Charming (38 page)

Working as part of a team again was… different. It felt good, sort of, in some ways, but it had been a long time since I wasn’t making all the decisions for myself by myself.

I looked over at the piano Choo was sitting in front of. He was finished with his food, so I nodded at it. “That piano. Can you carry a tune?”

Choo was morally outraged. “Carry a tune?!? Bitch, I can perform CPR on a tune if I have to.”

Just as a side note, calling a male werewolf a bitch isn’t really all that good an idea. In fact, it’s a really quick way to get your throat torn out. I’m not as sensitive about that sort of thing as full werewolves who are part of a pack, though, so I let it go.

“How about some music?” I asked him. “Might as well make this a party.” I left out the part about this maybe being the last night of our lives, but from the look that rippled over his face like some kind of emotional earthquake tremor, Choo heard it anyhow.

He took the bamboo tray he’d been balancing on top of the piano and went into the kitchen. I heard a trash can open, then a cabinet open, then a clink of glasses and ice. When he came back he was carrying a small glass of amber liquid.

“Just one,” he assured me, seeing my look.

“What is that?” Molly asked.

“Kentucky bourbon,” I said.

Choo stared at me.

“I’ve got the nose, remember?” I told him. “And I’ve been a bartender.”

“Ooh, I want one!” Molly said, and extricated herself from the recliner by handing her puppy over to me. Lewis whined and licked my chin. It would take a long time for him to nip me playfully.

Choo swiveled around and lifted the cover off the piano keys and let his fingers ripple over them experimentally. He played a few snatches of something classical. I can’t tell Vivaldi from Bach, but it sounded OK.

Molly came back in and sat down with a glass of bourbon in her hand, and Cahill got up, no doubt to investigate the fountain of alcohol that had mysteriously started bubbling up in Choo’s kitchen. I kept the puppy.

“Your real name is Chauncey,” I said to Choo. “You play classical music. You grew up around here.”

He flashed a quick grin at me. “My mama used to teach at the university here. Now she teaches in Chicago. She put a lot of pressure on me to go to college, so naturally I went into the army right out of high school.”

“How did she take that?” I asked.

“She replaced me with twins,” Choo said. “I got two half sisters who are nineteen years younger than me, if you can believe that shit, and I expect they’ll both be in school for the rest of their life. Mama doesn’t like me to be around them much. Afraid they might get disappointment poisoning.”

Choo didn’t want to talk about his mother anymore and
launched into something classical and stirring that I didn’t know. He was good. He was really good.

I didn’t look at Sig, but I knew the music was making things a little better. Maybe if the vampires didn’t kill us all tomorrow, and Stanislav or his nephews didn’t contact the knights, or hadn’t contacted them already, and didn’t try to shoot me in the back as soon as my usefulness was ended, and the knights didn’t show up as a result of their own investigations…

Damn. That was a lot of maybes.

31

T
he first thing that went wrong was that Dvornik didn’t come out of his trance. He was breathing shallowly and rapidly, and he seemed unable to stay awake for more than four seconds. Sig assured me that shaking him awake was a bad idea; she was crouched behind Dvornik, who was sitting in the passenger seat next to Choo. Sig, Andro, and I were all in the back of Choo’s van. He had unbolted and removed the backseat but left a frame to which we could anchor our climbing harnesses. We were in the middle of the clearing where the tunnel entrance was supposed to be, far from the eyes of man, and ready to jump out of the van and start rappelling.

“He’s been pushing himself too hard lately.” Sig had her fingers on the pulse in Dvornik’s throat. She looked guilty and stricken. “His body can’t take as much strain as it used to, and he’s been under a lot of physical and emotional stress.”

I remained silent while Andro glared at me. We knew how many vampires there should be—eleven—and a rough map of the tunnels that Dvornik had drawn two days ago, but it would
have been nice to have had some verification from our psychic scout on the day of the actual raid.

Oh yeah, and I was worried about Dvornik too. I was worried he might come out of it.

“Should we postpone for another day?” Choo asked quietly from behind the wheel.

Sig and Andro and I all answered at once. “No.”

Ahead of us, the Crown Vic that Molly and Cahill were riding in with Andrej pulled to a halt, and Choo began maneuvering so that he could back the van next to it.

There wasn’t really any point in trying to take the vampires by surprise. With their enhanced hearing they would detect the vibrations of our feet or whatever vehicle we approached in. The truth was, we weren’t mounting a raid so much as a siege with a twelve-hour time limit. Our biggest tactical advantage was the sun over our heads. We might not be able to sneak up on the vampires, but as long as it was daylight we had a safe place to pull back to if things went sour. Plus, we didn’t have to worry about them swarming up out of the ground like angry wasps and overwhelming us while we set up a base of attack.

Or that was what we thought, anyway. Vampires stay out of the sun because it affects them psychologically as well as physically. If their skin were just extra-sensitive, they could bundle up or wear tons of sun block. No, vampires have an instinctive fear of the sun that goes all the way down into their bone marrow. It’s as if they’re naughty children, and the sun is God’s eye.

Which is why I knew something was wrong as soon as I climbed out of the back of the van. I’ve hunted things that burrow before and recognized the sounds I was hearing even if I couldn’t see what was causing them—the scuffles, the scrabbles, the crumbling and sifting of dislodged earth showering
down a straight surface to a bottom far below. Somebody was climbing up a tunnel. No… not somebody… some bodies.

