Part Nine
The Reapers had a smell about them, different from that of the humans and different from that of ordinary vampires. Humans smelled of blood. The vampires that Blade was familiar with smelled of something so alien and wild that it could hardly be called flesh any longer. The Reapers smelled only of death.
When Blade stepped into the sewer and was struck immediately by the smell of sickroom decay, bodies that did not have the sense to lie down and be done with it, he knew that they were on the right track. From the corner of his eye he saw the members of the Blood Pack also drawing back in reaction to it, one or two even wrinkling their noses. Only Whistler seemed not to notice it. That was a greater comfort to Blade than he would admit.
He scarcely waited until everyone's feet had settled down to the cement before he divided them into four groups through a series of gestures that did not require a word to be spoken among them: Nyssa and Asad with himself as the head of the snake, Lighthammer and Verlaine together, as their relationship seemed to have given them a rapport, Snowman with Chupa, and Whistler with Reinhardt. The last group gave Blade a split-second's worth of pause, but in the end he shrugged it off. Couldn't be helped, and the old man knew more about fighting than any other human that Blade knew. Each one of them went down a separate tunnel. None of them were wearing lights, and the darkness soon swallowed them all. None of the vampires made a sound; the only noise that issued from Whistler was a faint scraping of his boots against the cement. Blade had to strain in order to hear it at all before Whistler disappeared.
He took his group through their tunnel at a steady, cautious pace, using no lights and relying only upon their sense of hearing and what little that they were able to glean once their eyes had adjusted. No one spoke. Asad was to Blade's left, a calm, competent shadow, while Nyssa lingered towards the back. Blade could feel her eyes against the back of his neck, though he did not turn his head to see her. He recognized her step, even as she was moving with a vampire's grace, knew her scent.
"Here," Asad said suddenly, kneeling down. Following him, Blade saw that he had found a pile of bones. Leaning over and sifting among the remains with Asad, Blade soon discovered that every one of them was from a lower jaw.
"They come here to change," Nyssa said from over Blade's shoulder. She sounded as if it was everything that she could do to contain her horror.
Blade and Asad both straightened. Blade poked at the bones with the toe of his boot and listened to them clink against one another before they rattled away. "Then we're on the right track," he said before he gestured for Nyssa and Asad to follow him again. They did so, Nyssa casting Blade a series of looks that he could feel even in the darkness, and Asad in turn watching Nyssa. Blade ignored the both of them.
They came to a juncture in the tunnel after several long moments of silent travel; hissing sounds could be heard coming from both sides. Blade hesitated, weighing the options available to him, until Asad added, "Nyssa and I can take the east tunnel." When Blade cut him a look, the other man's face was carefully blank. "We have hunted together many times before."
Asad was the second in command when it came to the Blood Pack's hierarchy, not the leader, but Nyssa was not speaking. Blade waited for several long seconds before he finally nodded. "All right." Nyssa and Asad turned down the eastern tunnel. Blade turned towards the north, and listened to the soft padding of his own boots as he slipped away. The sound of the Reapers was ahead of him, echoing and reechoing against the stone walls, until there was no way of knowing how many animals there actually were.
People who went deaf or blind were said to experience a sudden shift in the acuity of all of their other senses as they struggled to compensate. Whistler wondered if that could be said when all of the senses were knocked down by at least half, and all of the person's limbs lopped off at the same time. He wondered when it would stop being such a shock, this dramatic way that everything that he had become accustomed to had been knocked right out from under him, and decided that it would be some time after he was able to stop using a vampire as his eyes and ears.
Whistler was carrying the bomb pack that would be deployed once they had managed to draw the Reapers to the same place. Though his muscles were straining with the weight, Reinhardt did not offer to help. The vampire was a few yards ahead of him in the gloom, the back of his head the most gleaming and visible part of him. Even with his swagger, he moved as silently as air before he spoke.
