A beast of nine horns, p.33
A Beast of Nine Horns, page 33
part #3 of Into Vermilion Series
And then voices rang from the direction of the bonfire. Words rumbling nearer. Footsteps approaching the tent.
“Shit,” Tamara seethed. Reluctantly, Coral pulled away, blood running hot and wild.
“Milady,” came Jase’s voice from just outside. “The vanguard is equipped and stands ready for your inspection, as you requested.”
Coral gave one last look to Tamara, tried to burn her into her brain and overwrite her existing image of her. The way her hair was tousled from their embrace, lips swollen from fierce kisses. The look of utter desire in her eyes. Then she stood, exited the tent, and let Jase guide her to where the toughest of the Sons were testing their equipment.
As Coral walked, determination flooded her fear, drowning it entirely.
If she had to be a fallen angel, she would. If she had to be a murderer, she would. To give Tamara the world she wanted, she’d bring the entire planet to its knees if she had to. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Then again, after all they’d been through, the world was overdue for some fucking payback.
Chapter 41
The tunnel was dark, lit only by the old yellow bulbs hanging overhead, which were barely strong enough to illuminate the arched walls’ brickwork. Following behind the security detail, Lena craned her head, caught the sound of water dripping somewhere distant. The smell of earth and mildew enveloped her, the scent so thick she could swear it fogged the air.
They’d followed the escape tunnels from their exit, which was hidden beneath a warehouse on the banks of the Mohawk River. It was unoccupied and unguarded, a winding and gently sinking stretch of centennial concrete and brick that must have been a hair’s breadth from some old sewer system. Lena suspected it hadn’t been used since the time of Prohibition—which, in all likelihood, the Dahlia had profited handsomely off of.
The damp click of footsteps ahead came to an abrupt halt. “We’re here,” Leo said, voice low and hard as stone.
Lena squinted through the dark. The door was scarcely visible, save for the strangled yellow glow glinting dimly off its edges.
“This is it,” Falk said. The tunnel walls rumbled, dust spilling from the ceiling as an artillery shell detonated somewhere uncomfortably near. “And just in time, it seems. You boys ready to move?”
Leo and his two subordinates gave crisp nods in unison.
“Naya?”
“Ready as always,” the woman said, though a warble of fear snaked through her words.
“Love-Lies-Bleeding?”
“Ready,” Mama said.
“Voulgespawn?”
Lena breathed deep. Her blood was beginning to sing with the promise of violence. “Just point me at who you wanna hurt.”
Falk reached into her coat’s pocket and drew out a handful of blue-capped syringes. She stood there tense for a long moment, like she was awaiting a countdown only she could hear. They all waited in silence, listening to the drumbeat of explosions resonating through the earth. The attack was well underway. But they couldn’t move until the Dahlia’s attention was fully diverted to the guard.
Several minutes later, a loud rumble ripped through the tunnel, causing the overhead lights to flicker pitifully. Falk nodded. “Get ready.”
Leo and his men moved at once, taking up positions on either side of the door. They unpacked gobs of clay-like explosives and pressed them into the gaps in the hinges. Meanwhile, Falk proffered a blue-capped syringe to Naya, then Mama, then finally Lena.
Lena eyed the syringe skeptically. “What is this?”
“It’s been over thirty years, and I still haven’t come up with a good name for it,” Falk said. She uncapped hers and pressed the needle to a vein in her forearm, cringing as she lowered the barrel. “Call it an anti-muter if you like.”
“Anti-muter?”
“An antidote to erythrocyte transmuter,” Naya offered, breathing shallowly through her teeth as she clenched her fist. “Muters nullify the body’s ability to distinguish blood type, and thus inhibit hemomancy. These blue-caps instead supercharge the body’s handling of its native antigens, boosting your hemomantic strength and preventing muters from dulling it.”
“It also greatly amplifies your body’s sensitivity to blood type,” Falk said. “In the same way muters will protect you from the harmful effects of a type mismatch, these will cause your body to overreact lethally to incompatible antigens. And with no muters to forestall the runaway coagulation cascade, you will absolutely die if exposed to even a milliliter of off-type blood.”
