by John Conroe
“You alright there, North boy?”
“Yeah I’m fine…” I heard myself say as I took one step, the tunnel spun, then everything went gray.
Chapter 34
I woke from a bad dream. In my nightmare it had been dark and raining, much like the night before. I had felt an urgent need to get out of the downpour and so took refuge in a handy culvert. But the culvert became a grave and the rain changed to blood, then became filled with chunks of weres, falling on my head and shoulders. I huddled at the bottom of the grave, staring at the dirt where the blood puddled and flowed. The tiny rivelet under my gaze washed away the moldy grave dirt and something white shown through. More dirt eroded and the white object grew larger and took on the features of a vampire. My vampire. I dug around her to get her free, but she began to sink into the earth. Her eyes flashed opened, then the dirt pulled her below with a squelching, sucking sound and she was gone.
That was the part where I woke up.
* * *
A cool, powerful hand was squeezing my arm and I knew instantly that she was alive, wounded yet recovering. I sat upright and pivoted to look down at her. Tanya’s eyes were alert and bright as she questioned me with a look, yet her left arm was bandaged around the elbow and bicep. An IV entered the same arm, pumping O positive from the bag hung next to the bed.
“Nightmare,” I said, in answer to her unspoken question. “How are you?”
She cleared her throat first. “Alive and healing…thanks to you!” she said with a smile, weakly.
Checking her over, I found just the one bandage, the rest of her healed back to perfection.
* * *
Then I looked around the room. It was obviously a bedroom, decorated in an opulent fashion with very expensive furnishings. Other than that it looked like a bunker. The walls were poured concrete, buttressed ceiling massively solid.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Safehouse,” she replied, tapping a small button next to the bed. A microsecond later the door opened and Lydia blurred through, followed by Nika, who was carrying a tray.
I smiled at the spikey-haired vamp and the beautiful blonde, but my focus zoomed in on the cloth covered tray the mind reader was carrying. Food! I was suddenly, overwhelmingly hungry. Starving, famished. Potentially the hungriest I have ever been.
Nika put the tray down on the little hardwood table at the foot of the bed and pulled the cloth covering it off as she backed gracefully away, a small smile on her face.
I was suddenly standing next to the bed, my entire attention on the tray of food that smelled amazing. Then I was at the tray, trying to decide what to eat first. There was a huge bowl of oatmeal, which smelled of butter, blueberries and brown sugar. A stack of maple syrup (real!) covered pancakes and a plate of Canadian bacon vied for attention, as did the the bowl of scrambled eggs.
“Ahem!” Lydia said with a throat clearing sound.
I glanced up at her, then followed the direction of her gaze, looking down to discover I was stark naked. Lydia arched one eyebrow in amusement, the corner of Nika’s mouth twitched slightly as if she might actually know how to grin. I was too hungry to care, so I grabbed the whole tray and zipped back into bed, the food on my lap.
“Tanya, he’s a keeper!” Nika said quietly, her grin fully evident.
I’ve known Nika almost as long as I’ve known Tanya. But I never got to know her, not really. She is one of Tanya’s closest friends, placed with the pure bred vampire to help monitor her condition during the long years when Tanya refused to speak.
The Coven considered her worth a thousand times her own weight in any precious metal you care to name. True mind readers are rare. Ones with Nika’s ability are almost unheard of.
But I never spent much time around her, too nervous of her abilities to feel comfortable. Now she was picking on me almost like Lydia.
“Oh, he’s a prize, alright!” Lydia said, in a sardonic tone.
Okay, so the blonde has a long way to go to get to Lydia’s level.
“Is that a challenge?” Nika responded to my thought.
I held one shaky hand up in submission while I shoveled eggs into my mouth with my other, not bothering with a fork.
“Holy shit Chris! Slow down! They aren’t gonna outrun you, ya know,” Lydia said, taking in my performance.
“He’s hungrier than he has ever been,” Nika explained for me.
