Noah felt his whole chest explode in agony and looked down. The vampire had punched into his chest, cracking his ribs and sternum in the center, right to his heart. “Now, you might have been able to heal using vampire blood.” Michael looked down at the mess of Noah’s chest. “Well, probably not. However,” Michael pulled Noah’s hand and knife out of himself, turned the blade, and, using Noah’s own hand, shoved it into Noah’s stomach. “I think I’ll use your energy to heal myself.”

  Noah’s voice squeaked; he could feel the life being sucked out of him. Energy…the energy he needed to try and fix his own body.

  Soon Michael stepped back and allowed the emaciated corpse to fall to the ground. He turned and started walking toward the door of the suite. “May your sins stay on you until you stand in judgment,” Michael pronounced and pushed the suite’s door open, then closed it gently.

  Seven dead bodies littered the hall behind him.

  “Did you find anything?” Michael asked as he strode into the room Sabine was searching. “I only ask because I’m sure the security guards are on their way. I doubt they will want a friendly conversation.”

  “Are they a problem?” Sabine asked, looking up from the drawer she was rifling through.

  “No, but I’d rather not kill innocents.”

  Sabine shrugged and shut the desk drawer. “This place looks like a plant. It only shows the stuff he was doing as a businessman. It has nothing like the plans we saw in his chalet.”

  Akio walked into the room. “Hai.” He nodded. “I have found the same; nothing but business papers.”

  Michael looked around. “We need to visit England. Perhaps the group that is attacking William has ideas. We will ask them.” He looked at Akio. “I think you will have some fun.”

  Five minutes later a group of security guards kicked in the door to the suite and quickly searched it, guns drawn, expecting to find more dead bodies.

  All they found was a secret passageway leading somewhere. The captain in charge detailed two guards to carefully follow it and report back.

  Many minutes later, one of the guards came rushing back into the hallway, excited. He pointed over his shoulder back toward the suite. “You guys are not going to believe what is on the other end of that trap-filled passageway…”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Below the Kurobe Dam, Toyama Prefecture, Japan

  Three Pods hovered deep underwater just above a concrete protrusion.

  “You must be right above it. Let me take you to the side,” Eve’s voice told them over the comm.

  Mark had already released his harness and pressed his nose against the glass. “It’s a bit murky down here, but I think I can see the break point.”

  Jacqueline sat firmly in her seat monitoring her breathing. “How do we know we’re safe down here?” she asked. “I mean, if we leave the Pod, aren’t we going to be crushed by the weight of the water?”

  Mark tried to look upward out the front of the Pod. “Nah,” he said, despite not being able to actually see how far down they were. “I think we’d need to be much deeper for that to be an issue.”

  Jacqueline wasn’t entirely convinced, but she knew why she was here and she wasn’t going to start being a chicken now. She’d made her decision when she sat next to her father’s makeshift grave after he’d saved her. She was going to make her life mean something. And that meant being courageous.

  “Ok,” Eve confirmed. “The trackers in the Pods put you right at the location we talked about. You’re good to go, Mark.”

  Mark glanced back at Jacqueline, a slight hint of childish glee in his eyes at the prospect of what he was about to do.

  “Be careful,” she warned him. “And make sure you don’t go activating the charges until you’re back in here,” she added, undoing her own harness and wrapping him in her arms before releasing him to his task.

  Mark shrugged her warning off. “It’s ok. I’ll be right back.” He stopped. “Although… With the Pod filled with water, I wonder if that will impede its movement away from the explosion.”

  Jacqueline looked at him intensely. “I thought you had already done these calculations,” she said, exasperated at his lack of rigor.

  Mark pursed his lips. “I had. Approximately. But I’d rounded things up, and hadn’t quite factored in the range of the remote for the charges.” He thought for a moment. “Best we have a head start before we hit the button.”

  Jacqueline rolled her eyes.

  “Also,” he added, “let’s tilt the Pod forward to conserve as much air as possible.”

  Jacqueline relayed the suggestion to Eve via the communicator, and the Pod tipped forward, forcing them to balance themselves on the outer frame of the see-through door.

  “You ready?” He checked.

  Jacqueline nodded, suddenly anxious again, and held onto the sides of the bench seat.

  Mark hit the button to open the door and water started gushing in. Jacqueline instinctively scrambled to not get wet, but then remembered that most of the Pod was going to be submerged before they were done.

  In fact, she was going to be going out there as soon as this first phase was complete. She dropped her feet back down and gasped as the coldness of the water met the outside of her suit before the suit corrected for the temperature differential. A moment later the water was up to her chest, and she was feeling quite comfortable.

  Mark had moved out of the Pod and was swimming in the direction of the concrete slabs that were strangely juxtaposed on top of each other. Jacqueline waited, holding her breath and trying to see through the water she was now completely immersed in.

  Mark placed the first charge, and then the second, then made a visual check that the other two Pods were a sensible distance back. He swam back to the Pod he had just left, hitting the button as he clambered back through the door. Immediately it started to slide shut, and a second after it had closed the water level started to go down. Within three seconds they had a small air pocket forming at the top. Both Mark and Jacqueline immediately moved to the top to breathe.

