Ghost tore at Grigor’s flailing hands, slashing with his fangs, biting. I saw a couple of fingers arc through the air trailing streamers of blood. Grigor screamed for the Upierczi to help him and suddenly they were moving, rushing forward, converging on Ghost.
I clawed the pistol butt into my hand, racked the slide, rolled over, aimed.
Sudden thunder filled the chamber. The whole line of Upierczi closest to me went down but I hadn’t fired a shot.
The Upierczi spun and looked up.
And more of them died as bullets tore through faces and chests.
I heard a voice, leathery and deep-chested, bellowing one word over and over again.
“Echo! Echo! Echo!”
And the slaughter began.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-One
The Iran-Kuwait Border
June 16, 6:30 a.m.
Charles LaRoque sat hunched in one corner of the limousine as it raced toward the border checkpoint between Iran and Kuwait. Forty miles and they would be out of the accursed country.
Across from him, Father Nicodemus appeared to be dozing.
LaRoque’s phone rang and he snatched it up, looked at the screen display, and punched the button.
“Where are you?” asked Vox.
“Nearly to the border. We’ll be out of the country in less than an hour.”
“Good. Things are going to hell here. Get out and lay low, and I’ll call you when the dust settles.”
“What about the bombs?”
Vox laughed. “You’ll know if they go boom.”
“Goddamn it, Hugo.”
“Look, Kuwait’s safe ground. Grigor isn’t targeting that. But once you get to the airport go somewhere really safe. Outside of the prevailing weather patterns. Fallout drifts, you dig?”
LaRoque glanced at Nicodemus, who was smiling in his sleep.
“How could so many things go wrong all at once?” asked LaRoque. “I thought you said it was all under control.”
“Yeah, well,” said Vox. “Shit happens.”
Vox was laughing as he disconnected, and LaRoque frowned. His father had trusted Vox, but his grandfather had not. Now LaRoque wondered which one truly knew the man.
“Father-?” he asked.
Nicodemus opened one eye. “What is it, my son?”
“That was Vox.”
“Yes,” said the priest, as if he had heard the conversation. Perhaps he had. He was sneaky like that.
“Were we wrong to trust him?”
“‘We’?” The priest smiled. “I wouldn’t say that we were wrong to trust him.”
LaRoque stared at him in puzzlement, confused by the inflection.
“I’ve always trusted Hugo. Ever since he was a boy.”
“What? But I… I thought… you said you didn’t know him before this.”
“Oh,” said Nicodemus. “Yes, that was a lie.”
“What?”
“I do that,” said the priest. “Lie, I mean.”
“What are you talking about?”
The priest gestured to LaRoque’s pocket. “Look at your mirror. Tell me what you see.”
Deeply confused, LaRoque removed the compact from his jacket and opened it. The top mirror showed his own troubled face, mouth turned down in a frown, brows knitted. Then he angled it to show the bottom image.
It was the priest’s face. It was not the first time LaRoque had seen the priest in his mirror, but there was something different about it. The face was much younger, less seamed and spotted. A healthy face that was nonetheless un healthy. Diseased in a different way. The face was grinning-the merry, devious grin of a trickster.
“Sir Guy was a trusting fool, too,” said Nicodemus. “That’s why I loved him. You, however, are a disappointment even as a pawn. I’ll have to find some new toys.”
LaRoque heard the words, but he could not tear himself away from the image. As he watched the trickster opened his mouth and blew out his cheeks in a huge exhalation. But it was not air that he exhaled; instead a burst of living fire erupted from between the lips of the face of the demon in the mirror.
Sixty yards above the limousine the Nightbird 319 stealth helicopter hovered without lights in the endless predawn darkness.
“Target acquired.”
A voice on the radio headset said, “You are cleared to fire.”
The pilot squeezed the button and launched a Hellfire missile. It struck the car in less than one second and a massive fireball blasted upward from the hard-packed sand of the Iranian desert.
“Target destroyed,” reported the pilot, his voice bland, detached.
“Return to base,” said Mr. Church.
The helo banked left and flew toward the Kuwaiti border. The ground-based radar looked right through it as it vanished.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Two
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 6:33 a.m.
I struggled to get to my feet.
A minute ago I had thought that the whole world was sliding into the mouth of hell, but now a different kind of hell had come to this place of shadows. There were screams and Upierczi running everywhere. Flares popped in the air, painting everything in bright white light.
I took a step toward Grigor and my foot kicked something. I looked down and saw the code scrambler.
I bent and picked it up.
“Cowboy-on your six!”
It was Khalid’s voice, and I turned to see one of the vampires four feet away. I had no time to run. I didn’t want to run. As he slammed into me I buried the pistol under his chin and blew off the top of his head. We hit the ground and I lay there, Upier blood all over me. In my face, my eyes, my mouth.
I rolled over and threw up.
Grigor was still screaming. Then I heard a sharp yelp of pain and looked up to see the Upier fling Ghost aside. Ghost hit the side of a packing crate and collapsed, spitting blood onto the floor. I saw a couple of teeth, too.
That made me mad. Maybe I needed that to shake off the damage and the pain. I came out of my daze and finally the situation gelled in my mind. The Upierczi were rushing outward from me, some were seeking cover, most were rushing at Echo Team. Bunny and Top were at the foot of the metal stairs. Bunny had a combat shotgun with a drum magazine and he was firing, firing, firing. Everything that came at him died. The heavy buckshot soaked with garlic oil poisoned every Upier that wasn’t instantly killed by his blasts. The ones who took a few pellets staggered away, gagging and twitching with the onset of allergic shock.
Top was watching his back, firing a big Navy Colt automatic, the hollow points doing terrible work in the tightly packed crowd.
On the other side of the chamber, Khalid and Lydia were behind a packing crate, using it as a shooting blind to create a cross fire.
“Frag out!” Lydia yelled and lobbed grenades into the heart of the vampires.
The fragmentation grenades weren’t filled with garlic, but the blasts tore the monsters to pieces.
I saw three Upierczi running along the wall toward them, well out of Lydia’s line of sight. I raised my pistol but before I could fire the monsters went down, one, two, three, their heads burst apart by sniper rounds. John Smith, firing from somewhere I couldn’t see.
My knife was on the floor too, and I grabbed it as well. I shoved knife and scrambler into my pocket and tapped my earbud. “Echo, Echo, this is Cowboy. I have the football and I need a doorway out of here.”
“I have your back,” came the reply, but it wasn’t in my earbud. I whirled, and there she was.
Dressed all in black, splashed with blood, a wickedly curved blade in each hand.
“Violin,” I began, but she shook her head.
“No time.”
She lunged past me as several Upierczi rushed my blind side. Until that moment I didn’t understand what “gifts” the dhampyri had gotten from the cauldron of their birth. Violin was not as physically powerful, but my God, she was fast.
She met the rushing vampires, and even though I am trained to observe and understand combat at any level, I could not follow what happened. Her arms moved so fast, her body spun and danced as she threaded her way through the pack, the silver blades whipped with such frenzy that the monsters seemed to disintegrate around her. It was so fast that their blood hung in the air like mist. It was hypnotic and beautiful in the most awful way that perfect violence can be beautiful; and it was horrible because there was nothing natural about what I was seeing.