Dee jerked as the building behind them was ripped apart by a massive explosion from within. Just in front of her, with her gloved hands on his back, was Jean Chretien, Canada's Prime Minister. He had insisted on being the last one out of the building as the delegates made their way to the rear entrance to the grounds. The gray haired politician shuddered as the shockwave rolled over them then threw a fearful look over his shoulder at the ruins of the building they had just occupied, his eyes wide.
"Mon dieu!" he husked softly.
"No stopping, Mr. Prime Minister," Dee commanded tightly, giving the man a good shove in the back. "We have to keep moving or the terrorists will discover our location!"
Nodding, Chretien staggered on, keeping up with the other delegates that were just being pushed back into motion by the rest of Dee's tiny team. Together they ran into the darkness and away from the conflagration that now consumed the convention center with hungry tongues of ravenous fire as Dee and her team searched every shadow and looked over their shoulders at each step, hoping against hope that the Brotherhood wouldn't notice they were gone.
A low pitched hum was what dragged Jeriko's attention back to Ravage who had, somehow managed to complete his mission and destroy the convention center despite the tiny creatures inside his body eating him alive. As her eyes fell onto the Brotherhood hardwire once more, she quickly saw that the energies that he had pulled into his body had made the slender psionic glow from the inside. A glow that was noticeably darkened in several areas via the work of her tiny soldiers.
It was the activity of the energy now being barely held in check inside Ravage's body that had caused the low pitched sound as it surged along his neural pathways. Pathways that continued to degrade under the influence of her creations. Even as she watched, several tendrils of bioenergy escaped the confines of his nervous system to ripple along the surface of his body.
With an almost palpable pull on her senses, Jeriko found her eyes rising to meet the slender hardwire's. And, as their eyes met, Jeriko felt a chill travel down her spine as Ravage slowly smiled.
"You and your allies may have won this round, Jeriko," the slender hardwire rasped over the sound of the wild energies raging through his body. "But the Brotherhood is big, bigger than you can imagine. And determined. They won't wait long before they try again. You won't be so fortunate next time!"
Then, with a visible pulse of light, the slender psionic exploded. With its release, the energy that Ravage had been building inside his body lashed out in every direction, scything down both friend and foe in a wild rush of power as it consumed Ravage's flesh so completely he ceased to exist.
"Burn me to ash!" Jeriko hissed as she dropped to one knee to let the wave of energy wash blindingly over her, her shields just enough to hold the wall of destructive force at bay. And then it was gone, leaving even greater darkness in its wake than had existed before.
Agony grimaced as she turned away from the window.
"Sir," she husked softly, "the destroyer team has succeeded in destroying the convention center. But the newcomers have virtually wiped them out."
"Ravage?" Martin asked taughtly from the room's far corner, having retreated there when the Storm Wolves had appeared out of the blackness to launch their counterassault.
Agony slowly shook her head.
"Dead, sir. In an explosion of his own making."
"Merde," Martin hissed, his expression stony. Then he was reaching for his holo-communicator. "We need reinforcements. This city must be destroyed in order for the Brotherhood to find success here."
"I don't think so," a new voice rumbled, one that was low and filled with power.
Martin's head snapped up as he looked about wildly. And he felt his eyes widen as a powerful figure stepped from a seething hole of black bored through the very fabric of space and time and into his room. As he watched, the figure cleared the seething opening to let it vanish behind him as he slowly crossed his arms to stare across the intervening space at the Inner Council member.
Abruptly Martin's face hardened as he pushed his astonishment aside.
"And who are you?" he demanded tightly, the holo-communicator temporarily forgotten in his hand.
But it was Agony that replied, her face strangely serene at the stranger's appearance.
"An old friend, Mr. Martin," she said, stepping away from the window to the man's side. As Martin looked on in stunned surprise, she smiled up at the big man before returning his astonished gaze.
"The Brotherhood and the Inner Council know him as Mordecai, the Renegade."
"You traitorous bitch!" Martin breathed softly, eyes narrowing as he stared hard at Agony. "You have led our greatest enemy here! You will die an agonizing death for your treachery, this I swear."
"No." Agony slowly shook her head, her smile broadening slightly. "No, I don't think so."
Snarling silently, Martin reached for the psionic energies that had always been his birthright, to lash out at the smirking hardwire that had once been privy to the Brotherhood's most intimate secrets. But, much to his horror, he found nothing there.
"What ...?" he began with a stammer, head whirling.
"You see, Mordecai also possesses the ability to temporarily block psionics from their abilities." Agony went on to smoothly explain. "Without access to your abilities, you can't as much as bend a spoon without help."
The young hardwire slowly folded her arms to copy the big man beside her as two more holes in space opened to spill out two hard-faced women sheathed in black, their eyes almost glowing with intensity as they stared hard at the shocked Inner Councilor.
"The Brotherhood has lost, Mr. Martin," the big man Agony introduced as Mordecai pointed out in a quiet voice. "Your Armageddon Project is finished. And soon your Brotherhood will be too. Lisa, Samantha, take him into custody." The big man looked back at the slender Councilor as the two women in black advanced to take him by the arms.
"I have a question or two for you, friend, when all of this is over. I just hope you're in the mood to answer because I would hate to need to dig what I want out of your brain by force."
With the snarl of an opening inverted bore portal, Lisa and Samantha and their captive, stunned and shocked into silence, disappeared, leaving Agony and Mordecai alone in the room. Together the two of them stepped to the window to watch the Storm Wolves mop up what was left of the Brotherhood's destroyer cadres even as they both could sense the approach of military craft, both in the air and on the ground as the Normals responded in their own way to the attack.
