By Kelly Meding
(continued from part 3)
Tybalt put Intimidation Tactics 101 to good use at the Vinyl Store. The clerk behind the dingy counter had at least a dozen needle marks hidden beneath his long-sleeved, flannel shirt, and it only took one painful twist of his wrist and a single threat of police involvement before the boy showed them the basement door. He also babbled half a dozen confessions, ranging from selling his blood to the Halfies after he’d shot up with heroin–which apparently gave the Halfies quite a high–to stealing a walker from his ancient next door neighbor. The walker made no sense, but Tybalt had learned long ago to not bother questioning the motivations of a junkie.
The basement door was in the stock room, such as it was–a cubby hole with a cot, a mini-fridge, and a few shelves of supplies, as well as a toilet and sink hidden behind a folding paper screen. It reeked of mildew and the faint odor of rot. The clerk said four of them had come in before dawn.
After locking the front door, they turned the sign to Closed, knocked out the clerk, and dumped him on his cot. Tybalt checked his gun clip while Marcus and Astrid both stripped and shifted. He had only a regular clip on him, instead of the anti-coagulant rounds he’d normally carry into a situation involving Halfies. Unless he got them right in the head and blew out their brains, regular bullets wouldn’t kill the Halfies fast enough. And they needed at least one alive.
So far, the basement below remained silent of movement. Halfies were sun-sensitive, like the full-Bloods, which gave them nocturnal habits and often meant sleeping during the day–also not unlike Hunters. If they were lucky, they’d caught the nest deep in slumber and subduing them would be fast and relatively bloodless.
Tybalt reached for the basement door, his stomach tightening into a knot of apprehension–the same knot he’d gotten for four years, every time he went into a similar situation. The Halfies couldn’t infect the were-cats, but they could infect him with something as simple as a fang slice on his palm. Every Hunter he knew would rather die than turn, and Tybalt was no exception.
He swung the door open, and it squealed on rusty hinges. Marcus bolted past him, a smear of black, and Astrid’s black and tan streaked down next. Tybalt waited two beats, then flipped the light switch on the exterior wall. Somewhere below, a dim bulb glowed and someone shouted. He took the rickety wood steps two at a time and descended into chaos.
Humid air reeked of waste and old blood. Dirty mattresses were placed haphazardly around on the cement floor, and the four Halfies were in various stages of waking and fighting. One of them took a direct hit from Marcus’s massive paw and slammed against the far wall, then crumpled to the ground. Astrid landed on a Halfie who hadn’t gotten off his mattress yet, clamped powerful jaws down around his left shoulder and started to chew. The Halfie shrieked.
Tybalt angled toward the room’s only female Halfie, her luminescent eyes wide in terror and white-streaked hair flying in wild ringlets about her head. She wound up a sloppy punch, and he landed a high-kick smoothly to her forehead. Her head snapped back and she fell on her ass with a grunt. Covering her with the gun, he said, “Stay down, or I put one in your face.”
She snarled, baring fangs barely formed–she hadn’t been turned long ago, maybe two weeks. And judging from her skimpy attire of tankini and panties, as well as the bruises decorating her neck, shoulders and thighs, she’d been brought in for entertainment. She stayed down.
Tybalt let his peripheral vision tell him what was happening, unwilling to take his eyes off his quarry. Astrid appeared to have finished chewing the arms off her Halfie–it flopped on the floor, screaming and kicking and bleeding a goopy, purplish-red. She was rubbing her muzzle against one of the mattresses, wiping blood out of her whiskers. Marcus’s first Halfie was still unconscious, and the remaining one was trapped in a sprawl beneath the jaguar’s great weight. Even the strength inherited from the vampire parasite couldn’t dislodge two-hundred pounds of cat holding down all four limbs.
The curly-haired female let loose a string of curses, even as tears dribbled down her cheeks. Beneath Marcus came a muffled question: “What the hell do you want?”
Marcus snarled.
“Something tells me you already know,” Tybalt said, attention still on the female. “Where are they?”
“Where’s who?”
Marcus flexed his front paws, allowing thick claws to dig into the Halfie’s forearms. The prisoner squealed.
“You’ve got two choices.” Tybalt made his voice loud and commanding, so all the Halfies knew he was addressing them, as well. “You can die fast and relatively pain-free, or you can go piece by piece, like your armless friend over there.”
