High Moon (Part Three of Three) Date: 27 April 2013 Time: 9.09 PM Location: Ruined Bar, Outer City Characters: Guillaume d'Anjou, Lincoln Carrick, Sofia Martelli, Eleanor Nichols, Martijn Description: Final instalment of a three-part one-shot. Challenge from the Aim chat - 20,000 words, western and romance genres, featuring Lincoln and Guillaume (with appearances from others). Long-overdue conclusion. First instalment can be found here, and the second here. Status: Private, complete.
Lincoln couldn't say with any degree of accuracy just how many combat missions he'd been on in his life, but when it came to the calm before the storm, they were all the same. Silence laid over the small van, the only sound being the occasional crunch of levers, the crack of magazines as they were fitted, and the constant rumble of the engine as they hit the two-minute mark once more.
Uncomfortably, he was reminded of that helicopter flight, except this time it wasn't open warfare on the sands of Afghanistan, but an urban combat operation, through the streets and overhangs of an American city. Lincoln hated urban combat with a passion, like most soldiers. At least you had a fair idea of where the enemy was on a battlefield, even in modern asymmetrical warfare like the theatre he had come from. In cities and towns, every pile of rubble potentially housed an IED, every window became a sniper's nest. Every corner had to be handled with care, and there were just too many for small units like this one to keep track of all at once.
This time, however, he wasn't going up against battle-hardened insurgents or militia. It was something completely different, and none of them knew exactly what kind of foe they were likely to face. He could see the tension drawn out in the faces of Pietr, Jensen and Mort, the slight anxiety, tempered by dozens of firefights, that marked every unknown encounter.
Even Sofia, the vampire, looked as if she were ready to uncoil with violence at any moment. The only one who remained impassive was Guillaume, and not for the first time, he wondered just how old the vampire was. He suspected that his initial combat experience had more to do with horses and blades rather than automatic rifles and flashbangs, but the thought didn't fill him with confidence. He was yet another unknown, a new officer that hadn't bedded down with the unit, and that was one of the reasons why Lincoln had never taken any of the "private security" outfits up on offers before. He knew the Blackwaters and the private contractors of the world, they were up there with CIA paramilitary units and the more gung-ho Special Forces in being liabilities. At the end of the day, Lincoln was Army before anything else. He knew preparation, support, clear lines of authority. This was an entirely new paradigm.
And, ultimately, he was the only one outside of Guillaume who knew exactly what the demon was capable of, even if he had a feeling that he hadn't seen the half of it. Screams and blood flashed across his mind, and it set his skin to contract, the hairs on his arm lifting up. Curious, his wolf stirred, running with the pre-mission adrenaline that was coursing through him. He tried to shut it down, all too aware that it would make him sick if he allowed his emotions to get the better of him.
Guillaume held out a single finger - one minute.
It passed inexorably slowly, and he stared ahead, just over the shoulder of Sofia as the van crunched to a halt. The driver disembarked, and moments later, the back doors were opened silently. Jensen and Pietr were the first out, moving with the slick professionalism of men who had done this before, and fully planned on doing it again. They dropped from the lip of the van's aft with barely a whisper, rifles at the ready as they fanned out. Lincoln did the same, but with even less noise, his augmented muscles allowing him to absorb the impact of the tarmac on his boots with consummate stealth.
It was nothing compared to Sofia, who seemed to glide through the air, the Desert Eagle held loosely at her side, while her other hand remained on the handle of the wicked-looking kukri, blade dulled with ash, that was strapped to her waist.
The target building was ahead, boarded up and forbidding against the moonlight that cast its baleful glow over the surroundings. It was silent, without the noise of even urban foxes and insects to provide a little sound cover as they moved towards it. The location had been a road bar, once, one of the last pit-stops out of town or just before you entered it, depending on perspective. It was single-storey, and larger than he had expected from the plans. Rusting dumpsters lay forgotten at the side, and Lincoln moved ahead of his small squad, pointing out the broken glass by the windows that would give away their position just as surely as a gunshot. The moonlight gleamed dully off the silencer at the end of his rifle, and he cast about with his wolf-enhanced vision, scanning for sentries and lookouts. There was nothing.
