Derek Ward

Chapter 8

Be Careful For What You Wish

One of the things that took me a long time to get through my skull was that not all of the jobs were difficult or required an inordinate amount of firepower. Some were very simple. Even important jobs could be very simple and accomplished with minimal planning. As I grew in experience, I also came to the realization that those jobs – important and simple – were the ones that hunters desired above all. True, dramatic and harrowing adventures made great stories for the packs, but the professionals knew better. The simpler, the better. Which was why I was actually happy when the Guildmaster assigned me to take out the Bleeders’ armorer.

I knew Buddy Ritchart through Bradon, actually having met the vampire charged with arming the Bleeders once on neutral ground. He was tall and rotund with thinning brown hair and deceptively warm brown eyes. The entire time that I talked to him, I don’t think he stopped smiling his dazzling white grin. Ritchart played the southern country gent, including dressing the part and affecting an overdone southern accent. None of that genteelness fooled me into thinking that Richart was harmless. He was not only a Bleeder, but one of those that were as almost as well trained as hunters in the arena of firearms. Ritchart was also damned good about going to ground when the shit hit the fan. Two hit packs and a lone wolf had tried four different times to assassinate Ritchart since the beginning of the war. None had been able to acquire him at the last moment. I was given the assignment when a kin had reported seeing Ritchart in the Northdale section of Carrollwood. The Guildmaster was tired of having Ritchart running around handing weapons out to the TCV members. He asked me to handle the situation.

I knew of the troubles the others had, and I was pretty sure that I figured out the common factor. All of them had done the last bit of reconnaissance themselves. They had to see him with their own eyes before they would commence their jobs. It was one of those things that we were taught in camp that was hard for hunters to put aside. Ritchart survived because he had seen the other hunters and simply slipped out one of his planned escape routes. To avoid that mistake, I contacted the kin that made the most recent sighting.

The kin was a young housewife who lived in the same subdivision from where Ritchart was holing up. It was just by pure accident that she saw him coming out of his house. She agreed to keep me updated while I checked the satellite photos to decide on exactly how I was going to take out Ritchart. Getting close was going to be impossible because Ritchart always had a pair of ghoul helpers/bodyguards. These two were probably what fucked up the last attempts at bagging the bastard. Since I couldn’t get close, I was going to have to do either a sniper shot or try for a road kill. Road kills were easier in terms of infiltration and extraction, but they had a nasty habit of being splashy, event filled affairs – things that the human media loved to bombard all over television, radio, newspapers, and the internet. Considering how close the war was to hitting the level where we were courting intervention by the Pathwalkers, or maybe some preventative action by Turaki “peacekeepers,” I decided on a sniper shot.

Some luck was on my side because Ritchart’s house faced a cul-de-sac. This gave me a nice wide fifty yard shooting alley. The fun part was infiltrating the subdivision, covertly getting onto the roof of one of the houses at the end of the cul-de-sac, and then quickly getting the hell out once I took down Ritchart. After a couple of phone calls, I convinced the kin to drive me into the subdivision, which covered infiltration. Satellite photos showed me that I could extract by the simple means of running through back yards until I hit one of the numerous strip malls that lined Dale Mabry. Dramatic, yes, but not uncommon. If done in true form, most humans would simply not see me as I ran. Plus, my senses would give me enough warning so I wouldn’t drop into the middle of someone’s backyard party and chance the creation of witch-hunters. The part of the job I was having trouble with was securing the roof of the house. So, I ran it by Nicky and Hangman. Surprisingly, it was the pup who came up with the answer.

“Don’t we have a kin in one of the local ad agencies?” he asked, which resulted in questioning looks from Nicky and me. “I think I worked with her before.” Nick and I just traded confused looks as Hangman went searching through his phone for the kin’s telephone number.

“Okay, I give. What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked.

“Ad agencies are notorious for having spare promotional items, including something that will get the family out of the house long enough for you to do your job,” explained Hangman. It was something that I would have never thought of. I lived way too much in the lycanthrope world. Except for the bare minimum to maintain my camouflage, I just didn’t think about the normal human world. This was the reason we made sure our kin were deeply rooted into human society. Hangman made the calls and within six hours, it was all accomplished. Another phone call from the kin gave me the front of the house. It had a window that would make an excellent perch. I wouldn’t have to go on the roof at all. From there, everything went more or less like clockwork.

As the human family left on a grand night out, courtesy of our kin in the ad agency, I slipped into their house and quietly made my way upstairs. The window I chose for my shooting perch belonged to a teenage girl. I carefully moved a few items so that I could open the window, and then set up the rifle. I wanted a KAC Mark 11, but the Bowmasters didn’t have one available, so they let me use one of their newest acquisitions. The HK Model 417 was similar to the Mark 11 in that it was similar in form to the venerable M16. It was designed for precision shooting and was chambered in the hard-hitting 7.62 mm NATO cartridge. For this job, I equipped the 417 with bipod, starlight scope, suppressor, and brass collector. Then it was time to wait.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait very long. Maybe fifteen minutes after I set up my shooting position, Ritchart walked out of the house. One ghoul was in front, trying to screen its master. The other was pulling rear guard. The first shot was going to be a bitch. I had to take Ritchart down with the first shot, then the two ghouls. Best part of all, I had to get all three down in less than a minute. Any longer and my extraction would become more difficult. The ghouls will have called in for help, and the responders wouldn’t be normal vampires. They’d be Bleeders.

The Ancestors must have smiled upon me because the lead ghoul just stumbled and fell to the ground. Simple Murphy on the bad guys. Ritchart just looked down at his servant and laughed at its misfortune. He stopped laughing as the bullet ripped out his throat. Ritchart almost silently fell to the ground. The rear ghoul never came out of his momentary shock before the next bullet slammed through its chest. The front one took longer because I had to completely reorient my rifle. The ghoul looked down the street. It knew where I was. The small radio came out just in time for the last round to blow apart its head. Job done.

Extraction was simple. No one had even messed with my escape car. For all of my concerns about the job, it went remarkably smooth. More smooth than pretty much all of the jobs that I do. As I cruised back to the Guild, I did my normal reflection on the job. Most of the time, it was trying to find out where I made my mistakes, or which of my actions would cause the Guildmaster some grief. This one was different. It went as easy as the instructors promised back when I was young and naïve and believed everything I was told about perfect planning meant perfect missions. If I believed in fate and karma, I might have suspected that the fates were just setting me up for a future clusterfuck.

As I roared back into one of the garages above the Guild, I saw Gunny glaring at me. I shot him a questioning glance, but he didn’t say anything to me. I wanted to ask him what I had done wrong, but decided against it. He didn’t seem to be in the mood to talk to me at the moment, and it was sometimes very dangerous to try and pry him out of whatever hole he was in. I walked to the back of the truck and pulled out my tactical bag. Shutting the trunk, I smiled nicely at Gunny and then went down the elevator. I went down to the second floor to report into the intelligence group that I had taken care of Richart and see what else had happened while I was out. As I got off the elevator, I was almost run over by Smiley. Smiley, so named by his habit of constantly wearing stupid grins on his face, was a part-time member of the intelligence section. Unfortunately, Smiley was also on the hyperactive side, so I often wondered how they got him to do some of the hard work that intelligence required. Smiley looked down at me with that stupid grin on his face and pardoned himself. Then he went back towards the elevator with a single sheet of paper.

“Hey, what’s this?” I asked, pointing to the paper in his hand. Intelligence reports were rarely printed on only one sheet of paper. The intelligence section often tried to cover every possible angle on any data that came in. While it left some of the reports ambiguous, they often made sure that the most probable hypothesis was emphasized.

“It’s a request for assistance from one of the packs,” Smiley replied. He seemed torn between staying and talking to me and delivering the request downstairs. Smiley’s hyperactivity often led him to be chatty, which was something that the intelligence group had chastised him about often. It was also the reason that he was a part-time specialist instead of one of the full time operatives. To relieve him of his moral dilemma, I snatched the paper from his hands and read it. According to the request, a high ranking vampire and his minions – lesser vampires, ghouls, and human sycophants – were holed up in a house on the bottom of a cul-de-sac in the Forest Hills area. This leech was a major player of the independents that worked outside of the TCV. The vampire was supposedly rallying the independent vampires in the city and county. It was unknown exactly why he was bringing in all the freelancers, but it apparently unnerved the TCV enough to have a group of Bleeders and their ghouls station themselves in a house on the entrance to the cul-de-sac. The pack leader wanted to take out the independent leech, but the Bleeders were preventing any operation in the area surrounding the cul-de-sac. A daytime raid by several of the pack against the Bleeder house had resulted in the deaths of three pack warriors, and another dozen injured by gunfire before they even got close enough to the house to see anything. The pack leader was certain that the pack warriors could take care of the leech if hunters could remove the Bleeders. I checked it again to see if I missed any important details.

“Hell Smiley,” I said, looking back up at him with a grin of my own, “We don’t need to bother Deadeye or Sneller with this. I’ll just take care of this little job myself.” Smiley shifted his weight from left to right with barely contained energy. It wasn’t happy energy.

“Ranger,” he said, looking at me intently, “This type of operation is better suited for the hit packs. You can’t expect to pull off a raid that twenty pack warriors couldn’t do. Just give me back the request and I’ll take it back down to Sneller.”

“I can do this,” I responded glibly, deftly avoiding Smiley’s attempt at grabbing back the paper. “Listen, Sneller’s packs are all booked up, and I’m free right now. So let’s go see what the Guildmaster has to say about this.” Smiley’s grin vanished as the rest of his face dropped. There was a tinge of fear in the back of his eyes. Sometimes my relationship with the Guildmaster amused me. Most of the Guild saw the Guildmaster only as their leader, a cunning lycanthrope who rated just under the Lord. I, on the other hand, have always known him as a mostly strict father figure, who had guided me in the Guild since he had selected me for my post as his personal hitter. I turned and began to walk to the Guildmaster’s office as Smiley stood rooted in shock at my audacious remark. Most of the hunters, aside from the top hierarchy, would never thought of going to the Guildmaster unbidden. I never felt that way, so I often went directly to him if I had a problem or found out about a job that I wanted to take. I did have the common decency to knock. Smiley didn’t react until I was halfway to the Guildmaster’s office, then he sprinted down the corridor and grabbed my arm. I easily shook off his large weight and walked the rest of the way to the Guildmaster’s office. Smiley pleaded with me through a sad look in his eyes, but I just smiled at him and knocked on the office door.