  “Piece of cake,” he told her, winking.

  Jacqueline shook her head. “Let’s just get out of here,” she told him, sending the signal to move as a click over the intercom Eve had given her.

  A moment later the Pod had whipped them out of the way, so Mark detonated the charge. The explosion blew all the Pods back, jolting them.

  Despite the disturbance, the Pod had managed to replace around two-thirds of the water with air, leaving Jacqueline just wet and pissed. She slapped Mark hard on his arm. “Your calculations were off!”

  Mark rubbed his arm while still standing and holding onto the grab rail. “Well, I thought it wasn’t bad. There was a risk we’d be out of range for detonating the explosion,” he protested.

  Jacqueline was in no mood to concede, and Mark was smart enough to let it go. “As long as you’re ok,” he said. He ceased rubbing his arm and clutched her arm as romantically as he could under the circumstances.

  They looked in the direction of the ingress they had created, but it was several more minutes before enough debris had settled enough for them to see what was going on. Even after that, there was a suspension of concrete and building materials which wasn’t going anywhere.

  Mark looked out at the mess. “Well, I think this is about as good as it’s going to get for a while,” he remarked, moving toward the door button.

  Jacqueline pushed her bottom lip out, readying herself. “Doing this without an air supply sucks ass.”

  Mark nodded. “Couldn’t agree more,” he said, looking at her. “Thank goodness for superpowers,” he added with a wink.

  Jacqueline bobbed her head anxiously. “Yeah, but we don’t know what we’re going to encounter down there. And it’s a long way back to the surface.”

  Mark grinned at her. “Nervous, Little Wolf?” he asked playfully.

  Her eyes flashed fiercely for a moment before softening to her true emotions. “Yeah,” she admitted. “It’s not like we can just tear through a bunch of Weres or low-lives and be ok. There’ll be no fighting a lack of oxygen.”

  Mark sighed. “That’s true. We’ll be ok. You ready? I think we just need to head in there and keep going in the direction of that pipe you see running along the outside.”

  Jacqueline looked at the red pipe that ran the length of the concrete wall. “Ok, let’s do it,” she agreed, her expression more determined now.

  The other two Pods had approached and were hovering next to them. Ichika had already managed to get hers open, and she and Haruto had exited and were making their way toward the blasted opening.

  “Ok, come on,” Jacqueline said, spying her competition. “Can’t be seen as pussies,” she added, hitting the button to open the Pod door again. The door slid up, flooding the airspace they had regained with water again. Jacqueline and Mark took deep breaths and ducked into the water to swim behind Ichika, who led the way.

  Jacqueline turned to see Riku and Akari leaving their Pod and following.

  In waterlogged silence, all six of them managed to get through the entry created by the blast. After they had swum deep inside, the man made cavern turned out to have an air pocket inside it. They surfaced, switching on the waterproof flashlights that Eve had distributed among them.

  “Over there!” Riku shouted, pointing in the direction of a stairway. “That looks like it leads to a higher chamber.”

  Mark nodded. “Think so. From the schematics Eve managed to plot from her scans, it should be intact and dry.”

  Ichika shined the flashlight in the direction he was pointing, and the team headed over, guided by the light.

  They hauled themselves up the steps and soon found themselves in a chamber that was more or less dry except for the water they tracked in.

  Haruto glanced down at the sleeve of his suit. “Wow,” he remarked, touching it with his hand. “Yuko wasn’t kidding when she said these suits were quick-drying.”

  Jacqueline huffed. “Yeah, well, would have been good to have something that was oxygen-providing too,” she grumbled, wringing the water out of her hair.

  Akari was doing the same, but Ichika with her short dark bob simply flipped her hair back behind her ears and then squeezed the water out by running the flats of her hands over her head.

  “Ok, this way,” Mark told them, leading them deeper into the chamber and lugging the plastic-encased battery required for the job with him.

  Peckham, England

  George walked into Harry’s office. He turned and shut the door quietly.

  Harry looked up and frowned. “What’s happened now?”

  George ignored the tissues that were in the trashcan by Harry’s desk. “Noah has gone dark.”

  “And another one of us falls.” Harry sighed. “It seems that Charley William is trying to get back up off the ground.”

  Harry thought back to the bully. “I hated that little pecker. Let’s lock down the building and start calling in favors. We can’t let two of our own plus all of our mercs, assuming they are all dead, go without a response.”

  “Oh, we won’t,” Harry agreed and stood from behind his desk. “Call for a lockdown, and make sure the crop in the dungeons are tied down. We don’t need any of those fuckers getting loose while we deal with someone coming in from the outside.”

  “You think they will be coming here?” George asked, pulling the door back open as Harry walked toward him.

  Harry left his office, and George closed the door behind them. “Two of our kill-or-capture squads went after them. I doubt they are feeling very forgiving.”

  “Why not just go to ground, hide?” George asked. “We’ve seen it in the past.”