"That kid of yours," Reinhardt said in a conversational tone over his shoulder, causing Whistler to bristle. Somehow, when he himself called Blade 'kid', it did not have that air of disgusting arrogance. "You gotta be wondering where you went wrong, am I right?" Whistler maintained a sullen silence. After a few seconds, Whistler chuckled and went on. "You try to raise 'em right, put in all those good Christian values-"
"Pretty damned funny," Whistler gritted, his arms beginning to ache with the strain of carrying the bomb pack for so long. Now that he thought about it, a backpack might have been a good idea, but he had been concerned about damaging all of the separate components by treating them ungently. They had no guarantee that a field repair was going to hold out here, and they also had no Plan B at their disposal. "The idea of a vampire reading the Bible. Figured your kind went in for a different book."
"Hustler?" Reinhardt asked breezily without turning around to so much as check Whistler's expression. He let out a low, deep-throated chuckle. "Not if you're talking about that shit that Blade's pet called up a few years ago, no. Gotta stay true to the bloodline and the motherland, and that candy-ass magic ain't the way to do it." Reinhardt spat contemptuously to the side. "Give me something that I can touch."
Whistler knew something, then. Reinhardt was no more a pureblood than Whistler himself was. If he had been to this motherland that he was so obsessed with, then it sure as shit had not been until well after he was turned. Prior to that, Reinhardt's gods had been Budweiser and Nascar. Having spent a good half of his life among that type before his own fate had drifted into another direction, Whistler could spot the type at a glance.
"Where's your scar?" Whistler said to the back of Reinhardt's head, knowing that he might be making a mistake but still unable to halt himself. Reinhardt's shoulders and neck went rigid, letting Whistler know that he had struck a pulsing nerve.
"That some kind of code that's supposed to mean something to me, Deliverance?" Reinhardt snapped over his shoulder.
Whistler drew his lips back so that he could expose his teeth in a grin. To date, he could see that Reinhardt had clear and obvious problems with blacks, queers, and women who didn't understand that their natural place was swallowing his dick, and from what he saw standing in front of him, it all came back to fear. He might have been a fool when he was younger, but he would not have gotten to his advanced age in his chosen profession if he had not grown out of that particular character trait along the way. Men like Reinhardt, carved from that stereotypical Confederate-loving, narcissistic block of stone, were always obsessed with staring at their own reflection of white male virility, and were terrified of someone coming along to shatter that mirror.
"Thought that bloodsuckers who were turned kept the scars," Whistler said easily, his voice growing lighter in response to the tight, ugly set of Reinhardt's shoulders, though of course he thought no such thing. He didn't have the scar from his own turning. That was not the point. "Don't see any on your neck, though. Where were you bit?" And, Whistler wondered, had it been a male or a female who had done the biting? Given Reinhardt's extreme reactions to both Nyssa and Frost, equal money could probably be laid on either option.
Whistler had been betting that the fact that he was carrying the bomb pack would keep Reinhardt from getting physical, as his sense of self-preservation ought to have still been working even if all of his other human faculties seemed to have atrophied well before he was turned. It was a good thing that Whistler had not been involved in the stock market before his family had been taken from him, or else he might have lost quite a bit of money. Reinhardt's fist collided with Whistler's mouth, mashing his lips back against his teeth, and Whistler knew from the first second of impact that Reinhardt was not interested in pulling his punches back from full vampire strength. Only the blur of Reinhardt's bald head spinning around gave him time to jerk back enough so that his teeth were not broken. The bomb pack crashed to the ground at his feet. Whistler experienced a second of indecision in which he was honestly not sure which he would have preferred: that the bomb pack not go off, so that it could still be used against the Reapers, or that it would go off then and there and incinerate the son of a bitch where he stood. Whistler rebounded back against the wall, his head making a resounding thunking sound as it impacted against the cement, and blood immediately began to wet his grizzled gray hair.
"You trying to tell me something, you mouthy old shit?" Reinhardt asked him. His voice was scarcely more than a grunt. "That what you're asking?" Reinhardt's fist collided with Whistler's stomach, every bit as hard as it had struck him in the mouth, and drove all of the air from his lungs. "Blade ain't here to save you."
