Part Four: End - g

“Bravo team on the move,” Jenna whispered into her com.

“Check. Charlie team in position,” Elijah answered.

Kendra couldn’t respond because she was currently destroying as many vampires as possible in the biggest, showiest way she could. At least, that was what Jenna was hoping considering that was the crux of their entire plan. Considering the sounds of chaos they were all hearing, she seemed to be doing the job.

“Good girl,” Jenna whispered to herself.

The screaming was loud and very distracting. There was such a primal, yet unnatural fear she could hear in the shouts and yelling. She hated the vampires as much, if not more, than everyone else but hearing them scared out of their minds was unsettling.

“That’s off putting,” Felix whispered.

Jenna smirked and nodded her head in agreement. Then she jerked her head to the back entrance of the hotel.

“Ready?” she asked. She gave one last look around her at the men, women, and wolves she was leading. All told, she had almost a dozen knights, eight mages, and four werewolves. At her feet was a puppy dog with tan and white fur. It sneezed and tongues of fire erupted out of its fur. She smiled and reached down absentmindedly to pet the dog on the head.

“Are you sure bringing that here was a good idea?” Mina asked. She was in the furthest ranks with the other mages and her eyes kept going to the bulgae dog she had summoned to kill her brother. For some reason, the bond between them as summoner and summonee had been broken and it only responded to Jenna now.

“Toasty? He’ll be fine, don’t worry,” Jenna said.

“Toasty? That’s the best you could do?” Felix muttered, rolling his eyes. “I figured you would have thought of something more clever than that.”

“Well we can’t all be creative can we?” Jenna told him, her voice tinged with annoyance. She ignored Mina’s continued looks of unease. “Besides, vamps don’t like fire, remember? And Toasty is such a good little fire dog. Ain’t ya boy?”

Toasty let out a chuffing breath and a wide doggie grin spread across his muzzle with his tongue lolling out.

Jenna pet him again, scratching behind his ears, and then turned her attention to the back doors and loading dock of the hotel. There were no guards present, although that didn’t necessarily mean anything. It was right in the middle of the day and since sunlight didn’t agree with the bloodsuckers much, any guards were most likely on the inside where they could stay in relative darkness. Judging by their reconnaissance missions over the last few days, there were a lot of them in there.

A hell of a lot.

It was going to be a hard, nearly impossible fight but Jenna was confident that the combined strength of the Order and the werewolves would be sufficient. The vampires were strong but not completely invulnerable.

She double checked all her weapons to make sure she was good to go and made those with her do the same. When everyone was ready, they gave her affirmative nods. Her head swung back to the hotel and looked for any obvious signs of danger.

“Clear,” she said and then began moving quickly toward the back door next to the dock.

As soon as she moved, the others followed her, keeping to their assigned formation. The wolves on the sides, the knights in the middle, and the mages bringing up the rear. When they got to the door, Jenna signaled for Felix.

“Do your thing,” she commanded.

Felix immediately pressed a palm to the door.

“Sentire,” he muttered, his voice low.

As soon as the word was out of his mouth, his hand began to glow with faint, light blue light. There was a vibration in the air but it passed fairly quickly. When it did, the glowing stopped and he pulled his hand back. He turned to look at Jenna with a queasy expression on his face. Terror and fear warred inside his eyes.

“They’re there,” he whispered. “I can feel the way they take up space. Almost thirty. They’re waiting for us. It’s a trap.”

“Good thing we brought our anti-trap weapon,” Jenna smirked.

She nudged Felix out of the way, looked down at Toasty, and gave him a brief nod. That doggie grin appeared and he gave her a nod back, as if he already knew exactly what she wanted him to do.

“They may be expecting an army but what about a fire dog?” Her smile was wide and slightly malicious as she grabbed the door to the hotel’s interior and yanked it open. “Go ahead Toasty. Show these bloodsuckers what you can do!”

Without hesitation, Toasty lept into action. He exploded into a literal ball of fire, looking like an out of control comet, and raced through the hotel’s interior. It was a short hallway that opened up into a mid-sized laundry room. Immediately, shrieks of surprise and pain could be heard as fire enveloped everyone and everything inside. In a few moments, those vampires that had been sent to guard the back door were nothing but fire themselves as they raced around in a panic, trying to put themselves out. If one of them did manage to do so, Toasty took it as a personal attack on his character and immediately set them on fire again. It took a good ten or fifteen minutes for the little dog to do his job but eventually, the screaming stopped and the only sounds left to hear were the flames devouring walls, floors, vampires, and whatever else it could get its greedy hands on. When Jenna poked her head around the door frame to see what was going, she could almost see ephemeral dog-like creatures in those flames, jumping and leaping around in pure happiness.

Once everything and every vampire was thoroughly on fire, Toasty came back outside, his fur back to normal. There was a faint burning stench wafting off him but it wasn’t unpleasant. It smelled more like a campfire at midnight and was actually kind of relaxing.

“Good boy!” Jenna said, bending down to give the bulgae a hug around his furry neck. “Nicely done.”

