The Complete Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  The train cleared the tree line heading over Lincoln Drive, and the old Wissahickon trail came into view with its sprawling woods and its bountiful store of potential hiding places. Better hiding out than tempting another disastrous car chase through crowded streets, right?

  Could she really expect to hide from creatures that could catch her scent from across a crowded train stop, though?

  Probably not. Unless she used those freaky senses to her advantage.

  She didn’t have enough time to debate whether it would work or not. She just hastily removed her bra, clenched her teeth, and went to work agitating the scrapes on one palm with her own nails. When enough blood was welling, she wiped the mess off on the cups of the bra and fastened it to the pantograph stretching up to the electric lines above.

  Almost time.

  She ripped a strip of fabric from the bottom of her shirt, using micro-scale telekinesis to get things started, and wrapped the makeshift bandage hastily around her hand.

  Once she hopped off and recloaked her mind, she assumed the vampires would be stuck relying on their physical senses. Whether or not the decoy would carry enough of her scent to keep them trailing the train, Lilly had no idea, but it was something.

  The train was beginning to slow now, passing over Wissahickon Creek far below. The tree line was lush and inviting. Lilly waited until the land beside the tracks had sloped up far enough from the creek bed below, then she gathered her energy and jumped as far as she could with a little help from her telekinesis.

  As ready as she thought she’d been, the speed of the ground flying by only fifteen feet below nearly stopped her heart. She slowed herself as best she could with telekinesis. It didn’t make the landing any prettier.

  A few tumbling revolutions and a couple dozen new aches and pains later, Lilly pulled herself to her feet, coughing through dusty lungs and a healthy dose of channeling fatigue, and began loping her way toward the welcoming line of trees ten yards ahead. She flipped her cloaking pendant on as she went, cutting out the vampire minds she could vaguely feel charging after her maybe half a mile behind.

  Let them follow the train, she thought as she pushed into the woods, willing her body to be as scentless as it could be. Please let them follow the train.

  Some part of her mind pointed out that it would behoove her to avoid breaking branches, trampling the undergrowth, and generally leaving the kind of trail that anyone with half a mind to look might be able to follow. The more dominant part, though, insisted simply that she run—as far and as fast as possible, and everything else be damned.

  She didn’t argue with that part.

  A kind of frantic terror closed in on her as she went, somehow only worsening with each step until even the gentle quiet of the trees seemed somehow perverse and conspiratorial.

  This had been a mistake. Any moment, they were going to catch her. She was sure of it—could practically feel them in her irrational mind, nipping at her heels with hands like cold iron and eyes like embers.

  But she couldn’t turn back now.

  One foot in front of the other. Under the branch, past the tree, over the log. Keep moving. Keep moving.

  When the woods suddenly gave way to the wide curve of Henry Avenue, Lilly didn’t stop. Keep moving. Never mind the honking cars.

  Keep moving.

  Back in the woods on the other side of Henry, Lilly began to feel the first hints of hope. She’d made it almost a mile. As fast as the vampires were, if they’d been following her, she had to assume they would have made up the lost ground by now—even with the added handicap of having to track her by scent and sight.

  Was it possible she’d lost them?

  The thought was as terrifying as it was relieving. Because if she had lost them, only her worst fears could guess where they would turn to look for her.

  She was nearly to the creek—could glimpse it through the trees just fifty yards ahead, at the bottom of the soft forest downslope. She’d get across, then look for a spot to lay low and call John for an update. Maybe hop into the creek while crossing just for good meas—

  “We’re not hounds, you know.”

  The voice was perfectly casual, conversational, and so sudden and unexpected she only barely managed to not scream. Instead, she whipped around, trying to look every direction at once. Had it come from above? Definitely from the right and—

  There.

  The bearded vampire looked down at her from his perch at the base of a wide branch twenty feet up from the forest floor, his green jacket looking at home in the woodland setting and his expression decidedly bored.

  “I can taste your blood from here,” he added. “You think crossing a creek will save you?”

  Lilly could only stare, mind reeling.

  Was he alone? She didn’t see anyone else around, but she doubted they’d be far.

  Did it even matter? One vampire was more than enough.

  She reached for her cloaking pendant anyway. There was probably no point left in trying to hide her mind. As strong of telepaths as these things were, if he knew her location, she assumed the others would as well. Unless he was hoping to have his own fun with her before letting them onto his discovery.

  But no. As soon as she flipped off her cloak and reached out, she could feel them—three more blazing infernos ghosting their way toward them from the surrounding forest.

  “What do you want?”

  It was a stupid question. She wasn’t even sure why she asked it when she should surely be concocting a plan to somehow escape the four vampires and get the hell out of here.

  Maybe it was because there was no such plan. How could there be? She was on foot in the middle of the woods, surrounded on all sides by creatures that were stronger and faster than anything she knew and sharp enough of sense to have found her in the middle of these woods despite her decoy and with nothing but their noses to go by.

  In other words, she was fucked.

