Gavin leaned forward, until his worried face looked distorted in the feed, his forehead large and domelike. “Yolanthe and her group are just outside our doors. They were trapped, but now Julian’s attacking from the rear. Justine and Dominic have to deal with a fight on two sides now.”
Melly began to make sense of the feeds. Searching each scene, she muttered, “Where are they?”
Xavier knew exactly who she meant. He pointed to the top middle feed, showing the parking garage. “There’s Dominic.”
Despite the chaos of the battle, Dominic’s tall, athletic form, scarred features and blond hair were unmistakable. He wielded two swords with terrifying expertise. As Melly’s attention focused on him, he staked one Vampyre in the chest and slashed at another.
Xavier asked Tess, “Can we get sound on this feed?”
Tess leaned forward to tap on the keyboard. The tumultuous sounds of battle blared over the speakers, and quickly she adjusted the volume.
Melly barely noticed Shane’s return, even when he laid a hand on her shoulder again. Tension strung her muscles tight until her neck and shoulders ached.
An eddy of fast movement swirled through the battle. Suddenly Julian appeared, leaping over the heads of a cluster of fighters, sword in hand. While the feed was black and white, his fangs glinted long and wicked, and Melly knew his eyes would have turned hot red.
Landing, Julian moved toward Dominic, who focused on him and strode forward to engage.
Oh gods. Uselessly, she reached out to the screen. The blond Vampyre looked confident and lethal, while Julian was a juggernaut.
As they neared one another, Julian roared at him, “KNEEL!”
Even despite the physical distance and the all the noise from the rest of the battle, the savage Power in the command rocketed out of the speakers with such force, Xavier groaned and staggered.
All around Julian, every Vampyre fighter who heard the command reacted. Those visible in the feed slammed down onto his knees.
Except for Dominic.
He didn’t kneel.
But his forward momentum hitched for a critical moment.
Julian lunged into a blur and struck. Dominic’s blond head flew spinning from his shoulders, while his body froze in a posture of immense surprise before it vanished forever as it collapsed into dust.
Eighteen
Using the Power of the blood oaths he had taken as Nightkind King was Julian’s modern-day version of throwing sand in the face.
The Power command only bought him a few moments, and he doubted it would work again. He had felt the Power shoot out of him like a verbal bullet. It would take a while before he could pull that much together again.
Also, once Vampyres heard a Power command from someone who was not their sire, they instinctively fought to throw it off and were more resistant to hearing it a second time. The older and stronger a Vampyre was, the less effective Power commands were, until they worked only minimally or not at all, which was why Dominic had been able to resist kneeling, yet he had not been able to contain his reaction.
Julian didn’t pause to savor his victory over Dominic or wait for the Vampyres around him to recover. Instead, he spun to behead as many opponents as he could while they were still reeling and vulnerable.
He killed six before the command wore off. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the Light Fae guards who had joined his team were doing the same.
It turned the tide of the fight. As the other Vampyres recovered, they scattered.
Quickly he scanned the scene. If any of his direct progeny had heard the command, they would remain on their knees until he released them.
Julian didn’t personally turn many Vampyres. He didn’t like to carry the responsibility for them. Aside from Xavier and Yolanthe, he had only four other surviving progeny. They were all in the Nightkind guard, but none of them had been close enough to hear him.
He beckoned to his team, and they gathered around him, facing outward, weapons ready. As they did so, he noticed how Xavier’s humans and the Light Fae soldiers coughed. A few had tied cloths around their lower faces.
Rubbing his face with the back of one hand, he looked around. The air in the garage was hazy with black smoke from the burning vehicles. The quality of air, or lack of it, didn’t matter to him or to any of the other Vampyres, but it did to the rest of his team.
He told them, “I’m grateful for what you’ve done, but you’ll be no good to anyone if you pass out from smoke inhalation. Fall back. Go help Melly and her team.”
They were good people, good fighters. Their reluctance to leave was obvious, but they followed orders.
As they pulled back, he did a quick head count. He had lost four of his own, and now after sending the humans and Light Fae away, his team was down to eleven. They needed to join up with Yolanthe and her troops.
To find Yolanthe, all he had to do was follow the noise.
The hallway that led to the munitions area was across the garage on his right, while the IT area lay to his left. The bulk of the fighting had been on the left, but now it had shifted.
Toward the munitions area.
Followed by his team, he strode to the conflict.
As they closed in, he saw that enemy forces had breached the first security door and gained entrance to the hallway inside. He raced from cover to cover, first hiding behind a concrete pillar, then behind a BMW riddled with bullet holes, while his team did the same.
Scanning the scene, he finally saw Yolanthe crouched behind an SUV. Lunging into a sprint, he joined her.
Her dark, short hair and hawkish features were smeared with soot.
When she saw him, she said, “Yo. Glad you’re alive.”
“Back at you.” He slipped his sword into its shoulder sheath and braced one hand on a fender. “Dominic’s dead.”
“Witness my happy dance. Fucking fucker.” Rolling up and around, she fired at the open doorway to the munitions hall. “We were pinned just outside IT until you got here. Dominic kept hammering at us, while Justine worked over here. I guess if she had already broken through the inner door, she would have fired a rocket launcher or two in here by now. So there’s that.”
He had to flush Justine and her fighters out of that hallway before they managed to break through the inner door. Justine couldn’t gain the capacity to send a fireball through the garage.
A lot of times fighting took finesse, patience and strategy.
Sometimes it took a high body count and a bludgeoning force.
He said, “We need enough fire in that hallway to drive them out. I have two grenades. Do you have any?”
Her dark eyes flashed as she glanced at him. “No. Wait here. I’ll see if any of the others do.”
While he waited, he rubbed his dry eyes. He had so many things he wanted to tell Melly, but mostly he just wanted to know if she was all right.
Where was she? How had the evacuation gone? Had they run into any resistance?
He wanted to tell her, you’re the light of my life. I had no idea how bright and open things could become with you.
Yolanthe reappeared, running so hard, her body slammed full tilt into the side of the SUV. When he looked at her, she opened her hands and showed him a grenade belt with three more grenades.
“Okay,” he said. He gathered the belt out of her grasp and added his two to the belt. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll get these into the hallway. I need to get close enough and at the right angle to throw this in, so I need you to cover me.”
“I love suicidal missions,” Yolanthe said. She readied her automatic rifle and gave him a bright grin. “Let’s go.”