CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE

The Trick to Catching Vampires, Part 2

“About that... Medea told Bloodfyre about my connection to Pandora the 8th,” Sam admitted.

From the corner of his eye, Sam saw Farsight give herself a face slap. “Wow, you messed up that badly,” she said.

“Look, you were there too… and there was no way I could have hidden the shock of finding out my sister was alive or not want to save her from Chimera’s clutches after I learned the truth,” Sam insisted.

For just a brief moment, Farsight lost her smug look and understanding flashed on her face. “I know the desire to want to save your sister… I’ve lost two of them, remember?”

How could Sam forget when he still felt responsible for both losses? ‘Y-yeah, I know…”

Thunder placed a hand on Farsight’s shoulder, and seeing them standing side by side, Sam was reminded that this strong-willed and snarky teenager was still just a kid, who, like Serena, had her childhood innocence sacrificed on the altar of divine providence.

Another blood tendril came crashing down on them, forcing the trio to separate and find cover. All the while, Sam promised himself that he would do for Farsight what he couldn’t do for himself. He would heal Red Weaver from the coma Trickster’s poison forced her into—and now Sam had another reason to reclaim the Golden Fleece from Chimera’s clutches, which meant he needed to get Medea’s whereabouts from Bloodfyre’s lips no matter what.

“Crow-Man!” Sam yelled. “What’s the plan?”

“Same as it’s always been,” Crow-Man yelled back. “Follow my lead!”

With Crow-Man pulling back to direct the battle, the heroes began moving to take up the roles he deemed, "A more efficient use of your talents.”

As the battlefield remained three-dimensional, Jackboot and Thunder became the designated damage dealers who were instructed to harass Bloodfyre from all sides while ensuring they could make a quick escape from any retaliatory attacks.

“We’ll need a proper distraction to help our hit-and-run efforts,” Jackboot said.

Sam realized that Crow-Man had that covered too. It’s why he’d brought Raven Knight along in the first place. His former sidekick, Sam recalled, had a gift of ‘Shadow Manipulation’ that proved to be the perfect support power to tie up Bloodfyre’s chances for a counterattack.

He watched from his spot as smoky tendrils of shadow latched onto Bloodfyre’s wrist and yanked her arm back right before she could repel Jackboot’s heel kick from spearing her in the gut.

“It won’t matter how many gnats buzz around me, I will slay—”

Bloodfyre had aimed a sharp-nailed hand at Jackboot’s retreating figure, but another shadowy tendril latched onto her wrist and kept her from retaliating.

Bloodfyre snapped toward the shadowy form clinging to one of the steel shelves behind her. “I do believe you’re stealing my moves!”

She sent her branches to pierce a hole into Raven Knight’s body, but all they did was hit her shadow which disappeared the moment it was attacked only to pop up again ten feet away from where it vanished.

Meanwhile, Bloodfyre was distracted enough by Raven Knight’s shadows that she didn’t notice Thunder falling on top of her until it was too late. Thunder bashed her oval shield against Bloodfyre’s back, causing a kinetic explosion that propelled the vampire off her perch.

Sam watched in surprise as Bloodfyre twisted her upper body around so that her top half was facing backward despite her lower half still facing forward. And, despite what should have been a spine-breaking move, she remained in control of her limbs, allowing her to swing her sword down on Thunder’s head while Thunder looked to still be preoccupied with the shock of what just occurred.

Fortunately, a shadow hand latched onto Bloodfyre’s ankle and yanked her back at just the right moment to force her sword slash to angle away from Thunder’s body.

Then, as Sam watched the shock disappear from Thunder’s face, he saw her take a deep breath, and when she exhaled, the roar she unleashed was like the bellow of a god, which it technically was. ‘Thunder God’s Bellow’ unleashed a shockwave that crushed everything within ten feet of Thunder, driving even a powerful vampire like Bloodfyre to her knees while her branches of blood cracked and broke apart around them.

“You dare!” Bloodfyre snapped.

She struggled against the pressure, her sharp-nailed hand reaching for the heroine floating in the air, but Thunder was gone by the time the great weight vanished from Bloodfyre’s body.

Bloodfyre’s glare continued to follow Thunder as she jumped away, leaving her unaware of the shadow growing right behind her.

“I’m going to enjoy ripping your pretty face off—Argh!”

Bloodfyre screamed as a rapier’s pointy end popped out of her chest.

“So, vampires don’t die when you stab them in the heart,” Raven Knight mused.

As she’d done with her upper body, Bloodfyre’s head swiveled backward, but there was nothing for her fangs to bite into as Raven Knight’s shadow was already melting into the branch.

Sam saw the villainess chase after it, but she stumbled onto her knee, which probably meant she’d been injured to the point that a vampire’s healing ability was lagging behind the accumulated damage his friends caused.

He watched all this from the ground with his fists clenched tight and a whisper on his lips. “So cool…”

“Sam.” Dr. Hearthstone called. “Are you ready?”

Sam glanced over his shoulder and noticed that the doc was finished with his preparations too. He wasn’t sure where Dr. Hearthstone had gotten them, but chunks of rock now covered the man’s thick bulk like the armor of a medieval knight. Even his head was wrapped in a makeshift stone helmet.

