Courts and cabals, p.20
Courts and Cabals, page 20
Things were not going as well on the other flank. The officer hadn’t even been able to get off a shot before he was hit. The wendigo swiped its claws right across the officer’s belly, easily piercing Kevlar and flesh, to spill his intestine onto the floor. The guy didn’t even see the decapitation blow coming. He was too busy seeing what should be inside of him, outside of him. His buddies came to the rescue, but only tagged the wendigo as it used the hunks of meat as cover and retreated back into the depths of the building.
The radio traffic was crazy, but Vernon cut in with his own situation report. “Contact, team two has two down, one KIA, consolidating,” he relayed, as the officer who’d killed the wendigo dragged the footless rookie over to the perimeter they were setting up.
“This is a bad spot,” Vernon scanned the area. Their line of sight was still blocked by the meat, and the trail of blood from the injured officer was enticing for the wendigos. They were like sharks; fresh blood drew them in.
“Get him to the medics,” Vernon ordered.
A casualty collection point had been established outside because they knew they were going to take casualties. There was no way humans could go up against supernaturals, even with three-to-one odds, and come out of it without a scratch. On the bright side, as long as they grabbed the officer’s foot mages trained in medicine could reattach it and he’d never know the difference.
Two men down, and two more to haul the injured and dead outside, left Vernon with only one officer. He had the guy who took out the wendigo partner up with him for this next part. The man showed he was calm under pressure. Despite the small victory, things were not going well. Sixty percent of Vernon’s team was out of the fight, but the mission had to go on. He pushed through the rest of the meat freezer while the officer watched his six.
The wendigo came at them again before they hit the end of the room. It had been skittering up the wall, and along the grated ceiling looking for an opportunity. Vernon’s senses alerted him to the attack with a second to spare. That was more than enough time for him to orient on target and pull the trigger twice. His Colt’s heavier .44 caliber rounds smashed into the creature, breaking things, but not stopping it. Thankfully, Vernon was a lot tougher than his human companions.
He clotheslined the leaping wendigo. His forearm caught the creature’s ugly-ass face and rearranged its features. He felt something slice his flesh, but his healing kicked in immediately, and he was as good as new before the wendigo hit the ground. The creature cartwheeled head-over-ass as it flew past them. It smashed limply into the far wall, and slowly slid down; leaving a trail of blood in its wake. Once it was still, they could see that Vernon’s action had snapped its neck.
“Glad you’re on our side,” the officer looked a little green, but was good to push on.
“Freezer clear,” Vernon updated the brass running the operation from a mobile command center a block away.
“I need you down the hallway, second room on the right, now!” the SWAT commander screamed. “Team one is pinned and taking casualties.”
Vernon locked eyes with the other officer, and they set off at a run. They didn’t bother to clear the hallway before they burst into it. Two doors down was longer than it looked, but the sound of rapid gunfire drew them like moths to the flame. It also drew the enemy.
A wendigo came around the far corner just as they reached the door. “I’ve got him,” Vernon pushed the cop into the room with the firefight, and faced off against the creature. It roared at him and charged. He roared back and met the challenge head on.
Fire ripped through his body as he found the animal waiting inside, and changed. It was a moment of pain in exchange for pure power. He shot up a foot and a half and added hundreds of pounds of mass. Due to the runes etched into his clothes and equipment, he didn’t tear them to shreds like the Incredible Hulk. His face sprouted a muzzle with an impressive set of pointed teeth. His fingers grew claws that might not match the wendigo’s in length, but were easily as sharp. Even at six feet tall, the wendigo looked like a starving child compared to him.
The creature knew it was outmatched, and tried to backpedal, but Vernon was already on him. He got his jaws around the thing’s neck, lifted it off the ground, and shook it back and forth until the spine snapped with a loud crunch. He didn’t stop there, and gnawed on it like a rawhide until its head fell off. Only then did he spit it out, its rancid blood making him gag for a second.
