Midnight's Kiss

by Thea Harrison

  The top three feeds showed different scenes of a battle. Or maybe they were different battles.

  The left feed focused on an image of an industrial-sized, reinforced steel door. The door looked battered and scarred with scorch marks. Two people knelt on the floor on either side of the door, using blowtorches along the edges. Others surrounded them, facing outward with weapons poised.

  The middle feed showed the giant underground parking lot, but instead of peaceful rows of parked vehicles, Vampyres fought and shot at each other. A few cars burned. Billows of black smoke made it difficult to see details, and when she could, several of the Vampyres moved so fast, they were blurs.

  The third feed focused on a wide stone stairwell and more fighting. She caught sight of a few Light Fae guards, along with Julian’s salt-and-pepper hair and distinctive, powerful form in the middle of the undulating wave of people.

  “These aren’t all the same place, are they?” She clenched her hands into fists. “That stairwell is the one that leads into the parking garage, right?”

  “Yes,” Xavier said. He sounded as tense as she felt.

  Someone took hold of her shoulder in a hard, steady grip. She jumped violently and whirled, but it was only Shane. His gaze was sober, even compassionate.

  He said, “With your permission, I’ll put together a small team to send after councilman Leopold. Annis hasn’t left yet. Maybe she’ll agree to go with the team to convince Leopold it’s safe. Then they can evacuate together. You don’t need to be involved.”

  “Good thinking. Thank you.”

  She had already turned back to the battle scenes before his hand left her shoulder.

  Xavier told her, “There are several layers of barriers that were built into the lower levels. The first set of locked doors is at the head of the stairwell, where Julian and his team are fighting right now.” He pointed to the feed on the battered door. “This is the munitions area. There’s a door on the other side of the garage that leads down a hallway to this place. Both of those doors are made of reinforced steel.”

  “If this is a visual of the second door, you’re saying they’ve already broken through the first,” she said.

  “Yes. Rocket launchers and other distance weapons are kept in there. If they break through and get into the munitions area, Julian will have no choice. He’ll have to retreat.”

  Gavin leaned forward, until his worried face looked distorted in the feed, his forehead large and domelike. “Yolanthe and her group are just outside our doors. They were trapped, but now Julian’s attacking from the rear. Justine and Dominic have to deal with a fight on two sides now.”

  Melly began to make sense of the feeds. Searching each scene, she muttered, “Where are they?”

  Xavier knew exactly who she meant. He pointed to the top middle feed, showing the parking garage. “There’s Dominic.”

  Despite the chaos of the battle, Dominic’s tall, athletic form, scarred features and blond hair were unmistakable. He wielded two swords with terrifying expertise. As Melly’s attention focused on him, he staked one Vampyre in the chest and slashed at another.

  Xavier asked Tess, “Can we get sound on this feed?”

  Tess leaned forward to tap on the keyboard. The tumultuous sounds of battle blared over the speakers, and quickly she adjusted the volume.

  Melly barely noticed Shane’s return, even when he laid a hand on her shoulder again. Tension strung her muscles tight until her neck and shoulders ached.

  An eddy of fast movement swirled through the battle. Suddenly Julian appeared, leaping over the heads of a cluster of fighters, sword in hand. While the feed was black and white, his fangs glinted long and wicked, and Melly knew his eyes would have turned hot red.

  Landing, Julian moved toward Dominic, who focused on him and strode forward to engage.

  Oh gods. Uselessly, she reached out to the screen. The blond Vampyre looked confident and lethal, while Julian was a juggernaut.

  As they neared one another, Julian roared at him, “KNEEL!”

  Even despite the physical distance and the all the noise from the rest of the battle, the savage Power in the command rocketed out of the speakers with such force, Xavier groaned and staggered.

  All around Julian, every Vampyre fighter who heard the command reacted. Those visible in the feed slammed down onto his knees.

  Except for Dominic.

  He didn’t kneel.

