ONSET: Blood of the Innocent Read online

  “Call it twenty-one to twenty-four vampires down,” David concluded. “Any guesses on what’s left?”

  “Anywhere between six and thirty,” Leitz said grimly. “The Thrall thought his own bosses were downstairs, but they may have eaten Klein’s rockets. I’d err on the high side, Commander.”

  “Wonderful.” They were getting closer to the pocket of movement he’d heard, probably close enough that the vampires might be able to hear their whispered conversation even through his helmet.

  Carefully waving Hellet and Stone back, he stepped lightly forward. Listening carefully, he moved as silently as he could…and then his prescience flared and he dropped to the ground as a bolt of white fire blasted through where his chest had been.

  “At least one Mage,” he snapped. “Hellet!”

  “On it.”

  The darkness faded as the two Mages unleashed on each other, the vampire trying to take out the ONSET Mage and her companions, and Hellet simply keeping the vampire contained. Multicolored fire filled the hallway, and David managed to spot the vampires and their impromptu barricade at the other end.

  Stone noticed them at the same time, the big tanned man diving out into the hallway and coming up into a perfect firing stance before the vampires opened fire. Their first few bullets ricocheted off the man’s suddenly granite skin, and then he returned fire.

  Neat bursts of silver bullets tore apart the tables the defenders had overturned, shattering a magical shield as the Mage was forced to split his attention. One vampire went down. Then another.

  And then David arrived, bouncing off the wall to land in the middle of the vampires. Memoria flashed across the vampire Mage, shattering a desperate last-minute attempt at shielding, gutting the creature. Prescience warned him and the ONSET Commander dodged sideways as two vampires opened fire with assault rifles.

  With him out the way, they hit each other and both went down. One of the last two crumpled to the ground as Stone’s bullets found a lethal mark, and Memoria decapitated the last in a single blow.

  “Clear,” David snapped. “Moving forward. Mason, what’s your status?”

  “Coming down the stairs behind you,” she replied. “Aboveground is secure. It’s just digging out rats now.”

  David exhaled heavily and studied the wreckage of the vampires’ barricade.

  “These rats have teeth,” he noted. “You have our location flagged. Take the other direction.”

  “On it.”

  REACHING the end of the hallway and passing into the main section of the basement, David realized just how applicable the description of Golden Twilight’s basement as a dungeon had been. Literal cages lined the walls of an open space the original architect had probably intended as a storage room, though they were all empty today.

  The equipment in the room didn’t help with the impression, with medical gurneys modified with heavy cuffs and chains scattered around the space. Some had IV stands attached, a couple of empty bags leaking onto the floor with a medicinal scent David didn’t know enough to identify.

  “This looks like a horror movie’s idea of an insane asylum,” Hellet muttered. “And the complete lack of anybody doesn’t help.”

  Despite the current darkness, there were lights in the room, though turned off, and David hit the switch after a few moments. The room didn’t fit his expectations. All of the medical equipment was expensive and modern but matched with restraints that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition.

  The cages also contained what looked like full-body restraints. David wasn’t sure what the place was, but everything was consistent.

  “They didn’t need this for prisoners they were keeping for food,” he said softly. “What is this place?”

  “Vampire jail?” Stone suggested. “The fangs have things they lock their own up for, right? Wouldn’t you need most of this to keep one of them prisoner?”

  David shook his head. There were a multitude of reasons why ONSET’s policy on vampires was shoot on sight, ranging from the infectious nature of the disease that created them to the difficulty of containing an adult vampire.

  The vampires would only have to worry about the latter, he supposed, but it still didn’t fit.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he noted grimly. “There’s no one here now, prisoner or jailer. Let’s move.”

  Leaving the strange dungeon-like space behind, they proceeded to find an even more modern-looking medical clinic where, once again, everything was equipped with heavy leather cuffs and steel chains. Massive supply cabinets lined one wall, but all of them had been torn open and ransacked recently.

  “Someone’s trying to make a run for it with enough drugs to buy a small empire,” Stone observed. “We didn’t run into them, though, and only one exit from here.”

  “Cover me,” David ordered as he reached the half-concealed side door. When it refused to open outward, blocked with something heavy, he simply ripped it off its hinges.

  A big steel filing cabinet half-fell through the doorway once the door was removed. With a grunt and a wince, he embedded a gloved hand in it and yanked it through the door frame. The metal box crashed to the floor of the clinic, clearing the way through.

  The other side of the door appeared to have been a records room, hence the heavy filing cabinet that had blocked the door. The exit was open, the door hanging from its hinges in mute testimony to where the vampires appeared to have fled.

  David kept his senses peeled as he moved forward, but all he could hear were the inevitable mechanical noises of a properly operating underground ventilation system, nothing that could guide him to his enemies.

  “Check the doors,” he ordered as they moved down the hallway.

  In response, Hellet gestured and every door swung open simultaneously, exposing storage rooms and simple quarters with rough cots. This was likely where the more junior vampires or Thralls had been stuffed, out of sight and out of mind of their superiors.

  “Where did they all go?” he demanded.

