The Beast

TWO

“Are you fucking kidding me!”

As Hollywood’s massive body and stupid frickin’ pea-brained head broke rank and took off toward the dorms, Vishous was of half a mind to run after the guy just so he could beat the living shit out of his brother. But nooooooooooo.

You couldn’t snatch and grab a bullet after the trigger had been pulled.

Even if you were trying to save the piece of fool lead from its grave.

V whistled into the night, but it wasn’t like the rest of the fighters weren’t also watching the bastard’s backside go bat-out-of-hell rogue.

Members of the Brotherhood and the other males exploded free from behind their covers of trees and outbuildings, falling into wing formation behind Rhage, guns up and daggers ready. Shouts from the enemy announced that the attack was noticed almost immediately, and everyone was only halfway to goal when lessers began streaming out of doorways, wasps from the hives.

Cluster-fuck much? Hollow pops! sounded as Rhage discharged his weapon all over the place, nailing slayers in the face, his big-bore bullets blowing out the backs of those skulls and dropping the undead into tangles of writhing arms and legs. Which was great—but couldn’t possibly last as the slayers sought to close off behind the guy, isolate him, and create a second front line against the rest of the brothers.

Thank you, Mr. Premature Charge and your early-work-release, independent-study project that bent over the plan they’d worked on for nights.

Total chaos took over, although unlike Rhage’s bolt, that was expected: Just as you could trust every hand-to-hand combat to eventually end up on the ground, you could guarantee that the best-planned attack would, after a while, spin into the land of goatfucks and goddamn-its. If you were lucky, that inevitability took some time to land on your head, and your enemy sustained crippling losses beforehand.

Not with Hollywood around

Oh, and P.S., when someone tells you you’re going die tonight, how about you don’t run headlong into a triple digit of your enemy? You fucking asshole.

“I was trying to save you!” V hollered into the fight. Just because he could now that their covers were blown.

Rhage was such a hothead. And knowing this, V should have confronted the idiot back at the mansion, but he’d been too distracted getting his own shit together to plug into the vision. It wasn’t until he’d gotten out to the abandoned campus that he’d blinked a couple of times . . . and realized, yes, this was when it happened for Rhage. Tonight. In this field.

Keeping quiet about it would have been like putting a bullet into the guy himself.

Of course, saying something had worked out so fucking well.

“Fuck you, Hollywood!” he yelled. “I’m coming for you!”

’Cuz he was going to get that bitch off this field if it was the last thing he did.

V held his fire until he got within a ten-foot range of his first target—it was either that or run the risk of hitting one of his brothers or another of their fighters. The lesser that he bull’s-eyed was one with dark hair, dark eyes, and the kind of aggression you’d find in a grizzly bear: lumbering with a lot of spit spools. One bullet into the right eye socket and the bastard was good as lawn on the ground.

There was no stabbing the thing back to the Omega. Vishous jumped over the still-moving, but no longer mobile, piece of meat, and gunned for his next one. Identifying a blond slayer about fifteen feet to the left, he quick-checked the peripheral to make sure the Brotherhood wasn’t getting wagon-wheeled. Then, using his glove-covered trigger finger, he picked off the guy who looked like Rod Stewart, ca. 1980.

On to numbers three to infinity. V hit whatever was safe to take out, making sure that he didn’t cross-hair or impair friendly fire while still remaining effective. Some hundred and fifty yards of video game later and he’d reached both cover and danger: the first of the dorms, which they had originally planned to ambush. The damn thing was a hollowed-out shell with plenty of hidey-holes only a fool would assume were empty, and he was careful to monitor his six as he back-flatted down the side of the brick building, ducking under windows, jumping over low bushes.

The cotton-candy/rancid-meat stench of lessers leaking everywhere swirled around in the cold gusts, mixing into a war salad with the echoes of gunshots and the shouts of the enemy. Anger in his gut drove him forward and kept him focused at the same time as he tried to drop targets without getting shot himself.

As soon as he got to Rhage, he was going to fat-lip that goddamn beauty queen.

Assuming destiny didn’t black-shroud the SOB first.

The good news? With the Fore-lesser gone, the Lessening Society’s response was no more coordinated than the Brotherhood’s attack had been, and the fact that the enemy was poorly armed and pathetically untrained was another bene. There seemed to be a five-to-one slayer-to-gun ratio, and a one-in-ten competent fighter rate—and given the numbers? That might just save their asses.

Left, pop! Right, pop! Dodge. Drop and roll. Spring up and keep running. Over two downed slayers—thank you, Assail, you crazy sonofabitch—pop! right in front of him.

