Yes, that Hell. Yes, I went there. Yes, I came back. And yes, the seven pounds of matted gray fur and rage doing its level best to chew through my hamstring was causing more pain than all the demons on the top three Circles ever managed.
I looked down to see a very bedraggled and angry cat with all four legs wrapped around mine, and its teeth buried in my flesh. My jeans did nothing to stop the cat’s claws, and it had jumped high enough to clear the top of my Doc Martens before it latched on, so I was getting its whole body weight on four feet’s worth of claw, plus what felt like about a thousand needle-sharp teeth.
“Ow, goddammit!” I yelled, shaking one leg. Of course, the second I shifted my weight onto one foot was the precise moment the vampire dove at me, bearing me down to the concrete floor and driving all the air from my lungs. My head hit the floor and stars filled my vision, disorienting me enough that I barely got an arm up before the vamp latched onto my carotid.
Okay, time to focus on the real threat. The cat was hurting my leg, but this undead assclown was going to legit kill me if I didn’t stop screwing around. His fangs dug deep into my forearm and one knee pressed on my balls, but despite the growing ball of nausea in my gut and my inability to draw a full breath, I managed to focus my concentration and gasp out, “Fragor!”
I hurled my will into the vamp’s face, and it went off like a watermelon dropped off a skyscraper. I closed my eyes against the rain of gore and sagged back against the floor as the pressure on my nuts decreased slightly. More like shifted, as the vampire wasn’t trying to injure me anymore, he was just dead weight. And soon to be a pile of dissolving goo, so I flung him off me and pulled myself up into a sitting position.
“Mrow?” came from beside me, and I turned to see one of the most disgusting things I’d ever laid eyes on. The fluffy ninja assassin that tried valiantly to cripple me moments before stood glaring at me, covered in vampire brains, blood, and vitreous humor. There were even a couple of shards of fang sprinkled across its fur like confetti.
“Wow,” I said to the kitty. “You look like shit.”
The cat just hissed at me. I didn’t blame it. I probably looked at least as gross, and maybe worse. “So, what are you doing here, puss? This isn’t exactly a safe place for man nor cat.”
The cat sat down on its haunches and started licking a forepaw, and I swear it somehow managed to extend its middle claw/finger in my direction. Its eyes never left me, though, just stayed locked on me as if waiting for another chance to try and tear my leg to ribbons.
“Purgatio,” I murmured, letting my will shape the currents of energy that flow through every space and every creature. The minor spell coursed over me and the cat, cleansing us of the gore and body parts. The cat stood up, turned around in a circle as if confused, then sat back down and resumed grooming, without the rude gesture this time, real or imagined.
Now that I wasn’t dripping brains with every shake of my head, I took a quick personal inventory. Nothing broken in the fight, just a few bruises, a bump on the head, and a couple little holes in my forearm. I rolled up my jeans to examine my leg and wasn’t surprised to see I was right—the little fuzzbucket did a lot more damage than the vampire. My calf looked like somebody pumped a load of birdshot into it and drops of blood welled up from twenty perfectly spaced puncture wounds.
“It’s a good thing I’m pretty much immune to infection,” I said to the kitty, who seemed to give not a single shit what I was or was not immune to. “Because if I got gangrene from a cat scratch, Luke would never let me live that down.”
My legendary uncle hadn’t been in a mood to give me shit about much of anything for the past few months, but I had hope he’d eventually pull out of his grief and get back to his normal, entirely too buttoned-up self.
“Okay, kitty,” I said, heaving myself to my feet. “It’s been fun chatting, but I’ve got more bad guys to kill, and I’m sure you’ve got some vitally important cat business to take care of. So…nice meeting you and all that, and you take care of yourself.”
The cat just stared at me through this whole monologue, its yellow gaze unwavering and a little unnerving, if I’m being honest. But I couldn’t just sit there all night chatting with a stray cat. There were at least another five vampires somewhere in the building, and with all the noise I’d made, the element of surprise was right out the window.
I stood up and patted my belt and pockets to make sure I still had my gear. Pair of silver-edged daggers on my hips—check. Glock 19 in a shoulder holster under my black motorcycle jacket—check. Awesome vintage “I Broke Wahoo’s Leg” T-shirt I found on eBay—check. Plenty of magical mojo and a bad attitude—check.
I was a little bruised, a little bloody, and grumpy as shit after having that much trouble dealing with one middling vamp. So my mind was right, my gear was right, and I had plenty of magic stored up to take on a nest this size. “Let’s do this,” I said, and started across the expansive lobby to a door marked “Stairs.”
And almost fell over as something heavy slammed into my waist. I barely held in a curse as a small, knife-wielding psychopath climbed straight up my back to perch on my shoulder. I looked to the left and saw a pair of yellow eyes framed in a face covered in long, now clean, gray fur. “Mrow.”
Looked like I had a helper. Whether I wanted one or not. So I kept heading toward the stairs, adjusting my stride to accommodate my passenger, and ducked my head as the little furball leaned forward and started nuzzling my ear.
Cute cat but distracting as hell. I tried to brush him off a couple times, but that just resulted in holes in my jacket and more rending of my flesh, and there were about to be plenty of opportunities for that, right downstairs.
I’d come to this warehouse in an industrial park on Highway 74 in Marshville, about an hour east of Charlotte, because the workers at a local chicken processing plant had reported monsters attacking them on the night shift for about three weeks. It took a while for the report to make it onto the desk of anyone who would actually give it any credence, then wend its way through the various local law enforcement agencies, up the food chain to the Department of Homeland Security’s Paranormal Division, and then back down to my fiancée, Deputy Director Rebecca Gail Flynn, who headed up the Mid-Atlantic Division, covering the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia.
I would have expected the main office in D.C. to cover the states surrounding the nation’s capital, but I’m not a lifelong bureaucrat, so God only knows where the logic came from. Probably because the paper-pushers in Washington wouldn’t know what end of stake goes into the vampire, which is pretty accurate from most of the ones I’ve met.
So, I got the case of the chicken plant monsters, and after a couple nights of observation, I’d determined that there were indeed monsters of some flavor. The part that sealed it for me was watching a five-foot-tall, ninety-pound woman reach into the back of a cargo van, drag out a carpet-wrapped, human-shaped bundle that must have been at least a foot longer than she was tall, throw it over one shoulder, and walk into the warehouse like she was carrying a sack of potatoes. Either that was the world’s most securely wrapped mannequin, or she was way stronger than her frame should allow. So definitely some type of supernatural creature.
It took another day and night of investigation, but I finally figured out what was going on. There were at least four or five vampires living in the warehouse, and they would spend a couple days driving around to local cities and towns, collecting undocumented laborers, unhoused people, sex workers, criminals, runaways, and other folks who typically had fewer and weaker ties to their community, then they’d bundle them up and bring them back to this little patch of gravel and dirt outside Monroe, North Carolina and either feed on them, use them as thralls, or if they met their recruitment criteria, turn them.