Secret Unleashed

I pivoted my gun from Grendel to the charging vampire and fired three rounds into his head. Precision aiming was tricky enough when a human was running towards you, but with a vampire there was the added difficulty of their preternatural speed. My first shot glanced off the side of his scalp, making him turn his head. The next two lodged into his skull above his ear, fanning a cloud of pink mist into the air as he fell.

Vampires could heal most things, but two 9mm silver bullets into the brain wasn’t one of them.

With one of their comrades down, the other two guards were less gung ho to run wild into the fray. Basically, they were the worst guards ever: slow to act and only out for their own protection. Where did Grendel find these guys, Spineless Cowards ’R’ Us?

One of them lunged for the door, intent on making a getaway. Shane fired at him, landing a shot in the vamp’s shoulder, sending him spinning backwards into Grendel’s arms. The warrior vampire had evidently seen his minion make a break for it and was none too thrilled. Grendel raised the guard into the air as if he weighed nothing, then brought him down hard onto his knee, cracking the vamp’s spine.

The broken vampire howled in pain, but the injury wouldn’t kill him. It would take him out of the mix for a while as the fractured bones healed, though, giving us one fewer foe to worry about.

Grendel stepped on the vampire’s head, crushing his skull beneath big shit-kicker boots as if it were a grape.

So…that guy was out of the picture completely then.

“Jesus,” Shane said.

“I know. Try getting that out of your boots after,” Holden replied.

When Grendel stepped back, there was a red smear on the floor with fragments of scalp and brain matter now taking the place of the man’s head. In spite of my many years being exposed to some of the most revolting things imaginable, I fought back the urge to gag.

“I will do this to one of my own,” Grendel bellowed. “What do you think I will do to you?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I muttered. “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. You know what? You’re not a giant. You’re just a big, smelly vampire. And do you know what I do to vampires who go rogue?”

“Kneel before them,” he suggested.

“Kneel?” I arched a brow and contemplated his choice of words. “Not a bad idea.”

I fired two shots into each of his kneecaps in rapid succession. Grendel roared, and this time there was no disputing the anguish in his tone. I’d hurt him. He crashed down and landed on both knees, bringing the clamor of his wailing to greater heights.

I’d never been shot in the knee, but I had experienced the agony of having a fresh wound exploited, and given how he was writhing on the floor, he enjoyed the experience as much as I had. Adding insult to literal injury was the fact he was squirming around in the liquefied brain matter of his former colleague.

“You have two choices as far as I see it,” I told him, though I doubted he was listening to anything other than his own squalling. “Either I kill you here and now—and I am fully vested with the power of the Tribunal to make those decisions—or you let me bring you in.”

“I’d rather—”

“Be mindful…this is one of those situations where you want to be careful not to say I’d rather die. I’ll take it literally.”

He fell silent. A normal man might be breathing hard through his nose, trying to keep from hyperventilating, but since Grendel didn’t need to breathe he chose to scowl darkly at me instead.

“They will lock me up, and then what? A year from now, maybe two, someone will make a mistake and I will be free. And I will come for you. That is, if you’re not dead by the hand of another.”

Everyone fell silent, but my heart throbbed and my pulse was as loud as a bass drum in my ears.

“What did you say?” Holden ignored the presence of the final guard, positioning himself between Grendel and me. “What did you say?”

Grendel laughed, but the sound was strained and cut short. “You might as well kill me, you foul borborygmite, because if you let me go, I’ll kill you. And if you take me to the council instead…someone else will find you.”

Holden took the gun from Shane—who was still too stunned to do anything—and aimed it at Grendel’s forehead. The warrior vampire rolled onto his back to relieve the pressure on his knees and looked at us both upside down.

“You going to shoot me? I know you, Holden Chancery. I know you.”

“Oh do you? Did you ransack my village in its youth?”

Grendel snorted and struggled to get into a sitting position, wincing the whole way up. The three of us took a step back, and the remaining guard danced uneasily from foot to foot. After seeing what had happened to the other men he probably wasn’t going to make a break for it, but he also didn’t seem keen to rush to Grendel’s aid.

“You’re the trained dog, aren’t you? The bitch’s bitch.” Grendel spat on the floor. “You know something, though? I have bitches too. And mine are better trained.”

I started to remind him two of his bitches were headless, undead organ donors now, but the body at my feet started doing something most peculiar.

It beeped.

More than beep, though, it started to make a rapid succession of chirping noises like an electronic bird. The same noise was emitting from the corpse next to Grendel. And when the remaining guard started to beep as well, he wet himself.

Kneeling, I ripped open the buttons of the dead vampire’s shirt and spread the lapels wide. Strapped across his chest were two crisscrossed black bands with packets of beige putty and a few colored wires centralized over his breastbone.

I stumbled back and switched my aim from Grendel to the corpses and the living guard, and back to Grendel. I didn’t know who I could shoot right then to make this situation less of a mess, but I wanted to shoot something.

“Are those…?” Shane voice drifted off when he realized what was strapped to the guards.

“Bombs.”

That explained why the guards were so useless. They weren’t guards at all. They were a fail-safe.

“Grab him,” I shouted to Holden as the reality sank in. “He knows something about Peyton.” All his glib one-liners about other people taking care of me meant something. He might not know where Peyton was, but I had a feeling rogues knew more about each other’s habits than they let on. And if Grendel knew anything about Peyton, we needed to keep him alive.

Holden stepped over the body and tossed Shane’s gun back to him. The vampire hunter bobbled the catch, bouncing the gun between his hands until he got a hold on it and re-aimed it at Grendel to cover Holden.

The chirping was getting faster and functioned as a literal reminder of how little time we had left to escape. I was grateful we’d sent Siobhan out with the girl. The building wasn’t stable to begin with, and once these guys became vamp-pyres, the whole thing would come down on top of us.

Holden grabbed Grendel under the arms and started dragging him towards the exit. With Grendel’s legs useless, Holden was stuck hauling at least three hundred pounds of red, squirming, vampire weight. Grendel didn’t want to go easily, but he wasn’t fighting hard enough to be stopped.

He wanted to live.

“Help him,” I told Shane.

As they wrestled the massive vampire towards the exit, I kept my gun trained on the remaining guard. His pants were soaked with urine, and he looked frightened and desperate.

“Can you take it off? Without blowing?” I asked.

He shook his head, bloodstained tears welling in his eyes. I didn’t want to feel sympathy for a rogue vampire. He’d made some stupid life decisions to bring him to this point, and part of me felt like he deserved what he was getting.

But the human part of me—a part that didn’t actually exist physiologically—couldn’t just leave some poor crying bastard to die by explosion.