Chapter 2 – Déjà vu

The first thing Callum did was go looking for more mordite.

There was no reason to suffer any vampire to live, in his opinion. Not on Earth. While he had nothing to say about their behavior in the Night Lands, on Earth they preyed on people and that could not be borne. Every vampire left alive was condemning people to death. But Callum wasn’t physically or mentally capable of actually wiping out every vampire nest on Earth, and going after this one or that one in particular felt somewhat wrong. But given a target and a reason he had to act.

Chester had provided both, in the list of nests that had made themselves conspicuous by consumption. Creating thralls was killing people even if the body lived, and thralls themselves were more of an accident than a thing of calculated purpose. So they had supplied the reason, and Callum needed to deal with it. But he wasn’t going to go in half-cocked. He was making sure he was absolutely prepared.

His experience with Ravaeb had shown him that normal weaponry had an effect, but he would need artillery to deal with anything of real power. An ancient vampire probably couldn’t retaliate in quite the same way a fae king could, but might well be equally as tough. Buying artillery wasn’t completely off the table – the black market where he’d gotten his antimateriel rifle had featured a few pieces – but the care and feeding of something like that was so difficult that bane ammunition was a better idea.

He knew there were ammunition manufacturers somewhere who could do custom work for him, whether it was by tipping or cladding larger calibers with the stuff, or by making the entire bullet out of either pure mordite or an alloy. Mordite acted like a normal metal, so that was easy enough to deal with, though he was still trying to figure out how the other bane materials were turned into bullets. Just in case. At least with Callum’s abilities he didn’t need thousands of rounds.

Some of the salvaged enchantments that Chester provided were a mordite alloy, but it really wasn’t very much. Callum actually felt that his best bet would be to go back to the Night Lands — he knew what he was looking for there, and with the portal anchor and drone he could cover more territory faster. The portal anchor wasn’t really susceptible to being stung by stirges, either, so he could take his time and make sure he got every last bit from any cenote he ran across.

“This is kind of boring,” Lucy said, watching the feed from the drone. The approach to the Night Lands had been nigh identical to the first time he’d gone, only slightly complicated by some roving jammer fields and additional personnel. Even if they could see his tiny threads, they couldn’t see them when they were inside walls or floors. Callum had spent a good hour or two just studying the portal itself, not only sketching its structure into CAD but getting a feel for it. He didn’t have solid grasp of how they worked, but with two world portals transcribed he had a better understanding of what he was looking at. He knew it wouldn’t happen soon, but he took his agreement with Shahey seriously. Only once he was satisfied with his study did they actually breach the portal.

They’d been through and outside of the Night Lands settlement in less than two minutes.

“You’d think a land of eternal night populated by vampires would be exciting and chock full of ancient ruins or something, not an empty desert,” she added.

“It’s the shifting you have to watch out for,” Callum told her. “That’s what makes it weird and dangerous.”

“So if there were any ruins, they’d be gone,” Lucy said.

“According to one of the books, you have to have some kind of light to keep things from shifting. So yeah, I guess the moment things go dark any ruins would just vanish.”

“What about the drone? Will it get shifted away too?” Lucy asked. She was piloting the drone herself, sending it zipping through the air. Callum was focused almost entirely on his senses, while Lucy looked for anything that might be a cenote in the low light of the enormous moon.

“Not so long as I’ve got a vis box around it,” Callum said. “Now, that’s a guess but it’s a pretty good one. The light thing may actually only be the case if it’s magical light, but the space twisting didn’t affect me personally. Just everything around me.”

“Well, either way I’d rather be here than there,” Lucy said, leaning back in the new, very comfortable, padded chair placed in the sunny living room of the bunker house. Most of the beautiful handmade furniture was placed, with more on the way. He’d designed the living room to be open and airy and that was already paying dividends. The difference between being cramped into the trailer and having a real space to stretch was night and day.

“Yeah, there’s not much to recommend it.”

“There’s not even— wait, what the heck is that?” Lucy leaned forward to stare at the screen, and a moment later what she was referring to came into his perceptions. They were way out away from the settlement, the better to find cenotes without attracting any attention, and for the first time Callum saw evidence that there was some truth to the reasoning behind the mage draft.

There was an enormous insectile monster almost fifty feet high and twice that long ambling along a ridge. It was a strangely angular thing, with a slate-grey, slab-sided body from which projected a myriad of crystalline legs. The eyeless head had mandibles larger than a person, which twitched as it clicked its way along the rocky ground.

