Eyes of Ice

by J. C. Andrijeski

It really was broken.

  Not just his wrist, his arm. His lower arm was broken, twisted, like splintered wood. It looked really fucked up.

  Gross, really. It looked really gross. The bone stuck out of it.

  It probably should have worried him, or at least made him sick, seeing all of that bone.

  Nick stared at it, though, frowning down at it, even as he remained aware of the laughing vampire in front of him.

  Nick imagined the vampire’s face behind that mask. In his mind’s eye, he saw the vampire’s mouth and lips and tongue as he laughed.

  His fangs would be extended, of course.

  Nick thought about that distantly though.

  His mind was clear, still, in the forward areas of his thoughts.

  Clear enough, desperate enough… suicidal enough… for one last Hail Mary.

  Everything in front of him grew clear, too. All of it moved in slow-motion.

  The vampire’s laughter came out in slow-motion.

  He formed words slowly, distorted by the mask.

  Nick saw the mask move, the sound coming out in slow––dizzyingly slow––syllables. The vowels and consonants came out like a horror dream, or maybe like an old cartoon, so slowly the sounds were distorted; Nick couldn’t understand anything the other vampire said, and he doubted that was because of the mask.

  He read a kind of fierce, disbelieving… psychotic, his mind muttered… joy in those scarlet, wet-blood eyes, in the laughter and smile behind the mask as his mouth moved in slow motion, as the vampire slowly lifted Nick higher, showing him to the crowd.

  The sounds, the visuals, all of it happened so…

  Slow.

  So… fucking… slow.

  The slowness dragged everything out, granting him time, but also making this fight, his own slow dismemberment, fucking interminable.

  He looked down at his arm.

  He had time to really look at it. He had time to examine the shape and size of the bone sticking out, the thickness, the sharpness of it.

  He watched blood drip down off it, beading and collecting before each drop fell. All of it happened slow, but he knew in real time, in other-time, it was happening fast.

  He was losing blood.

  He was losing all that blood Wynter fed him, and he was losing it fast.

  But the blood wasn’t what fascinated him.

  It was the bone.

  The bone was what interested him.

  The sharp, jagged edge of that bone, a strangely white piece of himself he didn’t normally see. It looked like he would have guessed bone would look. It looked different, too. From a certain perspective, it looked like stone. Like a stone arrow. Like a digging stick, something a prehistoric human might use.

  It looked like it would have dug good holes.

  He remembered a movie he saw when he was human. A creature with knives for arms, morphing, metal arms that stabbed and ripped, pulling apart his enemies.

  That had been cool.

  That had been really fucking cool––especially when Nick was young.

  He probably saw that movie ten times in the theater with his friends.

  He stared at the bone, fascinated, then at the vampire under him.

  The vampire held him by the throat.

  He wouldn’t snap Nick’s neck. Nick didn’t need to breathe, so being held that way was only uncomfortable, not really frightening.

  The psychotic vampire wouldn’t snap Nick’s spine.

  It would end the fight.

  It would disqualify him.

  Anyway, you couldn’t kill a vampire that way.

  You had to rip out his heart.

  Or cut off his head.

  Nick watched the vampire’s throat move as he talked behind the red, virtually-enhanced mask in slow motion, flames coiling off the semi-organic metal plates, turning him briefly from the serpent into a dragon.

  Nick looked at that long swath of chalk-white throat.

  His mind fixated on that long, moving, living, blood-filled throat.

  It didn’t really come through to him as an idea, per se.

  It just struck him as the most logical thing.

  It struck him as logical.

  Sane, really.

  His mind thought… Sure. Okay. That makes sense.

  It was the sane thing to do.

  Nick focused on his arm. He could move more now. More than he could when the drug first hit him in the cage. The timing had been damned precise, he had to give them that. Whoever kept trying to murder him, he had to give them props––they were good at it.

  They were better than most people who tried to kill him.

  But the drug was wearing off now.

  He could move now. He tested his unbroken leg, the hand that didn’t have the protruding bone.

  He could definitely move.

  He was out of time, though.

  He was definitely running out of time.

  And he’d promised Wynter.

  He couldn’t remember if he’d said it out loud, or even to her really, but he could definitely remember promising someone he’d come back to her.

  He could definitely remember promising that to someone.

  He had no idea how much time he had left to keep that promise, but it wasn’t much.

  It really, really wasn’t much.

  Summoning every ounce of strength he could feel, whether returning or whatever he had left, in that stubborn, survival-obsessed reserve that lived in the non-thinking parts of his mind, he swung that arm up and around––

  ––and jammed the protruding bone into the throat of the vampire holding him.

  That sharp bone slid in like butter.

  It slid in with a faint pop as he pierced the vampire’s skin, then another as it went through the other side.

  Silence.

  Nick hung there, those fingers gripping his throat, the bone of his arm inside the vampire’s throat.

  Then, in that long-feeling moment of silence while his limbs moved, even slower than the other male’s, he heard the male scream.

  He heard the beginnings of that scream.

  He saw the vampire’s eyes widen.

  He saw the other vampire look up, his eyes above the red mask widening so much they didn’t look real at all now.

