Natural Consequences (66 page)

“This does present something of a problem,” Wentworth mumbled. “We should—er—that is…” His voice faltered in tandem with his mind. Why was it so hard to concentrate?

“We should go in there and slaughter them all!” snarled the sailor.

“He’s right,” nodded Rupert. “They can do a nasty number on one of us with focused fire, but with enough numbers their guns won’t make much difference.”

“Yes, we should—wait. Let’s not be hasty,” Wentworth said.

“Wait for what?” demanded the sailor.

“It could be a trap.”

“A trap?” snorted the priest. “How? We know their numbers.”

“There’s still the angel to worry about,” noted a pale girl in a black flapper dress.

“Yes,” Wentworth nodded in sudden thought, “that’s absolutely right, erm—miss,” he agreed. Damnation, but why couldn’t he remember names? “We must not rush in and be left facing the angel.”

“That’s why we brought Diana and her mongrels,” sneered the sailor.

“Diana?” blinked their leader. “Ah, yes, but, you see… we haven’t seen them in action yet. We must wait and make sure they can do the job.” That sounded good enough, he figured.

“The wolves and the angels are engaged,” growled a familiar voice. Heads turned as another vampire approached from the shadows off to Wentworth’s left. Unferth emerged from under the trees looking filthy and wet, but what caught everyone’s eyes was the broken bone jutting out through the skin of the vampire’s left forearm.

“Where in the hell did you go, mate?” snapped Rupert.

“After my brother, as I said.” He pulled on his left arm with his right hand, wincing with the effort and some degree of pain as the bone gradually returned to its rightful place within his flesh. His eyes turned back to Wentworth. “The werewolves fight with two angels now, both on the other side of the building. It seems like an even match, but that gives us time to act.”

“What of your brother?” asked the
sailor.

Unferth shook his head. “I freed him, but we ran afoul of the demon before we could get outside. Bjorn died in battle with her.”

“Hrm. The demon,” Wentworth frowned. “We’ll have to consider that complication.”

“Consider my ass!” the sailor pressed. “Send a group around back and hit the enemy from both sides!”

Wentworth almost took him up on his suggestion, but hesitated. Everyone else seemed to have something to say, too. It all seemed like good advice, but much of it contradicted the rest.

He wished his people would stop confusing him.

* * *

Amber made it up to the second floor, out of the stairway landing and a few precious yards down the hall
. She didn’t even know where to go. She simply knew there were other prisoners up here, perhaps ones that could help fight off the monsters—if she could figure out where Hauser had locked them all up. Amber slowed only to reload her pistol.

She ran and stumbled in the shadows, wishing a few of the lights would come back on. Bad enough that her ears rang so badly from the fight downstairs, but finding her way around in this darkness would be next to impossible.

A hand caught her arm as she ran, heaving back and bringing her to the floor. A brutal kick to her side drove the wind from her. The same foot to deliver the blow then kicked her gun hand hard, knocking the weapon from her grip.

“Fucking whore,” Rosario barked. She spat blood onto Amber’s face, looming above her with
a facial wound that would have incapacitated if not killed any ordinary person. “I’ll rip out your heart and fucking eat it for doing this to me,” she shouted, much louder than necessary, as she pointed to her cheek.

Amber wheezed out a defiant reply, or at least tried.

“What the fuck ever, bitch,” said Rosario. “I can’t fuckin’ hear shit right now ‘cause of you, anyway.”

Looking around for her weapon, refusing to simply give up, Amber saw only shadows, Rosario’s feet—and a pair of sneakers behind the vampire.

An obsolete computer monitor crashed down on top of Rosario’s skull, enveloping her whole head as glass and internal components shattered. Jason twisted and heaved on it, putting one leg behind Rosario’s to worsen her loss of balance.