Maybe not, but Whistler had been on this earth for a long time, and he had not gotten that far by being someone's helpless kitten. He threw a punch back at Reinhardt before the edge had even begun to dull off of the knife-like pain that was twisting through his gut. Whistler might not be as strong as a vampire, but he was still plenty swift, and he had surprise on his side. Reinhardt was not expecting Whistler to fight back. Men like him never did.
Reinhardt's head snapped back beneath the impact. Whistler experienced a moment of something that was very close to elation and victory. It was cut short when Reinhardt hit him again, with a closed fist, and so hard that Whistler's ears rang as violently as if his head had been placed within a bell. He staggered and went down to one knee as his legs turned to water, while Reinhardt leaned over him and jerked his head up by grabbing at a fistful of his hair. Reflex and half-forgotten memories, as he had been half-unconscious with the pain the last time, came in and caused Whistler to flail both of his fists at Reinhardt's again. Reinhardt jerked backwards; with the blood that soaked Whistler's hair, it was difficult for Reinhardt to retain his grip.
"I ain't gonna bite you," Reinhardt sneered at him, and looked confused for a second when Whistler's struggles grew wilder. He hit Whistler once, twice, three more times, until Whistler was slumped bloodied and breathless against the wall, before he finally released him. Reinhardt seemed to be breathing hard himself by then, though he had certainly not been doing anything terribly exerting from where Whistler had been standing. He spat on the ground at Whistler's feet before he bent and picked up the bomb pack. "Let 'em take you," he snarled at Whistler before he stalked off down the tunnel.
Whistler remained slumped against the wall for a long time, struggling to get his heart rate back under control and feeling the blood on his face and trickling down the back of his neck as it dried and cracked away. He did not know why Reinhardt had no killed him, save for that old response of fear.
Unless, of course, he did not expect either Blade or Whistler to make it out of this fight, and considered them both to be of such low priority that he could not be bothered to finish them off himself. That still did not ring true, though, not with the kind of status that Blade claimed within the vampire world. No one would pass up the opportunity to say that they were the one who killed him.
That settled it, then. Whatever else that Blade had done over the previous two years, they were family, and even in the depths of the Budweiser-drinking, Nascar-obsessed, Dirty South that he and Reinhardt had both once called home, that meant something. Whistler pushed himself back up to his feet on a painful sigh and then looked to the left and the right, struggling to get his bearings. One of his eyes was already beginning to swell.
From down the far tunnel came to the sound of screams. Whistler jerked his head in that direction and felt his adrenal glands beginning to work overtime, even though the screams sounded as if they were coming from a great distance off. Whistler thought that he was hearing Chupa and Snowman, though he could not be sure. Either way, it said a great deal about Reinhardt's confidence that he thought he could leave Whistler beaten but alive within the sewers and not face repercussions when eh reached the surface again.
Whistler ducked off down the far tunnel in the direction that led away from the screams, though the hissing that trailed after him still said that he might want to rethink that option.
Blade's hearing was superior to that of a human, though he still seemed clumsy and deaf in comparison to what a real vampire could do. Years before, when he and Whistler had only just begun their operation, he had taken this as a bad sign, as a signal that he belonged truly to neither world. Then he had outgrown the teenaged hormones, as there seemed to be some things that remained the same even when one was a hybrid, damn them all. Now, he simply was what he was and, if tolerating both a low-level thirst and his foul-mouthed pet poison was what it took to hit the suckheads where they lived, then that was what Blade would do. He had not told Nyssa this. She seemed the sort who needed her illusions. Neither had he told her that Frost had passed beyond tolerance and into something that often crouched between lust and a certain weary affection. There were certain illusions that Blade needed to maintain for himself, too.
The hissing had become so loud and omnipresent all around him that Blade nearly had to relegate it to the level of background noise so that he could continue to function. He kept his eyes alert for any stray movements instead, one hand resting upon the hilt of his sword at all times, so that several rats wound up with their heads severed from their bodies before Blade's instincts had a chance to catch up with the rest of him. He sighed as he shook a few stray drops of blood from the sword after the last one. He could get started on his atonement after he had saved the species that he had chosen as his adoptive family. If he could manage to let the other half of his nature burn at the same time, well. Blade had had a few days that comparably good in his lifetime, but not many. He might even allow himself the luxury of a full-blown smile.
