Gates of Rapture (Guardians of Ascension 6)

He could hear screams coming from houses and alleys between. Once he reached the ground, however, he retracted his wings and entered the first house he came to. There was a lot of blood and too many bodies. He raced through and found a death vampire in the back room with a teen ascender, drinking her down, raping her.

He threw a dagger into his kidney, which brought the death vamp arching back and off the young woman. Leto moved swiftly and with his sword took the bastard’s head.

The girl pushed away from the monster, then crawled to the other side of the room. He didn’t want to leave her, but he had to go. “Hide,” he said.

She held her neck and nodded. She slid quickly beneath the bed.

He left by way of the window, jumping out.

His night progressed in exactly that way. He went from house to house hunting for evil, finding it, striking it down.

He came upon four death vamps in a house on a hill near a small dry streambed. These pretty-boys were huge, and he recognized them for what they were. They belonged to a group of recruits brought from Third Earth, something Greaves had been doing for the past year. No one knew exactly how he’d been doing it, but Greaves was a vampire with many tricks.

Leto knew he wasn’t a match for these vamps in his current state. When three of them turned and stared at him indifferently, while the other continued drinking a woman to death, Leto felt the vibration go down his left leg, then his right.

For the first time, he did exactly what Brynna had been encouraging him to do all along: He let his beast take over. At the same moment he mentally adjusted the belt of his kilt as well as the buckles of his shin guards and battle sandals. He got rid of his weapons harness altogether.

“Motherfucker” came out of one of the oversized death vamps. “Where the hell did you learn to do that, traitor?”

Leto smiled. Now, there was one of the great ironies of his life—that a death vampire would call him traitor.

His sword almost felt small in his beast-sized hand. “What’s the matter, pretty-boy? You afraid of me?”

“Just because you can morph like a Third Earth warrior? Hell, no. There are still four of us and only one of you.”

“Bring it, ass**le. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Leto felt more powerful than he ever had before. He held out the palm of his left hand and let a hand-blast fly. The sound was almost deafening in the small house.

The death vamp on the left took it in the chest. He flew backward, hard into the wall. His ribs were smashed in. He wouldn’t be breathing anymore.

Leto aimed another hand-blast at the second death vamp, but since the bastard had decided to deliver his own deadly blast, the searing energy met in the middle, soared upward, and blew part of the roof off.

All this activity had the advantage of getting the fourth death vamp off the woman. But knowing the power of these Third Earth death vamps as he did, Leto was still no match for their combined strength and skill, so he used his primary advantage: his battle experience.

He folded behind them, shoved a dagger through the back of one, then folded outside the building and waited.

Two to go.

“Get him” came from inside. “He’s out there. I can smell him.”

Leto cloaked himself in mist. He listened. He felt the air move behind him. He swung his sword and took the bastard’s head off. It hit the stone lane with a terrible thump.

Only one left.

Leto looked up the lane. He extended his vision and saw a number of colonists rising up to look at him. He waved them down and they disappeared.

Good. The people were hiding. Part of the strategy among all the colonies was to teach the people to move the most vulnerable well way from the buildings when the death vampires came.

He smiled, remembering something Arthur had done to taunt death vampires. He made a raspberry sound with his lips. “Come out and play,” he shouted, letting his mist melt away.

He wasn’t going to hide this time.

The last death vamp leaped through the window, and it was game on. He was huge, like Leto, and had Third Earth skills. But Leto had been a warrior for three millennia while it seemed this bastard had been relying on size alone to win his battles.

Leto circled, his sword held out and away from his body. He watched the bastard’s eyes; when they shifted he lunged, blocked, stepped back, then whirled. With another swift lunge, he caught the pretty-boy up through soft part of the belly.

His scream swallowed up the night air.

Leto withdrew his sword. The death vamp fell forward and Leto, also with the practice of millennia, took his head.

He leaned back, bent his knees, and roared into the air.

He pivoted and headed back to the main street on a run, his gaze strafing the sky above, then every shadow nearby. By now, a thousand militia warriors were swarming the town. There were bodies of death vampires everywhere, some moving slightly, others inert.

Gideon had the north end secured and Diallo had already arrived to begin repairing the mist that had been burned away.

The air smelled of smoke and blood and fear.

The fighting was thickest now at the southern end, but the battle was almost over. His warriors were steadily collecting death vampire bodies and moving them to Gideon’s position.

Standing off to the side, Leto watched Gideon direct traffic. He had his warrior phone to his ear, issuing removal orders either to the morgue at Apache Junction Two or to the one at Central Command. Headless bodies and the detached heads began disappearing as fast as they were collected.

The mission proceeded with great speed, all the warriors moving on lightning feet. Months of training had paid off.

Gideon kept sending repeat details to scour each house, each garden, each nearby ravine, and especially the underground cisterns, hunting for the enemy. There was no way they were leaving a single death vamp behind.

Leto approached Gideon, knowing that he would look strange to the warrior, but it couldn’t be helped. Besides, in this form, Leto had vanquished four Third Earth death vamps. Not half bad for a beast-man.

Gideon’s eyes widened a little, as did the eyes of a number of the Militia Warriors near him.

Leto shrugged. “Better get used to it. Apparently, this is my new look.”

Gideon glanced around and ordered everyone back to work. “We’re bringing in backup squads to patrol through the night.”

“How many?”

“Twenty.”

“Good.” That would put eighty warriors on the ground. “And the healers?”

“As soon as the fighting in the south is done, we’re bringing them in. Horace has forty ready to go. But, Leto, we have at least twenty dead colonists, and several of our warriors didn’t make it.”