Chapter 57

Once again, Jo found herself standing in the snow amongst dense trees, staring at the side of a mountain. It was getting old, these vantage points, but with plenty of Xs left on her list to tick off and little else to do about it, she readied her weapon and hoped these assholes hadn’t gotten the memo that they needed to have their scandium bullets ready.
This mine was set off from the others, a little deeper into the mountain range, away from major towns or villages. It had taken them several hours to get there, so she hoped that meant they wouldn’t be expecting the next hit to come at this location. Granted, even Vampires were smart enough to figure out that they needed to have all of their facilities at the ready, but this one was so far off the beaten path, she was banking on the idea that they might just assume her forces wouldn’t bother to go there.
She was about to find out.
This time, she was sending Cassidy in first on her own to assess the situation. Dressed all in black, her aunt flew across the snow, just a sliver of moonlight illuminating her as she rocketed from the cover of trees to the cave opening, which they’d already ascertained was a narrow break in the rock that opened up into a fairly wide chamber as soon as one slid through the opening.
Cassidy was inside in less than two seconds. Jo switched to her aunt’s IAC point of view to follow along. It was strange that there’d been no gunfire on the outside of the cave, and now that she was inside, Cassidy was making her way through the cave unimpeded.
“Do you hear anything?” Brandon asked his wife over the IAC.
“Yes,” she said. “I hear some tinging sounds further back in the cave, like maybe tools hitting the rock. But no voices or footsteps.”
Finding the entire situation a little too odd, Jo decided to go ahead and send in her next line. She had the suspicion that they were about to be ambushed, and she didn’t want Cassidy to be alone if that happened, even though she was, by far, the most powerful and skilled of all of them.
Jo went in with the second wave, which made commanding the operation all that much harder. She needed to find someone else who could stay outside and call the movements, like her dad usually did, but it couldn’t be her. The only reason she was there was because of her gun. If she didn’t actually join the attack, she may as well be sitting at home. Not for the first time, she wished her dad was with them.
Inside of the cave, she saw several passageways leading off the main path to both her right and left. Quickly, she deployed troops down all of them, signaling for Scott and Zane to go with her as she followed Cassidy at a distance down the main passageway.
She could hear the sound Cassidy had referred to earlier, too, but it didn’t sound like tools to her. It sounded like a clock. Jo paused, concentrating on the sound. Why in the world would there be a clock that loud inside of the cave?
Then, it came to her. She hadn’t been keyed in on the near catastrophe at the bus in time to save her brother from biting it, but her aunt had. Now, it was Cassidy walking into a trap. “Bomb!” she shouted aloud and through her IAC.
Cassidy turned to look at her, her long brown hair whipping around behind her shoulders as she caught Jo’s eyes. Behind her, a bright blinding light began to fill the wide cavern, coming at them so quickly, Jo didn’t even have time to blink. Her aunt’s hand flew up, just as a fireball the size of the cavern they were in reached her. A blue light began to glow around the wave of energy radiating out from deeper inside of the cave.
Cassidy’s shield caught the force of the explosion, but it was clear she was straining to hold it in place. Fire and smoke began to billow against the thin blue veil that separated the power of the bomb from all of them, from bringing the cave down around them.
“Everyone get out, now!” Jo screamed. Her orders were clear and followed immediately. The sound of footsteps running back the way they’d come echoed out of the cave, but she didn’t take her eyes off of her aunt.
She’d never seen Cassidy struggle with anything before. She always had a way of making things look easy, effortless. That wasn’t the case now. Her forehead was damp with perspiration. Her arm was shaking. She hadn’t even turned back to face it or bothered to put up her other arm. It was taking every bit of concentration she had to hold that wave back.
“Come on, Jo!” Zane said at her elbow. “Let’s go so she can do what she needs to do.”
“I’m not leaving her!” Jo said with conviction. Brandon was there now, too, having run toward the danger instead of away from it. Jo turned to Zane. “But you need to get out.”
“No,” he said, as stalwart as she had made her own statement. “Not without you.”
“Go!” Cass yelled at all of them. “Brandon--get her out of here!”
“You think I’m going to leave you behind? To be buried in the rubble alone?”
“I’ve got it, goddamnit! Just go! It can’t kill me. We don’t know what’s in it!” Cassidy’s eyes, one hazel, one steel gray implored them to just leave her.
Jo could see that Cassidy was fading, and she knew how stubborn her aunt was, how badly she wanted them to go so she could deal with it herself. But she wasn’t planning to budge. “Do what you need to do!” she said. “That’s an order.”
Cassidy slowly shook her head. “You might’ve taken this position out of responsibility to your family, but you’re not going to tell me what to do. I owe it to my sister to get your ass out of her alive. Now go!”
With that, Cassidy picked Jo up off of the ground, using her free hand, and flung her backward toward the cave. Jo hit the ground, a little harder than expected, since Cassidy had no energy to gingerly lay her down. Brandon came flying back next, and Zane moved of his own accord, now that Jo was by the exit. He grabbed a hold of her and pulled her out before she had an opportunity to disagree and then tugged Brandon out as well.
“No! Cassidy!” Brandon was screaming. Jo felt his wail of despair to her very core. They were only feet outside of the cave when Cassidy’s strength gave out. A rush of hot air greeted them as the energy was finally loosed. The ground shook, and the sound of the insides of the mountain falling apart rumbled through the entryway.
“This is it,” Jo thought to herself. “This is the disaster I knew was on the horizon.” Even though they all believed her aunt wasn’t capable of dying, it certainly seemed now like perhaps they had made a mistake, and she was vulnerable to death, just like everyone else. As the rumbling increased, Cassidy’s IAC went to black, and there was no way of contacting her. In Jo’s experience, that usually meant the worst had happened.
A quick pop pop noise behind her and then a shout or two from her teammates let her know that the worst was just beginning. She turned to see a line of armed forms coming out of the trees. They weren’t her teammates. This was an ambush, and they were all ducks on a pond.