He pointed to a spot at the end of the lobby.

  “There is an access on the second floor,” I noted, touching the spot on the map. “I used it to sneak in,” I explained.

  Talus nodded. “That’s a good point, and useful.” He considered the map for a moment. “Okay, Tamara, you, Frankie, Celine and Kyle will go in the front door and sweep the building, still leaving you as a guard in the lobby. Jason and I will go in through the second-floor window and sweep the top floor. We meet here”—he stabbed at the old bar at the opposite end of the hotel—“and then head downstairs. Most likely, the basement is where we will meet the heaviest resistance, so we’ll want to concentrate there.

  “Any questions?”

  29

  We all loaded our weapons and gear into a van, more to conceal the fact that we were all wearing bulky body armor than any issue with walking the dozen or so blocks to the hotel. Shelly kissed Talus goodbye and wished us all luck before returning to the armory slash safehouse to secure it against accidental intrusion.

  After the few minutes it took us to get there, Talus maneuvered the van into the parking area of the construction lot across the street from the hotel and parked. He took a moment to look back at all of us.

  “Remember, there may be more prisoners in the building,” he told us, “so watch for them, and try to rescue them. But remember—I don’t want any vampires escaping alive. Kill every last one of them.”

  The sound that echoed in the van was too...animal to call anything but a snarl. Talus’s comment was definitely one we could all agree with.

  “O’Malley, MacDougall.” The noble gestured to the two men who’d slung heavy sniper rifles. “Think you can get up on those roofs?” He pointed through the window. Both men nodded instantly. “We’ll give you five minutes to get in position,” Talus told them, “then we’ll start moving in. Radio if there’s a problem.”

  The two gentry didn’t even respond before slipping out the back of the van. I watched them for a moment, somehow weaving their way through the sparse crowds while concealing the long weapons they held under their coats.

  Talus looked over at me, his expression concerned.

  “Jason, you can still back out if you want,” he told me. “You’re the only one here who isn’t a greater or noble fae; you’re not really in the weight class for this fight,” he reminded me quietly. “You did more than enough by showing us where to strike.”

  I needed to be along as the Queen’s eyes and ears on the ground, to see and remember the proof for Her as much as for myself. Talus knew I was a Vassal after our accidental mind-sharing, but his men didn’t—and weren’t supposed to know, either. I took a moment to think of how to explain to him, without saying the part we both knew.

  “After what I saw last night,” I said even more slowly than my usual drawl. “That poor girl. I want to help—I want to kill these bastards with my own hands.”

  “Fair enough,” Talus grunted. “I won’t mind the second gun hand and set of eyes upstairs.” He checked the watch. “Let’s move.”

  Tamara led the way out of the van, the flicker of flame on her skin concealed by a silk scarf wrapped around her face. The rest of us followed, keeping our weapons concealed. I know I walked with my hand on the grip of the Micro Uzi under my coat, and I doubted the others were any less paranoid.

  Talus led us toward the hotel, stopping by the scaffolding to look around at the group of fae.

  “Jason and I will go up here,” he said simply. “Give us a minute, and then go through the front. We’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  The fae noble was up the ladder so fast, I barely saw him move. I followed him up at a more sedate pace, joining him on the scaffolding as he opened the window I’d permanently unlocked the previous night. He held back, drawing his own machine pistol and waving me forward.

  Taking the invitation, I drew the Micro Uzi and stepped through into the empty room. Nothing had changed from the last time I’d been in there, though weak sunlight still leaked in today, illuminating the dust and the scuffed-up track from my and Jill’s escape last night.

  “Clear,” I whispered, knowing that Talus would hear me. One advantage to sneaking around when you knew your companions had superhuman hearing.

  Talus ducked in, and we paused to attach the suppressors to our Uzis now that concealment was less of a factor than noise and light. The fae noble drew an ancient-looking short sword, its blade covered in black oil of some kind, and held it in his left hand.

  “You have a knife?” he asked quietly. “Better than shooting them if they’re still sleeping from the sun.”

  When I shook my head, he tucked the short sword into the same hand as his Uzi for a moment and produced a US Marine Corps combat knife from the small of his back, the blade pitch black.

  “Nothing special about it; it’s just black to conceal it,” he whispered. “Sever the spinal cord, they’ll survive anything else.”

  I nodded jerkily as I took the knife in my free hand. For all my anger at the vampires last night, the thought of knifing them in their sleep made me acutely uncomfortable. Given that the feeders were just as fast and strong as me, and some of them had blood magic as well, it made sense. I just didn’t like it.

  “You go left,” the noble instructed, pointing as he stepped to the right. “Come if you hear me shoot.”