His beast was fully awake now, imbuing his senses with the natural instincts of a predator, and he couldn't deny the rush that he felt pour forth from his heart and his gut. He knew that he'd missed this, that he was a junkie for danger at heart. Even marking his points and corners seemed to emerge from muscle memory and nostalgic excitement as they made their way around the structure, looking for a relatively quiet point of ingress.
They found it around the back, the lines of the property being demarcated by oxidizing chain-link fences, decorated like a Christmas tree with equally-decrepit razor wire to discourage all but the most determined of vandals. The wolf fed information to him, using its senses to determine the proximity of his squad, to differentiate them by scent, to use his lupine abilities to cut through the miasma of rotting garbage and wood to identify where the weakest point on the boarded panels covering the back entrance were.
He knelt next to one of those points as the squad stacked up around him, and drew his combat knife, working it in the rotting joins where the chipboard had been nailed to the wall. It split apart like putty under the sharpness of the blade, and without motioning, Pietr was there to take the weight as it fell backwards. Silently, he picked it up and moved it to the side, leaning it against the wall.
Lincoln looked to Guillaume out of instinct - orders always came from the officer, after all - and the vampire nodded, signalling for Sofia to come forward, and for the three humans to act as a rearguard, motioning that they were still observing light discipline. He, Sofia and Lincoln wouldn't necessarily need the flashlights to see, but they would, and so they would guard their retreat lines while the three of them performed initial recon.
He was about to step through, when Sofia's arm shot out, stopping him. He froze instantly, and followed her gaze down, to where raccoon and rat traps littered the floor in front of the entrance, some with the skeletal remains of their previous catches still entombed within their killing mechanisms. The vampire rolled her eyes, and leaped with startling speed from the standing start, landing inaudibly several feet on. Lincoln stepped gingerly around them, making his way in a wide perimeter, as Guillaume performed his version of the jump accomplished by his "associate" - and Lincoln was starting to think "lieutenant", now - and landed with equal stealth.
His eyes adjusted to the gloom instantly, taking the small amount of light allowed in through their breached entrance in hand, and using it to focus on the details of the abandoned bar. He felt his eyes begin to shift, and they ached for a moment, until suddenly the saloon was as brightly illuminated as if it were day. Dust lay thickly over everything, having congealed into sticky tar by this point. The pumps were stripped for useful parts, and often consisted of broken levers held in place by wooden blocks. The chairs were on the tables, creating an eerie environment that looked as if the establishment had simply rung last call, closed up, and forgot to open again.
Dusty bottles lay across the floor in liberal quantities, and the trio picked their way carefully through them, retrieving as they went to clear a path for their three cohorts as they made their way around the bar.
Light streamed, dull and mostly obscured, from the metal trap door that covered a full third of the bar area's floor surface.
Guillaume signalled to Sofia, who bounded up onto the oak bar without the slightest indication of effort, while he made his way back to the exit, and returned momentarily with their comrades. Lincoln crouched near the bar entrance, using the corner for cover as he trained his rifle on the trap door. Mort took up position in front of it, his heavy combat shotgun levelled, while the others attempted as best they could to cover him. With a nod from Guillaume, Sofia reached down with one hand - one hand - and began to lever the door up.
Lincoln had expected the scream of metal against metal, the tortured groan of rust creating an impediment against movement, but it levered up with surprising ease, having obviously been oiled and used lately. Light flooded the bar, and it was in that instant that he noticed the men, pinned to the ceiling corners, glaring down at them with baleful eyes. A whiff of dark, fetid magic passed through the room as their glamours faded, and Lincoln didn't say anything.
He simply adjusted his aim, and opened fire.
Mort, for his part, took cover, while the rest followed suit, a cascade of phfutt-phfutt noises filling the area as they picked off their would-be assailants. He, Guillaume and Sofia accounted for most, their enhanced reactions proving terrifyingly effective. He tried not to focus on their eyes, which were ringed with black veins, their pupils so large that he couldn't see any white in them at all.