Toasty accepted his praise with humble dignity by trying to lick every inch of Jenna’s face. She let him do it for a few seconds and then stood back up. A fire was still raging inside the building but she motioned for two earth mages to come forward. One was a tall, Scandinavian man named William Olsen and the other was a Sudanese woman named Marceline Rayan. They stepped in front of everyone else and without needing any direction, focused their magic. A shimmery, green glow pulsed out of their eyes and then the ground shook a little. A second later, a chasm opened up. Dirt, rocks, and sand erupted out of it like a strange fountain. All that earth moved across the floor like some living thing driven by a purpose only it knew and went about quenching the fires inside. It even crawled up walls and ceilings to do its jobs. When all the fires were gone, the sea of dirt was sucked back into the chasm. Shortly after that, it closed and sealed itself. Scorch marks and smoking corpses still littered the hallway but it was safe to go in at least.

“They were waiting for us,” one of the knights said, a slim but dangerous man with a bald head and neatly trimmed beard. There was a thick, twisting scar going from his ear to the corner of his mouth that cut through his beard which only added to the man’s menacing aura. His name was Chris Allen and Jenna had known him for a little over five years. He was a solid knight and had faced off against some really nasty monsters and was one of the few she trusted almost absolutely.

“Do you trust me?” Jenna asked him. Her eyes bored into Chris’s with intensity.

There was a look of confusion but after a time, he slowly nodded his head.

“Good,” she replied. “Because this war with the vampires will end here tonight. Trust me on that. Now we stick to the original plan. Follow my lead and kill any vampires you see.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Any. Okay?”

They all nodded but Felix looked like he had some reservations. There was something he was missing about this whole situation and he didn’t like it one bit. Jenna caught the look in his eyes and grabbed his wrist. Her fingers tightened around him like a vice grip.

“Trust me,” she whispered.

He wanted to but flashes of memory hit him. Memories of seeing her shooting Kendra in the back because of Drake’s enthrallment. Not for the first time, he wondered how deep that compulsion went. How could anyone be sure there wasn’t some kind of lingering control over her? What if she was being controlled now?

“Please,” Jenna urged.

“Okay,” he told her, his eyes locked on hers. Theirs was a friendship forged in the fires of battle and constant, almost mind-shattering, fear. Because of that, he felt absolutely nothing off with her. No alarm bells started ringing. No gut feelings screaming a warning.

She smiled at him, the same, cocky-yet-slightly-insane smile she always wore right before they ended up fighting something really nasty and nightmarish. That smile had always annoyed him in the past but now, as crazy as it sounded, the sight of it was reassuring.

Jenna held up a hand and everyone else behind her quieted down. She poked her head around the doorframe and glanced around the charred room for a long minute.

It was empty.

She lifted her gun and was about to move but stopped short as a gust of wind sailed over her head, missing it by just centimeters. Several of her fly-away hairs were neatly sliced off. She whirled behind her to Felix, who’s hand was still outstretched, and then up above her. A charred, now-headless, vampire was clinging to the top of the door frame like a fat, hungry spider waiting for some fool to walk beneath it. There was a thump a second later when its head hit the floor. Right after that, there was a louder crash as the rest of its body hit. Jenna had to take a few steps back, otherwise she would have been hit.

“That was close,” one of the wolves said. He was a younger one named Parker Newsome. “Are there any more?”

She gave the room just outside the hall they were all crammed in a more careful look but this time, there really was nothing but smoking vampire corpses. Not one of them was moving.

“Clear,” she said and then cautiously entered the room.

As soon as they were all in the larger room, they spread out. They wove their way through the back part of the hotel, past all the burned parts, and into the areas usually reserved only for staff and employees. They didn’t find any vampires or human survivors. What they did find, however, was blood splattered all over the walls as well as torn bits of bloody fabric. It was obvious the vampires slaughtered and turned everyone in the hotel.

Eventually, Jenna’s group came to a full-sized, commercial kitchen. It was empty too. There was blood splatter on the chrome countertops and wire shelving units full of pots and pans. A lot of it. More so than in the hall and room they were in before. She swept her eyes over everything, taking in every shadow, every floating bit of dust, every shifting reflection. She could feel her heart picking up speed but her hands were rock steady and her breathing was steady and calm.

“Clear,” Jenna whispered.

Everyone followed behind her as they moved through the kitchen.

“I was expecting more...resistance,” a knight named Jules Barret whispered. This was her first real mission after moving up from a page. If Jenna was being honest, the girl was not a great candidate for knighthood. Her nerves were still too jumpy but her father overruled her. With the casualties the Order was taking at the hands of the vampires, the normally strict rules governing induction became necessarily lax.

“Don’t say that!” Felix hissed. “You never say things like that.”

Jules was about to say something else but a bunch of screeching and yelling interrupted her as dozens of fresh vampires burst out of a door further down the hall.

“Here they come!” Jenna roared.

The narrow hallway made it hard for the mages and wolves to fight. Jenna and the knights, however, were prepared for this and they stepped forward with their guns raised. They arranged themselves carefully so that each person had a clear line of sight.

“Fire,” Jenna shouted.