Getting the kids out of the building was our priority. We made a call to Detective Ames and hid them outside of the bloodied area. We thought we were done, everyone had regrouped to see what we could find while we waited for the Detective. We should have bailed.

  They were on us almost as soon as we had finished searching the first group of vampires’ bodies. They came from somewhere within the building. I wasn’t sure how they had gotten there so quickly. The first two beings that entered the fourth-floor space of dead vampires were as white as ghosts. They were beings of flesh and blood, but their skin looked like it was made of white ash. They had no hair to speak of, only bald pasty heads. Their blood-red eyes contrasted greatly with their skin. They appeared in a doorway across from me in the dark room, about twenty yards away.

  “Arthur… Frank,” I yelled for assistance. These two vampires were foreign to me. I’d never seen or read about anything like them. Their eyes were the only clue to what they were. Where had they come from?

  My brother and cousin ran up behind me, dropping a shredded body of one dead vampire as soon as they saw what was coming.

  “Regroup!” I ordered, slightly pressing my earpiece.

  It was only moments before we were all back in our tight unit, waiting for the unexpected attack.

  One of the sheet white beings stepped forward to us slowly. It had jagged yellowish teeth that snarled and hissed as it approached us, the prey. It was coming for one thing… to kill us all. I didn’t know what exactly it was, but we would fight tooth and nail to destroy these two and get the victims back to safety.

  The first ashen beast took off towards us in a blur. Luckily, Kayla had already hurled a packet of silver particulate into the highest reaches of the rafters, between us and the monsters. The silver dust sprinkled down into the air as an unescapable poison for the creatures. When the pale-skinned creature hit the cloud of silver, it was like his legs turned to noodles. The silver had a tremendous effect on him, much more powerful than the usual reaction of a typical vampire. Hisses and squeals painfully escaped the once-human creature as it flopped around on the hard floor. Its agony was so unbearable to watch that Arthur only let it go about three seconds.

  Arthur pulled the silver-loaded revolver from his hip and pointed it right at the thing’s skull. He looked at it for a moment, comparing it to his vast knowledge base, and then committed it to memory for future study. Arthur pulled the trigger mercilessly. The blast was deafening inside the well-contained room. The gunfire reverberated around the area with concussive force. Blood and brain matter spread out in an instant across the floor, back towards the other pale figure.

  The second foul beast snarled through the millions of dust particles, baring his teeth at us. It was angry and hungry, ready to attack and consume every beating heart in the room. It had no sympathy for its fellow creature, only riled up from the additional fresh blood that was just blasted across the floor. It looked like it was crouching, ready to explode from its stance and close the distance on us.

  Then, the glass windows beside the beast were destroyed as two figures came onto the scene in a blur. One silhouette had red hair and very little in the way of clothing. She pinned the pasty creature to the wall in a thunderous crash and sank her teeth in. They fought and struggled up against the wall, battling for dominance as the flowing red hair sucked the life from this unnamed creature.

  The second shadow that came crashing through the glass had a familiar face. It stopped right beside me, halting my gun as it rose to a point in his face. He was lucky he was faster than me, since my trigger finger was already primed from these two strange creatures.

  “Hold on, Carter,” Martin spoke in a rush. “We’re here to help.”

  “For fuck sakes, Martin,” Frank exhaled the stress of the moment, lowering his raised machete. “Who is that?” he asked, pointing his bloodied blade towards the one still pinning the pale-skinned creature to the wall.

  “Alex?” I assumed.

  “Yes,” Martin nodded. “We were monitoring you from outside and could sense these two coming.”

  “Is she… alright?” I asked, eyeing the mysterious Alex, who looked like a ravenous monster as she completely dominated the weird creature.

  Martin spoke of Alex to me before, assuring me it would be safe with her around. I eyed her curiously as she still pinned the unknown creature to the blood-stained wall by its neck, sucking the lifeforce from the struggling creature. I eased the hammer of my pistol.

