by L J C Fynn
TEEKA
International Bestselling Author
LJC FYNN
Copyright 2019 by LJC FYNN//Crazy Ink
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
www.crazyink.org
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout 2019 Crazy Ink
Editing by Erin Wolf
Dedications
Teeka has been such a fun write, and a genre I swore I would never do. I ended up falling in love with her and her world. Thank you to my husband who selflessly does the laundry as I get lost in my words. Thank you to my kids for enjoying easy dinners during deadline crunch time. Thank you to Erin and all of Crazy Ink for publishing and supporting my words—no matter how crazy they seem. I will always appreciate my parents and my sister who listen, hours on end, as I work out a plot. And, finally, thank you Karen for your unquestionable support—you mean the world to me.
Part One:
Born Human
Chapter One
I have seen death.
I have caused death.
I survived the apocalypse, bloodied and battered. I came out alive—for the most part.
I looked down at our interlaced hands, his fingers dwarfed mine. He used those massive hands for art, even in time of death. His hands were clean. Mine were covered in blood. Even though my hands weren’t designed as a weapon of war, they were the deadliest around.
My hands may not have started this war, but they will end it.
***
Ten Years Ago
There was limited sound as the three of us made our way down to the medical offices. At any given time, this building was filled with the voice of the humans. When we were on missions, the only sounds were of us breathing. Today, however, even our breath was on mute.
I heard, as clear as the voices of our fighters, boots running in our direction. I reached for the small pencil blade hiding in the sheath behind my belt. The kid never saw it coming. One second, he was running toward us and, in the next, I had him pinned against the wall with my blade to his neck.
I could see his veins pulse wildly as his heart rate accelerated. “How long have you been training…boy?”
The boy looked at the ceiling and the two doctors behind me. He never once looked me directly in the eye. “One week, sir.”
“Don’t run up to me ever again.” I pulled my knife away from his throat so fast, the boy fell to the ground.
“Alexia told to me find Captain and tell him three potentials have passed.” The boy rubbed his neck and did not bother getting off the floor to tell me this. He could stay there for all I cared.
I turned and made my way to the secluded wing.
***
My infected wife, bless her blood-sucking soul, hated the darkness before the virus took her from me. I always thrived in it. My vision was almost as good as an infected in limited darkness. I was surprised when I stepped into the test hall, the lights were turned off. It was high noon outside, but I couldn’t tell what time of day it was by how dark this room was.
I sat down in the empty chair by Alexia. I watched her profile, as she watched the three patients laying in the hospital beds through the two-way mirror in the experiment room—we could see in but they couldn’t see out.
“You see the dark-haired girl in the center?”
Two males, roughly the same age as the girl, laid on a bed on each side of the girl. Their chest artificially lifting as the machines filled their lungs with air. The girl, who couldn’t be a day over fifteen, had straps across her chest and metal cuffs on her wrists and legs. Effectively strapping her down to the bed. She had one wire monitoring her heartbeat. Other than those devices, the girl was not medically monitored like the two males.
“Why is she strapped down?” For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why someone so tiny would need to be strapped down. Her heart monitor was beeping loudly, indicating she was human.
Her eyes popped open. Even though there was limited light in the room, her red vampire-like eyes glowed. Her canines were pronounced, bigger than any infected with the vampire virus I have seen to date. The only sound in the two rooms were of her hissing and moaning in pain. Despite all of this, her heart monitor was still beeping strong.
I stood up and slowly made my way to the glass. I watched as two male techs, three times the size of her, calmly walk toward her bed as if they have been here many times before. Even though her body was held still by the straps, one male held on to a single wrist. The other male pulled out two syringes. One had red fluid and the other was yellow.
I couldn’t stop watching when they emptied both fluids in her veins. After a few more struggles, her breathing calmed down. Her large fangs retracted to normal size teeth. The young girl’s eyes were what got me. She was surrounded by long dark hair, accentuating pale green eyes. If I didn’t know any better, I would say she was looking at me—straight through the two-way glass.
Sometime during the girl’s struggle, Alexia moved to stand beside me. “She can’t see you.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, even though she was asleep now. “How can this young girl handle both the virus and the cure in her body? We tried this before, and scrapped the project when the combination was a hundred percent kill rate. You were there, you know this. Yet, her little body is handling what our strongest men couldn’t?”
“Do you know Thomas Michaud?”
Confused, I broke my attention from the girl to Alexia. “The janitor?”
I watched Alexia’s profile in the low light. She was not from a medical field, instead I found her in engineering. She was a child genius and was still incredibly young for someone who has achieved so much Before Infection—B.I. After Infection, A.I., she designed half of New Paris. What she did out of memory, volunteer workers and recycled metals was brilliant. In a short matter of years, New Paris, Virginia, looked similar to what was once Paris, France. After the infected organized, the only original building Alexia designed left standing was the replica of the Eiffel Tower. They destroyed everything else, and rebuilt their own version of New Paris.