  They looked fucking terrifying.

  Like some kind of screwed up Halloween mask.

  If he’d seen a face like that as a kid, Nick would’ve had nightmares.

  Nick saw the eyes change.

  Fear, disbelief, a terror of death––it began to shift, to twist.

  Nick saw the hatred begin to build in the silence, the unforgiving rage.

  He saw the danger in that look.

  Danger.

  Danger, Will Robinson––

  Gasping, Nick summoned even more of that strength, gritting his teeth as he twisted and ripped the bone of his arm, ripping it backwards and up with his waist, shoulders, his whole body as he threw his weight backwards, twisting inside the vampire’s grip––

  ––and tore out the vampire’s throat.

  He tore the whole fucking thing out.

  The screaming stopped.

  Slowly, Nick fell.

  He watched the vamp fall with him, fascinated by what he’d done to the other male’s throat, riveted by how strange it looked, how disturbingly, unrelentingly, unforgivably graphic it all was. He’d broken his spine. He’d basically decapitated him.

  He’d decapitated that red-haired vamp with the crazy eyes, using nothing but the bone in his arm.

  That was badass, in a way.

  It was also… pretty disgusting, actually.

  He hoped Wynter hadn’t seen that.

  He really, really hoped Wynter hadn’t seen him do that.

  That would probably really gross her out.

  She might not want to sleep with him after seeing that.

  Everything sped up at the end, just like it had before…

  …but when he landed, it hurt
less. It hurt significantly less than it had the times before. There was still pain, but it was less pain. It was a lot less pain…

  Nick landed on his knees.

  As he did, the red-haired vampire crumpled in front of him.

  Blood slowly pooled out of the massive, ragged hole in his throat.

  The vampire stared up, and Nick watched its eyes change.

  He watched every increment as they turned from glass, bright-red marbles to cracked, clear crystals… then, even faster, to murky, milky clouds.

  In the end, they held no life at all.

  The silence that time was deafening.

  The silence that time didn’t end for what felt like a really long time.

  Chapter 22

  A Soft Voice

  He heard a human voice near his head. Female.

  She was talking. She was talking to someone on her headset.

  He couldn’t be sure if she was talking to him at first. Then he realized she was talking to someone else, someone on the other end of her headset. He could hear her, so she must be speaking aloud, not using sub-vocals or talking in virtual.

  He listened, and then he understood.

  Once he did, he fought to be silent.

  He fought to be silent once he understood her words.

  Once he understood, he knew who she was talking to.

  He knew.

  “Look,” the voice said, soft. “It’s not a good time. She wanted me to call you back. She told me to call you back––”

  Then a different person, a male with closely-cropped black hair, stood over him, holding a dark green tablet. The vampire doctor, or “tech,” as they called them––like Nick was more machine than person, like he was collection of parts to be hit with a wrench or a hammer––tapped some kind of sequence into the green tablet with long fingers.

  Whatever that sequence was, it instantly had the machine around Nick moving, rotating, gyrating, pieces spinning.

  Tendrils grasped hold of Nick’s leg, right around his broken femur. Before Nick could comprehend what was happening, what was likely coming––the machine seemed to wrench different parts of his body in different directions, stopping his breath in his chest.

  The pain blinded him, making him gasp.

  Then––it snapped the ends of his bone back into place.

  Nick couldn’t help it.

  He screamed.

  Kit glared at the medi-tech, eyes furious as she backed out of the room.

  She must have hit the mute on her headset, but she clamped her hand over the end of it anyway, hissing at the young male human.

  “Are you kidding me right now?” she snapped. “I’ve got his damned girlfriend on the phone and she’s freaking out––”

  “Get out of here,” Nick said, panting from the pain, not from needing air. “Get out of here, Kit… tell Wynter I’ll call her later…”

  “Yeah,” she said, turning her anger on him. “Because that’s going to work, asshole. Shut up, okay?” She glared at the tech. “Are you torturing him on purpose? Can’t you give him something for the pain? Something to knock him out, at least?”

  “I did,” the tech said, his voice patient, but entirely unapologetic. “Clearly you don’t understand how quickly vampire bones heal… or how fast they process drugs through their system, even heavy narcotics. I gave him a second dose, but I can’t wait for it. We need to put the bones back in place. Now. Or he’s going to be in a lot more pain later.”

  Kit frowned, opening her mouth, but the tech cut her off.

  “If you’re really his friend, you’ll leave me alone so I can work––”

  “Get out of here,” Nick growled, again aiming his words at Kit. “If you’re going to talk to her, get out of here. Now.”

  “Listen to your friend,” the tech advised. “The sooner I get this done, the better.”

  Kit scowled at both of them, but Nick saw her take in his words, right before she clicked her headset back on and retreated out of the room.

  “Hey. Yeah. Sorry.” A pause. “Yeah. The dickhead claims he gave him something for the pain. I guess they can’t wait to break his bones and re-set them, or his vampire super-healing crap will grow them together all screwy…”

  Nick grimaced, wanting to yell after her again, to tell her to stop saying things like that to Wynter. He completely lost his train of thought when the tech started working on his hip, again using the organic-metal brace-like tool that wrapped around his leg, squeezing hard and moving to align his bone into the right position.