“Come in,” came the gruff reply. I opened the door and walked in with the same nonchalance that I was used to using around the Guildmaster. Smiley slunk in behind me and looked like he would have rather been inside the TCV Hall. The Guildmaster looked up from a report he was reading, looked me over, and then went back to the report. “This had better be good Marcus. The pack that went in behind you had a hell of a time entering Ritchart’s place. I thought I told you to keep that job quiet.”

“I used a silencer. I know you wanted me to do that job up close, but the facts of the job told me that I wouldn’t be able to. His ghouls were way too good at catching us before we could do anything to that Bleeder. At any rate, I’m not here about that boss,” I told him, taking a seat in one of the chairs that faced his desk. Smiley almost fainted when I did that without an invitation from the Guildmaster. “Actually, I need you to approve me for this job.” I tossed the paper onto his desk with an easy throw. It had taken me years of practice to pull that stunt off and make it look easy. He snatched it up with an angry glare towards me. The Guildmaster both hated and was amused by that particular stunt. At the moment, he was more pissed than amused, but he decided not to verbally strip a patch of my hide off for it. The Guildmaster scanned the request over, and then looked up at me with a skeptical look.

“You realize that this job is supposed to be done by a hit pack?” he asked me without the normal sarcasm that I usually garnered from him.

“Yeah,” I answered, keeping my tone confident, “But they’re busy, and I’m not.”

“That’s not a good enough reason, and you know it,” he retorted, “You just came off of a day-long job, and I don’t want you burning yourself out, particularly in light of your first couple of jobs. Furthermore, I don’t have enough hunters, let alone lone wolves, to let them put themselves in bad positions simply because they find the job interesting. Now why shouldn’t I wait until one of Kurt’s packs become available?”

“Because if you wait, there is a damned good chance that the main target of all of this will either be brought into the TCV or killed by the Bleeders,” I answered firmly. If there was one thing that I knew about my boss, if I made my request in terms of strategic importance, he would consider it more carefully. “Either way, we lose a damned good opportunity to eliminate or capture the leech and a bunch of Bleeders.” I waited as the Guildmaster digested all of this before continuing. “I can take down the house, if I get enough data beforehand and plan it out right. I’m not going to be stupid on this. You know me better than that.” The Guildmaster thought it over and looked over at Smiley. I couldn’t see Smiley’s expression, but I gathered that Smiley was adamantly against my pulling this job. The Guildmaster shook his head and began writing on the request.

“Your job is approved Marcus,” the Guildmaster told me seriously. I could almost hear Smiley deflate behind me. The Guildmaster waved him out before continuing. “Marcus, you will eliminate all Bleeders and their associates. Once that is done, you will allow the local packs to take care of the primary objective. If they want your assistance with the takedown of the primary target, then I expect you to do so. Weapons are fully authorized, but please don’t be too extravagant. Is that clear?”

“Yessir,” I responded, “Go in, kill all the bad guys, report back to the packleader, help them out if they want it, and then leave. Did you want me to fire the house?” Firing the house would ensure that the leeches would be completely eliminated, but it tended to draw humans. The bonfire in Plantation had made the evening news on all the major networks as well as both of the major newspapers. Risking such scrutiny was sometimes necessary, but not always.

“No,” the Guildmaster replied, his voice conveying no leniency on the issue. “I want to keep the humans out of this as much as possible. The police forces, and our allies within, are having enough to deal with in this war that we can operate without too much trouble, but if you involve the fire fighting units, the police will also involve themselves. Do you understand?”

I nodded my answer, and the Guildmaster handed me back the paper. He gave me full access of the armory, trusting me to use my discretion. Which meant he was either extremely fatigued or really wanted me out of his hair. I was guessing the former, because there were too many things that he needed to have done just to dismiss me without a job. As Smiley and I walked outside the office, Smiley gave me a hateful glare and hastened his pace back to the intelligence section. I just shook my head in resignation and walked to the armory. I often took for granted my close relationship with the Guildmaster, and it annoyed some of the other hunters.

I checked the order papers to see which pack I was supposed to meet up with for the operation. I frowned as I saw that it was my first pack, the one that had Discovered me. It was definitely a case of getting what I wished for. I began thinking over the operation as I headed to the stairs. The first thing I needed was some sleep. I left the intelligence area and went down to where my quarters were. On the way down, I ran into Nick.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked. He looked at me suspiciously before answering.

“I’m taking down the leech that has been coordinating logistics for the TCV,” he answered with a wary tone, “Why, what do you need?”

“I’ve got a little job in Forest Hills tomorrow and I really didn’t want to drive out there.”

“When were you planning on going?” he asked. I looked down at my watch. It was only about eight in the evening. I thought about loadout time and made some fast time calculations.

“I’d say about ten in the morning,” I told him. He thought about that for a moment before answering.

“Yeah, I can probably do that. Hangman and I are running a quickie tonight into the stadium to meet some independent lycanthropes and see if they can provide some support to us. That shouldn’t take too long.” I grimaced at Nick’s job. Those lycanthropes that left our society and tried to forget who they were were the most bizarre of our kind. It was rare, mostly from those whose grandparents or great-uncles/aunts were the contributing lycanthrope, but there were a few in Tampa. They had a few ties to their packs – you cannot eat human flesh and not have some help in disposing of the bodies – but their involvement in our affairs was practically nonexistent. I truly had no care for them – how could anyone give up the completeness of the world in true form? – but they did at least have the right to be fully informed about what was going on, and given the chance to return to the packs. Nick didn’t say anything further about his current job, but did tell me to call him in the morning when I was ready. I thanked him and went down to my room. I placed my SOB (Small Of the Back) holster with the USP still in it on the chest of drawers. Beside it went my spare magazine holder with its two mags in place, my wallet, and a pair of folding knives that I had been carrying on the operation to bag the Bleeder armorer. I stripped out of my clothing and took a quick shower, thinking over the operation that I had been assigned. For as much confidence as I had shown the Guildmaster, I knew that this wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. The opposition was Bleeders, which made them trained and nasty. Moreover, they had to have ghouls with them to protect their masters during the day. Bleeder ghouls were also trained and lethal killers, plus they had that nasty zealous streak in them that edged them over their masters in the nastiness factor. At least the leeches knew when to cut and run. I thought on that for a moment. Ghouls were overprotective of their masters, but they were still human, mostly at any rate. Thinking along that same track, I concluded that the best time for an attack was about an hour before dusk.

Ghouls, even Bleeder ghouls, were still going to have some human limitations, including the fatigue factor. If the Bleeders had set up shop in that house for a while, then the routine was probably set. About an hour before dusk was the critical time for ghouls in a protection mode. At that point, they began to believe that their job was almost done, and they began to let their guard down. If there was going to be a time to take out the house, then that was it. I was going to have to be on the ball, and not let any fuck-ups happen, but it gave me an edge that I sorely needed. I flipped on computer long enough to send Gunny and Boomer an e-mail that I was going to be up in the armory to pick out my gear for the mission in the morning. With that done, I turned the computer off and went to bed.

I woke up the next morning a little earlier than I had expected to. I managed to stagger into the bathroom to take care of my morning necessities. While in the shower, I thought over my options for the takedown. The Guildmaster had specifically said not to fire the house, so most of my normal entry mechanisms went out the proverbial window. I decided on waiting to see what data and resources the pack had before I decided on an entry method. I stepped out of the shower and dried myself off. I put on a simple dark t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Although they weren’t as mission oriented as the usual black jumpsuit, they were far more inconspicuous. I placed the USP in its normal position in the small of my back and trekked up to the armory. Gunny was in the armory checking over a pair or badly-mangled Uzis. He looked up as I walked in. He put down the remains of the sub-machine guns and walked over to me.

“What’s up with the Uzis?” I asked him. They looked like someone had run several thousand rounds in full-automatic without bothering to even fieldstrip the pieces. Ancestors, what stupid-ass hunter had taken such poor care of his weapons?

“I’m trying to cannibalize any of the usable parts out of them. The packs haven’t been real careful with the weapons I’ve loaned out,” Gunny answered. He sounded even more disgusted than I thought he would be. I hoped he wasn’t in such a bad mood that I would have a hard time getting the weaponry that I needed. His weapons were his pride and joy, and if someone had banged them too much, Gunny was real reluctant to let the rest out of his sight, “I’m running low on spare parts when they burn out various guns. I’ve talked to some of the pack leaders about it, but they don’t seem to understand that you can’t do all that abuse to a weapon like they do in the movies. So what do you need?”

“I’m taking down a house for a pack. I don’t have a layout on the house, but the Guildmaster has ruled out using normal explosives. I was thinking about a nice HK MP5K or maybe a Steyr TMP.” Gunny walked over to a rack of rifles as he thought over my request.

“Why not a shotgun?” he asked, picking up a Mossberg and examining the chamber, “Or something like your Commando.”

“Because the house I’m going into is going to have a lot of targets, and I want the SMG’s extra ammo and compactness without worrying about overpenetration from rifle caliber rounds.” Gunny seemed satisfied with that answer and went into one of his chained-off loadout pads. When he came back, he was holding an MP5K with a half dozen spare magazines. Gunny set the weapon and the magazines down on the same table he was working on before I came in.

“Are you going to need leather?” he asked as I began to check over the SMG.

“Yeah,” I told him, inspecting the action of the gun. I had a single shoulder holder for the compact MP5, but it was at my house, and it wouldn’t be practical for this operation as I understood it so far. Gunny, on the other hand, had plenty of various tactical rigs to hold all of my weapons, ammunition, and electronics. He didn’t disappoint me when he came back with a nice shoulder rig. As I fit the rig over my t-shirt and began fiddling with the straps, Gunny produced a few boxes of ammunition for the guns. I verified that the boxes were nine millimeter Silver Shoks. I trusted Gunny, but everyone makes mistakes, and it would be annoying to have to trek all the way back to the armory to switch ammunition boxes.

