Taking Down the Followers

Who: The Lockwoods and a load of demons!
Where: Somewhere in Mexico
When: afternoon

Mathias laid low, crouched down in the long grasses by the side of the train tracks. He kept half an eye on his brother, who he could just about see from his position and half an eye down the track, waiting for the train which should deliver Dorian, poised, ready and almost invisible where he was. He'd been doing regular scouting trips, circling round, checking that no ambush was being prepared ahead of time by the demons tracking Dorian. So far he'd found nothing, but they weren't taking any chances.

When Dorian realized he was nearing his destination, he did all he could do to prepare. It wasn't much, in this case, with only a handful of possessions in tow, and after all that had happened jumping from a moving train wasn't near as nerve wrecking as it could be for others. As the train came through, he pulled the cargo door open, watching as he grew closer. A shuffling above him drew his eyes up, but he refused to look-- if his tracker was on the roof and they'd gone this far without acknowledgment, he wasn't going to give in now. Hopefully it wouldn't be the decision that got him killed.

Stubbing out his cigarette on the cargo door, Dorian took a breath of fresh air and jumped. Or rolled, for that matter, as landing on his feet wasn't really an option. Ducking into a crouch, he tried to listen beyond the train, then turned to look as it continued to pass. Nothing was on the roof now, as it sped by behind him, but that didn't mean there hadn't been. Rising slowly, Dorian scanned the land around him, looking for his brothers or any other impending danger.

Mathias saw Dorian land, but didn't move straight away, casting his eye around for signs of anyone following his brother. They'd be better off if they caught the element of surprise, after all. He'd give it a moment or two, see if there was anything immediate going down. At least he didn't look badly hurt or anything, that was really something.

At times like this, Dorian wished he could sense where his enemies stood. Just because there'd only been one on the train didn't mean the rest weren't close behind. And what if he'd only seen one on the train? There'd been stops along the way and, hard as he tried, Dorian couldn't watch all entrances at once. Now, though, he could watch down the line, and he scowled as a figure jumped a mile down. Moving quickly to take cover, he continued away from the tracks, watching to see just how many followed suit.

Mathias watched his brother, then the line again, keeping an eye out before he moved to intercept Dorian before they got to the parking lot. He came at him from an angle, behind and to his right, moving swiftly to put a hand on his brother's shoulder, holding him down. "Long time no see, bro - you okay?" he asked, his voice low.

Dorian moved quickly, reflexes going into effect before recognition of his brother's voice. He spun, gun drawn, but was lucky enough not to fire before he realized who it was. "Shit, Math - don't sneak up on me," he said, voice quiet, lowering his gun as Math held him back. "I'm okay. Tired, but on my feet." The exhaustion showed in his face, in his nerves. His eyes had been lit up for days, but his hands were steady, which was better than he'd been two days ago.

"Good - that's gonna make things a whole lot easier then," Mathis told him. "Caleb's waiting, I'm running interference. He can deal with most things, but we're fucked if they've got guns, so anything you can do there'd be good. We have an initial set up and a retreat back to a maintenance shed down the road."

"I can handle guns," Dorian said, lips turning up slightly. True, he was tired, but guns were easy. Guns were light. Ripping them from a fiend's grip wasn't all that difficult and bullets could be easily diverted if he saw them coming. "So we head back to meet up with him and wait it out? I don't know if you saw, but they know I'm here."

"We figured they would do," Mathias said. "Most of our planning was done on the basis that they'd be coming straight at us and you'd be hurt, so I'm counting this as good," he added with a grin as they headed out. "We'll circle back round Caleb, come from behind, give him field of fire for now, just in case."

"I had almost two full days on a train to rest and recover," Dorian said. "I've been better, but I can fight." There was little that would have kept him out of it at this point. "Field of fire?" Dorian asked. "Wanna fill me in on what Caleb's got to dish out?" While he'd seen the damage his brother would take, Dorian was still clueless on Caleb's ability to fight.

"I'm not too up on the technical terms," Mathias told his brother as they passed into the shelter of the decrepit warehouse and Mathias used the shield from sight it provided to stand up, stretching a little - crouching for so long had given him kinks. "But, let's put it this way - his particular style of blood magic is lethal in a very messy way. His specialty seems to be this five stringed attack thing - takes out whatever's in his path in a wide swathe. Almost got me before I learned to keep the hell out of the way, I can tell you."

"So how do we stay out of his path?" Dorian asked, trying to figure out how they'd fight together if Caleb needed so much space. "Does he have any idea what kind of radius he needs? Cause I can probably work with him, given that." This would definitely be interesting, Dorian realized, and just hoped that he could keep out of his brother's way as well as the demons. Both were a danger if he wasn't careful.

