Chapter 55
Chapter Fifty-Five
The night was silent after the rainstorm that had delayed their flight from Miami to a private airport south of Jacksonville. Airport was generous. It was little more than a strip of asphalt bisecting an open field. Narine had been right. The purveyor was accustomed to helping drug traffickers slip under the FAA’s radar. He didn’t care what they were doing as long as the cash was good.
Split into several unassuming sedans, Elena and her inner circle took different routes to Baylor’s lair. Ten in number, they were Elena’s most trusted children. Before they’d left, each of them had dropped to their knees and asked to be compelled to prove their loyalty.
Elena hadn’t done it, much to Lib’s irritation. Giving in to paranoia was the fastest route to madness. She refused to indulge her lingering fear that there could be more daggers hidden inside cloaks.
Crammed together in something called a Ford Fiesta , Librada drove while Elena sat impatiently in the passenger seat. “Couldn’t you wind this toy a little more tightly? Surely it should go faster than walking.”
“This vehicle will not draw unwanted attention, announcing us before we’ve made a move. There was no time to run reconnaissance. We can’t be sure there are not lookouts posted?—”
“They’re not an army. They are a pack of stray pups yipping at the moon. All bark and pissing in the house.” Openly annoyed that she’d gotten stuck with the backseat because she was petite, Sofia played with the moon’s reflection on the edge of her knife.
Most vampires had no need of weapons outside of their own fangs, but Sofia had always harbored a fondness for blades. They’d served her well as a vulnerable woman navigating the streets of Rome and she’d never abandoned them. A loyal friend.
Elena didn’t want to remember the night she’d found her slumped over, blood pouring over the cobblestones. She’d been left in an alley. Discarded and nearly dead. Elena had been drawn by the overwhelming stink of blood and rage.
When Elena kneeled at Sofia’s side, the woman, who looked no older than sixteen despite having seen her twenty-second birthday, tried to stab her. Even moments from death, Sofia had fought and fiercely.
It had only taken Elena a second to calculate that the man whose artery had painted the walls and ground with blood had likely not made it ten paces without expiring. She’d smiled and offered Sofia what a girl like her wanted most: the power to be untouchable. There would never be a good night for her, or anything she’d ever do gently again. Not if she didn’t will it for herself.
For decades, Sofia carved a bloody path across Europe. From the cobblestones of Rome to the alleys of Paris and the gaslit streets of London, scores of men choked on their lies at the end of her blade. She only joined Elena in Havana in the early 1930s. Not too long later, the mafia followed.
It was another few decades before Sofia curbed the impulse to avenge. And here Elena was, asking her to do it again. Asking her only blood daughters to risk their lives for vengeance. Elena closed her eyes, Marisol’s voice in her mind.
She wasn’t wrong about violence begetting more violence. History was bursting at the seams with that lesson. Elena wasn’t ignorant, she was merely bereft of alternatives. Her only option was to strike completely and without flinching. To make a show of her power. To dissuade any future misguided idiot from needlessly forfeiting his life.
After leaving the gloss of gentrification, Librada didn’t have to tell them they were getting close to the abandoned church. The stink of Baylor’s men seeped into the car through the air conditioning vents, forcing Elena back to that night. To the horrific pain of loss and the ever-present memory of grief. In an instant, the heaviness in her chest disappeared to make room for reckoning.
They left the car in one of the many empty lots impaled with For Sale signs. Small houses checkered their silent walk to the church, many in such disrepair that it was a surprise humans dwelled within. It was a testament that people never changed. That they would always deem some lives disposable and leave them to rot in the shadow of progress.
Dark streets provided good cover from human eyes, but not vampire. Spread out, they approached without making a sound. Focusing on her strongest sense, Elena sniffed the air. There was at least one of Baylor’s fiends on the flat roof of the church—a square building with its painted gold cross chipping. He was relaxed. So very relaxed that Elena was sure he was asleep. Is that how confident they were? How unafraid of her?
Bad night to be on watch , she thought with a fire rivaled only by the Earth’s molten core roiling in her chest.
Without a word, she found Sofia’s gleaming green eyes and signaled to her. They’d never needed the hand-signs Librada taught them after returning from The War in 1945, but they hadn’t forgotten them. Showing no hesitation, Sofia melted into the shadow of what had once been a pharmacy and disappeared.
