Part Four: End - i

The hissing noise suddenly grew so loud it was deafening. Elijah could feel his mind and body amping up as adrenaline dumped into his system. It heightened his senses. Made him sharper. Deadlier. He put his gun up and sighted down its length, the barrel pointed at the cavernous hole of the stairwell.

The first of the vamps finally made it to the top and surged through what remained of the doorway.

“Fire!” Elijah shouted.

He pulled the trigger and his gun started barking. UV bullets traced through the air and smacked into the first of the creatures flooding onto the roof. As Elijah and the other knights spit bullets into the air, the mages slung magic around. The combination of bullets and magical energy flying through air was a deadly combination and the vampires were being killed in droves. That didn’t deter them. Not even a little. They stomped and trampled all over the corpses of their own kind like they weren’t even there.

Things were going according to plan. They continued their assault and kept their formation but Elijah had an instinct that something was about to change all that. He kept firing but he turned his head to look around and spotted the source of his disquietness.

Ronni.

The rage on her face contorted it into something nearly inhuman. She was hurling fireball after fireball but he could tell that wasn’t going to be enough for her. She wanted to make them pay for what happened to her brother. She wanted revenge and Elijah got a sense of what was about to happen that was so sharp, he could almost see it.

“Ronni, don’t…” he tried to yell but Ronnie either didn’t hear him or ignored him altogether.

She broke rank and charged through the knights in front of her, both of her hands wrapped in fire.

“Hold your fire!” Elijah screamed. “Ronnie, get back here!”

“Don’t do this,” Abraham tried to command but the fire mage wasn’t listening to him or anyone else.

She waded into the vampires like a crazed lunatic. She held her own for several long, agonizingly slow minutes, incinerating a few dozen of them and severely burning several others. But the sheer amount of vampires finally overpowered her. Two knights made moves to go help her but were stopped short by Elijah’s booming voice.

“No! Stay in formation!” he shouted, hating himself for having to give that order but he had to do it. Ronnie was too far gone and trying to save her would mean more lives lost. It was a hard decision but not the first time he had to make it in his tenure as leader of the Order. “We can’t save her now.”

The vampires were tearing into Ronni, taking literal chunks out of her flesh. Blood sprayed and everyone heard her screams. Her eyes found her teammates one last time. They saw her grit her teeth against the pain and then she closed her eyes. A second later, her skin started to turn red. It was dull at first but gradually kept getting redder until she was a bright, cherry color. After that, her entire body exploded outward in a blast of fire, incinerating the vampires closest to her. It was a small blast but even so, Elijah and the others still had to turn their heads away from the intense heat. After that, the battle went by in a blur of gunfire, magic, and wolves. Inch by bloody, desperate inch, the Order and the wolves managed to push forward. The vampires tried to push back but their numbers were starting to dwindle. With the three-pronged assault on the hotel, the enemy’s numbers were stretched too thin. They couldn’t hold the door for long. After about thirty minutes of getting torn to shreds, the vampires decided it was time to fall back. They let out a few hisses of anger and then started running down the stairs.

“Push forward!” Elijah yelled and as one, the knights, mages, and wolves crept down the stairs. Elijah swung his gun left, right, and down, looking for any possible attackers. He turned around and looked at those behind him. “Clear.”

He started down the stairs with another knight on his right. The others followed behind him, also two at a time. As they came to the first landing, Elijah cautiously opened the door and when he found the hallway behind it empty, he walked through. He gestured with one hand to the right and a company of knights and mages went down the right side. One of the wolves went with them. Then Elijah went down the left side and the rest followed after him. They proceeded down the hall, systematically flushing out any vampires they came across. Most of the rooms they checked were empty. They went through four rooms with not so much as a scent of a vampire but when they got to the fifth, eight of them burst out and tried to make a run for it.

They failed.

Elijah and the rest of the knights gunned them down while the wolves and mages finished them off. It was messy, but ultimately, short work. The vampires were severely outmatched. It went on like that for each floor. They would go down every hall, check each room, flush out all vampires, and then slaughter them. Floor after floor. The plan was working and it was working really well. Other than Carl and Ronni, there were no more casualties.

Until Elijah and his team were hit with the same overwhelming power Jenna and her team encountered. Several of them started gasping for air, stumbling around and then the entire hotel exploded. The mages all froze, their bodies stiffening up. Each one wore a look of utter, frozen terror on their faces, including Abraham. Whatever was happening, it was big and it was apparently terrifying.

Elijah was on the verge of asking his partner what was going on when the entire hotel crumbled around him and he was hit with what felt like a thousand sledgehammers. The breath was instantly driven out of his lungs and he started gasping. Then his skin started to slough off his outstretched right arm when a wave of purple-black light smashed into it. He stared down in complete shock as the muscle and bones started to blacken and then liquify right in front of his eyes. It was like his hand was decomposing and rotting away in a matter of seconds instead of years. Before that light could do the same to the rest of him, a pale green dome of magical energy encased him. That killing wave of energy was suddenly cut off and he was saved. He stared down at the stump of his right arm, his mind still trying to wrap itself around the fact that it was gone. The stump, at least, was cauterized and that was the only good news about the hideous wound. The pain bombarding his entire system was overwhelming and he started screaming. A second later, the floor beneath him fell away and he tumbled for what seemed like forever. He didn’t remember screaming but it was possible he did. He wasn’t sure. When he finally stopped falling, he was buried by tons of debris. Then, all he saw was darkness.

Most of Charlie team managed to stay alive thanks to the quick action of the mages. Three of them, however, weren’t so lucky with Abraham in that number. In that split second when he felt the power building, he made a decision to save Elijah but in doing so, he sacrificed himself. The last thing he did as that wave of black-purple light hit him was to create the shielding around his old friend. He imbued the spell with as much power as he could but, ultimately, he knew it was going to come down to luck. If he put too little power into the spell, the shield would fail and Elijah would end up being crushed. Too much and the feedback of magical energies could end up killing him just as successfully as the purple-black light. But there was nothing else he could do. He looked down at his body and found it rotting and decomposing. The pain was excruciating and he screamed loudly because of it. Then the rot spread with insane speed, lurching up the rest of his body in seconds and then he was just...gone. What remained of his body splattered onto some debris a few feet below him.

Then the rest of the building crumbled down around everyone.

The Order.

The mages.

The wolves.

Even the vampires themselves.