With the shock of the knowledge, I felt adrenaline course into my veins. I lifted, pulling the vampire to its feet as it jerked in my grasp and tried to sink teeth into my forearm. With a quick turn I threw it, my metahuman strength allowing me to heave him about twenty feet. I watched him twist in the air, his black clothing rippling in the night like a cloud of darkness blotting out the stars. He landed on his feet and was balanced and in motion again a second later, running back toward me, fangs bared and mouth dripping with my blood.
I froze for only a second as someone fired off a burst at him, the flame from the gun barrel lipping, shattering the night with the noise of the shots and destroying my night vision with the barrel flash. It fired again, and I realized it was Jackson, surprisingly calm considering that the vampire was still moving toward us, unerring. The bullets did nothing.
Fire.
The word echoed in my head, another scream of warning from Wolfe and Gavrikov, both of them pressing against the wall between me and them. I regretted for the first time that I had worked so hard to insulate myself from two metas who had centuries and millennia of experience dealing with metahumans, fighting in the very types of conflicts I myself was in on a daily basis. There was nothing I could do about it now but act on the message they worked so hard to get to me.
I swept my head around, looking back to the wreckage of the other helo, to where a few little flames remained in the dry grass. I reached back to where Reed was standing behind me and grabbed his sleeve as he was firing off a tornado-like wind that caught the vampire coming at us and threw him into the air. “Hey!” Reed shouted as I jerked the sleeve of his shredded and mangled suit coat and pulled it loose from him in one good tug, spinning him around like he was caught in his own wind. As he came around I jerked again and freed him from the other sleeve, catching a flash of his irritation as I ran past him toward the wreckage, already balling up the jacket.
I stooped to grab a long, slender piece of metal wreckage about two feet long; it looked like a strut. As I ran I wrapped Reed’s coat around it and dipped it into the fire that still burned near the crash, felt the heat and smelled the smoke. The flames took hold and I pulled it out. I held it aloft, my torch, my weapon, and spun back to where the battle was taking place, bullets being sprayed indiscriminately and the vampires having struck down at least two of our people. I could see Reed keeping one of them off of him with some difficulty while Parks had turned into a bear and was battering the other back with Scott’s help, a solid stream of water forcing it to be evasive as it ducked and attacked.
“HEY, douchebags!” I shouted. I spun the torch in my hand at my side, felt it whirl like Thor’s hammer as I let the icy resolve coat me, erasing that pinch of fear I felt. “Let’s have a cook-off. I’ll go first.” I jumped at the vampire that was coming at Reed – not a little hop, but a twenty-foot leap that would have looked more appropriate on the moon than anywhere near Earth. I came down as he was being buffeted back by Reed’s attack. I brought down my torch-club with a solid thud as he tried to block it with a forearm. The physical blow would have been a bone-breaker for a human; as it was I could tell I didn’t do anything but tissue damage. The impact was solid but bounced off, and I had to use all my strength to hold the weapon in place against the vampire’s skin.
While there was no reaction from the blow itself, after a moment of holding the flame against him, I heard a screeching wail that made me wish I had my ear protection on. It was worse than the gunfire by far, higher pitched and not unlike the worst scream I’d ever heard amplified by a factor of fifty. The vampire jerked away from me, falling back to the ground on its side, spinning like a top in a circle and then rolling back to his feet in a bizarre study of motion that probably violated some law of physics. He screamed at me, a hissing squeal that bared his teeth and drew the attention of his partner to me.
I heard the warnings of Scott and Parks at the same time I heard the footfalls. The second vampire, this one blond, did a leap of his own. I turned in time to bring my torch-club around in a swing at waist level and rising. “Batter up,” I whispered as I followed through. The club caught the vamp in the midsection and the strength of my swing arrested his momentum and wrapped him around the weapon.
I felt flesh give way to hard metal and meta strength. He flew through the air again, this time up and away from me, arms and legs stretched out limply, trailing the direction of his motion like streamers in the wind behind him. He came to a hard landing about fifteen feet away and I felt a shiver through my arms from the impact, a soreness that I knew my meta healing powers would keep me from feeling tomorrow.
The blond vampire vaulted back to his feet two seconds after landing and let out something between a hiss and a scream, high pitched, that made me cringe and look back to the other. Both of them, now, were dead on target, and the target was me. I took a deep breath as they both twitched, feet anchored in place, looking like they were ready to leap at any moment.
“We need to withdraw,” I heard Zack’s voice in my ear; he was one of the ones still standing, apparently.
“They’ve still got an RPG around here somewhere,” Parks said. “We get airborne without dealing with it or them, we’ll be back down in a worse predicament a few seconds later.”
“I’ll deal with them,” I said, not really feeling the truth of that down to my bones. “Get the wounded to the helo; I’ll cover your retreat.”
“You’re insane,” Scott said. “Those things aren’t playing; they’ll eat your throat out while you’re still alive.”
“I’ll be fine.” I kept a wary eye on each as they started to circle around me, not gaining ground, hesitating to spring. “Get moving and I’ll be right along.”
“What are you gonna do?” I could hear the strain in Zack’s voice as he helped Kurt to his feet.
“Not make them sparkle.” I tensed and gripped the torch-club even tighter, knowing they’d be striking in tandem.
They broke their holding pattern at the same time, both of them springing into a loping run, scattering dirt with every step. I realized for the first time that they were wearing leather dress shoes to match their black shirts and pants, and I would have laughed if I hadn’t been feeling a prickle of concern. They were wicked strong, vicious, more resistant to damage than any meta I’d encountered other than maybe Wolfe or Clary, and they had an appetite for blood – mine, apparently.
They closed the gap and I wondered how I’d deal with both at once when a tornado blew past and flung the raven-haired one into the air again and away from me. I turned to focus on the other, bringing my weapon around and down in an overhand swing. It landed in a perfectly timed blow, hitting the softer neck tissue and the side of the vamp’s head, the force of the strike driving him face first into the ground. I didn’t feel any pity for this beast and landed another hit to the back of his head as quickly as I could, then another and another before something struck me from behind and I had to roll my way out of the attack as I felt teeth sink into my shoulder.
I hit the ground and jabbed my elbow into the belly of the beast that had gotten me, the black-haired vamp. He didn’t let loose, and I felt the teeth dig into my left shoulder. I jerked forward as hard as I could, ripping myself free, losing flesh, muscle and blood in the process. I brought my right hand up and hammered the vamp with three quick blows from the burning club, using the last to jam it into his face, end on, running the flaming cloth hard into his eyes and nose, drawing another hissing scream and several swipes from claws.
I sensed the other coming up on me and turned, bringing the club around in time to catch him across the face. He screamed and I jammed the flaming end into his eyes, and after hearing the same howling noise from him, I ran for the chopper. I could taste blood in my mouth and my left arm was numb. My left shoulder was not; it screamed at me. I saw a few bodies still huddled at the chopper’s door, and I realized one of them was Reed, who was climbing inside. Scott was another, though he was already nearly in, pulling something in along with him, something brown and furred – Parks, I realized after a moment, though he was in bear form and bleeding quite a bit. Zack was last, helping to get Parks inside with one hand, while his gun was out and tracking behind me with the other. I couldn’t see his face as the spotlight from the front of the helo was nearly blinding me, but I saw him watching, and I heard him when he shouted a warning.