SEAL Team 13 (SEAL Team 13 series) (30 page)

It was far from good, clearly. The vampire was little affected by any of the weapons they had on their side, and even The Black himself hadn’t been able to do more than antagonize her. It had been the soldier, oddly, who’d done the most damage by taking her arm.

Zero-generation vampires, the originator of the curse, were monsters beyond the ken of most mortals, even those who crossed the veil with relative impunity. They were ravenous, nigh unstoppable, and only the fact that they were generally limited to extremely small areas of influence kept them from waging utter destruction on the world.

She wiped her mouth, clearing it of either blood or drool—honestly she didn’t know which—and focused on the situation at hand.

When the vampire struck Masters aside again, Hannah was granted a clear line of sight, and she refocused her mind and soul on the mission at hand. Her eyes changed to a solid icy blue, patterned like the deep ice of a glacier, and she touched two fingers to her third eye, then to her chest before extending them toward the target and incanting a command.

“
Freeze
.”

The air between her and the vampire roiled as condensed moisture was turned directly to ice crystals, forming a thick trail of mist that connected her to her foe. The deep-level command tore into the vampire, freezing her from the inside out as she stumbled under the assault.

Unfortunately, like everything else they’d tried, what worked on weaker members of the breed had far less impressive effects on the progenitor. The vampire twisted, glaring at Hannah from across the room, and hissed in anger.

“Haven’t learned yet, little priestess?” she asked, mocking. “You don’t have the power to stop me.”

“Perhaps not,” Hannah admitted through gritted teeth as power reverberated through her voice. “However, I will deeply enjoy trying.”

The two began to stride toward each another, only to be startled and stopped by a flash of light from one side that nearly blinded them.

“You know what, bitch? You’re really treading past the limits of my medication.” A tired voice said from one side.

Harold Masters groaned as he tried to peel himself off the coffin he’d been smashed into—every extremity of his body either ached or was worryingly numb. He rolled over, pushing himself up off the wooden box, glaring at it as though it were to blame for his current situation. Perhaps, in a bizarre way, it was.

The lid was still open from when Alex had tried ending the fight before it began, and he found himself looking down into the dirt-filled interior, eyes falling on the severed arm that was resting inside.

Crazy.

He felt like throwing up, but he suspected it had more to do with a concussion than the smell of the decomposing limb. In either case he forced himself upright and took a breath of fresher air before looking back down again. A memory flashed, something Alex had said, and he stared at the limb resting in the dirt for a long moment before a thought came to him.

He reached into his kit and drew out a flare in one arm and an incendiary in the other. It took him a few seconds to catch his breath and move, but he pulled the pin on the incendiary grenade and palmed the spoon even as he looked up to see the vampire and Hannah about to go head to head.

Masters slapped the flare down against the coffin, red flame erupting as the igniter flared, casting shadows throughout the building. With the flare in one hand and the grenade in the other, Masters glared at the vampire.

“You know what, bitch?” he asked tiredly, feeling the weight of the day’s work pressing down on him. “You’re really treading past the limits of my medication.”

The vampire turned to glare at him. “You wait your turn, pest. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll just cut the line.” Masters forced a grin, though he felt more like puking as the world spun around him. He lifted his hands, letting the spring pop the spoon on the thermite grenade.

The room went deathly silent as everyone stared at the explosive in his hand, and those who really understood what they were looking at began to fall back from him. His smile turned more genuine when he saw the two Asatru soldiers grab Hannah by the shoulders and drag her against her will.

“What do you think you’re going to accomplish?” the vampire hissed, clearly confused as Masters dropped the grenade over his shoulder, then slammed the coffin lid shut before he walked away.

“Do you know what thermite does to dirt?” he asked calmly, wondering in the back of his mind if he was going to get to a minimum safe distance. Honestly, he didn’t have a clue; as confused as his head was at the moment, he could barely keep one foot moving in front of the other.

The grenade exploded behind him, sounding more like a whooshing noise than the lethal crump he associated with antipersonnel explosives. He flinched as the heat washed over him, knowing that he was closer than he should be, but when nothing he was wearing caught fire he decided that diving to the ground would be superfluous.

“The same thing it does to everything else,” he answered his own question, noting with satisfaction the look of horrified rage on the vampire’s mangled face. “I’m sorry, did you need that?”

The unholy fire burning in her eyes was answer enough, and it wasn’t really until that moment that Masters understood just how much what was to come would hurt.

“You filthy…insignificant…,” the vampire raged, stalking toward him, clearly in no control of her emotions. “You have no idea what you’ve done.…I will
kill
you for that!”

“You were, what, planning on buying me a drink up until now?” Masters blurted, incredulous.

