He only managed to pull the slide of the pump-action backward to eject the first spent round before Thomas grabbed the weapon and snatched it from his grasp. He threw it aside with his right hand while his left smacked the masked man’s right wrist down, pinning it to his chest. Thomas balled his right hand into a fist and brought it down into the side of that masked face in a vicious punch. The blow rocked the man and made his legs kick out reflexively, but he continued to resist and appeared to be reaching for something strapped to his leg. Sure enough, his hand came back out with a pistol like the one that Raina still held. Raina was close enough that she was nearly standing right over the pair, but Thomas was in the way, preventing her from shooting the attacker point-blank in the head. Although another punch from Thomas did make him hesitate for a moment, it didn’t stop him from steadily bringing the aim of the weapon up and jamming it against Thomas’s ribs.
The shots weren’t nearly as loud as the others that had been fired awhile ago. Thomas’s body seemed to absorb much of the sound as three bullets tore through his torso, exiting his back in gory jets of bloody mist that spattered the nearby wall. Thomas rolled aside to his left and the killer, apparently already aware that Raina was standing nearby, immediately turned his gun upon her. He was not quick enough to get a shot off, however, as Raina pulled the trigger of her own pistol as soon as Thomas was no longer obstructing her aim. One shot seemed insufficient to ensure a kill, and two still seemed a bit merciful. Raina unloaded every remaining round from the gun’s magazine into the attacker’s face. His ski mask hid more than just his identity, as it also spared Raina from seeing most of the catastrophic destruction she inflicted upon him, essentially turning that ski mask into a cloth sack filled with bloody, shattered bone and jelly-like flesh.
In hindsight, it was a bad move, putting so many bullets through that man’s skull. Had she known that there was a fourth assassin in the house, she would have conserved those last few shots and put them to better use. Alas, the shot that took her in the left shoulder and spun her around would be a painful and bloody lesson to remember.
She fell back and landed directly upon her wounded shoulder, sending an immediate and paralyzing jolt of agony through her entire body. The pain that had started to gradually introduce itself from the two small wounds to her shoulder and upper arm were suddenly replaced by a horrible, absolute numbness. She was hurt, and badly so. Having dropped the emptied pistol as she fell, Raina struggled to immediately push herself upright as her entire left arm refused to function at all. In her shoulder and upper torso, she could feel the sickening crunch of splintered bones grating against one another as she pushed herself halfway up and began to drag herself toward where her sword lay upon the floor.
She both felt and heard the loud pops of more gunshots behind her, and she glanced back through the veil of her tousled hair to see that the fourth attacker, another man with a black ski mask but armed only with a pistol, had pumped a few more rounds into Thomas as he lay upon the floor beside the third and second attackers’ bodies. Almost calmly, he turned his gaze toward Raina and appeared to be watching with amusement as she frantically tried to crawl toward her dropped katana.
With death looming as surely for her as it had already came for the first three attackers (and Thomas), Raina felt her pulse in her head and dimly heard her own cries of pain and desperation as she put everything she had into dragging herself across the floor. The hardwood surface made it rather easy to slide herself along, the skin of her bare left arm lubricated by her own blood as it dragged uselessly underneath her. Raina made one final lunge for her weapon and felt her fingers close around the grip of the blood-smeared sword when three more pops sounded. She rolled onto her back, surprised that she hadn’t felt any more chunks of lead tearing through her body, and she swung the weapon at where she expected the legs of her foe to be. Quite unexpectedly, her forearm made abrupt contact with something heavy and firm before she had fully rolled back over, jamming her slashing movement, and her arm was abruptly pinned to the floor along with the sword as something large fell upon her. It took her a second or two, but she quickly realized that she was staring into the eyes of her would-be killer as he laid upon her arm. She actually felt his life quickly draining out of him in a matter of seconds. The surprised look in his blue eyes soon became glassy and distant as his emotions faded, much like a sheet of paper curling up and turning into ash within the flames of a bonfire.