Suddenly, Dorian stopped, looking back the way they'd come. "Do you hear that?" he asked. Something was coming closer. Something loud, at least at the moment. A few seconds later it faded out, but Dorian watched, waiting, sure hell would break loose at any second.

Mathias stilled, listening, but he heard nothing. "No - but, come on, let's get back to Caleb - he can tell you better than I can what he's capable of," the eldest Lockwood said, jogging round the side of the warehouse and heading for his other brother who was out front.

Caleb had been waiting the whole time. He'd been paying as strict attention as he could, and he was aware that by now his brothers by all rights should have been somewhere behind him, and he was really hoping that was the case. What with three ugly motherfucker fiends making a run through the field in his direction. They were at the very least not coming at him all from the same angle, tactically going for ahead and off to his right or left a little. He'd already sliced the inside of his arm to get the blood he required, all he had to do was the spellwork. He dropped down to one knee, and worked out three spells. Three, being he'd specifically tried to work it out that he'd have time for them, and also because he didn't know at all how fast these things were, or resilient to his particular brand of magic, and so he didn't want to rely on one spell to take shit down if it took more than one. So. The first was the five claw spell that raked out through the ground, on the heels of that was the three claw arc, and the third was the defensive type of spell he usually kicked up for just in case something got too close to him, the crushing spell that generally flattened anything that got within three feet.

The demon off to his right took the full brunt of the first attack, getting hit head on by it. While Caleb didn't see if it actually killed the demon, it sure as fuck wasn't still coming, so whatever, that was just fine. The one straight ahead got hit with the first spell, and got knocked off stride but was still coming. Caleb saw it get hit with the second, and knew at least one limb was down, and it wasn't coming forward in that same running speed as it had been. Looking off to his left, He saw it dodge the first spell, get nicked with the second, and he was in time to brace himself just as the demon got to him. He got glancingly raked on the arm, but then his own spell was already taking it down, with that flattening crunch sort of sound that meant bones were crushed. It didn't die, however, even if that thing usually killed most shit that came at him. It was still alive, just...not in any condition to fight. It was writhing on the ground, and Caleb scrambled back, just in case it got a claw moving in his direction.

When Dorian and Mathias rounded the corner, it was just in time to see the attack that Caleb dished out. It was an odd sort of feeling for Dorian, watching other magic work, magic that he couldn't see. When he was working his own brand, he knew what would happen, but here that wasn't the case. He didn't know the boundaries, didn't know how close was too close, though he realized that if he'd been as close as the demon, he'd be permanently down for the count. Rather than moving in, Dorian pulled both his knife and gun.

"....Or, he could just show you," Mathias added, conversationally as all hell broke loose. He lifted his shirt and drew out the gun. "Okay - so I have one full clip, blessed bullets. But that's it then we're hand to hand. But from what I hear, fiends are fucking hard to kill, so I'm hoping Caleb's magic will take a lot of them down before we come to that."

"I managed to get my knife blessed," Dorian said, hoping it would work as effectively as it should. It wasn't an angel's blessing, but he didn't have time to track down an angel when he was running for his life. "So just stay out of his way? Does he know we're here?" Dorian asked, and he threw his knife as the demon Caleb had taken down. It wasn't perfect aim, but that didn't matter. Dorian's telekinesis did the rest, stabbing the demon through it's eye sockets.

"Well, he knows I was coming to get you and I figure he knows that you're around since the attack began," Mathias pointed out, not firing, just keeping an eye on what was going down in the fight, judging where his limited skills could be best used, waiting for his moment. "I said we'd be coming on from the back, out of his way and I'm sure he just saw the knife you threw - your tk bring that back as well?" he asked, not sure of the limits there.

Backlash hit and it was nasty, considering he was getting it from three spells at the same time. Slashes opened up on his back, and one up his forearm. He didn't pay attention to them, considering he could already see streaks coming through the shadows towards him. Again. Round two, apparently. he did much the same thing he'd done the first time, only he added a fourth spell on top of it, It was the thin light blade spell, that he'd generally used on the shadow demons. Small, bright red arcs that shot out in front of him, to bite into a wider area, even if it was a weaker hit. He had less perspective on what got hit and went down this second round, and just knew there was another fiend that tried to blindside him from the right, and it got hit with the crushing spell, but again--that didn't kill it, it just took it down enough. And Caleb had to move again, feeling more blacklash hit. Yeah, this was going to get old fast. Or, he was going to get dead fast, one of the two.This worked so much better when he could actually heal himself up some between hits...and, say, the targets weren't some of the most stupidly difficult things to kill around. That bit really didn't help.