Between the infected and us, they were the most powerful in both strength and in numbers. They slowed down turning more humans like them. Lately, we have become nothing more than cattle for them. When the outbreak began, the CDC collapsed under the pressure. I created and headed up Center for Controlling the Infected, CCI. I have a research and development department, an education department, but most importantly, I used my B.I. military background to train some of the best vampire assassins in New Paris. For the better part of three years, the CCI has stayed underground. If this girl was capable of what I was thinking, then the possibilities were endless. The pendulum might finally have swung my way.
“What about the janitor?” I asked Alexia, as she stared at the unconscious girl.
Alexia’s lips turned slightly, not quite big enough for a smile but the look slightly softened her face. “His daughter was sick…she was on deathbed sick. He did everything he could for her, but she wasn’t healing. By the time he transported her over, her kidneys were failing. We almost did a blood transfusion, which would have killed her. I stopped them when her blood dropped on the floor. It dripped thick, like honey. Her own body was killing itself, because the blood was too thick to flow through the veins. I found some old manuals, ran some tests, and, low and behold, she has Ve
l-negative blood. Ever hear of it?”
I shook my head ‘no’, and watched the girl again. She opened her eyes and looked around the room. The guards were still there and one of them said something that made her laugh. Her fangs were gone.
Alexia continued, “well, other than figuring out Vel-negative existed, B.I. scientists didn’t know what it was either. I don’t even know exactly what it is, but I know what it can do. She was dying anyway, so I decided to run some tests—per her father’s request to try and save her. I extracted plasma from infected blood and her own blood. I created a duplicate of both. When I injected her with the tainted sample, no surprise, she began to show signs of changing. I inserted her blood, and the change stopped. As you could see a second ago, she did not change and returned human.”
The guards removed the straps from the girl and helped her stand. She walked over to the two men strapped down beside her and sat down in a chair between their tables. She held each of their hands as the guards returned to their post by the door. “I have been running tests on her for a month. When the first reintroduction of her blood, she became human again. I thought I found the cure, so I tried it on someone else. They died. So, it is all her. The more she is introduced to infected blood, the stronger she becomes. When she was first brought in, she was on her deathbed. Now, she is up and moving around. She is fast, can see in the dark, strong…she has all of their strengths. But, as long as she is reintroduced with Vel-negative plasma, she will never have to drink a drop of blood in her life. And, I learned when she took a bite of one of the guards, she is not contagious.”
My head was spinning when ideas of where to go with this. “Who are the two men?”
“They share the same blood type. So far, they haven’t woken up. But I am confident they will respond the same as her.”
“She close to them?”
“She doesn’t know them other than being in this room. Her only family is Thomas Michaud, the rest were lost during the Infection.”
I walked to the door, but stopped when a plan formed in my thoughts. I smiled to myself. “I will just have to make sure we are her only family left.”
I heard Alexia gasp as I left the room all together. It mattered not to me, I owned her, just like I owned everyone else involved with the CCI.
Soon I will own that girl in the room.
Chapter Two
Five Years Later
I could not breathe.
I tapped the mat.
The kick of his boots to my ribs didn’t stop—over and over again.
“Basil! Enough.” I knew Rhea was shouting. I could see it in her facial expressions, her face was almost as red as her hair. Her body was tense as she ran toward me. I tried to sit up and tell her I was okay. I couldn’t do anything more than softly tap my finger on the mat. Even that caused pain to creep up my arm every time my finger touched the solid surface. “Teeka, are you okay?”
I don’t know how long I laid there. Everyone was shouting, and moving around me. Rhea looked over me the whole time. Her brown eyes looked even bigger than they normally did. The only time she moved was when Captain took her place.
He leaned down with his hands on his knees. He was close enough, I could see a small patch of blond hair under his chin he missed shaving this morning. “What happened?”
The reality of the matter was, I was the best fighter in training they had. I was quick on my feet, and I could pack a punch that could knock a man across the room. But I was tired. I should have died five years ago. I get it. Alexia saved me. I should feel grateful, and at first I did. Now? I sometimes wished I were dead.
I lived to only train and fight. Nothing more, nothing less. I wasn’t even allowed out of this building. I had no idea where I was, and no idea where my father was. He was all I had left, and I have had no contact with him for five long years. I easily could have taken down the man who knocked me on my ass just now, his steel-toed boots and all. I didn’t even fight back. I let him get in every punch and kick.
“I’m done.”
He stood back up, but otherwise his face was emotionless. “Explain.”