The radio at his belt crackled. Blade nearly jumped before he realized what it was, and turned his head briefly towards the street above his head so that he could swear. The rats gave off the sound of static now. Of course they did. Get him much more rattled and unfocused, and he was going to be like a civilian all over again.
That was unacceptable.
The radio crackled again, ant this time Blade answered it without flinching. "Yes."
The radio crackled one more time before Reinhardt's voice came across the line. "I've spotted a group in the east tunnel. I'm prepping the bomb pack." There was a loud clicking noise as Reinhardt signed off.
Blade's last memory was of Nyssa disappearing down the east tunnel with Asad at her side. He swore and tore off in that direction.
Asad was a pureblood, from an old family that had been allied to Damaskinos's own since the early part of the seventeenth century. There were rumors that the founding father had been turned rather than born, but they were only rumors, and in families old enough they always found a way to surface. Nyssa had never paid them any attention before, as jealous lower vampires were rarely worth paying any mind, and Asad was clearly too noble and good at his job to have come from lower stock. She wondered now, though, both in regards to Asad's family and to her own. Vampirism was at its heart a virus. That meant that it had to have started, at some point however many millennia in the past, outside of a human form.
Nyssa could feel her face twisting into an even deeper scowl as she stalked down the tunnels with Asad by her side. She had known him since she was very small, and he had hardly seemed to age even across the lengthy decades. Asad was one of the great constants of her life. Nyssa tried to picture how things have possible been different between them if he had not been of stock worthy to consort with her own bloodline, and felt a deep sense of unease spreading through her.
"I worry," Asad said from beside her without warning. He was keeping his voice pitched low, but still the words echoed and reechoed across the stone and cement.
They ought not to be speaking at all, unless they absolutely needed to. Nyssa was still the leader, no matter how much she hesitated to exercise the full weight of her authority against him, and she could order him silent now if she wished it. Instead she found herself asking, "About what?"
"A great many things," Asad replied. Though his face was shrouded in shadow, she could still clearly see the concern with which he looked over her now. "I worry about the fate of our nation, should we fail here. I worry that the virus will mutate into something more difficult and dangerous the next time. I worry that you are forgetting what you are."
"I am a vampire." Nyssa wanted to touch at her weapons for comfort, but Asad had known her and trained her long enough to know what all of her tells were. She kept her hands fixed by her sides.
Evidently she was still allowing some signal or another to slide through, as Asad fixed her with a long and knowing look that nearly made her look down at her boots. "And what is Blade?" he asked.
"I don't know," Nyssa answered automatically, truthfully, before she cast Asad a quelling look. "But I remember what I am. That is enough."
Whether he was satisfied by that response or not, Asad seemed to realize that it would not be wise to push her further. He fell silent as they reached a wide opening at the end of the tunnel that culminated in a pool of water. It looked both deep and fetid. Nyssa wrinkled her nose as she and Asad began to wade into the water together. In the middle of the pool was a great pile of bones, most of them consisting of entire skeletons this time. These had not been turned, but had been entirely devoured. Nyssa nearly gagged. To drink the blood was natural, but to eat the I flesh /I ….Nyssa cast a glance in Asad's direction and saw that he appeared every bit as horrified as she.
There was a sound of someone approaching, and Nyssa and Asad turned as one to see Blade running at them from one of the adjoining tunnels. Nyssa had never seen Blade looking agitated in the way that a normal person could look agitated-she did not think that the muscles of his face were even capable of arranging themselves in such a manner-but he looked remarkably close to it now. "Get out, right now!" Blade yelled as soon as he was sure that he had their attention. Nyssa saw his eyes jerking downwards, towards the water that they were standing in.