More screams and gunfire from the room he’d bypassed forced him to suck it up. He smashed through the doorframe to survey the chaos. The room was a large employee breakroom. Eight-person circular tables dominated the space. Most wouldn’t be good for anything but kindling at this point, and several were coated in blood.
His quick scan showed two officers were down. One was lying on top of a table whose legs had snapped under some combined weight. The cop’s stomach and chest were torn out by a wendigo who tried to grab a snack during the fight. The wendigo was equally as dead on the floor beside him, riddled with bullet holes, but that didn’t help the poor guy. Another officer was against the wall and look like he’d been cut to ribbons.
Vernon’s sudden entrance paused the battle for a second. In that second, he was glad the officers didn’t shoot him. They weren’t packing silverbane, since wendigos didn’t suffer from a normal shifter’s affliction to the substance, but getting pumped full of lead would still suck. There were three wendigos in the room, and they reacted the way a lesser creature did when an alpha suddenly showed up among them. They recoiled for a second at his sheer presence, but took comfort in their numbers, before responded with a challenge of their own.
Two split off from the third, who used the tables as cover to advance on the officers. With the officer Vernon had brought along, that brought the combined team’s effective fighting force to a grand total of two. The rest of Team One was still alive, but unconscious, or too injured to hold a rifle. The one cop who’d still been fighting before they arrived looked like he’d barely dodged a claw. It still nicked his face, and an ugly red line seeped blood down his chin to drip onto his chest. If they survived the fight, the medics might be able to save his eye.
Vernon wanted to help, but the other two wendigos were coming for him. In his werewolf form, his fingers were two big for the Colts, but he was prepared for that. On the back of his magically-expanded body armor he wore a big-ass knife. To a human it would be considered a sword, but not to the eight-foot monstrosity he’d become.
He pulled it clean from its sheath, and it sang through the air as the wendigos split up and tried to come at him from both directions at once. The blade was steel with flecks of cold-iron and silverbane worked into it by a dwarf bladesmith. It wasn’t enough to kill shifters or Fae outright, but it would give them a bad day. A thick knuckle guard extended from the handle, which doubled as a set of brass knuckles made of the same components as the blade. It was designed to fight supernaturals in hand-to-hand combat.
The first wendigo learned that the hard way. It thought it was faster than it actually was, and he caught it across the chest with the blade. His strike threw off its trajectory and it smacked into one of the few remaining, intact tables.
The only thing the attack was good for was a distraction. The second wendigo hit him full in the side, taking advantage of its buddy’s misfortune. Vernon was ready for it. One of the protective wards on his armor flared and heated his fur beneath the protective fabric. It burned out in a puff of smoke, but it did its job. The wendigo had tried to impale him with its antlers, and swipe at his hamstring with its claws. Both attacks failed. In response, he spun, and used the centrifugal force generated by his core to deliver the mother-of-all backhands.
The crack of the wendigo’s bones breaking was audible over the gunfire, and it went down without another sound. Vernon stomped over to the first, wounded wendigo as it struggled to back away. His massive paw pinned the creature to the ground as he drove the blade through the back of its neck. The knife wasn’t designed for sawing, but he made it work.
The wendigo’s head came off with a wet pop. He repeated the action with the second wendigo before he turned to face the last threat in the room. He’d taken down the two wendigos so fast that the third creature was still working its way toward the officers. The officer’s fire was turning panicked as they failed to hit it, and they’d basically fallen back on the spray-and-pray method. Judging by the number of shells on the ground, they had to be low on ammo.
At that point, both officers had the misfortune of their weapons running dry at the same time. The wendigo’s enhanced hearing heard the click, and it seized the moment. It used a table as a spring board and launched itself at the remaining officers . . . only to get drilled in the shoulder by its comrade’s bloody head.
Vernon was aiming for the creature’s head, but was satisfied as the fastball knocked the wendigo off course. It still hit the table the officers were using as cover; smashing it backward and knocking the surviving men on their asses.
