Page 2 of Act of Brotherhood
Garth’s gaze slid from the case with the sword to several bullet holes in the wall next to it. They were from the same type of weapon that had injured the PSI operative. Had Auberi been the vampire who had been shot, Garth would have rejoiced. Hell, he’d have been a tad gentler when cuffing the dirtbag. As it stood, the injured vampire was a man Garth kind of liked.
More to the point, he didn’t hate the man.
He wasn’t going to skip into the rising sun, holding hands with the guy or anything (for more than one reason), but he didn’t want to see him turned into a pile of ash. The injury would more than likely heal over by morning light.
All in all, considering how outgunned Garth and his men had been upon their arrival, PSI had fared well in the mission.
The same could not be said for the other side. While the dirtbag had been escorted from the premises in cuffs that were made for a supernatural male, the majority of the dirtbag’s bodyguards had been taken out in body bags. That meant the streets had thirty or so fewer highly trained baddies running around.
For the best.
The crime family had been causing a stir and pulling too much attention in the direction of supernaturals. Their antics and blatant disregard for human life had gained notice from the human media, making headlines with the rising number of dead bodies and disappearances in the area.
That was a strict no-no.
Sure, killing humans was frowned upon, but having the media attached to it all was considered worse in the eyes of the people in charge of PSI and like-minded organizations.
Most humans weren’t privy to the truth about what was out there. That they weren’t alone in the world. That they weren’t at the top of the food chain. Alerting them to as much would go nowhere fast. There would be mass pandemonium. Garth knew. He’d seen it enough times over the centuries.
Throughout history, more than one attempt had been made to bring humans into the supernatural fold. Each try had ended poorly. Humans feared what they did not understand. And while that was fine, what they did with that fear wasn’t. Some took it to a dark place. A place that left them the bigger monsters in the scenario.
Not that supernaturals were innocent or anything. As a wolf-shifter, he knew firsthand what his kind was capable of doing. Some were pure evil. Others didn’t want to hurt anyone, but their inner demons won out.
Garth’s personal demon wasn’t a demon at all, it was an animal. He and the wolf seemed to have a basic understanding of one another, and that was fine by him. He’d known a large number of men who’d suffered from control issues with their beasts, but Garth rarely did. He had always welcomed the onset of his wolf.
Garth went through his first full change when he was only eleven. That had been early for his pack. Most didn’t go through the conversion until they were in their teens. He and his brother had been larger than normal eleven-year-old boys. The introduction of their shifter sides had come at a much-needed time in their lives. A time when the world around them was kill or be killed. With the presentation of the wolf came a sense of security. The wolf was something the boys could use to stand up for themselves in a pack that had the mentality of survival of the fittest.
There had been no room for the weak.
As shifters, his pack was even deadlier than the average human from that time period. They were lethal and proud of that fact. Warring between packs and villages was commonplace back then. And when his people perfected the art of traveling greater distances by way of longboats, the world became theirs to conquer.
Theirs to take.
And take they did.
He wasn’t proud of the way his people had behaved and the reputation they’d earned. He’d done what he could to minimize the atrocities committed, but he was one man. There had been only so much he could do. Even that had cost him greatly.
His family had a lot in common with current organized crime families. They too had broken many laws and took what they wanted by force. They held little regard for the rules of society and did as they pleased.
And they’d been ruthless.
His brother Grid danced on the edge of darkness to this day.
Though when Garth had read through the reports concerning the crime family in question, he’d found himself appalled at the level of brutality they perpetuated. He’d been raised by what many would term savages. If Garth thought someone was brutal, that was saying something.
The dirtbag in the van was something, all right.
Dirtbag was too nice a term for the guy.
If Garth’s guess was right, the dirtbag was maybe around a hundred or so. Give or take a decade. Just a baby in the world of supernaturals. Garth had undershirts older than the guy.
That being said, the man had amassed quite the collection of rare weapons in his short hundred or so years. He had an entire wing of his massive home devoted to his collection of weapons throughout the ages.
If museums were more like this, Garth would actually attend exhibits. As it stood, they very rarely offered anything he found interesting. Not even when they featured items and artifacts from the time period he was born in. The Viking Age of Scandinavia.
So what if they’d recovered another Viking grave or more cups and pots they assumed were from his time? He didn’t need broken relics or to be reminded of those he had cared for and lost.
What hedidneed was a sword like the one mounted on the wall before him.
