A group of guards rushed past, two hallways down. I counted up to twenty of them before they disappeared entirely. They looked like they were in a hurry.
“Who lit a fire under their ass?” Chancey mumbled.
“The Warden’s moving the guards and The Mission off-campus. I overheard some of them talking about it,” I whispered. “From what I heard, they’re planning on leaving some of the inmates behind.”
“For what?” Kallie asked.
“I ain’t sticking around to find out, sorry to say,” Chancey replied.
We were too hasty, and we ended up running into two guards on our way to confinement. I had the thought we were caught, but Ivy slammed the pistol against the temple of one of the guards, before he wrapped his arm around the head of another and swiftly broke his neck. My hand flashed to my throat as both guards went down. Beside me, Kallie gave a sigh of relief.
“Fucking hell, Ivy.” I shuddered.
“Done this before,” Ivy said, far too casually. “Stealth missions are kind of my thing.”
“It’s not a mission, it’s a breakout,” Marcus hissed. “Now we have two more bodies to lead them right to us!”
“Not if we get our asses moving. Let’s go!” Chancey shoved Marcus forward, and he stumbled over the motionless guards. I kept my eyes focused forward, trying to block it all out as we ventured onward.
“It’s going to be okay, Ava,” Kallie whispered, but I didn’t know if it would be. I was a villain… but this wasn’t the kind of villain I wanted to be.
We passed a set of metal pipes in the wall, ones that had previously been used for plumbing but now looked all but completely useless. I knew we were nearing the confinement rooms long before we got there, because I recognized the sound of Charlie’s screams. I let out a little whimper and nearly cried in relief, because he wasalive, before realizing that if he was screaming in such a terrible way, they had to be doing something awful to him. I put my hands on the wheels of my chair and tried to go faster, but Chancey held the chair back firmly.
“No, Ava. We gotta do this the right way,” he hissed.
Charlie gave another tormented wail, and I began to cry.
“There’s gotta be vampires in there,” Ivy muttered. “I can smell the blood from here. They’re making him bleed before they end it, cause they get off on it.”
“We can’t killvampire guards! All we have is a gun, and that’s basically useless!” Kallie snapped.
“Three ways to kill a vampire. Beheading, fire, and a sharp object through the heart,” Ivy replied, glancing at the pipes beside them.
Chancey began ripping metal pipes off the walls. It made a loud sound, but Charlie’s screams of pain were louder, so no one heard it. He bent them until they snapped, creating jagged edges. He distributed the makeshift stakes amongst the group. “Don’t fucking miss.”
I clutched the rusty pipe he gave me. If this was all I had to fight a vampire, it was more than enough, because I’d do anything to stop them from hurting Charlie further.
Chancey stopped me outside the door to the confinement room, then leaned against it. He nodded, telling us to get ready.
We all poised, waiting to go on the attack. Chancey rammed his shoulder into the door, and it flew open as the lock broke under his weight. He ducked as Ivy came charging in, firing the gun into the room.
There were three vampires each, and they all looked up at the sound of gunshots. A bullet hit each of their foreheads and sunk in, but didn’t appear to do any damage. Their fangs flashed as they hissed at us, and their forms became blurs across the room as they raced in our direction.
I thought I was ready, but you really couldn’t prepare for how quickly vampires moved. I felt my chair fall backwards, and the wind was knocked out of me as I slammed against the floor. The pipe flew out of my hands with the force of the tackle, rattling up against the wall. The vampire guard let out a screech, his hot venom dripping onto my skin as he displayed the full length of his red fangs.
Awesome, I was going to have my throat ripped open by a fucking psychopath. The vampire bent down to tear through my jugular, but the hiss he made became a strangling sound as I watched a metal pipe erupt through his chest. Ivy stood over him, gritting their own fangs as they shoved the metal pipe through the vampire’s back and clear through to his heart.
The vampire’s body fell forward, but Ivy tossed him off of me. Ivy righted my chair back up, helping me get readjusted as they brushed back my hair. “Precious, you good?”
I gave a frantic nod. Kallie had staked a separate vampire guard through the heart, who was dying as I watched, and Chancey had already taken care of the other. Their bodies became discarded casualties as my eyes locked on the person imprisoned on the metal table. “Ancestors,Charlie.”
He lay in a pool of his own blood, which was dripping off the table. Surgical instruments stuck out of him at every which angle. The vampires had spent who knew how longbloodletting him.
I rolled up to the table as quickly as I could and started pulling the instruments out of his body. They weren’t in too deep. It wouldn’t kill him, just hurt, so I had to get these things out of him. Charlie gasped with every object I yanked out, giving a few mottled coughs. Blood sputtered past his teeth and over his lips.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” More tears snaked down my cheeks, until I could barely see straight. Kallie and Marcus busied themselves with getting the cuffs off that held Charlie to the table. Once he was free, Chancey lowered Charlie to the ground. He was strong enough that he was able to prop himself up, though the breaths from his lungs sounded rattled and thick.
This was worse than the Infernal Underground. It was so much worse.
