Chapter Twenty-Two: The Second Battle
The Andrastes didn’t disappoint. There were nine of them still alive, by Paddington’s count – both parents, both sons, and five of the seven daughters – and from the amount of rifle-fire that greeted his opening the bailey door, most of them were in there waiting for them. He spun back, out of harm’s way, and the wolves did the same. If he’d had a grenade he’d have thrown it in there; that would teach them. Unless they threw it back out before it went off which was, honestly, far more likely.
Instead, he ran to the bailey’s other door. As he did, Truman spoke over the radio. “Paddington: sorry, you’re on your own. We’ll try to keep the mob from reaching the castle, but the vampires are all yours.”
Great. No reinforcements. They were only supposed to be the advance guard, not the attack force. Should they just run? No; too late. He’d told the wolves that this was it, do or die.
“Good news,” he said to the pack. “The Mainlanders are letting you have your revenge all to yourselves.” He threw open the bailey’s other door, took a deep breath, and blindly fired his pistol through the doorway a couple of times. The rifle shots stopped long enough for three of the wolves to rush into the bailey.
And, like comedic a silent film, a group of vampires rushed out the other door. There was nowhere for them to go; the other three wolves were waiting in the courtyard and leapt into the centre of the group, causing most of the vampires to fire wildly or drop their guns. A few – notably Leander – kept their heads and pistols, but the wolves nipped rather than tore at their opponents: in and out too quick for them to fire without risking hitting their siblings.
Paddington stuck his head into the bailey and found almost-pitch blackness. He fumbled with his flashlight and saw a long, quite narrow building with common beds set a few feet apart. Guards quarters of the cheapest variety. Oh, and three wolves tearing at a vampire.
And another vampire running for the door, screaming.
A spray of blood and crunch of bone and then the wolves – Dom, Pete, and Tony – ran after her. Paddington wandered over to the corpse. Themis. The wolves had done a good job. She hadn’t suffered. Just quick, efficient death.
“It needn’t have been this way,” said a voice behind him. Seemed that at the other end the bailey descended. The steps probably connected with the labyrinth the Team had found under the keep. Emerging up the stairs, a sad glint in his eyes, was Adonis.
“All we wanted is for you to fulfil the prophecy,” said Adonis. “One sacrifice was all the Three-God required. The four deaths that have occurred… those are because of your arrogance.”
“And yours. I didn’t break the treaty. I even tried to turn up without an army at my back, tried to negotiate.” The sounds of that army battling on the other side of the bailey wall echoed around them. Paddington saw flickers of movement out the door: a vampire leaping up onto the curtain wall and two dark shapes running after it. “But I’m done,” he said. “I’m sick of it. Sick of compromising and bargaining and bartering all so you can do it again with the next prophecy. No more. I’m not killing my brother.”
“You are the demon. There is no alternative.”
That was a lie. There was the other prophecy, the one that talked about the champion – Beck, presumably – eating the Fruit of Life and heralding redemption. Paddington wasn’t sure what passing beyond death’s touch entailed but living forever had to be better than dying tonight. Yes, everyone you knew would eventually die but… well… so did pets. That didn’t stop people buying them. The ultimate, sad, end didn’t negate the years of joy that preceded it.
“It has to hurt, doesn’t it?” Paddington asked. “Not being part of the prophecy. Again. Being the most devout follower of the Three-God and watching from the side-lines as those who don’t care take centre stage? Doesn’t that just burn you up?”
Adonis stiffened. “There must be a reason.”
“But you can’t think what it is, can you?” Paddington advanced on him. “Why would the Three-God use us heathens and ignore you – you who have devoted your whole long life to Them?”
“You have a theory, I assume.”
Paddington stopped a few feet from the top of the stairs. “You’ve believed for too long,” he said. “These Books make sense to you because you’ve spent hundreds of years filling in all the holes. You stopped asking the hard questions because you’d constructed defences for the parts you didn’t understand. You assumed and interpreted and added and omitted and fudged until you saw a picture that made sense to you. But now you can’t see the gaps anymore. You can’t fathom why everyone doesn’t already believe. How could they be so stunningly ignorant of the prophecies’ meanings?”