The female’s eyes widened and she craned her neck to stare at the moaning wretch behind her. “You don’t have to kill me,” she said. Looking back to Tybalt, she attempted a sultry smile that came off as constipated, and ran her fingers down the front of her chest, between her meager breasts. “I’ll do anything you want, handsome.”
Tybalt didn’t say out loud that all he wanted her to do was die with dignity and be freed her of miserable half-Blood existence. No longer human and never fully vampire, she had no world in which to belong. No place in the city he protected. He chambered a round and aimed for her nose. “Tell me where they’re keeping him,” he said.
Just like an animal backed into a corner, she tensed and hissed. Astrid padded over to Tybalt’s right side and stood, her broad shoulder almost waist-high on him. She licked her lips and hissed right back, blood still staining the front of her face. The female Halfie gulped.
“Astrid,” Tybalt said, “start with her left leg.”
The Halfie shrieked in ear-piercing terror. “The abandoned motel south of the city, Green Acres Lodge, near the old freeway exchange. He’s there, in one of the rooms on the forest-side. Don’t let her eat me!”
Tybalt silenced her with one round to her forehead and two into her heart. He systematically put the armless Halfie out its misery, and then the still-unconscious one, three bullets each. He kept count of the fifteen-round clip, unsure if he’d be able to resupply before this ended. Meanwhile, Marcus had separated his quarry’s head from its neck, producing an impressive gout of blood that oozed across the basement floor. The entire subterranean space reeked of death.
“I’m not familiar with that motel,” Astrid said, and Tybalt jumped. She stood next to him, stark naked, with blood on her shin and cheeks and hands.
Growing up around weres had quickly shed his inhibitions about nudity, but something about seeing his once-time girlfriend, the first girl–no, woman–he’d ever loved or slept with, in her birthday suit actually made him blush. He kept his eyes up, even though everything below her chin tempted him to admire it. Compare the now with what he remembered from then.
“I know where it is,” Tybalt said. He holstered his gun. “It’ll take us about twenty minutes or so, depending on traffic.”
“Then let’s go,” she replied, already pivoting toward the stairs.
Tybalt gave her and Marcus a slight head start so they could change. He gazed around the blood-soaked basement. Four dead Halfies with just a couple hours work on a case he wasn’t supposed to be involved in–not bad.
He produced his phone, dialing out of habit rather than thought. After four rings, the other end picked up, and the sleep-raspy voice of his Triad partner muttered that this better be an emergency. Tybalt smiled. “Milo,” he said, “I need a favor.”
#
Milo’s uncanny ability to extract information from almost any computer had helped their Triad time and again in the fifteen months since he was assigned, so Tybalt kept his phone handy. To his credit, Milo hadn’t asked why he needed the requested information, and it arrived on Tybalt’s phone ten minutes later. They were halfway across the city, moving quickly through early afternoon traffic.
“What is that?” Astrid asked from the backseat.
“Floor plan for the motel,” he replied, holding the phone up so she could see the screen. It was single-story, with rooms on both sides of a long, L-shaped building. The short end of the L had once held the office and a small diner. The inside of the L faced the mountains, and he guessed their package to be in one of the two rooms on either side of the right angle. Room twenty or twenty-one.
He enhanced that section and studied the rooms around it. Astrid leaned forward, her breath tickling his ear. He tried to ignore the distraction and focus on a plan. The duct-work was too narrow to be useful, and none of the rooms were adjoining–as an old trucker’s motel, it made sense.
“Frontal assault won’t help us,” he said. “They have the defensive positions, and we aren’t even certain which room he’s in. We could try surveillance from the trees, but the Halfies may scent us before we get into position.” It was also likely Prentiss had paid someone to lay a few traps, just in case someone got nosey.
“We need a distraction to draw them out of the room and to us,” Astrid said.
“Exactly. Halfies are easily distracted by violence, but you and Marcus fake-fighting is too obvious. We need someone outside the Pride.”
“I know someone from the Ursia Clan who owes me a favor,” Marcus said from the driver’s seat. “With the two of us out in the woods making some noise, it’s bound to get the Halfies’ attention.”
“Grizzly?” Tybalt asked.
“Black bear, actually.”
“Do I want to know why he owes you a favor?”
“She, and no, you don’t want to know.” The little smile tugging at Marcus’s mouth hinted at a good story, but Tybalt didn’t press.
Marcus called in his favor.
#
Check out the conclusion of Pride Before Fall, available tomorrow.