“Now, this is a good reason to have a portal world defense force,” Callum said. “Let’s not tempt fate and risk an anchor.” Lucy nodded agreement, and they sent the drone off away from the thing. After Lucy had snapped a few pictures.

It took a while to find a cenote, even with their speed and perspective, but pilfering from it was comically easy. Even though stealing mordite stirred up the wildlife, they just whisked the drone and anchor off and away before any of the animals could get the idea to even look for it. Unfortunately, not only were the cenotes rare, they didn’t yield all that much raw material.

Lucy decided to make a day of it, bringing him a surprise picnic lunch while he was taking a break from concentrating on the little mordite marbles. They snacked on sandwiches in chairs on the tropical lawn while navigating the Night Lands. Gathering weapons materials while safe and comfortable was oddly relaxing for something of such dire import.

Judging by the few bane bullets he had left, the alloy that was used in them was something like ten percent mordite, so even if he was going for double that it only took a few cenotes to acquire enough for a reasonable amount of bullets. A process that made him aware he was somewhat lucky to find one as quickly as he had, the first time. Lucy rattled them in the plastic container they were using.

“Doesn’t look like much, big man.”

“Yeah, but check this out.” He pulled his bottle of cenote water from where it was stored in the cave, only to find that it was just ordinary water. The magic had left it at some point, which explained at least why they didn’t ship it out to Earth. “Oh, never mind. I guess it doesn’t work on this side of the portal.” Lucy raised her eyebrows at his non-explanation.

“It looks like it’s liquid under the glow of Night Lands water,” he explained. “Next time I’ll siphon off some so you can see.”

“That does sound neat,” Lucy admitted. “But it just looks like metal now.”

“Just as well. That way it doesn’t raise any suspicions,” he said, and put the lid on the box of mordite marbles. He had a small crucible out back and some ingots of ammunition-appropriate lead alloy, so despite how much it hurt to use precious bane material for something other than enchanting, he headed outside and started the alloy process. A small test batch showed that the alloying process ended up with a loss in magical potency relative to the ratio of the metal. The end result was something with a magical signature partway between the vampire’s original bane bullets and what he’d been aiming for. Presumably the bane effect was of similar strength.

“Gonna make a lot of bullets,” Lucy said, watching him pour the metal from the crucible into the ingot molds. He was using a smaller variant of his lava technique, forcing the metal to slowly rise upward into a portal feeding directly to the top of the ingot mold.

“Hopefully more than we need. I really don’t want to go on some kind of rampage,” Callum said.

“Pretty sure nobody wants that,” Lucy said. “You’re already pretty scary in the magical world, mister Ghost.”

“I don’t like just letting vampires go either,” Callum grumped. “But it’d take way more bullets than I could ever get to deal with them.” He sighed. “Anyway, speaking of The Ghost, I assume there’s still a price on my head. How hard are they looking for me?”

“Officially? I think they’ve got one team but it’s kind of in name only. If you show up somewhere they’ll probably come after you but I’m not seeing much chatter about hunting you down right now. Mostly they have other concerns.”

“If they were smart, they’d take the opportunity to reform their policies,” Callum said. “But I doubt they will. Not for a while, anyway. It’s going to take time for Chester’s group to put real pressure on them.”

“To be fair, I don’t know how they can reform with vamps,” Lucy said, and Callum nodded. Though apparently vampires could survive on moonwater within the confines of the Night Lands, its potency drastically decreased in the scarcer mana of Earth. Actual vampirism was still an option in the Night Lands themselves, and even stronger there. Callum imagined the old vampires over on that side of the portal were truly monstrous.

Still, unless they could perform the kind of nonsense that fae magic allowed they were not exactly a threat to him. They could move as fast as they wanted, be as strong as they wanted, and since he wasn’t there they could do nothing. It wasn’t like he could be any more wanted by the supernatural authorities. The only reason they weren’t really actively looking for him was because the only way to track him was through his own failures. Or Chester, but he was a completely different thorn for GAR.

Lucy found a manufacturer out in Utah who was willing to work with supplied material, and the pair of them made a quick run to drop it off. He was certain that Chester probably could have dug someone up, but considering how much they were already relying on Chester for things, Callum wanted to diversify. It would be far too easy to just become an adjunct rather than his own agent.

The project would take a few days, but that was fine. While they were technically moved in, with the furniture arranged, there was always more tidying up to do, and Callum’s magic only helped so much when it came to planting the back garden. Or sweeping up, for that matter, and if there was a cleaning enchantment in the books he’d copied from the Fane household he hadn’t run across it yet.

