Death's Rival

CHAPTER SIX I Never Had a Chance to Say Good-bye

“You were a child of five. You were no match for the white man.” Through my tangled lashes, I saw Aggie One Feather’s wolf snout tilt, like a robin, the motion unsettling, part wolf, part bird, all dream.

“I swore an oath on my father’s blood,” I said. “I wiped it on my face, in promise.”

“Are you certain you failed?” Her head tilted far to the side. “Who did you tell of this great crime? Who did you go to?”

Instantly, I remembered the sharp stick piercing my foot as I ran through the dark, my pale nightgown catching the moonlight through the stalks of corn. The corn towered over my head, the garden never seeming so large in the daylight. Down the hill to my grandmother’s house, the longhouse where she lived with her daughters and their husbands. This was a new memory, and my breath caught before I said, unsteadily, “I went to Uni Lisi, grandmother of many children, Elisi, the mother of my father.” I saw my hand banging on the door. Pounding on it. Saw the door open and the light/heat/brilliant colors blast out. Voices so loud they pulsed against my eardrums. My screaming. The women grabbing up weapons. A hoe. A long knife. My grandmother holding a shotgun. And the long horrible run back through the corn, racing ahead, Elisi letting me lead the way.

In the sweathouse, my heart raced with an uneven beat, like a broken drum, as my body reacted to the memory and its terror. I saw again my mother, in a heap on the ground, naked in the moonlight. The white men gone. The smell of horses. And man stuff. The sound of her crying. The warrior-woman, my grandmother, putting me on a horse, in front of her, and galloping into the night, her arm a band holding me close. The smell of her sweat and her anger. The smell of the pelt she carried. The feel of her beast roiling under her skin—tlvdatsi—mountain lion. Yet the pelt she carried over her shoulder was black.

A black panther, my white mind murmured. Elisi was a skinwalker. Like me. A protector of the Cherokee, a warrior of the tribe.

The door opened, the vision shattered. I sat up.

Aggie One Feather stood in the doorway, fully human, freshly dressed in the coarse woven robe she wore in a sweat ceremony. Just entering for the session. “I was delayed. My apologies.”

“No need to be sorry,” I said, sitting up, standing, my legs feeling wobbly. “But I think I’m done for the day. Can I come back? Soon?”

Aggie tilted her head, just like she had in my vision, but there the resemblance ended. “Certainly. If you’re sure?”

“Very sure. Thank you.”

Back home, I showered, dressed, and fell on my bed, face in the pillow. It smelled musty. I needed to change the sheets. Wash clothes. Maybe get a life. On that thought, I slept.

The sun was setting when I heard a ringing and forced myself awake.

I was in my house, or, rather, the house I was using as long as I worked for the blood-master of New Orleans. It was a nice house, two hundred years old, give or take, remodeled to give it all the modern amenities and still have all the old-world charm, at a nice address in the Quarter.

Yawning, I made my way to the kitchen to see a cell phone lying on two notes, both signed by Troll, Katie’s primo blood-servant and protector. The top note said “Frm: Derek Lee. Angel Tit had no luck with New York contacts.” The second was an invitation to dinner from Katie and her girls. I had missed the girls who lived and worked at Katie’s, and it would be the first relaxing moment in my life recently. I needed some relaxing. The cell started ringing again, so I answered. And heard gunfire. And Bruiser shouting.

“Jane! Are you in New Orleans? We’re under attack!” The phone shifted and I heard him shouting to the side, muffled, “Get him out of here! Alejandro, Estavan, take four men and get our master to Katie’s! Set up a perimeter. Keep them safe! Hildebert, Koun, take over on the battlefield. Lorraine, Bettina, go with Alejandro. Guard your master and his heir! I charge you with—”

“I am going nowhere. This is my home! I stay!” Leo shouted, his voice guttural and vamped out. Even over the phone I could feel the power he was drawing upon, the power of all his clan. “I will not run from my enemies!”

Beast flooded into my system. Phone to my ear, I raced to the side door. I had heard a knock while I slept and hoped it was a delivery. I nearly ripped the door off its hinges. It slammed back against the wall, and I spotted the shipping containers full of my weapons.

