Charming (39 page)

The vampire tried to wrap his right arm around my legs while his left hand pulled and held his shirt in place. He was pressing my right calf into the space where his mouth was behind his mask: I could feel his fangs tearing through the mask and into my flesh when I pivoted my hips and broke his neck. His limbs dropped like a de-stringed puppet’s. I scrambled to my feet, my Glock in my hand as I surveyed the rest of my team.

It was the first time I’d really thought of them as my team.

The situation seemed to be under control. The Crown Vic was barely five feet away from the edge of the tunnel and there was a piece of black fabric hanging off the grille. As soon as
Cahill had realized what was going on, he must have hit the accelerator and rammed into another vampire that had just jumped out of the pit, knocking the heat seeker back down.

Sig was dangling an impaled vampire off her spear as if holding up a fishing rod, waiting for its body to reach the point of no return. And Molly… Molly was wearing a white cassock whose front bore a cross made of hand-sewn sequins, and she was advancing on another vampire who stood between her and the tunnel. The vampire was struggling to lift his weapon, a Browning of some kind though I couldn’t see it well enough to identify the model, and it was as if he were struggling against a hurricane. As Molly advanced, the vampire took first one, then another step backward, and I have no doubt he would have been forced back over the tunnel edge if his head hadn’t exploded. But it did. Andro had brought his .50 caliber rifle into play.

That made… at least six vampires in on the attack.

Six vampires who weren’t afraid of the sun… or, if they were afraid, capable of overcoming that fear. That was insane.

And then it occurred to me that maybe it was. Insane, that is. Mentally unstable types don’t usually become vampires, because vampires are generally pretty selective about whom they let in their club. Vampires are all about survival, hunger, and competition. None of these are incentives for creating other vampires who can’t control their impulses. Morons like Steve Ellison are the exception, not the rule, and he is a case in point.

But if Anne Marie was intentionally finding emotionally unstable fanatics who were already so borderline suicidal and easily led that they could be turned into kamikaze vampires willing to walk around in the sunlight as long as they wore layers… and this sort of anti-instinctive behavior could be learned
and culturally reinforced… humanity would lose its first and best defense against the undead.

I was picking up my katana to finish the vampire I’d paralyzed when I heard him gurgle the words: “Take… back… the light.”

It sounded like a prayer. If so, it was the first one I’d ever heard a vampire make. I took back his light.

32

W
e were blasting Buddhist chants from two speakers in the back of Choo’s van, and Andrej and Andro were watching the pit with their rifles trained downward while the rest of us gathered around the back of the van. Actually I was reanchoring the nylon cord I’d severed. Everyone else was gathering around me, and it was making me a little uncomfortable. I wanted to keep a clear firing zone around me.

“Those vampires were waiting for us to come close to the hole!” Cahill’s fingers were white around the butt of his gun, and I noticed that he wasn’t taking his eyes off Andrej and Andro. He jerked a thumb in my direction. “If wolf-boy here hadn’t tumbled onto them, we’d be dead right now.”

“But John was here,” Sig said tonelessly. “And now they’ve blown their big surprise and lost half their number.”

Her face was expressionless, but for a moment there was a gleam in her eye as she looked at me that might have been possessive or sexual. I had to look away before I found myself returning it. My adrenaline was still running high.

“Yeah, but how did they know?” Cahill demanded. If he’d
noticed anything unusual between Sig and me, he was ignoring it. “Are you telling me that six of them dress like that and stand around at the bottom of that shaft every day, twelve hours a day, just waiting?”

“No,” Sig admitted. “But vampires move fast, and I don’t know how far away they can pick up on a van’s vibrations underground, do you? Maybe what just happened is some kind of drill they’ve been working on. John killed one of them a few nights ago. Maybe they’re still paranoid.”

There was a subtext here. Cahill was wondering if we might have a traitor in the group, and Sig was reluctant to open that discussion because she was starting to realize that nobody liked Dvornik except his nephews, and she was still inclined to protect him out of guilt and loyalty and habit. Dvornik, by the way, was still zonked out in the back of the van.

“Do you think the snake alerted them?” Andrej called from the edge of the pit.

It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about Parth.

We all chewed that over for a minute. Parth was the only one who knew about the raid who wasn’t there. We had humiliated him in his own home, and he wanted to get my body on a lab table pretty badly. It was also possible that he might not have any more emotional investment in humans than in vampires.

“There’s something else,” I said reluctantly. By this point I was rethreading the nylon cord through the rappelling devices hooked to my climbing harness. “A vampire died here recently.”

Cahill squinted. I think. With his beady little eyes it was hard to tell. “No shit, Sherlock.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, another vampire died here before this morning. Sometime in the last two days or so. I smelled it when I was walking around the pit.”

“You’re sure about this?” Cahill demanded.

“When a vampire decomposes, it’s kind of like coffee being boiled all the way down to the bottom of the pot,” I answered. “It leaves a very powerful stench behind. So yeah, I’m sure.”

Sig looked troubled. Maybe she was thinking about the knight we’d seen. I know I was. “What killed it?”

“My nose works well,” I said testily. “It’s not a crystal ball.”

