Pablo looked down at his cell phone, responding to the vibrating buzz of a notification.
“Delilah’s out front. I’ll let her in.” He stood up from the table they’d met at earlier that morning, too early, when Gwen told Luke and the pack about the escape her first werewolf shift had facilitated. A moment later, he returned with Delilah. Pablo cleared his throat to get the attention of the room. “Hey, everyone. This is Delilah. She’s been helping us clear up Portland’s freelance phlebotomist problem.”
Everyone except Sam and Maggie gave Pablo a confused look; Sam was hiding a snicker behind her hand, pretending to cover her mouth and yawn. Maggie rolled her eyes at Pablo’s antics, although she grinned a bit.
“You know…vampires. They draw blood…” Pablo waggled his eyebrows.
Holly shook her head and rubbed her temples.
“Anywho… Delilah, the lady with the tattoos is Holly. She’s the packleader. The woman with the ponytail is Sam, Holly’s wife. The blond woman is Maggie, one of the pack doctors. And the fellow with the locs pouring over the map is Jamaal.”
The werewolves greeted Delilah with a mix of nods, smiles, and waves.
Luke filled in Delilah on last night’s events, including what they’d learned about Gwen and the initial recon of Wapato Jail. Luke moved over to the map of North Portland they had spread out on the table.
“OK. I think I have a working idea for a plan, if you don’t mind?” He looked at Holly, who nodded her consent to continue. “Pablo and I will go in first. We’ll take out the guards outside. How many fighters can you bring?”
“Including Pablo, Sam, and me, we’ve got about eighteen that I can get a hold of now,” Holly said.
“When do you think they’ll be ready?” Luke asked.
“We’re looking early afternoon by the time we get all the people and resources gathered.”
Luke’s eyes rolled up a bit as he mulled over the numbers.
“It’s going to be tight. I’d like to get in before sunset, but better to be properly prepared than rush in. OK, we’ll split it this way. Give me a dozen fighters for the jail. That’ll leave four to guard the buses and act as a reserve if we need reinforcements. Holly, you’ll be on the outside in charge of the evac team.” He looked back at the map, then pointed to a spot. “Jubitz Truck Stop. Take the buses and the rest of the evac team and park there until you get the all-clear. It’ll be less conspicuous for a couple buses and some extra cars to hang out there. Plus, you can just roll straight down Marine Drive to the pull-off to the jail.” He ran his finger along the map to demonstrate.
“Pablo and I will take Sam with us. She’ll coordinate communications. The FRS radios I have will work well enough around the jail, but she’ll need to stay in touch with you via cell,” Luke continued.
Everybody nodded along.
“Sweet! Cool CB handles for everyone!” Sam clapped her hands excitedly.
Holly smiled at Sam. “Jamaal, you’ll stay here; you’ll be in charge of the pack until I’m back in town.”
Jamaal nodded. “Understood.”
“What about me?” Delilah asked.
“You’ll be going into the jail with me, Pablo, and the werewolves.” Luke turned to Pablo. “Pablo, can you organize our advance team? I’ll need four teams. I’ll lead two and you and Delilah will lead the other two.”
“Hey, boys!” Sam called to the two human guards. “Can you help me with my car? It won’t start. You look like a couple fellas who know your way around a car.” She gave them her most winsome smile and struck a pose that highlighted her curvier assets. The two schlubs looked at each other and came to some sort of silent agreement.
“Sure, ma’am! We’d love to.” They abandoned their post and sauntered toward Sam.
“I’m parked over in the Harp store parking lot. I was supposed to meet someone for an appointment at three to look at some harps, but I’ve been waiting for over an hour, and it’s almost dark. They must have bailed. Then, when I went to turn my car on, it wouldn’t start. I’m so clueless about things like cars.” She added an extra bit of ditz to her routine. She led them to Luke’s old Volvo, which was parked behind the hedge, obscuring the view from the prison.
“Ma’am, would you mind popping the hood?” Sam opened the driver’s door and pulled the hood release lever. One of the guards slipped his hand under the hood, pulled the latch, and opened the hood. That was the signal, and Luke and Pablo stood up from their hiding place behind the car.
“What the f…”
Sam grabbed one of the guards and slammed his head into the top of the radiator. When his head bounced back up, she slammed a fist into his face with a wicked uppercut that dropped him to the pavement. By the time Sam was finished with the first schlubby guard, Pablo and Luke had knocked out the other.
“God, I can’t believe they fell for the old ‘damsel and car’ bit. Haven’t these guys ever watched a movie?” Sam asked.
Pablo chuckled. “Well, Sam, they probably weren’t thinking with their upstairs head, and you’re quite the adorable little bombshell when you want to be.”
