The first shot came from one of the female assassins. The second came from Kajus, holed up in the corner of a low garden wall, as well as the third, and by that time, the Noturatii soldiers had their fingers on their triggers, startled and searching through the darkness for something to shoot.
The fourth shot came from high on the roof, and from the angle, Baron guessed it had been delivered by the Khuli, and after that, it was a free-for-all, Noturatii and shifters alike letting loose a barrage of bullets that was as deafening as it was deadly.
Five Noturatii soldiers went down fast, head shots to all of them, as a convenient workaround to the bullet-proof vests protecting their chests. But the element of surprise wore off quickly, and that was as much of an advantage as the shifters were likely to get. Once they realised they were under fire, the soldiers lost no time in regrouping, adopting defensive formations, and making much greater use of the cover the gardens provided. There was a sudden yell over to Baron’s left, then a sickening crack and a thud, and he smiled; the assassins would never limit themselves to mere bullets, and he imagined they were going to be having fun today, taking down a dozen or more of their enemies each.
For his own part, Baron was sheltering behind a garden statue, waiting patiently for the trio of soldiers to the south to begin taking cautious steps closer. He hadn’t fired his gun yet, biding his time before he revealed his presence, waiting for a clear shot that would kill, rather than just piss them off. The path through the gardens was an obvious one, an easy route of access for any soldier who might lack the sufficient practical experience to think better of it, but if no one took the bait in the next minute, he would have to move and lend his support in another area.
Over to his right, John was displaying none of Baron’s reticence. He darted from cover to cover, rolling and jumping, firing shot after shot, vengeance a living being inside him, and Baron felt a distracting flush of heat in his groin as he watched his former lover move like liquid silk. Two soldiers went down, John snarled in pleasure, and then Baron forced his attention back to his own mark, sending two rapid shots down the path, one of the men collapsing instantly, another cursing and grabbing his neck as he ducked back into cover. A volley of bullets were sent back at him, all harmlessly passing him by as he ducked hastily behind his stone shelter.
At the northern edge of the property, Tank crouched in the low scrub, his finger itching to start pulling the trigger on his gun. Beside him, Simon, Aaron and two of the Grey Watch women were similarly restless, waiting for the fighting to start.
Genna, thankfully, was currently in Germany receiving some much-needed training for her unique abilities, and her absence had bypassed the question of whether she would have been asked to join the fight or not. Though her talent for making objects disappear was a powerful one and undoubtedly an asset in battle, she was also untrained, both with the shifter magic and with conventional weapons. Tank was wholly relieved that he hadn’t had to argue, either with Luna and Kajus, or with Genna herself, about her involvement in a battle of this magnitude.
“Engaging soldiers,” came a brief announcement through his earpiece, and a moment later, he heard the first shots fired on the other side of the manor. The soldiers in front of them were already restless, no doubt as eager to get things started as Tank was, and they started moving more rapidly towards the manor.
Tank signalled for his own group to move up to the edge of the tree line. The back lawn was wide, with no cover of any sort, and he waited while the soldiers crept forward, further from the possibility of retreat.
With a nod to his team, he brought up his gun and shot the closest man in the back of the head. He missed the next one, the soldier moving just at the wrong moment, but Simon got him, and he went down with a thud.
A burst of gun-fire sounded from over to the right, then another from the left, and by that point, the soldiers out on the lawn had realised what was going on. They dropped to the ground, and Tank’s team were forced to take cover as they returned fire. Even so, Tank managed to get a couple of shots off in return, seeing another man go down, clutching his leg, and then he withdrew behind a tree to reload.
“Get back!” He snapped at one of the women on his team who was leaning too far out from behind her tree, too focused on lining up her shot to pay attention to her own safety. She obediently darted back into cover. “Simon, ten o’clock,” he said, noticing a soldier sneaking sideways for a better shot, all but invisible in his dark clothing. Simon fired four rapid shots, and the man went down. But more soldiers from nearer the house had turned back now, and Tank wasn’t sure how long they’d be able to hold this line. If the soldiers made it back into the trees, the shifters could be in serious trouble.
Shouting started up from inside the manor, with the occupants no doubt well and truly awake by now. From Baron’s position a couple of metres from the west wall, several male voices filtered through to him, angry and commanding, and he regretted the current need to stay in human form. Canine hearing was far sharper, and he would have liked to know what was being said; whether the family was bunkering down inside, or if they planned to do anything reckless and heroic.