The magic happened about five minutes and fifty thousand years into the fight. Without warning, he separated from his body, peeling free of the flesh that was working so hard and with such accuracy, his spirit floating above the adrenaline that forest-fired his arms and legs, his essence witnessing himself pumping off rounds and pressing forward from a position over his own right shoulder.

It was the zone, and usually something that took him over pretty much as soon as he started fighting. But with Rhage under his skin, up his ass, and fucking his head, the shit was late to the party.

It was because of his above-the-fray perspective that he noticed the catch-22 first.

Sometimes the counter-intuitive, the WTF, the against-the-grain, was as important as all the things you expected to see in a battle.

Like, for example, three figures running laterally across the theater of engagement for the exit. Yeah, sure, it could be lessers who’d pissed their pants and were deserting—except for one thing: The Omega’s blood in their bodies was one fuck of a GPS locator, and having to tell that kind of boss that you’d pantywaisted out of an engagement like this would guarantee the sort of torture that made Hell look like a couch surf.

Goddamn it, he couldn’t let them go. Not when they could end up calling cops and adding another layer of FUBAR to this funhouse.

Assuming they hadn’t already done that.

With a curse, Vishous took after the three free-thinkers, dematerializing out in front of where the trio seemed to be heading. As he re-formed, he knew they were fucking humans even before he saw that the one in the rear was running backward with what was no doubt a cocksucking Apple, iConformist POS front and center and on video record.

He fricking iHated anything with a goddamn Macintosh trademark.

V jumped out into the guy’s path, which of course J. J. Abrams didn’t notice, because, hello, he was too busy getting footage.

Vishous extended his shitkicker, and as the human went into gravity shock, the phone airborned and V caught the thing and shoved it into his leather jacket.

Next move was to stomp the guy’s sternum and put a gun in his face. Staring down at the holy shit and sputter that was going on, it took all of V’s self-control not to slit the guy’s throat, then go Jason Voorhees all over the pair who were still on the run. He’d beyond had it with humans. He had real work to do, but noooo, he was once again wiping the asses of these rats without tails so that the rest of them didn’t get upset that vampires walked among them.

“D-d-d-d-don’t h-h-h-h-hurt me,” came the whine. Along with a whiff of urine as the guy pissed himself.

“You are so fucking pathetic.”

Cursing again, V pulled a mental snatch-and-grab, checking to see if the CPD had been contacted—which was a “no”—before wiping clean the kid’s memories of his pot smoking rendezvous with his buddies being interrupted by all hell breaking loose.

“You had a bad trip, you dumb-ass,” V muttered. “Bad trip. This is all just a bad fucking trip. Now run the fuck along back to Daddy and Mommy’s.”

Like the good little preprogrammed toy he now was, the kid was up on his new old-school Converses and tearing off after his friends, a look of total confusion on his flushed face.

Vishous pulled another jump ahead and intercepted Frick and Frack. And what do you know, V’s mere presence, materializing out of thin air, was enough to bust through their panic—the pair hard-stopped like they were chained dogs that had run out of steel links, jerking back in their shoes and pinwheeling their matching Buffalo Bills parkas.

“You asshats are always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Mentally lights-outing them, he patted them down, cleaning their pockets and their short-terms at the same time—then he sent them off on their pussyfooted flee once again, praying that one or the other of them had an undiagnosed heart condition that would suddenly show up under the strain and kill him outright.

Then again, V was a nasty bastard, so there you had it.

No time to waste. He headed back to try to catch Rhage, re-outing his forties and looking for the most efficient way to the sonofabitch. Too bad dematerializing into the thick of things was a no-go, but shit, there were guns pointing in every direction of the compass. At least necessary coverage came quick, first in a series of maple trees and then in the form of a building that had to have been yet another dormitory.

Slamming his back against the cold, hard brick, his ears tuned out the heaving breathing of his lungs. The heaviest discharges from firearms were on the left, up and forward of his position, and he quickly dumped both clips even though he had three bullets remaining in one and two in the other. Fully restocked, he jogged toward the far corner of the building and put his head—

The slayer popped out of the last window he’d ducked under, and without the creak of the sash, V would have gotten drilled. Instinct rather than training had his arm swinging out and around before he was conscious of moving, and his index finger pumped off a pound of lead right into the fucker’s face, clouds of black blood exploding out the rear of the skull like ink bottles getting dropped from a great height.

Unfortunately, an autonomic contraction of the slayer’s grip on whatever autoloader it had in its hand caused a number of bullets to go flying, and the burning stripe on the outside of V’s hip meant he’d been hit at least once. But better there than any other place—

A second slayer came around the corner, and V caught it in the throat with his left-hand gun. That one appeared to be unarmed, nothing of note dropping to the overgrown grass as the thing grabbed for the front of his neck to try to hold in the black gusher.