"Nice work, boss," Agony commented lightly, feeling truly at ease for the first time in months now that she didn't have to wear the mantle of her evil alter ego. "The Storm Wolves made short work of the cadres. But how did you manage to get the delegates out of the building in time before Ravage could destroy it?"
"The Normal, Tragedy McMaster," Mordecai replied, a slight smile touching his lips as he felt the probability node's power fade with the Brotherhood's failure to implement their program of genocide that would've seen millions dead. It had been the loosening of the node's grip on his psyche that had allowed the man in black to answer Agony's silent summons to the hotel to apprehend Martin, one of the Inner Council's most powerful members.
"She and her comrade, Duffy surprisingly had the ability and the determination to make it all work! They managed to get the delegates out of harm's way before the Brotherhood's assassins could do more than cursory damage." He looked down at the mole he had placed in the heart of the Brotherhood seemingly forever ago.
"And pretty good work yourself, Agony. Slipping Raven the information necessary to help Avalon keep the Brotherhood out of Calgary until we could consolidate our forces then handing Martin to us on a silver platter."
Agony shrugged, blushing slightly at what amounted to praise coming from the man in black.
"Just doing my part to make sure the Brotherhood didn't succeed at wiping out most of the Human Race, that's all," she modestly replied. "It wasn't anything big, like we had hoped. I'm just glad everything worked out."
"That, it did." Mordecai nodded slowly, silently mulling over what would happen now that the Brotherhood was finished here, in Calgary. At least, for now. "Speaking of Dee, we should probably check in!"
Dee glanced over her shoulder as the short column slowly advanced into the darkened street, the streetlights to either side burnt out by the Brotherhood before their assault on the convention center. The lack of light didn't stop her, however from seeing all the dead soldiers and police that laid in haphazard heaps everywhere, charred and smoking from their terminal encounter with the destroyer cadres. Her Shiva was clutched tightly in her hands as, through her visor, she scanned behind her using infrared and ultraviolet bands. Good, nothing. They hadn't been discovered.
Before she could take another step, however, the soft hiss of her earpiece activating caught her attention.
"Alpha Two, Alpha Five," Danik's voice hissed in her ear. "We're reading a surge of psionic energy up here."
"Copy that," Dee replied softly into her throat mike, stepping past the Canadian Prime Minister in front of her to advance towards the head of the column. "Hold everybody in place and standby until I get there."
"Standing by."
Jebith, Kohl and Danik were waiting for the tall human by the time she reached the front of the column of delegates in the dark, all three vampires holding their weapons tightly as they gazed off into the blackness.
"What do we have, Danik?" Dee husked softly into the big vampire's ear as she stepped to his side.
But before the Qos Viran member could answer, there was a bright flare of light in front of them, forcing all four to cover their visored eyes or risk getting blinded. When the light faded enough for their visors to work once more, all four found themselves looking at a smiling Raven, dressed in typical lone gunman black.
"You guys need a hand?" the Native American lone gunman asked and Dee nearly laughed out loud.
"Damn, Raven, but it's good to see you!" Then the smile was gone. "We have wounded here. We need to evacuate them ..."
"As soon as possible?" Raven finished for the tall, redheaded detective with a nod. "The Brotherhood dampening field has been brought down by Mordecai and the Storm Wolves. You can transmit to the Normal authorities whenever you like. However, if you can wait a second ..."
With a second flare of light, there was an abrupt downwash of air as a full-sized helicopter appeared just above the heads of the astonished delegates, hovering on rapidly rotating blades. A heartbeat later a second helicopter appeared in a third flare of light, both craft disgorging lines to let special forces operators slide down.
"Help will be on it's way!" Raven finished with a shout over the sound of the helicopters' engines, smiling as the two choppers quickly dropped towards the ground and the operators swarmed around the beleaguered world leaders.
"You can consider yourself relieved!"
Lash smiled tiredly as he looked around the body-littered battleground. By the Dark Father, it was finally over. The Brotherhood had been defeated on the eve of their greatest triumph against the Human Race. Defeated by an unlikely alliance of former enemies and prey, which had discovered what they needed to do and, against all odds, had done it.
Then his eyes fell on the broken and burnt bodies of his fallen Qos Viran and, for a brief moment, his smile faltered. Yes, they had won, but at what cost? The team that he had brought north from Brazil had nearly been wiped out, including his old friend Tahsis. Only those that had gone with Dee had managed to survive the all out Brotherhood assault.
The big vampire pushed his dark thoughts aside, as he became aware of the approach of a number of the inverted psionics that called themselves Storm Wolves.
"Commander Lash," Melanie said in a light British accent as she stepped forward from the knot of Storm Wolves that had broken from the main body still working through the bodies to make sure there weren't any Brotherhood survivors.
"Lisa and Samantha have placed us at your disposal."
"I see." Lash nodded thoughtfully. "Well, first of all, we need to police these bodies. No need for the Normals to discover just what sorts of creatures saved their collective lives now, is there?"
As the Storm Wolves began to busy themselves identifying and cleaning up the bodies, Lash nodded in satisfaction and folded his arms over his chest, both his Shiva and his knife returned to their respective holsters. Yes, it was over and they had taken heavy losses to defeat the Brotherhood.
But those Qos Viran that had fallen in battle, had done so in the knowledge that not only were they saving the vampire race, but the entire Human Race at large. The price had been high, but it was one that was necessary to pay.
"I just wonder what sort of world we'll have now that the Brotherhood is out in the open?" he mused out loud. "And what is next for my erstwhile ally, Mordecai, Psi Lord and lone gunman? A continuation of the war against the Brotherhood?"
A dark frown touched the handsome face for a brief moment.
"Or a war against the vampires?" Lash's dark eyes regarded the Storm Wolves that bustled around him. "I can only hope not. For I fear my people could not stand against such a powerful enemy!"
****