Seeing that he was dead, Raina jerked her right hand free from underneath his body, leaving the sword under him, and she awkwardly pushed herself up into a sitting position. Samantha was there to assist her almost immediately, saying something to her that she could not quite make out due to the continued ringing in her ears. Pulled up to stand again, Raina immediately hurried over to the third attacker’s body and knelt beside Thomas.
His eyes were closed. He lay still, crumpled up in a corner against the closet doors. His torn shirt was drenched in his own blood, and a drool of crimson spilled from his lips as she pulled him slightly upright. He was completely limp, and she sensed nothing at all from him, not even the slightest bit of emotion – no fear, no sadness, no anger … nothing at all. Thomas was dead. Just like that, here one moment and gone forever in the next. He had been lucky to survive the first attempt upon Raina’s life, but apparently his luck had run out with this second attack. Another life lost to a hail of bullets with her name written upon them, another soul having been sent to that mysterious oblivion beyond mortality into which all people for whom she cared were doomed to be sent for her sake. He had been a good man, brave, honorable, and loyal to the end. In tackling that third attacker, Thomas had likely saved Raina’s life. Alas, Raina’s foolish hesitation to shoot had cost Thomas his own.
Raina couldn’t stop to mourn him, not yet. There could be more gunmen in the house. It might not be over. She had been stupid enough to have assumed that once already. For all she knew, there could be an entire army of assassins coming to get them. Raina picked up the pistol that the third attacker had used to murder Thomas. She pushed herself to stand and shrugged off Samantha’s hand as she went toward the hallway door. With just a glance, though, she realized it wasn’t Samantha’s hand that she had felt upon her hip but rather her own arm as it dangled numbly from her severely wounded shoulder. She forced herself not to be completely horrified by the injury, and perhaps it was only a combination of her rage and the onset of shock that allowed her to storm into the hallway with that pistol out and ready in her right hand.
Nobody was in the living room, but the front door was sitting open. The spare bedroom and bathroom were clear. There might be others waiting outside, but she would attend to that possibility once she was sure that everyone else was safe. Raina pushed open the ruined remains of the other bedroom door, certain that nobody had successfully made it into that room. After all, Thomas had died in trying to prevent the third assassin from entering. The darkness of the bedroom made it impossible to see anything at all, as the flashes of gunfire moments ago had been bright enough to temporarily ruin her night vision. Squinting her eyes tightly in anticipation of the glare she knew was to come, Raina fumbled about with her right hand until she found the light switch and clicked it on with the back of her wrist.
At first glance, nobody was inside. The floor directly in front of the doorway was littered with fragments and splinters of wood from the heavily damaged door. The bed closest to the closet doors had a few holes in the gray comforter where the buckshot that had passed fully through the door. The sheets and covers to both beds appeared to have been flung back in a hurry, as both Sophie and Thomas had apparently still been sleeping before the attack. All three windows of the bedroom were halfway open, as the pair of European residents had apparently considered the eighty-degree norm for inside temperatures to be a bit too stuffy.
Thinking that perhaps there was a chance that Sophie had fled the room at some point, perhaps slipping out of an open window to the side or back yard, R
aina began to turn to head back up the hallway. However, a glaringly obvious detail that had initially escaped her now made her freeze in place as an icy stake of dread was thrust into her heart. How she had missed it before was beyond her, aside from perhaps the angle by which it could be viewed from where she stood in the doorway, but now the large blasted-out areas of damage to the closet doors were plainly and painfully obvious to her. Stepping slowly around the left-hand bed, the one upon which Brenna had once slept so long ago, Raina approached the closet with her weapon raised and ready.
“Sophie?” she called out.
If Sophie was replying to her call, she would never know, as her ears were still ringing so loudly with the tinny whine of white noise that she probably wouldn’t have heard her. Raina’s own words sounded muffled and too damned quiet, but she resisted the urge to yell. Sophie had been screaming when last she’d heard her, so she didn’t want to terrify the girl any more than she likely already had been.
“Sophie, it’s me. It’s okay, kiddo. It’s just me,” she said as she reached for the door. “They’re gone now. It’s all over.”
She’d had her doubts, her fears, before sliding that closet door open. But she’d had no idea at all just how close to the truth that her words had been. Indeed, it was all over … all over the clothes, the carpet, the shoes, and Sophie, herself, as though a bucketful of crimson paint had been thrown upon her.
