Chapter 113

“Where the hell are they?”
Jo wasn’t surprised that the first voice she heard over her IAC was Elliott’s. As soon as they’d walked into the mine, after Brandon had blasted the door down with the bazooka and the dust had cleared, they’d all been expecting to be rushed by a barrage of Vampires.
Instead, they were walking into a cave that appeared to be empty. The chamber they were standing in was relatively small, compared to the other mines they’d been in, but there were a lot of hallways shooting off in every direction. It reminded Jo of the mine they’d been in where the Vampires had lured them in and then blasted the hell out of them with that stupid bomb that had buried Cassidy in a ton of debris.
She didn’t get the impression that that’s what was going on here, though. In the distance, she could hear hurried footsteps.
Was it possible they had literally caught them off guard, and the Vampires hadn’t even been watching the entrance? It seemed like there should at least be a couple of bloodsuckers watching the front door, but if there had been any here, they had been blown to smithereens along with the barrier Brandon had blasted.
“They’re coming.” That was her dad. Even though he was in the back, as she’d asked him to be, he could hear better than the rest of them and could likely tell them exactly how many Vampires were on their way, what they were armed with, and how much each of them weighed.
Jo didn’t have time to scrutinize her own shortcomings at the moment. There were so many halls shooting off of the room they were all congregated in, she needed to split them up and send them deeper into the mine so that they could find Holland. Assuming this was the only exit, she’d leave people behind to watch for her to come this way, but she wasn’t convinced that the Vampire Queen wouldn’t have a second way out--like she had last time. After all, if she hadn’t had that stupid tunnel last time, she wouldn’t have escaped, and she surely wouldn’t put herself in a situation where she could be trapped now.
Jo started splitting her team into small groups, based on where they were standing, sending them down tunnels. She hadn’t done the math to see how many of them needed to go in each to cover all of them, but by the time she was done, there were four team members left to guard the exit while she and Zane headed down the hall right in front of them.
She’d left her dad behind on purpose, with some of the least experienced team members. Catching his eye to make sure he understood why she’d done it, she saw him nod and then turned to run down the hall just as the Vampires were becoming visible in the distance. The tunnel slanted down into the earth, so they were running uphill while she and Zane were headed down.
That gave them an advantage, but then, she had no idea how many of them there were either.
She wasn’t going to stand there and count. Jo and Zane both opened fire as soon as the Vampires were within range. With the titanium bullets in their weapons, they should have a better chance at killing them with their guns without having to rely on their knives, especially if Heather was throwing a shield to keep Holland’s powers at bay. She had no idea how well that might work, but the idea was, since Holland had been known to use her powers to give her armies super strengths in the past that kept them from dying or made them capable of taking different forms, if Heather could keep that power from reaching the attacking Vampires, even just to a degree, the titanium bullets should be enough to knock them out with just a carefully placed shot--or two.
Something seemed to be working. The first couple of Vampires Jo and Zane connected with exploded into ash with just a few rounds of shots. There were several more behind them, though. As the Vampires began to fire, Jo let Zane get in front of her, knowing that he should be fine even if they had the scandium bullets because he had on the protective gear Emma had made to keep the scandium from hurting Guardians.
They found out in a matter of seconds as the Vampires’ first round of bullets hit. Jo held her breath as she realized that these Vampires were better shots than most and clearly used to using guns. In her experience, most Vampires didn’t use bullets of any kind preferring to tear their prey apart.
A bullet hit Zane in the shoulder, knocking him back slightly into Jo, but it didn’t penetrate the fabric Emma had created. Zane winced a bit, which told her that just because it didn’t break the skin, that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt, but she was glad he wasn’t actually do damage, and the two of them could keep moving and keep shooting. Jo shot over his shoulder as they got closer to the Vampires who seemed a bit surprised that the Guardian wasn’t going down.
Jo shot another Vampire in the head twice, and the female bloodsucker fell backward, exploding into ash before she hit the ground. Zane took out another one as well, and then they were fighting for the same real estate. As much as Jo liked to blast a Vampire into oblivion with her gun, there was nothing quite like the satisfying tear of a Vampire’s head coming off of its body.
She slammed her elbow into the throat of the closest Vampire while lifting her leg and kicking hard into the gut of another as Zane took on three at the same time. Jo pulled her knife from her belt and jabbed into the Vampire’s neck, cranking it around before pulling it out and meeting the Vampire she’d kicked as he came barreling back at her. She caught him in the eye as she faintly noted that the woman she’d just stabbed in the neck was gone. With the knife in his eye, the Vampire shrieked and tried to back away, but Jo wasn’t letting him go anywhere. She grabbed the hilt of the blade and jerked it straight down before removing it and thrusting it in again. This time, she got him in the heart, and he was gone before the scream even dissipated.
She turned to help Zane with the last Vampire he had left to defeat. Grabbing its head from behind, she gave him a signal every LIGHTS team member knew, and Zane grabbed his torso. She turned his head to the left as Zane turned the body to the right, and in a few seconds, that satisfying ripping tearing sound filled her ears, and his head filled her hands for a second before it disappeared.
“Are you all right?” Zane asked her.
Jo nodded, glad to see that he was, too, and they took off running again.
Reports of other encounters came in from around the mine. Most of her team was doing fine, thanks to Emma’s new protective uniforms, but there had been a few Hunters injured. Thankfully, there were Healers near enough to keep anyone from being permanently hurt.
Zane was in front of her again as they came to the end of the tunnel. It entered another cavern like the one they’d been in at the opening of the cave. But this one was much larger. Eight other tunnels shot off of it, most of them seeming to lead back to the front, which meant some of the tunnels her teammates had gone down wouldn’t be able to reach them without working their way through a bit of a maze.
In front of her, there were three other tunnels that led deeper into the cave. Something told her that Holland was down there somewhere. Which one should she choose? Which one was screaming at her that it held the way to the Vampire Queen?
“What do you think?” Zane asked her.
With a deep breath, Jo listened to the voice in the back of her head and said, “Right.”
Zane didn’t question her, only nodded and got in front of her. They ran down the tunnel to their right, Jo letting the rest of the team know what to expect once they got through their passages as she ran. The ceiling wasn’t quite as high here, and it was difficult for Zane to run at full speed when he clearly had to hunch over, but Jo was short enough that she didn’t have to worry about hitting her head on the ceiling as long as it didn’t get any more narrow.
The floor here was different than in the other tunnel and the bigger rooms they’d been in. This floor seemed smoother. The longer they ran this direction, the more it seemed like it had been evened out and polished. Jo found it odd but didn’t have an explanation for it, unless it was because this was the queen’s part of the cave.