"Of course," Dorian said, raising a brow at such a question. Moving his knife around was simple. He only wished he had ten of them rather than one. The real trick was doing multiple things at once, but when he saw the attacks going in for Caleb, that was what he immediately swung into. Any fiend within a ten foot radius was thrown into the wall at the left-- always the left, so he could keep them together. With four in sight, then five, Dorian began to try and stuff them into a corner, hoping Caleb would hold off till another shot was actually worth it. It should have been easy, but Dorian's head pounded and he found himself gripping the nearest object for support. There were so many different things to hold on to at once, all of them fighting against his grip. As he pulled a sixth into the group, the world began to spin. The accuracy with his knife wouldn't hold up for long against that, though he tried to stab at the fiend's faces, his aim rather poor now that he was working on so many things at once.

Caleb definitely took the opportunity to get them while Dorian had them nice and bunched up for him. That? Was stupidly helpful. That he could work with and maybe not kill himself in the process of trying to take these stupid fuckers down. So, he concentrated his efforts, aimed better, And knocked off his most powerful rake spells, without wasting any time on the others. This of course meant he was hoping to hell that Math might have him covered with the blessed bullet situation, but either way he threw his concentration into slicing his way through the held demons.

Mathias had little else to do other than keep his brother's covered. But he was absolutely fine with playing the support role, especially given the concentration that both of the younger Lockwoods were clearly having to put into their attacks. His attention wasn't much on what Dorian and Caleb were doing to the group of demons, which was probably a good thing as it meant he saw the single fiend come in from the side, heading straight for Caleb. Mathias raised his gun and shot - really wishing he was a better shot as the blesseed bullet tore through the fiend's shoulder, but didn't kill it out right. He had to waste a second of his precious bullets to finish it off.

Dorian was doing all he could to hold six demons in place, completely unaware of the seventh until Mathias took it out. And when Caleb's rake spell effectively took out all six at once, there was no reason to hold them anymore. He couldn't tell if they were dead, but they were down, and that was really all that mattered. "Seven," he said to himself as his knife flew back into his hand. He knew there was more than that, but if that had been the bulk of the attack, maybe this wouldn't be so bad. His focus moved out, away from Caleb, scanning to see where they might be hit from next. He saw the gun before he saw the fiend, but that was all that mattered, since the gun was what he needed to remove. The weapon flew out of the demon's hands as he moved closer, and Dorian hoped to hell he was the only one that would be armed. They wouldn't always be that lucky.

Caleb, for his part, was doing a lot of bleeding. Whole bunches of it, even. He had been crouched, one knee on the ground, but his other knee joined it, and he held himself upright with one hand on the ground in front of him. He had his other arm held in against his stomach, where he knew a deeper slice of backlash had hit, a few rakes from different spells there. In a reactionary move, he sent a flurry of the lighter arc spell-blades towards the armed fiend that Dor disarmed, though that spell wasn't going to kill it. He'd just done quite a few in a short time and was paying for it. Most of the time when he fucked himself up this badly, he at the very least had a longer span of time between hits. Oh well. "Math--" he called, hoping that there could be a few more bullets flying around now when there was another two fiends starting to rush out.

And Caleb was down. That had been inevitable, of course, given the nature of his magic, but Math couldn't deny he'd hoped that he'd last a little longer. Maybe things weren't as bad as they seemed, but falling to one's knees generally wasn't a good thing. Mathias raised the gun and brought down another demon, this time purposefully aiming for the disable, rather than the kill. It couldn't move once it was down, but Mathias figured there was enugh life left in it that Caleb would be able to get rid of some of those injuries. Hopefully, anyhow.

"If Caleb's out, we can kill by hand," Dorian said, thinking now might be the time to move in and just slash away with his knife. There'd been eight total, and maybe more to come, but they couldn't rely on Caleb to kill them all without getting himself killed in the process. Dorian was sure he could handle finishing them off if they were already down, even if the world was spinning around him. When another demon came into view, Dorian pulled it to himself instead, one hand on the wall for support as the other held the knife the demon stabbed itself on. Dorian went down with it, effectively cutting it's throat as he tried to catch his breath.

Caleb wasn't necessarily out, he was just not at full capacity. Either way he had his knife out and was still watching all sides, sending off another spell as another fiend appeared, and he moved over to where one of the fuckers who'd gotten crushed when they got too close was lying. He went to the one he could see blood on, and stabbed his knife in the already open wound, digging it round to heal up some of his own injuries.

"You want to get up close and personal, feel free - you're the one with the blessed blade," Mathias pointed out. He just had his normal knife and against fiends he was sure that'd do little. "I'll cover, get any stragglers," he said, casting his eyes around the killing grounds.

Dorian wasn't sure he was going to go anywhere soon. He might not be bleeding like Caleb, but he was pushing complete exhaustion. With blood on his hands, he knelt beside the body, watching as Caleb... well, he wasn't sure what Caleb was doing, but he seemed to be in control. Bodies littered the floor where Dorian had shoved them, more than he could have taken out on his own. Moving them around had been easy enough, but actually killing them? If they had been human, it would have been a snap, but a fiend would never be an easy kill.