“Just like the old days,” Mama said, injecting the fluid into her arm.
Lena sighed. Sounded like one hell of a double-edged sword. “Guess I’m just gonna have to trust y’all.” She removed the cap from the syringe and slid the needle into her forearm, biting back against the uncomfortable sensation of icy fluid pouring into her bloodstream. It felt, for all the world, like a regular muter.
“C4 in place,” Leo said, retreating to the wall. “Say the word.”
Aura swelling with confidence and power, Falk set her gaze dead ahead, commanding everyone’s attention with just the posture of her shoulders. “Do it.”
Lena tensed, mind sharpened to a razor point.
A bang pierced the air, and a flash ripped through the door’s hinges. Dust spilled into the tunnel as Leo rolled out from his position and slammed his boot into the door. The door heaved and then toppled inward, letting a blinding shaft of light in.
The security detail charged through the doorway, rifles at the ready. “Go, go!”
Naya and Mama were next, charging on their heels. Lena shot after them, toward the sterilizing glare of the Dahlia base.
Just beyond the tunnel’s mouth was a small concrete room, crates of ammo and fuel and emergency provisions crammed thick along the walls. Storage, humming with a diesel generator. A flight of wooden stairs led up to the next level, from which came the sound of shouting voices and pounding footsteps. Leo and his boys took point, rushing up the stairs and meeting the Dahlia’s forces head-on.
“Let’s go!” Falk shouted, placing herself ahead of the other three hemos and fishing a metal canister from her coat. “Anti-muted or not, you don’t want to breathe this if you can help it.”
From above, gunshots blasted their skull-rattling song. Lena followed the thrill in her blood, vaulting up the stairs two at a time—only to find Mama ahead of her at each step, a chain of blodrigtstål already streaming behind her.
The stairs opened into a larger interstitial room thick with felled resistance. Half a dozen Dahlia lay groaning and wounded on the floor, but fresh guards were flooding in from several directions. As soon as Lena was through the door, chaos erupted around her, and then she joined in.
Cries of alarm rang beneath the gunfire. A black shape from the periphery made a move for Lena. She sent her elbow crashing across the black-garbed soldier’s face, a spray of blood painting the air as he crumpled to the floor. Mama danced between two more guards, effortlessly binding their wrists with her thorned bloodwhip. With a series of rapid kicks, she brought them to their knees and sent their guns tumbling from their hands.
The roar of assault rifles pounded. Lena pressed herself instinctively beside the door as the walls bloomed with bullet holes ringed in fresh splinters. Leo and his boys unloaded down the adjoining hallway, raking the enemy with volleys of rubber bullets while the Dahlia’s soldiers returned fire. A flash of crimson glinted from further down the hall. A hail of hemocrysts, streaking toward them. They moved too fast for Lena to weave her defensive hemomancy. The blades struck one of Leo’s boys, ripping him from his feet and sending him half-shredded to the floor.
“Taking indirect fire!” Leo yelled as he rolled away and put his back to the wall. “Get that fog out there!”
“Muter out!” Falk yelled, lobbing one of her canisters down the hallway. A rush of air preceded a frothing burst of sound, and the hall began filling with a swell of thick white fog.
A chorus of coughs and sputters came from the cloud. Leo and his second took full advantage, pressing into the haze and unloading a steady stream of debilitating shots. Only a few volleys later, a pernicious quiet settled into the mist. “Hall’s clear,” came Leo’s voice. “Forward!”
“Well done,” Falk called. She crouched down, laid a hand gently on their fallen soldier’s arm. “Are you alright? Can you stand?”
Though he was covered in blood, and though one of the Dahlia’s hemocrysts had sunk deep into his chest, the man nodded. “Not gonna fall to some fuckin’ bloodfiends.”
Falk took his hand and helped him to his feet. “Watch our backs. Disarm the ones we’ve dropped. No overexertions.”
“Ma’am.” Breathing heavily, he limped to the nearest of the subdued Dahlia guards and began stripping them of weapons.
A burst of static cut from Falk’s radio, echoing a rumble of words from just down the hall. “Foyer’s clear, looks like we just took out their doormen.”