“You are of no use to us burned alive,” Bruiser said, going all upper-class British. “Get to a place of safety until we can formulate a plan. Please, Master!”

Master? Things were bad if he was calling Leo Master. I lifted the heavy containers and carried them as fast as I could to my bed. Gunfire sounded so close I held the phone away from my ear. I heard sirens, fire and police, and Bruiser’s voice, grunting. I knew that sound, that specific tone of pain. He was hit. Hit bad. The phone fell and clattered away.

I never had a chance to say good-bye to my father. I had no intention of letting that happen to me again. I tore off the top of the shipping boxes and started to reassemble my weapons.

I bent over Bitsa, the wind tangling my hair, which streamed out in the wind, chilling the necklace of interlocked links that protected my throat from vamp-fang—the new necklace of silver-plated titanium. I took the old bridge over the Mississippi, the pebbled roadway a patterned hum beneath the tires, weaving between cars and trucks of evening traffic, ignoring both speed and safety laws with abandon. I nearly flew into the countryside on the far side of the river. I could see the light on the horizon miles away. A fire. A big fire.

The smell of smoke was hot on the wind. Wood, plastic, metal, brick, each has its own scent markers as it burns. So does the smell of burning flesh. Human. Foul and horrible, like spoiled pork. I shifted my weight forward and lowered my head over Bitsa, the Harley moving at the peak of her engineering specs, taking curves at top speed. Beast shared her night sight, the shadows glowing green and silver and blue. Her reflexes allowing me to handle the greater speed. Mine, she whispered into my thoughts. Mine.

I slowed, turning into the long drive, zigzagging between cars and fire trucks and emergency trucks, red, white, and blue lights strobing the dark, the artificial lights lost beneath the red-orange blaze of the conflagration. Men and women shouted. Water plumed up and over, aiming into broken dormer windows on the roof of the old wooden clan home. Smoke and fire billowed out from the windows of every story; sparks and flames leaped high into the air. Fire demons—tornadoes that sometimes formed above raging fires, sucking the flames into the gyre—spun high above the madness. The smell of magic tingled on the air, hot and spicy as cactus spines. Gunshots sounded in the distance, punctuated by muffled screams and shouted orders. Ahead, near the flames, I smelled Bruiser on the air, Bruiser and his blood, a lot of blood.

I dropped my Harley and helmet against a tree far from the fire, where the shadows would hide the Benelli strapped to the bike. I raced in, bypassing the cops who tried to stop me. Choosing the ambulance surrounded by the most people, I pushed through the throng, tripped over a hose. Shook off a hand that tried to pull me back. Rounded the ambulance, my boots grinding with my speed. Smelling the blood even over the smoke. Bruiser’s blood. Everything in my life narrowed to that one scent. I dodged another man who tried to stop me, shouting it was too dangerous for onlookers. I jumped into the ambulance. Bent over Bruiser, touched his shoulder, and leaned in to breathe in his scent, my unbound hair sliding forward.

His shirt had been half cut away, bloody rags still on one arm and half tucked into his trousers. Blood smeared his chest, as did brown Betadine and swathes of white bandages centered on his upper left shoulder and his right chest below his pec. Bags of clear fluid hung from IV stands; one was a plasma expander, the other normal saline. His eyes were closed and his skin was chilled where my hands brushed over his chest. But he was full of vamp blood. He would have some residual accelerated healing.

I tried to say something, anything, thinking, Are you okay? Or something like that. Something normal. Instead what growled out of my mouth was “If you bleed to death, I’ll kill you and Leo both.”

A faint smile touched his face, but before he could reply, the paramedic said, “Ma’am, unless you’re next of kin, get out, you.” Frenchy patois. Cajun background.

“She’s next of kin,” Bruiser said, without opening his eyes.

“Your wife, she is?” The paramedic sounded incredulous. I ignored him.

“Sure. She can make any medical decisions for me. My lawyer has the papers.”

Which was news to me, if it was true. And wife? I shook that away, even as Beast purred a satisfied Mine. “What happened?” I asked, knowing it had something to do with my trips and the vamp who was attacking other MOCs. “This is my fault,” I said.