  Nick screamed again.

  His back arched in agony, hurting his ribs, his spine… seemingly every damned bone in his body.

  When he fell back to the operating table, panting, he saw another person standing in the corner, on the opposite side of the room where Kit had been.

  Jordan winced when Nick met his gaze, his arms wrapped tightly around his chest. A grimace seemed permanently etched into his facial features.

  “Jesus, doc,” he said, looking away from Nick, seemingly with an effort. He aimed his grimace at the tech. “The kid’s not wrong. Can’t you do anything for him?”

  The tech gave him a hard look, but barely paused in what he was doing, tapping at the surface of the tablet with his fingers to adjust and maneuver the tool that was realigning Nick’s bones.

  Nick screamed again.

  That time when a different part of the machine manipulated his chest, moving his shattered ribs back into place.

  “We’re going to have to cut there,” the tech muttered. “You’ve got too many free-floating breaks in there. I think it’ll heal cleaner if we just remove some of the smaller parts, let them grow back, so you don’t end up with extra ribs that could cause problems with your other organs…”

  Nick was still panting, but he forced himself to nod.

  “Do it,” he said. “Do whatever you have to.”

  The tech nodded.

  Frowning, he glanced at the foot of Nick’s operating table, past the organic arms.

  “Can I kick out all these people?” he muttered.

  Nick followed his eyes, lifting his head slightly from the bench to see past his own body and the rotating organic arms… and flinched.

  A lot more than just Jordan and Kit had been watching this.

  Lara St. Maarten stood there, next to Malek, Charlie… not to mention his boss at the NYPD, James Morley. Nick stared around at the group clustered a few yards from the foot of the table in disbelief. The organic arms and tendrils were rotating again, though.

  Nick looked back up at the tech. He knew the question he’d asked before hadn’t been a real question, more an annoyed snark from a man just trying to do his job.

  Nick answered it anyway.

  “Yes,” he said, panting. “Yes, kick them all the fuck out of here.”

  He glanced over at the row of faces.

  The sheer number of them felt like a kind of assault, if only by stimulus overload. Jordan, Morley, Charlie Raider, Lara St. Maarten, Malek… not to mention Kit, who he could still hear out in the hallway, talking to Wynter.

  “He’s okay enough to throw me out of the room,” the tech-punk muttered into her headset. “So no, he’s probably not going to die…”

  Nick could hear the emotion in her voice, the shakiness there, despite the anger on the surface of her words. He wanted to beat the shit out of whoever put her on calling Wynter. He wanted to beat the shit out of whoever even let her in here.

  Kit shouldn’t be in here.

  She shouldn’t be anywhere near here, not right now.

  She played tough, but she really wasn’t much more than a damned kid.

  More than that, Nick knew a big softie when he met one. It was part of the reason he found himself acting like an overprotective asshole with her, at least when he didn’t restrain himself. Ring fighter or not, Kit wasn’t a hard person, or a jaded person, or even a particularly tough person. She was a tech geek. She was a barely-out-of-college tech gee
k smarty-pants who liked to pretend she was a lot more cynical than she was.

  It was part of why he liked her so much.

  He closed his eyes.

  When he did, he saw another face looking at him in that dark.

  That face was even younger than Kit’s.

  Curiosity shone in those silver-blue eyes.

  She walked up to him as the organic machine grabbed hold of shoulders, making him groan as it scanned his collarbone.

  Kid, get out of here, he told her. You can’t be in here––

  She leaned on the edge of the bed, smiling at him.

  It’s okay, she assured him. I’m not really here, Nick.

  At his confused look, she clarified, holding up a small hand,

  I mean, I’m here… but I’m not really there, where you are. You know what I mean? I’m at the school. Kellerman. I might come down with Ms. James tomorrow––

  “No,” he groaned aloud. “No. Don’t do that––”

  When Nick’s eyes flickered open he saw Jordan wince, that grimace still etched in his face, his muscular arms still folded over his boxer’s chest. He didn’t look away though, but continued to watch the tech work over Nick.

  You don’t have to talk out loud, Nick, Tai scolded him. Look at the tech. Look at your friends. No one can see me, Nick. No one. Just you.

  Nick followed her words with his eyes.

  He looked back at Jordan. From the direction of his eyes, the detective clearly didn’t see the little seer girl leaning on the metal table near Nick’s head.

  Neither did the tech standing over him, eyes concentrated as he worked with a stylus on a different, larger tablet than the one he’d been using before.

  She was right.

  No one was looking at her.

  Moreover, when his eyes were open, he couldn’t see her, either.

  He closed his eyes, returning to that dark.

  She was leaning on the table, so close she was practically touching his arm.

  No one was looking at her at all. He could see them all there, that time, even with his eyes closed. They all looked at him, at the machine manipulating his bones and flesh, at his face as his expression probably contorted in pain.

  They stared down at him, and he could feel their distress.

  They didn’t look at her.

  They didn’t hear her speak.