“The prophecies come true, do they not?”
“Yes. Because people like you twist everyone so they do. You make the prophecies self-fulfilling and I won’t let you!” Paddington raised the pistol.
Adonis barely cocked an eyebrow. “Killing me alters nothing. You will fulfil the prophecy regardless.”
“We’ll see,” Paddington said, and pulled the trigger.
He missed.
That wasn’t entirely his fault: Leander had wrenched his arm up from behind him. The bullet went into the ceiling; Adonis disappeared down the stairs.
“Now now,” Leander said. Fighting against his strength was pointless, so Paddington ignored the arm that Leander held and instead threw his left elbow back. It connected with something soft and light and Leander made a whoov noise as the wind went out of him.
Paddington turned to point the pistol at him, but Leander darted out of the beam of his flashlight. He’d heard the Team’s horror stories about trying to hit a vampire with bullets, and of their prowess disarming their opponents, so Paddington thrust the pistol back into its holster and drew something that wouldn’t be so easy to knock out of his hand, something designed for close quarters: the Bretherton Sabre. It slid out of the scabbard without a sound, which kind of disappointed him: he was hoping for the steel-on-steel shnneeeek he’d heard in films.
“Do you know how to use that?” asked a voice in the dark. Paddington swung his flashlight toward it and saw Leander, for a fraction of a second, lunging forward and swinging down. Then the end of the flashlight fell off.
“I guess not.”
Black completely took the bailey, but for the soft glow of the two doorways. Paddington chose retreat as the better part of being slaughtered and ran for the nearer, burst into the night – awash with the chaos of vampire and wolf – and turned back to face the doorway. After a few seconds, a shape emerged, the black sliding off him like a cape falling back. Leander had drawn the sword from his belt: a one-handed sword of some medieval design. He’d probably bought it new. He looked familiar with it, at any rate. More comfortable, certainly, than Paddington was with his.
“You can’t kill me,” Paddington said, because Leander looked like he needed reminding. “You need me for your prophecies.”
“We only need you alive,” Leander said. Paddington had never quite noticed how much muscle there was on him before. Around the dinner table Leander’s sisters drew any attention that his father hadn’t. The boys were always just… there. Seat-fillers.
Now Leander consumed Paddington’s attention. The hulk in his shoulders; the mane of blond hair; the wide, rounded face and flat nose; the slitted eyes constantly calculating. This man was a predator. Not a warrior like Truman, or Skylar, or even Mitchell. He was something else. Designed to chase down and kill small fluffy things and feast on their meat.
“There must be punishment for all you’ve done to my family.” Leander’s steps were smooth and soundless, but he never looked from Paddington’s eyes. “How much blood do you think you can lose before you bleed to death?”
Paddington’s own feet stumbled with the rough stone as he backed away. When he nearly missed a step and glanced down – only for an instant – Leander was on him. Paddington knocked the blade aside clumsily (but e
ffectively, which he felt was the main point), winced at the pain the clash had sent through the cut on his hand, and staggered backward into one of the girls.
She was gone a moment later, after a hiss and pursued by a wolf. The battle still raged, in large part because the vampire strategy seemed to be maintaining distance. The wolves didn’t waste time growling or snapping, they worked in threes to divide the vampires, herding them like sheep. The vampires were quick, though, and sometimes, annoyingly, they would leap clear over the wolves’ heads and onto the curtain wall which would force a wolf to chase them back down to the battle, though this had the advantage that the wolf could attack another unsuspecting vampire in the courtyard by leaping on her from above.
Both sides fought with snarls on their faces, but where the wolves relied on their teeth, the vampires’ canines were only for show. They used weapons, those that still had them. Guns and swords and axes lay discarded on the ground but whenever one was picked up the wolves concentrated their attack on that vampire and quickly either tore it out of their grip or forced them to discard it and flee.
All this Paddington saw in a moment of chaos: wolves and vampires leaping, weapons whirling through the air, blood on both sides.
Then Leander was back on him.
Paddington’s main plan of attack – well, defence – was to keep his body sideways to present a smaller target and keep his blade aimed at Leander’s torso. Hopefully Leander would have to find some way around the sword to attack him.