He tried to laugh, but his breath caught with pain. I thought I heard something wet and gurgly in his chest, but the paramedic didn’t seem concerned and the sound stopped.

When he could speak, he said, “You struck the match? Carried the gasoline? Tried to kill my friend and master?”

Inside, I flinched at the two terms used together for Leo, who was both vamp and monster, but I kept it there, in the dark inside me. I shook my head no.

“Just after moonrise, Leo was sitting down to breakfast,” Bruiser said. “We heard gunfire. Vamps and blood-servants attacked, killed the gardeners and three security men in the first ten seconds. Inside of fifteen they had us pinned down inside. By thirty seconds, they had firebombed the house and were taking off on trail bikes that they must have pushed in. Then we heard the second wave, gunfire from the surrounding property. It was well coordinated. They were professionals, well trained, and they are still fighting out there.” He lifted a finger and pointed off behind the house. “How can any of that be your fault?”

I had seen the property from an all-terrain vehicle during my review of Leo’s security systems, and hadn’t liked the easy access to the house. But making Leo move into town and give up his family home hadn’t been an option. When I’d suggested the move, he had lifted a narrow black brow and uttered a laconic “No.” I hadn’t argued and I should have. Now that decision was back to bite Leo. Worse was the knowledge that I was even more involved in today’s fiasco.

“It’s my fault because the man I killed in my hotel room was the Enforcer of the master vamp who’s challenging and taking other vamps’ territory.”

Faint humor touched his features, his closed eyes crinkling slightly. “Why do you think that?”

“Leo’s enemy left me a letter on a dead man.”

“A? Z? Q?” the paramedic asked, and laughed at his own joke.

Bruiser’s brown eyes came open slowly, as if they had been glued together. There was pain in his gaze, but also intense concentration and focus. He lifted a finger and touched my hand. I almost jerked away from the contact, his flesh as cold as a vamp’s, but his fingers closed over mine. “When you first saw him in your hotel room, was his gun drawn?”

The question surprised me nearly as much as the gesture. “I don’t know.” I stared into his eyes, unable to block out his study of me. Unable to not remember. It had been months, and what I recalled about the man had been the initial lack of scent on his person. Unscented deodorant, no cologne, only gun oil and lubricants to mark him as armed, and later, the very, very faint taint of his master—which I could now identify as beerlike, hops and fermentation and the sweet smell of blood. I had been naked, asleep, when he entered the hotel suite, my body hidden behind the mounded bed linens. I had risen, whirling, grabbed the statue beside the bed, and thrown it as both a diversion and a weapon, diving for my Walther 380. His arm had been coming up. “He was turned to the side, right arm down and out of sight, looking at my weapons, going through my blades and stakes with his left hand, when I threw the statue at him. It’s all in the police reports. I didn’t lie about anything.”

“You shot first?”

I hadn’t actually seen the weapon until he fired. Spats of sound from an illegal suppressor, like books dropping flat from shoulder height. Then the sound of my weapons firing. The recoil in wrist and shoulder. The stench of gunfire and blood. “No. He shot first.” Which meant that my attacker had been already holding a drawn weapon. An odd tightness in my chest eased.

“Self-defense. Did he say anything?”

“No. He went unconscious fast, even though there wasn’t a lot of blood. I thought he was going to live until they told me that he . . . died. Later.”

“The letter the master Mithran left you. Where is it?”

I slipped my hand from his and pulled the envelope from my pocket. He chuckled, the laughter holding more pain than comedy. “Read it to me.”

I unfolded it and read the letter aloud. When I was done, he took the single page and stared at the words. I heard something stutter-thump-give-way, something from inside him. Bruiser’s hand fell to his stomach, the letter fluttering to the floor. The paramedic cursed and pushed me to the side. Bruiser didn’t take another breath, his chest sunken in and still. I pulled the new cell and speed-dialed a landline number I seldom called. I was shocked when Katie—who hated phones—answered with my name, “Jane Yellowrock.” There was rage in the words, but I didn’t think it was directed at me.

I said, “Leo’s primo is bleeding out. I need someone strong to feed him. Fast.”

