• “Okay, on the count of three we’ll run to the door. Ready?” Byron asked me breathlessly as he reloaded the semi automatic in his left hand.
    “I’m not so sure.” I replied hesitantly, thinking of Byron, and his recent encounter with Lysa that had left his knee hardly able to move regularly, let alone run. I couldn’t see how he would make it to the door with his limp as horrible as it had become in recent years. He wasn’t exactly a young man anymore, and I had a feeling that age might have been one of the major factors that made the injury worse. He was almost 52 after all, and had lead a hard life, but as one of the Cacciatori, I’ve never met anyone who hadn’t.
    The Cacciatori are an elite group of assassins recognized in dark allies and back ways as the only group that could be relied upon to get the job done successfully and as quietly as you please. An extremely secretive group, founded in the fourteen hundreds by an elderly gypsy woman named Siyah Yildiz whose children were murdered by vampires. She spent the rest of her life searching, and destroying any evil thing that slithered into her path. After an untimely death at the hands of a particularly fierce Azazel demon. Her younger brother, Mavi, carried on her quest to rid the world of darkness, and the Yildiz family has been carrying on her work ever since.
    Forgive me for not sounding excited, but I’ve been hearing this story preached at me my whole life, and it gets old after a while with tradition, and honor and all that jazz. I just really don’t care any more. It gets sickening after a while, and messy.
    I looked to Byron. He seemed calm, and his face was happy as always. Byron had always seen the humor in things. I think he does this to escape from the depressingness of it all. I just embrace it, if you cant tell, and don’t understand how he can do anything different, but to each his own I guess.
    “Oh, you’ll be fine, you baby,” he replied in a joking manner. “Just remember, Xavier cant shoot moving targets, Lysa cant shoot still ones, and between the two of them enough bullets are wasted to fuel a war in Africa!”
    “Very funny,” I replied sarcastically. “Okay, one, two--”
    “Wait,” he interrupted, placing his last full magazine in my hands. “Load up, little sister.” I switched the magazines, and quickly cocked my gun, looking over the table for the two hunters, cautiously hidden by the decorative marble pillars.
    “Ready,” I asked him, and resumed my count when he nodded. “One, two, three!” We both ran around the heavy marble table that was now scratched, and shaped by whistling bullets. I quickly sprinted for the door on the other side of the large room, and saw Xavier half hidden behind one of the pillars to my left. We opened fire at the same time. He missed, but I got him in the chest, I had always been good at getting the heart…He went down hard. One down, one to go.
    Still running, I could hear Byron huffing behind me. Having a hard time because of his knee. I turned to help him, but before I could even slow down I heard a click, and Lysa’s sick laughter ring, echoing through the huge room, reverberating off the pillars of marble.
    “Oh, fu--” the rest of Byron’s words were drowned out by the steady pulsing rhythm of a machine gun. I looked over my shoulder, and saw Byron jerking, a shocked look on his face, as shot after shot poured into his falling body. No time to cry, I told myself. I’ll mourn later. One to one now.

    I looked to see where the shots were coming from as I ran towards Byron’s body, lying in a pool of blood on the floor. I grabbed his gun, still looking for Lysa. She stepped out from the large teller booth, and laughed again as she jumped, cat-like and graceful, onto the side of a pillar and propelled herself onto the ceiling. I let loose a volley of bullets in an arc towards her. She quickly dodged most of them, but quickly hissed and dropped to the ground again as two of them went through her thigh, and calf and embedded themselves in the ceiling.
    She landed on her feet smoothly, and open fired as I ran and slid behind the pillar she had leaped off of, grabbing a dropped gun off the floor as I went. I waited until I heard the clicking of an empty gun before running backwards towards the door, firing at her as I went. Moving so fast she was a blur Lysa continued to dodge the bullets my gun spit at her. About two feet from the door I turned my back to her to get out.
    “Hello,” Lysa said, standing in front of the rooms only exit as she raised a fresh gun, and began to fire. Quickly I did a back flip, and turned on my knees to return the fire from a safer distance, but she was already gone. I stood carefully, being careful not to step on any of the discarded rounds. I circled the room with my gun as I slowly walked for the cover of a pillar. I heard a chuckle behind me, and quickly turned. The empty noise echoed loudly in the quiet room.
    “Jumpy, aren’t we?” I turned again to intercept the sound only to find that my gun pointed only at air. A maniacal girlish giggle filled the room. It seemed to come from every direction at once.
    “You have such a pretty face,” Lysa spoke in the same manner of voice as she giggled. “Such a shame it has to be buried with the rest of you.” She quickly leaped down from somewhere above me, and landed to my left about 15 feet or so away.
    “You will be buried first, Lysa,” I said. “That is if there is anything left of you to bury at all.” I began to shoot, and dove behind a table at the same time for cover. I didn’t bother to look for Lysa, knowing she would have moved already. I could hear her return fire over the angry roar of my own gun. We stopped shooting at the same time. The air was thick with dust, and the echoing sounds of gun fire.