Clare sighed and pulled her coveralls back on. “Fine. But I make the plan next time.”

  “Sure.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  No way would he let Clare devise plans for infiltration. She had great ideas in general and devices to bring those ideas to life. With that in mind, her ideas of how infiltration ops should run were all based on popular fiction.

  If she had her say, they would end each mission with a massive explosion that leveled half the city. And probably her walking off with the man or woman of her dreams to the dulcet tunes of the latest pop music album.

  Anselm couldn’t help feeling like an old fart when he thought that way.

  “You didn’t consider the idea of hacking the car?” she whispered sharply.

  He raised his hand to stop her from talking. The rumble of the security vehicle covered their voices, but it wasn’t a guarantee. If someone heard them in the back, it would be the end of their escape. They would radio to inform the authorities about a break-in, and all hell would break loose.

  Five minutes into the drive, he peeked out the window to make sure they were far from the entrance before motioning for Clare to follow him to the front. Most of the automated security systems in the vehicles were in the back, but the people running the show preferred to have humans drive.

  Some people hated the idea of leaving everything in the hands of technology. He assumed vampires were above that, but he was proven wrong. He would work through that when he had the time.

  He drew his weapon from his coveralls. The damn things were too tight around the shoulders but loose enough everywhere else so he’d fit most of his equipment in. Clare came up behind him, ready with her particle gun. They’d timed it to press their weapons to the necks of the guards at the same time.

  “Afternoon, guys,” Anselm announced. “You two will want to stay very calm. Keep your hands where we can see them. No keying your comm devices.”

  “Keep smiling.” Clare grinned and pressed her weapon harder. “Nothing wrong here, so work the way you’re supposed to.”

  The security guards exchanged a glance. Anselm spotted a spark of rebellion in their eyes, the impulse to fight back and regain control of the situation.

  “Here’s what I see.” He leaned in and whispered in the driving guard’s ear. “Both your weapons are on your hips, belted to your holsters, safeties on, and at an awkward angle. You know yourself better than I do, so make the call. Are you willing to bet your life on your ability to draw your weapon and shoot me before I can twitch my finger?”

  Another glance was exchanged, and the spark vanished. They could bring themselves to do it when they considered their jobs and worked through the ideals of their responsibilities. When the situation involved their lives, terror was introduced. Anselm only had to remind them they would die if they acted. His gamble was on how they felt about their masters’ security. Were they willing to die for their employers?

  It was a good gamble, and it paid off. They relaxed and settled into their seats, hands firmly in view.

  “There we go.” Clare patted the passenger guard’s shoulder. “You won’t die today. If you play your cards right, you can sue them for dangerous working conditions and retire on the proceeds.”

  Anselm nodded in agreement. He hadn’t known that, but if it convinced them to play along, fine.

  The next few minutes were tense as they steadied their ride and headed deeper into the wilds.

  “All right,” Anselm ordered. “You’re going to set the vehicle to autopilot, open the doors, and jump out while it’s moving. Keep your knees bent, roll over your shoulders, and you’ll come away with nothing but a few scrapes.”

  They hesitated, and Anselm pushed his weapon behind the driver’s ear. “Now!”

  It required effort, but the guards pushed the heavy doors open and jumped out, leaving Anselm and Clare to climb into the front seats.

  “You sure they can’t hit this with a kill switch the moment the security guards are out?” Anselm asked as they strapped in.

  “I disabled it while we sat in the back.” Clare grinned as she managed the vehicle’s controls. “Nothing a hacker like me can’t work out, right?”

  “Right.” Anselm switched the scanners on to give them a better idea of the world around them. “How far to the city? Twenty kilometers?”

  “Around that, but I think we have another problem. There’s a party headed toward us.”

  Anselm had spotted the movement. He’d hoped they weren’t approaching. They might have been coming to the compound from the north, but they turned off the road and headed for the two of them.

  “You think they already realized Humphrey’s missing and in the back?” Clare whispered as she shifted the truck to drive faster.

  “No. They’d be running searches around the countryside. These assholes are coming for us.” He unstrapped from his seat and climbed into the back of the security truck.

  Sense dictated they couldn’t know who they were. The guards wouldn’t have called so soon to report their stolen vehicle. If Clare’s EMP device had worked, they wouldn’t be able to call at all.

  If they already knew where they were, that could only mean an active tracker.

  Anselm returned to the vampire situated in the back. He was conscious, although Clare’s device kept him from moving. His eyes followed Anselm as the adjudicator drew a bug tracer from his coveralls and scanned the vamp.

  “Shit.” He gritted his teeth. He didn’t need to search far before the device pinged. “Motherfucker. He’s got a tracker on him.”

  “Yeah, and from how quickly they were onto us, I’d say we were expected,” Clare shouted from the front. “You’ll have to put work into keeping them off our backs. I’m picking up at least eight armored ATVs and three more vehicles on the way. Looks like they have a helicopter, too.”

  “Huh.”

  Anselm didn’t want to admit they’d made a mistake. The best they could do was dump their hostage, but their pursuers could collect data on their location and find the vehicle. He wasn’t willing to drop their best source of intelligence regarding their hunters on those odds.

