Instinct had him turning toward the mouth of the alley a moment before the surrounding walls pulsed to the sound of a powerful engine ramping up. Christian shoved Natalie flat onto the front seat as gunfire erupted from behind them, shattering the SUV’s rear windows, and punching through metal. Marc had already started Natalie’s small car, and he now zoomed forward, slamming it into position next to the SUV, before shoving the door open and racing to Christian’s side. The smaller vehicle provided some additional cover from the hail of bullets, but it was too late for Alon. The warrior had followed his instincts, turning to face their attackers, protecting his friends with the only weapon he had—himself. He’d been hit badly, his body dancing wildly under the hail of gunfire.
Natalie screamed Alon’s name, and tried to crawl out of the vehicle, but Christian slammed the door, keeping her inside. He started forward, intent on catching the assailants before they could escape, but Natalie didn’t stay where he’d put her. She jumped out of the vehicle and went to her knees next to Alon, leaving them both completely unprotected.
“Marc!” Christian roared, and caught the weapon his lieutenant threw at him from the back seat of the SUV. He preferred to fight as a vampire, but as a wise man once said, you don’t bring a vampire mind trick to a gunfight. At least, not until you’ve gotten rid of all the fucking guns.
He and Marc took up position in the angle between the two vehicles, hoping to draw fire away from Natalie and the injured Alon where he lay on the other side next to the building. One of their attackers fell, and the others were suddenly more intent on maintaining cover than on shooting anyone. Christian lowered his gun, letting Marc keep their enemies busy, while he took stock of the situation. Their assailants were both human and vampire, and their white SUV—an irony he would appreciate later—appeared to be heavily reinforced. The man on the ground—injured but not yet dead—was vampire, while the remaining two gunmen were one of each. They were braced behind what were obviously bullet-resistant doors, and seemed mostly concerned with keeping their heads down. At the same time, Christian could detect a fourth, definitely vampire, presence sitting in the back seat of the vehicle.
He fired off a quick telepathic warning to Marc, then dropped out of the present, and into the expanded consciousness where powerful vampires could go. Using all of his considerable power, he probed past the hidden vampire’s shields and tried to identify him. The lurker was powerful enough to resist the intrusion, but not powerful enough to stop it. Christian had just slipped into the other vampire’s awareness, which told him all he needed to know, when he was jolted back to the alley by the sound of Natalie’s angry scream.
He nearly jumped to his feet to go to her, but Marc held him down, pulling open the SUV’s driver-side door instead. Christian slid across the seats to the other side of the vehicle, where Natalie was fighting off her attacker. The remaining human assailant had used Christian’s distraction with their master to slip past their defenses, probably crawling on his belly along the wall to get to her. But even as Christian was rushing to save her, he saw that he’d underestimated her ability to save herself. So had her attacker, who was handicapped by an obvious desire not to hurt her, and to take her alive. This was a kidnapping, not a murder—at least, not for Natalie. But she wasn’t going easily. She was a whirlwind of defense, her feet and hands flying as she beat back her very human attacker, until he was forced to drop his useless gun in a desperate bid to fight her off without shooting her.
It was a turnabout that Christian would have appreciated under other circumstances, but not with Alon’s life on the line, and not when their enemy could change his mind at any moment, and decide he didn’t need Natalie alive after all.
“Natalie, down!” Christian yelled, and she dropped like a rock, stunning her attacker into immobility for no more than a second or two. But that was all Christian needed. With a thought, he sent a focused blast of power burrowing into the human’s brain. The man’s mouth opened in a scream he never got to voice, before he collapsed to the ground like a bag of bones.
Christian popped the door open above where Natalie was still working on Alon’s motionless body, using her shirt in a fruitless attempt to stop the bleeding. “Stay down,” he ordered her, then gathered a second, focused blast of power. This one was for Alon, to keep his heart beating until he could get back to him.
He slid back to Marc’s side again. Only one gunman remained, a vampire whose resistance suffered from his desire to keep living in the face of Marc’s superior skills. That made two dead enemies, and one badly injured but still alive, lying on the ground next to the white SUV. And the leader of them all, who was still hiding in the back seat.