It didn’t make sense, and I had no clue what was going on, but sun or no sun, rules or no rules, I knew that letting normal humans get within ten feet of vampires was a bad idea. Firearms are ineffective against vampires at close range, at least if you don’t have shotguns or faster-than-human reflexes. Cahill was still behind the wheel of the Crown Vic, but Molly and Andrej had already gotten out of the car and were starting to walk around.

I couldn’t see the tunnel entrance. Choo had followed Dvornik’s car in, but according to Dvornik the hole was covered with a mud-smeared tent whose corners had been slit. The canvas had been spread out like a lopsided pressed flower, and grass and brush had been rubber-cemented to its surface so that it resembled the surrounding landscape. The former front entrance of the tent was facedown and next to the edge of the tunnel it was covering so that a door could be made by unzipping the canvas. But if I couldn’t see the entrance, I could smell chemical preservatives and glue and had a rough sense of where the sounds were coming from. I yelled “PERI!” which was our word for incoming danger while I grabbed the katana I’d placed against the wall of the van.

I almost hadn’t brought the katana. Two-foot-long curving razors aren’t really useful for rappelling or fighting in enclosed spaces—but I hadn’t been sure what was going to happen today, so I’d brought both my swords along. Now I unsheathed the katana in a fast but unhurried motion—because you never rush the unsheathing of a katana, even when you’re doing it fast—cutting the rappelling cord that I had already run through my harness before turning on my left foot and running toward the sounds that had just pissed in my porridge.

Sig and her crew probably thought I’d gone insane, but I’d only taken a few steps when the earth twenty feet in front of me seemed to get pulled down a drain. It simply disappeared like a napkin being pulled through a ring and was replaced by a gaping hole twelve feet around. Vampires began appearing at the rim of the exposed tunnel… one… two… three… four… they were covered from head to toe in black. Black ski masks, black sunglasses, black sweat shirts, black pants, black gloves. I’d never seen anything like it. I’ve seen individual vampires brave daylight for brief stretches at a time, bundled up and scurrying from one point of cover to another, but they had been caught outside and were running
from
the sun, not
into
it. And I’d never seen a group of vampires in the sun en masse.

What the hell kind of a hold did this Anne Marie have over them?

I aimed myself at the first one to come leaping over the rim, a vampire whose bound carried him some ten feet beyond the edge of the tunnel. I charged him in a running hasso-no-kamae stance, the sword held vertically toward my right, the guard at cheek level. He landed and stumbled forward, and I made a hidari kesa cut to his left where his hand was clawing for the gun holstered at his side, reaching my top speed by pushing myself forward in time with the stroke. He realized the danger and tried to bring his arm up to block at the last moment, but my blade moved from his left shoulder toward his right hip, cutting into the base of his neck. In ancient times this would have been the place where his armor was exposed.

I veered past him and his head fell off. Unfortunately I was now moving too fast to avoid the hole, and there was no way I was going to be able to stop in time to avoid throwing myself over the edge. Three vampires were jumping over the rim now, all in different directions. Rather than try to slow down, I
maintained speed and shifted my sword to one hand, hurtling myself over the pit with my arms spread wide, aiming toward the vampire on the north side because he wasn’t facing me.

I folded my arms and brought my katana toward my left shoulder as I landed, still running forward. The vampire ahead of me heard me and started to pivot. If he had kept running away from me he might have had time to react, but when he stopped moving forward… I didn’t. And I was moving fast. I closed with him before he was completely turned around and launched a one-handed strike that was half katsugi waza and half wild-ass tennis backhand swing.

Despite what they show in movies, kenjutsu really isn’t designed for running battles. His head came off, but my blade angled and lodged in the bone of his upflung upper arm on the opposite side, and I stumbled on the uneven ground and had to let go of my katana or risk cutting myself. I rolled and came back up on my feet, but now I was the one hearing someone else landing behind me and coming on fast.

I ducked and pivoted, sweeping my left foot behind me.

A bullet tore past my skull so close that I could feel the disturbance in the air, and my heel hooked behind the front foot of a vampire who was charging me with a cheap-ass .38 Special in his right hand. I had caught his foot in midair, and it doesn’t matter how strong you are, if someone catches your foot off the ground, they can push it whatever way they want and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it because you have nothing to push against to give yourself leverage.

I yanked the vampire’s front foot out from under him, but his momentum kept the bottom half of his body sliding forward even while the top half of his body slammed into the ground hard. His legs wound up cutting my own feet out from
under me as if he were sliding into a base, and I fell on top of him. His gun fell on the ground next to him, but I didn’t have time to try for it.

Weaponless and grappling on the ground with a sharp-toothed someone who was stronger than I and could go without breathing for long periods of time was not a position I wanted to be in. His hands went for my throat and I tucked my chin in and darted my hands toward his collar. His thumbs were digging around my windpipe and his fingers were getting ready to crack bone and crush cartilage when I ripped the black shirt he was wearing down to his navel. Sunlight hit his exposed chest and sizzled into his flesh, releasing stench and steam. He screamed and let go of my throat and frantically reached for his shirt to pull the fragments back together. Freed, I threw my upper torso backward and brought my feet up toward his head; now we were both on the ground with me lying on top of him in the opposite direction, his feet beneath my head and my feet over his face. I managed to wrap my legs behind his head, locking my feet behind his neck while my right hand went for my Glock.