Breathing Fire (Heretic Daughters #1)(54)
I smiled at him. He was quickly growing on me. “Give us the head count, and the plan, Mr. Personality.”
He sighed, growing slightly more serious and less sarcastic. “It’s not good.” He pointed to one of the larger buildings. It looked like a large house with a lot of windows. It was very out of place in the spartan compound. “They’re all in there. And there are too many of them for me to place.”
Another round of quiet cursing rocked the crowd. He waited patiently before continuing. “I would say we need backup, but I’m pretty sure that most of them are newborns, because every single one of the bastards is sleeping. And here’s the kicker.”
He paused for a dramatic moment, smiling a very grim smile. I knew he was good at his job, just by that smile. You earned a smile like that. It was a little scary. We were right about him. He was our kind of people.
“The Master is sleeping. I don’t understand it, given that it’s the middle of the night, but he is definitely dead asleep at the moment. That leaves us with two very unpleasant choices. We can try to stealth in there, quick and quiet, and take the master before slaughtering his flock. If they’re newborns, as I suspect, they’ll go down real easy, with their master dead. That’s option A.”
He let us process that, studying the crowd intently. “Option B is an almost guaranteed bloodbath, but with more favorable numbers for us. We risk losing our advantage to wait for some heavy druid backup, which will take god only knows how long. I’ll put it up for vote, but I’ll tell you now, I strongly favor option A, though I’ll need a few bloodthirsty volunteers for that one.” He looked at Christian and I as he said this. I wasn’t surprised that he’d meant us. We were more experienced, by far, than the rest of our little company.
“A sleeping Master is the best-case scenario when it comes to killing vamps, I can attest, but let’s vote on it. Raise your hand for option A.”
All but one raised their hand. The one was me. Ah, hell, I raised mine, too. Everyone looked at us as they voted, knowing that they were all as good as volunteering us. I sighed. I supposed I’d rather go get messy than watch the rest of them get sucked dry in a bloodbath later. Most of them were just humans, really, with a little supernatural talent thrown in. Christian and I were, at least, born pure Other, and hard as all hell to kill. Vampire hunters were born Other, as well, with blood no more human than Christian’s, and would be just as hard to take out.
“We’ll do it,” Christian told Corbin, without consulting me. He sounded way too chipper about it, too. I liked a good fight as much as he did, but hated messes more. Christian didn’t mind the messy so much. It had been awhile, but I could remember clearly the last time we’d gotten mixed up with vampires, and I sure as hell didn’t want a repeat performance. Of course, we hadn’t had a vampire hunter with us that time. It had just been Christian and I with some unfortunate humans, in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’d emerged from battle victorious, but we’d been bitten and stabbed and none of the humans had survived it, despite our best efforts, and that had been a small Kiss of the blood-suckers. The memory still pissed me off royally.
I sighed. There was really nothing else to be done. At least we wouldn’t be trying futilely to protect mortals, this time. I hoped. “Yeah, we will,” I finally agreed. “Let’s get to it, then. What’s the plan?”
Corbin gave me an almost fond smile. “You’re not at all what I expected. Guess I should know better than to listen to the rumors.”
That soured my mood. Of course he’d heard of me. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the reminder of my spotty reputation was, as always, a mood killer.
Except to Christian, of course. The punk actually laughed. “You want to stay on her good side, my good man, and that’s not the way to do it.”
Corbin grimaced, smacking his hand to his forehead. “My bad. Didn’t think before I spoke.”
I waved a hand at him, brushing it off, since that was the only productive thing to do. “It’s old news. Druids think I’m the anti-christ, and they like to spread that opinion around. I don’t have to wonder what you’ve heard about me, and I don’t have the time or the patience to disprove any of it, so let’s just move right along. The plan. Please.”
His face got real serious. “The three of us will move in together, real quiet like. I’m assuming, from what I’ve seen from you both so far, that you guys can each handle a room full of newborns, once the master is dead.”
We both just nodded.
“You’ll scout the house with me, and I’ll put you where you need to be when the master goes down. You guys can use those fancy weapons of yours to behead the bloodsuckers, which will put them out of commission long enough for me to come and do my whole stake thing.”
I didn’t bother to mention that we’d dealt with vamps before, and that we knew the hunter staking routine. He wasn’t exactly long-winded. And his quick, to the point, explanations might be helpful to the crew waiting outside, if the shit really hit the fan, and the mess spilled out to them.
“What happens if the master wakes up?” I asked. I didn’t want to ask. It wasn’t my fault I only saw in worse-case scenario vision. I was born that way, honest.
Corbin gave me his grim smile. “We start swinging, and hope we win.”