I looked over to the other side of the gym, as hunters were just getting back from the nightly missions. “Let me go out with them. I have beaten everyone else here. I can handle it.”
He didn’t say anything when he stepped away to let Alexia guide the guards to put me in a stretcher. I groaned when their arms moved my ribs, making it hard for me to breathe again.
“I don’t think you are in any position to go anywhere right now.” Captain finally spoke again after we left the gym.
Even though it took everything in me to respond, I managed to hoarsely get out, “You know as well as I do, when I take the pills, I will heal. Let me go with them tonight.”
He didn’t say anything the whole way to the back to the infirmary. It wasn’t until the doors were shut and I was locked into my bed before the intercom buzzed on. “When you are healed enough tonight, I will let you fight an infected. If you defeat it, then I will give you permission to join the hunting parties.”
My veins filled with warmth as the first of two I.V’s flowed through. I turned my head to the side as a I looked at one of the men beside me. I have no idea why I have been in a room with them my entire stay here. All I knew was, they have been my unconscious companions. When I thought I was losing myself trapped in this place, I would talk to them. They centered me, and somehow, in their own way they gave me strength.
As the second medicine in the I.V. flowed into my body, my eyelids felt heavy. I couldn’t stop myself as I lost conscious. I fought my vision for as long as I could. My body was so lethargic from the medicine, I didn’t jump when one of my companions had his eyes open, watching me.
***
They put me in a modified boxing ring. Replacing the ropes around the ring, was an enclosed fence. There was no way out of the ring. The entire facility was here, watching me either die or beat an infected. I was conflicted because I wasn’t sure I wanted to do either.
I stretched as best I as I could, I still felt slightly sore from yesterday. But it wasn’t enough to slow me down. The mat moved beside me as someone threw in a handheld blade at my feet. The knife was heavier than it looked, and as I slipped it in the back of my waistline, it slid my pants down a few inches. I realized if I was going to go out and hunt, I was going to need non-elastic waisted pants.
The fence opened on the other side of me and a tall female was pushed in using three longs poles with a noose around the end. She was released the moment the fenced door was shut.
When she got a good look at me, she snarled, baring her fangs. “You smell different from them.” Her speech was slurred by the elongated teeth.
I bent my knees, ready for an attack but she just stared at me. “You smell like a human.”
I guess that was the wrong thing to say, because she hissed and ran toward me. She moved faster than any of the humans I practiced with. She didn’t stop running when she got to me. Her momentum had me pinned against the side of the fence before I could blink.
“Your humans haven’t fed me in days.” She pushed my head to the side and pressed her nose to my neck, “Why do you smell different?”
I had no answer for her. I held on to the fence with one hand and wrapped my fingers around her neck with the other. I gave her all my strength. For brute strength, this girl was much stronger than me. No matter how much I pushed her neck, she still moved towards me—fangs and all.
She was going to kill me and there was nothing I could do about it. After all, I was the one who asked for this. I let her hold my weight, and took my hand off the fence to pull out the knife. I grabbed the handle and slid it out. The infected girl was so focused on my face, she didn’t once look down. I pushed the blade into her abdomen. They gave me a dull blade. It wasn’t smooth slide, more like sawing its way through her skin.
I didn’t stop pushing until the hilt was stopped by her skin. I yanked out the blade, prepa
red to stab again. She dropped me, backed up and grabbed her stomach, trying to stop the blood. “Stupid, bitch. This won’t kill me.”
She removed her hands, and I watched the skin on her stomach as it was mending itself back together. I knew this. There were three ways to kill an infected: the heart, the head, or fire. That was it. This time I didn’t hesitate, she ran at me and I lifted the blade. I used her own momentum against her. The blade slipped into her chest, right into her heart. When humans died, their body remained soft until rigor mortis set in. I was taught early on here that when a vampire dies, rigor mortis sets in immediately. I didn’t believe the instructor when she taught us this, but it was true. The girl died standing up, but she was so stiff, I barely had to push back on her shoulders and she fell down like a board.
I looked up at the people watching me. Between the clapping, I heard a combination of “I can’t believe she did it,” to “I want her watching my back.”
I found Captain standing by the exit of the gate. He watched me walk towards him with a new look in his eyes. I somehow shifted from his student to something more. But this wasn’t what I wanted.
I looked him straight in the eyes, making sure he could not misunderstand what my intentions were. “I want to go home.”
He lifted his head up once, barely acknowledging he heard me, and walked out.
Chapter Three
“She didn’t ask for any of this. You can’t do this to her.”
I ignored Alexia while she pleaded for me to change my mind. What she didn’t know was how badly CCI needed Teeka. The infected were killing more and more of my fighters every night. Teeka has potential to do more damage than any of us combined. Now was the time to ensure she would only fight for us.