“Are you going to need .45 rounds for that pistol of yours?” Gunny asked as I began to collect everything.

“No,” I answered casually, “I’ve still got enough ammo for another ten or fifteen magazines.” He nodded in acknowledgment, and went back to his work on the Uzis. I grabbed everything and headed back down to my room. After settling the MP5K, the spare magazines, and the rig on the bed, I went into my chest of drawers and began rummaging through it. I pulled out a box of energy bars and began munching on one as I began pulling out equipment. A Kevlar vest was laid next to the shoulder holster. One of my Motorola personal radios with a throat mike and earpiece were placed on the bed. The packs used enough Motorola personal communications gear that I should be able to use it without too many problems. I grabbed a pair of flash-bangs out of the box of them that were in my top drawer. I damn sure wasn’t going to forget those items again. I thought about pulling out my Glock since it was also a nine millimeter caliber weapon, but decided against it. The nine millimeter coming out of the barrel of the MP5K was a decent hitting cartridge, but it had significantly less kinetic energy dump, or K-dump, when fired from a pistol. Usually that didn’t matter too much because most of my targets immediately fell the moment silver hit them. This was against Bleeders and their minions. I felt that I would need the heavier .45 cartridge in the close confines of the house. I found a thigh holster for the USP. My back up pistol would be my trusted Ruger SP101. My Emerson would be on my belt, but a pair of silver fighting knives went onto sheaths in the small of the back. I pulled out a set of throwing knives, which were little more than oversized silver darts and the shoulder sheath for them. Satisfied that I had all of my equipment, I began loading the magazines for the MP5K. As I did that, I began to think on the mission.

The ghouls would have to be armed decently. More than likely they would have assault rifles with shotguns and sub-machine guns to back them up. I needed to see the floor plan of the house to better plan my assault, but it would have to be hard and fast, giving the ghouls no time to organize or awaken their masters. Once the ghouls were down, I could take care of the leeches either with bullets or by driving stakes through their hearts. Then, after securing the house, I could call the pack down on the independent leech. It was going to be nasty, but I was a nasty little fucker. When I had finished loading the magazines, I put them into the magazine holders on the shoulder rig. Then I carefully placed the loaded rig, my Kevlar vest, and the rest of the gear into one of my tactical bags and called over to Nick.

The drive over to the laager was mostly quiet. Nick was going over building plans and layouts in his head for his job. He had a rather simple job because his target hadn’t even bothered to move to a more secure location. The importance of the target was the only reason that Deadeye had given it to Nick rather than one of his younger lone wolves. Nick had already completed most of the initial pre-job work and was in Murphy-planning, or seeing exactly what could go wrong and trying to compensate for it. He almost missed the laager because he was in thought. I wondered if it was such a good idea dragging Nick into my job, but I didn’t want to go into the laager alone. There were too many bad memories.

The laager was a motor home park that had been taken over by field bivouacs of lycanthropes. Rather than planning and conducting assaults from their own homes, several of the packs in and around Forest Hills and Silver Springs had gathered together and formed a single big camp. There was some cooperation between the packs in missions and skirmishing, but mainly it was a matter of safety in numbers. The various motor homes were littered with antennae and cross connecting cables. A few pack warriors with badly concealed firearms patrolled the grounds. I shook my head at that. I would have hired one of the local rent-a-cop firms to provide a force of cannon fodder backed up with a lycanthrope reaction force armed with decent firepower. However, the pack leaders rarely cared what a hunter said until the hunter was doing a job for them. I looked over to Nick and gave him a resigned shrug. He kept his face neutral, but I could read his eyes well enough to know that he had already done his own estimate of the laager and had come up with the same conclusions that I had, and he wasn’t any happier about it than I was.

I was stopped near where the motor homes were by a pair of lycanthropes that were trying to look threatening. They were trying too hard, and it was an effort not to laugh out loud. A truly dangerous individual doesn’t have to try to look dangerous because he carries himself with the self-confidence and self-assuredness that few can match. More than once, it was how I spotted a Bleeder when I was on a job. We told the two lycanthropes that we were hunters and presented my orders. The older one of the two looked over my job orders and then directed the two of us over to where the pack leader and his warriors had set up shop. As we left them, I felt a pang of annoyance. If the Bleeders ever figured out how lax the security around this laager was, they would have the pack leaders’ heads and most of their warriors to boot. I made a mental note to ask the Guildmaster if he would send a hunter or ask for a Red Knight to help remedy the situation.

The pack that I was working for was near the center of the laager. I didn’t like that one bit. It made for bad terrain if a confrontation came down, which was likely. Even with the years behind me, the crushing pain and shame of watching all of the pack warriors stay in their entre when the Spiritmaster asked who stood for me at Discovery still flashed through me. Time hadn’t healed the wound as much as built up scars around the wound. Even now, the taunts of the other pups in tysach rang in my ears. I made sure that each of the bastards paid – in spades. Still, no matter how sweet the revenge, it did little to fill the hole left over the rejection.

The pack had not always occupied Forest Hills. When I was a pup, the pack roamed the south part of Carrollwood. They watched as that part of Hillsborough rose in affluence only to be eclipsed as newer developments were founded and began the affluence cycle. I never did find out how they knew about me because they were gone before I awoke from the dream that had beckoned me to the cravex. I woke up that night dazed and confused. My entire world had changed, become more real. It wasn’t until I had seen my brother’s horrified face that I realized how much my world had changed. As I stared into the mirror to see my true form for the first time, I felt adrift in the sea of what was once reality and lore. Only one thing seemed sure, and that was that I would know more at the cravex.

I left my family that night and never saw them again. I had wondered what they were like now, how much they had changed because of what had happened to me. Those thoughts came less frequently as I matured and delved deep into the lycanthrope world. During my first month as a lycanthrope, however, I thought of nothing else. I reached the cravex the following day, as it was far away from my home, and I didn’t dare get near any “normal” people. Waiting for me was Michael Twisted Knife, the pack leader, and Victor Ghost Dancer, a shaman that was working with the pack to help collect me. I was tired, hungry, cold, confused, and very susceptible to anything at that point. With a kind voice and a smile, Michael and Victor tried to divine who I was. I didn’t understand what was going on, much less why the two who had been so warm and friendly a few minutes before turned icy cold.

I was left in the care of an old member of the pack. He was a dirty old lycanthrope who thought I was his personal servant. I hated his grating voice, his demanding and whining personality, and his refusal to treat me as anything but a lowly creature. However, I did owe him a debt of gratitude. It was him that forced me to forge an iron will, and learn not to take anyone else’s crap. Shortly before Discovery, he and I had a little showdown, and at the end he was in a corner of the room, afraid, and I hadn’t laid a hand on him. He died after my Initiation when he heard I was going into the Guild. Whispers amongst the packs said that he was afraid I would return ready to break him into tiny pieces, but the truth was that I had already proved myself against him, and there was no need to do anything further.

My Discovery started normally as any other. I watched as the other pups walked into the circle and shed their forms. When it came time for me, Twisted Knife pushed me into the circle without saying a word. He didn’t say the words that were dictated in the Rite of Discovery, and it ended up with the Spiritmaster asking me to shed for true. When I did, he almost seemed relieved. Then when he asked if any would stand for me, none of the pack came forward. I could feel the shock around me, and could almost hear the whispers around the cravex. It was embarrassing and painful to watch the rest of the gathered packs look at me in accusing mystery. It also severed any ties that I might have had for Twisted Knife and his pack.

The Spiritmaster inducted us into tysach. The years of the training seemed to fly by as I was busy learning, fighting, and revenging. Although the rest of the pups treated me as an outsider, I was determined not to be defeated by them. The shaman that taught us both seemed amused and frightened of me. The main thing I learned there was just not to give a damn about what the bastards thought. It only mattered what wolves I respected thought of me. Everyone else could go to hell, and if they caused problems for me – well, there were ways for dealing with them. I finished tysach and was Initiated into the Lordship of Hillsborough County. The night I was Initiated, I was recruited into the Guild by a hunter who died fighting leeches while I was still in Guild training. I never did learn his pack name.

In the years since I joined the Guild, Twisted Knife’s pack had suffered bad fortunes. As the population in their territory grew, so did their pack. Shortly after I had returned from training and began my work in the Hunters Guild, the pack was large enough for a new pack to be formed. As dictated by law, the first Lord Vollen chose who would belong to the new pack and who would lead the pack. The problem was that the new pack didn’t want to leave the territory. The new pack leader and Twisted Knife faced off, and Twisted Knife lost. It was humiliating, and Twisted Knife should have lost his pack leadership to his deputy. However, Twisted Knife managed to regain face by finding them their new home in Forest Hills. The actual circumstances were unknown to me, but I had heard rumors that it was a political payoff between Twisted Knife and Grant Vollen, the first Lord Vollen. Now, I was face to face with the pack members that had forsaken me, and their progeny.

As I approached, the older lycanthropes of the pack recognized me and fell back in silent retreat. The younger lycanthropes watched their elders, and looked at me with hostile looks. They didn’t know or understand what was going on, but they resented that a single lycanthrope could make their veterans shirk back. I really didn’t give a damn about what they liked or didn’t like. I was there for a job, and one for which they had requested help. One of the lycanthropes that was a few years younger than me was about to stop me, but an older lycanthrope that I recognized from Discovery put a restraining hand on him. Nick just looked around casually, as if he didn’t notice or was immune to the tension in the laager.

Twisted Knife was outside an RV that was serving as his command center talking to a lycanthrope about my age. He obviously had seen me, or had been warned, because he was putting up an effort to ignore me. The lycanthrope he was talking to looked at me nervously, desperately trying to end the conversation and evacuate ground zero. I didn’t blame him. The memories of my past were barely kept in check by professionalism, but I no longer felt bound by protocol. I had seen Twisted Knife’s war record, or lack thereof. His pack had done reasonable well against the few independent vampires in his territory, but their victories were mainly due to his able deputies. Twisted Knife was an excellent political fighter, but he hadn’t done so well once the shooting had actually started. As far as I was concerned, that leveled the field between him and me. Finally, he couldn’t ignore me anymore and turned to face me. He didn’t look any different than when I had seen him at the Rite of Discovery, but his face and eyes conveyed nothing but utter contempt.

