"Whoo-hooo!" Dragon Rider shouted, running for cover. "Wanted to do that all me bloody life!" She grabbed Jasmine by her face, kissed her cheek, and got another bucket of holy water as clerics worked as quickly as they could to renew supplies.
Tara and Juanita slipped behind enemy lines like silent assassins with Marlene, using Tara's ability to track a male vampire's energy pulse. Their goal was the necromancer, the one who could continue to replenish fallen demons.
Marlene gave them the nod as she saw Sebastian working amid the ashes. Healer to healer, their eyes made contact at the same time. Overly confident but clearly exhausted, Sebastian bared his fangs with a roar, his arms outstretching at the same time as Marlene's in a white light-black charge stalemate. A thrown Neteru battle-axe culled both of his outstretched limbs away from his body at the forearms. His scream brought in demon reinforcements that were beheaded before they could assess the threat. Black blood flowed like a geyser from Sebastian's severed limbs as he tried to escape, and then his eyes suddenly widened when Marlene's walking stick ripped through his back and pierced his heart. Two seconds later, his head left his shoulders with a silver slug to his temple.
Juanita looked at the gun in her hand as Tara yanked the stick out of his back. The Neteru Amazon Queen slapped Marlene a high-five and cleaned off her blade.
"The fellas said hi," Marlene muttered over Sebastian's body before she spat on it and then damned it to never rise again with a good prayer.
While the New York and Detroit teams rumbled with evil in the streets below, Inez and Marj set up a seer's trap on a rooftop, using Krissy as bait. Liz Bathory's history of luring young women to their deaths would be her weakness they'd exploit. Joan of Arc waiting in the wings, they sent Elizabeth a fake distress SOS as though it were Damali, jumper cabling the Neteru Queen's young, female warrior energy with Krissy's young, living, pregnant energy to bring the councilwoman to the rooftop.
It was a lure too tempting to resist. Elizabeth touched down within moments, surrounded by a retinue of vampire henchmen. Nzinga's blade whirred through the air, Aset's silver-white prayer lines rolled over the rooftop. Elizabeth's head hit the tarred surface with a sizzling thud as her security forces spontaneously combusted.
"I wanted that venomous bitch, Elizabeth, in the worst way," Nzinga said coolly, retrieving her blade and wiping off the gore on the bottom of her boot.
A loud echoing yell scattered the rooftop team. Vlad's long "No!" made the building begin to crumble.
In a quick jettison, Damali pulled the Guardians down to safety but remained on the roof. Carlos came out of the fold-away, blade plunging into Vlad's steed at the heart. The monstrous nightmare kept plowing forward, momentum taking its flaming body over the roof's edge in a violent, ember-exploding display. Vlad landed on his feet, black blade drawn, facing Damali, and ready for war. But Carlos decapitated him with a double-handed swing, kicking his head over the roof as he spat.
"That was for my wife, motherfucker! Don't you ever draw on her!"
"Thank you, baby," Damali said with a hard smile, as they both folded away in different directions.
Damali nodded as a Neteru blade glinted off the roof a half mile from her. The signal that another council member was down made her open her arms and swan dive off the edge of a tall apartment building, wings spread, into the fray.
The Detroit, Chicago, and Atlanta teams had remnants of the Berserker army hemmed in. Now without a general or a necromancer, they'd begun to flee. But Yonnie was on the ground �with the Guardians, having gone hand-to-hand and acquiring a gigantic spiked mace, he sent Berserkers careening into hallowed earth gunfire, folding away like a ninja and reappearing out of the nothingness to do permanent bodily harm.
Carlos studied the battlefield from afar. Heru joined his side with Adam, Ausar, and Hannibal.
"They made another Chairman," Carlos muttered, still half blind.
"So we heard, my brother," Hannibal said, gripping his forearm in warrior support.
"Me and Fallen go back," Carlos said, tilting his head to the side, trying to sense where he might be. "That punk ain't leaving Lilith's side right through here. They're down three . . . and if I know Damali, in a minute they'll be down four when she goes after his wife."
Damali ran along the city streets in a zigzag pattern, searching for the water source. Although Lucrezia couldn't breach holy ground, she was into poison as a formidable weapon. All-out street combat just wasn't that councilwoman's style. But what better way to ensure that a weary populace and human armies couldn't live to attack another day than to taint the one thing every living thing required . . . water.
As expected, Damali found her target at Jerusalem's water mains. That source would send freshwater down a long aqueduct to the fountains on the Temple Mount, as well as the cisterns on the lower platform that had been designed years ago to collect rainwater. Battle-panicked, Lucrezia was more focused on doing her evil deed quickly and getting back to a safe position behind the wall than watching her back. Too bad she wasn't looking when seconds mattered; Nuit should have taught her better.
Damali smiled as Father Patrick laid a hand on her shoulder and she whispered the words he gave her, blessing the water before she folded out of the nothingness and gave Lucrezia a hard shove into one of the open reservoirs.
A blast rocked the area as Lucrezia combusted on impact. Vampire embers floated down in red glowing dust and gook floated to the water's surface.
"Eiiiww! Nasty. Hope they've got a good filtration system,"
Damali said, wiping water and gook off her face as she jumped up.
"You bitch!" Lilith screeched, materializing behind Damali, who quickly spun to meet the threat. "At long last, you've come out to play."
"But so have I," Eve said, sheering off Lilith's head with one clean cut.
The body dropped slowly as Lilith's hands grappled at her bleeding throat. Eve dispassionately watched Lilith sink to her knees, staring into Lilith's dead eyes as she kicked the body over using the bottom of her golden boot.
"I have been waiting eons to do that," Eve said in a hard murmur. "I didn't take nearly long enough, however, to make that bitch truly suffer." Then suddenly, crazed, Eve released a Neteru war cry and rammed her sword through Lilith's heart so ruthlessly that her blade stuck into the concrete. "For my sons, you whore of Babylon!"
Eve and Damali instantly jumped back as a black electrical charge shot up and out of Lilith's dead body from the wound in her chest, and her open neck, and then connected to her eyes, nose, and mouth, slowly turning her body inside out as it dragged her into the ground in a sizzling puff of black smoke.
Four Covenant clerics immediately appeared, standing at the four corners of the fissure to send prayers down behind Lilith's body, which caused an underground blast that shot up a black geyser of blood.