She had her arm clamped over a stomach wound.
The men surrounding her were yelling and pointing weapons.
Lilith coughed, and there was blood on her lips.
The two men in dark clothes laughed.
Lilith’s invasion had gone horribly wrong.
Deacon took all of this in within the space of a heartbeat.
He did not pause, did not waste time processing or strategizing. He tore a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, hurled it.
It was a flash-bang, a stun grenade developed by the British SAS. Deacon dropped into a crouch and covered his head with his arms. Even so the bang was almost unbearably loud. The burst of light stabbed him through his shut eyelids.
The men in the room screamed.
Deacon immediately opened his eyes, took his guns in both hands again and began firing as he rose. He was peripherally aware that the two men with Lilith were beyond the effective range of the flash-bang and yet they had their hands to their ears, hissing in pain.
He noted it, but it was far from a matter of first importance as he felt his gun buck in his hands.
His first shot took a scientist in the side of the face. It was not intended as a kill shot, though the bullet punched a wet hole through cheekbone and out through the opposite cheek. The intention had been to drive that man into the men beside him. The collision took three of Deacon’s opponents out in one second. He swung his pistol and fired four shots, two each to guards, hitting them as they turned toward him, the first shot to each hitting bodies to jolt them to a stop and the second hitting them in the head. Small caliber rounds lack the power to exit the far side of a skull, so instead they bounce around inside and destroy the brain. It was why the caliber was the preferred weapon of assassins.
That left two men immediately able to respond.
One man had the fire axe.
The other had a pistol.
Deacon shot the second man in the face and then put the axeman down with a head shot.
He calculated his ammunition. Eight shots fired. Four dead, one wounded, two recovering from the collision with the scientist. That was a full magazine and the one he’d chambered. He dropped the magazine and reached for a second, but one of the two survivors rushed him so fast he had no time to finish the reload.
Deacon stepped into the attack, pivoting his body as he tilted his weight onto his front leg. Both hands moved out as he simultaneously blocked with his left forearm and rammed the unloaded pistol into the attacker’s face hard enough to jolt the man to a stop. Deacon recoiled his gun-hand and chopped the man in the Adam’s apple with the gun.
The man dropped at once.
But now the second man was up and in motion, bringing his rifle to bear. If he’d dropped the gun and used his hands, or if he’d swung the rifle stock at Deacon, he might have had a chance. Instead he tried to aim the weapon.
Deacon stepped into him, dropping his own pistol as he intercepted the swing of the barrel and grabbed the long-gun with both hands. He turned his second step into a flat-footed kick that shattered the man’s knee so badly the leg buckled and bent the other way. Deacon tore the gun from his hand, reversed it and pulled the trigger.
The gun bucked as two rounds hit the man in the chest, but then the slide locked back.
Empty.
Deacon tossed the gun aside.
Twenty feet away the two men in black and Lilith had all turned toward him.
Her eyes were filled with pain and hate.
Their eyes were filled with a pernicious delight that was appalling to behold. And those eyes were all wrong. The irises were not brown or blue or green. They were red. As red as the blood that painted this room. Instead of round pupils, theirs were slits. Like the eyes of reptiles.
The two men smiled at him.
Deacon felt the blood in his veins turn to ice.
The intelligence reports, the rumors about the killers called the Red Knights…so much had been beyond belief. Horror stories. Crazy lies.
Except….
Except now the truth was like a punch over the heart. It stopped the world for a terrible moment. It tore the mind open and jammed in like daggers.
As their lips curled back, Deacon saw their teeth.
So white.
So long and sharp.
They had teeth like dogs.
Like wolves.
Like monsters.
“They’re Red Knights,” screamed Lilith. “Deacon, they’ll tear you apart. For God’s sake…run!”
Chap. 4
He could have run. He was closer to the door than the Red Knights. He could be outside, reloading as he ran, safe in darkness.
He should have run. This was Lilith’s fight. His government — even the small, clandestine groups that endorsed Deacon’s personal agendas — had in no way sanctioned any contact with Arklight. The few people in the U.S. government who even knew of Arklight considered it a borderline terrorist organization. So this was not his fight, and Lilith was not his ally.
He would have run. But that would have meant that he was a different person than he was.
Instead, Deacon let the empty assault rifle clatter to the floor.
“No,” he said.
The Red Knights — whatever they were — smiled with their wicked teeth. Their red eyes flared with the joy of a coming slaughter.
One of them stepped closer to Lilith. He had black fingernails, and blood dripped from them. Was that the weapon that had torn the screams from Lilith? Deacon was sure it was.
“I’ll finish the whore,” said that one, speaking in thickly accented French. He pointed at Deacon. “His blood is yours, my brother.”
The second Knight laughed, every bit as coldly and cruelly as a villain from an old-time movie. A stage laugh, and it should have been comical, should have inspired laughter or groans from the audience. And, in any other place, under any other circumstances, it might have. But this was a monster laughing at the thought of red slaughter. An actual monster.
A fanged killer.
A drinker of blood.
A thing that should not exist outside of fiction or nightmares or the tortured dreams of lunacy.
One vampire said something to his companion, rattling off a few terse sentences in a strange language that sounded vaguely like Latin but wasn’t. It gave no clue to the nationality or ethnicity of these Red Knights.
These things.
Deacon neither needed nor wanted a translation. Death was coming for him. That was the gist; he didn’t require details.
The Red Knight began moving toward him. Not fast, not using its speed. It stalked him, anticipation twisting the smile on its face. This was what it enjoyed. The hunt. Maybe more than the kill.
The Knight held out his hands and flexed his fingers, displaying thick fingernails as sharp as bear claws. Claws for tearing the humanity from a person, claws for rending to the bone.
Deacon began backing away.
This made the Knight laugh. A low chuckle, echoed by his companion. Lilith sagged to her knees, blood streaming from between the fingers of the hands she pressed to her stomach.
“Run,” she said weakly. “Run….”
Deacon turned and ran.
The Knight howled with delight and ran after him.
It took only six steps for the monster to catch the man.
Suddenly Deacon dropped to the ground, arms wrapped around his head, knees drawn up into a fetal ball.
The Knight paused, confused.
Not at that, but at the thing that floated toward him. Something his prey had thrown as he twisted and fell.
There was only a fragment of a moment to react.
The Knight said the same thing Deacon himself had said a few moments ago.