Darkest Hour (18 page)

“Couple of weeks.”

Too long to wait and hope the vamps disbursed on their own. The constant night gave them a frightening advantage. It certainly changed things tactically.

“You’re thinking we have to go in there,” Adam said. His voice sounded thick, sleepy.

“We don’t have much of a choice.”

“It’s going to take more than a single ops team.”

“I know,” Lockman said. The aftertaste of his egg sandwich grew rancid. “We’re going to have to send the whole army.”

Adam and Lockman called together six of their highest ranking members. Two of them—a golem that looked like a clay sculpture of the old cartoon hero, He-Man, and one of the few other humans brought into the fold—had worked on putting together ops for them before. The others had yet to enter the War Room before today.

They all sat around the central table, but most eyes stared at that red spot on the map.

One of the newbies, an ogre brother of Adam’s, raised his hand as if in a classroom.

Lockman tried to remember his name. No matter how much time he had spent with Adam’s brothers, the damn ogres still all looked the same to him.

Adam saved him the trouble and called on his brother. “Yes, Troy.”

“What are our estimates on numbers? Can there really be enough vamps to require our full force?”

Lockman took the question. “Based on intel from the team we lost contact with, we could safely guess that the vamps have either fed on or turned most of Barrow’s population. Depending on how directed they are—”

“You mean, if they have a new king.” The thing that spoke resembled a man-sized slug with pink legs and two mouths. One mouth looked almost human. The other was circular, more like a hole in its face, and lined with needle teeth in at least a half dozen rows. The creature was one of a number of beings they’d recruited that didn’t have a mythological counterpart, something that would traditionally be referred to as simply a demon. They called it an ally.

“King, or any kind of leader. Our impression is that the town’s occupation is more recreational, though. Still. To be safe, let’s assume they turn half the population. That’s two-thousand vampires, give or take.”

The slug thing made a slurping sound through its round, toothy mouth, then spoke with its mortal looking mouth. “That’s more vampires than we have troops.”

“That’s why we’ve gathered the six of you. We need ideas, strategies. We need to come up with a plan to contain that force in Barrow before the situation gets out of control.”

“It’s already out of control,” the human, Dixon, said. His square face had a scar than ran around the edges like a frame. Rumor was, some kind of demonic ritualist had removed his face, and that’s where the scar had come from. No one knew how he got his face back on. He didn’t talk about it. “We were supposed to recruit enough to keep this size of gathering from ever happening. They beat us to the punch. Game over, gents.”

“It’s not game over,” Adam said. “This is not an organized group like we saw in New Orleans. They are also in an extremely remote location. If we play it right, we can thin them out before they realize they’ve got a full assault on their hands.”

Dixon narrowed his eyes. He absently stroked one line of his scar with a thumb. “Maybe.
If
they’re not organized.”

Lockman shifted in his seat. He hated these kinds of meetings. Hating sitting. He wanted to be up and moving. “Like we’ve said. Intel seems pretty solid. This is the vamp version of spring break.”

The third newbie to the War Room didn’t look a day older than ten. She had black button eyes and wore a red and white checkered dress. She was a shape shifter of some kind, and probably about four-hundred years old. Why she chose to look like a toy doll most of the time was beyond Lockman. He had little doubt of her great power, though. He had once seen her take the form of a mastodon, staking vamps with her tusks while stomping the rest under her massive feet. Those mashed under her feet survived only long enough for the follow-up team to blowtorch them to ashes.

A creative way to clear a vamp nest, for sure.

They called her Virginia. Her real name some unpronounceable thing that started with a V sound, so Virginia was close enough. Some called her Ginny for short. She tilted her head back and tittered as if her blood were made of saccharine. “Vamps gone wild,” she said.

A few around the table forced laughter, but most of them probably felt the creepy vibe as much as Lockman. Ginny definitely qualified as one of those
We’re glad she’s on our side
kind of supernaturals. Of course, the golem stared blankly from his chiseled face. Stone men neither laughed nor got creeped out.

The last of the six, the remaining newbie, cleared her throat. This supernatural was classified as a mermaid—or merperson if you wanted to be politically correct. While able to breathe outside of water, unlike how some myths portrayed them, merpeople could not transform their lower bodies from fishtails to legs. This one, who went by Alexia, used a souped-up electric wheelchair to get around on land. Aside from her scaled lower-half, she looked human, and a beautiful one at that. After several meetings, Lockman insisted she begin wearing tops, as she otherwise went about naked, a sight distracting even to some of the non-mortals who recognized human beauty when they saw it.

Her voice sounded like the chiming of crystal, as beautiful as she was. “What of the Chosen One? Surely she can help us.”

Lockman clenched his jaw. Not everyone had yet heard about what happened with Jessie. He wanted to keep it as contained as possible. The golem and Dixon were the only others at the table besides Adam and Lockman who knew. The golem remained his stoic self, but Dixon snorted. “That pooch has been screwed. We’re on our own, beautiful.”

Alexia canted her head and looked at Lockman. “Something has happened to your daughter?”

Interesting how she worded the question, referring to Jessie as his daughter instead of the Chosen One or simply by name. The concern in her voice sounded different to Lockman, too. She wasn’t asking about the loss of an asset. She was asking about an actual person. Something most of these people seemed to forget that Jessie was—a person.

“I’m afraid so,” Lockman answered. “The soul of Gabriel Dolan somehow managed to overpower her.”

Alexia reached across the table and touched Lockman’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

“We’re all going to be real sorry,” Dixon said, “if we can’t contain all this shit. We still haven’t figured out where Gabriel’s headed. Now we got this vamp party in Alaska.”