  With a swift exchange of nods, I headed left. More of the doors were shut tonight than last night, presumably closed on occupants asleep against the sun. The first one was locked, but we really didn’t need to worry about people coming through after us and seeing evidence, so I burnt the deadbolt out with a quick slash of flame and stepped inside.

  Two people were asleep on the bed, and I hesitated as I stepped inside. It was hard to consider killing someone in their sleep. Then I got closer and saw the state of the bed. It was half-covered in blood, as were the two vampires. The blood came from a man who looked to have been in his mid-thirties but aged another twenty years by drugs and alcohol. Fo
r all that, he hadn’t deserved to be dragged up there and have his throat torn out to feed their thirst.

  The male—I refused to think of the vampire as a man—was the first and, in some ways, the hardest. I very carefully positioned the very sharp knife at the base of his neck, then, with a deep breath, stabbed home.

  A human might have failed to cleanly sever the spinal cord, but a changeling like me stood at the peak of human abilities. The knife slipped between the vertebrae perfectly, with a sickening popping feel, and the vampire just...stopped.

  He wasn’t really breathing and didn’t have much of a heartbeat before, so it was hard to say exactly how I knew he was dead. But I did. Quickly, realizing I was probably moving much slower than Talus was expecting, I took a deep breath and repeated the exercise with the second vampire.

  Then I regretted the deep breaths as, without the focus of needing to kill, the full stink of rotting blood and flesh in the room struck home and I gagged against it. Careful to breathe shallowly, I fled the room, forcing myself to move on to the next closed door.

  Two more vampires died silently, in their sleep. The fourth room was much cleaner than the first three, no scattered blood, no bodies. The bed had been made up neatly around the figure sleeping in it, and the closet had been cleaned out and a number of dry-cleaning bags containing suits and what might have been black robes had been hung up in it.

  I crossed to the bed and started to place the knife against the vampire’s throat when his eyes flicked open and he grabbed for the knife just as it touched his skin. Panicked, I tried to level the gun at him, but he swiftly knocked it out of my hand.

  Quickly, I grabbed the knife with both hands and started forcing it toward him. With a snarl, he tried to punch me, only to allow the knife to slip forward and gouge his half-dead flesh. He jerked sideways, half-opening his throat and falling out of the bed.

  He rolled to his feet and we faced each other across the bed. I held the knife, and he opened his mouth to shout for help.

  To both of our surprise, all that emerged was a hoarse croak. I’d managed to sever his windpipe and vocal cords, rendering him unable to make any real noise. Where a human would have been spurting blood, however, he only oozed a thick brown liquid it took me a moment to realize was half-congealed blood. An injury that would have been quickly if not instantly fatal to many inhumans, let alone humans, was a mild inconvenience.

  He snarled soundlessly at me and dove for the closet. I met him halfway there, trying to slash at his throat with the knife. He parried the blow and punched me in the stomach, sending me stumbling back a few paces as he reached the closet and produced what he was looking for: a sawed-off pump-action shotgun.

  I didn’t even bother going for my gun—I didn’t have time. By the time he’d finished pumping the first round into the chamber, I was in his face, stabbing down into his right arm. Tendons snapped and bone cracked under the strike, and the pistol grip of the shotgun slipped from his nerveless fingers.

  His other hand was still intact, though, and he used it to slam the gun broadside on into my face. I felt my nose break and was shoved back a step. I blinked away stars, and then blinked again when I saw what he was doing.

  The vampire’s left hand still held the shotgun by its pump, but the pistol grip was now lifting again—held in a living simulacrum of a hand, formed from the brown ooze of the vampire’s blood. I was fighting a blood mage.

  For a moment, I was staring down the barrel of a shotgun, convinced I was going to die. Then fear and anger hit me, and I remembered fire. The same whip of flame I’d first conjured when fighting Laurie suddenly flashed into existence in my hand and I lashed out.

  The whip wrapped around his left hand, and I pulled. Just as the gun was about to fire, I tore off the vampire’s functioning hand with a tendril of flame, and he opened his mouth in a hoarse, creepily quiet scream of pain as the shotgun collapsed to the ground, his attention broken.

  Taking advantage of his distraction, I wrapped the tendril around his neck. The vampire mage had enough time to realize what was about to happen and start to gesture his useless right hand at me to conjure some form of blood magic.

  Then I burnt the fucker’s head off.

  I held my breath for a moment as the vampiric blood mage’s body crumpled to the floor, half-expecting a horde of angry vampires, roused by our desperate struggle, to come charging through the door guns blazing.

  When said horde failed to materialize, I allowed myself to slowly begin to breathe again, and picked up my knife and submachine gun. I had two more rooms to check before I reached the end of the floor, and I hoped that the others were just normal vampires. Because that wasn’t a contradiction in terms.