“We have our own wounded. Leo is not alone to suffer assault tonight. We too are under attack,” she said, unintentionally repeating Bruiser’s words, from what felt like days ago, as he told vamp-warriors to get Leo to safety and to protect Katie. “My Alejandro and Estavan were injured as their carriage drove up. The little priestess is in a healing trance with them. The elder priestess is missing,” she spat. “The others are fighting and dying to ensure our safety. Who do you suggest I send to feed a human?”

Fury spurted through, me, hot and blazing at her callous disregard of any but another vamp, even a valuable human, like the primo. “I don’t care who you send,” I ground out, “but it better be fast, or so help me, by all I hold holy, I’ll stake and behead you myself, and rip out your fangs and mount them on my necklace.” My breath came hard and fast, as if I’d been running.

“Deo. You would too. And Leonardo would let you,” she hissed. “I will recall someone from the battlefield. He will be there in moments.” The cell connection ended and the ambulance started to move.

“Stop,” I said. When the paramedic ignored me, I swiveled on my heel and slid against the driver, shoving him. One handed, I opened the door and continued my momentum, pushing him off his seat and out onto the drive, even as I slid into the driver’s seat, hit the brakes, and threw the ambulance into park. I looked down, ascertained that I hadn’t run over the driver, and said, “If you’d been wearing your seat belt, this wouldn’t have happened.” I looked to the paramedic in back and started to tell him something, but the words died in my throat. He was doing CPR on Bruiser.

Time slowed into something spiked and thorny, as if each second, each compression to Bruiser’s chest, were a wound stabbed into my soul with a cold iron blade. Again and again. The medic was shouting. Something about getting to the hospital. The driver, also a paramedic, opened the back ambulance doors and jumped inside, black boots landing with twin thumps, two cops behind him. I turned off the ambulance. Opened the door. Threw the keys into the dark. Just before the paramedic body-slammed me.

The world tilted. Smoky air rushed at me as I fell from the ambulance, following the trajectory the driver had taken. The driveway hit my shoulder, hip, one booted foot. Men piled up on me. Pressing me down. Burying me. I couldn’t breathe. Didn’t really want to. I’d lost Rick. Now I was losing Bruiser.

My arms were yanked behind me. My face ground into the pavement. Cuffs ratcheted down on my wrists, cold and metallic. The weight began to shift off me, one body at a time. No one searched me. I was a girl, skinny and hysterical. Why would I have weapons? Or maybe they just didn’t care. Or more likely, they knew I couldn’t get to anything useful, even the gun in the spine holster. When the last man rolled to his knees, I got a breath, painful and short and heavy with smoke. I heard Koun speak. “Get out of my way or I will gut you where you stand. I am here to heal the human.”

I started laughing, coughing, abrading my face on the rough pavement. “He’ll do it too,” I said from the ground. “The blue tattoos are Celtic. Koun’s one of Leo Pellissier’s warriors. He’s about a thousand years old and he’s been fighting since he was in diapers.”

“My father placed my first knife on my belly the very hour I was born.”

“I stand corrected. Or I lie corrected. Let him heal Bruiser. He can save him. It’s why I stopped the ambulance.”

“Bruiser is what she calls the primo. She is in love with him and human women like pet names.”

“I’m not—” I stopped. In love with him? Human? Crap.

I heard Koun enter the ambulance and the doors shut. After that, my world was sounds and flashing lights and smoke and the distant pop of gunfire. There was a battle taking place in the distance. The rhythmic three-cracks of semiautomatic handguns, the overlapping thuts of machine-gun-style, fully automatic and illegal weapons, the boom of shotguns, the guttural shouts of orders and the screams of the wounded. Koun had come from the battle.

I realized that the humans around me didn’t seem concerned about the gunfire I had heard when I arrived. They didn’t even seem aware of the small war in the distance. It was vamp-magic, something new I hadn’t seen before. I smelled vamps on the wind, multiclans of them, only half of them recognizable by scent as Leo’s, the rest the beery scent of his enemy. I smelled vamp-blood and blood-servant blood, a lot of blood-servant blood.

