He told them, “I’m grateful for what you’ve done, but you’ll be no good to anyone if you pass out from smoke inhalation. Fall back. Go help Melly and her team.”

They were good people, good fighters. Their reluctance to leave was obvious, but they followed orders.

As they pulled back, he did a quick head count. He had lost four of his own, and now after sending the humans and Light Fae away, his team was down to eleven. They needed to join up with Yolanthe and her troops.

To find Yolanthe, all he had to do was follow the noise.

The hallway that led to the munitions area was across the garage on his right, while the IT area lay to his left. The bulk of the fighting had been on the left, but now it had shifted.

Toward the munitions area.

Followed by his team, he strode to the conflict.

As they closed in, he saw that enemy forces had breached the first security door and gained entrance to the hallway inside. He raced from cover to cover, first hiding behind a concrete pillar, then behind a BMW riddled with bullet holes, while his team did the same.

Scanning the scene, he finally saw Yolanthe crouched behind an SUV. Lunging into a sprint, he joined her.

Her dark, short hair and hawkish features were smeared with soot.

When she saw him, she said, “Yo. Glad you’re alive.”

“Back at you.” He slipped his sword into its shoulder sheath and braced one hand on a fender. “Dominic’s dead.”

“Witness my happy dance. Fucking fucker.” Rolling up and around, she fired at the open doorway to the munitions hall. “We were pinned just outside IT until you got here. Dominic kept hammering at us, while Justine worked over here. I guess if she had already broken through the inner door, she would have fired a rocket launcher or two in here by now. So there’s that.”

He had to flush Justine and her fighters out of that hallway before they managed to break through the inner door. Justine couldn’t gain the capacity to send a fireball through the garage.

A lot of times fighting took finesse, patience and strategy.

Sometimes it took a high body count and a bludgeoning force.

He said, “We need enough fire in that hallway to drive them out. I have two grenades. Do you have any?”

Her dark eyes flashed as she glanced at him. “No. Wait here. I’ll see if any of the others do.”

While he waited, he rubbed his dry eyes. He had so many things he wanted to tell Melly, but mostly he just wanted to know if she was all right.

Where was she? How had the evacuation gone? Had they run into any resistance?

He wanted to tell her, you’re the light of my life. I had no idea how bright and open things could become with you.

Yolanthe reappeared, running so hard, her body slammed full tilt into the side of the SUV. When he looked at her, she opened her hands and showed him a grenade belt with three more grenades.

“Okay,” he said. He gathered the belt out of her grasp and added his two to the belt. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll get these into the hallway. I need to get close enough and at the right angle to throw this in, so I need you to cover me.”

“I love suicidal missions,” Yolanthe said. She readied her automatic rifle and gave him a bright grin. “Let’s go.”

He gave a ghost of a chuckle and pulled the pins on the grenades. They pushed away from the SUV and raced toward the hallway. While Yolanthe laid down a hail of covering fire, he sprinted hard, spun like a discus thrower, and heaved the grenade belt. He put all the force he could into it, sending the belt shooting deep into the hallway.

He felt an invisible force punch his right shoulder and left thigh and knew he’d been hit, but his body armor blocked most of the damage. When he and Yolanthe had run past the hallway several yards, they spun around.

Fighters poured out, fleeing the impending blast.

One of them was Justine, her auburn hair flying out from her head like a flag.

She sprinted toward the staircase. She was one of the oldest, most Powerful Vampyres present, and she moved faster than almost anybody else in the garage.

Except for Yolanthe and Julian.

Everything in Julian narrowed down to the need to kill. He leaped forward, but his leg buckled underneath him. The hit he had taken in the thigh had done more damage than he had realized.

Yolanthe wasn’t impaired. She shot forward, moving toward Justine like a linebacker. Leaping, she grabbed Justine by the hair with both hands, bodily lifted the other Vampyre, swung around and flung her through the air.

Justine’s body slammed into a concrete pillar several feet off the ground. She dropped like a stone.

Yolanthe said in Julian’s head, Bitch wants to throw down with her lovely locks all loose and shiny? Okay then.

Down the hallway, the grenades blew. The concussion blasted out through the garage. It knocked Julian to his knees.

He shoved up, drew his sword and launched toward Justine, ignoring the nearby fire and the fighting that had broken out all around.

Bitch hadn’t turned to dust either. She wasn’t dead yet.

As he neared, Justine rolled onto her stomach and came up on her hands and knees. Her teeth were bared in a rictus grin. She reached toward her waist and drew a gun.

And turned to level it at him.

Someone ran toward them from his right, aiming an automatic rifle at Justine and firing a constant spray of bullets.

The shooter was a tall woman with blond hair pulled into a tight bun at her neck. She had a cloth wrapped around her nose and mouth, and she was shadowed by a tall, powerfully built Light Fae male who threw combat spells like sparks of deadly fire.

Melly.

Justine’s arm jerked back and her shots went wide.

Julian regarded the other Vampyre with some degree of incredulity. Bitch still wasn’t dead. But her arm was sure shot to hell.

He limped forward the rest of the way to her, swung his sword, and Justine’s head spun away from her body.

It flew straight toward Melly, as it happened, who flinched back and pulled a massive ew face that was obvious even through the masking cloth. Using the butt of her gun, she whacked at the head like it was a baseball, batting it away from her just as it crumbled to dust.

Meanwhile, bullets flew everywhere, and people still pounded the hell out of each other. Julian grabbed Melly by the waist and hauled her around the concrete pillar for cover.

He shouted at her, “What are you doing down here?”

Her eyes went very wide and she flung out her free hand. She looked more than a little crazed as she shouted in reply, “I couldn’t keep watching this on TV!”