The Black God (#2, Damian Eternal Series) (19 page)

The bunker beneath the warehouse was tiny
compared to the open floor of the bay. The sound of quick footfalls
made them duck into a nearby room. Ashley counted ten vamps race
past them towards the stairs before the hallway was quiet.

“I think there’s more than three dozen
here,” she observed.

“Charles says at least double.”

“What are they guarding?”

Hector didn’t answer but opened the door and
stepped into the hallway. They hurried in the direction the vamps
had come from, past several more darkened rooms, and into what
appeared to be nothing more than a barracks area.

“That’s it?” she asked, disappointed.

“This is good,” Hector said
simultaneously.

Ashley rolled her eyes and
gave the room a once over visually. “I see nothing here.”
And no Brandon.

“Valon had a good size unit guarding this
place. If –”

Rustling came from behind them, and they
both whirled. Before the hiding vamp was able to flee, Ashley had
tackled him to the ground. The sharp, hot electricity of a Taser
ripped through her, and she was flung off.

Gasping, she waited for her seizing to
subside while Hector smashed the vamp to the floor.

“What is it with vamps and … Tasers?” she
grumbled and rolled onto her belly. “You didn’t kill this one?” She
climbed to her feet with effort and shook off the shock.

Hector hauled the bloodied vamp up and
shoved him onto a chair. “We need to know what or who was here.” He
radioed Charles briefly to report in. “Search the area,
Natural.”

Ashley sheathed her knives and began
wandering through the cots, tables and chairs. “What am I looking
for?”

“Anything interesting.” Hector said and then
smacked the unconscious vamp.

Ashley glanced over her shoulder, uncertain
she wanted to see a vamp interrogation. If Jonny’s men were as
ruthless as he was, it wasn’t going to end pleasantly.

She walked without real purpose. There were
no bags or belongings anywhere that might identify who was around.
A familiar scent reached her heightened senses, and she paused. She
stood between two cots, one of which was pressed up against the
wall. Both had unfolded blankets as if the occupants had left
quickly.

Kneeling between them, she
waited for the scent to tickle her nose once more and then
stretched for the blanket on the cot against the wall. She sniffed
it and almost sighed. “Brandon,” she murmured, recognizing his
favorite
cologne
.
For once, she was glad he sprayed too much. She shook out the
blanket to see if he’d left something there to help her find
him.

A pool of blood had soaked through and
hardened a section of the blanket. Her heart skipped a beat, and
she stared at it. What had they done to Brandon? After a quick
search, she returned to Hector, who had managed to rouse the
vamp.

“Brandon was here,” Ashley said. “What
happened to him? Why was he bleeding?”

“Wait your turn, Natural,” Hector growled
and pushed her aside.

“No!” She pushed him back and shook the
blanket in front of the rogue vamp. “What happened? Did someone
bite him?”

The vamp glared at her.

Furious at the thought they’d been using her
brother as food, Ashley dropped the blanket and whipped out her
knife. She stabbed the vamp in the thigh.

He jerked and hissed in pain.

“Where is my brother?” she demanded and
withdrew the knife.

He didn’t answer, and she stabbed him
again.

“Your brother is not the mission,” Hector
shoved her aside once more. He lifted a Taser. “Charles won’t ask
why I had to use it.”

Ashley yanked her knife out of the vamp’s
leg and fumed silently off to the side. She soon began to pity the
captured vamp. Hector Tasered, beat and twisted his arms into
pretzels. She flinched as she watched, willing the stupid vamp to
just answer the questions about what was down in the basement.

“Kitchen!” gasped the vamp finally.

She perked up, and Hector eased back.
“What’s in the kitchen?” he demanded.

“Go … see …”

“I’ll go.” Ashley volunteered. “You can keep
doing … this.”

Hector nodded, and she left quickly,
relieved to be away. She had no love for vamps, but she didn’t like
to see anyone suffering either. Ashley scoured the bunker and found
the kitchen accessible through an entertainment room with a
television and couch. She crossed through to the space the vamp
indicated and looked around.