The house, not far from where I lay, burned hot and fast, until the walls started to fall in, loud, roaring crashes, the screech of heated wood. The water from the trucks was now being turned primarily on the trees, the barn, and the outlying buildings to keep the flames from spreading. The house was a total loss, according to the firefighters around me, pulling hoses across me and stepping over me.

Sometime later, the paramedic I had left doing CPR on Bruiser squatted near me. “Sorry, ma’am. I thought you had lost it. Didn’t know you had called a fanghead to help him. I’ll see if I can get you released.” I grunted. Even later, another man straddled me, one boot to either side of my hips, and removed the cuffs from my wrists. My arms slithered down to my sides, boneless and bloodless and tingly, as circulation was restored. He helped me to stand, patted my shoulder, and walked off before I could get a good look at him. But I got a good whiff. I’d know him again.

The paramedic came back, staring at me, studying my face, my body, and only now noticing the array of weapons. His gaze lingered on my ringless left hand. “Are you really his wife?”

“I don’t wear rings when I fight. They can get hung up on things.” Which was a lie of omission and misdirection, but I didn’t care. My voice went breathless. “Is he going to live?”

“We don’t know. He has a sinus rhythm sometimes. A normal heartbeat,” he clarified. “Sometimes not. My partner is bagging him.”

“Bagging him” meant Bruiser wasn’t breathing on his own. I blinked tears away just as Koun stepped from the back of the ambulance, licking his own wrist. I had been healed by vamps a few times, but I didn’t know what it took to be healed from . . . death. Apparently blood, and from Koun’s pale skin, a lot of blood. He was half-naked, dressed in sweat-slick skin, blue and black tattoos and a loincloth, sword at his side. Koun was taller than I was with the shoulders of a Viking and eyes like the North Sea. He was blondish, forever young, and mercy had long burned out of him. He looked and saw me. “I left my master’s fight to heal a human,” he snarled. “You owe me a boon, woman.” He pulled his sword.

I stepped back, going for my Walther. But he was on me in an instant, moving faster than I could see, with a little pop of displaced air. His long blade coming at my throat. Time slid into slow motion. His sword sliced at me, level and lethal, catching the red of embers, wavering in the heat of the burning clan home. Beast slammed power to me. The blade slicked into my throat as I jumped away, still fumbling for the gun even as my feet went out from under me and my muscles went into a shoulder-tucked roll. I landed hard. Heard officers shouting, “Put down the weapon!” And, “Police!” like a chorus of the tone-deaf. Gunshots sounded and Koun stumbled, coming back up upright, the wounds not even slowing him. He stood over me, one foot to either side, much as the cop had stood, his sword held in both hands, blade down, over me. “A boon!” he demanded.

I thought a boon was a favor, but with more connotations, and I wasn’t going to agree to the unknown without a negotiation, even if I sucked at them and I had a sword at my throat. “What boon?”

“I am weakened, and the primo requires yet more blood. You will fight in my place.” With one hand, he pointed to the trees, in the general direction of the gunshots, which were coming closer, more distinct.

“Done,” I said. He stepped back and I rolled to my feet. “How many are there? Who are they?”

“Perhaps three score of the enemy were still alive when I left, unless our attackers have reinforcements. They did not announce themselves by name or clan. We have half that many, fighting against shadows and cowards.” At Koun’s words, the humans nearby should have commented or questioned or at least said, “Huh? What?” They didn’t. More vamp mojo I didn’t understand.

I thought a score meant twenty, so sixty opponents. Crap. It was a small war. I turned my back to him and trotted across the pasture, stopping at Bitsa to pull the M4 and slide into the harness.

Fun, Beast thought at me. Hunt. She poured excitement and power into my bloodstream.

My breath deepened; my heart thumped like a bass drum against my ribs. “Not fun, so much,” I said aloud. No leather and armor, no silver studs, no magical shield to protect me from bullets.

Jane does not have a magical shield. Jane has Beast.

