‘He’s real spooked huh?’ Igor said with a chuckle. ‘Still, I guess I’ll have a look through—’
A sharp, gassy blast from the shadows to the far right of the balcony cut Igor’s sentence short – as did the ten-inch steel blade that seemed to have sprouted spontaneously from the teenager’s ear. Stas’s eyes grew wide as he watched his older brother’s eyeballs roll back in their sockets, with the glossy liquidity of life deserting them with shocking abruptness. The young man flopped forward, lifeless.
‘No,’ Stas gasped through the rising mass of terror, disbelief and panic that was threatening to engulf him completely. ‘No, no, no—’
Another blast cut through the shadows, and this time it was Stas’s knees that buckled beneath him as a gas-propelled blade cleaved through the darkness and found its mark. The projectile obliterated Stas’s left eyeball and lanced its unyielding steel through his eye socket into the core of his brain.
As the bodies of the two young men slithered to the floor in the limp slump of death, a hulking figure materialised from the shadows below them.
‘Slavic scum,’ Sigurd muttered emotionlessly as he stared at the still-warm corpses. Thin, half-translucent wisps of gas rose from the final two ballistic knife launchers on his forearms. The others had already been fired a few minutes earlier, dispatching the guards who had been posted on a lower level. He unstrapped the spent knife launchers from his forearms and tossed them aside; their job was done, and it had been done well. Grinning suddenly and savagely, he gripped the trench knives loosely, one in each hand. He was now ready for the final skirmish before the culmination of this mission.
‘It’s too late for you now, animal-brother,’ he growled. ‘Too late for you, and whatever worthless mortals are waiting on the top floor. The wolf is not simply at your door, he is now inside your fucking house. I will take your lives, and then I will take the prize that awaits.’
With his eyes closed for a few seconds, Sigurd breathed in deeply, his polar-bear-enhanced supersenses inhaling the strange concoction of scents of this place; the sharp sweetness of vast amounts of cocaine, the acrid sourness of used sex toys, the slightly mouldy smell of old books stacked in shelves, and the overpowering chemical assault of fresh coats of paint and varnish. However, interwoven into the sensory overload that was this miasma of odours were other scents; scents that stirred the electricity in his granite-like muscles and infused them with the urgent voltage of a thousand lightning strikes. There was fresh human blood, dripping from the splintered skulls of the corpses he had just made, and in addition to this heady olfactory cocktail, the humid breath of the still-living just above him; yes, the final few breaths of the oblivious corpses-to-be, wafting down the stale currents of air that trickled from the upper floors.
Sigurd crouched next to Stas’s corpse and slowly pulled the ballistic blade from the young man’s eye socket until, with a macabre sucking pop, it came out of his skull. A gooey mix of blood and brain oozed from the ruined eye socket, and Sigurd dipped the tips of his index finger and forefinger into the warm stickiness of it. He raised his glistening, gore-coated fingers up to his nose and inhaled deeply of the smell of fresh death, drawing in its iron-rich intensity and tasting the bitter metallic bite of blood, enjoying how ferociously and completely it saturated his olfactory senses. The hairs on his arms prickled with goosebumps as a thrill scuttled over the entirety of his skin. Battle, victory, the ruthless crushing of opponents … this was what it was to truly be alive.
He licked the bloody mess off his fingers, feeling the battle-rage beginning to pulse and throb with ravenous hunger in his veins at the taste of warm death in his mouth, and then he opened the slatted doors and grinned.
‘Come mortals,’ he whispered to the blanket of dark ahead, ‘come and dance with a god.’
With his right hand he reached into one of his suit pockets and pulled out the insect drone he had used to reconnoitre the balcony, and with his left he dug in another pocket and retrieved the insect’s remote control pad and the monocle viewing screen. He set the tiny robot down, placed the monocle over his right eye, and then flew the drone up the stairwell, observing his waiting opponents, noting their exact positions and their individual weapons. While doing this, he was also working out the exact sequence of manoeuvres he would perform when he stormed them. Once he was satisfied, he flew the drone back and put it away.
He breathed in and out a few times, holding the air in his lungs, allowing it to aerate his blood as efficiently as possible. Closing his eyes, he visualised his blood – thousand-year-old blood, supercharged with the power of his kind – inflating every fibre of every muscle in his body with the strength and ferocity of an ancient volcano bristling to erupt. The trench knives in his hands were steel extensions of his knuckles and fingers; their sharp and brutal blades would move with the fluidity of organic limbs, as if wired directly to his nervous system.
The men around the corner stood no chance; Sigurd was ready to unleash hell. He inhaled one final breath before the battle began,