The counters were empty. She searched the
cupboards. They, too, contained nothing. Suspecting he had tricked
them, she started to leave when she heard the sounds of shouting
and foot traffic. Several vamps raced by the entrance to the
entertainment room. They weren’t Charles’ vamps, though, and she
began to suspect Charles had gotten in over his head upstairs. She
waited for them to continue down the hallway and started forward
but stopped and turned suddenly.

She hadn’t thought to check the fridge.

Ashley retreated to the corner where the
refrigerator was and opened the door. Two boxes – one a shoebox,
the other the size of a large ring box – sat on the top shelf. She
reached in and grabbed both quickly to set on the counter. Not at
all certain what vamps kept in the fridge, she lifted the top off
the shoebox first.

“Oh … yuck.” They’d severed someone’s hand
and placed it in the center with a folded dishtowel beneath. She
replaced the lid with a grimace and opened the ring box.

The eyeball staring back at her was the
exact same hue as hers.

Ashley didn’t move, didn’t breathe for a
long minute. She pushed the lid off the shoebox once more and this
time, reached in to grab the hand inside. It could’ve been anyone’s
hand, and she was trying to convince herself of this when she
flipped it over and saw the faded blue ink where Brandon made his
to do list on a daily basis.

Until this moment, Brandon’s danger hadn’t
felt real. It had seemed simple to her. She’d help Jonny as a means
to help Brandon. No one would hurt either of them, because of
Xander.

Jonny and Xander both had
warned her it wasn’t a game, and she brushed them off, along with
Xander’s claim about there being consequences to every choice.
Those consequences, the danger, the idea one or both of them may
not survive this, that Brandon might die before she reached him or
perhaps she wasn’t able to handle everything without help … these
realities hadn’t felt
real
before she discovered the evidence that she was in
over her head.

How stupid am
I
? Jonny was right. Xander was
right.

Brandon was in the kind of danger she wasn’t
able to protect him from. And maybe no one else could, either.

With calmness she didn’t
feel, Ashley replaced the lids of both boxes and slid them into her
backpack with trembling hands. It hadn’t yet clicked she held her
brother’s
hand
or
that his eye had been staring lifelessly up at her.

“Hey!” the shout of a vamp from the entrance
of the entertainment room jarred her out of her thoughts and back
into her danger.

Because she was in danger. Just like
Brandon. This wasn’t another night beating up vamps for some stupid
hope of revenge against someone she didn’t even know anymore.

This was a civil war, one she and Jonny were
caught in the middle of.

Something clicked inside
her. This wasn’t a game. There was a chance one of the people she
loved most in the world wasn’t going to survive
this
.
Brandon was
being sawed into pieces for reasons she couldn’t begin to
guess.

This time when Ashley drew her knives, she
could think of only one thing: making anyone who had a hand in
hurting her brother pay for it.

The sound of Hector scuffling with vamps
distracted her briefly before she launched at the two moving
through the entertainment room towards her. Ashley drew a breath.
Her hands shook from emotion she wasn’t able to feel at the moment
but which she knew would be as powerful as one of her seizures when
it hit.

Her attack on the vamps passed as if she
were in a dream. Disengaged yet acutely aware of everything, she
didn’t try to refrain from killing as she usually did. She let her
instincts control her weapons and closed her eyes to the spray of
blood. Its warmth soaked her, before she had even made it out of
the entertainment room.

When the two vamps had stopped moving, she
assessed her situation swiftly.

No regret or fear or anything that might
discourage her emerged. She was glad the vamps were dead and proud
to have been the one to end them. For all she knew, they had hurt
her brother.

And no one who hurt Brandon was going to
make it through this.

Ashley strode into the hallway towards the
barracks area where she heard someone getting his ass beaten. She
didn’t need to look to know it was Hector on the ground. As soon as
she set foot in the barracks, she was a flurry of lethal activity.
Hacking, stabbing, slashing. She was too quick for her first few
vamps to have the chance to attack her. One managed to scrape her
arm but paid for it instantly with his life.

