Blazing Glory (6 page)

Levi’s solid body against him made
him feel rooted in the reality he’d thought he’d lost. Blaze suddenly realized
why he’d been so afraid of failing.

He wasn’t afraid for his own
safety, and it wasn’t because he stood on a high moral ground and cared about
the city being run over by zombies. He’d been afraid of losing Levi, especially
when Levi just entered his life and gave him another reason to live.

“Promise me again, bear. Promise me
we’re both going to make out of this alive.” The vehemence in Blaze’s voice
seemed to surprise Levi, but Levi only kissed him gently on the lips.

“I promise you I’ll make sure we’ll
both live to see another day, Blaze.”

****

“You and Volt seem close,” Levi
remarked during the short drive to the city cemetery.

He wanted to make conversation just
to dispel the grim, heavy atmosphere in the sleek black car, which also
coincidently belonged to Volt. Levi preferred his well-used and rusty pickup
any day, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“Yeah, Volt, and you’ve met Gale,
right?” Blaze continued at his nod. “Havoc adopted us, and the three of us grew
up like brothers. We didn’t always get along. I think Havoc didn’t really know
what he signed up for, adopting three volatile
elementalists
.
We pretty much wrecked a lot of things before he found a way to put our
abilities to good use.”

“Yeah, the city’s quick-and-easy
demolition crew, huh?” Levi caught the small smile on Blaze’s lips.

“How about you?”

“What about me?”

“Hasn’t anyone ever told you a
relationship takes two, bear?” Blaze asked in a mocking voice.

“Can’t say I know, because you’re
honestly the first one I had.”

The expression on Blaze’s face was
priceless. “What?”

Levi shrugged. “We bear shifters
only take one mate for life. So why bothering committing to something serious
when I know that person isn’t my mate?”

“But you called me your mate.”

Levi let Blaze chew on that for a
while. Sometimes Blaze could be awfully clueless. It annoyed the hell out of
him.

“Oh,” Blaze said finally, his eyes
slightly wide.

“Yeah, oh,” Levi growled. “Okay
fine. I’ll bite. What do you want to know?”

“Tell me more about yourself. I
know next to nothing about you.”

“Damn, Blaze. You’re a romantic,
aren’t you?” Levi sighed. “You know most shifters are either natural born or
bitten by the alpha of the pack?”

Blaze nodded, seeming genuinely
interested and curious, so Levi talked.

“I come from long line of
natural-born bear shifters. There aren’t a lot of us in the city. Bears don’t
adapt well to urban spaces, like wolves. They prefer nature and wide-open
spaces,” Levi explained. “Those who stay in the city usually band together,
form their own clan, and pull security or enforcer jobs.”

The streets they drove through were
relatively empty, not surprising given it was the dead of the night. Levi
expected to see denizens of the underworld hanging around street corners,
especially on this side of the city, but there weren’t any. No whores, pimps,
or drug dealers. It was as if they knew trouble was brewing.

“There were a couple of bear
shifters at Schneider Tower,” Blaze remembered. “How are they taking this
zombie-infestation job?”

“Not well. I’m working for a
different crew now, made up of different shifters and failed rejects, like me.
They aren’t assholes like members of my previous clan.”

Blaze guiltily looked away at that
information. “I’m sorry for landing you in this situation.”

Keeping one hand on the steering
wheel, Levi gripped Blaze’s arm. “You have nothing to be sorry for. I don’t
regret leaving my clan. I only joined them to pay the bills in the first place.
Like I said, this is our mess and we’ll clean it up. What did Volt say—we’re
alike?”

Blaze let out a huff of laughter.
“True enough. Levi, after this… if we make it out alive….”

Levi tightened his grip on Blaze’s
arm.

“No way in hell you’re going to hide
again, Blaze. You’re my mate. I’ve claimed you, so don’t even think about
running from me, because I have your scent and I’ll just hunt you down.”

“Hunt me down?” Blaze let out a
snort, but Levi could see he was secretly pleased. Whatever fears he didn’t
voice seemed straightened out for the moment.

Blaze’s phone rang and he picked it
up. After speaking to someone named Heath—Volt’s apprentice, Levi
remembered—Blaze turned to him. Levi did not like his serious expression one
bit.