The water. It was nearly up to her chest by now. Nyssa and Asad both froze and stared distrustfully down at the water around them. There were several yards of distance between them. It was all that saved Nyssa; it was what ultimately killed Asad. Reapers exploded from the water all around him, living weapons, and immediately launched onto Asad at several points in order to feed. Asad screamed as he was dragged beneath the water. Nyssa screamed herself, a garbled mess that might have been Asad's name and just as easily might have been a string of nonsense syllables, and began to fire upon the Reapers that were now springing up from the water all around her. The bullets did nothing other than temporarily wound and then enrage the Reapers, who wasted no time in hissing and drawing ever closer. Nyssa had known as she began to jerk her finger against the trigger that it was unlikely to do any good, and yet still could not bring herself to care.
Blade sprang from the mouth of the tunnel, landed in the water, and had soon made his way over to her. The Reapers hissed and drew back for a moment as their prey became considerably larger and more formidable. Nyssa snapped her teeth shut around her next scream with an abrupt clicking sound, soothed by Blade's presence in spite of herself.
"I'll attract them to me," Blade rumbled against her ear. He had a nice voice. It was a pity that she never got to hear him use it when their time was not better spent drawing swords and drawing blood. Nyssa jerked without meaning to, so that Blade's lips were pressed for a moment against the curve of her ear. "Do as I tell you," Blade continued before he shoved Nyssa away from himself, hard. " I Move! /I " Nyssa nodded and began stumbling towards the exit, towards safety, even though it made her skin crawl to run when she ought to fight.
Blade waited until he saw Nyssa's back and knew that she was going to make it to safety before he pulled a grenade from his belt and began prepping it for explosion. It began the countdown, and he threw it down to the pile of bones before he drew his sword so that he could deal with the Reapers springing up from the water all around him. He cut through them as easily as if they were nothing at all, confirming what Blade had already believed: Nomak was the threat. The rest of them were hardly more than animals. Blade drew his sword through the neck of a Reaper, severing its head, and watched as it exploded away into ash. The grenade activated at that moment, bathing them all in brilliant blue light. Blade merely ducked his head and squinted to protect his eyes, while the Reapers all began to scream and writhe in the air. Blade cut off several more heads before the process of disintegration was complete. Not necessary, but hell. He needed the release.
Nyssa's voice was crackling over the radio when Blade emerged from the tunnel, calling all of the vampires in, trying to regroup. There was a notable silence echoing back on the line in response. That meant that Whistler was not responding, either, and Blade ground his teeth against one another hard. Not something that he could worry about just now. Didn't mean that the Reapers were not going to pay, and pay dearly, along the way. In the meantime, there was one person that he could still locate.
Nyssa had sprinted down the tunnel at Blade's order and had then ducked around a curve in the wall in order to avoid being incinerated. Judging by the distance that she had gone before ducking for cover, she must have only barely made it. Upon hearing Blade's footsteps, Nyssa lunged around from her hiding place, gun drawn. Blade grabbed her wrist before he wound up taking a face full of lead.
"Wait," Blade called out to her, tightening his grip on her wrist and turning the weapon away from himself. Her skin was cool beneath his palm, much cooler than the flesh that Blade was accustomed to running his palms over and gripping, but still soft. "Are you all right?"
Nyssa had to pause for a moment and gather herself before she could even answer. Her eyes had a glazed look, to Blade's mind, and she could not seem to stop herself from looking down the tunnel and towards the place were Asad had died, where the scent of charred flesh was coiling out towards them both. The past thirty-six hours had offered little in the way of time to socialize, but Blade had still seen Asad and Nyssa standing close to one another more than once and talking to each other in low voices. Among vampires, that was evidence of a fairly close relationship. Blade might feel for her, but now was not the time.
As if she was feeling Blade's hand tightening subtly around her wrist, Nyssa's eyes cleared and she looked back at Blade's face. "Yeah," she said, still a trifle breathless from both fear and exertion, though she did not try to pull her wrist from Blade's grasp.
"We gotta move," Blade told her, using his grip upon her wrist to drag her at a jog down the tunnel after himself. "We have a lot of company."