  But his forward momentum hitched for a critical moment.

  Julian lunged into a blur and struck. Dominic’s blond head flew spinning from his shoulders, while his body froze in a posture of immense surprise before it vanished forever as it collapsed into dust.

  Eighteen

  U

  sing the Power of the blood oaths he had taken as Nightkind King was Julian’s modern-day version of throwing sand in the face.

  The Power command only bought him a few moments, and he doubted it would work again. He had felt the Power shoot out of him like a verbal bullet. It would take a while before he could pull that much together again.

  Also, once Vampyres heard a Power command from someone who was not their sire, they instinctively fought to throw it off and were more resistant to hearing it a second time. The older and stronger a Vampyre was, the less effective Power commands were, until they worked only minimally or not at all, which was why Dominic had been able to resist kneeling, yet he had not been able to contain his reaction.

  Julian didn’t pause to savor his victory over Dominic or wait for the Vampyres around him to recover. Instead, he spun to behead as many opponents as he could while they were still reeling and vulnerable.

  He killed six before the command wore off. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the Light Fae guards who had joined his team were doing the same.

  It turned the tide of the fight. As the other Vampyres recovered, they scattered.

  Quickly he scanned the scene. If any of his direct progeny had heard the command, they would remain on their knees until he released them.

  Julian didn’t personally turn many Vampyres. He didn’t like to carry the responsibility for them. Aside from Xavier and Yolanthe, he had only four other surviving progeny. They were all in the Nightkind guard, but none of them had been close enough to hear him.

  He beckoned to his team, and they gathered around him, facing outward, weapons ready. As they did so, he noticed how Xavier’s humans and the Light Fae soldiers coughed. A few had tied cloths around their lower faces.

  Rubbing his face with the back of one hand, he looked around. The air in the garage was hazy with black smoke from the burning vehicles. The quality of air, or lack of it, didn’t matter to him or to any of the other Vampyres, but it did to the rest of his team.

  He told them, “I’m grateful for what you’ve done, but you’ll be no good to anyone if you pass out from smoke inhalation. Fall back. Go help Melly and her team.”

  They were good people, good fighters. Their reluctance to leave was obvious, but they followed orders.

  As they pulled back, he did a quick head count. He had lost four of his own, and now after sending the humans and Light Fae away, his team was down to eleven. They needed to join up with Yolanthe and her troops.

  To find Yolanthe, all he had to do was follow the noise.

  The hallway that led to the munitions area was across the garage on his right, while the IT area lay to his left. The bulk of the fighting had been on the left, but now it had shifted.

  Toward the munitions area.

  Followed by his team, he strode to the conflict.

  As they closed in, he saw that enemy forces had breached the first security door and gained entrance to the hallway inside. He raced from cover to cover, first hiding behind a concrete pillar, then behind a BMW riddled with bullet holes, while his team did the same.

  Scanning the scene, he finally saw Yolanthe crouched behind an SUV. Lunging into a sprint, he joined her.

  Her dark, short hair and hawkish features were sm
eared with soot.

  When she saw him, she said, “Yo. Glad you’re alive.”

  “Back at you.” He slipped his sword into its shoulder sheath and braced one hand on a fender. “Dominic’s dead.”

  “Witness my happy dance. Fucking fucker.” Rolling up and around, she fired at the open doorway to the munitions hall. “We were pinned just outside IT until you got here. Dominic kept hammering at us, while Justine worked over here. I guess if she had already broken through the inner door, she would have fired a rocket launcher or two in here by now. So there’s that.”

  He had to flush Justine and her fighters out of that hallway before they managed to break through the inner door. Justine couldn’t gain the capacity to send a fireball through the garage.

  A lot of times fighting took finesse, patience and strategy.

  Sometimes it took a high body count and a bludgeoning force.

  He said, “We need enough fire in that hallway to drive them out. I have two grenades. Do you have any?”

  Her dark eyes flashed as she glanced at him. “No. Wait here. I’ll see if any of the others do.”

