The Vampire girl, Heather, had led them to some sort of a large opening, and from his vantage point, Aaron couldn’t quite see what she meant when she said they weren’t alone. But he could hear. Around them, the growls and hisses grew substantially louder until it was obvious attack was inevitable.
“What is this place that they don’t seem to want us here?” Elliott asked, his voice low.
“It’s not the place itself, I don’t think,” she replied in a harsh whisper. “I think it’s just that this place is more open than the rest, that they can see me—us—better, that’s all.”
“And this thing you want to show us is here?” Brandon clarified.
“Yep. So get ready. Be careful with your damn bullets, though. I ain’t traversed this place this long to get killed now.”
Heather took a few more steps into the opening and the rest of them followed. As soon as she was away from the tunnel from which they’d arrived, the creatures showed themselves. Stepping, slithering, crawling from the recesses of the other tunnels, seeming to drop from the ceiling or emerge from the floor. There were dozens of them, and they were everywhere.
Aaron couldn’t remember having seen anything like them before, not even when he’d been battling Dracula. Not even when Holland was at her trickiest. He didn’t get much of a chance to take them all in before his team was under attack, and they all drew their weapons, engaging the monsters who sought them out.
Luckily, the Glocks seemed to work just fine against them, unlike the shapeshifter Vampires Holland had created that often took beheading to end. These monsters went down quickly with a shot to the head or body in a location where one might assume the heart or lungs would be. Aaron took out some sort of giant snake with rows of serrated teeth before it could sweep him off of his legs as well as a bird-like creature that reminded him of an eagle. But there were so many of them, and despite the fact that all six Guardians were firing on all cylinders, and Heather was using her ax, Aaron soon found so many of them upon him, he was forced to holster is Glock and fight.
All of the creatures were either black or some darker version of another color—like purple or blue—that they were hard to see. Most of them had red eyes, though they didn’t exactly glow in the dark, so it was difficult to see what he was fighting. Aaron remembered he had Van’s knife in his pocket, so he pulled it out and started stabbing as another hellcat rushed from one side and a chimpanzee with a shark fin of some sort dodged at his right arm. A few quick swipes of her knife slowed them enough that he could reposition himself. As the monkey came at him again, he kicked it hard in the gut, sending it flying into a cavern wall. It slowly slid to the floor, limping off, possibly to regroup and try again.
The hellcat was bleeding from the neck from his first pass with the blade. It wasn’t as fast as it came at him again, but it was easier to see now that red smeared its black fur. Aaron aimed for the eyes this time, avoiding the sharp fangs, and smashed Van’s knife right into its left orb. The cat screeched in agony as Aaron pulled the knife and sliced across its throat again, this time buckling its knees and falling to the ground. It didn’t get back up.
Another snake was headed his way, but he had a moment to survey the scene around him. Jamie was busy blasting his teammates with blue light while still engaged with some sort of a furry pig. Elliott and Brandon were fighting several creatures with their backs against each other. Aaron couldn’t even classify half of them. Alex and Dax were also engaged, and Dax had blood all over his jacket. Aaron assumed many of the blue lights he saw were Jamie putting the least experienced of them back together.
Aaron pulled his Glock again. The numbers were more even now, but they could be fighting for hours if these creatures just kept pouring out of the shadows indefinitely. It seemed like, despite Heather’s explanation, whatever it was she wanted to show them, these beasts didn’t want it revealed. All the more reason to see it.
The wall behind him was just as rough and spiky as any of the others, but after shooting the snake several times in the face, causing it to stop its slithering, Aaron used the cave wall like it was The Hill in the training facility at home and ran straight up it, thinking there had to be either a ceiling or a ledge obscured by the darkness up there somewhere. What he found was a bit of both--a hole in the cave ceiling that could only be described as a pool of black ink. He stuck his hand in and couldn’t even define the sensation. Electric tingles, goo, some sort of slime. It was enough to keep him from trying to climb through the hole, but he did grab the lip of the opening with one hand, and swinging free, he used his X-ray vision to start shooting the creatures below him.
Heather screamed at him to stop, that he would kill them all, but she didn’t realize he could see through all of this much better from that vantage point, since his superpowers let him visualize the forms on the other side of the fog. The rim of the cave was slicing through his hand, and he could feel blood dripping down his fingers, pooling in his palm, but he held on, taking out the remainder of the monsters who had ventured across their paths, as his friends ended the ones they were already engaged with. Satisfied he’d gotten them all, for now, Aaron swung back toward the wall and used it to propel himself back safely to the ground.
“What the hell is the matter with you!” Heather screeched, coming his direction with her ax in her fist. “You coulda killt us all!”
“He could see through the fog up there. We can see through lots of stuff,” Elliott explained while Aaron was examining his hand. The cuts were deep; whatever these walls were made out of, it was as sharp as lava rock. If he had stayed up there much longer, Jamie would probably be putting some fingers back on.
Instead, the doctor took a look and said, “That’s gotta hurt,” and then waved his hand over top of Aaron’s, flickering blue lights along his injury. When he was done, the cuts were completely healed.
“Thanks.” Aaron patted his shoulder, glad that Jamie wasn’t even the least bit tired. It would’ve been a lot more difficult to manage all of those demons, or whatever the hell they were, without his healing capacity, especially if they also had to protect him from being eaten while he was asleep.