  Or maybe he needed an excuse to make his life as difficult as possible.

  Most of all, he needed a way to take a helicopter out of the sky. His sidearm technically could, but he had a limited number of high-ex rounds and a terrible platform to fire them from.

  He had to shoot, though. He couldn’t allow them to advance on the vehicle without being contested. If he slowed them down, he could pick them off. The best option was to use the helicopter to slow them, but he doubted that was possible.

  “Keep the truck as steady as you can.” Anselm pushed the passenger-side door open.

  “What the fu—”

  “Keep the fucking truck level!” Anselm slipped his visor on and jerked out into the open. Holding the railing on the side of the truck kept him in place. The visor picked up on the approaching vehicle, but he waited for a sightline on the helicopter.

  It didn’t sound like a military chopper. If it was, they would have been targeted and shot off the ground from twenty or thirty kilometers away. They were likely dealing with a civilian vehicle retrofitted for security work.

  When the craft was visible, he grunted and pulled himself out of view. Two contained transverse rotors explained how it had managed to stay low and out of sight. The chopper looked like it had guns mounted on both sides but no rockets.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Clare shouted over the roar through the open door.

  “Taking my time.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing!” Anselm let the visor track the helicopter based on the last visual and the device’s noise register. It showed him a bright red spot in his view when he couldn’t see it. The bird’s heavy guns left their marks as rounds hammered into the security vehicle’s armor. The truck would survive a few more rounds, but it wouldn’t last long after one got through.

  The shooters were good. They’d likely trained and been in firefights on the ground, but they were too anxious to pull the trigger. Unwilling to draw a deep breath, peek down the sights, and take the right shot. In fairness, it was an impulse Anselm had worked to control himself.

  The helicopter dipped from view when Clare drove them out of sight. He held himself in place and refrained from jumping into the fight before he was ready.

  “Anselm! Do something!”

  He stepped back out into view. Using the truck for cover, he rested his gun hand on a railing and waited for the helicopter to return. He timed it and squeezed the trigger a second before the helo broke through.

  A few shots pinged off the edges of the craft before the high-ex round crashed through the windshield. The explosive detonated a meter inside the chopper. The strong blast knocked the gunners off their spots, despite being held in place by ropes and wires. They might have wished they’d been thrown clear because the helicopter erupted in a massive fireball that crashed to the ground.

  It came down to the left of the road they were following. Of course, it was too much to ask for the helicopter to drop onto the road. More for it to crash directly into the vehicles chasing them. A man could hope, though.

  “Nice shot!”

  It was, but it was the first of many. He counted half a dozen vehicles chasing them. They were faster and carried heavier armor. Military vehicles, not security. He didn’t know how they’d caught up so fast. Supercharged ICEs, by his estimation, likely with interesting additions most militaries didn’t risk or bother with. Thick black smoke rose from the back of their vehicle, which meant the engines wouldn’t run for long. They would run fast, though.

  “Come on, come on.” Anselm watched and steadied himself with the gun in hand. The vehicles would be on them in less than a minute. He opened fire on the next one, but not with high-ex. He used simple, armor-piercing rounds that failed to damage the vehicle’s armor. He didn’t expect to find points where the rounds might get through, but he needed a target where the explosives wouldn’t bounce off.

  He twisted back when Clare yanked them around a corner and almost threw him off the side of the vehicle. No need to shout or scream. Showing the emotions racing through his body would only make them real. They were figments of his imagination. Only real if he allowed them. Most people did, and they had no control.

  Anselm almost didn’t realize he’d flicked over to high-ex as he watched the first vehicle tear in half. It wasn’t easy, but he’d picked the spot well.

  “How the hell are you doing that?”

  It was more impressive than Clare knew, but Anselm didn’t want to talk or think about it. The moment he did, shit would go sideways. He realized he didn’t have enough high-ex rounds to clear them out. He hoped to clog the road, but the ATVs would still be able to follow them. Slower, though they’d catch up before they could reach New Houston.

  They had to stop getting into scrapes on their own. They needed backup. Vampires, werewolves, humans, or any combination of the above. Someone to help them. He would settle for anyone at this point. He’d held an odd advantage over the vamps and werewolves, but he lacked those advantages in this situation.

  He almost fell over again for the wrong reason. His back hammered into the door behind him, which told him Clare had hit the brakes hard. Questions swirled in his head and were squashed before they could rise from the depths he’d banished them to. He had to fight a battle, and that meant trusting the woman he was fighting alongside to know what she was doing.

  If letting the whole troop of fuckers get next to them held logic, he’d play it out the way she planned. He yanked the door closed when an armored vehicle hammered into their side. Not hard enough to sideswipe them, but Clare still fought to keep them on the road.

  All three windows opened to reveal a small platoon with assault rifles trained directly at them.

  “Down!”

  Anselm followed his own advice and rolled when the first barrage smashed the side of their vehicle. Nothing got through, but it wouldn’t take long before something did. Especially with another bombardment coming at them from the other side. Anselm yanked his door open and fired another high-ex shot through an open window.

  The blast slammed the door shut, and Anselm felt the change of pressure in his eardrums.

