“Look at that,” one of the men jeered. He looked over his shoulder at his friends and jabbed the muzzle of his gun in Madoc’s direction. “It’s none other than the fucking cardinal himself. I’m gonna put his fangs on earrings for my wife.”
Madoc plucked his broken sunglasses off his nose and pitched them aside into the road. The dawn made his eyes sting, the world around him washed-out, as though he’d looked directly into a light, but it was bearable. Most things were.
“Maybe you should keep them for yourself,” Madoc said. “You seem to be short a few.”
The man flushed, a quick, easy swab of red over his cheekbones, and glowered at Madoc. “Ain’t gonna be a wetmouth, ain’t gonna need to wet teeth,” he blustered. “When I get to Heaven, God’s going to know I got there on purpose.”
One of the other men, dressed in jeans and a sweat-stained gas-station T-shirt, snorted. He wore a slim metal stake in a holster on his thigh and carried himself like he knew what he was doing.
“Shut up, Thomas,” he said as he reached up to clip Thomas around the back of the head. “Your soul is between you and God. This is temporal business.”
Madoc chuckled as he shifted his feet on the road to anchor himself. “I don’t think he knows what that means.”
Heather grabbed at Thomas’s arm. “My son,” she said anxiously. “You’ll be careful, won’t you? My son’s in the car.”
“Your son near ruined us all,” Truckstop snapped. “You’re just lucky we need him for now. It’s the only reason I’m going to let him see another sunset. Get her the fuck out of our way.”
There was one woman in the group, a lean young woman with fresh burn marks on her neck. She’d swapped a deputy’s uniform for black leather and old denim, but Madoc recognized the deputy that Took had saved from the explosion. She grabbed Heather’s elbow and dragged the older woman back to the truck. When Heather protested once too often, the blonde slapped her impatiently. The crack of a hard callused hand over Heather’s mouth shut her up.
“What do you think this is going to get you?” Madoc asked. Mindful of where they were in his peripheral vision, he shifted position as the hunters started to spread out around him. “VINE knows about you now. The chief of police back in Charleston? He’s wanted an excuse to incorporate your town, and now he’s got it. Whatever you had here, it’s gone now.”
Truckstop hitched his gun against his shoulder. “You don’t get it,” he said. “You think this is about us? It’s about Leveling the Accord, it’s about restoring whatshouldhave been the natural order. Maybe we’re done here, but you think we’re the only ones? Once we get those kids back, we’ll send them away to new homes, to places where they can grow up right with God. First, though, we’ll get rid of you. One less monster for them to kill.”
He pulled the trigger. The gun jarred back against his shoulder and the bullets stitched across the road toward Madoc, a trail of splintered pocks in their wake. He stepped into the shadows were time ran slowly, the spray of bullets like spilled metallic honey, and just sidestepped it before he dropped back into the world. The butt of a gun caught him across the jaw and slammed him backward. He flew through the air and came down hard on the road. It caught him across his shoulders and back and knocked the metaphorical wind out of him.
Habit dragged him back to his feet just in time to take a boot to the gut. It connected hard enough that he felt the bones in his pelvis grind against each other. This time he kept his feet, but only just, and managed to avoid the slash of a serrated knife that would have gutted him.
Too fast. Too strong.
Madoc caught sight of the muzzle of Truckstop’s gun out of the corner of his eye as it tracked him. He caught the knife under his arm as the man swung at him again and Madoc spun him around so he caught the whip of bullets across his back. It perforated him from hip bone to nipple, blood bright and syrupy where it soaked through his skintight, bleached-out camo shirt.
The man yanked free and staggered backward, but he stayed on his feet. He grinned at the expression on Madoc’s face.
“Not as easy as you thought,” he spat out as he yanked his shirt up. His stomach was already half-healed, the bullet holes sealed into soft, pocked scars. “Not once we even out the playing field. The game’s changed, wetmouth.”
It wasn’t, and it had.
Madoc shook his head to dislodge the high-pitched tone that hummed in his ear. He weighed up his opponents—six armed assailants who were close to his strength and speed. Those were not good odds. The out-of-uniform deputy and Thomas lunged at him. One aimed high and one low. He twisted out of the way of Thomas’s unsophisticated roundhouse and cracked his knee into the deputy’s temple as she tried to twist her weight around his legs to take him down. She rattled out a surprised yelp but managed to python herself around his legs like hobbles.
A gun cracked and Thomas yelped in surprise as blood sprayed out of his shoulder. It would heal, but the joint was pulverized. That took a bit more time for the body to jigsaw back together. It didn’t always get it right the first time either. Madoc had broken Pall’s knee four times before it healed into something that would bear weight.
Madoc glanced past the stunned Thomas’s pulped shoulder to nod acknowledgment to Lawrence. She ignored him, tongue caught between her teeth as she tried to get a clear bead on Truckstop.
Not quite six to one, then. It didn’t improve the odds that much, but it was better than nothing.
Madoc let the deputy trip him. He rolled as he hit the ground and grabbed the first foot that swung at his head. A quick, heel-of-the-hand punch to the joint the man had his weight on snapped it out of true. The man went down hard, mouth agape with shock and pain, and Madoc slit his throat down to the bone with the knife on his belt. Then he twisted, one sharp clean pop and jerk, and tossed the head away. It rolled over the uneven ground, bounced off Truckstop’s foot, and ended up under the wheel. Glassy blue eyes stared blankly at the tableau.
“Do you really think humans were ever our biggest issue?” Madoc mocked Truckstop as he kicked the deputy off, the impact of his heel against the point of her jaw enough to crack it into an awkward, broken angle. “Don’t flatter yourselves. I’ve fought more of my own kind than any Hunters.”
Not that they were human, or not completely, Madoc supposed. They weren’t vampires, and their blood didn’t have the skunked smell of a werewolf, but nothing human clicked their broken jaw back together like the deputy just had.
For a second, he considered sorcery, but six sorcerers willing to work together? A human with an Anakim’s right hook was more believable. Besides, he doubted Thomas could spell sorcerer, never mind be one.
Like a Goat.Took had told him that’s what Gabriel said about these faux Hounds, fake Hunters.But not rotted.Stronger than any Goat that Madoc had put down, but that would make sense if he was right.
“Madoc!” Lawrence’s voice cut through the muggy, mosquito-noisy air along the road. She sounded terrified, and Truckshop grinned when he heard her. Madoc kept one wary eye on his opponents as he shifted to have her in his periphery. She held up the radio, and it crackled with the staticky sound of Quick’s scream. “They have the other team, at the campground. They knew.”
Truckstop looked pleased with himself as he slung his gun up over his shoulder. “Like I told you,” he said, “games change. We’re playing by our rules now. You want your people back alive? Get on your knees.”