It was quick to recover and face Vernon, but forgot about the humans. Most supernaturals did in a fight, and it paid for the mistake with its life. The brave officer from team two had reloaded, and despite cradling an arm with a compound fracture, drilled the last wendigo in the skull at point blank range. He held down the trigger until the thirty-round magazine ran dry. The wendigo’s head looked like someone stuck a grenade up its nose. Vernon was sure it was dead when the smell of fresh shit permeated the room.
With all the wendigo’s down, two by his own hand, he threw back his head and howled in victory. The remaining officers jumped at the sound, maybe even pissed themselves, but didn’t shoot him.
“Glad he’s on our side,” the officer with the ruined eye replied.
The officer sent out the status reports, and it looked like the rest of the teams were reporting back that the building was clear. There were only about a dozen wendigos in the warehouse, and it just happened that half were concentrated where teams one and two breached. The rest of the assault force had taken casualties, but they hadn’t faced a mass attack like Vernon had. That was for the best.
As cleanup started, Vernon shifted back. His clothes shrank with him, and except for the one burned patch where the ward went up in smoke, the only sign that he’d even been in a fight was the massive amount of blood splatter covering his entire body. Medics worked their way among the wounded, while forensics teams entered the warehouse, and deputies secured the perimeter. The commotion had drawn a crowd, and the media was here in force.
Vernon kept well away from the reporters. It wasn’t a secret that he was with the UN Response Division, but that didn’t mean he needed to be on camera after the bloodbath. He kept to the inside of the warehouse. He walked among the carnage trying to look busy. In the depths of his webbed, combat harness, he felt his phone vibrate.
He pulled it out and recognized the number. Still high on the thrill of the hunt, his mind flashed back to memories of the caller clawing at his chest while she used his dick as her own personal play-thing. “I’m surprised to hear from you, Becky,” there was more than a little flirtation in his tone.
“Agent Dud,” her reply was serious. “You might want to get back up here. Somethings happened.”
Chapter 18
I had to claw my way out of unconsciousness. Grogginess clunk to me like tar, and everything hurt. When I say everything, I mean everything. If you could break your dick, I broke it.
“Falling out of a window buck naked will do that to you,” I chuckled to myself, which only made everything hurt more. I winced, and slowly opened my eyes.
By the grace of the gods the shades were drawn, so light didn’t eye-fuck me. Even with semi-darkness, it was hard to focus. When everything did sharpen, the first thing I saw was the woman who’d saved my life. Lilith sat on a chair next to my bed, her eyes closed, and her head resting against the back of the chair. She looked completely gorgeous and at peace. She could have been there for an hour, or a week. Either way, it felt good that someone cared enough to stay by my side.
As if my own consciousness was a signal, her eyes snapped open. We stared at each other for a long moment, and then her face hardened.
“What the hell?” this was not the warm welcome for the Fae-killing hero I expected.
“Welcome back, Cam,” her voice wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t warm and comforting either.
“Hey,” I answered hesitantly.
“Is the slacker finally awake?” another voice asked in a familiar cavalier tone.
“Dani,” I turned my head, and powered through the pain, to see the dwarf lying one bed over. It was clear everyone involved in the fight was in the school’s infirmary now. “Thank god you’re alive.” A weight I didn’t realize lifted off my shoulders. Dani was a friend now, and I thought she’d died trying to save me.
“I’m fine,” she waved it off, but I saw the discomfort the small movement generated. “I’ll be good as new in a week.”
“Two weeks,” Lilith clarified in the same not-hard-but-neutral tone. “You can’t get out of bed for a week.”
Dani knew when not to argue, especially when she was so weak. I tried to sit up, and was surprised it didn’t hurt as much as I expected. The pain was already receding to bearable levels.
“I don’t know why she’s pissed at me, but her sex magic did the trick.”