Sophie lay slumped over and propped upright in the left-hand corner of the closet, held up in a halfway-seated position by a couple of low wooden shelves that held two rows of assorted shoes. Her upper body was obscured by the clothes (mostly black, of course) that hung in front of her. All that Raina could readily see was Sophie’s pale, bare, slender legs, her delicate hands, and a terrible, terrible amount of blood. Sophie was dressed only in an oversized pink T-shirt and panties, and her shirt was completely soaked in crimson from the midsection on down, a few trails of blood having additionally oozed down her bared legs. Both of her hands were sheathed wetly in blood, her left hand still covering the terrible wound she had sustained near the middle of her torso.
Raina felt a thump upon the floor near her right foot and she realized that she had let the pistol drop from her grasp as she stared in shock. Slowly, she lowered herself to her knees and reached for the shirts, skirts, and dresses that hung between them like a curtain of dark cotton and polyester. With dreadful anticipation, slowly moved the clothes aside. Like Thomas, Sophie was completely still and utterly devoid of any emotion that Raina could sense. Trails of blood oozed from Sophie’s lips and nostrils, the shotgun blast at almost point-blank range having apparently caused massive internal damage that even her vampiric physiology could not have overcome. The front of her nightshirt was a ragged, bloody mess from the single shotgun load that had stricken her. Silver-coated buckshot or not, the physical trauma of a blast like that at such close range was virtually impossible for a vampire to survive. Her eyes were half-open, looking almost directly at Raina with a raw stare that seemed to pose a frightened and impossible question … the same one that had haunted her for months:
So … what happens now?
It didn’t take the rest of the world very long to find Raina once again. Minutes later, the resultant swarm of police and media that swooped down upon the once-quiet neighborhood where Samantha Schwarz had lived for so long was simply absurd. Helicopters, both news and police, were on the scene within minutes, and the entire area became a sea of flashing strobe lights of red, white, blue, and amber. Raina and Samantha were separated once again to be questioned independently, and Raina’s wounds were treated on-scene by paramedics.
Raina’s wounds were both severe and superficial. Had Samantha received the kind of wounds that Raina had suffered, she would have been in serious or perhaps even critical condition; as a vampire, a Fallamhain no less, Raina was in a great deal of pain but really not at risk of death from the gunshot wounds she had sustained. The worst that had been inflicted upon her was a wound from a nine-millimeter bullet to her left shoulder that had damaged (but not severed) a major nerve for that arm and practically shattered her left shoulder joint. It had been by sheer luck alone that a major artery hadn’t been opened by that wound, nor by the buckshot pellets that had grazed that same shoulder and her left cheek. Additionally, though she hadn’t noticed it before, one of the shotgun pellets had taken a small nick out of her left ear, as well, halfway up its elongated tip – an inch to the right and it would have entered through her eye socket and punched right through her brain.
Samantha had emerged from the incident practically unscathed. Aside from being mildly traumatized by the attack and by the realization that she had just killed someone, the only wounds Sam had suffered that night were the bite marks Raina had left upon her, mostly in places that the investigators could not notice while she was still clothed. Thomas had died from multiple gunshot wounds, two of which had gone directly through his heart – again, severe wounds that almost no vampire could survive. Raina did not need to be given an official explanation to know Sophie’s cause of death, but the Coroner’s eventual ruling would be that she had expired due to massive organ damage and rapid exsanguination. She could have done without the additional knowledge that Sophie had not died instantly, but had lain there for some time and choked to death upon her own blood as both of her lungs had collapsed. She had likely expired just seconds before Raina had found her.
It didn’t take long for the police to identify half of the attackers, as two of them had been carrying identification. Samantha confirmed the identity of a third attacker, the one that she had shot to death. He had been one of the bouncers that had been “on loan” from Dante Giovanni to work security for “Naughty by Night” that same evening. While they had been more than simple hired goons, these four men were not professionals of the paramilitary sort that had attacked Raina in London. Their coordination and apparent training were due to the fact that all four men were licensed security officers that also worked together as part of a professional bounty-hunting group.