“Seal the doors,” Falk ordered. “Then sweep to the rear entrance and do the same. Nobody in, nobody out.”
“Your word, my will.”
Falk cut the transmission, gave the rest of them a wry grin. “Not a bad opening, ladies. Let’s move.”
The four of them headed down the opposite hall to the main stairway, stopping briefly so Naya could slash the power running to the elevators. As they ascended through the six story complex, Falk moved to point, her noble birth and capacity for leadership on full display as she shouted orders into her radio and lobbed muter bombs into oncoming attackers.
Lena dashed through the curtains of fog. The vapor stung her nose and sinuses, but its effects were negated by the blue-cap running in her veins. Alongside Mama and Naya, she slashed limbs and struck enfeebling blows wherever her blood risked lethality. Every movement was a little easier, even within the haze of the muters. Her strikes fell hard into stomachs, crushing air from lungs and sending their enemies sprawling uselessly on the floor.
And her blood felt powerful as well. Almost too powerful. Whereas before it took a vast expenditure of focus and will to collapse hemocryst into bloodsteel, it now came easily to her, barely more effort than freezing the blood in the first place. It counterbalanced the surprising difficulty of not actually killing her opponents. As the halls came alive with gunfire that lit the fog with diffuse tracer flares, Lena hacked and chopped, cleaving the Dahlia’s rifles to uselessness and opening the path for Naya to bring up the rear.
It was a good thing the visibility was so poor, Lena thought. Because if not for the muter fog, it might’ve been too easy to become entranced by Mama’s graceful dancing between their enemies, the mesmerising twirl of her scourge, the way she seemed to break bones and sever tendons with no more than the gentlest caress.
Two dozen guards later, the four of them stood outside the executive offices on the top floor. As testament to the efficacy of Falk’s blue-caps, they arrived virtually unscathed. And while the Dahlia’s security forces hadn’t sustained any casualties, each toppled foe would need some serious recovery time before they’d be taking the field again. That meant the only thing they had left to worry about was their target.
Lena panted, blood covering her hands, knuckles burning from the bones she’d shattered. The extended combat winded her, but she wasn’t done yet. In front of her, Falk stood, imperial and commanding. Upon the frosted glass window of the corner office door before them, the name Amalia Beaufort stood in stark bronze lettering.
Falk’s hands flexed as she stood facing the door. She seemed to hesitate, like the weight of everything they were doing had just caught up with her. Then, setting her jaw, she shot forward to the door and kicked it ajar.
As the bang of boot on wood sounded, a gallop of gunfire came from within. Falk wheeled instinctively to the side and Naya lunged ahead, swiping her hand and sending a hemocryst dagger tumbling over Falk’s shoulder into the office. A pained cry answered as her blade struck a sharp-dressed woman’s hand, springing her grip and sending her pistol flying.
And just like that, they’d won. The four flowed into the office one after another, a semi-circle of violence just waiting for an excuse to go off. Lena was furthest back in their formation, barring escape from the impressive office, which was all polished mahogany and sunset-lit gold trim.
“What is the meaning of this?” Amalia said, fingers flexing about the blade of frozen blood still lodged in the back of her hand. She wore a navy blue business suit, her red hair cropped short in an A-line cut.
Falk marched right up to the woman’s grand desk, hands tucked into her coat pockets. “Madam Beaufort,” she said cordially. “My personal army and I just happened to be in the neighborhood, so I thought we’d stop by and kindly request you reconsider our offer of asylum.”
The woman showed them her teeth. “God damn you, Falk. This attack was you?”
“Guilty as charged.” She canted her head toward the massive windows looking out on the quaint skyline of downtown Ongsville. Six blocks away, pillars of smoke rose from where the Massachusetts National Guard was shelling the Dahlia’s defensive emplacements. And against that backdrop, hundreds of Dahlia loyal—hemos and mercenaries and rogue guardsmen—were preparing for an assault that wasn’t actually coming. “I knew you would never suffer the indignity of such a brazen assault. I knew you’d immediately put the Dahlia’s full might to repelling the trespass.”
Rage twisted Amalia’s face into a hideous snarl. “What insolence! You have a hell of a lot to answer for!”
