Chapter 30: Chapter 30

Getting the team together was one thing; having a plan was something else. Assembling everyone from the cabin less the team that had gone with her Aunt Cassidy hadn’t taken long, but all of them wanted to know what Jo had in mind as far as the attack was concerned, and she didn’t have too many answers.

She’d spent as much time as she could discussing the obstacles in front of them with Cassidy and Branden as well as Elliott. Those were the people she trusted most that she could easily access at the moment. Now would’ve been a great time for her dad to come barreling through a nearby portal opening, but that likely wasn’t going to happen, especially since she hadn’t sent him a text and Elliott had. No, if Aaron was able to make it back to help anyone, it would be the Africa team. Jo was basically on her own. And these veterans wanted answers.

Mikali and Mila had volunteered to take point, with Sergio and Dax providing cover. Jo had given in, even though she thought she should be leading from the front. She decided she’d go in after the two more experienced teammates, with Zane to protect her. When Cadon had insisted on going along with her, she’d complied, though she intended to outrun him so that they wouldn’t be forced to work together. Everyone else would come in after them, with Cale, Hattie, and Fiona providing coverage outside. Cale would only become involved if he had to since he was their primary Healer and would need to be available if anyone became injured.

It was dark when the vehicles pulled to a halt outside of the location. Deep inside of her gut, Jo had an unsettled feeling that let her know there were Vampires nearby. At least they hadn’t left to go out hunting yet--not all of them anyway.

Jo looked around the vehicle before she got out, meeting the eyes of her teammates. Everyone looked confident and ready to get into the fray. Jo was eager to fight as well. It had been so long since she’d smelled the refreshing scent of Vampire ash, she was longing to fill her lungs with that burning sensation that let her know she was alive.

“We’ve got this,” Zane said in her head, and Jo nodded, hopping out of the SUV. Double checking she was still armed to the teeth, she headed off into the trees, completely dressed in black, her IAC tuned in to all of her teammates so that she could keep track of everyone.

She’d never called a battle before. Coordinating so many people while being engaged herself would be a challenge. She knew there was a reason her father used to stay up in a tree or take some other high vantage point to observe so he could give orders, but Jo didn’t have that luxury. Not only was that impractical for an attack on a cave, they had no idea how many Vampires they were up against. Jo sent out one more reminder, “We want to narrow this down to two and be sure to hold onto them so that we can figure out who’s going to talk.”

The answers came back that everyone understood. Jo walked out into the open, no longer under cover, her eyes focused on the bushes she knew concealed the cave entryway. She gave the command, and the first wave headed for the entry point, her teammates moving so quickly, she could hardly track them, even with her superhuman abilities.

Mikali and Mila both had X-ray vision the same way that Jo did, but they’d still be diving into that doorway not knowing exactly what they were getting into. For all they knew, a thousand Vampires could be waiting on the other side. As she sprinted to follow them in, Jo tried to see through the layer of stone so that she’d have a sense of what they were facing, but running at full speed did not make it easy to focus, and all she could see were the same empty halls she’d seen earlier that day.

She arrived at the entryway only a second before Zane. “Let me go first,” he said to her aloud. She nodded, knowing that was the best bet since he was a Guardian. He crouched down and slid his tall body through the opening, disappearing a second later. Jo held her breath, not waiting for him to tell her what lay on the other side, and plunged ahead.

It was more like a children’s slide than a doorway or a fall. She found herself slipping on her backside about five feet into the earth before she hit something at the bottom. Her eyes adjusted to the dark quickly, and she realized it was Zane she’d collided with. He moved aside, and knowing there would be more LIGHTS team members coming down the shoot, Jo got up and moved out of the way just in time to clear the runway for Cadon, Leo, and Ping.

A few moments to get her bearings would’ve been nice, but Jo had no such luxury. Ahead of her in the darkness, she heard gunfire, but couldn’t say which of the multiple tunnels it had originated in. Switching to her IAC visuals, she saw that Mikali and Mila had made contact and were firing heavily into what appeared to be rows of coffins---or were those macabre bunk beds? She couldn’t say, but it looked like they had that room under control.

The sound of footsteps on stone came from her left, so Jo headed that way, assuming that was the sound of Vampires attempting to make toward what was likely the only exit. “No one else come in here!” Jo shouted to the rest of her team. “Cover the exit!” If they had them on the run, there was no sense putting any more of her team in danger on the inside when the Vampires apparently only had one way out. She’d had no idea if they would stand and fight or try to run away. From the sounds of it, not many of them were ready for the attack; they’d been taken by surprise and were attempting to flee, which is the best case scenario Jo could’ve hoped for.

As she ran down the passageway, the ceiling dropped, and she found herself crouching. Zane, who was behind her, had to bend at the waist to keep from hitting his head, which wasn’t an ideal way to fight. Forms filled in from the shadows in front of her. The feeling in her stomach told her the bodies directly ahead of her had to be Vampires. Besides, the only two members of her team ahead of her were Mikali and Mila, and she could see them elsewhere on the IAC.