  “She’ll be fine around all of you. It’s easy for her to resist humans. She only craves one thing.” He looked back at his fellow vampire as she continued to dominate this strange breed with her superior strength.

  “So, this is Martin,” Zeke said as he strolled up to my old friend.

  “You must be Zeke,” Martin returned. “Carter has spoken very highly of you.”

  I hadn’t. Martin was just playing the game. Trying to ease the situation wherever possible. He knew Zeke had pretty solid boundaries when it came to monsters. He barely tolerated Frank and Jane, and the Talbots have been with our family for generations.

  “So, you don’t kill humans, huh?” Zeke prodded him. Arthur even looked intrigued from behind Frank.

  “No. However, now isn’t the time for introductions.” Martin looked back at his vampire companion. “Alex, enough. I can hear more coming.”

  Alex pulled off from the white-skinned creature slowly, dropping him from her grasp. She had pinned him to the wall with his feet off the ground. When she let go, his body dropped straight to the ground like a crumpled bag of sticks. Whatever it was… it was dead. Alex pulled back to face us. Her entire face, from the tip of her nose down, was covered in blood that trailed down to a point near the middle of her shirt. Her eyes were a deeply brighter version of the average vampire's.

  “Did she just feed off of another creature?” One of the few times, Arthur spoke aloud.

  “Yes, but as I said, more are coming. We don’t have the time,” Martin reiterated. He seemed panicked.

  What could he sense?

  Feet were moving in all directions. I started to hear the sound of people… or things running around the floors above and below us.

  “Dad…” Autumn worried. “What do we do?”

  “We fuckin’ fight,” Zeke exclaimed.

  “We need a plan, Zeke. If we stay, we're all going to get killed. We didn’t plan for this; ten vampires tops, that’s what we agreed on. If it was anything more, we said we’d bail,” I urged my cousin to reconsider. He had to stop. We all knew it was suicide to stay and fight when we were surrounded from above and below.

  It was too late. The commotion I heard from the floor below us had found the stairs and made it through the entry to our location. Six more bloodthirsty vampires had made their way to us from somewhere in the depths of the old brewery. They were not like the two pasty bastards that we had just seen destroyed. These were your run-of-the-mill fledglings. They were newly made and inexperienced, so we had an advantage. We were running low on ammo, silver flares, packets, and all of our tools to even the playing field. This was going to be toe to toe, with six fully powered, common vampires… and once they saw the bodies all around, they were out for blood.

  I wasn’t sure what happened with the commotion above us. It was like they had just stopped in place and were no longer gaining on us. Or maybe they had found their way to the stairs… I was unsure.

  When it started, Martin and Alex became blurs of blood, slashing and biting through a vampire each, taking two bloodsuckers from the equation. Martin smacked his target into a wall with tremendous power, while Alex leaped on her prey in a vicious feeding frenzy. This was the first time I had seen her in action. I knew she was an anthropophagous vampire, but I had never seen one active in person like this. There wasn’t much written about them in our bestiaries either.

  The rest of us started firing. Clara, Frank, and Arthur were already primed for battle, still covered in blood from the slaughter before. They jumped into the mix as soon as it kicked back off. They were modern-day berserkers, falling into a trancelike state when the heat of battle was at its peak. Unfortunately, most of the silver dust had settled on the concrete floor and was almost completely ineffective for this wave. The little bit of strength dulled was enough. Even without these vampires being fully weakened in some way, they all three held their own. Their thirst for battle fueled them to keep going, even when seriously injured. We weren’t all like that, but I was glad we had three family members who found that iron-like will for situations just like this.

  Once it kicked off, we couldn’t fire our guns to just mow them down since our family members were intertwined with the creatures. Yet, Autumn was a crack shot and put the sixth one into the ground with a headshot from her rifle. I thought she had tossed it earlier, but she was a warrior, and she knew her weapons well. She must have retrieved it in the battle and cleared the jam already. She was trained well.

