Crosses and Runes: Summersgate Chronicles, #1

To my mother Margy Triplett for putting up with me while I wrote this book and for all the other things she has done for me over the years.

Chapter One

Defeating the guards outside the warehouse was incredibly easy.  After all, they were only human.  The only hard part was that we weren’t allowed to bring some of our favorite gear from the Homelands because we had to keep things low profile.  So, that meant using conventional firearms in order to make it look like a drug deal gone wrong or something else that wouldn’t seem odd to the local authorities.  Otherwise, it would have taken us less than two minutes to clear the perimeter.

My team and I were in a rather unimpressive part of Los Angeles that was sometimes used to shoot scenes for television shows set in New York.  I think the building our targets were hiding inside was used in an early episode of Numb3rs.  It was a decent enough choice if the bad guys were really vampires like the Old Man said.  Most of the things people have heard about sunlight aren’t true, so the local weather wouldn’t present any difficulties.  It was more a question of having many potential victims around that ordinary, law-abiding folks wouldn’t miss and access to a good local infrastructure.  You might be surprised to learn how much vampires rely on trains and buses.

Sunlight making creatures of the night burst into flames isn’t the only thing popular books and films have gotten wrong about vampires.  They don’t get transformed by being bitten or drinking their attacker’s blood.  Vampires aren’t irresistible to the opposite sex.  They don’t communicate with wolves or turn into bats in exchange for odd weaknesses such as not being able to enter someone’s house without permission.  They don’t sparkle either.  Vampires are created by the darkest necromancy. Most of them are mindless killing machines that still have to obey what humans like to call the laws of physics.  A small percentage of them retain their old personalities and learn how to wield some forms of magic, but that just makes them a little harder to kill.

In real life, vampires don’t find ways to atone for the murders they committed or fall madly in love with mortal women.  They’re more like gangsters.  They do whatever it takes to live like rock stars while staying off the grid.  I have gone after vampires who sold weapons to terrorists or ran counterfeiting rings.  Some of them dabble in sex trafficking as a lazy way of finding fresh victims.  Less ambitious vampires deal drugs, steal cars, or resell stolen goods.  There might be vampires who try to be decent people, but every one I have ever encountered was a complete scumbag.  The dossier I read said our targets were engaged in half a dozen types of criminal activity and producing porn movies as part of a money laundering scam.  Breaking up their operation would do the city a favor.

If anybody wondered what we were up to in that part of town, our cover story was that we were working on a low-budget horror movie about vampires who were plotting to kill the governor of California.  A crew of guys with cameras and a prop truck would tell anybody who asked that we were doing second unit scenes.  Fortunately, we weren’t going to need to show anybody our fake permits.  The area was almost totally devoid of human life. That was for the best, but it left me with mixed feelings.  After all the time we spent holding auditions and shooting our fake movie to make our cover more convincing, I felt a little disappointed that we wouldn’t have to explain all our tactical gear and weapons.

To untrained eyes, my team and I might look like members of a SWAT team if people ignored things like my ponytail or the broadsword strapped across Will’s back.  Will also somehow got away with wearing a black chain mail shirt over his Kevlar vest.  It made more sense for close quarters combat than the dark blue sweater I was wearing.  Ever the traditionalist, Erin insisted on bringing a beautiful Mongol-style composite bow and two quivers (one at her hip, one on her back) along with her sidearm and submachine gun.  There was nothing out of the ordinary about Maggie, unless someone had never seen an Asian-American woman with pointed ears before.  I was very grateful that she agreed to wear her helmet.  Fred, on the other hand, seemed determined to stand out from the crowd.

If we were really there to shoot a movie, Fred would be the detective who brought in backup for the denouement.  Or maybe he’d be playing the captain who tells the hero he writes checks his body can’t cash.  He wore a moderately nice gray suit, a fedora, and a completely inappropriate raincoat because he refused to conform to the dress code for the mission.  He used to be a G-man back in the Prohibition era, so that may explain why his idea of proper battle gear made him look like he wanted to be Dashiell Hammett when he grew up.  His sartorial choices combined with his dignified white temples might lead an innocent bystander to assume he was our leader.