A burst of gun-fire sounded from the west, well off into the forest; Andre and his team had no doubt engaged the soldiers on that front, and then he heard the distant hum of a machine. A sudden BOOM from the roof confirmed what he’d already suspected about that development – the Noturatii were sending up drones, and Caroline was taking unholy glee in shooting them down. She had what some people might consider to be an unhealthy obsession with powerful rifles, although in their day-to-day work there was little reason to use one. If she’d been recruited under slightly different circumstances, she could well have been chosen by the Council to be trained as an assassin.
More soldiers were approaching from the south-west, and Baron dropped one of them and managed to injure another before being forced to take cover again. The sound of heavy thudding came from within the house, and he tensed. No, no, no, just stay inside. Don’t go doing anything stupid -
“…a whole battalion of fucking cops!” The angry voice was clearly audible through a half-open window, and Baron’s eyes opened wide as he heard the next part, with three or four men involved in the conversation.
“We can’t shoot cops! Are you fucking suicidal?”
“I’m not going to jail! I told you that right from the start.”
“What about the lab?”
“Fuck the lab…” the voices drifted off to angry rumbles as the men moved to another part of the house… and a moment later, a volley of gun-fire and shouting came from the front door.
Cursing under his breath, Baron took a chance and darted out of his hiding spot, moving rapidly through hedges and potted plants – taking out one, then two soldiers as he went – to where Kajus was positioned, south of the front corner of the house. When he arrived, it was to find Kajus staring dumbly at the front door. Checking they weren’t in any immediate danger, Baron dared to look, and saw that six burly men had just burst outside with a shotgun and several sub-machine guns and begun spraying the garden with bullets.
“What the fuck!?” Kajus demanded, then he smoothly spun around and took out a soldier creeping up from the right, his bullet slicing through the man’s neck at the same time as John took out his kneecap.
“Don’t really know,” Baron told him, “but from a few choice words, I’m guessing they’re drug dealers.”
Li Khuli felt an odd thread of discomfort as she slid down off the highest roof of the manor and onto the second storey. Saving the civilians was a priority, of course, and she was well-trained enough to put her emotions aside in order to get the job done, but each time she pulled that trigger and saw another soldier go down, she felt a stab of guilt. What if these men had been sent into battle against their will? What if they were like she had been for so long, obeying their master’s orders with dire consequences if they tried to rebel?
There were two men below her who had made it all the way to the manor, and they were preparing to break a window to gain access to the interior. What if they hated the Noturatii just as much as the shifters did, and had been either forced or coerced into joining the organisation? Surely they didn’t deserve to die for that?
Silent as a ghost, Li Khuli dropped down on top of them. One of the men was dead before he hit the ground, his neck broken with a neat, quick snap. The other man had a split second to gape at her in terror before he, too, was dead, a knife in his throat severing an artery that sprayed blood all over a hydrangea.
Such a waste of life, Li Khuli thought as she wiped the blade on the leaves of a nearby bush and melted back into the shadows. What would it take for this war to end and the pointless loss of life to stop?
The young assassin hated fights like this. With a grimace, she grabbed a soldier by the head and slit his throat, then dropped the body carelessly on the ground. The rampant bloodshed wasn’t without its benefits, of course. Surrounded by the Noturatii, she could silence her own conscience for once, feeling no remorse about killing men who were bent on ending the shifters’ existence. But assassins were trained for stealth, for silence, for sneaking in and killing a target without ever being seen.
She spun around, grabbed one of the soldiers and used him as a shield as she shot another man coming up behind him, then shot the first man in the head. She dived to the side and rolled, avoiding a spray of bullets, then fired her gun once, twice, and the man shooting at her was dead.
There was no subtlety here, she reflected as she reloaded her gun. There was no time to plan refined strategy or put carefully honed patience and attention to detail to work. It was just a case of find a target and take him out, then find the next one.
Seeing a pair of legs through a gap in a hedge, she lashed out with both feet, satisfied when she felt something snap and heard a pained scream. Two bullets finished the job, and then she was back on her feet, seeking out her next target through the darkness.
A thud sounded right behind Baron; he and Kajus both spun around, guns at the ready, in time to see a dark shape roll into a bush. “Easy!” a gentle, female voice came back at them. “I’m on your side.”
“I don’t know you,” Baron snarled, not putting his gun down.