I laughed. “Yeah. I do.” I trotted past the barn, where horses milled, restless and anxious with the smell of blood and smoke. The scent of their fear was like an aphrodisiac to Beast, but the added reek of big-cat sent the horses into full-blown panic. Hooves struck stall walls, screams of terror and challenge bugled on the night air. I sped up to take my scent away from them. Ahead, smoke and lights danced drunkenly in a field, illuminating surrounding pine trees and another horse barn, the central barn doors open to the dark and the stall doors like half-open eyes, staring out over the field. This barn was older, without the telltale scent of fresh manure. By the smell, it was full of hay and diesel-powered machines. The pasture around it had been planted in hay, thigh deep and brown, ready for the final harvest of the long growing year.

Stopping behind a large-bole pine, I studied the scene through all my senses, the night too black and the lights too bright to rely solely on sight. There were five or six vamps and as many human blood-servants in the barn, some bleeding, stinking of sweat and vomit. I caught the strong tang of a chemical that I now recognized, bitter and metallic and artificial. Beneath the metallic tang I smelled the beery scent that belonged to the vampire who had challenged and defeated three master vamps and left them sick. It belonged to the vamp who had sent blood-slaves after me, and who had killed and drained the men on the Learjet. And I realized, standing in the trees, the air saturated with the stink, that though the beery scent was native to the master vamp, the metallic, chemical smell was man-made, not natural in any way.

I looked out over the field of hay and the circle of trees, smelling and hearing others, injured or dead, lying in the tall grasses, some of them the enemy’s vamps and humans, some of them Leo’s.

I smelled Derek Lee, close, only a few paces over, his body strong with the bitter scent of battle. He was speaking into his com unit, and I could hear the new men, the Tequila Boys, his newest former marines, home from Iraq or Afghanistan, talking back into his earpiece, their voices muffled. In the dark, I saw a guy in camo bend over a vamp half-hidden in the grass, and offer his wrist to feed on. It was Tequila El Diablo and it was unexpected that he would be generous to a vampire in need. Not many humans, and even fewer marines, liked vamps enough to spit on them if they were on fire, but maybe they knew one another, or more likely, money talks. Vamps were known to offer most anything when they were wounded and needed blood to heal. El Diablo was unusual for one of Derek’s men. I liked him for reasons I couldn’t name, except maybe his ready smile and his laughing eyes. Marines with laughing eyes are a rarity.

Farther on, I saw another new guy, Tequila Cheek Sneak, as he clubbed a vamp to the ground. It wasn’t one of ours, so I didn’t react, but I made a note to keep an eye on him.

Farther yet, at the edge of the woods, I saw two other Tequila Boys pulling an injured soldier off the battlefield. A vamp followed them to help with the healing; I thought it was Leo’s former daughter-in-law, Amitee Marchand, which was weird on all sorts of levels. Amitee hated Leo, but maybe a common enemy had healed some wounds.

Closer, I scented Innara and her anamchara, Jena, the mind-joined female vamp leaders of Clan Bouvier. One moved, the light of weapons-flash catching her face, and I stepped back into the shadows. Innara was no longer the thin, petite, elegant vamp of our few meetings, but a warrior, lips pulled back in a snarl to expose fangs glistening in the dark, a silver-plated short sword in one hand and a handgun in the other, her eyes vamped out, the blood red sclera like openings into Hades. Her muscles were sharply defined and blood smeared her mouth and chin.

The hairs on the back of my neck rose and bristled. Beast hissed deep inside. I had never seen a vampire at war, and her vision didn’t blink away, but reappeared in negative image on the inside of my lids. She was wearing a headset, a modern accouterment to her primitive fury.

She was upwind of me and so didn’t know I was there until I said, softly, “Innara, coleader of Clan Bouvier.”

Her head jerked and focused on me in the dark. She growled.

“It’s Jane,” I said. “Koun sent me to fight in his place. Will you tell the others so I don’t get shot?” After a moment her lips relaxed and she nodded, speaking softly into her mic. Derek turned to me and I lifted a hand, seeing the low-light-vision goggles on his face. “Where do you want me?” I asked just as softly, trusting her vamp hearing.

Innara moved with the air-popping speed of her kind and appeared next to me. I tried not to jerk, but didn’t quite manage it, and Innara smiled up at me. Not a human smile of amusement, but the hunting smile of the predator who saw prey flinch. “Leo’s Mercy Blade was to lead the assault on the barn, with Koun at his side. In light of his removal from the field of battle, we are reconsidering our options, and then the master’s Enforcer appears, well weaponed. How fortuitous.”