  “Floor plans say the end of the hall should link up to the parking lot,” Leitz warned him over the radio. “If they’ve dug in anywhere else to hold, it’ll be in there.”

  “Wonderful,” David replied. “Makes sense. Anything I should be aware of?”

  “We have no idea what these people have for gear, but they’ve demonstrated again and again they have gear they shouldn’t,” she pointed out. “And if I were keeping heavy weapons in a relatively public building…”

  “They’d be in the private section of the parking lot,” he agreed.

  “Wait for Mason, sir,” Leitz suggested. “There’s no way they can get out.”

  “We put down one Mage,” he told her. “There could be more. A Mage could make that whole debris fall disappear.”

  There was silence on the channel.

  “Shit.”

  “We’re going in.”

  THE HEAVY SET of double doors leading into the underground parking lot had been chained shut, but that didn’t slow David down for more than a few seconds. Memoria slashed through the door, severing the chain, and then the stocky officer kicked the door open and charged through at full speed.

  The shell that flashed through the doors missed him by at least a foot, but the shock wave of the artillery shell passing by threw him to the ground, the shell flying down the corridor to turn the records room into an earth-shaking fireball.

  “Holy shit!” Stone cursed. “The hell is that?!”

  David was already moving, registering the tracked vehicle sitting in the middle of the open parking garage, the barrel of the big artillery gun returning from recoil as its autoloader activated.

  “Is that a tank?”

  “Self-propelled artillery,” Leitz pointed out over the radio. “Running the model, but you’re probably talking a one-five-five cannon.”

  David barely registered the conversation, counting the seconds as the big gun loaded, skewing to try and follow him.
A side-mounted lighter gun opened fire as well, machine gun rounds shattering the concrete as they chased him—but he moved faster than the gun could track and leapt, leaving the ground ten feet away from the mobile howitzer with Memoria flashing through the air to bisect the barrel of the main gun.

  And, as it turned out, the second shell they tried to fire. The ensuing explosion flung him away from the vehicle, his armor somehow holding against the heat as he slammed into the concrete wall of the underground lot.

  There was a stunned silence for several seconds, and then Stone’s M60 opened up as the gunner started to pick out targets. The vampires rapidly responded, and David traced them by the sound of their weapons as he charged through the smoke.

  His Sight warned him about the Mage just in time, allowing him to dodge sideways as a burst of wind ripped the clouds of smoke apart, trying to provide clear vision on the attacking ONSET agents. David’s prescience allowed him to move with the smoke like an armored ghost, approaching to barely half a dozen feet from the Mage—lunging distance.

  The vampire never even realized the ONSET Commander was there before Memoria stabbed into his throat, cutting off any spells he was planning on casting.

  There were only a handful of vampires left, but they opened up on David with a will. Half a second’s prescience and inhuman speed were enough for him to dodge bullets, but not enough for him to advance in the face of that hail of fire. He was forced to retreat to evade their bullets, but that wasn’t enough to save the vampires.

  As soon as he was clear, Kate Hellet went to work. A ball of blue witchfire whipped through the smoke, dropped into the middle of the vampires, and exploded into streams of plasma that burnt everything they touched to ash.

  Hellet couldn’t do that often, but it was enough for now. The pair of vampires that dodged her witchfire went down almost instantly to Stone’s fire, leaving the room suddenly, finally still.

  David crossed back to the still-smoldering artillery piece.

  “Leitz?” he said slowly.

  “M109A6,” the analyst explained. “Mobile artillery piece, one hundred-fifty-five-millimeter gun-howitzer. Could have come from a dozen sources, but I’m guessing a National Guard unit. We’ll have to see if there’s any intact serial numbers to trace it.”

  “Any more surprises?”

  “There shouldn’t be,” Leitz told him. “It looks like we’ve swept the building. You’re secure, Commander.”

  3

  The main hall of the Golden Twilight Casino reeked of blood, gunpowder, and burnt electronics. The ceiling lights were on now, though several of them flickered from damaged wiring and others were simply gone, and they illuminated the wreckage where Klein’s Elfin Warriors had blasted their way in past a squad’s worth of Thralls.

  Now those same Warriors were laying white sheets over the dead defenders, waiting for a forensics team to come take on the unenviable task of cataloging the dead, human and vampire alike.

  “Where are the prisoners?” David asked as he surveyed the wreckage.

  “Ours or the vampires’?” Mason replied. The Mage had removed her helmet and let her long gold braid fall down over the black armored bodysuit that formed the core of ONSET’s tactical armor.

  “Both,” he admitted. “Though I meant ours.”

  “The rescuees have been loaded onto a pair of Pendragons and are being shuttled straight to the Campus for medical exams,” she told him crisply. “The prisoners are currently locked up in a storage room used for spare slot machines; Samuels is guarding them.”

  The Campus, located near Colorado Springs, was the hyper-classified headquarters of the Office of the National Supernatural Enforcement Teams. While other facilities hosted the offices of the various pieces of the Omicron Branch of the US Government that handled the supernatural, the ONSET Campus was slowly becoming the centerpiece of supernatural law enforcement.