“Marcel Weiss,” Christian muttered, telling Marc the name of the master vampire lurking in the shadows while his people died.
Marc nodded, and sent a withering volley of fire at the lone defender’s position.
Marcel wasn’t making an appearance, but Christian knew they had to wrap this up. It had been no more than three minutes since he’d first heard the screech of the white SUV’s tires, but there were screams coming from the dojo, and he could sense more than one human huddling near the back door. He reminded himself that many of the people inside were trained professionals, either police or military, and while they were too smart to walk into the middle of a gunfight, he had no doubt that more than one call to 911 had already been made. In fact, he could hear distant sirens that might well be the human police responding to their calls.
He thought about Alon, lying in a pool of his own blood, and about Natalie, and how close she’d come to being kidnapped. Fuck that. Natalie was his, and Alon was, too. Forgetting reason, dismissing concerns for his own safety, he slammed into the remaining vampire gunman’s brain—bulletproof was no guard against his kind of assault—and turned it to mush, then snapped a shield of power around himself and stepped out into the open.
“Marcel Weiss,” he called, augmenting his voice so that it dug right into his enemy’s ear. “If you would be Lord of the South, come out and face me.”
The back door of the white SUV opened silently, and Marcel Weiss—the Midwestern vampire who’d decided he couldn’t live under Aden’s rule—stepped out of the vehicle and into the open. He was carrying an HK MP5 submachine gun hanging down at his side.
“Let me have the woman, and we’ll call it a draw,” Weiss called.
Christian laughed. “There will be no draw tonight, Weiss. You challenged me, remember?”
Weiss lifted one shoulder. “All I really wanted was the girl,” he said casually, but in a flash of movement only a vampire could follow, he raised the gun and aimed at Christian, his finger tightening on the trigger.
As fast as Weiss was, however, Christian was faster. Weiss screamed as the gun exploded in his hand. He belatedly attempted to gather his shields, but Christian wouldn’t let him. He didn’t know what Weiss had been thinking to stage a challenge in such a public place—and with guns of all things—but the sirens were getting closer, definitely heading their way, and it was time to end this.
He advanced upon Weiss, lobbing grenade-like bits of power at the other vampire, disrupting his every attempt to structure some shields. Weiss’s right hand was shattered, bone gleaming whitely beneath the gushing blood. His inability to stop the bleeding spoke to how weak he was, or at least how rattled by Christian’s unceasing attacks.
“Stop,” Weiss ground out, holding out his one good hand, palm forward, as if to build a wall to hide behind. Except, there was no power to back it up. “I yield,” he rasped, staggering.
“There is no yield in this contest, Weiss,” Christian informed him, still maintaining his own shields lest Weiss be pretending more weakness than was real. “You should have checked the rules before you started.”
“It wasn’t supposed to come to this. Anthony wanted the girl, that’s all.”
Christian laughed in disbelief. “And you thought I’d just let that happen?”
Weiss shook his head in confusion, his concentration clearly fraying. “Fine. You win. I’ll be gone by—”
Christian gathered himself for a final strike. “You still don’t get it, Weiss. I don’t win until you’re dead.” He shaped his power into a burning spear and sent it flying through the air. Weiss screamed, and tried to bat it away, but the weapon wasn’t a physical thing to be knocked from the air. And Weiss no longer had the power, or the control, to deflect it any other way.
The weapon stabbed through his nonexistent shields and pierced his heart, where it flamed hotter than the hottest forge, turning that vital organ into dust. He died as silently as his human minion, his mouth open in an empty scream for a fraction of a second before his body joined his heart in turning to dust.
There was no sound for an instant, and then Natalie’s sobs broke through Christian’s awareness. “Alon,” he whispered, and raced around the SUV to where Natalie still knelt over her friend’s motionless form, her blood-soaked shirt still pressed to his chest, struggling to stanch too many wounds. It was pointless. She might stop one hole from bleeding, but there were too many others. The only thing keeping Alon alive right now was Christian, and even he couldn’t stave off death forever.
“Let me have him, chére,” he said gently, trying to pull her away.