“What are you doing here Badmoon?” he asked as if I was little more than a wayward pup trying to play hunter. The Badmoon came out as a vile curse. A flare of anger passed through me, but I pushed it back down. I had the upper hand, and Twisted Knife knew it.

“Cleaning up your fuck-ups,” I responded in a level voice. There were more than a few sharp intakes of air around us. In matters of lycanthrope pack protocol, it was most unseemly to swear in front of those who were your social superiors, especially in public. Furthermore, it was an entirely separate breach of etiquette to lay blame for failures at the feet of your superior in public. That was reserved for private pack meetings, usually when a strong deputy or other lycanthrope was challenging for control of the pack. I kept my glee hidden as I watched his face bloom with deep color as he tried to contain his anger at the effrontery.

“I would watch my tone, if I were you,” he said through clenched teeth, “It might lead to ugly situations.” He was still trying to be intimidating. Either he still hadn’t realized that I was no longer that scared little pup he had first met, or he really thought he was that fearsome. My guess was the latter. It was time to educate him that neither of the assumptions was true.

“My tone didn’t manage to get your pack warriors killed.” Twisted Knife was on the verge of striking me, and I could see the decision flickering in his head. I wasn’t too worried about that. What did worry me was the restraining hand that Nick put on my shoulder. He obviously thought I had gone too far and needed to be reigned in before I hampered my job. I took a breath before continuing. “I’m going to clean that house that you failed to take down. I expect full cooperation from your pack on this, and so does the Guildmaster.”

Twisted Knife was now in a bad position. He had made the request to the Guild. He couldn’t refuse my services, because when the Guild sent a hunter or hit pack out, they were expected to be the best for the job. A refusal would constitute telling the Guild that the pack leader didn’t have faith in their abilities, and long tradition held that those who turned away hunters were placed low on the priority list unless the lord specifically told the Guildmaster to work with the pack. Furthermore, asking for hunters, and then not giving the support that they required to accomplish their jobs was also considered a rebuke against the Guildmaster, and had the same consequences as refusing a hunter. I wondered what Twisted Knife was going to do as the tense, silent moments passed.

“Very well,” Twisted Knife said, composed, “If the Guildmaster thinks you’re qualified to take down the house, I guess I have no other choice but to accept his judgment.” It was a careful concession. It didn’t sound right coming from him, and it made me concerned about what was actually going through his head. Twisted Knife was just too good a political fighter to accept such a public defeat without a scheme for vengeance. He motioned to a young lycanthrope amongst the group that had gathered around Twisted Knife and myself. “Paul, here, will provide you with anything that you require from us.”

Twisted Knife clearly considered the matter closed, because he abruptly turned from me and went into the command vehicle. Paul walked over to us in the gangly stride of a green warrior. Obviously, Twisted Knife had meant teaming me up with this pup as an insult, but I had a feeling that it was better for me. The pup seemed oblivious to the discomfort of the rest of his pack’s warriors and was wearing an expression that I had seen many times on pups’ faces. Hunters engendered a certain mystique amongst the packs, and many pups found it exciting to work with us. Most of them, fortunately, could easily be taught to put away whatever stories, rumors, and such that they had heard about us. The others had to be beaten around the head and neck a few more times before they understood.

“What can I do for you sir?” he asked very respectfully. I looked him over carefully. He was only a year or two out of tysach, still a teenager by human standards, and his eyes held a gleam of excitement and enthusiasm. He was taller than I was, standing about six foot three or so, and had the characteristic dark brown hair and eyes that dominated lycanthrope lineage. His frame was thin, but I could see that it was mostly muscle. He was decked out in jeans and a dark t-shirt with a Ruger automatic pistol holstered at his side. What endeared me most to this pup was his smile. It wasn’t that it was so different, it was just that it made his face complete and gave him the look of complete sincerity and innocence. He just looked like someone’s kid brother.

“First thing we need to do is get together all the information that you have on where the ghouls and leeches are holed up. Now, what do you know about the house?” I asked, keeping my voice level and calm. He thought about it studiously a moment before answering.

“It’s a single story house on the corner of a cul-de-sac. Twisted Knife sent a pack under Jeeves and they all disappeared. We didn’t find any bodies when the pack investigated. There also was no gunfire when the pack attacked, from Jeeves group or from inside the house.” I stopped him for a moment and asked him to repeat that last part. “Yessir, there was no gunfire.”

“That does not bode well,” Nick said, rubbing his chin in bewilderment. “Bleeders are good, and their ghouls aren’t shabby either, but I don’t think they could sneak up on a group of ten lycanthropes that are prepared for combat, and then drag their bodies away without leaving a sign.”

“No, and what bothers me is that I was told there was a gunfight with lots of wounded,” I replied, “If I have been lied to, then this whole job is going to be a hell of a lot nastier than I thought.” I turned to the pup. “What happened to the wounded?”

“A doctor came and saw them,” Paul answered, “She said that most of the wounds were from friendly fire, but a few were a little more suspicious. She patched them up and sent them back to their packs.” If the doctor was the same one that attended to Hangman and me back in Plantation, then I trusted the information. She was good.

“Does Twisted Knife know what happened?” I asked, hoping the pack leader confided in his pack warriors than he had told us.

“He isn’t sure,” responded Paul, “That was why he called the Hunters Guild for help.” The three of us walked back to Nick’s car. Nick was right, and I didn’t like the implications. There was something out at that house that I hadn’t considered. I also hadn’t considered being lied to by the pack leader, which I should have considering who the fuck it was.

“Do we have floor plans for the house, or some kind of internal diagram?” I asked Paul, “It would help to know the internal layout so I don’t get any nasty surprises.” I was really wishing that the intelligence section had been able to hack their way into the county offices. We were supposed to have a database with the internal schematics of all the buildings in the county, but that had fallen to the wayside with the war.

“No,” he answered, almost as if he was ashamed that he didn’t. Then his face lit up with an idea, “I think I can help with that one. There’s a house that I know of that has the same, or at least a similar design to the house that you’ll be going up against. It belongs to a friend of one of the other pack warriors. Jeeves asked Twisted Knife if he and his group could go through the house first before the attack, but Twisted Knife was pressured from the Manor to quickly take care of the house, and then hit Bradon.”

“What do you mean Bradon?” I asked him, my eyes leveling with his.

“Bradon is the vampire that is at the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. He’s been organizing some of the independent leeches to work with the TCV. I thought you were told about that.” Paul was confused about my question. I paused for a moment as the shock hit me. . I wasn’t aware of another vampire in Tampa with the name of Bradon, and I had been pretty sure that Phillip would have told me if there had been. It would have saved a lot of confusion if there was an emergency. Still, Phillip had always been a reserved individual, and cryptic when he did speak.

“Sorry,” I told Paul, who still looked disconcerted, “The head of the Bleeders before the war started was named Bradon, and the commonality caught me off guard. How quickly can you get us over to the friend’s house?”

“I’ve got to ask Mikey to call his friend and let him know that we are coming, but that shouldn’t take too long. Twisted Knife said to help you out the best we could. Was there anything else?” He looked much more alive with a job to do, almost as if that was what he lived to do. Quite frankly, it startled me a bit. I was often considered a fanatical hunter, but I never looked quite so focused and devoted to a specific job.

“See if there are any photographs or specific data surrounding the house in terms of forces inside,” I answered, keeping my voice as neutral as possible, “I need hard information, not any analysis from either the Manor or the packs. It just gets fucked up.” He nodded and walked off at a brisk pace. I looked over at Nick. He also looked worried about Paul’s intensity, but he just shrugged his shoulders. I understood that sometimes you could only weather a storm, but I was still concerned. Twisted Knife might have done a better job at causing me grief than I had previously thought. “Are you going to stay here, or do you need to go back to the Guild?”

“I can stay here for awhile,” he replied, “There is something about this job that isn’t quite right. Are you sure you still want to do this?” I nodded. For all of my concerns, which were considerable in light of the new information that Paul provided, I still had asked for and accepted this job. Personal pride wouldn’t allow me to back off of this job, and I was still sure I could pull it off without getting killed. As I was mulling over the problems in my head, Paul returned with a manila envelope in hand.

“Here you go,” Paul said in his normal cheery voice, handing me the envelope. I opened it to find some photographs and accompanying documents. The first photograph was a picture of a white single story house. The lawn needed some maintenance and there was a tall shrub wall, about four to five feet tall, surrounding the left part of the house. The shrubbery was dense enough to shield the left side of the house from the main road. The right part of the house held the driveway and a tall tree. Although there were no cars in the driveway in the photograph, the oil stains looked fairly recent. I wasn’t sure if it was significant, but I kept in the back of my head. The mailbox was on the left of the driveway. I studied the mailbox in the picture. I didn’t see any wires or small protrusions that might indicate a booby trap. I didn’t think that they had thought of it, but I had once, and I tried to believe that my opposition was at least as thoughtful and devious as myself. Better to err on the side of caution. The door was hidden in the photograph by the front porch, which looked like a small indention in the house. I grimaced at the fact that I couldn’t see the door, which in turn made Paul looked worried. I was really going to have to settle the pup down before he got one or both of us killed.

The second photo had to do with the house where Bradon, the independent vampire leader, was living. It was a single story also, but it was slightly larger. The look of the house put my instincts up, but I couldn’t figure out why. It was similar to the house that the Bleeders were at, but lacked the tree and shrubbery. The paper gave information on Bradon and his house. There was no mention if he was related to Phillip Bradon, but it looked like he had been a vampire as long as Phillip had said he had been. There was mention that approximately ten to fifteen known independents had been sighted at the house, but conflicting reports made the actual number unknown. This bit came from the lord’s intelligence group, which was run by the Red Knights with assistance from the Guild’s intel section and whatever the shaman could divine. They weren’t always the most reliable sources of intelligence, but sometimes they turned the occasional nugget. I hoped that the data was reliable and not their normal patchwork of rumors and guesses.