One managed to raise the crude pistol it carried, and fire off a round, before a bullet from Sofia took it in the head.
The vampire rocked backwards as she was struck by the round, and Guillaume was there, guiding her to the floor and dragging her back as Jensen and Pieter moved to cover them. But the real threat came from below. The sound of the gunshot echoed tremendously in the still space, and someone - something - screamed below. The noise shook the molecules in his blood, and he had to bite his lip to stop his hands from dropping his rifle to cover his ears. The splitting shriek continued, gaining in intensity as the thing bounded up the stairs. Sofia's hand let go of the heavy metal door, and it clanged shut, just as Lincoln had a glimpse of black hair, black eyes and oily skin. It thudded into the obstruction with a snarl, and Mort backed off, raising the shotgun as the creature threw itself against the door again, managing to get its snout through to stop the door from closing. Guillaume saw its teeth flash in the half-light, saliva ribboning from their sharp points and pooling where it thrashed between the metal and the door. Another second and it could use its massive shoulders to lever its way up and through, and in these close quarters, Lincoln didn't think they had much chance of bringing it down before it did serious damage. On autopilot, he ejected his mostly-spent magazine and slammed a new one home, as Pietr racked the shotgun.
"Cover," said Guillaume, breaking the noise discipline order in a calm voice. They all reacted instantly as the vampire vaulted the bar, pulling a small, black object from his combat belt, ripping the pin out of it with one hand, and pulling his fist back, smashing through the creature's front row of teeth before pulling his arm back out, the sleeves and flesh ripped to ribbons.
"Fire in the hole!" Jensen shouted, and all six of them dove for cover. Seconds later, a dull crump and a massive vibration through the floor signalled the detonation of the grenade, and Lincoln coughed as smoke and dust filled the room.
"Into it, gentlemen," Guillaume ordered, still in that maddeningly level voice. Sofia hissed against the superheated door as she levered it up, and Lincoln chanced a look at the commander. The wound had seemed severe, life-threatening almost, but Guillaume was calmly wiping the blood from his arm, angry red welts marking where there had been deep lacerations only a moment before. The vampire noticed, and locked eyes briefly with the werewolf. There were definite hints of red in them now, and as he watched, the vampire's fangs extended.
"Go, Sergeant," he said, and there was a rough, animalistic edge to his voice now, not unlike when the wolf was straining to be released from him.
Pietr was first in, blasting with his shotgun to clear the minimal resistance they met, small-arms fire pinging off metal surfaces and thudding into the brickwork of the cellar, as black ichor dripped from the walls. The creature had left an impressive mess, and the smell was overpowering. Lincoln gagged as he made his way down, his eyes watering as his wolf recoiled and made its opposition to the situation very well known.
Enough!
He chastised himself and refocused as Sofia slipped past him on the wide staircase, built for rolling barrels lengthways down it. He noted that she'd already regained full movement of her arm, and he could smell her rich blood from here. It seemed tainted, alive somehow.
The cellar wasn't any better illuminated, and Lincoln allowed the wolf through even more, this time feeling his teeth begin to come into points. A murmur to his left drew his attention, and his head snapped to the source. Pietr was staring at him with wide eyes, and in the reflection of a dusty mirror behind him, he saw why. His face was elongated, more so than a human's would be, but it was the eyes that were most startling. A deep, dark gold in colour, they shone with reflected light, giving him a terrifying appearance. He grinned, and his sharp teeth - far too many of them for a man's mouth, and far too sharp - filled the grin, giving it a deadly aspect.
"Moon siek," he said, and his voice was a growl, the basso rumble of a wolf's throat. Pieter nodded, and refocused on the room.
There, in the centre, was another altar, just like the one in the hovel of the insurgent's lair in Afghanistan. They fanned out around it, all six of them, checking the few bodies that had been left from Mort's onslaught for booby traps, or signs of life. Sofia, her fangs fully extended, sniffed at one, and recoiled from it instantly.