  Even without our usual silver, in only minutes, we had dispatched the six vampires that had met us on the fourth floor. Clara, Frank, and Arthur breathed heavily as they put the last of their vampires into an eternal dirt nap. They were tired and worn out from fighting and defending against the superior strength and speed of the creatures. If they didn’t have their silver blades, then we surely would have been in trouble. Their clothes, arms, and bladed weapons were slick with the inhuman blood of the vampires. Clara and Arthur took a knee outside of a growing pool of crimson blood. Frank sat against the wall at the edge of the room as he tried to catch his breath.

  Zeke let out a laugh in the settling carnage, “Nothing like a good fight to clear the senses.” He applauded us, too cocky and overconfident, in my opinion. His attitude was reckless and dangerous. If it wasn’t for Martin and Alex, he’d probably be one of these vampire’s fucking juice box right now.

  I clenched my fist and walked over to him; I had it cocked and ready to lay his ass out. He forced our hand to come here and protect him, his daughter, and his brother, whom he endangered continuously.

  Right as I stepped up to shatter his fucking glass jaw, there was a loud crash above us. It shook the entire ceiling, rattling dust from overhead. Then, the feet started moving again. We all shot our eyes to the sky, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, and then prepare for the next wave.

  A roar broke out across the fifth floor that shook the windows of the fourth. It was a loud, earsplitting growl that took the originator's full breath. It wasn’t a threat, or for a show, it was made from rage. The feet scurried faster and harder across the floor. We could hear them running in frantic patterns above us. I didn’t know what to make of it. Then a wet thud shook the whole ceiling above our heads, then another, and a third. I could feel the vibrations of the thunderous crashes on the floor of our level. It was powerful. The third crash cracked the dividing material that was our ceiling and the floor of the next level. A crack of light peered through the gap for only a moment, and then it was replaced with oozing blood. It dripped to our floor ominously.

  “What’s going on up there?” Kayla asked shakily, trying to maintain her composure.

  The feet had been running down the ladder well across the room from us. That’s when we decided to bolt.

  “Let’s go,” I ordered. “Other side, other side,” I urged my family to follow me down away from the substantial threat above. There were two ladder wells on each side of this part of the building, and we all ran into the safe side’s ladder well.

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  Nobody argued, not even Martin or Alex; they all fell in line to fight with us until we got to safety. Then I realized our problem: all of the kidnapped humans were just outside, still waiting to be rescued. It had only been a few minutes since Eleanor, Kayla, and Patrick had left them. We couldn’t let them be exposed to these vampires and whatever creature they had with them. We had to face them; otherwise, the humans outside wouldn’t stand a chance.

  When we hit the first floor, we turned inside the building and charged forward. As soon as we came onto the ground level, all of the vampires came pouring out of the other side. They were wild and chaotic, sprinting straight at us in the large section of the first floor. They were hard to predict, but we had to kill them before they found their captives just outside. It was going to be a bloodbath.

  Then, something strange happened. The vampires tried to keep running past us. When I met with the first vampire, he saw me coming and ducked my swinging blade, dodging the attack and leaving me wide open. The weird part was, when he could have counterattacked, he just kept running. None of them were attacking us… they were only running. Then I noticed the fear in their eyes… every single one of them. They weren’t running to kill the humans we saved, or us; they were fleeing.

  Even though they tried to evade our attacks, we didn’t let them just escape. As their crowd interlaced with our own, we cut them down as fast as we could. There were only four of them stomping through the brewery, but their speed and strength made it sound like a lot more. Two were taken out; one by Eleanor’s rifle, and the other by the swing of Arthur’s machete. Two down, two to go.

  Then, down in the shadowy corridors of the first floor, more vampires erupted out of a hole in a grungy sublevel basement, up to the ground floor with us. There were probably ten more of them, all red-eyed and gnashing teeth. What had we stumbled upon? Why were there so many here around these human captives?

  One of them got the jump on Clara. It sped up to her so fast that she had no time to react as we entered the space. The beast had her by the neck and was holding her feet off the ground. He had dark brown hair and looked to be in his late twenties, tall and extremely strong. However, he was probably much older than that, being a vampire.