  While he waited, he rubbed his dry eyes. He had so many things he wanted to tell Melly, but mostly he just wanted to know if she was all right.

  Where was she? How had the evacuation gone? Had they run into any resistance?

  He wanted to tell her, you’re the light of my life. I had no idea how bright and open things could become with you.

  Yolanthe reappeared, running so hard, her body slammed full tilt into the side of the SUV. When he looked at her, she opened her hands and showed him a grenade belt with three more grenades.

  “Okay,” he said. He gathered the belt out of her grasp and added his two to the belt. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll get these into the hallway. I need to get close enough and at the right angle to throw this in, so I need you to cover me.”

  “I love suicidal missions,” Yolanthe said. She readied her automatic rifle and gave him a bright grin. “Let’s go.”

  He gave a ghost of a chuckle and pulled the pins on the grenades. They pushed away from the SUV and raced toward the hallway. While Yolanthe laid down a hail of covering fire, he sprinted hard, spun like a discus thrower, and heaved the grenade belt. He put all the force he could into it, sending the belt shooting deep into the hallway.

  He felt an invisible force punch his right shoulder and left thigh and knew he’d been hit, but his body armor blocked most of the damage. When he and Yolanthe had run past the hallway several yards, they spun around.

  Fighters poured out, fleeing the impending blast.

  One of them was Justine, her auburn hair flying out from her head like a flag.

  She sprinted toward the staircase. She was one of the oldest, most Powerful Vampyres present, and she moved faster than almost anybody else in the garage.

  Except for Yolanthe and Julian.

  Everything in Julian narrowed down to the need to kill. He leaped forward, but his leg buckled underneath him. The hit he had taken in the thigh had done more damage than he had realized.

  Yolanthe wasn’t impaired. She shot forward, moving toward Justine like a linebacker. Leaping, she grabbed Justine by the hair with both hands, bodily lifted the other Vampyre, swung around and flung her through the air.

  Justine’s body slammed into a concrete pillar several feet off the ground. She dropped like a stone.

  Yolanthe said in Julian’s head, Bitch wants to throw down with her lovely locks all loose and shiny? Okay then.

  Down the hallway, the grenades blew. The concussion blasted out through the garage. It knocked Julian to his knees.

  He shoved up, drew his sword and launched toward Justine, ignoring the nearby fire and the fighting that had broken out all around.

  Bitch hadn’t turned to dust either. She wasn’t dead yet.

  As he neared, Justine rolled onto her stomach and came up on her hands and knees. Her teeth were bared in a rictus grin. She reached toward her waist and drew a gun.

  And turned to level it at him.

  Someone ran toward them from his right, aiming an automatic rifle at Justine and firing a constant spray of bullets.

  The shooter was a tall woman with blond hair pulled into a tight bun at her neck. She had a cloth wrapped around her nose and mouth, and she was shadowed by a tall, powerfully built Light Fae male who threw combat spells like sparks of deadly fire.

  Melly.

  Justine’s arm jerked back and her shots went wide.

  Julian regarded the other Vampyre with some degree of incredulity. Bitch still wasn’t dead. But her arm was sure shot to hell.

  He limped forward the rest of the way to her, swung his sword, and Justine’s head spun away from her body.

  It flew straight toward Melly, as it happened, who flinched back and pulled a massive ew face that was obvious even through the masking cloth. Using the butt of her gun, she whacked at the head like it was a baseball, batting it away from her just as it crumbled to dust.

  Meanwhile, bullets flew everywhere, and people still pounded the hell out of each other. Julian grabbed Melly by the waist and hauled her around the concrete pillar for cover.

  He shouted at her, “What are you doing down here?”

  Her eyes went very wide and she flung out her free hand. She looked more than a little crazed as she shouted in reply, “I couldn’t keep watching this on TV!”