“Ah, Doc? Could you come in here, please?” Lydia asked in a normal speaking voice.
Nonetheless, the door opened and the dark, lean doctor glided into the room.
“Ah, Chris, how are you doing?” he asked calmly.
I nodded around the mouthful of sausage (they had been in a little covered dish) then swallowed.
“I’m starving! But other than that I feel pretty good. Maybe a little tired, but overall, just really hungry,” I said, then wrapped a pancake around a wad of bacon and stuffed the whole thing in my mouth.
Lydia looked half fascinated, half disgusted. It had been a long time since she had ingested normal food and the whole thing seemed to make her queasy. I swallowed half my food, opened my mouth and pointed at the chewed mess inside, before swallowing again.
“Look, Lyd! SEE FOOD!” I said.
“Never mind, Doc. He’s fine…as big an asshole as ever!” the green-eyed little vamp said.
Doctor Singh ignored our attempt at banter, instead giving me a professional once over, then checking on Tanya. I got serious.
“How is she, Doc?” I asked, food forgotten for the moment.
“She’s doing great, Chris! It’ll be some time before she’s back to full specs so to speak, but she’s healing at her normal phenomenal rate,” the vampire physician said. “The surface damage has mostly healed, it’s the silver poisoning that is taking some time. But your application of your own potent blood helped immensely!”
“So what happened? I don’t remember a lot, just seeing Tanya get bit by a bear with silver teeth. The rest is blurry or just plain gone.”
“Hmm, well, it’ll probably come back to you at some point, but I’ll leave it to the Elders to fill you in,” he said. “I will say that fighting weres with teeth and claws painted with silver nitrate is nasty business. They would have eventually died from the very stuff they painted on their own teeth!”
He left with a wave, leaving me to look a question at Lydia while I polished off the last of the food. She didn’t need to read my mind to know what I wanted.
“Senka and Tzao want to…discuss things with you. When you’re ready and dressed I’ll take you to them. We don’t want to expose you to anyone else!”
“Alright, but I need more breakfast first,” I said, popping up to grab a pair of jeans that were stacked near the bed. Tanya always makes sure I have a supply of clothes handy.
“Jeeze, Chris! Warn us next time, we could go blind!” Lydia protested at my nakedness.
“Yeah, like I don’t know it was you two who undressed me in the first place!”
Nika and Lydia exchanged glances with each other and Tanya who shrugged, still too weak to say much.
“Oh come on! You two are the least afraid of me and the only ones Tanya would trust!”
“I’m not afraid of you! Who are you calling afraid?” Lydia said.
“I saw your face in the tunnel, Lyd! You were scared of me. Why”
She started to protest, then stopped herself. After a moment, she went ahead.
“Listen, I couldn’t tell if you even knew who I was let alone what you would do next!” she said.
“What I would do next? What does that mean? What did I do in the first place?”
She looked uncertain. Just then, Tanya’s cool hand touched my arm and I snapped around to look at her. She took a breath, then spoke, softly, with effort.
“You killed them, all of them…the other weres,” she said.
“I killed all of the Spawn? How?”
Nika spoke up.
“We’re not sure
. The ceiling exploded and you came in like a bolt of lightning, ripping through the weres like rag dolls, then Tanya went down under a bunch and you freaked. There was this flash…like a burst of purple light. It came from you. We couldn’t see for a moment…when our vision cleared, there you were. Holding Tanya on your lap…growling,” she said, a puzzled look on her face. “All the weres had disappeared – gone like smoke. At first we couldn’t figure it out, but then we realized there was dust covering our clothes, hair, everything and it wasn’t dust…it was ash!”
It was by far the longest speech I had ever heard her make. And I didn’t know what to make of it. I could almost remember a flash, but not much else.
“The growling would have been Okwari. I seem to remember him standing over us,” I said, to clear up that part.
Lydia shook her spikey haired head. “No, Chris. He was at the other end of the tunnel where he had been tearing apart Spawn. He only came over when you growled.”
