“EDIK!! GET OFF of him, you lunatic!” I shouted, launching myself into the fray.
Edik was clearly doing his best to rip Trev’s throat out, so I didn’t waste time trying to be nice. I kicked him in the head as soon as an opportunity presented itself, and then, as the inevitable shock of my boot hitting his face sent him reeling backwards, launched myself at his shoulders so that I would be between him and Trev.
“Victoria, darling, I do not like this disguise. Where are your beautiful eyes? Who is this pale whisper of a woman?”
I was a little surprised that Edik didn’t prefer the blonde that Gwen had turned me into, since that seemed more like his type, but I honestly cared so little about what he found attractive that I skipped right past his comment and continued punching him in the face.
“Ow! Why did you do that, beloved?”
“Edik, seriously. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but if you ever touch my brother again, I will kill you.”
“Brother?” he asked, finally letting his head fall back to the floor.
“Yes. My brother. Not that it’s any of your damned business who he is.”
As Edik was now lying down and cradling his likely broken nose, I got off of him and stood up.
“If you ever attack me or anyone I care about again, Edik, I swear it will be one of the last things you do. Now, what the hells are you doing here?” I asked.
Edik stared at me with such a strange look in his eyes that for a moment I wondered if he was concussed.
“You can’t charm her, vamp, so stop wasting your time,” Trevor said from beside me.
“I’m here because I love you. We’re meant to be, Victoria, you will come to see it in ti—”
Edik’s voice cut off as I wrapped my hand around his throat, picked him up off the ground, and slammed him against the wall. I made a mental note to be shocked later about how I was suddenly strong enough to use only one hand to pin a two hundred pound person to the wall, but for now I just clamped down on his throat with my hand and growled threateningly.
“Let’s try this again,” I gritted out, so very sick of Edik’s shit. “Why are you here? And don’t pretend it has anything to do with me, asswipe. You may be a moron with no sense of personal space, but you didn’t follow me to a MOME facility in the Andes just to profess your misguided amorous feelings for me.”
Edik shrugged, after a moment, and then wrenched his way out of my grip.
“Fine. You’re right. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to buy the besotted lover ruse for much longer…. I’m looking for my daughter.”
I FELT MY brain scratch like dirty vinyl, but Edik just kept talking.
“I heard you talking about MOME in your home, and then that Gwen person showed up and I decided to hitch a ride.”
That had to have been the truth, because it didn’t make any damned sense as a lie.
“Daughter? Wait, what? How do vampires even work in this world? And how could you have hitched a ride? We'd have seen you. And how could you have known where Gwen was taking us? We didn’t even know!”
“I didn’t know where she was taking you, but I was desperate to follow you to MOME, and I had to hope she would get you closer than I could have gotten on my own. And as for you not seeing me there, I am quite capable of shadow walking, thank you very much.”
I opened my mouth to ask a hundred more questions, but Trev cut me off.
“We’ll do vampire 101 later, Vic. We have to go. Now.”
I wanted to argue with that, because nothing that Edik had just said made any sense. Like why he had thought I could lead him to MOME when I hadn’t even known MOME existed until a day ago, and he’d been stalking me for three days. But Trev had a point—we were low on time. Besides, that was when we heard a bunch of incoherent screaming from the hallway ahead of us, and Edik jumped up and ran in the opposite direction.
Since we didn't wish to confront the screaming ourselves, we followed him.
I could hear cursing in at least three languages behind us, as well as what sounded like chanting. I might have been new to the whole "magic is real" thing, and no, I wasn’t super clear on how everything worked yet, but I certainly wasn’t new to the idea of magic. And any experienced fantasy nerd, whether gamer, reader, or movie goer, knows that bad guys chanting in languages you don’t speak and running in your direction means shit is about to go down.
We quickly picked up speed, right on Edik’s heels, as we transitioned from vampire-smack-down to runneth-the-hell-away. I didn’t have a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch shoved in my back pocket, and whatever was behind us was definitely in possession of some big, pointy teeth—metaphorically, at least.
We plowed through a few identically bland institutional hallways, turning seemingly at random, but presumably following some sort of pattern that Edik could sense. At any rate, Trev never suggested that we follow a different course, so I just went along with it. Each hallway was the same disgusting off-white lit with flickering halogen lights. I had no idea how anyone kept their bearings in a place like this. I generally had an excellent sense of direction, but I couldn’t keep track of where we were in this MOME facility. Perhaps it was because we were too far beneath the mountain, or perhaps it was simply because every damned hallway looked exactly the same.
Then we turned a hard right into a fifteen-by-fifteen foot room, painted in the same disgusting eggshell and lit with the same shitty halogen bulbs as every hallway we’d just gone through, and I was so surprised that I actually ran into Edik’s back.
“The fuck?” I asked, finally looking up as I bounced off of Edik’s frame, almost knocking both of us to the floor.
“Well, that’s a surprise,” I heard Trevor mutter behind me, and then I stepped around Edik to see the rest of the room.