  “Back the fuck up,” he spat to us, squeezing Clara’s throat with increasing pressure.

  Everyone stopped fighting. The vampires that still lived rushed to the other side of the building to their leader, who held Clara. We all froze in place, seeing the gravity of the quickly shifting situation.

  “Wait,” Wayland barked at him. “Just wait.”

  “Fuck you, hunter. None of you will make it out of here,” he squeezed harder again. Clara’s legs kicked as she squealed, gasping for air under the grip of the vampire.

  I didn’t know what to do. I locked up… frozen. I looked around to see my whole family, still ready to fight and save my sister, but we wouldn’t be fast enough. We were outmatched and outnumbered without any more silver bombs.

  Wayland choked out, “Clara!” He stepped towards the vampire, feeling the adrenaline surging.

  “Fitz! Is that you?” Martin yelled at the creature.

  “Martin?” The vampire loosened his claws around Clara’s neck. “What are you doing here? Did he contact you?” Then, his eyes peered through the darkness of the area to our group of vampire butchers. He eyed Alex intently when his sight passed over the strange vampire positioned with us.

  “Fitz, we have to leave…” a young creature tried to get the attention of the one holding Clara’s life in his hand.

  “Silence!” Fitz spat at the cowering fledgling. The younger vampire obeyed his order.

  “Listen to me, Fitz. You don’t understand what’s going on here, old friend. I need you to set her down… NOW!” Martin tried to command this old acquaintance.

  Fitz’s red eyes grew irritated, “No one sent for you… Did they?” He looked around at his horde of vampires. “It’s been a while, Martin, but I remember your weakness from before. You're protecting these humans, aren’t you… Both of you?” He eyed Alex as he bared his teeth at us.

  “Fitz…” another newborn tried to signal their leader.

  “I said, SILENCE!” Fitz berated the vampires. “I’ll deal with you lot after this is over.” He shook his head at his cohorts, “Running from hunters… how pathetic! Get up, and prepare yourselves,” he ordered.

  Then, Fitz looked down like he had heard something beside him. He looked to his side slightly and then back at us.

  “Bring me that one,” Fitz pointed directly to Patrick. “You won’t die yet… We’ll take you someplace special.”

  I looked over to Patrick, who looked like he’d seen a ghost. I saw him swallow hard as he stepped back in fear. Autumn stepped in front of him, gun cocked and loaded as she prepared to kill anything that came for him. My whole family converged on him, ready to fight. Wayland, however, took steps towards Fitz, alongside Martin and Alex. They were prepared to move on him quickly. They knew Clara didn’t have much more time, being held by the neck as she was. She couldn’t breathe, and she was struggling through short, horrible gasps.

  “Enough,” a calm voice spoke through the darkness, followed by the sound of approaching feet.

  We all looked into the shadows behind Fitz to see a man walking up from the darkness. He walked slowly and confidently as his figure eased into the little light there was inside the old building. The vampires around that side of the building moved and kept their distance from him as he paced near them. They seemed… afraid of this man.

  When the man came into the light, I saw his face. I had never seen him before… and he looked human. He had straight black hair that was parted perfectly in a line on his left side. He appeared very well-groomed and was dressed in a fancy suit that looked expensive. His tall and lanky form stepped up beside Fitz, staring at us all wide-eyed and excited. Something wasn’t right about him.

  “You all might want to listen to Fitz here if you want this beautiful young lady to still have a throat to breathe through,” he smiled as he spoke. “She is quite the physical specimen, isn’t she?” he eyed Clara as she struggled to breathe, “Strong!” He looked at Martin and Alex as they stood in front of our family like supernatural guardians. “Ah… it seems he is finally taken care of!” He was happy about something.

  “Who are you?” Eleanor asked in disgust. “What are you doing with all of these people? Why are you taking them?”