The last photo was a satellite photograph that gave a view of the entire cul-de-sac. Well, someone in the lord’s intel group had been smart enough to download it off the internet. Sometimes the aristocracy seemed to forget that the human world did provide us with little luxuries that were very useful. The photo had that unique blocky look of a digital picture zoomed to close, but I could make out that the cul- de-sac itself had a standard shape, making it look like a keyhole. Handwritten notes on the photo pointed to Bradon’s house at the apex of the cul- de-sac with the Bleeders’ outpost on the left hand corner. The shrub fence protected the left side of the property from view of the cross street. All of the houses looked similar, with minor size and style differences. I could see signs that the other houses were occupied.

“Before the raid, did Twisted Knife get all of the humans out of the way?” I asked, “The neighborhood still looks a little crowded for a raid.” It wasn’t unusual for the packs to clear humans out of the area before a raid. Our kin helped us a lot in this area.

“No,” Paul replied, “Twisted Knife didn’t want to involve any humans at all. Jeeves’ group went in totally covert.”

“A bunch of warriors is not covert,” I retorted, “Not even in the dark. They are a fucking beacon to anyone looking for anything out of the ordinary. Was there any human involvement after the group disappeared?”

“No,” he answered, “The humans in the neighborhood seemed not to notice. No alarms or police activity. According to what Twisted Knife said, the lord’s intelligence says that Bradon either didn’t notice, or he hasn’t done anything to indicate that he did notice.” I didn’t like the sound of that. Humans could be expected to ignore our actions, but Bradon should have at least heightened his security around his home. Independents that weren’t slightly paranoid tended to die out quickly, and Bradon had been around long enough to know better. That was, unless he had already allied himself with the TCV, at which point, killing the Bleeders and him had become a more vital point than just taking out the Bleeders. It was simple. If Bradon had allied with the TCV, and he was as influential as his reputation made him out to be, then he could bring in a large number of unaligned vampires to fight on the TCV’s side. Independent vampires tended to be better fighters than their TCV brethren because the independent vampires didn’t have the Bleeders or the Peace to protect them. On the other hand, if we could kill Bradon, even when he had joined the TCV, it would signal to the independents that the TCV couldn’t protect them, and that they were possibly better on their own. With vampires, image and perception were everything. This was one of the things that Phillip Bradon had stressed with me more than once. The strategic considerations would have to wait. I had the initial job to do, and it looked to be a bitch.

“Let’s go take a look at the house layout, then I’ll have a better idea of what we face.” Nicky and Paul nodded and the three of us climbed into Nick’s car. Following Paul’s directions, we left the trailer camp and went through the normally quiet streets of Forest Hills. Paul made sure we took a long detour around the target area in hopes that we would avoid any chance that the ghouls would see us. Apparently Nick and I had reputations in the lycanthrope society, which Paul was sure had spilled out into the leech community. I hated to dampen the pup’s enthusiasm, but I already knew that it wasn’t true. Although there was that mention of a bounty at Bradon’s – Philip Bradon’s – place before I killed him, but I wasn’t sure how widespread that was amongst the leeches. After about twenty minutes of driving, we arrived at the house. The basic design was similar to the house in the photograph, however the landscaping was different. It made the approach planning more difficult, but I was more interested in the internal layout.

The owner of the house had left, not wanting to get involved in whatever what was going on. He wasn’t a kin, but he knew better than to get in the middle of a lycanthrope-vampire war. I couldn’t say that I blamed him. The door that I was so interested in was a solid plank of carved wood. It was held into the frame with solid brass hinges and a standard door knob. The main lock was a reinforced deadbolt with magnetic tumblers and a heavier striker plate. It would be a royal bitch to pick with standard lock picks, and I didn’t think that I would have the half hour or so necessary to pick the lock. This was the biggest obstacle to me because I couldn’t use my normal explosive entrance techniques, and once I was inside I had a bunch of well-armed ghouls and leeches to deal with as quickly as possible. In true form, I could rip the door out of its frame, but I wouldn’t have that advantage. I needed the compactness of my human form for maneuvering inside the close confines of the house. That was a mistake made often by warriors. They thought the power and completeness of true form superseded all situational requirements. It was something the instructors at the Guild drummed out of our heads very quickly. I spoke out loud as I thought, “A sledgehammer.”

“Pardon?” asked Paul, confused by my seeming cryptic statement. Paul and Nicky were standing just past the door, waiting for me to finish my inspection of the door itself. Although Nick immediate understood me, Paul looked completely lost. Well, he had never been to the training camp, nor had he been trained by a hunter. It was time for me to remedy some of that. If Paul was going to survive this war, he was going to need to learn some of the dirty tricks that hunters used against our enemies.

“I’m going to need a sledgehammer for the door,” I answered him, standing up from where I had been inspecting the lock. “I can’t blow the door with explosives, so I’m going to have to slam my way through. The thickness of the door should withstand the blow enough to allow the hammer to pound open the deadbolt.”

“Why not just shoot the lock open?” Paul asked.

“Because that’s never a sure thing unless you have dedicated rounds for lock busting, and that usually means I would have to carry a shotgun, which I really don’t want to do. I need to keep as light as possible for entry and to clear the house. The sledge you just pound and drop. It’s either that or a homemade battering ram, which we really don’t have the time to fashion.” The battering ram was a metal pipe filled with concrete connected to another metal pipe by two chains. It was used by SWAT teams for entry and the Guild had a few for the hit packs to use, but I didn’t have the time to make one or go get one from the Guild. A sledge, on the other hand, could easily be purchased at any hardware store, or even Wal-Mart. Paul nodded his understanding at my explanation. At least he was willing to put away those fantasy scenarios he had seen on television and in the movies.

The interior beyond the front door opened up into a living room. There was a window directly to my left that would allow them to see me, but I couldn’t use as my entry point. I could, on the other hand, throw a flash-bang through it and give me a second or two for my entry. To do it right, however, meant carrying the primed flash-bang in one hand and the sledge in the other hand. It would be awkward, but it could be done. Off to my right was a glass paneled wall that led into a study. There was a hall to my left that led down to the bathrooms and the bedrooms. On the far side of the living room was a door that led into the kitchen. I ignored the furnishings because I wasn’t sure where or if the ghouls would have the furniture. The leeches would have to be in the bedrooms. Most vampires still had human habits, such as sleeping in bedrooms. The ghouls would probably be in the main living room and the glassed-in study. Since they would mostly be concentrated in one area, the flash-bang would more than likely incapacitate most of them just before I came crashing through the door. Once through, I’d have to drop the sledge and pull out the MP5K and start hosing the place. The more I thought about that entrance, the less I liked it. Full atuo fire in a house had some nasty Murphy factors. Ricochets had this odd habit of coming out of nowhere. I finally decided against that approach and decided the first weapon pulled would have to be my USP. I drew the pistol, removed the round out of the chamber and began moving around the room in likely shot positions. Nick followed me with a critical eye, and occasionally voicing his thoughts on where I was standing and my likely hitting probabilities. Some of his ideas I agreed with, and a few I didn’t, which led to a quick discussion. Paul tried to follow what was going on, but he didn’t know enough of the jargon, much less when Nick and I would talk to each other in half sentences. We came down to six targets before I had enough room to draw the MP5K. From that point, I would have the sub-machine weapon to complete my operation.

Nick and I figured about twelve ghouls. We came to that figure after we inspected the bedrooms and decided that there was enough room to comfortably fit six Bleeders. Six Bleeders would also be enough operatives in case the TCV wanted Bradon eliminated. Each Bleeder would probably bring two ghouls each. By our figuring, there probably four ghouls in the main room, four in the kitchen, two in the study, and two in the hall to the bedrooms. This was a simple, flexible setup that would allow them to reinforce and protect with their numbers. My first two hits would have to be the ghouls in the study. I could hit them easily enough and it kept them from hitting me from the rear. Once they were down, the four in the main room could be taken down with single shots or double taps, depending on their location and if it looked like they were wearing body armor. By that time, I could find cover and draw the sub-machine gun. Once I had that out, I would be able to bottleneck both the hall and the kitchen with bursts. When I was satisfied that I had taken out enough of the ghouls, I could take out the leeches in the bedroom.

“Why don’t you go through the bedrooms?” asked Paul. Truth to tell I had considered that attack profile when I had been studying the photo of the house, but then I had thought of something I had read in one of the reports.

“How did Jeeves’ group try to attack the house?” I asked in response.

“Through the back of the house,” Paul answered.

“Right,” I said, trying to keep a lecturing tone come into my voice, “No one heard them being taken out. That could mean booby-traps behind the house, or something else. From the sat photo and the frontal photo, I can’t see any signs of traps, but something had to take them out that fast and that quietly. A frontal assault gives me a quicker attack time, less time for them to react. Sure, they’ll see me coming, but it gives me a chance to disable more of them with the flash-bang. It may sound crazy, but it actually works more times than one would suspect.” Paul seemed to soak all of it in before comprehension spread across his face and he nodded his understanding.

“How did you plan on getting to the target house?” Nick asked.

“Anyone ever swiped a taxi before?” I asked innocently.

Nick smiled in the mirror as we approached the house. The taxi had been stolen by a pack warrior in a raid during the beginning of the war. When we returned to the laager, the pack that had stolen it offered it to Nick and me. Nick and Paul were a little surprised at my plan. Paul wanted to do the driving, but I didn’t think he could keep his head during the operation to pull off his part convincingly. Nick would have to do the driving. Laying on the seat next to Nick was a twenty-four pound sledgehammer we bought at a hardware supply store and a flash-bang.

Nick pulled up to the curb with a roughness that only professional cab drivers seemed to master. I staggered out of the back of the cab, trying not to overact the drunk. I leaned into the driver’s side window pretending to pay Nick, but he handed me the flash-bang with the pin pulled, careful to make sure the spoon wasn’t accidentally released, and the sledgehammer. I turned sluggishly back towards the house, trying to keep my body between the house and the hammer. I mimicked the stagger of a drunk up the lawn towards the front door. There were no signs that anyone inside the house. When I was about three yards from the front door, I dropped the charade and began moving more forcefully to the house, prepping the throw of the flash-bang. As I hit the walkway two yards from the front door, the world went white.