I ignored the bland trappings of the place as my eyes were instantly drawn to the two women standing in the center of it. Namely Gwen and someone I’d never met who had mouse-brown hair, brown eyes, and skin that looked like it had never seen the sun.
THE PALE WOMAN looked nonplussed to see all of us there, but it wasn’t until I heard Edik scream something incomprehensible in what I thought might have been Russian that the other woman paled a bit. Then she smiled weakly, as though she thought she could smooth things over with the right facial expression.
Edik, however, looked furious. Oddly, despite the number of times I had broken his nose, or otherwise beaten the crap out of him, I had never seen him look angry. It wasn’t a good look on him. Too much sneering—facial features all distorted—it ruined the symmetry of his near perfect face. Made him look like the douchetart he actually was.
“WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?!”
Huh. The plot thickens. I couldn’t help but share the thought with Trevor, and he shared a sensation of humor with me, on top of his general annoyance at being held up in our escape. I, for one, was curious how the new person that Gwen was talking to was involved in this latest development.
“I don’t know,” said the pale brunette who had been talking to Gwen moments earlier. “They took her.”
“They took her? THEY took her!? YOU took her from me!”
“I did not. We left together. Voluntarily. To be with Guille, but he…”
The brunette looked embarrassed.
“B! She’s not an adult yet. You can’t take her out of the country without my consent, no matter who you’ve chosen to run away with. You should have left her with me.”
“She didn’t want me to leave her behind.”
“Then you should have stayed.”
If flames could have shot out of Edik’s eyes I imagine they would have, but luckily that didn’t seem to be on his list of skills. By this point, Trev was cursing almost silently behind me. I was waiting for him to suggest that we keep moving and leave Edik to his fate, but it hadn’t happened yet. In the meantime, I will admit to being damned curious about what was going to happen next.
B shrugged.
“We were b
oth bored. It’s not as though there’s anything much to do in that town, and you were so hell bent on keeping us hidden from the rest of the vampires that we felt like shut-ins.”
“And tell me, dear B, what happened to you as soon as you made yourselves known to the magical community outside of our family?”
B looked entirely sheepish.
“Well, I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed about how things turned out with Guille, but—”
“But WHAT? You’re trapped here at MOME, aren’t you? This is their primary research center. Did you know that? Did you know anything about that asshole before you ran off and handed over our DAUGHTER to him?”
I wasn’t a fan of Edik at all, and I thought the yelling was stupidly over the top, but for just a moment I felt sorry for him. The context was clear enough, and while I certainly couldn’t blame anyone who wanted to get as far away from Edik as humanly (or vampirely) possibly, the whole stealing away with his kid who winds up in MOME’s hands struck me as pretty damned heartbreaking. Then I remembered what Edik was like, and the heartbreak ended.
“I didn’t know he worked for MOME. Thanks to you practically keeping us in a damned cage, I barely understood what MOME was! If you had let us talk to anyone else I might have known what the risks were. Instead you tried to keep us wrapped in fucking bubble wrap and we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into!”
Yeah. There we go. I should have realized before I even started to feel bad for him that he was likely the bringer of his own destruction.
“It never even occurred to you that people might have a more than healthy fascination with a Dhampir!?”
That was a fair point. Dhampir, huh? I wondered if that word carried any of the meaning it held in certain works of fiction.
Gwen raised a hand and spoke before either of them could continue.
“There are approximately twenty guards headed this way at the moment. The only reason they aren’t here yet is thanks to some handy spellwork Trevor left behind for them in one of the hallways, and I don’t think now is the best time for the rest of this conversation. B,” she said, turning towards the young female vampire, “when was the last time you saw Renata?”
“Guille said he was going to take her for a hike two days ago. They never came back. It took me a day to track them here. I spent the morning sneaking through this place.”
Gwen looked impressed.
“They didn’t catch you until an hour ago?”
“They didn’t catch me at all!” B replied angrily. “I walked into this room and accidentally let the door latch behind me. I couldn’t get out again.”
“What made you come in here?” Edik asked, looking around himself for the first time.
I had to admit I hadn’t paid much attention to the room, aside from the lame paint job, until Edik raised the question, but just as I started to take in the details of the various apparati around the room, and the creepy metal table in the center of it, Trev jumped up on the table, pushed one of the ceiling panels out of the way, and started crawling into one of the vents.
“Where are we headed, exactly?” I asked, climbing up on the table and pulling myself up into the vent behind him, following his feet as they disappeared down the large metal shaft.
“We’re headed to the northern slope,” he replied. “The ventilation system ends in the middle of a cliff face, so they don’t leave much security on it.”
I wondered if Edik and B would follow us, or if they had their own way of dealing with the security here. I knew Gwen would just do whatever the fuck suited her fancy.
“Right. Makes sense,” I said, taking a deep breath. We were already in the shafts that led to our exit point? I enjoyed a brief moment of feeling hopeful that we were going to get out of here without anyone dying.
Of course, that was when the alarms started going off.
~~~
“And what does this mean, exactly?” I asked Trevor, as we both sped up our snakelike movements along the ventilation shafts.