“There have been reports of
residents of a nearby subdivision being attacked, and the zombies are
spreading. Local enforcement was called in, but I doubt they’ll be of much
help. The City Council arranged a blockade near the cemetery so they’ll be no
further casualties.”

“Great. I’m really starting to feel
like a sacrificial pig here.”

Blaze didn’t laugh. “Levi, you do
know what Biters are, right?”

Recalling the enormous undead giant
in Schneider Tower, Levi answered, “Major league, undead nasty?”

“They’re not just that. You’ve seen
it at work in my apartment. Biters aren’t mindless like the zombies they
control. They’re remnants of failed necromancers who’d tried playing their hand
at death.”

“Wait, are you saying these things
were once human?” Levi asked, shocked.

Blaze nodded glumly. “I don’t want
to know what those brainless city councilors were doing, keeping a thing like
that.”

“They wanted to use it as a
weapon.” Levi made a face. “Do you remember what that evening’s highlight was?”

“An auction.”
Blaze’s jaw tightened. “Bloody hell, they were going to sell that thing?”

“Yeah, but now
they’ve decided its better to get rid of it, and we’re the suckers who ended up
cleaning their mess.”

“Bloody great.”

“Oh yeah,” Levi agreed.

Half an hour later, Levi announced,
“We’re here.” He directed the car into an opened iron gate.

The words
Gracefall
Cemetery were written in elaborate script on an expensive plate above the wide
iron gate
. Spanning almost nine hundred acres with almost a
million burials, Gracefall was the largest cemetery in the city.

Levi hadn’t been here before, but
he knew it would be hard as hell to maneuver through the vast space. Since
Blaze mentioned the City Council ordered a blockade, he had a feeling the main
entrance was also their only other exit.

He stationed the car in the empty
parking lot. Beside him, Blaze shivered for some unexplainable reason. Levi
opened the car door, and the overpowering scent of the dead assaulted him. The
smell here was ten times worse than Blaze’s apartment.

“Levi, you good?”
Blaze asked cautiously, gripping his shoulder. Blaze had strapped on so many
guns, he was like walking, talking ammunition. With his tell-tale elemental red
ink, Blaze also looked a little savage.

Yummy.
Levi licked his lips,
recovering from the stench. Thinking of Blaze and knowing what was underneath
all those guns and clothes would distract him from the smell.

Blaze withdrew his hand in
annoyance. “You’re clearly fine if you’re ogling me like that.”

“What can I say? My mate’s worth
ogling.”

Spots of color appeared on Blaze’s
cheeks. “I don’t think I’ll ever me used to that,” Blaze mumbled. “Not with
these.” Blaze offhandedly pointed to his burned hand and scarred body
underneath his clothes.

Levi frowned. He was about to
speak, but Blaze shook his head.

Right.
Business first.

“Blaze, before we
start, I need to ask you something, and you have to be honest with me.”
It’d been bothering Levi for a while, and it was better to have it all out now.

Blaze let out a breath. “You want
to ask about my left hand, right?”

“When you
summoned those balls of fire in the apartment corridor, your hand was shaking
badly,” Levi pointed out.

Blaze grimaced. He dropped his
eyes, but Levi tilted his chin, forcing Blaze to look at him.

“The fire at Schneider Tower didn’t
just leave you with physical scars, did it? It also hindered your natural
ability to call flame.”

“I assure you, I’m not going to
slow you down,” Blaze finally said, his voice quaking with visible anger.

“If I thought you were, I would’ve
left you, but I didn’t,” Levi told him calmly, watching Blaze take in his
words.

“What point are you trying to
make?” Blaze demanded.

“No more reckless moves, Blaze. If
we’re going to survive this, I call the shots. I move in first and you guard
our backs.” Levi expected him to put up more of an argument, but he only nodded
curtly. Blaze’s trust warmed him.

“Are you going to continue nagging,
bear?”

Levi smiled and took the front. He
wound his way past the endless rows of burials, keeping to the edges where
there were foliages and trees. It wasn’t much, he knew. The zombies keenly
smelled and hungered for the flesh of the living just as he smelled their
decaying and offending rot.

All they could do was keep moving
forward.