That might not have been the right thing to say
…, he thought blankly when she roared in totally incomprehensible rage and blurred in his general direction.

Masters threw himself to the left, hitting the ground in a roll as the vampire flashed past him and struck the flaming coffin hard enough to cause the wood to explode into splinters. Fighting back the urge to vomit from the motion, he got back to his feet and spun in time to see her kick away the flaming shards of wood.

“Oh, hell no!” he complained. “Damn you, Alex, you said fire would kill it!”

Alexander Norton laughed painfully from where he was lying on the floor. “She’d have to stand still long enough to burn.”

“Great,” Masters grumbled, the urge to vomit fading as the adrenaline surge of his second wind began to fill him. “That’s just frigging great.”

Any further conversation was pretty much put to rest when the vampire, still roaring in incandescent rage, began stalking in his direction again.

“No fast death for you, filth,” she mumbled, pretty clearly talking to herself. “We’ll see how you enjoy losing an arm. Then perhaps I’ll burn your comrades in front of your eyes before I take your blood.”

“Hoo boy, she’s lost the track,” Masters mumbled, wide eyed as he began backing up. “You guys take care of yourselves.”

With that last comment, Masters spun and bolted for the door, blowing through the open portal at a dead sprint as though all the demons of hell were on his heels. Which, honestly, they might as well have been since the vampire tore after him, raging nearly incoherently as she ran.

Outside the air was noticeably cooler, though Masters expected that was more from the sweat sticking to his flesh than any actual change in the ambient temperature. He ran through the smoke-and-fog-filled night, knowing that he had no chance in hell of outrunning what was on his heels.

They’d tried everything they could, and none of it had worked, so he wasn’t even thinking about killing her anymore. Getting her away from his comrades would come in at a distant second place. He hated it when he had to take the consolation prize and be happy to have it.

Masters just prayed that his team had the sense to clear the hell out and get away from the area while they could. With her coffin and home soil burning, their best option was to leave her to die slowly. Hopefully. Norton’s information hadn’t exactly been five for five up until now, but all things considered, it was the best hope he had.

Too bad I won’t live to see it
.

Masters spun, hefting the big curved kukri blade as he cocked his arm back and then let it fly with a snap that sent it spinning through the night air. The Clan blade flipped end for end, humming as it sliced the cold air, and stopped with a meaty smack as it embedded itself in his pursuer’s forehead.

The thick blade punctured bone with ease, sinking into her skull almost to the hilt, its tip exploding from the back of her skull. She just stopped in her tracks, glaring at him as she reached up and grasped the hilt, slowly drawing the blade out.

“Oh screw you!” Masters cursed. “A knife that big in the head
always
trumps!”

She hefted the blade for a moment, eyes never leaving him; then her hand snapped out like lightning. Masters didn’t even have a chance to flinch as a whooshing sound tore past him, followed by a deep
chunk
from behind him. He turned slowly, eyes falling to where the blade had bit deeply into the door of an oil-company Jeep parked behind him.

The vampire’s misshapen and ravaged face twisted into a sneer as he looked back at her. “No easy death for you, little pest. I will see you broken first.”

“Lady, you are starting to remind me of my exes.”

The two glared at one another for several long seconds; then Masters twisted and bolted for the Jeep.

Norton helped Eddie to his feet. “Are you all right?”

“Broken leg.” The master chief grimaced. “Forget me; go after Hawk.”

“And do
what
exactly?” Norton demanded. “We hit her with everything we had. Damn it, man, it took blessed weapons and a Masterwork to even cut that bitch. We gave it our all, man. Masters may have killed her with that grenade in the coffin, but she’ll outlive us if we don’t get the fuck out of here.”

Eddie growled. “He’s
team
, Black. You don’t know what that means.”

“It means that he just stepped between us and
death
, Eddie,” Alex snarled back. “You planning on making that count for nothing?”

Eddie shoved him away, almost collapsing in pain as his weight fell on the broken leg. “Ah. Fuck!”

“You can’t do anything.”

“He’s right.”

The two men turned to see Hannah approaching them, flanked by the two soldiers from the Asatru lodge.

“What do you know about it?” Eddie snapped. “Hawk kept me from drowning in the South China Sea that damned night. When those assholes in the chopper flew
away
so they could check on the damn cruiser, he was the one who kept me and our package from slipping off the debris we were clinging to and vanishing into the depths like everyone else that night. I’m not letting him be taken out by some walking nightmare from a bad horror movie!”

Hannah looked to the two men at her sides, and she let out a deep sigh when they nodded.

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll do what we can.”

The petite woman nodded to the door, and the two large soldiers followed as she led them out. Behind them, the remains of the navy SEAL team took stock of their situation and found that it wasn’t good.