decides to do.”
Anastasia turned and smiled at Alex, who was staring at Mitsuru in shock at her totally understandable disregard.
“Maybe you could hide underneath Eerie’s skirt,” Anastasia suggested helpfully. “Kill two birds with one stone.”
Alex barely acknowledged Anastasia, or her jibe. He just lowered his head, balled his fists, and stood there, his eyes still locked on Mitsuru as if they were locked in epic combat.
“I am not hiding,” he said quietly, with a determined voice that made it very difficult for Anastasia not to laugh. “I’m going to stay up here and fight.”
“You don’t know how to fight, Alex. Renton, Margot, Edward and I are all combat veterans,” Mitsuru reminded, looking a bit annoyed. “If you want to help, then stay out of the way, and let us do our jobs.”
Alex shook his head slowly, glaring definitely at Mitsuru.
“I am not hiding in that hole,” he said firmly, pointing at the dilapidated ruins.
Mitsuru stood up, brushing the dead grass from her jeans, and then walked over to stand close to Alex. Though she had to look up at him, she wasn’t any less intimidating for it.
“It is my job to bring all of you home. All of you. And you and Eerie can’t even defend yourselves, Alex, much less help the rest of us. So the two of you are going in the basement,” she insisted, raising her voice slightly, “and that is final.”
Mitsuru stopped and then shook her head in disbelief when Eerie cleared her throat politely, from right behind her. She had been curled, asleep or pretending to be asleep, underneath a nearby tree since they had arrived in the valley. Anastasia couldn’t understand how she managed to cross the clearing and walk up behind Mitsuru without her noticing — frankly, she hadn’t even seen her get up from under the tree — and Anastasia felt a trace of annoyance over it.
Then she went back to being just a touch amused. It always made her feel upbeat, watching a plan come together, even if it didn’t all go exactly the way that she had expected.
“I am not going in the basement if Alex isn’t,” Eerie said shyly, her hands clenched in front of her, her eyes downcast.
Mitsuru turned around, looking more surprised than angry.
“You too, Eerie? Look, both of you, this isn’t up for debate. I’m not asking you to do it, understand? I’m telling you.”
Renton and Edward entered the valley from the south, moving briskly over the damp ground, looking unhappy. Renton ran over to Anastasia and whispered his report to her. Anastasia listened for a moment, then nodded and turned back to Mitsuru, who was moving quickly from impatient to infuriated.
“We may not have time for discussion, Miss Aoki,” Anastasia said brightly. “Renton says that he discovered a number of large, feral Etheric signatures nearby, approaching rapidly.”
Mitsuru turned from Eerie to Anastasia, and then threw up her hands, looking exasperated.
“How could they have found us so quickly? We haven’t activated the beacon, yet.”
Anastasia shrugged half-heartedly. What could she have said? It wouldn’t have helped anything, to have answered Mitsuru’s question.
“Okay, no choice. Eerie, do you know how to activate a beacon?”
Eerie got all tongue-tied, but eventually she managed to nod at Mitsuru.
“Then do it, there’s one over there,” Mitsuru ordered, pointing to the pile of mostly empty bags leaning against one wall of the concrete building. “And keep your head down. Renton, you and Edward know what to do. Where is Margot?”
“She’s already in place,” Renton said, a little out of breath, “and waiting.”
Mitsuru nodded gravely, pulling the belt that held her guns from the bag at her feet. She clicked the buckle into place, one hand absently confirming the presence of the twin pistols, strapped to the small of her back.
“Alright, then you do the same,” she said, nodding at Renton and Edward, as she added a sheathed knife to her belt. “Let me know as soon as you know which way they are going to come, especially the big one.”
Alex grabbed Mitsuru’s arm, and everyone froze in shock, midway through their preparations, Renton holding a forgotten assault rifle only partially removed his bag, even Anastasia standing wide-eyed and staring.
“That’s the silver one, right? That Weir?”
Everyone was surprised. Mitsuru simply nodded, instead of exploding. After a moment, she brushed his hand distastefully off her arm. Anastasia was disappointed by her restraint.
“Yes, I would imagine so,” Mitsuru said grimly, turning away from Alex and walking toward the edge of the valley. “But, if this works, you won’t ever see him.”
“So, what do I do?”
Mitsuru shrugged and kept walking.
“I don’t know,” she said, without looking back. “What can you do?”
Alex wasn’t even totally sure how to operate the gun he’d been handed; the snub-nosed submachine gun was a deceptively heavy mass of black carbon fiber stock and tooled metal, and with the clip in, very difficult to aim, as the front end was too heavy for the grip, and tended to pull down. Renton had showed him how to fire short bursts from the thing, and that was pretty much the best he could manage, firing at the nearby brush when it moved suspiciously.
It had taken him an embarrassingly long time after the shooting had started to find and deactivate the safety. Alex wasn’t too sure that it made much difference — he was fairly certain that he hadn’t shot anything other than the surrounding flora.
From where he crouched, behind a chunk of discarded concrete from some ancient foundation, Alex could see Renton and Edward, further out towards the edge of the clearing, exchanging fire with targets that remain stubbornly invisible to Alex. Not for the first time, he wondered how many bullets he had, and how many he had fired already, and exactly what he was supposed to do when they were all gone. Run and hide, probably.
Alex already heartily wished that he had done just that. Eerie was crouched somewhere behind the remains of the concrete structure, with Anastasia keeping an eye on her. Mitsuru and Margot had disappeared as soon as the shooting started, and he hadn’t seen either since then, though during the occasional breaks in the gunfire, he could sometimes hear distant screams and howls. He was suspicious that Mitsuru or the vampire-girl might have something to do with that. Not for the first time, Alex wondered how long the fight had been going, and how long it would continue.
It never occurred to him that he could be killed here, not in a real sense, until a group of Weir came pouring out of the tree cover like a feral tide, all teeth and claws and knotted muscle under matted fur, with a sound that was something between a scream and a howl. Alex didn’t even bother to aim, he just pointed the gun in the direction of the Weir and held down the trigger until it bucked in his hand.
Alex noticed an odd thing, then, his mind operating with a strange clarity despite the sheer horror of his surroundings. As the mass of Weir advanced, moving as far as the withering fire from Renton and Edward would allow, they streamed past Renton’s position as if he wasn’t there.
Alex watched as Renton calmly lifted the rifle to his shoulder, and then fired a quick burst, three rounds hitting one of the Weir in the chest, the hollow point shells mushrooming when they impacted the skin, creating great bleeding craters. The remaining Weir turned and spun in place, trying to locate the sound, to pinpoint their attacker’s position, apparently oblivious to the fact that he stood among them. After a few moments of half-hearted searching, the Weir seemed to forget and lose interest, returning to their forward push, only to have another of their number picked off by Renton.
And so it went for what seemed to Alex to be a very long time — the Weir pushed forward into the clearing, where they were exposed to fire from all angles, and were eventually driven back. Meanwhile, Renton continued to quietly pick off the beasts, secure in what Alex could only assume was some kind of telepathic protocol. Occasionally, Alex manage to get a few clean shots off, and he thought that one or two might actually have hit, which somehow made him sick and proud at the same time.
Then, without warning, the Weir pressed forward, and this time, the fire against them wavered. Edward was the closest, and therefore the first to go under. He kept firing even as the Weir pounced on him, with no perceptible effect. He tossed aside the assault rifle at the last moment, and Alex clearly felt the Etheric ripple that meant he