Ironically, while they had made a living by tracking down and arresting fugitive criminals, apparently they also had hired themselves out to commit robberies, acts of intimidation, and (in this case) murder. They had even used their business as a cover for this particular event, as each of them had been wearing a T-shirt with “Bond Enforcement” emblazoned upon the back in bright yellow lettering, in the event that they might have been spotted by neighbors or stopped by police en route to or from the attack. Inside the black Chevrolet SUV in which they had arrived, they even had fabricated fake documentation to provide justification for being equipped and armed as they were, supposedly to track down “a trio of rogue vampires.”
Their employer for this assassination contract seemed rather obvious. After all, the attack had occurred soon after Raina had declared Dante Giovanni to be a rogue vampire, and one of the men had been positively identified as one of his employees. Although utterly exhausted by the toll of her injuries and the emotional strain of everything that had taken place over the past few days, Raina was already preparing herself for her next task. As dawn arrived and the initial on-scene investigation and media frenzy began to settle down, Raina refused to be admitted to a local hospital for further treatment. Instead, she accepted stabilization treatment that kept her impending bloodlust at bay, some heavy-duty painkillers that left her a bit fuzzy-headed and barely lucid enough to function, and binding her left arm in a sling so that her bandaged left shoulder could begin to heal. She would not leave this matter to the police. She was going to find and kill Dante Giovanni herself.
Alas, justice had been carried out by the hands of another.
Squinting against the glare of dawn’s sunlight and protected by both sunglasses and a liberal application of sunscreen, Raina was still trying to convince the local authorities to return her katana when Samantha came running. It was the first time Raina had even seen her since the police had arrived. Sam looked haggard a
nd drained by all that had passed, yet she was beyond excited by something. She held out her cell phone to Raina as she tried to push her way past a nearby police detective.
“It’s her!” she cried, trying to hand the phone to Raina. “It’s Jasmine! She’s alive!”
Her entire body humming with sleep deprivation, painkillers, and a fresh buzz of adrenaline, Raina accepted the phone. Indeed, the caller was Jasmine. And not only was she alive, but Jasmine was the bearer of bittersweet news:
“I killed him, Raina,” she said calmly. “I killed Dante Giovanni.”
Within minutes, Raina and Samantha were in the back of a police cruiser as they accompanied police officers to where Jasmine awaited them, standing on the side of the Apache Trail Highway near Tortilla Flat, deep in the rocky canyon of the Superstition Mountains. She was bruised, bleeding from a stab wound to her right side, her right eye was blackened, her left eye was swollen shut, and two of her ribs were broken … but she was alive. Dante Giovanni, or whatever was left of him, was nowhere to be found.
Jasmine explained all that had happened, speaking softly and calmly with a disturbing lack of emotion. She had been severely beaten and raped repeatedly, and had then nearly been executed before somehow shooting Dante Giovanni with his own gun and then sending him to the bottom of Canyon Lake. By the time help had arrived, Jasmine had already begun to exhibit the earliest signs that her Change was beginning. Even in death, Dante Giovanni would forever be a part of Jasmine’s life as he became her Maker posthumously, having forced his seed into her and, thus, having also forced the Change upon her, much as it had been forced upon Raina.
This, in addition to all of the abuse she had endured beforehand, had all but completely broken poor Jasmine. She was so deeply traumatized, so psychologically mauled, that the emotions that Raina sensed from her were actually frightening. There was an almost psychotic swirl of so many strong feelings radiating from Jasmine – fear, pain, rage, shame, confusion – that when the police pulled her aside to question her privately, Raina actually felt relieved by the increased physical distance. Jasmine was outwardly calm and seemed almost indifferent to what she had endured, aside from the pain of her physical injuries. But underneath that cool and functional exterior, Raina knew that she was in raw Hell. Even without her High Court empathic senses, she had seen it plainly in Jasmine’s almost blank stare. She recognized what she had seen because, in Jasmine, Raina saw herself. That sickened look of both horror and relief she saw in Jasmine’s face was exactly the same look Raina’s own face had worn as police had swarmed over the scene following the death of her parents.
The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations Page 58