It worked. Kind of. Leander couldn’t rush in and take him, and the fight was less Hollywood clash and clang of steel and more about Leander testing one way, faking another, and striking a fourth. What had happened to the third attack Paddington wasn’t sure. It was in there, he thought, but it was over before he’d registered it had started.
Still, the “sword front-and-centre” theory required little in the way of blade movement. Slapping Leander’s sword away with the tip of his own was about the extent of it. Leander darted forward and back, but unless he was trying to put his blade within two feet of Paddington, Paddington let him be.
Of course, that laid-back attitude meant that – more often than he’d like – Leander’s blade came quite close to him. The sabre’s guard caught a nip a couple of times, and other strikes passed within inches of him. One pierced the radio on his hip, which he heard short out, but near misses were better than attempting to hit the lightning-fast Andraste and leaving himself open to certain hits.
The seconds wore on – and seconds had never lasted so long. Even when he’d been in the midst of the zombie town he hadn’t felt time stretch. He hadn’t been locking eyes with a creature focussed solely on harming him. Hadn’t felt the gaze unsettle him. Hadn’t had the impression they were toying with him. Not that Leander wasn’t trying to hurt him – he clearly was – but he wasn’t worried about Paddington as a threat. Either Leander would win or he would leave. Actually, even that was generous. Leander would win; it was just a question of when.
And still Paddington could only defend. There were no openings. No weaknesses he could see to exploit. Leander didn’t even seem to be tiring. Maybe a touch of sweat on the brow, but no slowing of the strikes.
Paddington was running out of strength. The sabre started increasing in weight. Sweat had pooled in his armpits long ago and now ran down his back and neck. Each defensive flick came later, Leander’s blade closer to his body. He noticed less of the outside world, as well. At the start of the fight he’d known where the wolves and other Andrastes were and where in the courtyard he and Leander were, but now he knew only Leander in front of him and the pain in his hand. Everything else had faded, unimportant.
Another flash and clang of steel, though this time Paddington knew something was wrong. Leander’s blade was on the outside of his own, then the inside flicking out, throwing him off balance. As he stumbled forward, Leander kept his sword in place.
It slid into Paddington’s chest between the heart and the left shoulder. With the searing pain, Paddington’s legs found extra strength and he forced himself to twist left. He was still falling, but backward now, so that instead of skewering him completely, the blade’s tip slid out through the hole in his chest it had entered through.
He landed on his backside and tumbled. He caught himself against the stone with his left arm, then shouted in pain as he attempted to use muscles that were only now only barely connected.
His scream was enough for the wolves to rush to his rescue, which went about as well as Paddington suspected it would against Leander. The first wolf was Rick, who only avoided Leander’s sword by ducking under it at the last moment. Pete was more ambitious, probably losing track of common sense in his rush for revenge. He went for Leander’s throat.
Leander stepped back and thrust down in a single motion, piercing Pete through the neck as he landed. Interestingly, Pete didn’t turn back into a naked mid-twenties human on death. He remained a wolf. Leander didn’t pause to gloat; he withdrew the sword with a clean, practiced motion before another wolf could attack him.
“Don’t!” Paddington shouted. “He’s mine.”
The wolves circled Leander for a moment, but the vampire was in a ready stance and didn’t seem to have left any part of himself vulnerable. Additionally, the other Andrastes were capitalising on the wolves’ distraction by reclaiming their fallen weapons.
Most of the wolves spun away, back to the fray. The lightest one, Will, kept watching Paddington as he struggled to his feet, wincing and clutching his left shoulder with his right hand. It was tricky, still holding a sword while trying to put pressure on a wound, and ultimately Paddington knew he couldn’t do both.
“For Ianthe,” said Leander.
Oh, Gods, how many other Andrastes had died? Erato and Themis, certainly; were there others? Part of him wanted to scan the courtyard to see how many more wounds Leander planned to inflict on him. Another part didn’t want to know.
And then there was the third part. The part he tried to ignore most of the time. The part he’d first recognised in himself when he’d been a child and he’d humiliated Lisa in front of the whole school for sport. The part that whispered it was all useless, and to either give up or get mad. The darkness, curling inside him, awaiting an opportunity to lash out.