“It means,” said Trev, as he deftly "vaulted" over another of the down shafts that we ran into periodically, which we had to clear by shimmying as close to the edge of one side as we could get and then stretching our arms across and pulling/pushing the rest of our bodies across the gap without sliding into it, “that they finally noticed that we freed up the entire high-security roster.”
I nodded, ignoring the fact that he couldn’t see me.
“And that’s a good thing?” I asked.
“We need the distraction.”
“Right. And what about the two vampires and er… Gwen?”
“Your redheaded friend smells like a deity of some kind, so she likely can’t be trapped, the vampire who followed you seemed like the kind of asshat we wouldn’t mind seeing interrogated by MOME’s goons, and as for B and her daughter… could be risky, but they can probably take care of themselves.”
“Even her daughter?” I asked.
“No one likes a Dhampir, but she can very likely take care of herself.”
“She’s a kid, Trev.”
He swiveled his head around and stared at me until I realized the ridiculousness of what I was saying. For all I knew, she was our age. Certainly she was likely to be only a few years younger, and if…
“Are Dhampirs the badasses everyone writes them to be in Urban Fantasy books?”
Trevor chuckled.
“Very much Dorina Bassarab style, from the few I’ve met, though perhaps slightly less… intense.”
I chuckled at that. Then frowned, when I realized why he’d likely met any Dhampirs at all, let alone a few, since they were supposed to be incredibly uncommon.
“Does MOME kidnap all of them?” I asked.
“The ones they can get to before the vampires kill them, yes.”
“For ‘research’ purposes?”
“Yep. And to ‘protect the people,’ don’t forget that. Same as me, I guess. Although, to be fair, the vampires do try to kill them all, so MOME is providing some protection in the case of Dhampirs.”
I scowled at Trev’s back but said nothing.
As we’d been talking, we’d turned at one of the intersections and started scurrying slightly uphill.
“Sol and Seamus should be up here somewhere, if everything went the way it was supposed to,” Trevor said, as we reached another intersection.
“Well, since everything else has gone so swimmingly, I don’t see how they could have run into trouble,” I replied, with just a hint of sarcasm.
Trevor chuckled, ahead of me, and I decided to stop talking and focus on where I was crawling. I was impressed that he had the whole place mapped out well enough in his head to keep track of where we were and where we needed to be. I still knew where we were pointed in terms of cardinal directions, thanks to whatever directional sense my snow leopard form granted me, but I was lost in terms of these tunnels of ventilation shafts and hallways that all seemed identical and veered off arbitrarily.
I was still contemplating whether someone in charge of MOME might be a wererabbit trying to make this research facility feel like home when Trev stopped abruptly ahead of me.
“I think we found them.” His voice sounded… less than optimistic.
“Is that not a good thing?” I asked.
“Not when they’ve got five high-security mages for company,” he replied.
“Does that mean we’re fighting our way out?”
“Depends on whether or not you want your friends back.”
I smiled. I hadn’t had a good fight in… well, not since I left my old dojo, and even that had just been sparring, not a real test of my skills.
“I could use some exercise,” I said, to the back of Trevor’s head. When he said nothing in response, I added, “I don’t have many friends Trev, it’d be a shame to lose these ones.”
That seemed to convince him.
“You may want to shift,” he said, just before the floor fell out from under us.
I
WAS ALL for having the element of surprise, but I generally would have preferred to not be getting surprised right along with my target. Things must have been about to get hairy though, because Trevor went down flaming.
Of course, Trev, who could blink and become an eight-foot-wing-spanned fire bird, didn’t think anything of the drop from the ventilation shaft. Whereas I had to do my best to roll through a fall that left me crashing into the linoleum floor eight feet below where we’d started.
Yeah, sure, Trevor had warned me to shift, but I couldn’t call on it quite that fast yet, and I didn’t know if I was better off in cat form anyway. After all, I had trained for my san-dan in Shotokan as a human, not as a snow leopard.
In the beginning, not shifting seemed like the right decision. The mages who were in that room with Sol and Seamus all started screeching (presumably slinging spells) as soon as the flaming ball of wings and fury that was my brother descended into the room, and they all seemed inclined to take my human-looking female frame for granted. In our planning stages, Sol had mentioned more than once that mages weren’t very good at detecting weres, so I supposed now was my chance to take advantage of their ignorance about my powers. The nearest one didn’t even throw any spells at me, simply stepping forward with a pair of handcuffs—presumably magic ones, but I never let him get close enough to find out.
I ducked under the arm he swung out to grab me, a horribly telegraphed move that would have ended up with him unconscious at my feet if I hadn’t been defending against multiple opponents, and swept my leg out to take his feet from under him while also dodging something sparkly that flew from the hands of the next closest mage.
So, some forms of magic were visible. Useful intel. In the meantime, it also helped that mages, or at least these mages, telegraphed their spellcasting like crazy. Maybe they couldn’t help it, maybe there was no way to cast without the wild hand gestures and targeted glaring accompanying each spell. I was too new to all of this to know what the rules for mages were, but as it was, I had multiple seconds of warning before each attack came, which was more than enough.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 11