“Hopefully the movie magic continues, and these uniforms magically fit us, but I won’t hold my breath,” commented Luke as he began stripping the guard of his uniform. “There are zip ties in the duffel bag in the back seat. We’ll stash the guards out of the way. Pablo, when you’re done stripping the other one, give me a hand with this one. I’ll grab the shoulders, you grab the feet. No need to drag them across the pavement. We’ve already knocked them out and stripped them; we don’t need to give them road rash on their asses.”
The three of them quickly had the guards bound and gagged and out of the way. Luke and Pablo stripped down to their undies and socks. Luke didn’t have one of those romance novel cover six-pack bodies, but one that was muscular from hard work balanced by just a touch of love handles. Falling into old habits, he’d began bulking up on calories for leaner times that always came on a campaign. A series of old scars ran down the backs of his legs, peeking out from his boxer briefs. Scars of various sizes and shapes also dotted his torso and arms. Pablo, though stockier, was likewise muscled from lifting large sacks of malt at the brewery. Sam whistled at them appreciatively. As she eyed them up and down, her breath caught when she saw the back of Luke’s legs.
“What happened to your legs?”
“Those?” Luke stuck out his leg and twisted to look. “Those I got in training. Centurions were fond of the vine rods as a motivational tool. Vine rods were a symbol of their station and one they liked using heavily. Unfortunately, I was often on the edge of the formation. That, coupled with my centurion’s dislike of us ‘barbarian boys’ and my high performance, meant I got a bit more than average in quantity and quality. I did not mourn his loss when a Dacian arrow split his head open.”
As anticipated, the uniforms were a bit on the baggy side. Sam helped them out by pulling the sides of both the shirts and pants around and smartly tucking them into the back, using the belts to cinch everything down.
“That’ll have to do. Try not to move too vigorously. And keep your back away from anyone you have to talk to. At least the extra material does a good job of hiding Luke’s swords.”
Luke snagged the two security ball caps off the ground and tossed one to Pablo.
“We’d better get back before they notice their guards aren’t on patrol, but if the guards inside are anything like these two, I don’t think ‘highly qualified’ was anywhere near the top of the list for hiring requirements. Everyone got their radio on? Sam, let Holly and the convoy know they can move to the second wait point.”
Pablo and Sam nodded at Luke as they checked the FRS radios he’d handed them. They headed toward the jail, leaving Sam with the car. Once they got back to the jail, they resumed the guards’ patrol route.
“Hey, Luke. I was thinking. Do you think they have more human guards inside? What I mean is, would they let hired guards have any contact with the humans they’ve captured? These guys,” he said, plucking his uniform, “don’t seem like the scary black bag kind of mercs who would be cold-blooded enough for this kind of job.”
“You might be right. We’ll have to keep an eye on it. It could be that they have an initial layer of hired help to watch during the day, but it’s all outward facing. The human guards likely have no idea what’s going on deeper in the building. In my experience, vampires are highly secretive. The humans, or whoever their employer is, have no idea who they’re contracting with.” Luke looked at the descending sun. “We should keep the conversation to a minimum. I think the vampires will come out to relieve us as soon as the sun’s down.”
They continued the repetitive path around the jail’s perimeter for another fifteen minutes before Luke signaled for Pablo to stop.
“OK, I can feel them. Once we turn the corner, we’ll be able to see them. I think they’re by the main entrance,” Luke whispered. He reached back with both hands and pulled out his gladius and his rudis. He flipped the gladius around in a neat maneuver and offered it toward Pablo, hilt first. “This should look enough like one of the batons the guards carried to get us close. Pointy end goes in the vampire. Try to hit the heart. And careful, it’s sharp. The anti-vamp enchantments shouldn’t be a problem for you though.”
Pablo nodded once and asked, “Won’t they see the swords?”
“Here. Hold it like this.” Luke demonstrated a reverse grip. “Keep the blade tight against your forearm, and that should do it. Your sleeve should protect you from the silver.”
Situated, they turned the corner and kept their casual pace. Pretending to spot their relief, Luke gave the vampires standing just away from the overhead lights near the main entrance a casual wave.
“Anything to report?” one of the vampires asked as they got closer.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Luke replied.
“Hey, you’re not the normal guys.”
“They couldn’t make it tonight.”
The vampires tensed and looked at the two guards still walking toward them. It was too late by the time they noticed the swords weren’t batons. “What the fu…”
Luke rammed the rudis home into the vampire’s heart, starting his final death. Pablo was a bit slower with his sword and the other vampire, a tallish woman, had turned around and was trying to run back to the entrance. Fortunately, she tripped in a gopher hole, allowing Pablo’s heightened werewolf speed to catch up to her. He grabbed her left shoulder and shoved the gladius into her back so hard it sank to the hilt. The vampire fell forward, pulling the sword from Pablo’s hand.
“Good catch. You only need to stab them a little bit, not impale them up to your elbow.”
“I got a little overexcited; I’m not a sword boy like you.” Pablo bent over to pull the sword out but couldn’t get it to budge. “It’s not coming out.”