They only jogged for a few paces before breaking into an outright sprint, while Blade snatched his radio from his belt and began calling in everyone to regroup in the same manner that Nyssa had been struggling to do moments before. There was nothing but silence from any of the three other groups. Blade was beginning to think that Nyssa and himself were the only ones who had survived at all when Reinhardt burst out on top of them from a side tunnel. He came without warning, nearly getting himself shot by two guns at once. A second later, Blade understood why Reinhardt had been too distracted to announce his presence. He was bleeding from a deep wound in his shoulder. Luckily for him, it was too deep to have been caused by Reaper teeth, or else Blade would have cut him down right then and there. From the tunnel behind him issues the deep hissing noise that was unmistakably Reaper. Reinhardt was alone.
He met eyes with Blade and, even though Blade had not said a word, knew exactly what Blade was asking. While he did not look broken up by the answer that he was going to give, Reinhardt had either the good grace or the good sense not to appear pleased by it. He shook his head. "I lost him," Reinhardt panted, jerking his head towards the tunnel from which he had emerged. "Back there."
That did not bode well at all for Whistler's chances of survival, not with the hissing that was eating up the entire world, and Blade thought that his teeth would grind down to dust if he clenched them against each other any harder. It was different, the idea of Whistler becoming this new kind of vampire. This time there would be no cure.
The result, then, Blade decided in a blinding flash of regret and fury, would have to be the same as if there had never been any cure at all.
Something in Blade's face made Reinhardt pull back for a moment before he could stop himself, though he had never shown any fear of Blade before, even when Blade had been pressing the explosive to the back of Reinhardt's head. Without time to get himself under control, Blade gestured swiftly to indicate that Reinhardt should follow Nyssa and himself, not particularly giving a damn if Reinhardt dared to follow. It only took Reinhardt a second to decide that the chances of surviving the Reapers', and Blade could hear the thud of his boots on the pavement behind him as he followed. The three of them fled the approach of the Reapers, whirling about frequently in order to fire shots that would at least slow the Reapers even if they would not put them down. The hissing grew louder as the Reapers drew closer still to them, close enough to be seen as well as heard, so close that they nearly took Blade's breath away. It was one thing to listen to a sterile recitation of the exponential way in which the Reapers' numbers would grow. It was quite another to see those numbers in the flesh. The Reapers filled up the entire tunnel, even dangling from the ceiling and the walls, hopping over one another like tree frogs in order to make room. Their skin nearly glowed in the dim light; several of them had split open their lower jaws and were swirling their long, barbed tongues through the air, seeking out blood.
Blade, Nyssa, and Reinhardt had no choice but to continue their retreat until they found themselves in a big central cavern into which all of the other tunnels opened up. It was not a haven for long, as Reapers were also spilling into the cavern from all of these other tunnels, drawn by the scent of close, available food. The three of them were surrounded within moments, and, while they continued to fire their weapons into the throng, it soon became clear that they had a finite amount of ground left to lose.
"Where's the bomb pack?" Blade yelled at Reinhardt. Nyssa, while silent, was looking sharp and clear-eyed once more. That was very good. For what Blade had in mind, she would soon need every scrap of reflex and instinct for self-preservation that she had at her disposal.
"I had to leave it down that tunnel," Reinhardt replied, throwing his arm out to indicate the general direction from whence he had come. While the wound on his shoulder was swiftly knitting itself back together again, the blood still gleamed, low oxygen content making it appear beetle-black.
Nothing ever got to be easy. Blade's mind whirred across the options for only a few seconds before he hit upon the only suitable one. He fired his gun, taking a Reaper dead between the eyes, and watched it fall and then spring up again several seconds later. "Give me the rest of the pheromones," Blade demanded. Reinhardt complied, and Blade smashed the bottle against his chest. Immediately, the musky reek was nearly overpowering. Blade threw his arm out to indicate the way that they had come, the way where he knew for a fact that there was water deep enough to shield a vampire from UV light. "Go down that tunnel." Nyssa's eyes lit up in understanding, and she grabbed Reinhardt's arm to get him to follow her as Blade went on, "Go, go, go!"
