sunnydalealum | (no subject)

That's more than enough of a hint; Wolfram & Hart employees know how to recognize a vampire when they see one in action. (Two, in this case.)

Nightsticks come out, and heavy wooden stakes spring out of their far ends.

River's head snaps to the side, raking the room in a quick sweeping glance, and back to the target.

(And there, her first expression: a fleeting moment of what might be exasperation.)

Her fanning hand drops, slaps leather and jerks sideways all in one motion as she spins to set her back to the wall; the right-hand gun shoots for blood, and the left-hand one to splinter wood.

Spike's having a hard time remembering what the plan was. He was there, he assumes, but there was a lot of talking with words in, and somewhere along the line he must have mistaken it for one of Angel & Hart's interminable meetings and quit listening. Kill shit, and then... well, for now just kill shit. When that gets old probably someone will shout something useful.

The sticks with more sticks in them are quite good, though. He doesn't remember that from L.A. He deflects the one coming at him, mostly -- there's a hole in his black t-shirt and one in his white stomach, but it's worth it to break the attacker's elbow instead of the toy, which he shoves in a back pocket.

Harth has his own plan.

It may or may not line up with the overall plan.

For now, though, it's right in line with Spike's, and he jumps into a lazy fighting stance against one wall to welcome his attackers. Aim one: Break arms holding stakes. He fires the crossbow casually at one guard, before raising it as a bludgeon for the rest.

The crossbow bolt sticks in the guard's shoulder. The guard gives it an annoyed look, reaches up with one plate-scaled hand to snap it off, and hurls the broken shaft back at Harth like a dart before starting to move in River's direction.

The bullets from her gun aren't doing much to stop this one either.

River ignores him for the moment, or seems to. Her eyes scan desks, potted plants, filing cabinets and water cooler; her bullets follow.

She rolls behind her filing cabinet again, reloading without looking, her fingers deft and gunslinger-fast. But when the cylinders are full again, she jams the guns back into their holsters, head cocked as if she's listening for something. Perhaps she is.

Because when she spins back around, it's the katana that's in her hands.

There's blood scent in the air now, some of it his, and Spike wishes he had time for a proper meal -- unlike Angel, he can't see the harm in eating what you're going to kill regardless. It's bloody well conservationist, innit? Except that in this case it's likely drugged with something odorless, tasteless and nasty to vampires -- it's what he would do himself.

Any road someone's coming through the door who looks like he might be a step up from GoonTemps. That's a sodding expensive suit, and some of the blood scent is coming from it, along with chalk dust and hot wax.

"Fucking magician," he says, half a head's up to the rest of the team and half just commentary, and throws a handy rolling chair at the bloke.

The chair's knocked aside in midair with an easy, contemptuous gesture.

"Save one of them alive," Expensive Suit says tersely to the others. "I want to know how they got in without tripping the vamp alarm."

"Rocketship!" remarks Harth, eyes shining in interest behind his glasses as he snaps one man's leg with a vicious kick from behind.

He strains his senses, but apart from the telltale dark prickle that Spike had already pointed out, there's not much he can gather.

Ah well. He draws a knife from his back pocket and starts forward, ducking around the injured man.

The irritated and unfortunately bulletproof guard facing River looks no more impressed by her sword than he did by her guns. It doesn't help that her wall and filing cabinet are as much corner as cover; if she moves out too far she's in danger of crossbow bolts and arrows, but her protections limit her movement. And the guard wades into the fray with the unruffled assurance of someone confident in his skill, his armor, or both.

A feint, a sideways dodge, a low kick and a high stab-- Those glinting purple scales around his neck, it turns out, may guard well against beheading, but they do absolutely nothing to help with a katana through the eye.

River rears back and plants a solid kick to the demon's chest in the instant before he goes limp; he crumples backwards, and her sword pulls from his eye socket with a horrible grating squelch. She ignores him, except to wipe her sword efficiently on his once-fancy suit -- you never know when demon blood's corrosive, and his is a marvelous shade of purple -- and to dive over him in a roll that carries her towards the hallway and into another cluster of guards.

Oh, well, if River's leaving, no point in hanging round here.
She's nicked Spike's plan of showing off over the body of their enemy, but he doesn't bear malice. He does, however, bear knives. He leaves one through the magician's palm and one in his vocal chords -- chant now, supercilious bastard -- on his way to the door.

He's whistling something that one might, if one were an optimist, recognize as "can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man..."

There are more guards in the hallway. There's also a handful of young women, with weapons.