“Give it a twist. It doesn’t have a blood channel, so the flesh can form a bit of a vacuum. Or give it a few seconds for the vamp to start its decay.”
Pablo gave it a hard twist and yanked it free.
“Wipe it clean before the vamp goes totally gooey on us, please,” Luke added.
The men bent over to clean Luke’s blades, then rifled through the clothes and pulled two more sets of keys, making a grand total of five they’d taken from the guards, including Gwen’s set. Luke stood up and keyed the radio button. After Luke resheathed the rudis, Pablo returned Luke’s gladius to him.
“We appear to have a plethora of keys,” Pablo said.
“Yeah. We’ll spread them out and leave a set with Sam. Speaking of which…” Luke engaged the mic on his radio. “Hey, Bandit, bring the Trans-Am over.”
Sam swung around with Luke’s Volvo, then backed it up to Luke and Pablo, who were standing just out of the light. Luke pulled the trunk hatch open and slid out his gear tub. Pablo pulled a ladder and a can of spray paint from the back of the car. Setting the ladder up under the security camera, he climbed up and sprayed the clear plastic dome with black spray paint.
“Hopefully they won’t rush out blind. You better get your business suit on in a hurry, just in case,” Pablo instructed, taking down the ladder.
Luke shucked his purloined guard uniform and redressed in a pair of skinny jeans and a tight black T-shirt. He pulled on his steel-toed boots and followed them with a set of elaborately engraved steel greaves. Next, he pulled out a scarf, wrapped it around his neck, then pulled out the lorica segmentata armor and settled it around his shoulders. Before he tied up the armor, he slid a manica, an armor sleeve made of segmented plates, up his right arm and fastened it to the inside of the lorica, which he followed by lacing up the armor and cinching it closed. He clipped on his nylon tactical bandolier, attached the rudis to the back, hilt pointing left, and clipped the gladius’s scabbard to the left at the bottom just above his hip.
“Sam, please signal Holly to get the evac squad moving,” Luke said.
As Luke finished draping a black cloak around his armor, a couple of passenger vans backed up to the entrance and disgorged Delilah and a bunch of men and women in sweatpants. Pablo walked over and got everyone’s attention.
“Hi, everyone. For those who don’t know,” he looked around the crowd, “which is most of you, this is Luke. He’s a human and all-around general vampire slaying badass. The Black lady with the cute mini ‘fro is Delilah, also human, also a vampire slaying badass. Over behind us are a couple of vampire corpses returning to a more liquid state. Once everyone gets changed, go over and give them a good sniff. You’ll want to keep that scent in mind. If it smells strongly like that, kill it. Luke, got anything to add?”
Luke nodded. “The vampires will also be easy to tell because they’ll sport huge fangs and their fingernails will convert to claws. Watch out for those. They can disable just as well as the fangs. Don’t let them swipe at your throats or you will cease to have throats. You can render them inert by ripping their heads off or stabbing them through the heart with a wooden stake. If you do rip the head off, make sure it can’t roll back to the neck or someone else can put it back into place. It can reattach and reactivate the vampire. They are fast and strong. The older they are, the faster and stronger they are, so don’t get caught off guard or it will be the last thing you do. Pablo?”
“OK, Holly has given you your assignments. Alpha team and Bravo team, you’re with Luke. Follow his instructions as if they came directly from Holly or me. Charlie and Delta Teams, you’re with me and Delilah. She’ll be handling communication with Luke and his team. Don’t let any of the human hostages out of their cells until we’ve cleared the facility. Luke?” Luke shook his head; he had nothing more to add. “OK, team. Put on your fighting faces. It’s time to rumble.”
“Yay, team! Go Team! Rah, rah, ree; kick ‘em in the knee!” Sam cheered them on.
The sound of a door opening behind them caused everyone to turn around. A head popped out the door, eyes going wide at the sight of a bunch of burly werewolves. Luke thought he mouthed the word “fuck” before disappearing back into the jail.
“That’s their scout figuring out what happened to that camera. Let’s go before they can get too organized,” Luke ordered.
All the wolves, except for Sam and the other two divers, stripped off their sweatpants and tossed them back into their vans before beginning their shifts. A few moments later, Luke was surrounded by a dozen werewolves in bipedal hybrid form. The drivers of each of the vans had opened the back doors and pulled out boxes full of stakes attached to bandolier-style belts. They handed two to each of the wolves. Pablo strung on a pair as well. By the time they were done, they looked like a nightmare version of a Chewbacca cosplay convention.
Luke looked at Pablo, who nodded in reply. “Let’s do it. Everyone behind us.”
Luke and Pablo walked to the front doors, inserted their pilfered keys into the locks, and opened the doors. Two wolves followed up by dropping large rocks to prop them open. Luke drew his gladius and darted forward to the next set of doors.