  The fact that it was fortified to withstand attack by anything short of multiple dragons had something to do with it.

  “Control, what’s the status on our forensics team?” David asked Leitz.

  “They just left the Campus; ETA a bit more than an hour,” she replied instantly. “Two teams and a portable lab setup; they were waiting for the all clear.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He’d known what was being sent, but making sure all of the information was conveyed was still useful.

  “Klein.” He gestured the Warrior over to him. “How are your people holding up? We didn’t lose anyone, right?”

  “No losses,” the battle Mage confirmed. Like Mason, he’d removed his helmet to reveal the dark skin and hair of his half-Chinese features. Despite having shared beers with the man, David had no idea what had led to a half-Chinese Mage becoming enough of a Tolkien fanatic to end up with the Elfin—or if the man’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Lord of the Rings had come after joining the organization, as it did for many.

  “We have a few wounded but nothing serious,” he continued. “They’re outside, being treated in the Pendragon.”

  “Any further warning signs or concerns?” David asked. “I’m sure the Reno PD would prefer to let people back into their homes sooner rather than later.”

  “Do we really want an audience yet?” Mason replied.

  “Not really, but we’ll keep the casino itself under lockdown,” he told her. “Crime-scene tape, FBI jackets; we all know how it works. No one is going to question the black helicopters, even if it helps fuel a conspiracy theory or six.”

  “It always does,” she agreed. “We’ve swept the upstairs again. Everything looks clean. Klein?”

  “We’re still picking through pieces, but I don’t think we’ve any enemy combatants hiding in a broom closet anywhere,” the Elfin told them. “This building is secure, at least until the gamblers show up and start asking where the dealers are.”

  Some of the slot machines and tables had survived the brief but intense firefight, but the staff was probably going to have to find new jobs.

  “I’m relatively certain that even the stripe of gambler that shows up to a suburban Reno casino is going to notice the crime-scene tape,” David replied. “I’ll get in touch with the cops, let them know we’re lifting the evac order.

  “Keep an eye out regardless,” he ordered. “I don’t want surprises.”

  THE CONTRAST between the mundane gaudiness of the casino, with its slot machines and poker tables and bar, and the bodies of the vampires and their magically controlled minions was jarring. Several of the machines and tables had been shattered by fireballs or blades of force, not bullets, as the Mages among the Elfin Warriors had cleared the way for their compatriots.

  The empty, abandoned state of the casino would have been disconcerting enough. The rows of bodies, combined with David’s own ability to see the magic that had so recently torn through the air, only added to the feeling.

  The oppressive feeling of death and decay leaking down from the concealed floor above them didn’t help.

  “You know, every so often, I wonder if we shouldn’t try and negotiate with the Familias,” Mason said softly. “And then I see places like the hellhole upstairs here and am reminded of why we shoot them on sight.”

  “There’s no saving a vampire once they’ve turned,” David agreed. “Though, as I understand, they don’t have to drink human blood. Animal blood is fine, but they drink human blood to be assholes.”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t go up there,” she advised. “I had to, and the forensics people have to, and after that, I recommend we burn this whole place to the ground.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad.” Mason shook her head. “It was bad enough for me, and my Sight isn’t nearly as strong as yours. You should definitely not go up there.”

  David shivered. His Sight gave him many advantages: he could identify supernaturals at a glance, he could see several moments into the future, and he occasionally got glimpses of even further…but it came with a co
st. He could See the horror, despair and sickness of a place like the upstairs club, and it was difficult, at best, to forget what he had Seen.

  “If we have it secure, then I see no reason to go up there,” he agreed. “Did you find anything to suggest what the hell was in the basement or where those trucks went?”

  “There wasn’t exactly a big book labeled EVIL VAMPIRE PLANS FOR THE CURRENT YEAR on the table,” Mason replied. “The forensics team will rip their computers apart; that’ll get us our answers.”

  David shook his head.

  “I can’t help feeling like it might be urgent,” he admitted. “That weird clinic dungeon has my teeth on edge, like we’re missing something.”

  “We’re always missing something with the vampires,” she pointed out. “We’ve basically been at war with them for as long as the Omicron Branch has existed; they haven’t exactly given us tours of their homes and explained how their society works.”

  He chuckled.

  “Leave it to the IT people, then,” he agreed. “I’m going to give Charles a call, see if His Scaliness has any ideas.”

  “Enjoy,” the other Commander said. “Tell him I said hi; I’m going to go check in on our outside patrol and make sure the Warriors aren’t doing anything outrageously cover-blowing.”

  “They’re not that bad.”

  “No,” she agreed. “They just have no idea how to even act like federal agents, and the Reno PD has a decent idea of what Feds should look like.”

  “WELL A NAE, Commander, what would ye be looking to talk to little ol’ mae about?” Charles brogued over the radio.

  The discrepancy between the impression you got talking to Charles over the radio, where he spoke like a 1930s Irishman and broke computers like a 2010s hacktivist, and the fact that the being in question was an immense fire-breathing lizard was…severe.

  “Charles,” David said warningly. “I’ve just spent the last twenty-four hours with Klein. My tolerance for jokers is sorely pressed.”