When the white faded, I was standing in the middle of a circle of ghouls and a human who smelled of odd herbs. My mind made the quick conclusion – the human was a wizard The wizarding community had pretty much withdrawn since the incident with the Sirens. They had almost disappeared since the beginning of the war. They knew better than to be caught in the crossfire between the lycanthropes and the vampires. Needless to say, I was surprised to see one of the wizards in the room.

“What the fuck,” one of the ghouls began, “He’s still awake–” At that point I began my own attack. There wasn’t time to think, and barely enough to act. I dropped the flash-bang and swung the sledgehammer at the wizard. Why he was in the room wasn’t important at the moment. The wizard was the most dangerous, and most vulnerable, person in the room. Killing him first was imperative. My being conscious was enough of a shock to surprise him, and he didn’t even dodge the heavy iron hammer as it came across to his head. His skull broke open like a ripe melon, spilling grey brains out onto the floor. Then the flash-bang went off.

I had closed my eyes as soon as I had hit the wizard with the sledge, but the roar of the flash-bang was deafening. I opened my eyes and saw the ghouls stunned, holding their ears or their eyes. I shook my head for a half-second, trying to get the ringing out of my head. It didn’t fade that quickly unfortunately. I pulled out the MP5K and just tried to ignore my throbbing head. I knew my hearing would return on its own accord, and I had targets to handle. I flipped the selector switch to three-round burst and began placing bursts on the ten or so ghouls in the room. Only the last two had managed to get out weapons before I dealt with them. As soon as I had finished with the ghouls, I finally took a look around the room.

The room was a square about twenty feet on the side. The walls were off-white, but now streaked with the black-red blood of the ghouls and the grey matter from the dead wizard. On the floor was a pentagram drawn in black. It was stained with blood also, which was both the blood of my targets and some older, browned blood stains. I wondered if it had been the blood of the pack warriors that had originally attacked the house. There were no windows or doors that I could see. I was wondering what the hell had happened, and where I was. Tinny echoes told me that my hearing had come back from the beating it had taken from the flash-bang and the unsuppressed fire from my sub-machine gun.

“Garas,” said a voice from out of nowhere, “What is going on down there?” I fought down the urge to respond. The voice sounded like an intercom, but I couldn’t see the speaker on the walls or the ceiling. “Garas, what the hell are you doing down there? Is that werewolf dead?” The voice was becoming more insistent. My guess was that the next thing they would do would be to send down a response group. At least, that’s what I expected them to do since they apparently didn’t have a working video feed from this room. Whomever they sent down to check on what was going on was now my only ticket out of the room. The best bet would be to take them by surprise and commandeer whatever they used to get into the room. The room had no furniture or anything that could be used as cover. There was only one way to hide, and that was in plain sight.

First, I replaced the magazine in the sub-machine gun. Then, I laid down amongst the bodies, spreading some of the blood and gore on me. I gripped the MP5K in my left hand, and drew my USP with my right. This would only work for a short time, and I had to make each second – and each shot – count. I laid amongst the dead, slowing down my breathing. After a minute or two, a concealed door in the wall to my left opened up and four ghouls entered the room. Two were cradling sub-machine guns, one had an automatic pistol, and the last was carrying a shotgun. Their stances were that of slacking professionals. That fact made me a bit nervous with the plan that I had rapidly thrown together. I stopped my breathing shortly before they entered the room and watched them. They were dressed in white t-shirts and jeans, and I couldn’t see any of the tell-tale signs of Kevlar vests. Their first reaction was shock. Then, they braced themselves and began to check over the bodies. The one with the pistol seemed to be the leader, and he directed the rest of them amongst the bodies. He stood over me and turned my head to look at my face. He didn’t notice as my arm shot up, placed the barrel of the USP at his side and fired. His face changed to shock when he figured out what had happened, but then he slid to the side as death claimed him.

The others turned at the gunshot, but I was already up and attacking. The shotgun ghoul was the first, a victim of a three-round burst from the MP5K. One of the ghouls fired at me as I double-tapped him with my pistol. The Kevlar vest I was wearing absorbed most of the impact – thank the Ancestors for trauma plates – but I still had the wind kicked out of me. I fired the MP5K at the other ghoul as I tried to recover my breath. He dodged the bullets and ran for the concealed door. He dropped his weapon and pulled out a small device that looked like the remote control to a car alarm. I put a round into his back and waited as he slid across the floor. I walked over to the dead ghoul and pulled the device out of his hand. I pointed the device at where the concealed door was and hit the button. The door slid open to reveal an elevator car that was big enough to hold nearly a dozen people. I did a quick check of the elevator and saw a video camera mounted above the door. I destroyed that with a three round burst from the sub-machine gun. Satisfied that there were no other security devices in the elevator, I got in and looked at the control panel. The panel only had two buttons, up and down. I pressed the “up” button and replaced the magazines in my pistol and sub-machine gun. The pistol went back into the holster and I gripped the foregrip of the MP5K. I was trying to keep my calm, but I was anxious. I had no fucking clue where I was and why there was a human wizard in the room. There had been too many fucking surprises and too few answers. It wasn’t helping that the elevator ride was slower and longer than I had been expecting.

The door opened with that familiar electronic tone. A pair of ghouls was standing there with pistols and bags that looked like medical kits. From the shocked looks on their faces, they were surprised to see a lycanthrope wielding a sub-machine gun in their elevator. Without hesitation, I eviscerated the two ghouls with the submachine gun. I ran out of the elevator into some kind of control room. There were monitors on one wall with a keyboard, a mouse, and a microphone on a desk in front of the video bank. The monitors showed various pictures of rooms. Some of the rooms held the caskets of leeches. None of the rooms looked like the rooms in the model house. I had no idea where I was. The rest of the room was barren with linoleum tile on the floor and plain off-white walls. I didn’t see another door or any other way out. I replaced the magazine in the MP5K, leaving me four more. That didn’t appeal to me. I flipped on my radio and clicked the throat mike. “Ranger to any Tango or Hotel units on this line, acknowledge please, over.”

The radio crackled and hissed with static. I was not happy. The specific radio that I was using was designed to penetrate concrete and steel, so something was blocking the signal. I decided not to waste the batteries on the radio and clicked it off. I holstered the sub-machine gun and sat down at the monitors and console. I began playing with the keyboard. The main monitor turned to a standard operating screen. My computer skills were limited to running applications and a minimum of troubleshooting problems that appeared on my personal computer. This system was in a completely different operating system than the one that I normally used. I punched randomly at some keys, hoping to run into something through blind luck. After trying to get it to list options, I saw a door slide open out of the corner of my eye.

For a moment, I thought I had managed to trigger something, but then I saw the ghoul in the elevator car behind the door. He was more than surprised to see me, because his eyes went wide in shock. I didn’t waste time. I launched myself from the chair and across the room. He barely had time to throw up his arms to protect his body as I collided with him. The two of us slammed into the far wall of the elevator car. I picked myself up and pulled out the sub-machine gun. He looked up at me with dazed eyes, and then his eyes locked on the barrel of the MP5K that was in his face. I kept my voice calm as I asked him, “Where the fuck am I?”

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked in response. I was pretty sure it was delaying tactic. He had refocused himself and began looking around for a way out. I didn’t give him a chance to think about escaping me. I slapped him across the face with the MP5K. He rocked back with the impact and fell back to the floor. I took a step towards him when I realized that he had been knocked out by the blow. Great, of all the fucking ghouls in this place, the one I had managed to capture for information had a fucking glass jaw.

“Please step all the way into the elevator, werewolf,” said a voice from a speaker on the roof of the elevator. The voice sounded familiar, with the strange harmonic tones of a vampire. I stepped into the elevator car, bracing myself for any of the number of possibilities that entered my mind. The door closed and the elevator began to rise. I made sure that the selector switch on the MP5K was set to “FULL.” At least I could spray the area if I needed to. The ghoul on the floor began to stir. I kicked him in the face and he went back down with a grunt of pain. The door opened into a room that looked like someone’s living room. A dark wood floor was covered with a Persian rug of greens and yellows. To my left was a wet bar and a pair of dark brown leather chairs. Off to my right was an oaken bookcase with all of its shelves filled with leather-bound books with gold-lettered titles. They looked like reference books of some type. Next to the bookcase was another of those leather chairs. The occupant must have got a deal on the matching set. Sitting in the chair was a vampire holding an open book in his right hand and a glass of what looked like whiskey limply in his left. In his lap was an automatic pistol. In front of me was a long leather couch. Lounging on the couch was another vampire, who had his face buried behind another book. Next to him was an Uzi with a long silencer attached to it. Standing next to him were two ghouls, one holding a shotgun and the other cradling another suppressed Uzi. It was like a scene out of some modern gothic movie. The vampires were trying too hard to look cultured and civilized. I knew better.

I didn’t hesitate. I had already leveled the muzzle of the MP5K on the ghoul holding the shotgun. The MP5K stuttered, and I caught the two ghouls with a long burst of fire. The vampire to my right dropped his book and glass and picked up his pistol. He went down with three rounds to the head. The vampire whose face I couldn’t see didn’t react visibly. He just casually dropped his book and looked at me levelly. My mind froze as I recognized the pale features of Philip Bradon. It shouldn’t have been possible, because I had put two bullets into Bradon on the first night of the war. Then the voice came back to me, because it sounded like Bradon’s, but slightly different. The vampire reached for the Uzi, but I came out of my surprise to put a small burst between him and the weapon. He looked at me in almost an amused way. He stood up with a grace that reminded me of Bradon, but again, slightly different. It was like watching an extremely good actor do an uncanny impression of Bradon. I didn’t know who this fucker was, but it was more than a little unnerving. Bradon was one of those jobs I didn’t agree with, and didn’t like doing. Bradon wasn’t a friend, but I respected him. I could always trust him to be level-headed about any crisis between the two races. The vampire saw my unease and grinned smugly. I brought the MP5K up and lined the sights on his china face.

