Chapter 40
“Let’s go!” Jo shouted, gesturing with her arm for the others to follow her. Brandon and Zane took off behind her, but before Jo turned around, she noticed Cassidy lift her open hand and pull one of the Vampire guns from the pile of ash that used to be a Vampire. All of the attacking forces were down now, most of them dissolved, others still burning. It might’ve been a good idea to go ahead and make her attack, but until Jo knew how the Vampires were able to shoot Guardians, she didn’t want to take such a huge chance and put her team in that sort of danger. If Vampires could kill Guardians, the entire world was more out of sorts than she thought.
In a few minutes, she caught up to the rest of the team, shouting mentally to Lucy and Leo that it was them coming since the two were acting as scouts, guns at the ready, in case they were followed by the enemy.
A quick assessment of the situation showed her that everyone who’d been hit was either recovering or back to normal, thanks to the Healers. Cale looked frazzled, maybe a little worn out, and Scott looked pissed. She imagined he didn’t like the idea of Vampires being able to shoot Guardians any more than she did.
Cass arrived a step after the other three, what looked like a modified AK47 in her hands. She was spinning it over, studying it, before she even came to a stop.
“How is everyone?” Jo asked, looking around at each of them. “Is everyone okay?”
“Thanks to Scott and Cale,” Ping said. “I thought I was going to die.”
“How the hell did that happen?” Scott demanded. “How did a fucking Vampire shoot me?”
“I don’t know,” Jo admitted. “But I felt like we should fall back until we figure it out.” She looked over at Cassidy and saw that her aunt had a bullet in her hand. “Any idea what’s different about it?”
“Not for sure, but I have a guess,” she said, looking up and catching Jo’s eyes. “You wanted to know what the scandium was for. Well, I’m guessing it’s for these bullets. We won’t be able to tell without taking it apart and looking at its chemical makeup. That’s something Christian usually does.”
“I can do it,” Emma chimed in, walking over from where she had been sitting next to Ping. “It’ll take me a few days, and I’m not sure I have all of the equipment I’ll need. I might have to go to Moscow.”
Jo sucked in a deep breath. She definitely wanted Emma to do whatever was necessary to make sure they identified what was in the bullet, but it all made sense to her now. “Okay. Do what you need to do,” she said to Emma. Cassidy handed her the bullet, and Jo turned around, her hands on her hips. It made perfect sense now. Why hadn’t it occurred to any of them before? Especially the ones who had been alive when the revelation that titanium bullets allowed a Hunter to kill another Hunter had been discovered?
“So… they’re mining scandium to create bullets that kill Guardians?” Cadon asked, his hands on his hips. “But… that’s not possible. How can anything allow a Vampire to kill a Guardian?”
“How can anything allow a Hunter to kill another Hunter?” Cassidy asked. “It doesn’t follow the rules, but Vampires aren’t exactly about that, are they? At least this way, maybe they’ll stop making their bands of Hunter assassins. I hate those assholes.”
“I doubt that,” Brandon said, shaking his head. “Why any Hunter would allow themselves to be bought out by the enemy to go after Guardians and kill them, I don't know, but nowadays, everybody seems to have a price.”
Jo had heard of the bands of assassin Hunters they were referring to, though she’d never seen one with her own eyes. This new discovery, the scandium bullets, was much more deadly, potentially much more readily accessible to any and all Vampires. And she had no idea how in the world she could ever stop them. If every single one of those Xs on the maps was a scandium mine, then she’d have to kill off thousands of Vampires who were armed with ammunition that could kill the ones meant to keep her safe while she did it.
“They can’t all be operational,” Cass said, as if she were reading her mind and knew the sentence she’d just formulated. Maybe she was. “If they were, they would’ve hit us the first time.”
“They knew we were coming here next,” Brandon said. “They must’ve concentrated their available ammo here.”
“If we’ve caught them early enough in the process, maybe we can stop them before they’re fully armed,” Cadon offered.
“Or come up with a shield of some sort that their bullets can’t penetrate.” Zane joined the conversation for the first time. While Jo liked that idea, she didn’t know how feasible it was. For now, she just needed to find their bitch queen and cut her head off before she could cause any more damage.
“How did they know where we were headed, though?” Cassidy asked aloud. “We didn’t say which cave we were headed to.”
“Maybe they spread the ammo they had between the closest caves to the last one we hit,” Brandon offered.
“Maybe….” If Cassidy said anything else, Jo didn’t hear her. Another thought had entered her mind, and she was off and running through the woods at full speed before she even had a chance to tell the others where she was going, one word upon her lips.
“Ryker!”
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