Great. Just freaking great. I had no doubt that Koun meant for me to take his place in the assault too. I looked back at the barn. “I’ll take Koun’s place. Fill me in.”

Instead, Innara spoke into her mic and a moment later I saw a form that seemed to float through the trees like a dark mist, like an owl in flight, his feet never appearing to touch the ground. “The little goddess will fight with me?” Gee DiMercy asked, his teeth flashing in the night. “We fought well in the past. This battle will be a joy and a thing of beauty to behold.”

I flipped the long blade I held, letting it settle firmly in my hand. Goddess. Yeah, right. “And the tactics?”

“Attack from two sides at once, create a diversion, and leave the way open for the Mithrans to eat the fallen. The human soldiers may clean up the leavings.”

“Wrong. No one eats or drains the vamps or the humans,” I said.

Innara growled and the hairs on my neck quivered in atavistic response. “No one tells me who I may not drain on the field of battle.”

I carefully did not make eye contact, to avoid ratcheting up the tension. “The vamps are diseased. And maybe on some chemical. Drug. Something. Can’t you smell it?”

Innara lifted her nose and sniffed, her head moving like a snake, in little jerking motions with each breath. “I smell nothing.”

“Well, I do. It smells metallic.”

“Like silver? Many of our old masters were poisoned when a blood-slave drank colloidal silver and brandy and allowed them to drain her.”

I knew that story. I lifted my blade and sniffed it, smelling the iron in the steel and the silver in the plating. I frowned. “Not silver. Not iron. But something metallic. Maybe a drug. Just don’t drink from them and don’t get bit. Okay?” Innara studied me. The disparity in our heights should have allowed me to feel superior, but I didn’t, I wasn’t. Not next to the fierce little vamp, her fangs picking up the moonlight.

“You think their bite is dangerous?” she asked. “You think the blood of their servants is poisoned?”

I shrugged. “I smell something that isn’t right.” And vamps were getting sick. I didn’t have to add that part.

“My anamchara and I will herd them into a small group. And then we will cut off their heads.”

I chuckled softly at the bloodthirsty comment. “It would be nice to have something left to question after. Also there are cops nearby. I’m surprised they haven’t shown up here already.”

“The police are human, and humans can be swayed to see what we wish them to.”

Which sooo did not make me happy.

Derek walked up, nearly silent in the night, with his soldier’s training, but Innara and Gee DiMercy turned, hearing him coming. “I won’t be part of a slaughter,” he said, “even if the fangheads are naturally armed and bat-shit crazy.”

“You will do as you are told, human,” Innara hissed.

“Enough,” I said. “Derek, do you have flashbangs?” At his nod, I said to Innara, “No slaughter. You and your vamps make a diversionary feint directly at the front of the barn. Gee, you go left with half of Derek’s men, aiming for the open, middle stall door. Derek, you and the rest of your men go in on the right”—I pointed—“to that door, but behind me. When we get to the barn, we throw in every stun grenade we have. It isn’t a confined space, which will limit the noise and concussion factor, but I’ll take what we can get with the light.

“After the blasts, we go in.” I pointed to Gee and me. “We’ll take care of any vamp old enough to still be standing after the candle flash. Derek and his men will round up anyone blinded and temporarily disabled.” Flashbangs produced enough noise and light to incapacitate a human and to blind vamps. Maybe permanently. But old vamps had enough power to survive things the young ones did not, and I’d never tested them on a master. Without a pause, I went on.

“Innara, you and your fan—vamps come in behind us. No drinking, no killing. I want them alive.”

Her eyes lit up, bleeding back to human, her pupils shrinking, sclera paling down from scarlet to merely bloodshot. “So that we can make them tell us everything they know. Yes! I like your plan.”

It wasn’t much of a plan, but I didn’t argue. For some reason they were listening to me. Maybe that ill-fated Enforcer situation. Derek handed two flashbangs to me and one to Gee, demonstrated the use of the military-grade, M84 stun grenades, which I was pretty sure he should not have had in his possession. He said, “We need to pull and throw together, otherwise the suckheads will have time to react and look away, cover their eyes. It’ll be on three.” He tapped his mouthpiece three times to demonstrate.

