Kim was heartbroken over what had happened to her friend, but Bella felt very little of that grief. The way she saw it, the willful, hot-tempered Amanda she'd once known had already died on Elm Street. Twisted by the Will of Hell, the demon Ruby had nothing to do with the Amanda of old.
Not being able to find the mastermind was a shame, but there was a countermeasure for everything — she'd meet each threat as it came.
A high-level mage who came prepared feared no fight. Dragon? Angel? Demon? She could kill them all. The only thing to fear was being caught unready.
Albanians show up, she kills Albanians. Vampires show up, she kills vampires. It really was that simple.
Bella figured her family was probably safe. Even if Charlie lost his election bid, he was still very much a public figure — not some backwoods sheriff who could lie dead for two weeks before anyone noticed. The odds of vampires storming in to attack him openly were low, unless they wanted all-out war with the mortal world.
Still, Bella asked the Divine Dragon, Bumblebee, and Jazz to help keep an eye on her family.
The Divine Dragon and Bumblebee were a pair of goofballs — not exactly dependable. But Jazz, as Optimus Prime's second-in-command, was reliable enough.
With her family safe, Bella snatched up the phone, seething, and ordered her people to bring the "hardware" over. She still had to wait for word on the vampires — but in the meantime, she was going to teach the Albanians a lesson they'd never forget.
...
Among Albania's many crime families, the Murad clan wasn't especially well known. And Albania itself wasn't even a junior player on the European stage — it was a small nation with no history, no culture, and no industry to speak of.
But the country sat across the water from Italy, separated at its narrowest by less than 75 kilometers (47 miles) of the Adriatic Sea. The Albanians hadn't picked up any of the Italians' artistic refinement, and they'd never learned the art of compromise — yet they'd absorbed the mafia's brutal code down to the last letter.
You kill one member of my family, and I'll hunt you down to the ends of the earth and make you pay.
It was precisely that fierce loyalty that had kept the crime family alive all these years.
Under Murad Krasniqi's leadership, the family had set out on its road of revenge.
We can murder your people and traffic your women — but you killing us? Never. That was exactly the kind of arrogance they lived by.
Catching him off guard, they'd used the wife of Bryan Mills — the veteran operative — as leverage to seize the old agent himself, then teamed up with a group of mysterious figures out of Italy in a bid to capture Bella. The plan had failed.
Now they were holed up inside a gymnasium and two apartment blocks in a slum district of Istanbul.
The Istanbul authorities didn't dare interfere. They could only quietly tolerate the mafia's presence.
As dusk settled, a knot of thugs were lounging in front of the TV when a sudden, thunderous whine reached them from outside — the high-speed thrum of rotor blades.
A big-bearded man shouted, "The enemy's here!"
"Grab your weapons!"
"Get ready! Break out the rocket launchers!"
They'd braced for Bella's retaliation — relaxed on the surface, coiled underneath — and had quietly rigged plenty of traps. The faintest disturbance outside was enough to snap the whole crew into combat mode.
Several of the fiercer-looking men had smeared blood across their faces in marks of vengeance, baring knotted, muscular arms as they waited, focused, for the enemy to walk into the killing zone.
Thud. Thud. Two dull impacts — a helicopter had dropped two shipping containers in front of their courtyard gate, then peeled away.
Murad Krasniqi was cunning and cautious. Seeing the containers sitting there, there was no way he'd let his men rush over like idiots to pop them open — who knew what the hell was inside?
"Open fire!" Even if there was a bomb in there, the distance was too great for it to reach them. He wasn't worried.
A crackle of gunfire, like beans popping in a pan, raised the curtain on this act of revenge.
Riiip. A massive hand, its skin an iron-grey, tore through the bullet-shredded container.
A tall man stepped out — bald, cold-eyed, draped in an army-green coat, radiating a chilling menace. Behind him came a second, identical hulk.
This was the latest bio-organic weapon rolling off Weyland-Yutani's production line. By the virus's generational count, these were fifth-generation Tyrants.
Greater control. Greater lethality. As the Tyrants emerged from the container, the biological signals in their brains completed their conversion, and they quickly received the order from their handler: kill everyone in this house who was carrying a weapon.
Boom, boom. The Tyrants took long strides and broke into a charge.
Rat-tat-tat! In the pitch dark, the Albanians couldn't make out what these things even were. They raised their assault rifles and opened up in a frenzy.
They aimed their muzzles at the Tyrants' heads and hearts, squeezed the triggers all the way down, and sent bullets raining in like a downpour.
The Tyrants' bodies were heavy, but they weren't slow. Throwing their arms up to shield their eyes, they slammed forward like freight trains.
A bearded bruiser — a good 150 kilograms (330 pounds) — was rammed into red mist on the spot, at least eighty percent of his bones snapping at once. Blood welled from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as his body, limp as mud, slid slowly down from where it hung. His brother was hardly less imposing; with a roar, he leapt out from a corner, a rocket launcher hoisted on his shoulder.
The rocket streaked dead-on at the Tyrant. The Tyrant raised an elbow and pulped the first bearded man's head entirely, then reached out with his right hand — deceptively slow, actually blinding — caught the rocket, converted its forward thrust into upward force, gripped it tight, and hurled it skyward. The rocket detonated fifty meters (160 feet) above everyone's heads.
Before the man who'd fired it could even snap out of his shock, the second Tyrant seized his skull and drove it into the nearest wall.
Bone, brain, and a spray of blood painted half the wall. Utterly without feeling, the Tyrant tossed the corpse aside and moved on to its next target.
The two Tyrants ignored the storm of bullets and unleashed a berserk slaughter among the Albanians.
Those who fought to the death had to die. Those who tried to run had to die too.
"Die! Just die!" A man wielding a chainsaw, backed into a corner, swung the blade at a Tyrant's neck — only to be caught by the head and the foot and torn clean in two.
A gangster with a shotgun pumped round after round into a Tyrant's back, the buckshot leaving the army-green coat riddled with holes. The Tyrant wrenched the shotgun away and, with a savage backhand swing, drove the stock into the gangster hard enough to knock his head clean off.
The army-green coat had been upgraded several times over; it was now fully immune to pistol rounds and could absorb well over half the kinetic energy of rifle fire.
The Tyrants' bodies, cultivated with the t-Virus, weren't quite bulletproof — that would be an exaggeration — but their regeneration was astonishing. A rifle round that buried itself in the flesh would be squeezed back out by the muscle in under thirty seconds.
One on the left, one on the right, the two Tyrants plowed two blood-soaked furrows through the Albanian mob — paths paved with severed limbs and shattered bone.