In the meantime, Lucy had dug into GAR reports and found three vampire nests that had noticeably expanded their ranks of thralls and so had exposed themselves. Some of them had even increased their number of vampires, but that was importation from the Night Lands. Even though he knew it intellectually, sometimes Callum had to remind himself that vampires couldn’t turn ordinary people. Though making thralls was bad enough.

“This feels like real spy stuff,” Lucy said, sprawled in the early morning sunshine on the back patio and poking at a tablet as they monitored one of the nests in question. Callum had no desire to repeat the attack on Ravaeb, which had not been as clean and effective as he wanted. By preference there would be no collateral damage, no witnesses, and no survivors. Ravaeb’s assassination had broken his streak, but that just meant he had to be even more careful.

“We do have certain advantages,” Callum admitted. He’d installed a few of Lucy’s monitoring boxes around the Madrid nest and while neither of them spoke Spanish the actions of the nest were obvious enough. As stereotypical as it was, they seemed to be involved in organized crime, preying on trafficking victims. Which meant Callum had already transported several would-be dinners or thralls out of their grasp and over to a nearby police station. It probably wasn’t enough, but there was only so much he could do.

Despite the obvious differences, the entire setup felt a lot like what he’d seen the very first time he’d dealt with vampires. A building full of men with guns, with a smaller number of vampires, and a mage for defense. The only real change was that one of the vampires was obviously in charge, rather than it just being an undifferentiated group of supernaturals.

He’d stuck with shotgun slugs for the mordite rounds, because he just wanted something that did maximum damage at point blank range. Besides, he still had plenty of shotguns from his initial raid, having carried the weapons from cache to cache. The manufacturer had done an excellent job, delivering ammunition that was to his eye indistinguishable from commercial rounds, but Lucy made additional versions of the remote gun trigger just in case.

Now that he’d had more experience with mages, he was grateful the first one he’d dealt with had been at the bottom of the rung. The more trained and more powerful ones could throw out a shield that stopped multiple ton boulder impacts, let alone a falling chunk of wood. Judging by the vis bubble the mage monitoring and helping the vampires in question wasn’t much stronger, so he actually wasn’t worried about whoever it was interfering.

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Not that he was going to let the mage go back to whatever they were doing. The mage was there aiding and abetting something absolutely terrible, even if they wasn’t holding the trigger themselves, as it were. Accordingly he had a simple plan to deal with them — a flashbang, and then a gravity-accelerated rolled steel joist that he’d picked up at a scrapyard. Metal mages were rare enough that he was pretty certain none of them would be stuck with scutwork like monitoring wards.

The second round of vampire assassinations went almost entirely without drama. There was no time crunch, no worry about physically transporting himself from site to site. He had enough portal anchors that he could use one for each nest; New York, Madrid, and San Francisco, in that order. Like Madrid, the New York nest got most of its victims through human trafficking, which made a grim kind of sense, and he’d arranged for an anonymous tip to the authorities through Lucy after he took care of the supernaturals. In San Francisco, they simply kidnapped vagrants and homeless, so there was less that could be done on the mundane side.

An RSJ moving at a hundred-plus miles per hour was enough to deal with the mages. He was actually surprised, and glad he didn’t have to go with the other options he’d set up just in case that wasn’t enough. There was just a huge difference between dealing with prepared Archmages and specialists, and ambushing the dregs.

The vampires, even the ones that were still awake, were practically helpless. Of course, he conducted the raids during the day, early morning in San Francisco and afternoon in Madrid. He had four shotguns set up by remote, which meant he could multitask on targets, especially since he wanted to recover the slugs for recycling. The bane shots were absolutely devastating, stripping away all the supernatural toughness of the vampires and resulting in horrendous amounts of damage.

It was horrible. He was glad that he didn’t have to experience it with his other senses, and equally grateful he wasn’t inured to it. He didn’t want to turn into some cold-blooded psychopath.

He was equally glad that he hadn’t performed the entire operation from his house. Callum could just imagine trying to relax in the sofa and having flashbacks to executing vampires en masse. The two of them were in the cave-cache, which at least felt more suited to dark and dirty business, and was something he wasn’t actually in most of the time.

Unlike House Fane, there weren’t any innocents involved with the vampires, no children or menials whose future or life savings might be bundled up with the cache of money and materials. He looted their vaults, though he restricted himself to actual money, gold, bane materials, and weapons, which he piled up in the corner of the cave. There was probably more wealth in objects d’art or furniture, but Callum didn’t have the time or energy to spare on that. He just wanted what he could use himself.