Appearances can be deceiving.  I was put in charge of these expendable misfits because I was the oldest. Fred would argue that he should be leading the mission, and I might even agree with him.  He had formal military training and several decades’ worth of combat experience informing his opinions.  Fred probably should have been in Afghanistan or somewhere equally pleasant hunting for terrorists.  Bringing him along on our little raid was a waste of his talents.  That may have explained why he constantly looked like he wanted to punch me.

Fred couldn’t help thinking of me as a snot-nosed hippie brat.  He told me once that my father’s reputation helped grease some wheels for me that I didn’t deserve to have greased, and he wasn’t completely wrong.  It probably didn’t help that I was born in 1860 and I still got carded when I went to bars.  Fred was about twenty-five years younger and he looked like a healthy mortal in his forties.  Life is not fair.  I could bore you with a lengthy lecture about bloodlines and how things are complicated for us half-breeds, but then I might have to kill you.  Just kidding.  No, really.  It might be necessary.  Some of that information is classified.  The people I answer to don’t play around.

Fred’s nonconformist streak carried over to his weapons.  We were issued Heckler and Koch MP5s customized with special noise suppressors, but Fred insisted on bringing a pump shotgun and a MAC-10 because he wanted more stopping power.  He had pockets inside his coat for extra shells and spare magazines, along with an assortment of other weapons and paraphernalia.  In theory, he was the best prepared out of all of us.  I was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to move freely with all that hardware weighing him down.

I was in the middle of scanning the area with my extra senses to make sure we hadn't missed anybody when Fred distracted me.  There was something really morbid about the way he was wiping blood off a telescoping baton.  He gave me a hard look and said, What are you waiting for, kid?  Losing your nerve?

A lot of people back Home would have responded to his poor manners by dislocating his knees or turning him into a newt.  I'm trying to be a better person than that.  Just admiring your hat.  Let's go.

Maggie pulled a rectangular piece of jade out of a pouch on her belt and tossed it up into the air.  It hovered at her eye level and started glowing.  After a few seconds, it disappeared in a puff of smoke.  She waved a glow stick around for a second and nodded when it changed color from lime green to pink.  She smiled and gave the all-clear signal.

We won’t show up on their cameras for at least fifteen minutes, she said.

Well done rookie, I smiled at her and added more juice to her spell to make it last a few minutes longer.

Will said something about wanting to breach the door when Fred suddenly grabbed him.  Stop, dummy.  Don’t you see the traps?

Will’s brows furrowed in confusion.  What traps?

Fred took a golden sphere out of a pocket and held it up so Will could see it.  Nothing up my sleeve, he said.  He threw the big marble sidearm and after it traveled about seven feet, a red pentagram about the same diameter as a manhole cover appeared on the ground.  At the same time a burst of raw energy temporarily blinded me.  When I recovered a few seconds later, Fred had his baton out again.

Do you know how to see infra-red? Fred asked.  His tone was fairly neutral, but he had murder in his eyes.

Of course, Will said.  Stop being a jerk.

Fred tapped him in the chest with his baton.  Start doing it.  It might save your worthless life.

Erin rolled her eyes as she walked past them and took some things out of a pouch.  First, she used an aerosol spray that made another pentagram visible.  Then she recited a poem in an old form of German as she poured the contents of a small vial over it.  Orange smoke flowed out of the bottle and formed a ring a few inches above the trap. A faint electrical humming sound suggested that her spell was working.  She put the bottle back in her leather bag and clapped her hands together once.  Suddenly, the spell contained inside the pentagram unraveled with an anticlimactic little pop.  Three more pentagrams appeared and then immediately winked out of existence about a second later.  Erin made a dramatic flourish like a stage magician with her right hand and the bag in her left hand disappeared.

We’re wasting time, Erin said.

Right, Fred said.  He poked Will gently in the belly with his baton.  Come on, dummy.  I’ll show you the right way to pick a lock.

Why don’t you just use a universal key? Will asked.

Fred grimaced and let out a slow breath.  Stop asking stupid questions.

