Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [903]
At the same moment Hunter shot forward, the assassin released his gun and launched himself into the air in a great leap. The pair of Gen Ones collided in a crash of pummeling bone and muscle. As they went down onto the ground, locked in vicious hand-to-hand combat that would not cease until one or the other was killed, the rest of the warriors moved in quickly to mow down the remaining Minions guarding the mine.
The dual battles were furious, bloody, and seemed to take place in a vacuum of time that was both agonizingly slow motion and spinning out at the speed of light.
Kade and the others converged on the mine’s entrance. Blood and bone and bullets sprayed the snow-filled darkness. Minions fell in greater numbers now, their sharp, agonized screams splitting the night as the mine’s alarms continued to blare and howl.
And on the ground nearby, Hunter and the Gen One assassin rolled and twisted in an indiscernible blur of movement, hammering each other with their fists. As Kade took out another Minion near the entrance, he saw the flash of the assassin’s fangs in the darkness as the Gen One opened his maw and brought his bite down hard on Hunter’s shoulder.
Kade had an opening to fire on the bastard, but in the midst of all the chaos around them, it was a miserably thin chance. If he missed, he could put a bullet in Hunter’s head instead.
He blew out a curse and lined up his shot—just as Hunter grabbed the black polymer collar around the assassin’s neck and threw him off. Hunter pounced onto the male’s chest. Silent, merciless, he grabbed the vampire’s huge, hairless head in both hands and cracked it hard onto the snow-packed ground. Kade felt the skull-crushing thump reverberate in the ground beneath his boots.
The assassin’s fight slowed then, but Hunter wasn’t finished. Hands moving with grim efficiency and ruthless strength, he hoisted the heavy bulk of the other male and sent the disabled assassin flying. The body crashed into the side of one of the cargo containers, the assassin’s electronic collar shooting off a shower of sparks as it impacted with the corrugated steel.
“Oh, shit!” Kade shouted, having seen firsthand what those collars could do. “UV blast coming—everybody down!”
His command sent Hunter and all the rest of the warriors straight to the deck. No sooner had they hit the ground than there was a sudden, blinding flash of pure white light. The ultraviolet ray shot out from beneath the assassin’s head, cutting a clean line through skin, flesh, tendons, and bone. When it extinguished a moment later, the immense Gen One assassin lay in the melting snow in a broken heap, his hairless, glyph-covered head severed cleanly from the rest of him.
Without missing a beat, Hunter drew a pistol from his weapons belt and squeezed off more rounds at the handful of Minions who were staggering around, temporarily blinded by the explosion of light a second ago. Kade and the rest of the group joined in, and, within moments, nothing stood in their way of the mine’s entrance except a field of fallen bodies.
Tegan kicked in the steel door and led the push inside the building. The front room was vacant, except for more Minion carnage and a couple of security cameras. At the back of the space was another door, this one steel, as well, but fortified with a heavy latch and turnstile lock, like the door of a bank vault.
“Brock,” Tegan said. “Give it a bump of that C-4.”
Brock moved forward and swung the black ammunitions satchel off his back. He took out one of the pale cakes of explosive material and cut off a small piece. When he’d pressed it into place on the steel door and set the charges, everyone drew back outside and covered their heads as he hit the detonator and blew the door.
“We’re in,” he said, as the rolling smoke and dust started to clear.
They hauled open the blasted interior door and crept into the corridor on the other side. Bunk rooms lined one side of the