A jolt shot up Lockman’s spine. He went rigid. His mind drifted away, chasing the thought that had sneaked around the edge of his consciousness. The conversation continued around the table, but he didn’t hear any of it.

Not until Adam shouted his name, snapping him back.

Everyone—every
thing
—stared at him. Even the slug demon that had no visible eyes, had its needle-filled hole aimed in Lockman’s direction. “What?” he asked.

Adam slouched back in his chair, which groaned under his weight. “You’ve heard nothing we’ve just discussed.”

“Last I heard was Dixon whining.”

“Troy came up with a pretty good idea for thinning the herd up there.”

“Alexia over there made me think of it,” Troy said. Then he leaned his large elbows on the table and said, “Crop dusters.”

Lockman stared, wondering what in hell Alexia and crop dusters had to do with killing vamps.

“We fill them with water,” Troy went on. “Have some priests bless the water. Then rain holiness on their vamp asses.”

A rain of holy water. Lockman smiled. “Nice.”

Troy did the ogre equivalent of a blush, spots on his cheeks turning a darker green. “Like I said, Alexia inspired me, got me thinking about water, and then it was just like...ping!”

Lockman turned to Adam. “Feasible?”

“We have connections that could get us the equipment. It’ll take time putting it together, though. Especially getting it to a location like Barrow.”

The muscles in Lockman’s neck twinged. Before this day ended, he would probably be chewing on aspirin. “Make it happen as fast as you can. We have less time than we realize.”

Lockman felt that communal stare at him again. He had the attention of the entire table and he was making them nervous. Good. Because it was time to be nervous. Real nervous if what he’d been thinking about when he had zoned out earlier was right.

“Last night I told Jessie about the situation in Alaska,” Lockman said. “If Jessie knows, that means Gabriel does, too. The opportunity is too ripe for Gabe to pass up.”

“Whoa, hold it a sec,” Dixon said. He’d lost some color in his face, accentuating his scar. “You’re saying Gabriel’s headed to Alaska to throw gas on that vamp fire?”

“I’d bet my life on it.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Even without the fatal weakness to it, traveling by daylight was tricky for a vampire. Mortals did not react well to the gray pallor and dark veins, nor the fangs when they accidentally flashed. Going unnoticed proved difficult. Gabriel had filched a makeup kit from a department store and did his best to cover the most obvious indicators of vampirism. Still, when he tried to interact with anyone, they refused to take him seriously because to them he looked like a fifteen year-old girl with a bad makeup job and even worse complexion.

While he did manage to hitch a ride to the nearest airport, Gabriel had to kill the driver when the driver attempted to rape the girl. Gabriel blamed himself for the attack. He should have known better than to hitchhike in the body of a young teen. However, Gabriel took the opportunity to feed on the failed rapist and drove the old Pontiac himself, with the body in the trunk, the rest of the way to the airport.

All for naught.

The woman at the ticket counter refused to sell Gabriel a ticket—which he planned to buy with the cash he had taken from the rapist—insisting he needed parental permission to travel as an unaccompanied minor. Apparently, some airlines had tightened up restrictions since Jessie had flown from Michigan to California to find her father a couple of years earlier.

Alas, day walking had not been as freeing as Gabriel thought it would.

You really thought you could just catch a flight north looking the way you do?

The girl again.

Gabriel sat at a back table in a fast food restaurant at the airport, contemplating his next move, when her voice interrupted his thoughts. He swallowed his irritation. After all, she was correct. In his haste, he had become short-sighted. Conventional means of travel would not serve. But if a group of average-brained vampires could find their way to a remote city in the middle of the frozen tundra, surely Gabriel could as well.

After the woman refused to sell him the ticket, he had purchased an atlas from a gift shop. He opened the atlas now to a full map of the United States. He pinpointed his location in Texas and looked at the surrounding areas, not recognizing any of the names outside the big ones like Dallas, Austin, or Fort Worth. He had little knowledge of this state, and no connections to anyone. He knew of no supernatural hotspots, though there had to be some. Such beds of supernatural activity existed in every state.

Not to worry. He would simply have to make his way out of state. The closest locale he knew that had a strong supernatural presence was in New Mexico. If he pushed, he could make it there by that evening. Of course, he would have to obtain a new vehicle, one without a body in the trunk. Finding and stealing a car added one more annoying step between him and his destiny.

Embarrassing that he possessed so much power, yet could be stymied by such ridiculous complications.

Just a common murderer and car thief now, huh?

Gabriel slapped the atlas shut and stood.
Enjoy your laughs now, girl. When darkness reigns, I doubt you’ll find much funny.

Whatev.

Ignoring the girl, Gabriel strode out of the restaurant with the atlas tucked under his arm and began the search for his next prey.

Chapter Twenty-Three

This time they sent the ghost.

He loomed over Kate as her eyes fluttered open. His glowing face floated only inches from hers. She imagined he meant to scare her, but she managed to close her throat before she screamed and kept as stoic a face as possible while her senses returned after the pixie dust coma Mica put her in...again.

The ghost named Thom smiled. “Here’s where I say
boo
.”

Like with Mica, Kate mentally shoved at the ghost.

He didn’t budge. That’s when she realized not just his face hovered above her. His whole body floated in the air about six inches over hers. He quirked an eyebrow. “Neat trick, huh?”

A deep cold oozed through Kate. Goosebumps covered her skin. The memory of another ghost invaded her mind. That was why they sent in Thom. And why he had been the first to interrogate her. They somehow knew about her experience with the ghost who had possessed her. They were using her fear of that encounter against her.