The vamps moved into the night like snakes in the grass, their bodies weirdly not human, disjointed. I dropped into the hay, Derek behind me. It wasn’t a long crawl, but it wasn’t going to be easy as loaded down with blades as I was. And wearing the wrong boots. And the wrong clothes. Not that I would gripe about it. I didn’t have time to gripe about anything.

We crawled through the hay, crushing the stiff stalks, disturbing insects, sending rodents scurrying and snakes slithering. From one whispered curse, I gathered that Derek was not fond of reptiles. We also set up a cloud of mosquitoes as we moved. With all the activity, the vamps had to see and hear us coming. Great plan. We’d have been better to just charge, except that one group had done that, and engaged someone at the front of the barn. Blades clashed and voices shouted.

I stood up at one corner of the barn, Gee across from me. We met eyes, and the smaller man nodded. Derek tapped his mic. On one, I pulled the pin. On two, I stepped to the door, Derek behind me, mirroring my actions. On three, I threw the grenade. Derek’s lofted high and at a different angle from mine. I pulled the pin on the second flashbang and tossed it, eyes closed, and continued the arc of the throw, bringing up my hands to cover my eyes and ears. A flashbang explodes at 170 decibels and a pyrotechnic metal-oxidant mix of magnesium and ammonium, at over six million candela. The night went white in a series of blasts. Moments later, we rushed in.

I figured it was useless, but I shouted as I ran, “Surrender and you’ll live. Put down your weapons.” Surprisingly, a few listened and surrendered. The fight with the rest was short and brutal. Derek and his men herded half-blind vamps and injured humans out into the night and dropped them onto the ground. Three enemy vamps who could still see went after Derek and his men, leaping off huge farm equipment and out of the hayloft at the former marines. Innara and her vamps attacked before they landed. Sneak Cheek moved off the side at a dead run and clubbed two vamps to the ground. They stayed down. Tequila Sunrise staked them in the lower bellies to immobilize them. It was nice work.

Gee and I turned to the two vamps rushing us from the corner. I fired the M4 at one, emptying both barrels, two hand-packed, silver fléchette rounds into his abdomen, the recoil reverberating through me. The vamp went down but was still alive, struggling back to his feet, even without any flesh between ribs and hips, and only a damaged spine holding him together. He was gripping a sword and an old six-shooter pistol. I kicked the gun away and blocked his human-slow-because-he-no-longer-had-blood-inside strikes until he fell for good.

Shotguns loaded with silver made fighting vamps way too easy, especially the old ones. They didn’t have the mind-set to fear guns and so took few precautions against them. But there was no fair in war. I stood over the vamp. “Yield and you’ll live,” I said.

“No,” he gasped, his face set in stubborn, frantic lines as he bled into the dirt.

I waited until he stopped gasping for breath, until his blood stopped flowing, giving him a chance to surrender. Then, when he looked dead, I took his head to keep him from rising as a revenant.

Gee was a two-blade fighter, moving like the love child of a flamenco dancer and a bird of prey, his swords like two wings, sweeping together and apart, cutting and slicing, his feet balletic, his body graceful. After making sure there were no more vamps in the barn, I holstered the M4 and leaned against a wall, watching him play with the vamp. And it was play, because though the vampire had obviously been fencing for centuries, he looked like a first-year student against the Mercy Blade. I had never fought against Gee DiMercy, and it was a good thing, as he would have cut me to ribbons. Literally. Just as he was doing with a fighter who was way better at swordplay than I was.

When he took mercy on his opponent and called for him to surrender, the man charged him, and Gee took his head. It was just like in the old TV shows and movies about the Highlander, and the saying “There can be only one.” Only without the lightning and wind when the head fell. I couldn’t help it. I clapped.

And Girrard DiMercy whirled with a flourish and bowed, one sword behind him like a wing, the other across his body, pointed down to the floor. “Very pretty,” I said.

He rose with another dramatic flourish and said, “I am, aren’t I?”

I snorted and followed him out of the barn, to find Innara casually staking a vamp.