  Naturally, her Light Fae troops had returned to the garage with her. Their arrival turned the tide again. While pockets of fighting still raged in a few areas, he saw the battle was essentially over.

  He turned back to Melly. “All those fantastic kill shots you made when you dusted the ferals, and you damn near shoot Justine’s arm off?”

  “All I could see was the gun she had pointed toward your head. I needed to stop it.”

  A fine tremor ran through her body. Her eyes were huge and dark. He snatched her close, hugging her with one arm hooked around her neck. With trembling fingers, she touched his face, his neck.

  The scene around them was like something out of hell. It seemed fitting that hell might be found in Evenfall’s basement garage. The last of the fighting came to an end.

  Overhead, a fire sprinkler system tried to spurt water, but the system was a modernization that had been tacked onto the old, original stone ceiling. The grid of thin, exposed pipes had been too damaged from various explosions.

  As a thin trickle of water dripped on his head, Julian looked up. “That’s not going to be enough.”

  Yolanthe shouted, “Get fire extinguishers down here, people!”

  Melly coughed. “Do you need to be down here anymore?”

  “No. Let’s go.” He kept an arm around her shoulders and stayed watchful, just in case. He had seen too many tragedies occur when people let down their guard at the end of a battle. “It’s over.”

  At that, she barked out a hoarse, rasping laugh and coughed harder.

  “No,” she told him. “It’s not. Annis and Leopold are busily gathering the Nightkind council together. I predict they’ll all be here inside of two hours.”

  He thought about that as they made for the staircase. “Well,” he offered after a few minutes. “At least Dominic and Justine are dead.”

  She put an arm around his waist. “At least there’s that.”

  They made their way back to Julian’s suite, where Xavier hugged them both and Tess gave Melly a wide, relieved smile.

  Meanwhile, chaos reigned. Light Fae troops crowded in. People continued to pop into the stairway tunnel, until someone realized Julian and Melly had returned. Then instead of evacuating, they started pouring back through the tunnel entrance. A loud, excited babble of conversation filled the air.

  “I’m never going to get my bedroom back again,” Julian muttered, as he watched the influx of jubilant, relieved people.

  Xavier told them, “Evenfall still isn’t secure. We need to do a sweep.”

  “We also have to ta
ke care of Dominic’s troops stationed outside.” Taking Melly by the hand, he hauled her into his office, which was marginally quieter.

  Xavier, Tess and Shane joined them. Melly watched as Julian picked up the receiver from the phone set on his desk. He slammed it back down immediately. “The phone’s dead. Goddammit. They did cut the telecommunications cables.”

  Xavier said, “With your permission, I’ll command the sweep. If there’s any more fighting, it’ll be minimal and the guards can take care of it. I’ll also coordinate with Yolanthe to make sure the Nightkind troops are purged of traitors.” Frowning, he paused to regard Tess.

  Tess’s expression turned determined. “You don’t need me here anymore. I’m coming with you.”

  Purged of traitors. Melly swallowed hard.

  “Good, go take care of it,” Julian told the pair. He hadn’t let go of Melly’s hand, his fingers laced through hers.

  Melly said to Shane, “It’s still daylight. We can handle that much better than the Nightkind. Send fifteen troops to help with clearing Dominic’s forces from the area around the castle. And we have to clear out some of the chaos in here. Would you make sure people are directed to go out of the suite, so they don’t linger to chat? And close the tunnel entrance as soon as you can.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Following Xavier and Tess, Shane stepped out.

  As soon as they had left, Melly released Julian’s hand, stepped forward and slammed the door, shutting out the rest of the world. Julian followed her.

  As she turned around, he pinned her back against the door panel with his body weight. Leaning both his arms on the door, he bowed his head next to hers.

  Torn between holding on to him and running her hands over the surface of his scarred body armor, she tried to do both at once.

  “You were hit,” she whispered. “You were limping.”

  He shook his head, his cheek pressed against hers. “I’m all right,” he muttered in her ear. “What about you? Did you take any hits?”