“I growled?” I asked. All three nodded. “Weird! So you thought I might go…what? Nuts on you or something?” I looked at Lydia as I said this.
“Chris, you had just wiped almost two hundred weres off the planet like so much mold and you were growling and not responding…so yeah, I was a little concerned!”
I thought about that and then nodded, before turning my head to look at Nika.
“I wasn’t scared. I could read your thoughts. You were only interested in protecting Tanya and to a degree the rest of us. Your blast or flash or whatever didn’t harm any of the Coven or the Pack weres!” she said.
“How the hell did I manage that?
They couldn’t answer.
“Come on, the Elders would like to speak with you,” Lydia said.
As I pulled on my shirt, Tanya started to swing her legs off her bed. Her Hello Kitty pajamas were fairly incongruous.
‘Whoa! Where do you think you’re going?” Lydia asked.
“With him,” Tanya replied through gritted teeth.
“You’re not supposed to be going anywhere,” Lydia said.
Tanya gave her a level look and her sister in essence sighed, acknowledging the inevitable.
I swooped in and scooped my little vampire princess up in my arms. She started to protest, then suddenly changed her mind and snuggled into my chest. Nika grabbed the bag of blood off the IV rack and handed it to Tanya, who simply held it in her hand.
The four of us traversed the underground fortress in this manner, with Lydia leading, me carrying Tanya in the middle and Nika following close behind. The vampires we met in the corridors, moved quickly out of the way, most craning to glimpse the young full-blood, but quick to avoid my gaze.
Finally Lydia opened a steel door that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a battleship and led us into a well appointed sitting room, where Tzao and Senka sat motionless.
Senka raised one eyebrow in Tanya’s direction, but said nothing as I settled her into a loveseat, with me next to her. The other two found seats and sat quietly while I bore the silent inspection of the two ancient vampires. I seem to know a vampires age at a glance, and my eyes told me that Senka was over twelve hundred years old with Tzao around thirteen hundred. Yet they appeared to be in their thirties.
“Chris, we wanted to have a word with you,” Senka began in her crisp British accent, but stopping when I held up my hand.
“Elders, if I may. I need to express something first,” I said, touching the Tear to fuel my determination. “I belong to Tanya and she belongs to me! I will not allow anyone to separate us again.” I said evenly, then waited for the shitstorm to hit.
Neither of the Elders reacted, then Senka continued.
“We agree,” was all she said.
“You do?”
Both nodded once in unison, like eerie twins that looked nothing alike.
“We do. Chris, I’ve told you how the Darkkin feel about Tatiana. How every member of the Coven has felt she was destined for important things?”
I nodded and she continued.
“When you came into the picture, waking her and claiming her heart, I felt you might be the key. The individual who would ground her and keep her stable,” she said. “But Lydia felt differently. Lydia felt that Tanya was here to ground you…to keep you from, what’s the phrase? Going off?”
“More like going Postal,” Lydia supplied from her spot.
Senka gave her a look, then turned back to me.
“I couldn’t begin to understand her point of view. That you would somehow be a force to contend with,” the blonde Elder said. “Oh, I held you in high regard. Your abilities were amazing. But I never grasped what you would become.”
I was following her but their rapid change of heart from our last meeting had my head reeling.
“Chris, there were over two hundred Spawn in that tunnel. When you screamed and …..flashed..or whatever it was, you flash fried everyone of them, including their dead into ash.
There has never been any vampire or being, that we” she looked at Tzao, who nodded, “have any knowledge of, either directly or in our rather extensive archives, that could do that.”
Tzao spoke in a crystal toned voice. “The ones attacking Tatiana were destroyed first and fastest, the rest from there.”
“How do you know that? Which died first?” I asked.
“We found two self-contained cameras, set by the Spawn, likely to provide proof of our demise,” Senka said. “Fairly sophisticated units, I’m given to understand, with a relatively high rate of recording. Our technicians have processed the information. Let me show you.”