“I’m the Khuli,” the Khuli said, and Baron couldn’t help cursing. Of all the fucked up bloody times to - “They’ve got a meth lab. I heard them talking about it while I was on the roof.” The Khuli raised a pistol, lined up a shot and fired, the bullet somehow missing one of the civilians by scant millimetres before lodging right between the eyes of a soldier on the far side of the group. Despite his deep distrust of the woman, even Baron couldn’t help being impressed.
“We’re risking our lives to save a bunch of meth dealers?” Kajus sounded seriously pissed off, and Baron could hardly blame him -
“GRENADE!” The booming warning came from the roof, from the male assassin, and the three of them bolted for cover, Baron feeling a sharp pain along his shoulder just before he threw himself into a small pond. The explosion was blinding, even from behind closed eyelids, and he felt a surge of heat roll over the top of him. They’d made it out of the immediate blast range, but not by much. A quick check of his own injuries – negligible – and a visual check of both his teammates (it was a crazy day in hell when he could call a Khuli a teammate), and they were back to business. Through his earpiece, Baron could hear Tank calling for backup for his team, Andre’s calm response that he was moving his team closer, and he had the stray thought that he was glad Simon had chosen the waterproof model.
“What do we do?” Kajus asked him, and Baron wished his brain would stop throwing these distractions at him all the time. He’d slept with Kajus back in Scotland, and had fantasised about doing it again more than once, and now, with Kajus’s face coated with dirt and sweat, his eyes fierce, his chest heaving, he felt an urgent desire to bend him over that low wall over there, and -
“Civilians have no place in this war,” the Khuli answered. “We defend them. As we would anyone else.”
“You have a seriously fucked-up moral compass, you know that?” Baron snarled at her. Three of the men from the house were dead, and he watched as a soldier walked brazenly up to a fourth and shot him in the head. A moment later, the soldier was dead, one of the female assassins making a quick job of it.
“We’re getting hammered out here,” Mark reported through Baron’s earpiece.
“Man down,” Tank’s voice came through, cold and calm.
Four more soldiers filtered through the bushes, keeping Baron and his group occupied for long seconds, the standoff finally broken when the Khuli leapt sideways out of a hedge, taking down all four men in under five seconds. Baron hadn’t even noticed her leave. His heart lurched belatedly as he wondered who on Tank’s team had been killed.
“Man down,” Mark reported, sounding tense and breathless.
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” one of the female assassins reported, “but the civilians are all dead.”
Baron shook his head. It was no surprise, the way they’d come rushing out of the house, guns blazing, all but painting bright red targets on their chests.
“Retreat,” Caroline ordered sharply. “There’s too many of them. Team Two, get clear of the fence. I’m going to lob a grenade in your direction to cut a path out of here.”
“We’ll cover you on your way down,” Baron told her, shoving a new clip into his gun. Even with that promise, he wasn’t sure of her chances. The path off the roof had little cover and far too many guns pointed in that direction.
Down the path, Baron spotted John, who gave him a quick nod. He slunk off towards the rear of the manor where Caroline was about to pull off her fireworks act, ready to make a run for it the moment the coast was clear. The three assassins he trusted to make their own way off the property, or at the very least, to let him know if they couldn’t. So that only left Raniesha, who had been positioned at the south-east corner. He hadn’t heard from her in a while, but she wasn’t too far from where both female assassins had set up shop.
“Raniesha, which way are you headed?”
There was no reply. More gun-fire sounded from the far eastern side of the property where Mark’s team was making its stand.
“We’re headed to rendezvous site four,” Silas’s voice told him, sounding tinny and tired, and Baron immediately wondered if he’d been injured. “We can’t make it across to Team Two.”
“Copy that,” Baron replied, making a mental note to let Luna and her crew know. There was a total of six potential pick-up sites, designed to provide an easy exit no matter where on the property the shifters ended up fighting. He only hoped no one was injured so badly as to suffer with the necessary delay in rounding everyone up. “Raniesha, do you copy? What’s your location?” Still no reply. “Raniesha?” Silence. “RANIESHA!”
“Raniesha’s dead,” an assassin reported. “We’ll bring her body and see Caroline down safely. Get the hell out of here.”
Why the fuck was everyone so calm!?
“Copy that. Retreat in progress.” Baron’s voice came out smooth and even.
“We’re clear,” Tank reported, the leader of Team Two. About ten seconds later, a booming explosion ripped through the rear of the property.
“Let’s go,” Baron told Kajus, the pair of them making a hasty retreat around the side of the building. The Khuli was nowhere to be seen.