He’d spent seventeen years denying it. Forcing it down. Playing the good town bobby. But that was just an act; the real Paddington knew that, just as his indecision was a cover: a way to test the waters, to discover what other people thought was the right way to behave.
As if other people mattered.
Because, in his heart of hearts, Paddington had always known he was different. Oh, probably everyone thought they were. But he was. He’d proved that when he’d taken the only good thing in his life and driven her away from him. And she’d abandoned him – as she should have – for so many years. The darkness had been chained but not submissive, beaten but not defeated, awaiting his recognition of its importance. Its necessity.
Paddington released the dark, embraced his pain, let go of his shoulder, and advanced.
At first Leander smiled. Took Paddington’s newfound confidence as a precursor to future failure. That lasted about the first two slashes, which Paddington felt coming far before they formed in Leander’s arm, and slapped away with as much ease. By Leander’s third strike, a frown had passed by the vampire’s face. It disappeared, of course; Leander was far too old to consider someone like Paddington a threat, especially injured.
Which was why, when Leander feigned left, Paddington aimed a quick slice at the arm instead of jumping back in fright. The Bretherton Sabre drew blood and severed tendons. Leander dropped his sword and looked up, shocked.
“How’s your revenge coming?” Paddington asked, and thrust forward. Perhaps he shouldn’t be enjoying Leander’s expression as much as he was, but he was just hilarious: the way his cocksure face barely knew how to form confusion or fear.
Leander was fast enough to sidestep th
e swipe and grabbed Paddington’s sword arm. In the moment that they tousled, Paddington brought his left hand up in a fist which connected satisfyingly with Leander’s nose, somewhat increasing its width and causing it to spurt blood.
The vampire crumbled beneath the hit, colliding with the courtyard to the sound of bone on stone. He was tough, however, and immediately grabbed for his dropped sword. Unfortunately, Paddington’s foot was already there and, with a flick, it put the sword well out of reach.
Then Paddington walked away. He didn’t see who made the kill but he heard that Leander’s battle-cry was loud, desperate, and much shorter than Leander had hoped it would be.
Now Paddington truly had time to view the carnage. For carnage it was. If the vampires had a strategy, it was beyond Paddington’s fathoming. Certainly they had improved since the battle three years ago: no longer were their movements balletic, graceful, and useless. Melanthios struck hard, flashes of axe-blade and bang of pistol-fire. But the vampires still didn’t work together, not the way the wolves did.
And they had no one to impose order on the chaos. Stepping back, viewing it all dispassionately, Paddington could see where to strike and how to divide the vampires. The battle could be over very quickly; they only needed a few lucky breaks and to listen to orders.
That was not to say that the battle’s end was a foregone conclusion: the balance of wolf-to-vampire was not nearly as high as Paddington would like. There were five left on each side, plus Paddington.
“Will, Tony! To Melanthios, curtain wall!” he called. Melanthios turned to fire at him, so Paddington ran into the fray, swiping with his sword at the nearest human-looking figure. Niamh saw the attack coming and rolled away, and Melanthios fired. The bullet missed him, he assumed, but a wolf did crash into him, thrown at him by Phaedra, who had thought it the best way to protect her sister. The wolf was Dom, who took a moment to reach his feet and get off Paddington.
By the time that moment was done, Will and Tony had herded Melanthios off the top of the wall. He’d leapt clear over the battle to stand in front of the keep. “To me!” he called, and his sisters darted to his side.
That left Melanthios with a clear line of sight at all of the wolves, a point of which he was clearly aware because he raised his pistol and fired at them. The wolves weren’t stupid; they ran in every direction, making themselves harder targets. Melanthios had trouble with the recoil on his gun and took a significant pause between shots. Not long enough for the wolves to safely reach him, but enough for Paddington to hurl the Bretherton Sabre at him.
Melanthios jumped out of the way of the sword, which buried itself in the keep’s wooden door. By the time he was on his feet, Paddington and the wolves had closed the distance to him.
And the fight was back on.