Blue blood blue wolf boo.., p.1
Blue Blood (Blue Wolf Book 5), page 1
Blue Blood
Blue Wolf 5
Brad Magnarella
Copyright © 2020 by Brad Magnarella
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Ron Uzilla
Background elements by Esther Magnarella-Ray
Cover titling by Deranged Doctor Design
Wolf symbol by Orina Kafe
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Available Now
Free Books, Anyone?
Join the Strange Brigade
Croftverse Catalogue
Acknowledgments
The Blue Wolf Series
Blue Curse
Blue Shadow
Blue Howl
Blue Venom
Blue Blood
MORE COMING!
1
As dusk spread over the West Texas landscape, I studied the flex tablet on my suit’s forearm. The screen showed a live drone feed panning across the former oil operations. Hundreds of square miles of drilling rigs, empty fuel tanks, and abandoned trailers littered the scrubland. I centered the image on a lone tank truck motoring down a desolate road, dust kicking up behind it.
“How we looking?” I asked through the commo system.
“Fine as sunshine,” Rusty answered above his rumbling engine. “No activity so far. Must not like redheads.”
Given the size of the search area, I’d convinced our tech wiz to act as human bait. Though he was being a good sport about it, I could hear his nerves. I paced around to the other side of our parked van.
“All right, just—”
“Damn!” Rusty shouted, cutting me off.
My hackles spiked as his truck jerked off road in a storm of dust. “What’s happening?”
“That wasn’t a pothole,” Rusty said, the truck rocking back onto the asphalt. “That was a danged canyon!”
I relaxed with a growl. “Just remember to stay inside the radius.”
“Gotcha, boss.”
I scanned the dimming horizon—lifeless save for the distant gas flares and oil derricks of the only company left in the once-booming basin. Genesis Energy was operating at a loss, and in more ways than one. For the past month their workers had been disappearing. Truck drivers and roughnecks picked off at night, their bodies found dumped in ravines, mangled and blood-drained. Centurion’s algos said vamps, and the system had been spot-on lately.
“All right, I’m turning around,” Rusty radioed.
Back on the screen, I watched him circle an abandoned drill site. As he passed a dry mud pit, figures began emerging from the site’s drilling booth and trailers. And they were too damned fast to be human.
“You’ve got contact,” I said.
“What?” Rusty cried. “Where?”
“Behind you. Come back our way. Fast.”
“Oh, shit,” he said above his revving engine.
By the time I climbed into the van, Sarah was steering us from behind the camouflage screen and onto the road. She blew a strand of chestnut hair from her glasses. “He’s four kilometers out.”
“Just watch for potholes,” I said, strapping myself into the console seat.
“Pulling out,” Olaf radioed from the other van, where he and Takara were positioned.
I tapped a screen, zooming in on the vampires’ apparent nest. Eight creatures had emerged and were converging on Rusty’s truck. I targeted the oil rig and trailers in pulsing squares. Maybe I’d catch a few late risers.
“Missiles away,” I announced, hitting a command button.
Flashes streaked from the sky, and the targets detonated in bursts of white light. The rumble that arrived moments later rattled our van. As the oil rig toppled, small fingers of fire scattered from the surrounding buildings. A hard grin spread across my muzzle as the figures staggered and fell to the ground.
I hated vampires.
“One minute to arrival,” Sarah said from behind the wheel.
I took the gun’s controls now, rotating the weapon until the console’s screen picked up Rusty’s empty tank truck coming at us from the other direction. He was still accelerating, but not fast enough. Several vampires had caught up to him and were alternately ramming the truck’s sides, trying to tip it over.
“Hey, stop that!” Rusty cried.
“We’re almost to you,” I said. Turning, I asked, “Can you do anything from here?”
In the back of the van, Yoofi peered out from a cloud of cigar smoke. For the past hour, he’d been sitting with his head bowed in his hooded coat, ingratiating himself to his god, Dabu. “I can try, Mr. Wolfe.”
“Try fast,” I said.
He began chanting in a foreign tongue. The pressure in the van drew toward his staff in a way that made me queasy—a side effect of his magic I’d never quite adapted to. One of the windows retracted, sending wind storming inside. With a final shout, Yoofi’s gathered energy detonated from the van.
“I cast a lingo,” he explained as he closed the window. “It will protect him.”
With Rusty slowing down to regain control, several vampires had latched onto the truck and were spider-crawling toward the reinforced windows. On the feed, I watched Yoofi’s energetic field waver into place around the vehicle. One by one, the vamps dropped off and pulled back a safe distance, giving me some clear targets.
“Nice,” I told Yoofi, locking onto the closest bloodsucker.
