“No.”
It meant something entirely different.
The object exploded.
With a flash.
With a bang.
Six inches from the vampire’s face.
The Red Knight screamed. Caught point-blank inside the blast zone, the Knight was slammed backward, blood bursting from his nose and ears. Red tears fell from its traumatized eyes. It staggered sideways, clawing at its face, shrieking in its strange, alien language.
The second Knight was thirty feet away, outside of the blast zone, but even so, he staggered, too. Extraordinary hearing and eyesight were powerful tools in the quiet and in the dark. Less so in the presence of a light-amplified concussion grenade.
Deacon rolled out of his fetal ball and snapped a kick at the closest Red Knight’s knee.
The scream of pain from the flash-bang and the scream of pain from the shattered knee hit different notes. The second was sharper, higher, and as filled with fear and surprise as it was with agony.
Deacon came up off the floor and attacked the Knight. He did not enjoy fighting. There was no sense of style to what he did, he made no comments, he wasted no time.
As he rose, he hooked an uppercut into the monster’s groin. That folded the Knight forward, and Deacon met the sudden bend by grabbing the thing’s head and yanking him face-forward onto a rising knee. As the Knight rebounded from that impact, Deacon punched him three times in the throat with the extended knuckles of both fists, left, right, left. Cartilage collapsed. Deacon did not know how strong this thing was; he didn’t know what kind of damage he could sustain or how fast he could recover. Centuries of lies and half-truths and myths masked the truth. All he knew, all that he had to work with, was that the Red Knight could be hurt and could bleed and needed to breathe.
That was enough.
He attacked the Knight, giving him no chance, no advantage, no mercy. He blinded him and broke his arms, he stamped again on the shattered knee, destroying the leg completely, then he used a kick-sweep to cut both legs out from under his screaming enemy. As the Knight fell, Deacon twisted and followed it to the floor so that his punch to the solar plexus landed at the same instant the man’s weight hit hard ground. The effect was to drive whatever air was trapped in the Knight’s throat upward against the wreckage of his throat. The extra force tore apart whatever was left of the structure of the throat — using the fragments of the hyoid bone as razors. Blood immediately began filling the Red Knight’s lungs; he began thrashing and flopping around with hysterical force.
Deacon hurled himself backward and spun away from a dying enemy to face the other vampire.
He froze at the spectacle before him, and he knew immediately that it would live forever in the darkest parts of his mind.
The second Red Knight was down.
Lilith sat astride him.
She had not been at the point of death from the wound in her stomach. It was immediately clear that she’d been faking, exaggerating the severity in order to find a moment to make her move.
In the confusion, while Deacon killed the first Knight, Lilith had attacked the other.
Not with her hands.
Not with her knives.
She crouched over him, her mouth buried in the side of the vampire’s throat. For the oddest little fracture moment, Deacon thought she was kissing the Knight.
But, of course, that was wrong.
Everything in this moment was wrong.
There was a feral snarling, tearing, ripping sound. The Red Knight thrashed beneath her, tearing at her clothing and flesh with his nails. Weakly, though.
And weaker still with each pulsing moment.
Blood pooled beneath the Knight’s head.
Then, with a terrible spasm, the creature shivered and flopped and lay utterly still. Lilith still bent over him, her face buried beside the Knight’s neck, half-hidden by the corpse’s profile.
“Lilith…,” murmured Deacon.
Nothing.
Only the sound of a wild animal. Wet and awful.
“Lilith,” he said again.
Nothing.
He bent and picked up his fallen pistol and the second magazine he hadn’t been able to use. He slapped it into place. The sound was loud, harsh.
Lilith froze.
The sounds stopped.
“Lilith,” Deacon said once more as he raised the pistol and racked the slide.
Only then did she lift her head. Her face was completely covered with dark red blood.
And her eyes.
Her eyes.
They were entirely black. Without pupil or iris or sclera.
Black within black within black.
Deacon pointed the pistol at her.
“Come back,” he said.
His voice was gentle. The barrel of the gun was a promise.
Blood dripped from Lilith’s chin and lips.
“Come back.”
She blinked at him.
Once.
Twice.
And then her eyes were human again.
No, thought Deacon, that was an imprecise way of understanding what had happened. She was not human again, not even more human.
In that moment, as Lilith stepped back from the edge of the abyss, it was simply that for now she was less of a monster.
They stayed like that for a long moment. She, kneeling astride a savaged corpse, he standing with a gun in bloody hands. The world ground on its gears around them.
Lilith spoke a single word, and it came out thick, and wet and harsh.
“Deacon.”
His heart beat many times before he lowered his gun.
Part Two
Now
Chap. 5
I was ankle-deep in water that smelled like shit and garlic.
Charming.
It had been dry in Paris, and the only thing sloshing around in the sewers came from toilets and bidets. Which made me weigh my pay scale and benefits against the benefits of saving the world. I’m pretty sure I was being shortchanged.
And I was pretty sure I was lost.
The Paris sewer system was a bitch. It would have given Daedalus a boner.
I tapped my earbud. “Bug, where in the wide blue fuck am I?”
Bug said, “Two turns to go, Cowboy.”
Although this was in no way a high-profile mission we were using combat call signs. Well…I was, at least. Bug was Bug at all times.
“You said that before the last turn.”
“No, that was a bend, not an actual turn.”
“Yeah? When I get back I am going to bend your head and shove it up your actual ass.”
Bug chuckled. He’s the computer guru for the Department of Military Sciences. And a world-class geek.
And a friend, so the threat was only half serious.
If I couldn’t find my target soon, it was going to get a lot more serious. I’d been down here in the smelly darkness for too long, and I was beginning to suspect that this whole thing was a wild goose chase.
The mission briefing went like this….
My boss, Mr. Church, received intel about a new player in the international black market for stolen technologies. The guy’s actual identity was unknown, but the rumor mill said that he was paying top dollar for certain kinds of software, bulk research, or hardware. Interpol had formed a task force to hunt the guy, but so far he’d been as elusive as Professor Moriarty. A few associates had been bagged, but the big man himself always seemed to vanish like smoke. Barrier, the British equivalent of the DMS, reached out for our help — mostly to have our super-duper computer system, MindReader, interface with their computers and collate data from a dozen enforcement agencies in Europe, looking for useful patterns. MindReader got a whole bunch of hits, and since then every police department and intelligence service on three continents had been running down leads.