  “When you are a king, on the top of a sand pile,” Harry answered, “you make sure to toss off anyone trying to get to you.” The two men turned toward the operations room in their headquarters. “They won’t run away from the sand pile or dig themselves a hole in it. They know we are after them now. Their egos won’t accept us running, I don’t think.”

  Harry opened the door to their operations room. His eyes swept to Thomas’ and Noah’s work areas, knowing neither one would ever be there to speak with again. “Call in everyone we can. Everyone we know who were friends with the people on those teams that were murdered.” A second later, he called back to his friend, “Power up the trap, too!”

  George nodded and turned to go make some calls.

  Saint-Genis-Pouilly, France

  The man was sitting behind a wooden desk in an office dozens of meters underground. His eyes glanced between two screens he had connected to his tablet computer.

  “I could never hate another as much as I hate Michael,” William whispered. He watched the video from one of his contacts, showing what was left of his chalet in France. In another window he had an open report about the attack outside his suite in Frankfurt. He didn’t doubt that there was other damage to his suite, more than the expensive vase that was listed destroyed in the report.

  More, his personal sanctuary had been destroyed by people rifling through his personal effects.

  “Gerard!” William called. A moment later, his number-one man stepped in.

  “Yes, sir?” Gerard motioned to the door with his head.

  “Leave it open,” William answered. “I need you to call the mercenaries and tell them their new location will be in Peckham, England. They will wait for Michael to show up. If he walks out of the building, kill him. Let them know if they can confirm his death, I’ll pay double the agreed.”

  “As you wish, sir.” Gerard nodded and left, closing the door behind him.

  Peckham, England, Green Antlers Pub

  There were seven police officers in uniform and three other men in street clothes inside the room deep in the back of the Green Antlers Pub.

  Oscar sat down at the table. As the newest member, he had decided that keeping his mouth shut was his best course of action.

  Leo, Oscar’s partner, stood up so everyone sitting around the table could see him easily. “I asked you here to discuss the new information we’ve received.” He picked up a bottle. “But first, we toast to those of our people who have fallen.”

  “Toast!” Eight men and two women raised their drinks in salute and then took a sip before putting them back down.

  “We have good intelligence that Noah, may demons eat his corpse in hell, was killed during a kill-or-capture operation in Germany, and Thomas was killed the day before, also in Germany.”

  “Two down, two to go,” Josiah Williamson grumbled.

  Leo nodded his understanding and continued speaking. “That means we only have two of the leadership left, and we need to consider our next steps.”

  “Are we going to get a better time to take them out?” Mickie Clark asked. Her voice a bit gravelly as she chewed on a toothpick.

  “Our latest intel shows them locking the place down,” Leo told her.

  “Probably think they are about to be attacked by whoever took them out in Germany,” she mused. “Hell, I would.”

  Josiah rapped his knuckles on the table. “Watch and be ready to take the opportunity to rush them if a fight happens?”

  Leo looked around the table, gauging the response to Josiah’s suggestion. “How many could we get across all three shifts?”

  “Hell,” Mickie replied, “I’ll take my shift and sleep in our lookout rooms during the other two. I’ll grab a suitcase of clothes to be ready.”

  There were nods of agreement around the table. “Ok, let’s work out the details. Who’s closest to Judge Keeth to get the legal documents we need?”

  The discussions went on for another two hours before the ten broke up and went their separate ways to inform their members.

  The Green Antlers were going to war.

  One of the reasons humans have survived the millennia is an ability to sense trouble at an unconscious level. Oftentimes science has been unable to ascertain just what caused the humans to react when there didn’t seem to be any obvious trouble about to occur.

  However, there would be many stories written about the fateful day in Peckham, England when the Dark Messiah and his followers took out the blood-baggers and rained fire down from the heavens to destroy their building.

  Many would argue that he didn’t bring any fire, but rather it was done by those in the police who had been secretly trying to dismantle the blood-baggers and help the victims they had grabbed over the years to escape.

  Here is what no one argued…

  It started at noon, the streets emptying as the blood-baggers’ headquarters was boarded up. Gun-wielding men and women, hard as sheets of metal and carrying weapons and ammunition, went into the building in the light.

  Then an advanced ship the likes no one had seen descended out of the sky, as if it had come down from the sun itself. It was black and made no noise that anyone who had been willing to stay near the black building could discern. When it hovered over the street three blocks from the blood-baggers, the canopy opened, and two people got out.

  One was a woman who had two pistols strapped down and her hair tied back.

  The other was a shorter man, Asian. He also had pistols, but reached inside the flying vehicle and pulled out a katana.

  Suddenly there was another man with them. He had on a long coat and was carrying a black leather hat. Many swore they couldn’t see any hair on his head as he looked around, taking in the street.

  The Pod took off, rising into the sky and disappearing, leaving the three on the ground. The man in the duster put on his hat and took the middle as the Asian man went to his left side and the woman took the right.

  All had checked their pistols, sliding them back into their holsters and preparing themselves.

 

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