  I had just slipped the door to the next room open when everything went to hell. To my ears, the sound of a suppressed submachine gun might as well be cracking thunder, and three of them opened up simultaneously beneath me.

  Vampiric hearing wasn’t as good as mine, but it was good enough that the gunfire clearly woke up the vampire in the room I was entering. I never gave him a chance to do more than come to his feet, raising the Micro Uzi and putting a neat burst into his head. Even vampires die when they don’t have a head anymore.

  I kicked the next door open, not bothering with subtlety. Kicking hinges out hurts, but it’s more effective than trying to break through the door directly. The cracking sound of a pistol firing echoed through the hotel as a heavy bullet barely missed me.

  Diving through the door, I rolled under a second bullet and came to my feet to find two vampires in the room. Both were naked. The girl was rushing for the closet, presumably for some kind of weapon, while the man was bringing a very large revolver, a Dirty Harry gun, to bear on me as he fired again.

  I threw my knife first, catching the female vampire in the leg as I jumped sideways to avoid a fourth bullet. I fired back while ducking under the bed, not so much intending to hit anyone as to keep the gunman down.

  Two more bullets ripped into the bed, tearing apart the mattress and shattering the cheap wooden frame. That was six bullets, though, and revolvers were called six-shooters for a reason.

  I leapt over the bed, one hand on the remnants of the frame, and landed in a perfect two-handed shooter’s stance. My second burst was not intended to keep anyone down, and three rounds slammed into the girl’s chest with bloody precision. For a moment, I thought I hadn’t done anything, as the congealed black goo that was vampire blood began to ooze from the holes—and then her blood caught fire and the vampire screamed for a moment.

  I knew that the bullets had been coated in garlic oil. I knew garlic was bad for vampires. I hadn’t known that concentrated garlic oil ignited the blood of a living vampire like a match to gasoline. The girl’s body burned up from the inside out, and I watched in horrified surprise.

  Which almost killed me, as the other vampire slammed a single heavy cartridge into the cylinder and pointed the gun at me. At this range, with no cover, he couldn’t possibly miss. If he hit me somewhere non-vital, I’d heal, but I’d be out of this fight. If I was lucky, he’d hit me somewhere really non-vital.

  I didn’t feel lucky, and the barrel of the gun was huge. And then it wasn’t there anymore, as a half-seen, half-sensed, telekinetic blow smashed the vampire’s spine to pieces. The shattered corpse collapsed, and Talus stood behind him. The noble’s hand still glowed to my eyes with the force he’d used to destroy the vampire.

  Gunfire continued to echo downstairs, and the suppressed submachine guns I knew were our companions were now being interspersed with the tearing sound of very real and very un-suppressed automatic weapons.

  “Let’s go,” Talus ordered, and I followed him out.

  The stairs at the rear of the hotel echoed with the gunfight going on below. With the top floor clear of vampires, Talus and I went down the stairs as quietly as we could, doing our best to work out where the fight was.

  Halfway down the stairs, I gagged as a draft carried a suddenly
intense smell of formaldehyde and rot up the stairwell. Talus and I exchanged questioning glances and he shrugged, clearly not having any more idea than I did.

  The stairs exited into what had once been the hotel’s bar but now was the source of the smell of preserved rot. The remaining tables and chairs had been haphazardly tossed aside, clearing space for several neat rows of bodies. All of the bodies showed the telltale neck wounds of being killed by vampires, and all had been, from the smell, soaked in some kind of preservative. Three rows of ten bodies filed the room, and Talus looked at them with horror on his face.

  “What?” I whispered. “What the hell is this for?”

  He shook himself. “I don’t know,” he said uncertainly. “It can’t possibly be...” The fae noble trailed off, and the approaching sound of gunfire distracted us.

  Whoever had the automatic weapons and was firing at our friends was getting closer. Talus gestured toward the bar and we took cover behind it. The only door out of the room other than the exit and the two leading deeper into the hotel was back there with us, and I kept one eye on it, just in case.

  The gunfire grew louder, and four vampires walked backward into the bar, firing back down the hallways to keep the other fae’s heads down. Talus and I waited for them to fully enter into the room, and then he gestured roughly to me and rose up to fire over the bar.

  I hit the closest vampire with five or six bullets, and he crumpled in silent agony as his blood burst into flame inside him. The second one I fired at managed to turn and shoot at me before I hit him, but he went down after a single shot.

  Talus’s pair went down even faster, and the hotel was silent for a long moment until the others slowly appeared in the doors from the hotel. Tamara led the way, her face wrap gone somewhere along the way after she’d ignored the plan for her to stand guard at the other end of the hotel, and fire glittering across her black skin as she offered us a thumb-up.