"Corruption," she hissed, and spat. He didn't want to know what she meant. Guillaume approached the altar carefully, his eyes firmly on the small icon in the centre. This, like the others in the Middle East, had tentacles and impossible angles. It hurt his eyes to look at, and he felt physically repelled by its presence. Something dark and malicious oozed from it, beyond the ken of his regular senses, but he knew that it was... Other. Unnatural. He was filled with two conflicting urges at the same time, one to run as far as he could from this source of primordial menace, the other to tear it to pieces, to erase it from existence, to salt the earth of this cursed place and burn it until nothing remained.
He did neither, but the grip on his rifle tightened, and his control over the wolf loosened just a little more.
It was then that he heard the laugh again.
It cut to the core of his mind, activating the screaming memory that he'd tried so hard to bury all of those years ago. The intonation was the same, the timbre identical. It set off something in his brain that overwhelmed his synapses for a fraction of a fraction of a second, and he was sure that for a blink of an eye, he fully lost his sanity.
"Déjà vu, wolf?" The voice said, and the reaction among the group was one of horror, their rifles and weapons coming to the ready as they turned to cover the corner of the room that they thought it had come from. The wolf screamed in pure survival instinct, and he felt his bones begin to creak as the transformation threatened to overrun his mental barricades. Ahead of them, stepping out of the shadows and up to the altar as if he had always been there, was...
... a man. An elderly man, in a well-worn but immaculately pressed suit, leaning on a polished cane. Glasses sat on the tip of his nose as he regarded them. All around the room, veteran, vampire and mercenary looked into the cold, dead, grey depths of his eyes, and put their souls up against whatever he had left that counted as the same.
The man seemed unimpressed by what he found, and everyone inadvertently took a step back.
"Vampire," he intoned, and his voice was terrifying in its complexity. A thousand accents mirrored at once, the voice calm but under-laid with cold fury and rage, practically screaming in its quietude. Everyone remained stock still. "I told you to pass on a message, the last time we met. I believe I also suggested that it would be in your best interests not to cross my path again, after you deprived me of the Narthudde." He glanced around the room, the movement oddly serpentine as his body remained motionless but his neck twisted. "Yet here you are, an uninvited guest in my house. And what a poor guest you have been."
He took a step forward, and Guillaume retreated. Lincoln noted how he instinctively moved in front of the vampire woman, and it wasn't lost on the creature who wore the skin of an old man, either.
"And this must be the protege. How simple the Queen must be these days, if she doesn't know what you've been siring in the dark, Captain,"
Sudden movement to his left drew his attention, as Mort's courage seemed to overcome whatever spell held them in check. The shotgun was raised and cocked again, the sound echoing through the now-still chamber, as he pointed it at the old man.
"Sir, please withdraw," he said, and Lincoln wanted to scream at the man, to tell him to stop talking and start shooting, but he couldn't. His jaw was locked together, his feet unresponsive to the commands sent from his brain. The old man didn't even look, just motioned with a small flick of his fingers. The hand itself never left the cane, but Mort spun in the air with a sickening crack, coming to land with a heavy thump that betrayed his death, his limbs not even attempting to break his fall. Lincoln glanced down at the Marine, whose eyes had glassed over, his head at an unnatural length to the rest of his body.
He felt it bubble over, then. He'd liked Mort, he'd loved his brothers in the squad that this creature - and Lincoln knew it was the same one - had wiped out. It had taken from him twice now, and suddenly, it wasn't Lincoln thinking any more. He didn't even realise that the Change was upon him until his eyes weren't level any more, until the tear of fabric signalled his changing skeletal structure, until the wolf flooded everything that he was and there was only the kill, only the violence, only the creature's insult to answer.