She picked up a remote and pressed several buttons, which caused a large high-def LCD flatscreen to rise up from an unassuming chest. Another click of a button and two images were displayed side by side. Taken from each end of the tunnel, the videos displayed all the events before I got there right up till the vamps found the cameras after my ‘flash’ or whatever it was.
They were right, the weres on Tanya simply exploded into ash, then a concentric circle of violet fire flared through the rest of the Spawn, sparing any Pack or Coven members that were around them. In one case, a Pack were was on top of a Spawn and ended up falling when the Spawn vaporized underneath him.
“Wow…that’s pretty freaky!” I said, feeling a bit surreal.
“Ya think?” Lydia said absently, still staring at the screen.
Senka gave her a glance, then looked back at me. “You don’t remember how you accomplished that?”
I shook my head. “I remember seeing Tanya go down under a wave of weres, and no matter how many I killed, I knew I wasn’t gonna get there in time. I can also remember thinking ‘No! Not gonna happen!’ with incredible determination and rage. Then, nothing…till Lydia was calling my name.”
Everyone was silent, each processing the videos and my words internally.
“Okay, so that will remain a mystery for now,” Senka said. “What’s your next step, Chris?”
I looked at five expectant faces, took a deep breath and told them.
Chapter 35
I entered Washington Square Park from the Southwest corner, off West Fourth Street, as it was closest to my destination. The sun was not quite directly overhead. It’s not a big park, only about six or seven acres tucked in lower Manhattan, a block or so from the Avenue of the Americas. General Creek had chosen this location for our meeting.
After my conversation with the Coven leaders, we had agreed on this course of action. We had planned madly, drawing the Pack into it as well. Once we had the framework, I had called General Creek and asked to meet, letting him pick the time and place. That was important, because the only way the government would get my message would be if they controlled the details of the meeting as much as possible. The impact would be that much greater when I took away their advantages, one by one.
* * *
To the casual observer, the lower corner of the park appeared to be closed for renovations, yellow ‘DO NOT CROSS’ tape cord
oning off the area. I ducked under the tape, my internal fighter noting the dark blue van on McDougal Street and the two black Chevy Suburbans parked on Fourth, engines running. This part of the park was famous for its built-in chess tables. Ahead of me, at the furthest chess table sat two figures. I had expected one, but wasn’t all together surprised to find the other.
General Creek rose from his seat at the table and crossed to shake my hand, his posture stiff, his face expressionless. He was wearing khakis and a dark green commando sweater. He looked military even in casual clothes, contrasting with my jeans and blue runners jacket. The other man stood more slowly, his movements managing to convey a sense of self importance. Black suit, a lean five feet, eleven inches or so, with dark hair and black eyes. His ethnicity was difficult to pin down. A slight tilt in his eye structure spoke of Asia, his olive toned skin—the Mediterranean.
“Chris Gordon, this is Mr. Kincaid,” the general introduced us.
“General, I was expecting to meet with just you?” I asked, although I wasn’t really surprised.
“The powers that be and all that,” he explained negligently.
>Bartholomew Kincaid, special envoy from the President< Nika’s voice said from the collar of my jacket. The tag inside would tell you that the jacket was made in Russia, not China, and the sophisticated electronics built into the shell would tell you this wasn’t your average jacket. It was built for Russian intelligence services and my Russian vampires had excellent connections with all levels of Moscow’s government. The headlight reflective patches on the back and arms were actually sensors, designed to pick up the infrared laser beam being directed at it from the fifth floor window of the building on the corner of McDougal and Fourth. One of Deckert’s men was keeping the laser locked onto my back, so that the secure carrier wave contained within the coherent beam of light would carry Nika’s messages to me with no fear of interception.
>He’s going to play tough, feels safe with two…no make that three snipers and the fast reaction guys in the cars<
I decided that having a mind reader in the family was worth the lack of privacy, although Tanya had promised to teach me how to block Nika’s abilities.