Lucas still thought sometimes about how much easier his life back then would have been with a good pair of binoculars, and maybe a motion sensor or two.
He looked up as the SUV slowed, and Klemens’s monstrosity of a house came into view. It looked more like an asylum than a home, but the Chicago vampire lord probably liked it that way.
“Sire.”
Lucas turned to Nick. “Everything set?”
“The gate guards are down, and the entry teams are in place.”
“The human, McKinney?”
“Still inside, my lord. One of his bodyguards was with Klemens’s gate guards, and there’s an empty SUV with the door open on the street. I’m guessing the human guard was supposed to remain with the vehicle.”
“Is the human dead?”
Nick nodded.
Lucas was glad Kathryn wasn’t there to debate the issue. He took a moment to search out every one of his vampires, reaffirming their connection to him, offering strength and courage, as well as verifying their positions around the estate.
“Let’s do this, Nick.”
* * * *
Kathryn settled into position, making sure everything she needed was within reach. She and Mason had broken speed limits all the way across town, getting here in what had to be some sort of record. Once on the scene, they’d set another record, making it into and through the house so quickly that she was sure someone had scouted it out ahead of time. The door they’d entered through had been unlocked, and once inside, he’d shown no hesitation. He’d known exactly where to go and had literally carried her up the stairs, simply slinging an arm around her waist and moving. It had been exhilarating and terrifying all at once. Getting to the roof hadn’t proved a problem either, since she’d already decided she wasn’t going to work from there. One look at the steeply pitched roof as they’d pulled in behind the house, and she’d known it wouldn’t work. The only place she could have set up securely on a pitch like that would have been the peak, and that wouldn’t have given her a good line of sight on Klemens’s house next door. So, she’d shooed Mason on his way, then set up in one of the third-story bedrooms instead. It was very nearly as high off the ground as the rooftop, and from the window, she had a nearly 180 degree view of Klemens’s estate. She could see any movement along the front and back walls, as well as the side nearest her position.
The window was one of the older double-hung kind that operated on a pulley system to open straight upward. With the window wide open, she had arranged her sandbags on the broad sill, then set up a Sig SSG 3000, which was nearly identical to the one she used back at Quantico. Setting the rifle carefully on a table she’d pulled over near the window, she lifted her binoculars and swept the scene in night vision mode. Lucas hadn’t arrived yet, but the advance team vampires were on the move, taking up positions all around the house.
Raising her field, she checked out the building itself with the night vision off. There were a few lights inside, mostly concentrated on the second floor, a corner room on her side of the building. The curtains were drawn, but the occasional shadow of movement could be seen along the edge of one window. And that was it.
She heard the roar of multiple engines and shifted her gaze just in time to see several big, black SUVs tear around the corner and come to a tire squealing stop in front of the wrought iron gate. Kathryn had a bad moment, fearing they’d been discovered, but then the doors popped open, and she recognized several of Lucas’s vampires as they poured through the gate and disappeared into the shadows around Klemens’s huge compound.
She kept watching, her eye on the one SUV whose doors remained closed. The night grew abruptly silent. No truck engines, no quiet commands, not even the sound of traffic from nearby Lake Shore Drive. Suddenly, the doors opened, and Kathryn sucked in a breath as Lucas emerged to stand silently, his gaze sweeping from side-to-side, seeming to catalogue every detail down to the exact location of vampires Kathryn had long ago lost sight of. His head turned slowly, his gaze settling on the window where she sat watching, as if he could see her despite all the precautions she’d taken to remain invisible. He shot her a quick grin, then sobered and turned back to face his enemy.
Lucas started forward, surrounded by his troops, and it was a terrifying sight. They were the warriors of their race, tall and bulky with muscle, their eyes glowing an eerie red, like the pits of hell. They were dressed completely in black combat gear, with not a telltale gleam of metal among them. Their weapons varied, some carrying long, wicked-looking knives, others a variety of guns, and some several of both. And all of them, Lucas included, were fully fanged, the white gleam of their teeth a stark contrast to their uniformly somber garb.
Of them all, only Lucas wore no weapons, not even a simple blade. But he was armed more lethally than any of them. The power he’d told her about, the power of a vampire lord that she’d only half believed in, was made real as he strode toward the house. A wind picked up out of nowhere, quickly escalating from a breeze that rattled the trees and sent dead leaves scurrying to escape his footsteps, to a raging storm that stalked the ground ahead of him, pounding the shutters and doors of Klemens’s mansion, shattering the windows in their frames. The air, which had been so quiet and still only moments before, was now heavy with a sense of doom, as if the night itself understood that a great battle was about to take place.