“I assume you’re Ranger,” he said in that eerie voice, “Philip said you were a dangerous little werewolf. I can see he was quite right.” He almost sounded entertained by my presence. I was deciding whether or not to crack a smart-ass comment when he began again, “I know what you’re wondering. Go ahead and ask.” I kept my face neutral and my weapon trained on him. I wanted him to keep talking without giving out anything to the leech. The basic idea was to let him fill the silence he expected me to fill.

“Please don’t try that ploy with me Ranger,” he said, with a bored tone in his voice, “Philip taught me that many years ago. I can talk for hours without actually saying anything that would be useful to you. Can we try this again?” He didn’t exactly unnerve me, but he did make me reevaluate him as a threat. He was way too cool and collected than a vampire should be under the circumstances.

“Okay,” I replied, not lowering my aim, “Who are you and where am I?”

“I am Joseph Bradon, the so-called leader of the independent nosferatu. And the twin of Philip.” It explained a lot, and opened up a bunch of new questions. The lead one was why would Philip, the head of the TCV’s elite enforcers, allow his twin brother lead the independents in Hillsborough County.

“Philip’s twin?” I asked, trying to sound surprised. I needed to keep him talking for a while longer. “That explains the who, but what about the where.”

“You are in my home,” he answered simply. “I was unpleasantly surprised to see that you had managed to take out most of my ghouls. They were well-trained.” He looked away dramatically. He acted like he was in the middle of some bad television movie.

“Not that good Bradon,” I replied quickly. “Where are the rest of your ghouls and friends?”

“Around the house. Most of my vassals are still asleep, but I suspect that you were already aware of that fact.” I didn’t respond to that remark. Plans began working through my head as Bradon continued to walk around seemingly oblivious to the fact that a hunter had a sub-machine gun trained on his head.

“Okay,” I answered, trying to keep that confused tone that Bradon seemed to be expecting, “So are the Bleeders in the house at the corner your allies?” Bradon had some game playing, but was completely unaware that I had long quit playing.

“There are no Bleeders there, my young werewolf,” he answered with a laugh, “Jean-Mark, one of the ghouls you killed in my security room planted that rumor. Too bad that you killed him. He was one of my favorites. Paolo will not be happy that you killed his ghoul either.” Bradon walk away from me and headed to the wet bar. My instincts were roaring all hell. This guy was way too confident, like his game was coming to its end. That left only one thing to do. He was so busy pretending I was some guest that had arrived uninvited, he didn’t see me turn on my radio. I didn’t waste any time.

“All Tango units, the word is tortoise,” I said into the microphone. The codeword let the warriors know that the house had been cleared and they could attack the house. Within moments, cars would be pulling into the cul-de-sac and armed warriors would be swamping the house. Bradon whirled from the wet bar with a look of pure surprise. He had just lost control of the situation, and it was obviously something he was not used to. Phillip obviously didn’t train his brother as well as Joseph thought he had.

“What the hell did you do?” he asked as his surprise turned to anger. “We were having a conversation!” He began to storm towards me.

“You assumed that I would give you the same respect that I gave Philip. You assumed wrong.” The last statement was punctuated by a short burst to his midsection. His face contorted with the pain and confusion of his last moments. “I am a hunter, and my job is to assist the local pack, whose warriors will be crashing this place in less than a minute. Hunters always do their jobs. Philip understood that when I put two rounds of silver into his head.” Bradon began changing into true form with a look of total incomprehension on his face. Somehow, that didn’t surprise me.

I waited in the room as the warriors began raiding the house. I didn’t want to get in the middle of their combat zones. I had a nasty suspicion that the moment I appeared around a corner, the warriors would fill me with silver rounds. It would be completely be accident, but I would still be completely dead. I made sure that all of the vampires’ weapons in the room were unloaded and waited for Twisted Knife and his pack to finish ransacking the house. Finally a pair of lycanthropes stormed into the room in a very sloppy fashion. Had I been a bad guy, I could have easily killed the both of them without even warning the rest of the attacking force that their comrades had been eliminated. I didn’t bother critiquing their performance; I told them who was who and then walked out to meet the rest of the attack crew that Twisted Knife had brought in. There were about twenty lycanthropes altogether, and most of them were busy mopping up the last few ghouls who were desperately trying to fight to the bitter end. I ignored the bursts of gunfire and began searching the house for Bradon’s office. I needed to search through his files to find any important information for the Guild. From the way he was talking, it sounded as if he was far more connected to the TCV than it seemed from the outside. It occurred to me that he might know some useful things, like the identity of the new Bleeder leader. Plus, I wanted to see just how much he and his twin were involved together. I wouldn’t have put it past Philip to have been using his brother to gather intelligence on the various independent vampires of the area.

Paul, who was part of the attack force, quickly found me amidst the clean-up as I searched the house for the office. He quickly agreed to help me search and between the two of us, we quickly found it. It was a small room half-concealed in a corner of the house. It held a desk against the far wall. The desk had a computer on it that was similar to the one that I had at home. The office also held a pair of metal filing cabinets and bookcase with several books on finance and management. Paul moved to the file cabinets, but I grabbed him before he opened the nearest one. He looked at me strangely, and was about to say something before I preempted him.

“If this Bradon was smart, he’d have booby-trapped the cabinets,” I told him calmly. Paul’s eyes went wide as he realized that he could have just gotten himself killed. “Go check the computer while I see if he left us any surprises in the cabinets.”

“What am I looking for?” he asked, turning on the computer and sitting down in the leather swivel chair.

“Personnel files, memos between him and anyone on the TCV, anything that looks like it might have to do with him and the TCV. Before I killed him, he made it clear he had a contact within the Bleeders that I think linked him to the Council as a whole. It’s a guess, but an educated one. We kind of need to know what kind of contacts the TCV had with the independents, and if the independents were coming into the war.” Paul didn’t even flinch at that and went to right to work on the computer.

The metal cabinet was similar to the common ones that were found in offices around the nation. I sniffed around the corners of the filing cabinet, trying to find the “dead rubber” smell of plastic explosive. I didn’t smell it, but I did smell ozone. After checking over the cabinet, I found the bolts on the back that were holding the laser. It was a simple design booby-trap. The laser measured the distance between the back of the cabinet to the front of the drawer. If the drawer was pulled before the laser was turned off, the bomb or incendiary device would trigger. I wasn’t sure if turning the laser off would disarm or if there were other back-ups, but I didn’t have the luxury of time. I needed to get the files out before Twisted Knife or one of the other pack leaders decided to intervene and do something stupid – like hand over all of the intelligence to the aristocracy rather than the Guild. I placed the muzzle of my USP to the place where the laser should have been and gently squeezed the trigger. The gun rang out in a deafening blast. I shook my head to clear the ringing and walked to the front of the cabinet. There was smoke coming out from the bullet hole and all of the other crevices. I yanked open the top drawer to see all the hard copies destroyed. Bradon had made sure the files would be unusable to anyone but himself. Ancestors damn him, he was a smart leech. I could smell the quick-burn liquid that had helped destroy the hard copies on the smoke that was wafting out of the filing cabinet. Hopefully, the computer would have the information that I needed without all of the bad stuff.

I looked to see how Paul was doing. He was staring at me, trying to catch his breath. I mentally knocked myself. I had forgotten to warn him before I fired the pistol, and I had just scared the hell out of him. I gave him a weak smile and let him get back to work. As he started to pound away at the keyboard, two lycanthropes with shotguns came charging into the room. The lead one did the main sweep while his partner did the opposite sweep. It was a standard entrance technique, but these two had not practiced with each other enough, because they weren’t supporting each other enough. To demonstrate my point, when the second man almost had the barrel of his weapon trained on me, I laid him out with a palm strike. By the time his partner had noticed and begun to react, I had the muzzle of my weapon under his chin.

“If I were a Bleeder,” I told him in a quiet voice, “You and your partner would be dead. You do a FULL sweep, not half of a sweep. Your partner is there to see if you missed anything, not to cover a full half of your firing arc. You two need to practice together. Solo bullshit is for hunters. Got it?” He swallowed and nodded slowly. I hit the decocker on the USP and replaced it in its holster. The lycanthrope helped his partner up and the two left the room, mumbling all sorts of curses and oaths at me. I didn’t care. If they did what I told them to – either from anger, shame, or dawning comprehension – they would live longer in this war. That was the important thing. There had been too many lost already. Far too many.

“Ancestors,” Paul breathed, watching me go through the two lycanthropes, “Are you always so brutal, even to other lycanthropes?” I could see that his idealistic view of hunters had taken a beating while working with me. Having some of that fascination gone was a good thing, but I knew that I would miss some of Paul’s naive exuberance. Still, I had to continue shaving away at his misconceptions.

“Sometimes the best way to learn is through brutal demonstration. One of my instructors let me fall fifty feet to prove a point.”

“What point was that?” he asked incredulously.

“That it is very difficult to do a rapid rappel while holding a weapon, and if I wasn’t watching what I was doing I would fall down and hurt myself. It was quite painful, and very humiliating, but I learned not to do that again.” Paul still looked like he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t say anything further on the subject. As he did that, I began to search the bookcase and the closet for anything that looked useful. The bookcase didn’t have anything decent, just books. The closet held a few coats and an empty gun case. From the impressions left in the case, it looked like it held the Uzi that Bradon had when I killed him.

“Found all of his personal files,” Paul said. I got up from where I had torn the closet apart and walked over to the desk. Paul had found several folders of documents that had previously been encrypted. Paul had already broken the encryption and was checking the first folder. Thank the Ancestors that I had found a pup with decent computer skills. It looked like a bunch of spreadsheets, but we would have had to go into his spreadsheet program to access what they were about. I didn’t think we had enough time. I didn’t trust Twisted Knife enough to give over the information, and I didn’t think that he would let me have anything if he knew that it was there.