Within seconds, everyone but her and Hector
was dead.

“’
Bout time,” he complained
and got to his feet. “I got nothing else out of him. What did you
find?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said in
a strained voice. “What orders did Charles give next?”

“He got cut off. They were fighting last I
heard up on the –”

She whirled and sprinted through the
hallways of the underground bunker. Ashley took the stairs two at a
time and dashed into the open bay. The dark side remained silent.
Her emotions close to breaking, she raced to the doors dividing the
warehouse in two and pulled one open. Stepping into the north bay,
it took all of two seconds for her to figure out Charles and his
remaining four men had been captured by around thirty vamps.

She needed to dance, to keep active, to
block the fear and guilt about to break over her and prevent her
from doing anything but crying for her brother. Ashley did the only
thing she knew to do. With an infuriated battle cry, she launched
at the vamps approaching her. She began to fight. This time, she
didn’t care about holding back her weapons or moves to spare the
lives of those around her. This time, she fought to kill.

Jonny checked his phone the second Charles
reported in. The vamp was late, but Charles was only late when
there was an issue. Expecting the usual long report, Jonny frowned
when he read the four words Charles had sent instead.

You better come now.

Jonny scanned reports coming into the
makeshift command center to ensure his other teams weren’t in
trouble in before Traveling to the location he’d given Charles. By
and large, their first night dedicated to raids was successful. Two
of the five places they hit had been hideouts for the rogues. A
third was a backup safehouse that appeared unused and the other two
already abandoned. Jonny would happily take three out of five and
call it a victory.

The vamp he materialized near jumped and
then stepped aside. Ten rogue vamps lay dead on the ground in front
of the entrance of the warehouse with two of his vamps posted as
guards.

“North bay,” the vamp
beside him said. “Charles is expecting you. Cut through the
warehouse,
ikir.
”

Jonny strode forward into the darkened side
of the warehouse, aware of his vamps stationed periodically along
the way. When he entered the lighted half, he slowed. Charles had
two vamps with him, but it was the carnage that caught his
attention.

Jonny was at first surprised then pleased to
see three dozen dead rogues before him, until he saw who sat in the
middle of them, her head bowed and frame shaking. The sight of
Ashley alone and trembling made something twist inside of him. He
canned the emotion. He had too much to lose as it was without
letting his feelings cloud his judgment.

“What happened?” he asked without lifting
his eyes from her.

“I don’t know,” was the quiet reply. “Your
little Natural just went crazy and started killing everyone. We
helped, of course.”

“Ashley doesn’t kill.”

“She did tonight.”

Something’s wrong.

“We’ve searched everywhere and found nothing
here. No reason for there to be wards or so many of them located in
one place. I suspect Valon was here but slipped away before we
arrived,” Charles continued.

“Get everyone back to Virginia. Pick up
dinner along the way,” Jonny ordered.

“You got her? My Taser’s missing.”

Jonny snorted. “Yeah. I’m good.” He waited
for Charles to move away before he ventured into the killing field.
Jonny picked his way through the dead, attention on Ashley. She was
soaked with vamp blood; even her hair dripped with it. Any doubt he
had about her killing was gone by the time he reached her. Her
knives were at her side, and her arms wrapped around a shoebox.
Concern fluttered through him, no matter how hard he wanted not to
feel anything.

“Ash,” he said quietly. Unafraid of her, he
nonetheless knew when a wounded animal required a softer approach
than he would usually consider. He crouched close enough to see her
features, not about to touch her if she was close to exploding.
“Ashley. Are you ready to leave?”

She shifted and lifted her head. Her eyes
were haunted and her features tight. “He was here.”

“Who?”

She wordlessly handed him the shoebox she’d
been clutching. Jonny smelled the blood before he opened it and saw
the severed hand. He nudged the top off the ring box next and
observed the body parts before him, unaffected by the gruesome
sight or knowledge they were pieces of her brother. He had hardened
himself to violence and what his people were capable of.