Lucas strode forward, dressed in the same black combats as his soldiers, his long leather coat blowing behind him like a cape as the storm of his power spun before him. His black hair was slicked back from his handsome face, and his eyes burned the purest gold, casting a brilliant light on the path he cut across the manicured lawn, a beacon guiding his vampires onward. Kathryn shivered, and not from the cold.
Lucas was several yards from the porch when the door opened, only to be quickly torn from the hand of the man who stood there, bracing himself desperately against the storm of Lucas’s power. A piercing white light smeared the frosted yard, giving it a dull, silver cast, and silhouetting two humans. Kathryn immediately dropped the binocs onto the pad of blankets she’d scavenged and placed her eye to the rifle scope.
She centered on Lucas, then moved carefully toward the doorway, marking the two men, first one, then the other. The humans had gone old-school, each carrying an Uzi sub-machine gun, held gangster-style at the hip, with an automatic 9mm sidearm in the other hand. She assumed these were the mob boss McKinney’s bodyguards, since Lucas had indicated they’d be the only humans in the house.
One of the two took an aggressive step out onto the front porch, his hair and clothes blowing wildly as he shouted something that the wind tore from his mouth and tossed away. Lucas and his vampires kept coming, as if the man didn’t exist. Kathryn swore silently and placed her crosshairs on the foolish human. Lucas might be nearly immortal, but only nearly. And she didn’t care what he’d said about bullets not taking down vampires. Enough bullets could do a lot of damage, and if that guard turned his Uzi on Lucas, it would tear him apart. She sank into her sniper space, her mind and sight riveted to the events unfolding far below, every detail as clear as if she stood two feet away. Her entire world became the small circle of space revealed by her scope. She saw the guard’s arm tense as he lifted the gun fractionally, saw him snug the weapon closer to his hip to stabilize it, saw his finger twitch.
She blew out a breath, began her slow squeeze of the trigger . . . and froze as her target disappeared. Moving so fast they’d been nothing but a dark blur across the face of her scope, Lucas’s vampires had taken the two human guards down. One moment the two men were getting ready to fire, and the next the doorway was empty, and there were two bodies lying in a huddle on the cold ground. She swallowed hard as one of Lucas’s vampires dragged a body up off the ground and sank his teeth into the man’s throat, drinking deeply before tossing him aside. She brought up the binocs and took a look. The man was on his back, his head at an unnatural angle, his throat torn out. If he hadn’t been dead before, he was now, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. The human was a gangster and probably a killer, but . . .
But nothing, Kathryn, she reminded herself. Lucas had warned her that this was war. And that guard down there would have happily killed every one of the invading vampires, including Lucas, if he’d had the chance. After all, hadn’t she been preparing to do exactly the same thing? If Lucas’s vampire hadn’t done it first, she would have shot him before he could kill Lucas, and she would have shot to kill, too. But seeing the way he died, seeing him lying there with his throat torn out . . . It bothered her. She couldn’t deny it.
She jolted as something like static electricity buzzed over her skin, making the fine hairs on her arms stiffen. Far below, Lucas had lifted his arms as if to embrace the mansion and everyone in it. Then the wind died, and the night went dark and silent as every light in the house, every street light, every distant night light in the neighborhood was doused in the space of a heartbeat.
Kathryn grabbed the night vision binoculars, her fingers trembling as she struggled to hold the lenses steadily enough to see. But there was nothing, only blackness where Lucas had been standing.
She had lowered the binocs, when a flash of movement where there hadn’t been any before made her pull away from her desperate search near the front door. She lifted the lenses again and scanned the side of the house, certain she’d seen something move. It had been close to the ground, an anomaly caught in her peripheral vision, not an animal, but there . . . something—a window maybe—was being pushed out from the house. It was little more than a slightly less dark patch of wall, but it was definite movement and, oh, yeah, lots of it.
Kathryn touched the small radio bud in her ear. “Nick.” It was only a few seconds before he responded, but it seemed like forever as she watched figures begin to emerge from what was clearly a basement exit. It had to be Klemens’s vampires, the ones Nick had said would be hiding from the human visitor, McKinney.
“What have you got, Hunter?” Nick’s voice was a welcome noise.