I depressed the trigger, sending gunfire from the top of our van. A stream of silver-laced incendiary rounds blew apart vamp number one. I pivoted the weapon toward another, locked on, and tore him apart too. I was locking onto a third when Rusty’s headlights canted down, and the truck flipped ass over end. Sparks burst from the asphalt as the forty-ton vehicle tumbled forward, smashing apart Yoofi’s protective field. The truck plowed into the sand and came to a ponderous rest on its side.
“Rusty,” I radioed. “Do you copy?”
No response. As our van rushed up to the scene, I pounded the roadway with cover fire. The remaining vampires dispersed, then fled in the direction of another abandoned oil operation. I jumped from the van with my MP88, nostrils wrinkling from the harsh smells of burned rubber and leaking fuel.
Olaf skidded his van to a stop on the opposite side of the toppled truck and stepped out. His dull eyes roved our surroundings above the rifle, grenade launcher, and flamethrower that constituted his own MP88. Takara appeared behind him in her ninja leathers, covering the scene with an M4.
I leapt onto the crashed truck and pulled the door open. Rusty was strapped in but sprawled across the seat. His helmet had come off, and in the flashing lights of the console, blood glistened through his hair.
“Rus?” I called.
His weak moan became words. “Are we insured?”
“Hang tight,” I told him, and climbed back down. “He’s conscious, but injured,” I informed the team. “Olaf, help Sarah extract him and then remain on guard while she treats him. Yoofi, I want you here too, in case he needs additional healing. Takara and I will pursue the remaining targets.”
We took off toward the drilling site. Breaths stormed from my muzzle as I turned up the speed. With her dragon powers, Takara kept pace, red crescents pulsing around her irises. After several meters, she took flight and pulled ahead. I racked my weapon across my back and fell to my hands, my long arms giving me an extra gear. Chunks of desert and scrub brush flew in my wake as we gained on the fleeing vampires.
A shot cracked from Takara’s airborne vantage, and half a vamp’s head disappeared. By the time the body tumbled to a rest, she’d taken down two more. I bounded over the fallen creatures, ears peaking at the sound of howling.
Coyotes?
But they weren’t fleeing the gunfire; they were racing toward it. Their yipping cries grew louder until the mangy beasts were springing from ravines on either side of us, tongues lolling from slavering jaws.
Suckers are undead, I realized.
Grasping my weapon, I sent separate volleys of grenade rounds into their paths. The thudding detonations that followed spewed silver and shrapnel. Yelps sounded, and bodies and severed limbs went flying.
“Go,” Takara called. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
I nodded and fell to my hands again. I had total faith in Takara. As fresh shots coughed from her weapon, I focused on th
My panting turned to deep growls, urging me onward.
As the lead vampire reached the drilling site, he barked something, and the two trailing vamps pivoted to face me. They were lean and sinewy, old tattoos staining their faces. A turf war with another nest had probably driven them from a nearby city and into this sun-blasted hinterland. Why else would they be here?
The two had stopped amid a scatter of old drilling pipes. With their preternatural speed and strength, the vamps turned the thirty-foot-long pipes into a storm of missiles. I ducked under one and smashed another aside, but as I took aim, a third cracked my helmet. Another pipe caught me in the ribs, and I grunted for breath. The vampires laughed at my attempt to keep my footing.
My grandmother once told me you could tell a lot from someone’s laugh, and theirs sounded stupid. Wanting to test the theory, I fell to the ground, my weapon arm splayed out in front of me. The two rushed in, each with a pipe raised overhead.
Grandma had been right.
Angling the barrel of the MP88, I squeezed the bottom trigger. A fiery jet of pressurized napalm swallowed the vamp on the left. He went into a screaming, stomping fit. The other vamp swung his pipe down. Anticipating the attack, I rolled to the side. As the length of steel broke against the ground, I bathed him in a two thousand-degree blaze to match his buddy’s. I opened their chests with auto fire for good measure.
One left, I thought, stepping past their crackling bodies.
Before the pipes had begun flying, I’d seen the final vampire veer toward an outbuilding. I consulted my forearm tablet. The drone feed picked up movement behind what looked like a pump station.
Leading with my MP88, I stalked toward the building. Besides being the fastest vamp of the group, he also seemed to be the one giving orders. But that only made him the captain of a bush league squad. A few well-placed shots would drive him into the open. An assault to the head would finish him.
But I needed to see his face first.
“You have a choice,” I called. “Go down like one of your coyotes, or face me.”
He peeked out from behind the pump station. “You’re armed.”
I tried to line up his voice with one I’d heard almost two decades before. Hard to tell. The proof would be seeing him up close. I’d never forgotten the face, the predatory eyes, the blood-smeared smile.