At her side, Librada was a loaded weapon desperate to go off. Elena thought of her enlisted as Army Corporal Victor Serrano. Of all the evil Lib had single-handedly extinguished. Their targets were so outmatched, Elena could almost feel sorry for them. Almost.
Minutes later, they were moving along the perimeter of the church in complete silence. The rest of her most-trusted were hidden in the dark. When Sofia appeared on the roof, she leaned over the side and produced a freshly severed head. The first spoil of battle.
Joining Sofia on the roof, her entire band stood around a metal roof access hatch. If they opened it, they’d have a better idea of where Baylor’s goons were inside the building but once they did, they’d risk being detected. Even the most incompetent would detect the scent of that many vampires wafting in at once. They only had one opening strike. One chance to make the most of a surprise.
Using her superior hearing, Librada kneeled by the hatch and put her ear to the aluminum cover. She held up her hand to count the voices and other signs of life.
When Librada stopped at twenty-two, Elena looked around at her thirteen and smiled. Those were excellent odds. If Elena hadn’t made promises to Marisol and Zuri, she’d tell the rest of her children to stay on the roof while she defeated them on her own.
After sending a handful of her most experienced men out to the exterior egress points, she signaled for Librada to open the hatch. A patient heartbeat later, she gestured for Sofia to throw the head through the hole. Baylor should know that Elena wasn’t the kind of guest to show up without a gift.
A gruff voice cursed, “What the fuck,” as soon as Sofia flung in her prize. And then it was on.
First through the hatch, Elena leapt without bothering with the ladder. She landed as light as a cat on the wooden platform bordering a huge open room like a balcony at the opera. Below, nearly thirty males were scrambling to their feet. Littered blood bags told Elena that she’d interrupted dinner.
She smiled. Maybe there would be some challenge before the slaughter.
The clueless pimple who was staring at his friend’s head at his feet found a second brain cell and lunged for her. High on the adrenaline of battle, Elena decided not to waste time with him.
With an effortless duck and a simple turn to change his clumsy momentum, she dropped him on his back. Her fist in his short hair, she used the edge of the wooden platform to sever his brainstem. With a twist for good measure, he was dead and Elena was jumping into the hornet’s nest below.
She was death made manifest, her children a black cloak splayed out behind her. They advanced, as unstoppable as the night. While they screamed and cursed, Elena was silent.
Ending only those stupid enough to approach her, Elena hunted for Baylor through the chaos. Around her, her children move through Baylor’s forces like a storm, each strike precise, every movement deadly. It was pathetic, really. Baylor’s men were weak and desperate and uncoordinated. How had they come so close to taking her life? This couldn’t be all of them.
As she expected, cowards ran for the doors only to be met with more of her sons. Without tricks to weaken them, not a one could stand against them.
A bearded vampire, tall and muscular and almost handsome if he hadn’t been vibrating with hatred, broke ranks and ran. Not toward the doors, but to the side of the hall where cots were stacked three high in rows lining one long brick wall. A pathetic makeshift barracks for infants playing at war.
Every instinct told Elena he was Baylor. He moved like a man in charge. Like he still hadn’t accepted that he’d lost. Avoiding the lunging bodies and knowing that Sofia and Librada were right behind her, she darted after him.
He’d made it to one of the chests at the base of the cots, but Elena didn’t let him do more than reach for the black firearm. It was different from the one that had fired the shot into her body that nearly killed her, but Elena was sure that it would contain the same poison.
“That gimmick won’t work twice,” she said with casual delight, gripping the man’s wrist so hard that he involuntarily dropped the gun onto the small bed when his bones snapped.
Before he could reach for it with his other hand, Elena grabbed him by the neck and forced him to his knees. “Lib,” she called over the sound of curses and pleas filling the hall with unusual prayers. Prayers that would land uselessly on unsympathetic ears.
Librada’s eyes were as red as the blood sprayed over her face and chest and dripping down her fingers. With the shift of her gaze, Elena told her to take the gun and keep it secure.
Librada took the weapon and unloaded it in a blur.
“Don’t touch the bullets,” Elena warned when the magazine was visible. “We can’t be sure that merely touching the substance will not produce some weakness.”
Lib nodded, secured the bullets and rejoined the nearly finished fight. Turning Baylor’s head to make sure he saw everything he thought he’d built crumble, Elena relished the flicker of despair that breached his anger.