No time to peel any weapons off either of them—or to stab them back to the Omega.

Up ahead, Rhage was in trouble.

Out in the heart of the campus, in the town square–like area formed by a circle of buildings set some five acres apart, Rhage was center-of-attention with a peanut gallery of at least twenty slayers closing in on him.

“Jesus Christ,” V muttered.

No time for strategy. Duh. And no one else coming to Hollywood’s aid, either. The other brothers and fighters were engaged all around, the attack having dissipated into half a dozen skirmishes that were being fought in different quadrants.

There was nobody to spare in a situation that could have used three to four wingmen.

Instead of one who had a thigh wound and a grudge the size of Canada.

Goddamn it, he was used to always being right, but sometimes it sucked ass.

Vishous surged forward and focused on one side of the melee, picking off slayers as he tried to give his brother a viable escape route. But Rhage . . . fucking Rhage.

He was somehow on it. Even though the math didn’t add up to anything but a casket equation, the dumb bastard was a thing of deadly beauty as he slowly circled ’round and ’round, discharging his weapons on a first-come, first-served basis, refueling his autoloader without missing a beat, creating a ring of writhing, half-dead undead bodies like he was the eye of a helter-skelter hurricane.

The only thing that wasn’t in control? His handsome-for-the-history-books face was contorted into a monster’s snarl, the killing rage within him not even partially leashed. And that would have been almost acceptable.

If it weren’t for the fact that he was supposed to be a professional.

That sort of murderous emotion was an amateur’s downfall, the kind of thing that blinded you instead of focused you, weakened you instead of made you invincible.

Vishous worked as fast he as could, spot-on’ing chests, guts, heads, until the stench saturated the open air even with the wind blowing in the opposite direction. But he had to compensate for Rhage’s ever-rotating shooting field, staying out of range himself, because shit knew he had no confidence that the brother would differentiate between targets.

And that was the fucking problem when you were half-cocked in battle.

Then it was done.

Kinda.

Even after those twenty or twenty-five lessers were down on the ground, Rhage still spun around and continued shooting, a death carousel with no more riders left on its demon horses that was too stupid to know where its own off switch was.

“Rhage!” V glanced around as he kept his guns up, but stopped his own discharging. “You fucking idiot! Stop!”

Pop! Pop! Pop-pop!

Hollywood’s muzzle kept coughing out flashes of light even though there was nothing to shoot at—except other fighters off in the distance who just happened to be out of range for the moment.

But were not guaranteed to stay that way.

Vishous moved in closer, stepping over the animated corpses on the ground, keeping at Rhage’s back as the rotation continued. “Rhage!”

The temptation to shoot the guy in the ass was so strong, his right hand lowered a muzzle to butt-cheek level. But that was just a fantasy. Giving Hollywood a lead injection would only trigger the beast when V himself was within appetizer range.

“Rhage!”

Something must have gotten through to the brother, because the barrage of do-nothing shooting slowed . . . then stopped, leaving Rhage in a panting, sagging neutral.

That was so out in the open, they both might as well have had neon arrows over their heads.

“You’re out of here,” V barked. “Are you fucking even kidding me with this shit—”

That was when it happened.

One second, he was moving around to get in front of his brother . . . and the next, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, one of the not-dead-enough lessers lift an unsteady arm . . . that had a gun attached to the end of it. As the bullet came blasting out of that muzzle, V’s brain did the triangulation as fast as the lead slug flew.

It was going into Rhage’s chest.

Right into the center of Rhage’s chest—because, hello, that was the biggest target outside of one of the fucking dormitory doors on the campus.

“No!” V screamed as he went to jump into the path.

Yeah, ’cuz him dying instead was such a great outcome? Lose/lose, either way.

No blaze of pain as he airborned, no resounding kick of a bullet’s entry into his side, his hip, his other thigh.

Because the goddamned thing had already found home.

Rhage let out a grunt and both of his arms punched to the sky, that patented, autonomic compression on the triggers in those hands emptying those clips: Bang, bang, bang, bang! up to the sky, up to the heavens, as if Rhage were cursing in pain.

And then the brother went down.

Unlike the Omega’s boys, a direct hit like that would knock out any vampire, even a member of the Brotherhood. Nobody walked away from that shit, nobody.

As V screamed again, he hit his own patch of ground and discharged one of his weapons, plowing the slayer with the hole-in-one shot with enough lead to turn the fucker into a bank vault.

Threat neutralized, he scrambled to his brother, crab-walking on his guns and the balls of his shitkickers. For a male who never felt fear, he found himself looking into the gaping maw of pure terror.

“Rhage!” he said. “Jesus fucking Christ— Rhage!”