CHAPTER 18
Harold Masters was not having what he’d consider a good day.
Hell, it wasn’t even a so-so day.
He was quite comfortable declaring it to be a very bad day, in point of fact. The ache in his bones wasn’t crippling, but he could tell that once the adrenaline wore off he wasn’t going to be moving anywhere very fast.
He groaned as he got to his feet, far less steadily than he would have liked, and walked on wobbly legs over to where he’d dropped his blade. After retrieving it, he turned to watch as Hannah, Rick, and Perry danced with the macabre vampire.
He couldn’t see what the hell was keeping her in one piece, given how many holes they’d blown into her body. She didn’t regenerate like they did in the movies, but damned if it seemed to make much of a difference.
Bullets just seemed to flat out piss her off, even those that left gaping wounds that would have killed a bull elephant. The heavy fifty-caliber round he’d put into the bitch’s head had literally split her skull, and he knew that it had to have scrambled what little brain matter was in there, but it hadn’t seemed to have any effect. He just couldn’t get his head wrapped around what kind of thing could possibly survive a hit like that.
At the moment she was taking on Hannah and two trained soldiers, and it was immediately obvious to him that all three of them were quite comfortably on the wrong side of the veil. Hannah’s punches were clearly stronger than they had any right to be, but he’d seen supernatural strength more than a few times since he’d set foot across that invisible line.
The faint glow of the swords the other two were carrying was more interesting, as was the fact that they seemed to have an effect that went above and beyond the bullets. Strikes from the weapons clearly burned and hurt her, so much so that she was dodging their blows rather than blocking them. He was impressed — they knew what they were doing.
“It won’t be enough.”
Masters turned, grimacing as pain shot through his head. “What?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Norton said, nodding toward the fight. “They’re good, they’re very good…but she’s going to kill them.”
Masters spat out blood, then wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “Not gonna let that happen. I need a plan of attack, Alex. Help me out here.”
“Cut her heart out,” Norton said, hefting his Bowie. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“First fire, now ritual sacrifice?” Masters snorted as he got ready to throw himself back into the battle. “You’re such a cheery bastard today.”
“Must be Monday,” Norton said, joining his friend as they began to limp toward the fight.
I need to learn how to fight.
Hannah had done a great many things in her short life — she’d survived trials that would have killed grown women; she’d learned secrets of the universe hidden to all but a piddling fraction of living souls — but despite her allegiance to the gods of Valhalla, fighting had never been her strong suit.
Case in point, she thought sourly as she barely dodged a claw strike. The three of us are getting our arses handed to us by a one-armed woman. Though, admittedly, “woman” is stretching the term a bit freely.
Spotting an opening, Hannah lunged in and delivered a blow to the vampire’s guts with surprising force. The vampire grunted from the blow, but was barely fazed as she crushed her elbow down into Hannah’s back, driving the smaller woman to the ground.
Rick and Perry charged in, covering Hannah as she gasped on the ground, their swords forcing the vampire back as the burns sizzled in the cool air. A couple of shots rang out, and bullets tore through their foe’s face and throat — the hits would have been lethal to anything human, but they were little more than an annoyance for the creature before them.
The bullets served their purpose, though, letting the two soldiers bodily pick Hannah up and pull her back from the fight as she gasped for air.
Mack, Derek, and Judith closed with their HK417 rifles roaring, intent only on buying time and space for their comrades, but in a flash the vampire was on them with a claw strike that sliced Derek’s throat open in an instant. The SEAL went down, his rifle falling to hang on its strap as he clutched at his ravaged flesh.
“Derek!” Mack screamed, eyes blazing.
Together, the two had faced down sights that would chill other men to the core, and that was before they’d crossed the veil. Since then, they’d both realized that their days were numbered, but at the same time, the reality of it had never really sunk in in some ways. He and Derek had stood shoulder to shoulder for so long that he couldn’t remember a time without the other man.
“You bitch!” Mack lost his cool, charging in and hammering into her with the butt of the rifle.
For all the good it did, he may as well have struck her with a child’s toy.
The vampire shrugged him off easily, then backhanded him across the room with a single blow. He hadn’t even landed when she turned her focus to the third of their little trio, eyes fierce as she bore down on Captain Andrews, showing as little respect for her blazing 417 as one might give a child armed with a pea shooter.
Judith fired her mag dry as the thing approached, freezing when her rifle slide locked open on the empty chamber. The face she was looking at was leathery and dry, pockmarked with holes and torn flaps of flesh from her team’s bullets, but despite that and despite the glassy dead look in its eyes, the thing would just not return to the grave.
Her rifle was torn from her hand, swung away in a backhanded motion that casually hammered Robbie Keyz to the ground as he too tried to charge their adversary. The thing, the vampire, didn’t even looked back at the fallen EOD man.
“You are all beginning to try my patience,” the walking horror said to her, the smell of decomposition making Judith gag as she fell back. “Have you not learned yet? I am beyond you!”
Judith cringed as the vampire swung the rifle again, smashing it into a thousand pieces against the cement floor. She used that moment, clawing at her service pistol as she took a step back. Training took over — it was the only way to explain how smoothly the motions went.
Step back, clear the distance to the enemy, she thought as she drew her weapon. Front site, center mass. Squeeze smoothly. Repeat.
The Browning nine-millimeter she carried barked as she fired as fast as she could pull the trigger, her target not even bothering to dodge. In three seconds the slide locked back on another empty chamber. She didn’t have time to even flinch at the knowledge that she was out of ammo before the monster gripped her hand, gun and all, with a crushing force.
Judith screamed as the bones in her hand cracked and broke, caught between the irresistible force of the vampire’s grip and the unmovable steel of her own weapon.
And then the pain was gone, like a switch being turned, and she fell to her knees as a chaotic flurry of action erupted around her.
Hitting the bitch was like a spear tackling a brick wall.
All right, that wasn’t entirely true, Masters had to admit. Despite her strength and refusal to break, the vampire didn’t have the mass of a wall, so she moved when he hit her. The problem was that she also recovered inhumanly fast, as the fist to his spine quickly showed.
He was wearing body armor, however, and it spread out the impact enough that he didn’t lose his breath…or have his back snapped like a twig. The force still pushed him down to one knee, but Masters took that as an opportunity to slash his target’s legs out from under her.