With his unbroken hand, he reached back in a weak attempt to get a hold on her. Elena laughed.
“You know what I love about insects like you?” She tilted his head back so he was looking at her, albeit upside down. “You never seem to know how insignificant you are.” She turned his head back to the melee. “But I’m very happy to remind you. I want you to see it all end before you die.”
He struggled against her grasp until she used her free hand to press the nerve that would interrupt his upper body’s communication with his brain. With her thumb keeping him partially paralyzed, he had no choice but to watch and listen. If it wasn’t enough to show him how futile it had all become, she’d break his legs.
“I’m not just going to kill you. I’m going to erase you,” she promised against the shell of his ear. “Gods, I wish you could control your mouth so I could ask you how that feels. To know it was all meaningless.” She shrugged and stood upright again. “But some things can’t be helped, I suppose.”
Wishing she could join them, but not risking Baylor being killed prematurely, Elena watched along with her captive audience. Her daughters fought with enviable grace while her sons moved with the wild fury of grief.
When they were finished and the blood pooled at their feet, Librada turned to Elena. Some of her sons had been injured, but would heal. Not a single one had been lost—a fact she knew would taste like acid on Baylor’s tongue. He’d never stood a chance. Not ever. He’d only marshaled forces to slaughter.
“I wish we could scar,” Sofia said while evaluating the gash across her pretty cheek in her phone’s reflection.
Elena laughed and released Baylor with a kick to the back. It was several annoying minutes before his nerves healed enough for him to stand. He looked around at the insurmountable odds like he might do something incredibly stupid before he glared at Elena.
“What are you going to do with me?” he asked like he was spitting out a loose tooth.
“Oh my darling mutant, you’re not asking a single question here.” Elena wasn’t going to waste time with theater, but at the very least a little torment was in order. “Although, I have to admit your commitment to delusion is… Something.” She punched him hard enough to tear open his lip, her knuckles immediately covered in his blood. “Tell me, when you were planning your great attack in this stinking hovel, how did you imagine it would end?”
Baylor sneered through swollen lips. “With my boot on your?—”
Librada’s stiletto nails were in his throat, cutting off his ability to speak and spraying his blood onto Elena’s chest.
“Don’t tear it out,” Elena warned before Lib could show him a part of his body he’d never seen before. “We’re not done yet.”
Lib let him go, but not before forcing him back to his knees. Baylor grimaced in pain but didn’t cry out, his unsteady gaze still fixed on Elena.
“You might kill me—” he choked out.
“Oh, most definitely,” Elena agreed.
“But you’ll never suffocate the truth.”
Head cocked to one side, Elena smiled. “This is the part where you very dramatically tell me what the truth is before I kill you. Let’s move this along, I have dinner plans.”
“With your witch and that?—”
This time, it was Elena’s kick that cut him short. He was not going to speak of Zuri or Marisol. He was not going to so much as conjure their images in his addled mind.
“What the fuck is this?” One of her sons was peering into a cabinet set into the wall.
Baylor stiffened a second before the cabinet door swung open and then another and another. In one of the most chilling displays Elena had ever seen, row after row of human skulls sat on the shelves like macabre wedding china.
“Those deaths are all on you. If you’d only taught anyone else how to–”
“There’s nothing to teach you, you fucking terrorist,” she roared, understanding that they’d killed all those people in a doomed attempt to turn them. Scores and scores of lives cut short for nothing. Elena had no faith that they’d found people deserving death. They’d probably picked off the easiest prey. The isolated. The weak. The unlikely to be missed.
Baylor’s lip curled with something like self-righteousness. “To the oppressors, freedom fighters always look like insurgents, don’t they?”
“You have seconds left of breathing on this planet.” Elena gritted her teeth. She wanted to know what conspiracy he’d been spreading, but she only had so much tolerance for the sound of his voice.
He looked up at her, face marred with blood and hate. “For time immemorial, we’ve been fed the story that the natural order of things is female leadership, but there is no biological reason women are superior?—”
“It’s not superiority, you wart. We serve different roles. You want me to teach a horse to fly. A fish to run. A matriarchy?—”
“Is against nature itself.” He spat blood on the ground and fragments of a broken tooth along with it. “Look at the order of predators. When they are not solitary, they’re led by the strongest, smartest male.”