He registered the gasp from Jensen, who had clearly never seen such a thing before, and even the strangled cry from Guillaume, who was attempting to ward him off, unsuccessfully. Lincoln was not a small wolf when he transformed, weighing in at the very far edge of the 190-pound mark. All of it was teeth, claws and muscle, and all of it was sheer power. His feet left the ground as he barreled into the demon, snapping and biting and roaring with fury. The demon smiled as he bore it down, but in an instant, it somehow managed to writhe and wriggle from beneath him, avoiding decapitation by a hair's breadth. He felt something puncture his side, but the hunt, the kill was on him, and he lashed out with his paws, catching the creature on the arm as it rolled away. He snapped into an attack posture again, but his assault seemed to wake up his cohorts, who began blasting away with their weapons at the now-exposed demon.
Guillaume, for his part, dived forward, grabbing the diseased icon from the altar, and threw it to Sofia.
"Back!" He cried, as the vampire ran, faster than most could register. Lincoln roared in disapproval, and lunged at the demon again, ignoring the buckshot and bullets that whickered past him. The creature smiled once more, and simply grabbed him by the throat, its grip far too strong for something of its size, and arrested the forward motion until Lincoln, in wolf form, hung like chicken in a butcher's window. This close, the stink from it was almost material, and the wolf gagged from both the pressure on its windpipe and the awful, cloying foulness of the creature's magic. It held him out like an errant puppy, seeming to grow to accommodate the size of Lincoln, and leaned in. From the side, he noticed his squad fanning around, attempting to get a clear line of fire, but Martijn used Lincoln as a shield with that hideous strength.
"I admire your courage, wulfen," it whispered, its voice a sibilant, silken thread of deception and rage, poisoning the air around it. "It has bought you victory today, just as your cowardice bought you defeat in the desert." It levered Lincoln's head around as he choked, until his lupine eye was level with the cold, depthless murk of the demon's. "I'll look forward to watching you develop with great interest."
Then, with a release of pressure and a flood of oxygen through his bruised throat, the demon was gone. Lincoln collapsed to the floor, his paws unable to break it as they struggled to restore blood flow. He hacked weakly, and suddenly, pain shot through him from where the demon had stabbed him in the chest, just below where his heart should have been.
"I'm not a vet," he heard Pietr murmur, as his squad surrounded him.
"Just look," Guillaume snapped, and even as Lincoln's vision blurred, he saw the vampire standing over him, sword drawn and waiting in a guard position.
"Missed the artery, I think," Pietr's Afrikaner drawl came from his ear, although it was muddled. "But he n-"
Lincoln blacked out, then, and didn't hear anything more.
He couldn't remember much of how they'd gotten away from that charnel house, just momentary flashes. A rotor working as dust and gravel flew in every direction, tell-tale signs of a chopper. A screaming pain in his side - now human again, and very naked - as they carried him onto the aircraft in a stretcher.
A loud argument from the pilot, dark-skinned and female, dressed in combat fatigues, and a loud retort from a man who sounded like Guillaume.
The less-than-tender medical approach of long, slender fingers that could only be Sofia as his wound was poked and prodded, the smell of gun oil and the lingering quiet over the death of Mort, as the remnants of his team strapped themselves in.
Then, nothing.
An indeterminate amount of time passed, but when he came to, the first thing he felt was the soreness of the wound. He moved, and wished that he hadn't, an ache from his bones at the quick Change telling him to stay still, while the pull of sutures from where the demon had stabbed him in the chest bound together skin that had already closed.
"You could have been killed, Guillaume," a woman's hushed voice same from somewhere to his left. He didn't open his eyes, yet, content to drift as if he might lose consciousness again. His beast slumbered, exhausted inside his mind and his body, and he himself struggled to maintain his awareness. It was like he was hearing a loudspeaker underwater, and his limbs wouldn't respond after the initial twitch. He suspected that he'd been medicated, although given the particular rate at which his metabolism worked, he must have been given enough to knock out five elephants.
"I had to act," another voice came - Guillaume's - but it was quiet. Not quite apologetic, but something else. "There was no time."
A long pause, then, and scents drifted over to him. The rustle of clothing, the sigh of skin against skin.
"If I lost you, I..." the woman said, her voice husky, and Guillaume cut in with a murmur.
