Ambushed (6 page)

He
waved me over before I could ask him what was going on and as I got
closer I realized that the door hadn't been soundproofed very well.

"…I
pay you for results, not excuses. No, if I had any clue where they'd
gone I wouldn't need you. All I can figure is that they decided to
try and make a run for it after they saw how much those kids were
carrying."

There
was silence for a couple of seconds while the vampire listened to
whoever was on the other end of the line and a smile crept out onto
my face. It was ironic that the vampires' own nature was working
against them like this. If their boss had even a shred of faith in
their loyalty he would have made a run for it himself after they
failed to report back to him. Instead he'd just assumed that they'd
taken the money and run.

"No,
they haven't taken a plane. I've got normals in place watching all of
the outbound flights. They have to be trying to make it out by
boat…no, they wouldn't just go to ground, not for more than a
day or so, at least. Any longer than that and their conditioning
would start pushing them back to me."

My
smile started to fade as I realized that the phone call was a
double-edged sword. It meant that we knew he didn't suspect us of
having been the reason his people had disappeared, but it also made
our attack less likely to succeed. We couldn't go through the door
right now and risk him saying something to whomever he was talking
to, but by the same measure we couldn't just wait outside of his door
indefinitely.

I
stepped away from the door and walked back down the hall, making sure
that I was far enough that the vampire wouldn't be able to hear me.

"Jess,
we need you up here. Grab the desk clerk and take the elevator. Maybe
if someone shows up they'll just think he's using the bathroom or
something. It's not much, but we need every edge we can get right
now."

I
waved Jasmin back to the elevator to help Jess with the doorman and
then rejoined James at the door.

"…I
don't care, just make it happen. I want a status update in four
hours."

There
was a muffled impact that I was pretty sure was his phone hitting the
sofa, and then what sounded like bare feet moving across tile.

James
looked at me expectantly, but I was still trying to make a decision
when Jasmin and Jess arrived. I'd put on a confident front for the
others, but I was worried about going up against this particular
vampire.

In
a lot of ways mentalists were the most dangerous vampires to tangle
with, and this one had nearly overpowered me from several feet away.
I'd been sure we could take him if we had surprise on our side and
caught him half asleep. I wasn't as sure we could take him in a
standup fight, at least not without losing someone from our side.

Jasmin
and Jess quietly lowered the doorman down onto the carpet and I
finally decided that we had to move now or risk having the building
surrounded by police at some point in the next hour or so once people
realized that the doorman was missing.

I
double-checked to make sure that there wasn't a security camera in
this hall, and then ripped my ski mask off, shed my clothes, and
unleashed my beast.

The
transformation swept through me and took most of my worries with it.
Part of that was the fact that I'd already made my decision and it
didn't do any good to second-guess a plan once I was committed to it,
but mostly it was the fact that my beast was looking forward to this
particular fight.

My
beast saw things as being much more black and white than most people
did. For him vampires were bad, they were dangerous and they preyed
on the humans that legends said we'd been created to protect. As far
as my beast—my wolf—was concerned, the only good enemy
was a dead enemy and he couldn't wait to make sure that this
particular vampire would never again pose a danger to us.

It was a heady,
addictive feeling, but it wasn't my first time dealing with it. I
forced my beast back into a corner of my mind, not far enough back to
trigger a transformation into human form, but far enough that there
wasn't any question who was in charge. I was going to fight this
vampire, but I was going to do it on my terms, fully aware and
calculating.

My
transformation was the signal that the others had been waiting for
and they all followed suit in a multi-pointed surge of power. A few
seconds later everyone was ready and I charged forward, throwing all
of my considerable bulk against the door.

The vampire had
chosen well. The door was well-constructed and the locking mechanism
held despite the titanic forces I unleashed upon it, but the hinges
gave way and I stumbled into the apartment as the door went flying
into a wet bar only a few feet inside of the entryway.

James was less
than half a step behind me with the girls mere inches behind him. We
must have made for a fearsome sight, but the vampire reacted with the
kind of smooth reflexes that were inevitable after centuries of
infighting against other vampires.

We'd managed to
catch him by surprise, but I hadn't counted on the apartment being
quite so big. Our massive hybrid legs devoured nearly ten feet with
each stride when we were running like this, but even so it took us
too long to reach him.

He held his
hand out and a sword flew across the room towards him, arriving a
split second before I did. I slashed at his neck, but he knocked my
claws to one side and probably would have taken my head off at the
neck if James hadn't followed up my attack with one of his own.

The telekinesis
was a bad sign. Most vampires had only one supernatural ability. The
fact that this one was enough of a telekinetic to grab his sword like
that meant that he was probably even older than I'd expected.

Jasmin nipped
at the back of his leg, but was forced away as his blade nearly
sliced off her front paw. Jess tried for an arm and got an elbow to
the side of her head that sent her sprawling. The vampire ducked
under my next attack without even looking at me, and I suddenly
realized that he must already be inside of our heads.

"He's
reading your minds, don't overcommit!"

The fight
ground to a halt between one second and the next as James, Jasmin and
Jess all took a step backwards and turned most of their attention
inward in an attempt to push the vampire out of their minds.

Their actions
were understandable, but it was a mistake. I unleashed my beast,
pointing him at the clear, almost invisible tendrils invading our
mind, and grabbed a nearby chair. The improvised projectile spun as
it left my hands, blurring towards our opponent.

I nearly got
him. He slapped the metal projectile to one side at the last moment
with a blast of telekinetic power that sent it into the
floor-to-ceiling window behind him, but his response was delayed. I
was already moving towards him, trying to capitalize on his
distraction, but that didn't stop me from worrying.

My worry proved
justified a split second later when Jasmin threw herself at James.