Jo opened fire.

Screams and shrieks echoed off of the cave walls in a deafening roar that filled her soul with the same gusto the crescendo of a grand opera might stir in order to bring the crowd to their feet, their hearts and hands banging together as they spurred the musicians on. Jo pulled the trigger again and again, firing into the near darkness at anything that moved in front of her.

Zane held his fire. “Careful not to take out all of them,” he reminded her.

Jo nodded, remembering the entire raid would do them no good if they couldn’t catch a squealer or two. The Vampires continued to pour around the corner, exploding in ash one after another. Whatever powers it had been increasing the strength of many of the monsters she’d encountered over the years, these seemed weak in comparison. Many of them went down from a single bullet, maybe two. It was unusual and made her question everything she knew about Vampires.

Eventually, the stream died down. Whether their assailants realized they were running into the enemy and chose another course or that was all of them from this part of the cave, Jo didn’t know, but she kept her gun at the ready as she took off, Vampire dust filling her lungs and coating her skin. She hunched over and made her way through the narrowing tunnel. If it didn’t open up soon, Zane was going to have a problem. It was getting hard for her to walk, and she was much shorter than he was.

As the ceiling began to rise back up, Jo could see the tunnel ahead of widening as well. Using her X-ray vision for just a second, she realized she was coming to a larger area of the cave. An unnatural tunnel, supported by wooden beams, jutted off to the right, and she imagined that was the hallway many of the Vampires she’d shot down had been flushed from as they fled Mikali and Mila’s gunfire.

Standing up, she moved out of the way so that Zane could follow her out of the passage and surveyed the area. She could hear shouts and the additional pop pop of guns going off down that hallway, but she was more interested in the room up ahead to her left. From her vantage point, it looked as if this room had also been built into the cave, like the hallway. She had to wonder what would lead a clan of Vampires to build a small room inside of a cave.

Letting her instincts guide her, Jo moved to the room. The door was similar to what one might find in a bank vault. There were no windows, and the room itself was made of some sort of sturdy material far stronger than wood. Jo threw her shoulder against the door, but it didn’t budge. Swearing under her breath, she studied the mechanism one would use to open the door. She needed to get into that room, though she didn’t know why. “How do we get inside?” she asked Zane as he came up behind her.

“Why do we need in there?” he asked. “The cave’s almost clear. Mila has a Vampire in her clutches she thinks will talk, and we’ve got a few others cornered in a hallway on the other side of the cave. I’d say this has been a pretty successful raid, Jo. Why bother busting down the door?”

“Because it’s locked,” she replied with a shrug. “Why wouldn’t we knock it down? It doesn’t make sense to have a locked door deep in a cave unless there’s something in there they don’t want us to see.”

Zane studied the locking mechanism for a moment as well. “While that’s true, I don’t know how we’d get into that room, Jo. If Cass was here, she might be able to see inside someone’s head to find the code to unlock the door, assuming the Vampires with that information are still alive, but otherwise, we’d need to find a way to blast it open, and I don’t think we’ve got the tools for that, do we?”

Jo thought about all of the weapons they’d brought along. They had grenades, but most of them were the kind that spewed liquified silver, not the sort one would use to blast their way through a vault door. The ones she had that would blow things up she needed to save for life or death situations, not use to satisfy her curiosity. She didn’t have anything expendable in her arsenal that would get them in that room. But there had to be a way….

“Jo, are you seeing this?” Leo’s voice invaded her head. “Can you get over here? Now?”

Jo hadn’t been paying any attention to her IAC visuals until his voice demanded she did so. Through his eyes, she could see a dark chamber that appeared to be deep in the cave. Dozens of people were chained to the walls, most of them by just one arm, their bodies slumped on the floor. Some of them appeared to be dead already; others might still be drawing shallow breaths. As Leo’s eyes traced over the scene, she realized what she was looking at. “Reserve de sange,” she said aloud.

“Reserve de sange?” Zane echoed. “Really? I’ve never actually seen that in person before. Have you?”

“No,” Jo admitted. “But I’ve heard my parents talk about it many times. Poor bastards. There won’t be anything we can do to save them. They’ve all been fed off of so many times, the best we can do is put them out of their misery.”

“But what keeps them from changing?” Zane asked.

Jo decided to leave the vault for now, though she’d certainly be back, and she headed over toward Leo’s position. “No one knows. And none of our attempts to heal them have ever been successful either. Even though Jamie figured out how to turn some of the other forms of mutants back into people, like Shadow Creepers, he could never quite solve this riddle.”

Zane was following along behind her. “Thousands of years of fighting these bloodsucking bastards, and we still don’t have all the answers.”