  The bearded vampire didn’t bother to answer. He dropped from his branch and hit the ground with enough force to shake the earth beneath Lilly. The fall could’ve easily broken a normal man’s legs, but the vampire didn’t seem to particularly care about that fact. He didn’t even bother to bend his legs or to roll on landing.

  He just strode calmly toward her.

  Run, her lizard brain prodded. She had to run. But where? How?

  “You can’t win here,” the vampire said. “Can’t escape us. Can’t even hold out against us.”

  Lilly whipped around at the sound of cracking branches in time to see a figure plummet through the canopy and slam to the earth in a landing four times harder than the bearded one’s had been.

  Jesus, had he leapt from the other side of the creek?

  She glanced back at the bearded vampire closing on her and spotted another, striding silently toward them through the trees to the right.

  “You’re going to undo this curse you’ve wrought. There’s no escaping it. We’ll break your mind and make you.” The hint of a cold smile touched his mouth. “Or your family. We could always break them too if it’s motivation you need.”

  Lilly hit him with a hard telekinetic punch in the side of the head from across the ten feet still separating them.

  He staggered, head jerking away from her with the force of the blow. Then he chuckled, and when he turned back to her, his eyes had come alive with crimson fire.

  “Touch my family,” Lilly said through clenched teeth, “and I’ll boil you from the inside.”

  The vampire sneered and was about to say something in reply when another voice cut in, deep and total in its authority.

  “Your family is dead.”

  Lilly fought the sudden surge of raw panic that blurred the forest in her eyes and made her want to drop all other thought and run screaming home at a dead sprint.

  Words. They were just words. They were trying to rile her up, knock her off balance.

  Only the middle-aged man who’d spoken didn’t look like he wa
s playing games as he strode toward them. His posture was easy, his dark eyes calm.

  The bearded vampire bowed in deference to the newcomer. “Master.”

  “You’re lying,” Lilly said.

  He had to be.

  His face was cut from cool, dispassionate stone. “I compelled four men to go to your house and remove any loose ends just before I came over here. If they still live, it will not be for long.”

  True panic crept in like an icy stream down her spine and through her gut. He wasn’t lying. Nor boasting or threatening or playing any game at all. He was simply telling Lilly that he’d ordered her family killed with all the feeling one might put into ordering a meal at a restaurant.

  “Why?” she whispered. Then again, anger bubbling up inside, “Why would you do that? You think…” She glanced at the bearded vampire then back to this Master. “You seriously think anything you do could get me to help you if you hurt th—”

  “I do not think this,” the Master said. “No human mind will stand against 5 raknoth. And certainly not against 30. It is simply not possible. We need not rely on petty leverage. If you do not wish to rectify the disease you birthed, you will be made to.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you do to me,” Lilly growled. “Call off your men now and we can talk.”

  A flicker of bafflement crossed his brow. “Were you not listening? This is not negotiation. Your family will die because of what they may know, and you will come with us to undo this curse, willingly or otherwise.”

  He made no gesture, but he must have given some telepathic command, because the bearded vampire stepped forward and grabbed her by the arm, and the burly black vampire from the overpass appeared on her other side to provide unnecessary assistance restraining her.

  She considered fighting them off for all of two seconds before deciding it was futile. Even if she broke free, outrunning these things—what had he called them? raknoth?—was clearly not an option. Not on foot, which was all she had to work with.

  What she needed to do was figure out how to get this Master to call off his thugs.

  “Please. My family doesn’t know anything.” She shook her head emphatically. “They’re not a part of this. It was only me and—”

  “Drs. Jeffery Haswell and Koren Miller,” the Master said. “Yes, I know. They showed me as much.”

  Her stomach sank at the reminder of her failure to warn Jeff in time.

  Not that it would have made a difference. Look how well running had worked out for her.

  “Are they alive?”

  The Master gave a single curt nod. “For now.”

  “Then why not spare my family when they have nothing to do with this? Call off your men. Please.”

  He frowned at her like she’d just proposed something utterly nonsensical.

  “Drs. Jeffery Haswell and Koren Miller might yet prove to have some value. Your family does not.” The first hint of irritation crept onto his expression and lit a soft red glow in his eyes. “Do you have any idea how many thousands of years of raknoth existence this cursed virus of yours has already destroyed? And you think to squabble for the lives of three pointless humans?” He shook his head, his calm returning. “The only thing consistently remarkable about mortals is your supreme self-centeredness in the face of your momentary lifespans. It is tragically pathetic.”

  He paused for a moment as if hoping for some rebuttal, but all Lilly could think about was not pissing him off—not condoning her family to die.

  “I will not call these men off,” the Master finally said. “Could not even if I so desired. I do not know them. I reached out for minds well-suited to violence, and I simply pointed the way and gave the push.”

  Building anger snapped over to hot rage, and Lilly threw herself at the vampire with a wordless cry and no plan other than to pummel his face until it showed something other than cold hard nothingness.