He opened his eyes, slowly at first, caked as they were with dried rheum and conjunctivita. The glare of a light overhead caused him to close them again, and repeat the process, until it settled into a comfortable level.
"Sergeant," Guillaume's voice came again, and he turned his head, despite the muscles screaming at him not to. "How are you feeling?"
He debated a sarcastic answer, settled on a reasonable one, then swung all the way back again.
"Not a sergeant, Frenchy," he murmured, his voice sluggish with the medication and fatigue. His vision began to sharpen, and he could finally take in the two vampires. Guillaume, of course, wearing a shirt and jeans, looking for all the world as if he'd had a relaxing afternoon of golf and a few cocktails down the country club after. And next to him... the pilot of the helicopter.
To call her a woman would be like calling the Mona Lisa a drawing. She radiated something that he couldn't put his finger on, as his other senses began to awake from their torpor. Gravity, magnetism. Despite being diminutive in figure, it seemed as if she were larger than life. This was a woman, he thought, who commanded armies and nations, who went beyond what mortals were into something more. Something greater.
She was ancient, and unknowable. Not in the way that the demon was, but he thought he could pick up more than a slight hint of that about her. About all vampires, now he thought on it. She was a goddess in human form, as terrifying as those of old, and as worthy of his respect, if he had any sense.
"Who's your girlfriend?"
Lincoln never claimed to have much in the way of sense. Guillaume barked out a laugh, as if the sound were unfamiliar to his throat, and the woman raised an eyebrow.
"On the mend I see, wolf," she said, and fixed the other vampire with a gaze that men around the world had received from their wives and partners, one that promised an in-depth examination of their perceived poor choices later on. She left the room, and as she did, her presence retreated with her. It felt hollow, somehow, when she had gone.
"Quite impressive, no?" Guillaume said, leaning back in his chair, and pulling a silver hip flask from inside the folds of his combat jacket. He took a swig, and held it up questioningly.
"God yes," Lincoln said, in response to both of his inquiries. Guillaume held it to the wolf's lips, and angled the flash so that a dram escaped, burning its way down his throat. He sighed, allowing the warmth of the whiskey to flow through his ravaged nervous system.
"You should feel honoured," Guillaume continued, after a moment, as he screwed the lid back on and slipped the flask back into his pocket. "She healed you. Her blood is a better curative than anything on the planet." He must have caught Lincoln's panicked gaze, given the way in which he waved his hand. "Do not worry, we had you tested for compatibility with our... condition. It seems being a wolf bears no chance of contracting it."
He reached into the duffel bag as his feet, and rummaged for a second or two, before he withdrew a large, heavy dossier file.
"As promised, Sergeant, your payment," he said, holding it up. "Everything we know about Ivaylo, and the Faoladh pack. A not-inconsiderable amount. As an added performance-related bonus, we have made a modest deposit into your bank account. I trust you will find it acceptable."
He handed over a slip of paper with the dossier, and Lincoln took both, gingerly, before glancing at the slip. He started coughing almost instantly.
"Fifty thousand dollars?" He choked, and Guillaume gave a wry smile.
"The least we could do. As I understand it, the forestry service doesn't exactly pay financial-district wages."
Lincoln stared at it for a moment longer, and shook his head, before picking up the dossier. It was all here, he thought. All of the answers to the questions that had plagued his curiosity for so many months. All of the solutions to the riddles.
He made his decision.
"Burn it," he said, and handed it back to Guillaume, who hesitated before taking it.
"You are certain?" He asked, his eyebrow piqued, and Lincoln nodded.
"I'm sure."
Guillaume sighed, and hesitated again, before placing it back into the bag.
"It will be done," he said. They sat in silence for a moment, before he spoke again. "Why, if I may ask?"
Lincoln stirred as he felt the bond between him and Parker grow in strength, a sure indication that she was nearing him.
"Because sometimes, Guillaume," he said. "You just don't have to know everything to know what the right choice is."
It was then that he started to hear thumps, and a very particular raised voice from outside. He smiled.