Closing his eyes, he drew on the strength of Elyse’s blood in his veins as he prepared himself for the battle to come. These bastards had imprisoned and tortured her, and he would make them pay.
Enough time passed that he was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong. He was about to stick his head around the tree when an explosion rent the air, the ground quaked, and the tree branches rattled over his head. With his ears ringing, he poked his head around the tree to discover smoke rising from a hole where the door used to be. Fifty feet away, the door lay smoldering in the center of the clearing.
Saxon glanced at the others, and they all nodded to each other. He took a deep breath before sprinting across the open expanse of land and converged on the door at the same time as Ronan, Lucien, Declan, and Killean.
He’d love to hang back and better ascertain what lay below, but that would only give the Savages more time to prepare for the invasion. Now, he could only hope the Savages weren’t ready as he jumped into the hole first.
Chapter Forty-Two
The air buffetedhim and tugged at his hair as he fell twenty feet before hitting the ground and rolling. He came up with a stake in each hand as he heard the thuds of the others landing behind him. He remained crouched, as he searched the shadows for an enemy, but nothing stirred in them.
He chanced a glance behind him as Ronan and Lucien emerged from the shadows followed by Declan and Killean. Behind them, he spotted the ladder pinned to the wall and rising toward the doorway. Nathan and Asher leapt into the hole next, followed by more hunters and vamps.
He’d been right; they couldn’t go any more than three-wide in the tunnel; Ronan and Lucien fell in beside him as he continued down the long, metal hall while the rest of their fighters entered.
Lucien pulled out a flashlight and clicked it on when they moved so far into the tunnel that sunlight stopped penetrating the gloomy depths. Not all of them had flashlights, but they’d brought enough that there was one for every three of them.
Lucien’s beam reflected off lights set into the walls, but all those lights were off. Saxon didn’t know if they were off because they rarely used this tunnel and were conserving energy, or if they’d been shut off when the door blew open.
Behind him, more flashlights clicked on, and their beams played across the silver floor. The only sounds were their soft breaths and the occasional scrape of a boot against the floor. The potent stench of rotten garbage permeated the air, but beneath it, he detected the earthy aroma of dirt and the coppery tang of blood.
A shift in air current alerted him of an opening beside him a second before a Savage leapt out of the dark. He tried to spin in time to catch the bastard, but it was already too late, and the creature crashed into his side. Knocked back a step from the impact of its weight, it took Saxon a second to steady himself.
Lucien aimed his light at the Savage clinging to him and revealed its pale face and sunken, red eyes. The hunger it radiated beat against Saxon as its finger clawed his flesh. Another Savage barreled from the tunnel, wrapped its arms around his waist, and knocked him into the wall.
Keeping his palm in the face of the Savage hanging off him, he turned its head until its neck snapped, and it fell away. Saxon clasped the shirt of the one with its arms around his waist and yanked it away from him. Killean drove a stake through its heart.
“Shit,” Lucien muttered.
Saxon’s blood ran cold when he spotted the dozens, if not hundreds of Savages, bounding toward them from the side tunnel. There were so many of them; it was impossible to tell their exact numbers. They looked like rats fleeing water as they poured over the top of each other in their eagerness to get at them. In the mix of red eyes, he spotted the eerie, white-blue color the hunter’s eyes turned when they became a vampire.
Shit was right.Savages were bad enough, but hunters turned Savage were stronger and trained on how to fight and kill vampires.
Saxon’s fangs lengthened, and he braced his feet apart as he prepared to fight his way through every last one of them if that was what it took. He grouped closer to Killean and Lucien as the pounding of the Savage’s feet vibrated the tunnels and their eager grunts reverberated off the walls.
He suspected these were newly turned vamps and hunters who’d been starved into mindlessness and turned loose to kill. By the time they regained enough reason to realize what they’d done, it would be too late for them to be anything other than Savages.
The first wave poured out of the tunnel and spread out as they pounced on vampires and hunters. Saxon seized the next one who leapt on him and slammed it into the ground as Lucien bashed another’s head off the wall. Killean tried to tackle one, but it shoved him aside before leaping onto a turned recruit.
Saxon sank his stake into the Savage’s heart as the screams of the wounded and dying sounded around him. The stench of blood and the cloying tang of terror filled the air as more Savages clogged the side tunnel. His vision sharpened to the point where the creatures seemed to run in slow motion as they barreled toward him in a rush of bloodlust and death.
“Get out of the way!” Elijah shouted as he pushed his way through the others. “Get down!”
Saxon didn’t see what he threw into the tunnel, but metal clanked against metal as it spiraled into the shadows. Another Savage jumped at him, and, catching it in midair, Saxon pulled it on top of him as the concussive boom of an explosion threw him into the wall behind him.
His ears rang as fire flashed out of the tunnel. Flames blistered the skin of his exposed hands and set the Savage’s clothes on fire. The creature howled; its arms and legs flailed as Saxon lifted it over his head and flung it into the tunnel.
It bounced across the floor before disappearing into the flames devouring its friends. With only the bodies and clothes of the vamps to feed it, the fire quickly retreated, but some of the Savages evaded the explosion and were still coming at them. Ronan tore the throat out of the first one to burst out of the tunnel, and Nathan fired a bolt into the heart of the next.
The flesh of Saxon’s burned hands worked to repair itself as he tore the heart out of the next Savage and dodged a second. One of the hunters killed the one he ducked, but another hunter and a vamp were taken out by two turned hunters before they were destroyed.
They destroyed the rest of the dozen or so remaining Savages and tossed their bodies back into the side tunnel. What remained of the flames crackled as they consumed the bodies sprawled across the tunnel floor.
The smoke and the reek of burning flesh and hair clogging the air made it difficult to breathe and see. Eventually, the air cleared enough that he could see beyond the dying fires to where the roof had collapsed and blocked the tunnel with a thick pile of debris. This place wasn’t capable of withstanding grenades going off inside it.
He hoped Elyse’s father hadn’t been somewhere down there; they’d never find him if he were. He turned his attention to the dead scattered across the floor as flashlights played over their bodies. The smoke was so thick he couldn’t tell how many of their own they’d lost. Some of the wounded were helped to their feet while the injured Savages were destroyed.
“We’ll collect our dead later,” Ronan said. “Let’s go.”