  He smiled through his perfectly straight white teeth, “Don’t hate what you don’t understand. I needed them for something, but you took them from me. Maybe I should just take all of you instead. An even trade…” he grinned devilishly at his own words. “This will be… very poetic,” he smiled. “You can’t write this stuff. It’s like fate has presented your family to me on a silver platter.” His eyes pulsed a faint green as his menacing smile widened.

  It was him… the man from the woods outside of Cliff Cave. The one controlling the Olitiau with those blazing green eyes. It wasn’t much, but he just showed us who he was… he wanted us to know… that this wasn't the first time we’d interacted. I don’t think all of my family realized it… But I did.

  Wayland had tears running down his face as he yelled at them, “Please… put her down!” He was shaking with anger… and fear of losing his wife.

  “You heard the man, Fitz. Put her down,” he urged, insinuating something different.

  Fitz’s eyes grew hungry, eyeing Clara’s neck as she faded in and out of consciousness from his ironlike grip. His eyes pulsed all of the blood into his irises right as his fangs lengthened.

  Alex and Martin roared and snarled as we stood surrounded. They wanted to fight, but knew if they left their posts in front of us, we’d be swarmed by these lesser vampires. They’d overrun us in an instant. We were too tired, out of equipment, and shaken by the fear of losing Clara like this. We had no way out. I looked at Clara as she struggled; it hurt me to see her like that. I wanted to do something at that moment… but I didn’t know what I could do. I looked at Eleanor and my sweet Autumn. I was sorry that we all came here to protect Zeke and his family. I should have let them die on their own. If it meant protecting the three most important girls in my life, then I would have done it differently.

  “Fitz… NO!” Martin barked at him as he readied to drink the life from my sister.

  A low growl escaped his throat as he reared his head back…

  A massive crash sounded through the room and was followed immediately by the scream of an unseen vampire. One of the younger vampires on the outer edge of the hoard was pulled into the darkness of the vacant structure, vanishing from the crowd of killers. He screamed in an unseen part of the brewery. It was terrifying screams of agony and fear. Horror gripped the few vampires that lingered closest to the exit, the ones that tried to warn Fitz earlier.

  Fitz stopped before he bit into Clara’s jugular. He still held her unconscious body in his grasp, but turned his attention to the haunting screams and wails from the darkness. The sound of bones snapping, flesh ripping, and blood being cast onto hard surfaces echoed between us all.

  “Fitz…” the tall, dark-haired man looked to his subordinate. “One of yours?”

  Fitz looked like he saw something in the shadows, something that the other man couldn’t see with his human eyes. The look in his red eyes was something I hadn’t ever seen on a vampire until tonight. If I had to describe it, I’d say it was fear. Not just any fear… fear of something unknown. His look had questions, uncertainty, and impending doom. His grip loosened on Clara, dropping her body to the floor in front of him. He looked into the shadows at something, trembling as he stepped back. That’s when I noticed all of the vampires started slowly stepping away. They could see something… something that none of us could see. Martin and Alex were keeping their eyes trained on the hoard, not looking at anything else. I wondered, did they already know what it was?

  A long, deep, throaty exhale sounded throughout the level from where they were looking. The shadows were thick in that area, cloaking whatever had pulled the vampire to its death. There was something in that darkness… a dread… a creeping doom that felt like it was trying to pull the breath from my lungs. I felt that, if I went inside those shadows, I wouldn’t just be killed… but completely annihilated.

  Heavy feet thudded and scratched with each step. Claws drug across the hardened concrete floors of the brewery as this behemoth inched out of the shadows that shrouded him. Only one more sound came from the shadow, and it was right as the size and shape of this creature barely presented itself through the darkness. It was a sharp and guttural snarl that was directed across the room to the vampires.

  “Well, well, well,” the man with the parted hair and nice suit seemed irritated. His eyes glowed green again, “It seems you aren’t taken care of after all. No matter…” he was cut off, literally.