Elena laughed, anger leaving her body. He didn’t deserve her ire. He deserved absolutely nothing from her. “And you presume that to be you?” She was still laughing when she stared down at the most pathetic creature she’d ever seen. “Assuming you were correct and elephants, hyenas, killer whales, and lions didn’t exist to poke a little hole in your theory, you believe you are stronger than me?”
With all the conviction of a person too willfully blind to the truth, Baylor looked up at her and sneered. “Absolutely.”
“You believe what? That I hold my position by chance? That I failed-up to it?”
His unwavering expression said yes.
“Get up,” she demanded. “Do you have more revolting blood bags?”
He stood, gaze flashing to a storage area fashioned out of industrial shelves and plastic crates. Gods, he was going to be so easy to kill.
Elena waited for him to drink as much disgusting blood full of additives and preservatives as he wanted. Waited until he said he was healed. She didn’t want whatever sliver of soul he might have left to spend the afterlife convinced he could have won if he’d been at full strength.
“Now’s your chance to test your little theory,” Elena said, arms widespread. “But first, you’ll tell me where the rest of your disciples are.”
“There are no others?—”
Elena reached into his weak mind and compelled him. Breaking in seconds, he revealed the names and locations of three vampires who hadn’t been at the church when they arrived. After confirming their lack of poisoned weapons, she sent all her blood sons after them.
“You’re not really going to fight me,” Baylor said when he’d recovered from the brief mental incursion. “The moment I start to best you, they’re going to intervene.”
Elena looked behind her as if she didn’t know to whom he was referring. “They will not. Because you will not so much as touch me.”
“How do I know?—”
“Baylor, you’re already dead and have absolutely no power. I can kill you or I can kill you. The choice is yours.”
Fangs extended, he positioned himself in what Elena guessed was a fighting stance. A fighting stance learned from martial arts movies rather than reality.
In that moment, she decided Baylor’s humiliation would be swift. She was ready to put this behind her. To put an end to the nightmare and go home.
When he finally made his move, teeth barred and hands outstretched, she crouched. In a fluid motion, she kicked his legs out from under him. When he fell to the ground, she decided to show him again that he’d never touch her. To show him his staggering inadequacy.
Elena stood, hands behind her back and waited for a second attack. It came, more angry and clumsy than the first. This time, she dodged his fists and lunges with her hands still clasped behind her until he screamed in frustration and punched a table in half.
“You’re dead,” she said while he gathered himself. “Every person you infested with your worthless theory is dead. Everything you did was for nothing. You failed.”
The rage in Baylor’s eyes was a burning volcanic pit that reason couldn’t extinguish. Nothing but death would stop him, and Elena was happy to don death’s mask and do her work.
When he lunged at her again, she didn’t dodge. Instead, she swatted away his outstretched hand and punched the center of his chest at blinding speed. With the powerful strike, she stopped his heart mid beat.
Baylor’s response was a strangled gasp. Accepting defeat looked like wide eyes and paling skin. When he dropped to his knees, Elena’s fingers were a cobra’s bite shredding through bone and sinew to reach into his chest cavity and tear out his heart.
He was still alive when she showed him the limp muscle, when she let it slip through her fingers and land on the filthy floor. Vampires could regenerate anything as long as their brains were still intact. But without his heart, Baylor’s brain would starve before it could regenerate the critical organ. His last moments would be fear and pain and the utter hopelessness of his plight. A small comfort given the needless destruction he’d wrought, but Elena basked in it until Baylor managed another breath.
She didn’t wait for death. Swift and decisive, Elena tore into his throat. Slicing through muscle and cartilage, she found his spinal cord and severed the connection to his brain. True death followed immediately.
“Call the others,” Elena said, spitting out the acrid taste of Baylor’s blood. “Tell them to return here as soon as they’ve finished.”
Without giving voice to the question, Sofia asked why with the subtle twitch of her brow. She was probably expecting Elena to leave the bloodbath as a warning to anyone else who might challenge her.
“We are going to erase them,” Elena explained. “We’re going to make it look like Baylor never existed.” She set her jaw. “He’s not going to be anyone’s martyr.”
It was going to be a long night, Elena knew, but the thoughts of returning to Marisol and Zuri fueled her resolve. Of keeping them truly safe. Of finally having the freedom to be together without a mortal threat hanging over them. Of helping Zuri with her coven and figuring out what Marisol needed. They’d given Elena everything, and she was going to repay them for as long as she had them.