Caleb slashed at the fiend until it expired, clearing up some of his wounds, before he pushed himself to his feet and walked unsteadily over to the other, where he repeated the process. He didn't heal himself up fully, but enough, in his own view. He was looking around again, and for the first time properly caught sight of Dorian. He upnodded to his brother, then looked around one more time just to be sure he wasn't going to be blindsided.

Mathias turned, quickly, as a final fiend appeared, though it did seem that the attack wasn't as heartfelt as it could have been. Willing or not, the demon still got a bullet in its head. Actually, right between its eyes, which was a milarcle, since Math really wasn't that good a shot. Maybe there was something extra to blessed bullets, he really didn't know. Maybe not though, since he'd been going for wounding to give Caleb something to work with...

It was silent then, as Mathias took out the final fiend, and Dorian listened carefully for any little sound that wasn't made by them. There was nothing, which he hoped to be a sign that they were done. He was close to done either way; Telekinesis proved rather ineffective when he couldn't see straight. Turning back to his brothers, Dorian wondered what to say. 'Thank you' wouldn't have even covered it.

Caleb more or less stayed where he was for a moment, silently assessing where he was still bleeding. Then he pushed himself to his feet, swiped an arm across his forehead, and headed towards his brothers, wiping fiend blood off of his blade before he pocketed it. "We good?" he asked.

"Think so," Mathias said, slipping the gun back into the waistline of his jeans, since he had nowhere better to put it. "Unless that was the first wave, but really hoping that's not the case."

"It would make the total count pretty damn high," Dorian said, squinting, then blinking. He rubbed his eyes, but didn't help the pain pulsing inside his head. Wiping his knife on his shirt tail, he put it away as he slowly rose to his feet. His whole body ached. "We should be good."

Looking back towards where the demons had been coming from Caleb waited. "...well if they were coming now, they probably would have, and Math probably cleaned out more, yeah?" he asked rhetorically. "I figure we're fine for the moment, let's get the fuck out of here." Caleb said, walking past his brothers, dragging his fingers through his hair. "I need a shower." and possibly some bandages. But shower first. "Math, you know where we're heading?" he asked, since the eldest Lockwood would definitely have that shit covered. He'd had little bolt holes arranged, he was sure that Math had a place for them to go should they have lived and everything went off without a hitch.

"Yeah, I know - come on," Mathias said, leading the way to his apparently beat up piece of shit car that would get them out of here faster than they'd believe - looks were deceiving, after all. "You two rest, I'll drive, I'll make sure that we're not followed. I figure let's stay in town over night, get some rest, make a plan - safer than running for the sake of it," he advised. "If there's more coming, we'll need a plan. If not, we still need to get lost for a while. Make sure our trail's cold."

Dorian nodded, dizzy with the relief of it all, adrenaline still pumping through his veins. After almost a week of running, it was hard to believe he might really be done, that there was no one left to chase him down. He wanted that to be the case, needed it even, but actually having it was hard to accept. His eyes turned on Caleb as he declared he needed a shower, and decided not to fight him for it. His youngest brother had wounds to tend to, while he just stunk. "I could do with a bed and some pain killers," Dorian said, content with having neither so long as he could actually rest. As he caught sight of their car, he turned to his brothers, curious. "Did you do this yourself? Or run into trouble on the way down?"

Caleb got to the car, and opened it up, dropping face first down onto the back seat, not answering Dorian's question, figuring Math would have that covered. Right now he'd rather just lie there and bleed for a bit. That sounded like a good plan. And if any more demons showed up...well, he'd be pissed, for one. Massively pissed. Pissed enough to shred some more. He just wouldn't be happy about it. The fight was a lot more fun when he wasn't worrying about his brother's imminent demise.

"Got it done in town," Math told Dorian as he closed the door behind Caleb and walked round to the driver's side. "New car would have drawn too much attention, so I paid some guys to make it look like the rest of the wrecks out here. It's all body work though." He chuckled a little. "My last car would have fitted right in - that one got fucked up by vamps though, so - new car." he'd past the last one over to Caleb, who'd told him it was being babysat whilst they were away by his friend Dean. At least there was use being gotten out of it.

"By vamps?" Dorian asked, clueless as to what Mathias was talking about. He'd done a piss poor job at checking in with his brothers while he was gone, so there was likely a ton he'd missed in that time. Vampires fucking up Mathias' car wouldn't have been a possibility he'd even considered. "You're gonna have to fill me in," he told his brothers as he slid into the passenger seat and shut the door. "Maybe not now... but eventually." Now, he wanted to shut his eyes. If his brothers were willing to talk, he could listen, but that was about all he was good for.