  As the creepy tall man spoke into the shadows in front of him, a burst of rage shot out from the darkness. In only one second, a massive beast ripped from the cover of black to the man in the middle of the room. It was a behemoth that was wrapped in dark greyish skin. It stood almost twice as tall as me, and probably four times as large. Its massive black talons ripped through the gut of the fancy man in an instant, spilling out his insides like noodles on the concrete. He dropped to the ground as the lights had already left his eyes. But he was still met with the dominating force of the monster’s large, muscular arms. It smashed and crushed every bone inside his body, turning his insides to dust and goo. It hit him over and over, smashing him into the hard floor as the terrorized vampires watched on in horror.

  The panic and the fear of losing Clara blocked my brain from connecting the dots at first. I thought this thing was something else that crawled out of that hole in the ground of the Lemp Brewery, but now I saw it. I saw him. It was Sam… that thing he turned into that night, all those months ago. For the second time in my life, I saw the unexplainable power and mystery of what he was. Even still… I didn’t know for certain if that thing would turn on us, too.

  Everything that happened next was too fast to react to. The monster… Sam… moved that massive form so quickly in a leap that he actually hit the ceiling of the first floor. He carved through the metal braces overhead. The supporting structures all buckled from the unsupported weight and collapsed the section of the ceiling in the corridor above. Everything above the area fell into a deafening rumble of chaos, pulling down massive amounts of debris from the floor above. Dust was kicked up as the debris settled in front of our group of hunters and the two vampires. We all stood in shock, separated from them and the threat they all posed. The only problem was that Clara was over there with them… barely hanging onto life.

  “GET OUT NOW!” Martin ordered us all.

  “NO!” Wayland pushed past him in an instant, already trying to wedge himself between the rubble that separated him from his wife.

  “Wayland!” Martin barked. “You need to leave… I don’t know if Sam can kill everything that’s coming up from that hole in the ground.”

  The twisting metal and falling debris were still settling out, making it loud and hard to hear each other.

  Wayland ripped stones and metal from the mound of debris as Martin tried to reason with him. He was in a frenzied panic.

  Autumn, Eleanor, and Frank came to my side as we watched in terror at the sight of a frantic Wayland. He never lost his cool like this. Ever since Wayland had met our family, when Clara first started bringing him around, he was always quiet and collected. When he found out about the supernatural world around him and what our family truly did within that world, he was always composed. He never broke that composure the whole time I knew him. He was a silent and deadly warrior, but to see him like this shook us all. On top of that, the fear of what had happened, or would happen, to Clara had us all in a state of shock.

  Alex ran up beside Wayland and snapped him out of his state in an instant, “Hey! Stop and go protect the rest of your family. She’s alright, I can still hear her heart beating on the other side. None of them are focusing on her; that thing’s killing all of them. I’ll get her out of there and bring her back to you.” She had placed her hand on his shoulder as she spoke through her bloodied mouth to him.

  “Wayland,” Martin sped to his side as well. Before he could speak, his voice was cut off by a thundering shake on the other side of the barrier that was preceded and followed by deathly screams for mercy. Martin centered himself, “We’ll get her, and we'll bring her to safety. Delilah can’t lose you, too. Trust me… I’ll get her.”

  Wayland looked to both of them, relenting from his initial urge to throw himself into the fray for his wife, “Please… save her…” His jaw was clenched hard at the decision to leave his wife’s fate to our inhuman friends. I could see in his eyes that he thought he had failed her. Then, he climbed down the hill of debris and met us at the door.

  We all ran, scared for Clara, hoping Alex and Martin could get her back to us safely. We were putting so much trust into them for this that it was unsettling. However, we couldn’t fight that many creatures the way we were, with no plan or equipment. So, we ran, smashing through the doors of the ground level and sprinting into the big open space where our vehicles were parked.

  We made it outside of the building to the remaining human survivors who had been taken by the vampires. They had been kidnapped and imprisoned to be used as food… or maybe it was something else. Whatever that fucking asshole with the hair-part had planned for them had been shut down. Even though he was human… I was glad that Sam slaughtered his ass. I just hoped and prayed that Sam would get my sister out of there alive.