One of them should be familiar to two of the combatants.

"Dana!" she shouts at the sight of River. And then, to Spike, in fury: "Jesus christ, you people armed her?"

Harth hops out last after knocking down and stabbing through the back of the neck of the last guard standing in the room, and his eyes narrow at the sight of the girls, hands raising automatically as he approaches with a mix of caution and fascination.

Slayers. And he knew there were many here and now, but...

He stays silent, for now, eyes fixed hungrily on the face of the woman who'd spoken.

River's sword punches messily through the throat of an unfortunately slow guard, and blood sprays across her knuckles.

"Wrong," she whispers over his choked gurgle, and it's almost gentle.

He collapses in the same moment her blade jerks out.

"You can tell 'cause my bleeding hands are still on," Spike adds, irritated. He doesn't want to kill Slayers.

Well, he doesn't want to want to kill Slayers. It'll have to do.

He unclasps the length of chain wrapped round his waist and starts to whirl it, incidentally clocking one of the remaining guards on the backswing. He's not sure himself if he means to throttle the bint or just wrap her weapon and render it useless, but in the meantime the thing's radius buys him a bit of non-breathing room.

Until one of the other zhirelin steps in from the side, thrusting the sharpened baseball bat she carries into the whirling chain, sacrificing her grasp on it to break his defense.

As though it's been rehearsed, another leaps in almost at the same moment to strike.

And Harth darts forward, almost in step, to kick her legs out from under her with a snarl of effort and anticipation, raising one arm against retaliation.

For the moment, the plan's on hold. He can't resist this.

A Slayer's fast, and strong. Dangerous.

A Slayer is like anything else: a collection of targets.

River slips sideways, away from that dangerous spinning chain before it's tangled and taken out of the fight. Instead, she lashes her sword downward -- blood droplets fly -- and back up to slide it into the sheath, one-handed, in the same moment her free hand blurs towards her hip.

A Slayer's like any other human in this, too: bullets kill them sure as anyone.

Spike's nose is dripping blood; his chain is gone, and there's at least three stakes aimed in his direction. He's grinning. Bugger scruples, this is what a vampire lives for, and he gets to do it on the side of sodding motherhood and apple pie. And River.

He changes face. It's traditional. And then puts a stake through Brianna's shoulderblade, 'cause it's not, and dammit, one of them should know what it feels like.

Brianna lets out a strangled sound that's half scream of rage and half cursing in pain, and with her uninjured arm backhands Spike hard enough to send him into the opposite wall.

"Cover me," she gasps to another zhirel, who's already stepping between her and the fight to give her time to pull the thing out.

Harth shudders as he breathes in, throwing the girl he'd tripped away as hard as possible away to unbalance her as far as he can. He resists for a second before letting himself slip into game face - it's not Melaka, his own face won't throw them in the least.

Then the initial shock passes, and he grins viciously at the first girl to catch his eye, and lunges foward with a knife in one hand, and the fingers of his other hooked into a claw.

River's got her own trouble: a knot of guards and zhirelin, converging on her. Gunshots draw attention.

So do bodies.

She's fast, almost inhumanly so, and her hands know their work. But so is everybody else in this corridor, and some of them have cover or demonic natures to protect them, and every twelve shots she has to reload.

Spike's got blood on his mouth and splinters in his palm, and fuck if he exactly remembers how either got there, but there's a dead guard -- a dead human guard on his hands, literally, with a snapped neck, and the body weighs more than he remembered.

He uses it for counterweight for a spinning kick at the nearest Bad Slayer, the sort of thing Andrew could do by pressing buttons in some complicated sequence Spike couldn't be arsed to remember. She falls back but its only an organized retreat, not a rout, and from somewhere to his right is the sound of River not firing a gun.

Bloody hell. He risks a glance -- takes a punch in the cheek for it from a bint wearing entirely too many rings -- and ranges himself in front of her. Vampires only survive bullets, not stop them, but such as it is, she's got cover now.

The guard advancing on Spike right now isn't human. It's fairly easy to tell: humans don't grow that large, or come in quite that color. Or texture.

Nor, generally, are they equipped with detachable hook-tipped bone spikes all up their arms.

River ducks low to reload, using Spike's spinning darting form for what cover she can, and rises again to fire. She keeps moving, keeps spinning, kicks where she has to and shoots every target that presents itself; in a fight like this, that's its own kind of cover.

Keep canda. Shoot with your mind; kill with your heart.

Do the job.