I hit the bottom of the empty pool flat on my back, hard enough to knock the wind out of me, if I’d had any. Dropping twelve feet onto concrete wouldn’t have slowed me much, normally, but the three holes in my chest would and did. Even for someone with my ‘condition’, large caliber slugs weren’t the kind of thing that you could just brush off. I might be a gorilla, and a vampire to boot, but pain is pain.

The world went fuzzy for a bit. When it slid back into focus, first thing I saw was one of the bonobos who’d ambushed me swinging down the ladder hooked to the side of the pool. I could hear him hooting to himself as he rolled over to where I was splayed out, bitching about being sent down to put another round into a guy just took three in the chest.

I’d have felt bad for him, if he and his pals hadn’t just tried to punch my ticket. Low ape in the pack always gets the crap jobs flung at him. Also meant he was going to be the first of them to die.

He looked surprised when his eyes met mine, and even more when my hand shot out, faster than he could track, and grabbed him by the wrist. I twisted, hard, his elbow dropping and his shoulder pulled towards me. I got the hand holding the gun pointed back towards it’s owner, just as the order to fire reached his trigger finger. What was left of his face looked most surprised of all.

The round that killed him had severed an artery, and I clamped my mouth over the pumping spray. I don’t like to feed on my own kind, but I’d need the juice to survive the next few minutes.

I’d gotten a good bit of the blood down when the first shape appeared at the edge of the pool. It took a second for the scene to register with this fella, but when it did, he let out half a swear and reached for his cannon. While he’d been goggling, though, I’d pulled his dead friend onto me, and used my legs to shove the body up over the lip of the pool, and it was still rising and moving fast when it hit him in the chest. Both the living and the dead vanished from sight.

I used the momentum to roll forward onto my feet, crouched, and leaped upward. No normal gorilla could have passed the edge of the pool and still been rising, but a vampire with a load of fresh blood in him can do all kinds of amazing things. The other four bonobos seemed to be moving in slow motion. As I passed the closest one, I made a long arm and wrapped my fingers around his head. My momentum pulled him off his feet, and his weight brought be around in a circle, until I landed on my feet. It felt like something cracked when my hand, still holding his head, came down hard on the tile floor. I was already moving, even as I registered that, leaping forward and throwing a balled fist into the chest of another bonobo. Ribs and sternum gave way, and the force of my hit took him over the edge and into the pool, a line of blood coming out of his mouth.

I turned toward the last two would-be assassins. They were standing, one behind the other from my perspective, all three of us in a line. I closed the distance to the nearest one, using one hand to grab the wrist of his gun hand, forcing it out of line with my body. The other hand I wrapped around his neck, lifting him slightly off the ground. His eyes, wide with fear, locked onto mine, and I felt the tendons of his wrist tighten and loosen as he fired round after round into the ceiling of the abandoned pool-house.

The last bonobo had time to get a good bead on me, and unload three quick rounds in what felt like a tight group. Pity his partner was between the two of us, or he might have done me some serious harm. As understanding spread across his face, I reached out one last time and gave his head a sharp twist. And that was that.

They’d come prepared for a gorilla, and for a PI with a hard rep, but they’d never expected a… Vampire Gorilla, PI.