Now that the path was clear, Fred walked at a brisk pace over to a side door a short distance away from a loading bay.  He traced a rune in the air and then put his ear up to the door for a few seconds.  Finally, he gave the all-clear signal and got his lock pick kit out.  He fussed with the tumblers for a while.  Will shook his head in disgust, picked Fred up like he only weighed a few pounds, and gently moved him out of the way.  Then Will unceremoniously broke down the door with a front snap kick and went inside.  With a disgusted snort, Fred followed him.

I was about to do the same when I saw Maggie trembling like she just came face to face with a dragon.  What’s the matter Megara? I asked.

I’m not sure I’m ready for this.  I mean, I killed those creeps in Hong Kong who learned how to stay young by draining the life force out of call girls but there were only four of them and they were basically just guys with guns.  I’ve never fought a ghoul or a real vampire.  What if I choke under pressure?  What if I can’t form spells in time?  I don’t even have any holy water or wooden stakes or garlic or anything.

Maggie wasn’t using the proper terminology, presumably because she was freaking out a little.  Most vampires fall into two categories.  Type one vampires, as we sometimes call them, were alive during the transformation ritual. Type two vampires, or ghouls as some people insist on calling them even though real ghouls are different, are corpses that were reanimated in a variant of the ritual that may have inspired old voodoo ceremonies.  They’re pretty dumb and they need guidance from a living vampire. 

Arguably, type two vampires are more dangerous.  You might be able to negotiate terms with a type one because he or she might not feel like drinking your blood right then.  Your average type two vampire is more like a shark with clothes that could use a good scrubbing.  If you try diplomacy or running away, they will do everything they can to open your veins.  The good news is that they probably won’t think clearly enough to dodge when you start blasting away with a 12-gauge.  If you’re fast enough on the trigger, you might end their unnatural existence before they do any damage.

Living vampires are more of a mixed bag.  The results of the ritual aren’t terribly consistent, so the victims (or volunteers) might gain amazing powers and they might end up without much to show for it beside better hearing and night vision.  Most aspiring bloodsuckers have to make do with limited shape shifting—enough to give themselves claws or perhaps bigger fangs—and an odd form of telepathy that works much better on other vampires than it does on the living.  They are less sensitive to pain, but by our standards they aren’t very resistant to injury.  If you shoot them often enough in the head or the heart, they will die like ordinary folks. 

You’re going to be fine, Maggie. I guided her over to a crate she could sit on.  Would you like something to help you calm down?

She waved that away impatiently.  I’ll be okay in a minute.

I was skeptical, but I tried to keep that from showing on my face.  Let me tell you a story.

Do we really have time for this?

Of course we do, I said.

Lay it on me, boss.

The big thing to remember is that vampires are a lot easier to fight than you might think.  You don’t need holy water or wooden stakes.  On my thirteenth birthday, a bunch of vampires showed up at the family farm looking for my father.  My mother killed seven or eight creatures of the night with her Henry rifle.  I managed to kill one with a crossbow Dad liked to use sometimes for hunting and probably got a couple more with a Colt revolver before I gave up and started throwing magic fireballs at them.  My pater familias came to the rescue and wounded or killed several of them with arrows before plowing through the ones who were still standing with a sword and a small shield.  Of course, the sword was enchanted and my father is better at using sorcery than I am.  But you get the general idea.

A lever-action rifle and a six shooter? Maggie’s eyes got big.  You expect me to believe that?

I held up three fingers.  Scout’s honor.

You’re not doing the salute right.

The important thing to remember is this.  You have thirty enchanted frangible rounds in your magazine.  If you keep your shot groupings tight, you should be able to kill at least ten vampires without reloading.

That’s supposed to be comforting? Maggie asked.

You have a good weapon.  You’re smart, you’re talented, and you’re more than qualified for this mission.  You’ll be fine.

Thanks, I guess.

I smiled and offered her my hand.  Come on.  Let’s go shoot some suckers.

We caught up with the others and cleared the first floor without any surprises.  The party really got started when we walked up creaky stairs to the second level.  Within seconds, we saw our first suckers.  Nine type two vampires were standing at attention like they were on guard duty.  This probably meant they had a handler somewhere nearby controlling their minds.