“Maybe Anne Marie killed one of her followers,” Sig said slowly. “It had to have taken a lot of convincing to train them to go out in the sun like that. Maybe she’s taking control of her new hive with her claws out.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Or maybe Parth came here to talk to them,” Cahill said. “And Mr. Pacifist had to rip a sentry’s head off before they took him seriously.”

Molly looked like she wanted to object, but she didn’t say anything. She hadn’t said much of anything all morning.

“Stanislav said there were only eleven vampires down there,” Sig thought out loud. “And we just killed six of them.”

“Damn straight,” Choo said.

I didn’t see much point in talking any longer. Like Cahill, I was troubled by the ambush we’d almost walked into, but there was no way we were going to turn around now because of a few questions with no definite answers. We’d had a lot of those when we started—hell, that’s why we were here in the first place. I had been worried about Dvornik and his nephews before the ambush, and if Parth had tipped the vampires off… well… the element of surprise had never been a big part of our plans anyhow. Nothing had changed.

Sig seemed to have reached a similar conclusion. “Let’s do this.” At her words the energy in the air shifted discernibly from angry and panicked to frightened but determined. I felt
a surge of something… fondness? Admiration? Sig had the knack for being the spine of a group. I, myself, do not.

I started feeding my line downward into the pit. The line ran through two rappelling devices locked to my harness by carabiners, one at my back and one by my side. I probably didn’t need the backup ’biner for a fifty-foot drop, but I’d always worn one when Australian rappelling in the past. Friction and tension and weight can warp metal fast.

Australian rappelling, by the way, is a slang term for rappelling facedown. It got its name from the fact that the only people who do this are military commandos and insane rock climbers, and an unusually high percentage of the latter happen to be Australian. The advantage of rappelling facedown is that you can fire a weapon downward as you approach a target. The disadvantages are that the physical and psychological strains are greater, and relatively minor things like stopping and landing become more complicated.

My rope hit the bottom of the shaft, and I gave Choo a nod. He pulled the tab on a steam canister and tossed it down the tunnel mouth.

I looked at Sig while I waited to hear the steam canister start hissing. Have you ever tried to use your eyes to tell someone that you want them, that because of them you’re going to do the best you can to survive but that you’re willing to die if that’s the cost of putting yourself between them and anything that means them harm? That you don’t care if they’re playing you, or if what you have is really love, or if the two of you have a shot at lasting, that the very fact that they exist has made you come back to life in some way that’s terrifying and exhilarating? A few seconds isn’t long enough, especially when the person you’re looking at is staring back as if she wants to pull you inside her and crush the two of you into one being. We
were already wearing our air filter masks, and when I pulled my night-vision goggles down over my eyes, it felt like I was cutting myself off from her.

Then everything started happening too fast.

The steam canister started hissing before it hit the bottom of the shaft.

Sig tossed her shield and spear down into the pit.

Something down below let out a startled curse and began making scrabbling sounds, as if hands and feet were both on the ground.

I realized that I really, truly did not want to go down into that vampire nest.

Drawing my Glock, I ran along the cord toward the tunnel mouth and threw myself headfirst down into the hole.

My Glock was pointing at the darkness like a spear tip while I plunged straight down, controlling my descent with my brake hand. Static rope has only 2 percent stretch, and I halted my descent just above the area where the shaft opened up into another tunnel, the entrance at least eight feet high. Whatever had been moving had stopped, maybe because the steam from Choo’s canister was already dispersing.

From here I could see where the heat seeker Cahill had knocked back into the tunnel opening had landed. The vampire had broken through a Punji pit at the bottom of the shaft, smashing through the thin mud-covered reed mat and impaling itself on the multiple sharp wooden stakes below. One of them had gone through its heart.

I fired my Glock into the mud below.

At this signal Choo dropped the flash grenade. That was what we’d agreed on.

A steam canister to make them back off.

A pistol shot to make them focus their eyes forward.

A flash grenade to blind them.

Infra-vision doesn’t keep you from being blinded by sources of heat and light. If anything it makes you more easily blinded, although vampires and werewolves also recover more quickly. Fast healing applies to retinas too.

I closed my eyes, and as soon as the flash grenade made the insides of my eyelids go orange, I lowered myself another four feet. I was dangling upside down, my shoulders now beneath the top corner of the entrance and my Glock pointed down the tunnel. Well, actually, it was pointed up the tunnel. The vampires had made the connecting tunnel into a twenty-foot upward slope roughly as steep as a children’s slide. At the top it leveled out into another tunnel that I couldn’t see. Dvornik’s map hadn’t indicated the elevation change.

The good news was that this tunnel was eight feet tall by eight feet wide; the vampires had built for comfort rather than to limit their firing zone and increase the tunnels’ defensibility. Cahill had guessed correctly: these were amateurs, and amateurs build big.

The bad news was that there was a vampire waiting at the top of the tunnel slope, only visible from the shoulders up. He was lying on the flat surface at the top where the tunnel leveled off, his rifle in front of him, preparing to fire down on me. Fortunately he had been blinded by the flash grenade and his hearing was being messed with by the Buddhist chants echoing from up above, but he knew that something was coming and he fired at the exact moment my head peeked out past the top of the tunnel. The shot plowed into the ceiling of the tunnel a good six feet ahead and two feet to the left of me in a shower of mud. Flecks of it got on my left goggle. The next shot followed immediately and slammed into the floor of the shaft beneath me.