  The two vampires—or raknoth or whatever the hell they were—held her tight, expending less than no effort to do so.

  “You bastard!” she screamed.

  The bearded vampire cuffed her on the side of the head hard enough that everything else was lost to stars and ringing for a handful of seconds. Everything except the thought of Rachel, alone and afraid, cornered by violent men coming closer, closer.

  Alone. And afraid.

  The world snapped back to focus around Lilly, and she realized with a wave of nausea that it hadn’t been a mere thought, but some kind of tenuous projection her stupefied mind had sniffed out.

  Something was happening. Now. And if she’d just felt a brush of it from Rachel… Was Rachel’s telepathy awakening?

  Lilly needed to go back, in mind if nothing else.

  But it was too far. They were at least twice as far as any arcanist could consciously reach. Unconsciously, though, like in the moment of a desperate mother struck senseless or a defenseless little girl confronted by relentless violence and no hope of escape… Lilly needed to go back.

  She saw two ways to throw herself into the proper state, and only one that the vampires couldn’t easily interfere with.

  It was extreme. Mad, even. But it didn’t matter now. In that moment, she would have sacrificed the world to save her girl. Next to that, it was a small enough thing.

  So Lilly showed the Master a bitter grin and reached down with her senses to stop her own heart.

  12

  Some quiet corner of Lilly’s mind was vaguely aware of her physical body going slack in the vampires’ hold back in the Wissahickon woods and of their disgruntled growls and angry tones. The rest was concerned only with casting itself out like an arrow loosed straight for home.

  Lilly flew over trees and busy roads, stuffed apartments and budding parks—all of it tinged with the odd surreality that lay in the twilight between consciousness and unconsciousness. Or death.

  She pressed on faster, further than she ever could have otherwise hoped to, spurred on by the thought of Rachel’s terror. No, not by the thought, she realized. That was the very emotion itself she was racing toward.

  That was Rachel.

  Lilly felt her daughters mind like a flickering candle suspended over a vat of kerosene.

  It was happening. Rachel’s latent abilities… There was still hope. Lilly just had to hang on to her own tenuous grasp on consciousness long enough.

  She reached for the kindling light of Rachel’s mind.

  Rachel was beyond terrified, that much was immediately clear. Her thoughts were too wild and frenzied to understand, her emotions so dreadfully intense that it was a wonder she hadn’t already imploded into catatonia.

  Lilly wrapped her mind around her daughters and embraced her with all of her love, feeling Rachel’s pain as her own. She was about to attempt more explicit communication and tell Rachel to let her in so she could help when Rachel’s terror peaked to new levels.

  Men. Approaching. Two of them.

  No time to explain or ask permission.

  Lilly slid into Rachel’s mind just as the first man’s rough hand closed on her wrist.

  “C’mere, girly.” He pulled her forward. God, he reeked of alcohol and body odor… and blood?

  Lilly frantically reached out to the light overhead and channeled its energy through Rachel’s body, and the man recoiled with a startled yelp, clutching at a burned hand.

  That’s when Lilly got her first good look at the rest of the room.

  The blood was everywhere. It turned her stomach even before she registered the still shapes of Robert and her mom.

  No. No, no, no.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  Robert’s lifeless gaze assured her it most certainly was happening—had happened.

  She was too late.

  Robert’s face was battered, his torso covered in blood. He’d died with a hand outstretched toward her—toward Rachel.

  A part of Lilly broke staring at him. If her mom had been facing her too, she might have snapped completely. Instead, Mom la
y face down, her head and neck twisted at an unnatural angle.

  And all of this right next to the four men who were watching Lilly’s daughter like predators preparing for their next meal.

  Dark rage built inside her like a gathering storm.

  “What the fuck, man?” one of them said to the man she’d burned. “You scared of a little girl now?”

  Lilly reached for Rachel to comfort, to reassure, but Rachel was gone—withdrawn somewhere so deep that Lilly could only feel the subtle suggestion of her quivering mind there. If not for Lilly’s presence, Rachel’s body would have collapsed to the ground.

  “Motherfucker, help yourself,” the man replied. “Bitch burned my hand.”

  “You sick bastards.”

  They were Lilly’s words, but it was Rachel’s mouth they came out of, and something about the delivery seemed to at first spook the four men and then, once their projected self-images caught up, amuse them.

  “Man, girly’s got spunk,” one said.

  “Just shut her up,” said another.

  “Touch a hair on her head,” Lilly said. “And I’ll kill every last one of you. Now get the fuck out of my house.”

  The looks they exchanged this time were more concerned.

  Who the hell was this little girl threatening four grown men, they were probably wondering, and why the hell was she talking in third person?

  One of them—the one who’d just told these monsters to shut her daughter up—drew a pistol before they had time to find out.

  Lilly lost it.

  She threw her mind out for the weapon, turned it on one of the thugs with telekinesis, and pulled the trigger. The bastard it hit howled, clutching at his shoulder, and the man with the gun spat curses and yanked to regain control of the weapon.