He wasted no time. Jason swept up Amber’s pistol, pointed it at the monitor befor
e Rosario could wrench it off her head and fired repeatedly. Rosario jerked from the first shot, and the second and third, but not the fourth. He paused for a heartbeat, then another, and finally kicked Rosario’s lifeless shoulder.

It burst into ashes. The rest of her slowly began to crumble.

“Jason?” asked Amber.

“Yeah. So listen,” he said, turning to her to help her up. “I ain’t even mad, okay? I mean you had a job to do and you didn’t know me and then you were stuck with the whole undercover thing. I get it.”

“What?” Amber blinked.

“I’m just sayin’ I’m not mad. But, like, I know who you really are now, and you know about me an
d what I’ve got going on, and obviously I’m not seriously going to jail for all this shit,” he went on, gesturing with his gun to the crumbling body behind him, “since I’m clearly one of the good guys, right? So can we still date?”

“Jason, are you—how’d you get out of your cell?”

“You mean how’d I get out of an old locked office?” he frowned. “You know how many YouTube videos I’ve seen for that?”

She needed no
further explanation. It seemed perfectly plausible out of his mouth. “There are vampires attacking the building!”

“I kinda caught up to that point already.”

“And you want to talk about dating me?”

He shrugged defensively, gesturing again to Rosario’s corpse with Amber’s gun. “Like I’m ever gonna get a moment like that again?”

Amber shook her head as if to clear out the topic and move on. “Do you know where the others are?”

“A couple, yeah. Here, you should take this.” He handed the gun back to her as he moved to another door. “
You’re a way better shot than I am. Wade, you in there?” he called out.

“Yeah!” came the muffled reply. “What th’ fuck’s goin’ on?”

“Bad guys!” answered Jason. “Amber, do you have the keys?”

“No,” she shook her head.

“Shit,” Jason spat. “Wade, I gotta kick down this door!”

“Aim for just below the doorknob,” Wade advised, “and give it all you got.”

“Right, stand back,” huffed Jason.

“Hey,” Amber counseled, “I don’t think—“

He didn’t wait for her advice. Jason’s foot came up at the door in a strong, solid kick that succeeded only in creating shooting pains from Jason’s ankle all the way up his leg. “Owww, fuck, fuck,” Jason winced, spinning around and hopping on his good foot.

“You alright?” asked Wade from the other side of the door.

“No, that fucking hurt!” Jason snapped. “Did I at least budge it a little?”

A heartbeat passed. “Sure,” Wade plainly lied.

“Oh, son of a bitch,” Jason grumbled. “Just gimme the gun.”

“Wait, what?”

A hand rested on Jason’s shoulder. “Allow me,” its owner said. Lorelei put her foot into exactly the same spot Jason had tried. The door flew open.

“Oh, thank God,” Wade sighed when he saw Lorelei.

“Did you thank Him for putting you here in the first place, too?” she asked with a wry frown.

“Where’d you two come from?” Jason blinked.

“Upstairs,” said Alex. “Do you know where Drew is?”

“He’s in that one over there,” answered Wade as he stepped out of his room and pointed. Lorelei followed his gesture without pause.

“Amber,” said Alex, “we all need to be cool with each other if we’re gonna get out of this, okay?”

She nodded in agreement. “No, I get it now. I’m sorry for everything. Look, I think they killed a bunch of my team and at least half of our
tac support squad, too.”

Whatever else she might have said was cut off by the crash of Drew’s door as Lorelei forced it open. The pair moved to rejoin the others. “I don’t know how many vampires there are,” Amber went on, “but like I said, they’ve already taken down a bunch of my people. I don’t know where Hauser is.”

“He’s upstairs, but he’s out cold,” Alex said. “Something’s wrong in that guy’s head. I think he wanted this to happen. He figured Rachel would have to come to the rescue and wipe out the bad guys.”

“Is he right?” asked Jason.

“Not exactly,” Alex replied.

“Rachel faces a greater problem for
now,” said Lorelei, “leaving us to face the threat we already know.”