Our silencers were much better than what most people can get, so we just shot the vampires as they charged toward us using odd, shambling gaits that somehow enabled them to move about three times as fast as an average human.  I was in the middle with Maggie to my left and Will to my right.  Fred had the left flank and Erin was to the right of Will.  Will followed Fred’s lead and went with a MAC-10.  The guys mowed down their targets with bursts of .45 caliber rounds that slammed into the vampires in a most satisfying manner.  My nine-millimeter in semi-auto mode made less noise and allowed me to show off my knack for tricky head shots.  A couple of them almost got close enough to fight back, but Maggie and I killed them first.  It was a little too easy, actually.

They know we’re here now, Fred said.  Stay alert.

I think that’s my line, I couldn’t help smiling at that for some reason.  Fred’s right.  I can sense somebody with real power, and we might have just rubbed him or her the wrong way.  Stay frosty.

Stay frosty? Erin repeated as she checked the fletching on her arrow.

It was amazing how well Erin could express disdain without doing anything obvious.  I found that oddly appealing.  If I wasn’t married and she was into men at all, I might have been tempted to do something I would regret later.  Fortunately, my parents raised me right and I’m well aware of what the Good Book says.  I couldn’t do anything like that to my wife or her wives.  All four of Erin’s special ladies were really nice gals, even if we didn’t see eye to eye on religious issues.

I heard it in a movie, I said.  Let’s go before we get pinned down here.

Nobody could really argue with that, so we proceeded with our search.  We soon found tangible proof that we had stumbled onto a massive operation when at least sixty more vampires poured into the room we were in from places we hadn’t explored yet.  All that time at the range paid off as I opened fire with my MP5.  I was dropping suckers at a steady rate while Fred yelled something at me about switching to full automatic.  I couldn’t give him my full attention because I was too busy making about eight of the bad guys silently explode (it is a complicated process that involves creating a total vacuum inside a force field to eliminate the noise).  That bought me enough time to slap in a fresh magazine and take Fred’s constructive criticism more seriously.

At that point, Maggie decided that if I could break our supervisor’s rule about using combat spells she could too and she raised her left hand palm outward.  Patterns of runes flared into life with green light along the back of her glove before she started zapping vampires with some kind of exotic death ray.  It was a pretty neat trick.  Her magical gizmo fired a blast about the same diameter as a fifty-cent piece that sliced through the bad guys like they were made out of melting ice cream.  At the same time, it didn’t do much damage to the odds and ends that had been left behind in the warehouse or things that might be important such as structural support beams.  There was some impressive sympathetic magic stuff going on that I would have to ask about later if we both survived the mission. 

While that was going on and I was trying to remember to use my gun instead of watching Maggie, Erin was demonstrating her archery skills.  She was using a simple, but effective spell I had seen before.  Her flint-tipped arrows disintegrated anything within about a yard as soon as they broke a target’s skin.  The spell created a blinding flash of light and then everything inside the spell's radius crumbled into dust in roughly a tenth of a second. Against ordinary humans, it was very effective—at least until the enemy started spreading out to minimize casualties.  Against these bozos, it would be interesting. Would their increased speed make them harder to hit or would Erin be able to compensate for that?

Erin proved to be more than a match for them.  With each shot she made, at least two or three vampires got hit because the type twos were too stupid to give each other more room.  That left a lot of partial bodies making messes on the floor.  Some of the vampires were now missing arms and oozing dark blood all over the place.  A human would be out of the fight.  These guys were inconvenienced a little, but they kept right on coming.  One vampire who lost part of a leg was barely slowed down as he crawled toward us.  I think Will shot him.

Fred’s biggest problem was that a MAC-10 eats ammunition at an alarming rate.  Every few seconds, he needed Maggie to cover him while he reloaded. Sometimes vampires would bounce off a protective shield he generated while he grabbed a spare magazine from either a special ammo case he had slung over his left shoulder or from inside his coat.  I might have had a few choice words for him if Will and I weren’t basically doing the same thing.  Fortunately, he was reloading with his shield up when somebody fired back.