“You sure you want to do this?” Sam asked.

“A reversal of our usual roles.” Dr. Hearthstone flexed his muscles and the cracks in his stone armor began to emit the same reddish glow that usually wrapped around his arms when he generated heat from inside his body. “It’ll be fun.”

“Yeah. Sure. Maybe,” Sam relented.

Dr. hearthstone offered Sam his rock-encased hand. “Fastball Special—boulder style.”

As Sam took the doc’s hand in his, he glanced over to Ice Brand who was deep in concentration about ten feet away. With each second his eyes were closed; the warehouse grew colder and colder so that the drops of blood that fell to the floor were freezing up quickly.

“You ready?” Sam asked.

Ice Brand opened his eyes which were now as white as his fluffy hair. “Just about.”

“Remember, Jin-Oppa… Freeze the blood and not the heroes tangled up there,” Miracle Girl said.

She was sitting on top of a nearby fallen crate with her legs swinging in the air.

“You’re bored, aren’t you?” Ice Brand asked as he raised his arm high.

“I can’t do much until someone gets hurt,” she sighed.

“Well, you can heal Bloodfyre when we’re done beating her up.” Ice Brand chuckled. Then he snapped his fingers while whispering “Winter’s Coming,” into the ether.

Sam felt a surge of cold rise up from the ground and freeze the air. This winter draft climbed higher and higher, and one by one the thick branches of blood began icing up until the entirety of Bloodfyre’s tree was frozen. The vampire wasn’t left unscathed either. A coating of frost clung to her body, dulling her movements temporarily while Sam prepared to strike her out with the brand-new version of the fastball special.

As for Ice Brand, the powerful ability he’d just cast must have been quite taxing for him. He fell to his knees panting with sweat coating his brow and blood dripping from his nose.

“Finally, something to do,” Miracle Girl chirped as she got off her box and began to administer some first aid to her friend.

“Ready for lift-off?” Dr. Hearthstone asked.

Sam’s gaze drifted away from Ice Brand and toward Raven Knight’s shadow which was hanging underneath a frozen branch a good ten feet away from where the villainess struggled against the cold.

“Target locked,” Sam replied. “Assuming this works and all…”

“It’ll work,” Dr. Hearthstone promised. “They’ll make it work.”

Crow-Man’s plan supported by Farsight’s prediction had a lot of moving parts to it, but this was the trickiest bit in Sam’s opinion. It was a plan that required him to throw Dr. Hearthstone with perfect aim while also timing his throw at just the right moment.

“We only get one chance at making this work,” Farsight had insisted earlier. “Just one out of a thousand probabilities.”

Now, as he watched Crow-Man jump up to where Bloodfyre was—their dance of death beginning instantly—Sam knew his time was coming.

“Just a little more,” he whispered. “Just a little more…”

It was a stroke of luck that Bloodfyre caught ‘frozen’ debuff from Ice Brand’s ability that kept her supernatural reflexes manageable for Crow-Man who was leading her toward the target location without the vampire being aware of the subterfuge.

“Now, Sam!” Dr. Hearthstone ordered.

Flames erupted out of the cracks in the doc’s armor as he dialed up his ‘Heat Generation’ to eleven while Sam’s fingers tightened on his arm. Then, with a roar of “Herculean!” Sam launched the doc into the air, sending Dr. Hearthstone up like a rocket ship with flames and smoke trailing in his wake.

As Crow-Man instructed, Sam didn’t aim Dr. Hearthstone at Bloodfyre directly, because, as Crow-Man’s first attack proved, she had the senses to notice attacks aimed directly at her while the dagger which had failed to reach her ultimately caused Bloodfyre’s earlier fall. So, instead, Sam had fired Dr. Hearthstone at the bullseye they’d conjured for him—Raven Knight’s shadow.

Bloodfyre might have still noticed the human meteor ascending toward her because he was smashing through frozen branch after frozen branch like a bull at a china shop were it not for the distraction of Farsight’s arrows disappearing from view only to stab her in spots she hadn’t been protecting.

Crow-Man was also adept at keeping Bloodfyre’s focus fixed on him so that the vampire didn’t even notice when her feet slid into position directly above where Raven Knight’s shadow hung.

In that brief moment between failure and success—with the Fates seemingly egging the heroes on—Dr. Hearthstone’s meteor smashed into the frozen branch that Raven Knight's shadow hung from and then he barreled into Bloodfyre from underneath her feet. They hurtled past through the ceiling and smashed through the warehouse’s roof and up into the stormy night sky.

It wasn’t enough to just hit her though because a villain as powerful as Bloodfyre would get back up again—and they had a plan for that too.

With his arms tightening around the vampire’s waist, Dr. Hearthstone used his secondary gift of ‘Earth Manipulation’ to transfer his rock armor onto Bloodfyre, encasing her completely in a prison of molten rock that she couldn’t escape from.

Two more figures jumped into the night sky; Jackboot, whose job it was to catch the doc as he fell back to earth, and Sam, who had the unenviable task of catching Bloodfyre’s molten cage before it crashed into Warehouse Thirteen’s roof.