“How do you know where to go?”
Blaze whispered behind him.

“It doesn’t take a genius to
pinpoint the Biter’s location.” Levi wrinkled his nose. “Let’s assume the
monster is smart enough not to be
careless,
and it’d
surround itself with its flunkies.”

“So… you’re basically your trusting
your nose to lead you to where most of the undead are gathering?”

Levi ignored the sarcasm in Blaze’s
voice and continued following the sickly stench of rot. The deeper they headed
into the cemetery grounds, the heavier the air seemed to become. They were
entering territory where the living weren’t welcomed and would most likely end
up as food. All the hairs in Levi’s arms began to stand.

Here and there, he could see
glimpses of bloodshot and gleaming, hungry eyes. The zombies were everywhere.
Hiding in the bushes, behind graves, and even up the trees.
A shudder passed through Levi, like something unpleasant crawled down his
spine.

One thing was certain, though. They
were finally in the heart of the creature’s lair, and Levi and his bear didn’t
like the reversal of roles. Bears weren’t prey.

“You were right, Levi,” Blaze
whispered, his voice tight with emotion.

Soft growling and moaning noises
penetrated the misty, foul air, reminding him the patience of the undead were
at a limit. Behind him, he could hear Blaze nervously tightened his grip on his
sawed-off shotgun.

The sounds of their shuffling feet
and groaning bodies made him nervous. Were some of them retreating from their
hiding places to protect their master?

Levi heard the loud rustle of
leaves from the grove of trees surrounding the statue of a marble angel ahead
of him. An inhuman rumbling sound followed. It was a sound Levi remembered from
his dreams.

A shadow was stretched into odd
proportions on the ground by the moonlight. Dirty yellow reptilian eyes opened
to stare at them. All hulking fourteen feet of it emerged from its hiding spot.
Covered in thick gray leathery skin, it was vaguely humanoid in shape and
layered with tough, lean muscle. Long, yellowing talons curled at the ends of
the creature’s spindly arms. Sharp canines as long as Levi’s arm protruded from
its massive jaws.
 

To Levi’s shock and chagrin, the
creature spoke in an ugly, nasally voice. “Foolish mortals, did you come into
my lair to feed my children?”

“Wrong, asshole.
We came here to wipe you and your children out,” Blaze said.

Blaze’s shotgun roared to life. His
bullet made a circular hole in the Biter’s forehead, and then another and
another until Blaze emptied his entire clip.

The bullets hardly damaged the
monster. Odd choking wheezes came from the Biter, and it took Levi a second to
realize it was laughing, not dying.

“Shit.”

Levi swung his own gun upward just
as a half-naked zombie came into his line of sight. This time he remembered to
make full use of his ammo. He placed two careful shots in its heart and head,
then
stepped over it. Adrenaline sang in his veins, before
his mood was dampened and a sea of gray rotting bodies came at them.

“Blaze, they’re too many. We have
to make a path and reach the Biter!” Levi shouted over the loud groaning
animated bodies.

He felt Blaze’s back press against
his, and Levi let out a sigh of relief. They covered each other, loading and
reloading. There was no end to the horde closing in on them. They emptied out
their guns as they kept the creatures from reaching their sphere of attack.

Levi hoped they had enough just to
clear a path to the Biter. “Blaze, cover me while I shift. Our bullets aren’t
doing us any good,” Levi shouted.

“I got you,” Blaze said tightly.

Somewhere, the Biter was letting
out its mechanical, nasty, nasal laugh as it watched them struggle.

“Damn monster,” Levi growled.

He stripped out of his protective
gear and clothes. He could hear Blaze emptying all of his guns. Blaze was a
relentless machine, swapping from one gun from the next until they clicked
empty.

A gasp of pain from Blaze brought
Levi’s raw, protective instincts to the forefront.

Levi let out a growl of challenge.
His massive paws easily swiped the zombie latched on Blaze’s back. Nostrils
flaring, he quickly scanned their surroundings, showing him more zombies
replacing their fallen brethren.

Rage coated his vision in a red-hot
sea of wrath. His bear remembered the puny mouths that latched on to its fur
hours ago and wanted revenge. It was on the verge of going berserk, of simply
cutting loose and letting its claws and teeth do as nature intended.