“Pretty much,” Jo agreed. “My dad said, for the first hundred years of his life, nothing changed. Everything was predictable. There were rules, and nature insisted that they be followed. Then… titanium bullets were discovered, and everything seemed to go to pot.”

“Yeah, it had to be quite a shock to discover that there truly was a way for a Hunter to kill another Hunter.”

“And for a Guardian to kill a Hunter,” Jo added. “That was something that had never happened up until the day my dad shot and killed that female Hunter who had helped ambush the team at Sierraville.”

“Is that the place where Elliott was killed?” Zane asked.

Jo wasn’t sure on all of the details, but she knew that much. “Yes.” She’d already told him some of this but repeated it now. “The Hunter who shot him was named Cowboy Sam. My dad shot a Hunter named Camilla. She’d shot… Jamie, I think. But then, Christian had gotten shot that night, too. Maybe it was him. I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that story, and it wasn’t one either of my parents liked to talk about.” She could hear voices ahead of her and knew they were almost to the part of the cave where Leo had found the humans being kept to feed the Vampires.

“I can’t imagine Elliott likes to talk about it much either,” Zane added.

“Yeah. Actually, I don’t know. Whenever he tells the story, he always focuses on how brave he was to put himself between Sam and Meagan. It’s kind of funny actually. He says, in a lot of ways, that was the best day of his life, and he never should’ve let my mom talk him into coming back through the Blue Moon Portal, that everything was downhill from there.”

Zane was chuckling. “He can’t mean that. Didn’t he get back together with his wife and have Mandy after he came back from the dead?”

“Yes,” Jo confirmed. “But if he hadn’t come back, he’d have missed out on all of this shit. My mom used to talk about what it was like on the other side. She died for a few minutes before Cadon and I were born, and she always said it was the most perfect place anyone could imagine.” Thinking about how her mom might be there now, in that perfect place, Jo felt herself growing emotional and had to put all of those thoughts aside to concentrate on the task at hand.

Luckily, they had found the holding cell. It did look like a dungeon of sorts, a locked, barred door keeping it separate from the rest of the cave. The stench of body odor, piss, feces, and blood was overwhelming. Jo felt bile rising in the back of her throat but fought it down. She’d smelled worse--but not by much.

“How many of them are alive?” she asked Leo as she came into the dark, damp space.

“So far… four,” he said, gesturing at a woman and three men slumped against the wall. All of them had been unchained, but not a single one of them was moving. The woman’s eyes were wide, her mouth drooping open, dried blood darkening her neck, all the way down her collar as if she’d been left to drip or bleed out after the Vampires had finished their feedings. “There are a lot of bodies, though.”

They were all dressed in a way that suggested they were from local villages. Their clothing reminded Jo of the people she’d seen in the tavern when she’d met Ryker.

“What are we going to do with them?” Ping asked, gesturing at the people who were still breathing, though the question could’ve applied to the others, the stack at the back of the room.

“We can’t do anything to help them,” Jo reminded her team, a few others of which had made their way into the room. “We’ll need to make the bodies available for their families to collect. Maybe this will serve as a warning to the others that pacts aren’t being honored.”

“Unless all of these people came from villages that didn’t have pacts,” Mila said, coming through the door. “Mikali has our two candidates in custody, whenever you’re ready.”

Jo raised an eyebrow, not understanding what she was talking about at first. Then she remembered she was supposed to get some information from these spiky-toothed bastards. “All right. Thanks.” Jo took a deep breath and looked back at the four live reserve de sange. As the leader, she felt compelled to put them out of their misery herself, but the thought of pulling out her gun and shooting four innocent humans made the bile make a reappearance.

Mila was studying them. “These the only survivors?” she asked Leo.

“I think so,” he said from back in the darkness where he was still sorting bodies.

Jo was just about to ask Mila what she thought they should do when the Guardian fired off four quick shots, the nanoseconds between the first and last bang not even enough time for the last of them to realize what he had coming.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ping shouted. “They’re not Vampires!”

“Not yet,” Mila said with a shrug as she holstered her Glock. “But they would be if we left them alone.”

“You don't know that!” he shouted back.

“I do know that,” Mila retorted, not raising her voice. She turned to look Ping in the face, a vacant look in her eyes. “I know a lot more than you do, kid.”

“It’s all right, Ping,” Jo reassured him, even though she couldn’t blame him for being upset. “If she hadn’t done it, I would have. Now, come on. You can help me with my interrogation.” She pulled on his arm, and he came along, reluctantly. She didn’t know exactly how she planned to put him to use, but it was just as well he get away from Mila.

Jo snaked her way through the labyrinth, looking for Mikali and the two Vampires he had under his command, praying her plan to get one of them to talk would work. They had a lot of unanswered questions, and while none of the bloodsuckers would likely tell them how reserve de sange worked, maybe one of them could confirm if the redheaded woman really was Holland and where she might be.