“I’d rather not hear that from a woman with your criminal record. Where’s your brother Fredrick?”
“Like I’ll tell you!” She turned abruptly in her chair, lunged for a drawer with her good hand. Before her fingers could even touch the wood, a crimson lash sliced the air. Mama’s hypercryst whip cracked as its barbed length wrapped around Amalia’s wrist and pinned it against her chair’s arm.
“Before you get too bold,” Falk said calmly, “know that you stand in the presence of Lord Randall’s infamous voulge.”
Eyes wide with horror, Amalia looked over to where Mama stood at Lena’s side. “Voulge? You can’t mean… Love-Lies…?”
“Not only that,” Falk said, clearly enjoying her leverage, “but we have her daughter in our midst as well. So I would very much recommend not resisting, if you’d like to keep all of your limbs.”
Amalia’s neck went taut with tension. “What did you do to my men?”
“Took the fight out of them. Don’t worry. They’re still alive. I’m not interested in taking any Dahlia lives, as if that bears repeating.”
“Then why the hell are you here?”
“To protect you from yourself. Voulge, bind her.”
At her command, Mama snapped her hand out. Her bloodsteel whip writhed and slithered like a living thing, looping about Amalia’s other wrist and then tightening, chaining her hands together with but a thought.
“You don’t know the enemy you’re making, Falk!” Amalia sputtered.
“I look forward to tasting your wrath as soon as we’ve defeated Descoteaux and averted the hemoclasm.” She made a signal, and Mama flowed to Amalia’s side. She hefted her up by her restraints and put one hand on her shoulder—almost sympathetically—as Naya placed a pair of handcuffs on their captive’s wrists, allowing the bloodwhip to ease its bite.
Falk nodded approvingly. “If you’d only heeded my initial warnings, this little house call would never have been necessary. But you just had to play emperor with your brother, endangering the entire planet for your political delusions.”
Amalia glared at Falk but said nothing. Her wounded pride was on full display.
“Don’t worry, Madam Beaufort. We’re just borrowing you for a little while. Once this is all over, we’ll bring you back home. Though by then, I’ll wager your home will be significantly smaller.” Falk grabbed her radio and depressed the transmission button. “Leo, status report.”
The hiss of static answered. “Got a few trick-or-treaters at the door, but they haven’t gotten through. We’ve disarmed everyone on the bottom floor, and we should have a straight shot through the tunnels. You got Amalia?”
“Firmly under our control. We’re on the way down, just keep the entrance tidy and we’ll…”
A low keening rose from beneath the distant rumble of artillery fire and wind-warped gunshots.
Lena looked out the full-wall windows. The setting sun gouged Ongsville’s horizon, turning it the color of fire. Hanging between the dark columns of smoke downtown, a dozen dark shapes flocked against the red. Lena blinked, eyes struggling to focus on them.
Vast wings that gleamed like fresh-shed blood. Humanoid bodies that lacked heads. Razor-sharp claws crowning their overlong limbs.
Lena gasped. “Oh, shit.”
“Shrikes,” Naya breathed, terror leaping through her.
Falk gritted her teeth. “Fuck! Why now?” She shot a glance at Lena. “Take her and follow me!”
Lena obeyed, grabbing hold of Amalia’s shoulder and dragging her forcefully after Falk as they exited into the hall, Mama and Naya on either side of her.
“What have you done?” Amalia asked with a snarl. She glared between Mama and the director, every muscle in her body tense. “Was this your plan? Distract our guards and defang our security so the goddamn Hyacinth can move in for the kill?!”
Fear crashed across Falk’s normally stoic expression. “Leo,” she shouted into her radio. “Change of plans. Make your way up to meet us, muter bomb each floor on the way—”
Falk’s order was washed away by the sound of glass exploding.
Panic and exhilaration flooded Lena as she turned. Through the door to the office, she saw a huge, headless monstrosity heaving its way in through a wreath of shattered glass. The sound of more windows breaking choired through the hall. The light of sunset dimmed, eclipsed by the vast wings of the butcherbirds as they swarmed the building.
The Hyacinth had arrived in force.