  It did its job, too. The round ripped through the vehicle from the inside and blasted it to pieces. The explosion slowed the others and gave them an inch of breathing room.

  Anselm faced Clare. “Why are you slowing?”

  “We can’t fight this battle alone,” she shouted. “We need help!”

  “And where’s that going to come from? Got a whole horde of paratroopers waiting to drop down from the sky?”

  Clare grinned. “Something less dramatic.”

  She yanked the emergency brake and skidded them to a halt off the road.

  “Clare!” Shouting at her wouldn’t help. She was already out of the vehicle and rushing toward the rock formations. “Shit!”

  He flicked his empty mag out and slapped a fresh one in as he jumped from the truck and rushed after her. This wasn’t how the operation would end. Not with her doing something stupid and him too slow to stop it. That wouldn’t be how he failed. He’d die first.

  Clare had a small device in her hand, but nobody was trying to shoot her. It seemed they wanted her alive, although the why of it was lost in his head. Anselm ducked and moved as fast and low as he could.

  She planted the device in the ground and ran from it toward the rock formations that would provide them with cover. Anselm saw why only a second later when a massive ball of red light shot from the device, climbing higher into the sky than he bothered to watch. It exploded with a deafening crack.

  “If this is you trying to get us killed, I’d say it’s a job well done.” Anselm skidded to a halt next to her and fired a pair of smoke bombs behind him to obfuscate their position. “That said, I’ll haunt the shit out of you if I’m the only one who dies because of this!”

  “I called for help.” Clare dragged him behind the rocky cover. “Wait and see. Or, I guess, listen.”

  It took him a second to figure out what she was talking about. Most of what he heard was the chattering of automatic weapons and the hisses of smoke bombs filling the air.

  Then he saw them.

  Anselm dropped to a knee behind the boulders and peeked out for a shot at the mercs who’d showed up on his visor. They mostly pulled up to the rock formations, kicking up dust to increase the lack of visibility in the smoke.

  They didn’t rush into the fight. They formed around their vehicles and opened fire.

  He supposed they were lucky the assholes hadn’t tossed any grenades yet, or they’d be dead in seconds. Although if they wanted to keep Clare alive, a grenade would be a massive no-no.

  One assault rifle stopped shooting. Anselm thought it was because they’d failed their lessons on overlapping fire, but the shooter didn’t pick up again.

  Another stopped shooting after that. Soft howls in the distance sounded like a warning, although Anselm couldn’t tell where they came from. He’d heard wolves could do that. More voices joined the howl, turning it into a wild chorus that filled the air with a bloodcurdling song.

  Maybe song wasn’t quite the word.

  The mercs heard it, too. They stopped shooting and turned to find the source of the howls, which appeared to come from everywhere.

  The smoke dissipated, as did the dust. Anselm noticed that three or four mercs were missing from where he’d pinned them. It would have meant they were trying for a flank attack, but they’d left their rifles behind in splashes of blood.

  More splashes soaked the ground. Two mercs fell, missing their heads. One was tossed into the depths of a ravine next to the rock formation, leaving Clare and Anselm to take cover while the rest shot wildly at their surroundings.

  “What the hell is going on?” Anselm snapped.

  “Nothing you need to worry about.” Clare grinned and punched his shoulder. “It’s only my family coming in to save my ass. Well, our asses, but yours is more of an accidental saving.”

  Anselm tried to smile, but he only managed a nervous laugh as the mercs’ screams picked up. A few were gurgled through blood. Others started as pleas for their lives and cut out suddenly.

  Most of the noise came from the assault rifles. They kept shooting for a while, then fell silent one by one until a lingering stillness settled, broken only by whispered gusts of wind.

  “Come on. Sounds like they’re done mopping up.” Clare yanked him by the shoulder she’d punched and pulled him around the edge of their cover.

  A wolf stood in the center of the vehicles. Not a transformed werewolf, but an actual wolf. A meter and a half tall at the shoulder, massive, and covered in thick black fur.

  “Curtis, I do appreciate you guys coming so quickly.” Clare waved at him. “Come on. Shift back so Florence can have a look at you.”

  The loud cracks of bones breaking and reshaping announced a change. The fur disappeared from his skin, and he reared up on his hind legs, which turned into human legs a second later.

  A lot faster than the were changes he’d seen previously.

  “Here.” Clare pulled her coveralls off and tossed them to him. “Let’s get all those cuts and scratches looked at when you’ve got clothes on.”

  Anselm breathed slowly and tucked his sidearm back into its holster. “Curtis. Good to see you again.”

  “Anselm.” Curtis winked at Clare and pulled the coveralls on. They were tighter on him than on the adjudicator, but they fit. “What trouble have you gotten my sister into this time?”

  “Big trouble,” Anselm answered without hesitation.

  “Right.” Clare withdrew the portable Florence from her pack and scanned Curtis. “You’ll want to ask yourself one question, adjudicator. If they needed help to keep the city from coming down, why did they send someone so obviously clueless to find me?”

  “City coming down?” Curtis yelped as the bot treated the scratches on his shoulder.

  “Don’t you mind that. Focus on healing.”