Pandora's Box: Book 3 of the Crystal Raven Series

Angel was up on the walls with April near sunset. Both wore worried frowns. The vampyres had been too quiet over the past few days, not even testing their defences. Something big had to be coming down the pipe, perhaps even the big one they had all been dreading. They were as ready as their leaders could make them, missing half a choir of reinforcements who had never made it in-country before the vampyre invasion. And even more than the missing personnel, the supplies that had either not made it in-country or were lost on the runway of the airport. April could not help wondering what would become of her girls if the fortress fell and if their presence here had not led to the harrowing of Turkey.

The drums started the moment the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, a lurid, hypnotic beat that chased sleep from the night. At its first beat, alarms sent the choir to the walls, where they stood listening and watching the night. Nothing. They saw absolutely nothing but darkness. The darkness deepened, becoming an inky blackness that swallowed all sound but the drums. April found herself swaying to their rhythm and had to give herself a good shake. Up and down the wall, others were doing the same thing.

The fighting began on the eastern outwall, while those in the fortress were still caught up in the rhythm of the drums. Dark-skinned warriors, many wearing grass and feather headdresses, poured in through the breach and raced towards the fortress. Soon there were hundreds at the skirt of the poorly defended fortress wall, the defenders still oblivious to the danger. And still, the drums throbbed.

The first vampyre over the inner walls found an exposed throat. The second met the strong jaws of Strawberry. Huckleberry howled. It cut across the beating drums, the long notes of alarm rising to fill the night, and the defenders suddenly saw the danger. Grey and brown-robed warrior monks raced to fill the breach. The beachhead was too wide to contain easily. Seeing this, Angel and Alvaro led a sally from the front wall, arriving first. Along with the hounds and the surviving defenders, they began fighting a delaying action, waiting for reinforcements to arrive. Desperate steel met claws and fangs in a dance of violence and death. And still, the drums throbbed.

April led the second counter charge, vampyre zinger at the ready. As much as it pained her to admit, her daughter’s accidental discovery was coming in handy. Even powered by her crystal alone, it threw three to five vampyres from the wall with each psychic blast. Only it was draining, both on the crystal and one its user. By the time she reached the heaviest fighting, April felt an overwhelming sense of exhaustion, a lethargy deep in her bones that lulled her towards sleep. If the fighting lasted much longer, she doubted she would still be on her feet. And still, the drums throbbed.

On the outwall, the Egyptian gathered his reserves behind him for a charge. In the breach, where he knew the Turk was fighting a desperate battle, he could only see dark shapes battling. He ordered the tank to advance, his men using it as a shield as they flung ancient hand grenades – clay containers containing gunpowder and hawthorn splinters. It was a very effective weapon against vampyres, not always deadly but one that was debilitating and painful. Tank and grenades opened a wedge in the vampyres’ ranks, and the monks rushed to exploit it. And still, the drums throbbed.

Angel and Alvaro followed the vampyres off the wall, trailing a hundred Brotherhood monks. Angel saw a chance to trap these vampyres between the defenders on the outwall and his own force, and any chance to weaken the vampyres had to be taken against the overwhelming forces that waited for the orders to finally destroy the Templar fortress completely. They must see the Brotherhood forces as stronger than they were in truth, and wiping out this force would go a long way towards that. They would then have to somehow convince their opposites the idea that the breach had in truth been a trap – not a lapse in their defences, but a tactical move. And still, the drums throbbed.

A dark shape brushed by Angel. The imp riding Huckleberry. An eyeblink later, Angel was flanked by the two furry tanks, and the three met the enemy in a wall of tooth and fang. The vampyre rearguard fought viciously, making a stand wherever the terrain allowed. It made no difference. An angel and three demons were hard to contain. The moment they held up two, the hell hounds blinked out of existence and reappeared in their rear. Indifferent to claws or steel, their jaws closed like iron traps on vulnerable flesh. Anything caught by these two was ripped to shreds like old paper, disappearing in flashes of dust. And still, the drums throbbed.

The breach closed, the tank leading a charge into the rear of the vampyres. With the Turks and the Egyptian following behind, their grenades lighting the night from all sides, teams with crucifixes rushing in to finish off the stunned and the wounded, they pushed to meet those from the fortress. Angel and Alvaro redoubled their efforts, rallying their surviving troops for one final push. Between the two, they had trapped nearly five hundred vampyres, and although severely outnumbered, their opposition was scattered and in disarray. And with the push coming from both directions, they fell. And still, the drums throbbed.

And like that, it was over. The Egyptian and his tank pushed through, meeting Angel and his relief force from the fortress. As they shook hands, the drums fell silent.