“We need a plan,” Wade spoke up, “and I need a—oh, thanks, Alex,” he said as
Alex put the M4 carbine and its spare clips he’d taken from Theo’s body into Wade’s hands. Wade turned his attention back to Amber. “Tell me y’all pack them anti-vampire bullets? No? Shit.”

“We’d never even heard of such a thing until we met you guys,” she replied.

“Why haven’t they just bum-rushed this place yet?” Drew wondered. “They gotta know we can’t hurt ‘em easily.”

“They may suspect the agents here have countermeasures ready for their kind,” Lorelei suggested. “We can’t expect the delay to continue.
We have no hope of negotiating our way out. They cannot tolerate this operation. They
must
capture or kill everyone here. Their social order demands it.”

“Do we try to fight our way out?” Jason suggested.

“Dark buildin’, dark woods, us against sneaky-ass vampires?” Wade shook his head. “We’d get eaten alive. This buildin’s too big to hold with just us. We gotta find a spot we can defend an’ dig in until we find some better option. Need a place where we can see what’s goin’ on outside, though.”

Alex pointed up toward a corner of the building. “Upstairs. You can see out in two directions and there’s enough old furniture to make some barricades. Better than nothing, anyway.”

“Stay together,” warned Lorelei. “I will try to draw off some of their numbers. I am far more suited to such a task than any of you.”

“I’m with you,” Alex said, falling in step with her as soon as she turned to go. He waited for her to argue, but she merely took his hand.

The others would have watched them disappear down the shadows of the hallway but for Wade urging them to move. “We gotta go. Amber, y’all keep anybody else on this floor?”

“No,” she shook her head, following the rest. “No, it was just you guys.”

“Most of the doors are open, anyway,” Drew murmured, “except this one here.” He turned to it suspiciously, sizing it up for a kick.

“Oh, that’s where we kept—
“ she winced as Drew slammed his foot into the door with a precise and powerful kick. “Lorelei,” she finished.

Inside, they saw only a chair, a lamp hanging from the ceiling, and a snoring man on the floor with his pants and boxers crumpled in a pile beside him.

Four pairs of eyes bulged. “Bridger?” Amber burst.

Though initially as stunned as the others, Wade quickly recovered. “Okay,” he said, “don’t lie.
There ain’t
one
of us who didn’t see this sort’a shit comin’ a mile away.”

* * *

Eight feet and seven hundred pounds of teeth, fur and claws all clamped onto a girl’s sword-arm made for a bitch of a handicap.

Though stronger than her opponents, Rachel still had to contend with their size, ferocity and superior numbers. The monsters knew how to fight as a pack, too. As soon as she batted away the lunge of a grey wolf-monster, a black one would leap in to exploit the opening. Its claws slashed down her shoulder and chest, and though she withstood the wounds and kicked the thing away, it gave the red wolf a chance to dart in behind her and
chomp down on her left ankle.

All the while, the black werewolf clawed and clung to her right arm to keep her sword out of the fight. He couldn’t hold her in place, and in fact found h
imself repeatedly lifted off his feet and flung around, but his claws stayed on. She felt them scrape agonizingly through her flesh.

Somewhere in her haze of pain and anger, she heard Donald’s scream. Rachel caught sight of him across the clearing from her. His sword flailed in wild circles to keep his foes at bay with fire trailing in its wake. He backed away all the time, and clearly wanted to simply flee, but then she saw why he couldn’t: one of the beasts had already done a vicious and bloody number on his wing.

Even when walking in the mortal world, few things could touch an angel’s wings. They simply faded through everything, living and inanimate alike. Yet they were real, and an angel couldn’t fly without them.

The first werewolves had been bred to hunt angels. Rachel knew little of that history, but every angel knew how dangerous they could be. Whoever created the first of their kind ultimately abandoned the effort,
finding them too limited or too hard to manage. Yet the legacy lived on and, at the moment, quite literally bit Rachel in the ass.