Soul winked out of sight. The last thing I heard as she disappeared was the sounds of her tail and her teeth, like bones rattling, like dry bones dancing. Yeah. It was all coming together: the myths, the oral tradition, the scriptures, the lost People of the Straight Ways, and the Builders. All tying in with the weak places between universes and the loss of all civilization through flood, the mythos that tied almost all ancient peoples together.

I opened my eyes to my vacant backyard.

Eli was standing on the porch, his eyes sweeping across the yard, back and forth. “Eli, we need to weapon up and get to vamp HQ.”

He didn’t answer, just swiveled on a heel and headed back in through the open window. We really needed to get the doors fixed. Yeah. Some easy, lazy, sunny, summer day.

•   •   •

We made a run to Walmart for camping supplies and to a storage unit that my partner had rented and not told me about, and we still got to vamp HQ in plenty of time to prepare. I turned Eli and Alex loose with the new supplies. My lousy plan was coming together, but there was plenty of room for things to go horribly wrong.

CHAPTER 23

The Keeper of the Iron Spike

The staff had been decreased to shooters, swordsmen, and techies. No one who could be killed easily was still in vamp HQ. Housekeeping and the culinary staff were at Grégoire’s under heavy guard, maintenance crews at skeleton levels. It was like a stripped-down Aardvark Protocol. All the blood-servants and vamps on hand were old ones—looking well fed and grim, geared up for battle. I had never seen a vamp war, but it must have been a bloody business by the number of blades the vamps carried.

They were, to a fanghead, wearing chain-mail armor, with titanium gorgets and steel gauntlets with fingers that looked like metal roly-polies. They still moved with the graceful speed of the vamp, but now they clanked, just a bit.

On my part, I was decked out in my best fighting gear—the fancy leathers with plastic joint protectors and lots of silver-plated titanium chain mail. My hair braided into a fighting queue, close to my skull. Tall combat boots and more blades than I usually carried. No long, flat sword. Not yet. Hopefully not ever. But the new thigh holster, yeah. And every other weapon I could think of, with the exception of my shotgun. It wasn’t helpful in close-quarters shooting when I might take out friendly forces along with the big-bad-uglies.

The Kid and Angel Tit were rigging backup coms, the stuff we had picked up from the storage unit, all over the place, putting portable CNBs—communications nexus boxes—on every stairwell and floor. The CNB tactical radio system was designed to work in places where physical or electromagnetic interference was high. Or underground. And on battery power. We had used them before and they had worked great, but the specs were limited. They had to be aligned, pointing in proper places and directions. It took time to set up and the system was clunky. It was also easy to ruin. A swift kick to any box would stop all comms from that location. So the Kid instructed that they were all to be duct-taped to the ceilings, which was pretty smart. Eli put the humans to work with the tape and positioning new battery-powered backup lights on the floors. It was low-tech, but was also better than nothing, and not something Peregrinus was likely to be expecting, since most of it had been purchased with cash and not recorded on credit cards.

Go, Eli and his paranoid survivalist instincts and hoarding nature. Not that I would tell him that. He’d either be insulted or arrogantly proud. Or both.

Eli and Derek agreed on locations for shooters. It would be a pain to create such a lousy plan and then get taken out by friendly fire, when it should be much more likely to be eaten by a vamp or a rainbow dragon or drained by the Son of Darkness.

When everything was in place, I sent Alex and the last of the maintenance staff down to double-check the generators. Eli had covered them with metal heating blankets, the kind that he had used to preserve Wrassler’s body heat. It was a long shot, but maybe the little amount of reflective material would bounce any magic EM attacks off. Since we were all trying new paraphernalia and untested theories, I taped a single obfuscation charm on top of the first generator. It might work to keep any spell from finding and stopping the generators. Who knew? But it was the only obfuscation charm I had.

When he was finished with the generators, Alex settled in to the security console with Angel Tit. If this worked, we’d want footage of it. If it didn’t, well, maybe our survivors could learn from our stupidity. Derek and his team and four vamp fighters were stationed at the front entrance. Eli and I chose to man the back entrance under the porte cochere, and took all the new men from the swamps with us. They’d had showers, been fed, and gotten some rest. They looked a lot less scruffy, a lot more operational, and smelled a lot better. I figured Peregrinus wouldn’t use the same entrance twice and we had to make sure that he went in the right direction when he came in. So at both entrances we had positioned fighters to herd him where we wanted him.

On the ground floor at the back, Eli put his hands and arms to work, torqueing his body to open the elevator doors. The elevator wasn’t there, just the dark shaft, which was empty all the way to the basement, filled only with a stink on the air that spoke of mold and rot. At the bottom were the doors that would open to Joses Bar-Judas’ prison. And our pitiful plan.

Eli and his guys settled in to wait, their purpose to lead the attackers to the open shaft and down, and I got ready to carry out my part of the plan. Which was when I was summoned by His Regal Grumpiness via a text message from Del that asked me to come to Leo’s office.

I put the cell in a pocket and looked up to see Eli watching me. “Leo.”

“You haven’t seen him since he was bound on the floor of the catacombs.”

“Worse. I haven’t talked to the MOC since he tried to kill me in my bathroom. And it’s a dungeon. Catacombs are long tunnels.”

Eli smiled. It wasn’t his battle smile, which was all adrenaline and cold intent. It wasn’t the smile he used for his lady love. It was the smile he’d have worn every day had he not chosen the military for his job. Had he not seen and done things that hardened him. It was friendship.

I shrugged. “Leo wants me in his office.”

He looked at his watch. “It’s early yet. I don’t think they’ll attack this soon after sunset. You got a cross with you?”

“Thirteen. Even better. I have a piece of the Blood Cross.”