Removing the strap from around my torso, I set the MP88 on the ground and stepped forward. “Not anymore.”
“Your helmet,” he said.
I unclasped it and tossed it behind me. “Anything else?”
“The armor.”
With a sigh, I began unfastening my vest. A projectile nailed the side of my head and exploded into dust. Something harsh and gritty stormed up my nostrils, setting my eyes ablaze.
Hit me with a bag of lime…
I stumbled backwards, tears flooding my vision, talons raking the ground in search of my weapon. Feet rushed up, and a fist drove into my gut. A second punch cracked my jaw, sending my head halfway around and filling my mouth with the coppery taste of blood. Though my healing powers absorbed the sharp pain, my brain was reeling.
I swiped out blindly, talons lashing through air. The vamp’s head drove into my chest, fists closing around my low back. We went airborne before the ground met my neck with enough force to snap a human spine. A bombardment of super-fast head shots reduced my thoughts to cottony clouds.
When the scent of oily hair filtered past the sting of the lime, I became aware that the vamp had stopped swinging and buried his face into my shaggy neck. Sharp pricks registered next, canines punching through skin.
Son of a bitch is biting me!
The rage that stormed through me was overcome by the flood of neurotoxins dumping into my bloodstream. As my muscles went doughy, the vamp began slurping.
But even as he drained me, my healing powers were amping up, dissolving the vampiric toxins. With renewed strength, I seized his mane and yanked his head back. He fought, hissing, to return to his meal. With a single blow, I crushed his chin beneath my knuckles. But with my fist poised to strike again, I stopped. I still needed to see him. As my tears flushed out the last of the lime, I blinked my vision clear.
The eyes that peered back at me were dark and hungry. A slick of blood—my blood—covered the lower half of his stubbly face, down to where his chin had begun molding back into shape.
“Ever been to Beaumont, Texas?” I asked.
“I’ve been lots of places,” he garbled, grinning to show his canines.
I slashed my talons, and his body toppled to the ground. Standing, I dropped his head beside his boots. He might have been one of the vamps we were contracted to exterminate, but he wasn’t the one I’d been hunting.
2
“What happened here?” I asked.
I froze the video at the moment Rusty’s truck began to flip, then zoomed in on the vampire that had slipped underneath the vehicle and heaved the back end.
“Little bastard,” Rusty muttered.
After ascertaining that the oil fields were vampire and spawn free, we’d turned the case over to the Centurion suits and flown back to our compound outside Vegas. Now, twenty-eight hours after I’d beheaded the lead vampire, the team was gathered in the conference room for our standard post-mission review—even Rusty, who had recovered from his concussion and was sporting a sling on his right arm.
“It was my fault, Mr. Wolfe,” Yoofi said from his cloud of cigar smoke. He bowed his head until I could see the intricate pattern of cornrows atop his scalp. I’d given up on getting him to call me Jason, but I wasn’t about to let him go pity party on me.
“This isn’t about laying blame,” I said. “It’s about learning, tightening up. So what happened?”
“I did not lingo the bottom side of the truck.”
“Is that something you could have managed?”
“Yes, I just did not think they could get under like that.” He turned to Rusty. “I am very sorry, my brother.”
“Hey, crud happens. Anyway, you put it right with your healing mojo.” In addition to his concussion, Rusty had suffered a snapped clavicle in the accident, both mending well thanks to Yoofi’s magic.
I forwarded the video to where Olaf recovered Rusty from the wreckage and Sarah began assessing him. “Your extraction and care for our teammate were on point,” I said. “That goes for you too, Yoofi.”
“I will do better next time,” he promised.
I backed up the video and panned over, tracking Takara and me as we pursued the fleeing vampires. Yoofi oohed as Takara picked off the creatures with exact headshots. When the coyotes arrived, Rusty uttered a “holy crud.”
Sarah cleared her throat. “They’re what the vampires were feeding on between human victims. They acted as guard dogs too.” She had been sure to collect blood, fur, and tissue samples from them for our bio-base.
I held the video on Takara as she calmly shot the coyotes giving me chase. She then took care of the ones that had gathered into a leaping mass underneath where she hovered.
“Excellent work,” I told her.
Though she nodded, her expression was flat with disinterest. Backing up to the point where Takara and I separated, I tracked my bounding form to the abandoned drilling site. When I lit up the two pipe-chucking vampires with the flamethrower, Rusty remarked, “Not too shabby yourself, boss.”
“Keep watching,” I said, already chastising myself.
On screen, I stopped in the middle of the drill site, set down my weapon, and removed my helmet.