Sitting up gave me a good view of the room, and there were two more people present. Jerome was sitting two beds down with the shifter who’d been on duty when Chloe attacked. The poor guy had white bandages wrapped around his throat. The Fae cut through everything; throat, windpipe, and spine. She nearly took his head off. There was no coming back from decapitation; supernatural or not. The injuries he had were going to take a while to heal, even for a shifter. If the blade had been silverbane, or she’d cut a few inches deeper, he’d be dead.
I wanted to call out to my friend, but Lilith’s hand on mine gave a jolt to my system. I turned to face her, and whatever was bothering her, it looked like we were going to have it out right here and now.
“What were you thinking?” she kept her voice down so the nurse sitting nearby couldn’t hear.
“I was thinking I was saving my own ass,” I could feel my stubbornness taking over. “I was thinking I was avenging Dani,” I gestured over my shoulder at her. “She got fucking gutted trying to protect me, and I thought she was dead. I was thinking that you were holding that psycho down so I could finish the job.”
I’d worked up a good head of steam, but while I felt better than I expected, I was still weak. A wave of lightheadedness hit me and I slumped back in my bed. It didn’t give my argument the teeth I wanted.
Lilith’s face softened a little, and she shook her head back and forth. “Cam,” she exhaled heavily. “I wasn’t trying to kill Chloe. I was trying to stop her from killing you. Those are two very different things.”
I didn’t understand. “You ran her through with a flaming sword, and were choking her out with a whip Wonder Woman would give her left tit for. How were you not trying to kill her?”
“Look at Dani,” she replied. “She got run through, but survived.” The dwarf gave me a little thumbs up. “I wasn’t going to kill Chloe,” Lilith reiterated. “I was just going to kick her ass, so she’d crawl back to Aveena with her tail between her legs and missing some teeth. Killing her was the last thing I ever wanted to happen.”
For a moment, the succubus looked completely exhausted. It was gone so quick I wondered if I’d even seen it. “If anything, you’re in more trouble now than before.”
I was lost. If saving my own life got me in more trouble then I couldn’t imagine what letting myself get killed would equate to. That was the thing with supernaturals; sometimes, they made no sense.
“I thought marking you would be enough,” Lilith said, more to herself than me. “She’s risking the covenants to come after you. You must have really pissed her off.”
“Covenants?” I was lost again.
“Relationships between the Fae and supernatural races predate the treaties and agreements signed by human authorities. A lot of what is incorporated into those treaties mirrors our own covenants, but theirs are just words on paper. Ours were sworn in blood and have been established tradition for millennia. That age and weight lends it the gravitas a human treaty can never hope to achieve.”
“Great; so, everyone is playing by a separate set of rules.” Was it just me, or was the whole supernatural world just one big clusterfuck?
“The real question is, what did you do to lead a Fae noble to attempt to break the covenants in order to ensure your death?” she asked the million-dollar question. “I probably should have asked you this already,” her tone was apologetic, “but what were you doing that put you at the top of her shit list.”
I’d been wondering the same thing. I knew what I’d failed to procure for her, but had no idea why that was some horrible offense. Maybe putting our heads together would give us the answer.
“The same day you came asking for those quiz answers, she wanted me to get something for her. She gave me twenty-four hours to get a baby’s rib from my contacts. I didn’t ask what it was for, and I still don’t know, but when I failed her . . . well, you walked in on her about to take her pound of flesh,” I looked at my succubus, and hoped she had the answers.
Apparently, she did. I saw the lightbulb go off in her mind, and the grimace it brought to her face. “It all makes sense now,” she leaned back in her chair and absentmindedly played with a lock of her hair.
“Care to enlighten us?” Dani asked after a moment. “This is the only action I’m going to get for a week. Without my soaps, this is the only drama I have to look forward to.”
I pushed the realization that Dani was a daytime soap opera fan to the back of my mind. We’d be spending plenty of time in the infirmary together, so there was time to unpack that bombshell.