“Can you send this all out on e-mail?” I asked him. He nodded cautiously. “Good, send it to this address.” I grabbed a pen off the desk and wrote down my address at the Guild. I didn’t bother watching him as he worked his way through the computer, so I continued to search around the office for hidden places where Bradon could have hidden things. The computer files were nice, but I was sure that there was more in the room. Vampires were born pack rats, especially when it involved documents that could have any possible use in the future, and considering the way that vampire politics played out – almost every document could have a future use. I still hadn’t found anything when Twisted Knife walked in. His eyes were blazing with anger and his true form was swaying slightly with barely concealed rage. I didn’t know what he was angry about, but I wasn’t about to back down from him. I stood up slowly from the baseboard that I had been searching, and he looked even more enraged that I hadn’t shown him proper deference as he came into the room. When he came just outside of arm reach, I leveled the MP5K at his stomach and looked him in the eye. He glanced down at the gun and stopped with eyes wide in shock.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked, trying to use the Wolf’s Growl at me. While it worked well on humans, it had limited effect on lycanthropes. The recipient must believe that he is lower than the lycanthrope using the Growl for it to be of any use at all. I no longer believed I was lower than Twisted Knife, so I just kept my weapon steady and made sure he didn’t try anything stupid. I heard Paul stop what he was doing. He must have stood up because I heard the chair being pushed away from the desk.

“I’m just keeping the distance between us Twisted Knife,” I told him, “Now, what the hell are you so mad about?” Truthfully, I had no intention of shooting the pack leader, but he didn’t know that. The fact that he was incensed about something enough to storm in and confront me gave me some pause. Enough that I didn’t want him close enough for him to do something stupid, like physically attack me.

“You killed Bradon,” he yelled in a booming voice that must have been intimidating to his pack members, “He could have been useful to us. Furthermore, two of my pack came in here to help you, and you attacked them. Is there any reason I just shouldn’t have you arrested and brought before the lord for treason?” At that point, I was well and truly pissed off. Twisted Knife was annoying before, but now he was threatening my life. As a pack leader, he was well within his power to have me arrested and sent to the Manor until the Guildmaster petitioned the lord for my release. That was assuming that the lord didn’t have me summarily executed just to ensure that I wasn’t a traitor, or to appease Twisted Knife and whatever group of pack leaders backed him against me. I knew of a few that still blamed me personally for the death of Stephen Vollen. Those few had the power to press the issue, perhaps even over the objections of the Guildmaster. So, I went on the offensive.

“You are the one who asked for the Guild’s assistance,” I began in a menacing tone, “You were the one who did no follow-up investigation of what happened to your warriors. You were the one who failed to ensure that your warriors were trained properly. If you want to blame me for anything, you can blame me for doing your job. As far as I’m concerned you are a trivial matter. When I return to the Guild, I will make damned sure that all of the hunters know of your allegations. What do you think that they will do, once they hear that you threatened the hunter that assisted you? Exactly where will your pack stand when you need hunters to bail you out again?” Twisted Knife backed up slowly, but I knew what he was going to do next. He was quivering in a near uncontrollable rage that had only one option in his mind to handle my perceived insubordination. He would have to take me down physically. If I had been in his pack, I probably would have just waited for him to fight, and then taken him down, but I wasn’t looking to take over his pack. I just wanted to finish this job without Twisted Knife thinking he could still have me arrested. A burst of gunfire at his feet quickly quelled his notion that he could attack me.

At the sound of the gunfire, four more lycanthropes burst into the room. All four knew who I was and had sided with Twisted Knife during my Discovery and Initiation. At that point, there was a silence as they looked at me and my weapon pointed at them. I watched each of them for any sign that they were going to attack. The tension rose in the room, and it would have taken very little to set it off. Paul ended it by moving between us.

“Put down your weapons,” the pup told the older lycanthropes with a confidence of a much more seasoned veteran, “We have too many enemies out there for us to waste our lives fighting each other. This hunter has done what we asked him to do. Are there any here who dispute that?” Twisted Knife looked about to open his mouth, but Paul shot him a look and continued. “Ranger, you need to control yourself. These wolves are not the enemy, and you can’t expect warriors to act like hunters. Now, I have sent the information to where you have asked. Your job is done. I think it is time for you to leave.”

I was quite taken aback by Paul’s sudden forcefulness. From the looks on the other lycanthropes’ faces, they were just as surprised as me. Paul just maintained his steady, determined gaze at us. I lowered my weapon and studied the young wolf. I couldn’t believe that I had missed the signs of just how intelligent the pup – young warrior – actually was. He had come up with solutions to problems with the proficiency of an experienced pack warrior. I had been too blinded by my initial reaction to Paul and had chalked up his demonstrated proficiency as a need to prove himself to a hunter. It had been my mistake, and because of it, I had pushed the young warrior too far. His loyalty had to be to the pack. He was not a hunter, and he wasn’t about to challenge Twisted Knife for leadership. I took a long look into Paul’s eyes. He was firmly with his pack, and would protect them from me. It was time to salvage what I could. Unfortunately, Twisted Knife could smell the blood in the water and decided to pay me back for my earlier transgressions against him,

“Well Badmoon,” Twisted Knife sneered, “What are you going to do now?” He knew there wasn’t really anything for me to do. I had no reason to continue the fight beyond personal pride. Hunters don’t fight for personal pride. We do it for the lordship. Oh sure, we’ll stand up for ourselves when we can, but not at the cost of the job. My job wasn’t quite finished, and Twisted Knife knew that it wouldn’t be until I extracted. My job was to assist the pack, and I couldn’t assist the pack by striking out at Twisted Knife. I pushed by the lycanthropes and began walking out of the house. I could hear Twisted Knife’s laughter as I walked down the hall. The rest of the packmembers stood off to the side, apparently from the evil look on my face. I radioed out to a hit pack that was nearby for a ride back to the Guild. I didn’t say anything on the ride home.

As soon as we got back to the Guild, I went down to the Guildmaster’s office without bothering to take off my mission gear. Several of the intelligence hunters looked at me strangely, but none challenged me. I listened at the Guildmaster’s door to make sure that there wasn’t anyone in with him. After hearing him just grumbling about some reports, I knocked and walked in before he answered.

“You’re back?” he asked, seemingly surprised at my appearance. I wondered if it was because he had expected the job to take longer, or if he had expected me to get killed doing the job. I hoped it was the first.

“Oh yeah,” I replied. I related the tale of my adventure earlier to the Guildmaster. He listened with his normal blank look on his face. When I was done, he looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath.

“It worries me that the vampires are using human magic wielders, but I’m not surprised,” the Guildmaster said, “They need some defense against the shaman, who have been very good at tearing the leeches apart. Especially since we pretty much wiped out their alchemists. What about Bradon’s files?”

“I was going to send them up to Baser,” I answered, “I wanted to review some of the personal files first though.” The Guildmaster looked at me for a moment. His gaze was penetrating, and very uncomfortable. He seemed to know what was going through my mind.

“Philip is dead, Marcus,” he said bluntly, “You won’t find any insight in his brother’s files. You’re a shooter, not an analyst, and I don’t have the luxury of letting you play analyst. Now take what you borrowed back to the armory and get some rest. If anything interesting is turned up in the files, I’ll have Baser send it down to you.” I nodded to the Guildmaster and left his office without another word. I trusted the elder lycanthrope to hold to his word.

As I went back down to my room, I began thinking about the two Bradons. Philip was secretive, but this was beyond anything that I had expected from him. I had figured out that Philip and his brother had communicated frequently, and I had a strong instinct that Joseph Bradon had some tie to the TCV through his brother. As to what implications that had, I wasn’t sure. Maybe there wasn’t one. Bradon was the only job against a vampire that I regretted and had reservations about. Bradon would have been a deadly opponent, and I understood why it was necessary to eliminate him, but Phillip was also a vampire that could be talked to. Lord Vollen may have decided to completely wipe out the vampires, but the toll of the war could change his mind. If that happened, we would need vampires that would talk to us. Bradon would have, but I wasn’t so sure about the rest of the Inner Council. At any rate, all of that was in the past, and I would have to deal with the situation as it was. I opened the door to my room and stepped in. The monitor of my computer glowed eerily in the darkness. I stripped off my weapons, gear, and clothing, placing most of it on the bed. My vest went into the bathroom sink so I could wash it out. After a careful cleaning, I hung it up to dry. From there, I went on my computer and sent all the data Paul had sent me up to intelligence’s mailbox. With that task done, I went about cleaning the weapons. The MP5K was its normal pain, but I managed to finish it quicker than normal. Then I went to work on my USP and back-up pistol. I focused completely on the task at hand, trying to forget the day’s fighting.

When all the firearms were cleaned, I placed the MP5K into its case and replaced the Ruger into the gun safe. My USP was placed in its normal small-of-the-back holster and left on top of my chest of drawers. I methodically checked the rest of the gear, carefully putting it away. When all of my things were secured, I left my room and headed up to the armory.

When I got there, Boomer and Gunny were outfitting a hit pack with heavy assault weapons. I placed the case on one of the tables and started to leave. Then one of the hit packs called my name. I turned around to see the leader of the four-hunter team coming up to me. He was about my height and frame, with bleached blond hair and dark black eyes. It took me a moment to remember his name.

“What do you want Uptown?” I asked him a little sharper than I wanted to. I was tired and a bit pissed off by having to back down to Twisted Knife. . His eyebrows arched at my tone and he looked like he was about to reply with something nasty. I raised my hand to stop him from saying anything. “Excuse me, I’ve had a bad day.”

“Yeah, we heard that you disappeared in Forest Hills today. Nick said that you suddenly vanished.” He stopped for a moment and waited to see if I was going to fill in the details. When I didn’t. he asked me, “Listen, do you have any jobs tonight?” Uptown had received his name because he was very good at blending into the upscale environments and making hits among the vampires that decided to infiltrate the upper crust of human society. His team acted as back-up for him and they were known to have a good reputation for making quick and clean kills.

“No,” I answered carefully, “Why, what do you have in mind?”

“I’ve got a job in Channelside tonight. It’s a rescue operation for some lycanthropes that got caught down near the Forum when night came. My boys and I could probably handle it, but I would like a sniper to help out. Interested?” I thought about it. I should have gone back to my rooms and gotten some sleep, but I was still angry and more than a little frustrated. The thought of having to force myself to cool down by acting as a covering sniper for Uptown’s hit pack sounded good to me. I hated just sitting in my room and beating myself up. Plus, I needed the opportunity to prove to myself that I still was as good as I thought I was.

“Sure,” I told him, “Just let me get a few things.”

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