“Vampyre voodoo drums,” Alvaro spat. “I’ve heard of, but never experienced them before.”

The others nodded, too exhausted to comment. It was almost dawn before the Brotherhood was through collecting their dead and wounded and mopping up. Any vampyre out there playing possum would soon be taken care of by the rising sun, and still, they took the time to check. Teams with crucifixes were wandering the field searching for smoke, ready to dispatch any wounded enemy they found. This was a battle where no quarter would be asked for or given – survival of the fittest to decide the fate of two species.

Angel did not like their chances. Frowning, he walked across the fortress towards the building where Elliot had set up his laboratory and workshop. It was time for the mortal to earn his keep. They needed to sow not only the fields leading up to the fortress but those between the outwalls and even the fortress with his little toys. If they had to keep a crew working in the shop day and night, so be it, they could not miss the opportunity the vampyres’ daytime weakness offered. Not if they wanted to survive until relief could arrive. If it ever arrived.

“Elliot?” Angel asked the backend of the large man. “What do you have for us?”

The man in question was currently wedged up to his hips in some contraption. A voice drifted back up out of the iron ball, and the angel thought he heard something like ‘wobbly pops and wing nuts.’ Was that an English dish?

“Come again?”

Elliot slid out of his invention and turned to face Angel. “I said quite a bit.”

“Anything we can use now?” Angel prompted.

“Well,” Elliot paused, wiping sweat from his brow with a sleeve. “I modelled these after a Vietnamese nasty the Marines called ball poppers. We managed to produce a couple of hundred of them. And maybe another hundred of the hawthorn mines. When I finish that monstrosity, we’ll have three of the big bangers.”

“I need ten times that number,” Angel shook his head sadly.

“If you wouldn’t keep sending my best workers to the frontlines,” Elliot complained.

“How many bodies do you need?” Angel asked.

“Twenty a shift,” Wilson replied, “as long as none of them are all thumbs.”

“I’ll get you every cadet in the fortress,” Angel promised. “And I’ll send someone to collect everything you have ready.”

Alvaro was still reading when Angel reached their quarters, still hoping to find something in Jean-Claude’s writings to solve their problem with the Eaters of the Dead. It struck Angel at that moment that neither Jean-Claude nor Wandjina had made an appearance during the latest battle. He could wish the powerful little godlet was more reliable, although blaming him for the twenty deaths would be patiently unfair given that even he had not seen the trap until it was too late. And where the aboriginal lived time did not run the same – it was possible he still meant to make an appearance, but to him, the battle was still years away.

Angel collected the Wandering Jew and the boys, setting them to work seeking out every unoccupied body in the fortress. These would become his workforce, and together they would work through the day seeding the stretch of land between the valley draw and the western outwall with explosives. Some, he decided, to send to Elliot to start on a new batch, explosives they would need to cover the stretch between the fortress and the eastern outwall. As long as they had daylight over the next few days or weeks, however much time they had left, the Brotherhood would be burying mines and booby-traps in one of the four strips of land until not even a mouse’s fart could cross safely to the fortress.

The remains of Jonas and the crucified men hung like grim reminders of the bloody days to come. Their bones had been picked clean, and judging by the amount of blast marks pocketing the field, that feeding had not come easily. They would start with this stretch of field, hoping what rotting flesh remained would attack more victims. And, of course, wherever a mine was exploded, it had to be replaced. Only then would they turn to the section of ground before the breach in the wall. That too would attract its share of victims come the next raid.

Working in this hot, dry climate was hard on the fortress’ dwindling water supply. Come what may, if Gabriel’s relief efforts did not breakthrough in the next three weeks, they would run out of water. Judging by Alvaro’s calculations, it was a moot point. If the vampyres did not release the horde of Eaters of the Dead in the next ten days, they would lose control of them. And they would come anyway because the fortress’ garrison was the nearest source of fresh meat. Ten days and one way or another, it would be over. Angel was working with Drake and Precious Albert, his mind on his own mortality for the first time in his existence. While he could easily escape, either flying away across this plane or fleeing into another, he knew he would not until the last of the mortals was gone. He was more Guardian Angel than he had given himself credit for in the last several hundred years. And that epiphany might prove his undoing.

Drake had grown grim and implacable since Jaime’s death, even more so than Angel. Unless it had to do with killing vampyres, he had no interest in anything in life. And when it did, he threw himself into the task with fatalistic energy. As now. He easily dug two holes to everyone anyone else had, and Angel knew he would not stop short of heatstroke. These mortals were so fragile, capable of both falling prey to microscopic creatures and displaying great feats of strength of character. Watching Drake now, Angel renewed his fascination with the species. It would be hard to watch them die.