Nyssa jerked hard on at Reinhardt's arm. The two of them began a swift retreat, firing at the Reapers in order to force them to make a path. The animals closed back in a throng as soon as Nyssa and Reinhardt were gone, like the Red Sea collapsing back inward on the Egyptians. Blade knew that the only reason that the maneuver worked at all and Nyssa and Reinhardt allowed to escape was due to the pheromones that he was now drenched in. The Reapers were clamoring across the cement in order to get closer to him. Blade saw several of them pause and take snapping chunks out of their neighbors as they climbed over and around one another in a rush to get at Blade. The blood congealed and the wounds began to close over again almost immediately.
There was no rationality here, Blade realized, not even the thirst-driven sense of self-preservation that could be granted to an ordinary vampire. There was nothing but hot, pulsing animal need.
That did not make Blade's rage or need to kill them any less. "You do not," he began as he pulled one of the final UV grenades from his belt and began prepping it. "Know. Who you are I fucking /I with!" He hurled the grenade down into the water. It went off a second later, illuminating both the Reapers in the water with him and the ones on the dry land. There was a brief moment in which Blade could actually see into the skeletons of the Reapers that had been caught mid-leap before they were incinerated. He was left with only the wailings of those who had been close enough to be wounded but too far to actually be killed.
It was not an opportunity that Blade intended to squander. He took off a sprint in the direction where Reinhardt had reported the bomb pack to be, well aware as he did so that an equal number of Reapers were still pursuing Nyssa and Reinhardt as were chasing him. Even if the ones who I were /I chasing him were such a significant number that he hardly had room to complain.
Blade had a mind that Reinhardt was the sort of man who lied as he breathed. From the moment that Reinhardt had opened his mouth, Blade had had serious doubts about whether this bomb pack would be in its supposed location once he managed to get back to it at all. Even the very worst odds had to enter a winning streak once in a while, though. The bomb pack was exactly where Reinhardt had said that it would be, sitting lopsidedly upon another of those piles of bones that marked a Reaper feeding ground. Blade sprinted to it, the Reapers directly behind him, and began struggling to set it. He had to pause once so that he could whirl around and shoot another Reaper directly in the mouth before he could return to his work. The others were not so easily deterred. Blade felt the first prickings of worry that he did not allow to show in his face.
Reinhardt's voice came over the radio, silky with malice. "By the way, Blade, did I happen to mention that the bomb lever is stuck?"
Son of a fucking I whore /I . Blade growled and made a list of the things that he was going to do to Reinhardt as soon as he saw him again, now that they did not need one another any longer, and kicked the offending lever off altogether. Blue light filled up the entire world, temporarily blinding Blade, though he could still hear the Reapers surrounding him shrieking as they died. The smell of charred flesh filled the air. Blade waited until the sounds had died down again, opened his eyes, and saw that there was not even enough left to compose a series of skeletons. Blade would like to see them try to heal from that. He picked among them long enough to ensure that they were truly dead before he left to find Nyssa.
It was the natural result of trusting vampires that Whistler should now be prowling the sewers alone, battered and bloodied, and he figured that he had gotten off lightly in that he was still alive at all. Whistler did not know how Blade did not see it. Frost was at the center, though. There was no way that he could not be, as things had been nothing like this before. Blade never would have allowed a killer into his midst before.
It occurred to Whistler, though he hardly liked it, that this now included him as well.
He scowled. Whistler was as a result caught distracted and off of his game when he heard a noise, spun, and found his blow being blocked by none other than Nomak himself. Nomak, though he was as blue and hairless as all of the other Reapers, made it clear within seconds that he was nothing at all like them. His eyes gleamed with a cold shark's intelligence as he stared Whistler down, and had he had nothing of the animal within his mannerisms at all.
Nomak's only response to Whistler's struggling was to tighten his grip upon Whistler's wrist; Whistler might as well have been a misbehaving puppy for all of the effect that he was having. "Whistler, wait," Nomak said. His voice was deep and raspy, as if he did not get the chance to use it all that often. Among the company that made up the rest of the Reapers, Whistler could easily see why that may be the case. "You will survive only so that you can tell Blade about this ring." Nomak pressed a cold circle of metal into Whistler's palm. "About the truth." He leaned forward so that he could whisper into Whistler's ear. Whistler listened, and felt his eyes growing wide with horror.
End Part Nine