I tried to take
the vampire's head off with the claws on my right hand, but even as
he ducked away and slashed at my leg with the curved edge of his
sword, I had visions of him taking all four of us over at the same
time.

James managed
to interpose his elbow between Jasmin and his throat, but it was a
close thing. A heartbeat later Jess sailed through the air and
wrapped her jaws around the back of Jasmin's neck. It was a killing
hold, but it didn't have to be. From there Jess could hold onto
Jasmin and for the most part control her.

Almost as soon
as Jess got ahold of Jasmin, James took a swipe at Jess. I yelled out
a warning as I grabbed two more chairs and threw them at the vampire,
but if Jess hadn't been paying attention she still would have been
killed. She released Jasmin and darted to the side, getting just far
enough away that she was able to roll with the force of James' blow.
She came up bleeding, but still alive, which was more than I'd had
any right to hope.

Jasmin nipped
at James, apparently having been released as soon as the vampire had
taken James over, but the momentum of the fight had shifted away from
us. All four of us had been hard-pressed to keep the bloodsucker
occupied. Now that he was turning us against each other there didn't
seem to be much hope of winning.

Amazingly, one
of the chairs I'd just thrown clipped the vampire in the shoulder
before ricocheting off and hitting the window behind him. He stepped
out of the path of the third chair, and the cracks on the window
behind him doubled in size.

I had managed
to hit him though, and that meant he couldn't take one of us over and
stay inside our minds well enough to anticipate our every action at
the same time.

Jasmin yelped
in pain as James connected with his claws, but I was too far away to
stop James, and if I let myself get distracted it would leave the
vampire free to do whatever he wanted. I heard movement off to my
left and charged forward just in time to avoid a large knife that
leapt off of the kitchen counter, powered by a telekinetic push.

There wasn't
any way to get all of us out of this particular fight alive. I'd
gotten us in over our heads, which meant that I needed to be the one
to save them.

My dodge of the
knife hadn't just been a single step forward. That's probably all it
would have taken to avoid being impaled, but I'd dashed towards the
vampire at a full sprint. The distance between us wasn't sufficient
to get up to full speed, but I came close and the vampire obviously
hadn't been expecting that.

The smart thing
would have been to avoid overcommitting. You had to commit your
bodyweight to any given attack when you were fighting another hybrid
or a werewolf because they were too big for anything less, but that
wasn't how you fought a wolf.

For those kinds
of fights you kept your weight balanced so that you could change
directions on a dime and used your claws in lightning-quick attacks
to keep your enemy off balance. Fighting a vampire was a lot more
like fighting a wolf than anything else and that went doubly so when
it came to fighting a vampire who might or might not be inside of
your head at any given time.

I ignored all
of the rules of smart fighting and threw myself at the monster
currently inside of my friend's mind. The katana darted in from my
left side, but the sheer stupidity of my attack succeeded in catching
the vampire off guard. He started to hold his ground just like he
would have done against a human, but even if he'd cut me in half that
still wouldn't have been enough to stop me from colliding with him.

At the last
second he tried to move to the side, which robbed his blow of most of
its power. My claws deflected the blade up into the meaty part of my
side, and then my right hand grabbed him.

We were going
to hit the glass hard.

Maybe the glass
would have held if it hadn't been compromised already by the chairs
that had cracked it, but more than likely we still would have
shattered it. I pushed the vampire ahead of me and felt him trying to
break into my mind in the split second before he hit the window.

It was the last
effort of a desperate man, but even as dark threads of thought
breached my defenses I knew he was too late. Even if I'd been trying
to stop us from hurtling out into space I wouldn't have been able to.

I heard
footsteps, James' heavy hybrid thumps and the lighter ones from the
two girls and wondered whether or not one of them was still being
controlled by the vampire, but that didn't matter either. Even
another hybrid couldn't stop me now, there was simply too much mass
moving at too great of a speed.

The glass bowed
as the back of the vampire's head hit it, and then it shattered. I
had so much adrenaline in my system that it all happened in slow
motion. One moment I was looking at a single pane of glass,
spiderwebbed with cracks, and then tens of thousands of pieces
shivered in the air as the vampire cut through them in a spray of
red.

The vampire was
all of the way out of the building now, but he let go of his sword
and was trying to grab hold of my arm. It didn't matter, nothing
mattered anymore, but I didn't want to fall to my death connected to
a parasite who had killed thousands of people to preserve his
unnatural existence.

I shifted
forms, and the vampire's hands closed on empty air, my human
fingertips now ending nearly a foot sooner than they had as a hybrid.
The vampire finally realized that there wasn't anything he could do
to save himself and I saw a level of terror on his face that I hope
to never see again.

Popular culture
glorifies vampires and portrays them as powerful beings who survive
for centuries based off of willpower, but at that moment I saw the
truth. He'd survived for centuries, but it hadn't been because of a
drive to achieve some kind of master plan. He'd survived because he'd
been terrified of dying.

I closed my
eyes as gravity started to take hold of me. Things had happened so
quickly that I couldn't have traveled more than a few inches, a foot
at most, out of the building, but I had nothing to push against, no
way of reversing my course.

I had a moment
to hope that my death wouldn't hit Rachel too hard, hidden away back
in the States against her will because I hadn't wanted to expose her
to danger, and then my leg was practically ripped from my body.

The pain nearly
made me black out. It wasn't just the sudden deceleration. James
tried not to tear me up too badly, but he'd been most concerned with
stopping me, so he'd sunk all five claws into my leg nearly down to
the bone.

My course
reversed with a suddenness that would have been impossible with
anything less than the massive, preternaturally strong muscles of a
hybrid powering the change, and then I was sliding across the floor.