A living vampire had apparently chosen a customized UZI for reasons similar to why we went with the MP5 Navy.  With a suppressor and what I assumed was subsonic ammunition, it was pretty quiet indoors and it could probably still kill one of the undead suckers if they turned on her.  To my ears, and probably hers as well, it was still too darn loud.  She wasted ammo trying to shoot through Fred’s shield while a Eurotrash guy in a shiny blue suit armed with what appeared to be a Ruger .22 did what he could to cover her.  He seemed surprised when one of his bullets failed to penetrate Maggie’s helmet.  During that brief period of hesitation, I shot him and hit him at least three times somewhere vital.  He might not have been dead, but he wasn’t getting up right away.  That was good enough for the moment.

As if UZI Gal wasn’t bad enough, another sucker started shooting at us from somewhere up above.  Fred was the first one to spot him and he emptied another magazine trying to get the guy.  Unfortunately for us, being farther away meant he had just enough time to react and use evasive tactics.  Fred grabbed a handgun with a silencer from inside his coat and wasted more rounds as the surprisingly quick little fellow kept staying one step ahead of him. Right around the same time, Maggie’s glove blaster gave out.  She had to use her submachine gun to give Fred some breathing room.

Somebody yelled Jack!  Look out!

My name is Jonathan.  It took me half a second to remember that I was Jack and that was almost the end of my story.  Half a dozen vampires surrounded me.  I was out of ammo, but I hadn’t raised my defensive barrier yet.  I pushed with my mind and threw the suckers a few yards away from Will and me.  Then I grabbed one of my backup weapons off my belt.  I was rather proud of this particular one.

I created a lightsaber.  It started out life as a perfectly ordinary Maglite flashlight.  After my experiments were done, I had a working replica that created a roughly three feet long blue blade that would cut through practically anything.  Using it was different from fighting with a regular sword in several important ways, but I could muddle my way through cutting off some jerk’s arm if it became necessary.  I wasn’t sure how long I could use it before the power supply gave out.  I figured I better make the most of my time.  So, after taking a cleansing breath, I started beheading anyone dumb enough to get within my reach.

Will put his empty gun away and drew that big hunk of steel from the scabbard on his back.  A fifty-five inch long broadsword is a thing of beauty when properly wielded. Back in 1996, when America still loved Mel Gibson, Will was inspired by his obsession with the movie Braveheart to learn old-school fighting techniques from masters who were willing to teach him.  Before long, he was good enough with a two-handed blade to take out three suckers at a time with one blow. Of course, it helped that he stood about 6’5" and weighed almost three hundred pounds.  Somebody my size might have trouble trying to fight with a sword that long, but it was just right for a guy who looked like he was a defensive lineman on the varsity football team.

With his more-than-human strength and stamina Will could fight with his sword for several hours before getting tired.  He wasn’t much faster than an ordinary human, but that didn’t keep him from beheading more of the vampires than I did as he calmly worked his way forward.  Will almost seemed to be moving in slow motion compared to our enemies.  Still, he was clearly doing something right as he anticipated their shambling movements and destroyed their brains with his blade.  The singing in Gaelic was a bit much, but I wasn’t about to say so if it was helping him focus.  Between the sword, the chain mail, the beard he was trying to grow, and the camo paint in a strange pattern on his face, it was like he was channeling William Wallace.  If our foes were smarter, they would have been afraid of him.

Chapter Two

As Will killed two vampires with one circular motion of his blade, I did my best to keep up with him and watch his six.  With a sturdy, double edged dagger in my left hand and my copyright infringing, um, laser sword in my right I used an odd mixture of French and Chinese fencing techniques to thin out the herd of suckers that swarmed toward us.  My Greenleaf Model Eleven hunting knife was an excellent weapon and tool with a thousand uses, but stabbing creatures that were faster than me in the heart with it was not an easy task.  I’m pretty nimble, and I can use magic to give myself extra bursts of speed now and then but I still couldn’t do much with my shorter blade.  I tried to slash a sucker’s jugular and missed.  In frustration, I threw my knife at a different vampire and cheated to make sure the sharp end slid in between his ribs.  Telekinesis also has a thousand uses.

I needed to recover that knife later.  Not only did a helpful armorer put some nice enchantments on the blade, but also the runes etched on it might