by D. N. Hoxa
“Okay. Good. We’ll get your friends out, then we find the vampire, and she helps us. If she doesn’t help us, you still will,” Sean said, but he was talking to himself, so none of us bothered to reply. He just needed to put the plan into his own words. “I’ll just write that down,” he said, and stood up to go find some paper and a pen.
“What the hell could she have stolen, anyway?” Brady said in wonder.
“No idea.”
“Maybe she stole the bombs,” Wyatt said.
“I don’t think so,” said Sharps. “If they have as much as Hammer said, she wouldn’t have been able to steal all of them.”
“Whatever it was, thank God she stole it. It means time for us. To prepare,” I said. We were going to need all the time we could get.
“When do we leave?” Sharps asked me.
“I’d like to see what kinds of weapons you have first. That should help me plan a way to get inside unnoticed.”
“Okay,” Sharps said, and stood up, too.
I shook my head. “The sun is a few minutes away. I’m going to need to lie down soon.”
“I’ll take you to your room,” he said and headed for the door.
Sean came back with a piece of paper in hand. He’d written the plan in two sentences, and kept reading it.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said to the others.
They all nodded, and Sean offered his hand.
“Get some rest. We’ll have a lot to do.” I nodded, and followed Sharps. “Thanks again, Hammer. Really.”
I waved my hand but didn’t turn. I didn’t want them to thank me. I hadn’t done anything to help them yet.
“He’s always like this,” Sharps mumbled as we walked the hallways. A few humans passed us, and they all watched me curiously
“I like him,” I said. Sean seemed like a nice guy.
“I think he has a tattoo with your name on it somewhere on his body,” Sharps said.
I laughed. “I’d rather not know.”
He stopped in front of the room I’d woken up in.
“What happened to your father?” I asked before he could leave, and he froze.
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I hope you’re not playing games with us, that’s all,” he said, and nodded once before he walked away.
I didn’t understand him. One second, he joked and acted as if he was my friend. The next, he looked like he wanted me to drop dead.
The room was the same as it had been. I fell on the bed and looked at the white ceiling. So many things had changed in just one night. How the hell was that even possible?
I was dying to know more about Hammer. What else did he do that no one else knew about? I felt half him, half Matias. My mind swam with thoughts, bouncing from Morta, to Bugz, to Dublin, and to Chandra, and the humans around me. So many beating hearts. I closed my eyes to try and drown the sound out. The thought of them terrified me. What if I failed? Why had I agreed to help them? It felt like by agreeing, I’d taken on the whole responsibility. I didn’t know nearly enough to help them.
It was her. Everything began and ended with her. The hope that she would agree to help us consumed me. It was the only outcome I was willing to accept.
***
The drawing looked clear enough when I handed it to Sharps. With a huge smile on his face, he took it.
“This looks amazing,” he said. “So we just cover a vampire with it, and it’s done?”
“Cover and make sure this touches every part of him. The vampire won’t die, but it will paralyze him. The silver in it will.”
The blanket was something I’d imagined a long time ago, when I had nothing better to do. I’d thought: you know what would really suck? If humans could cover us entirely with silver. At the time, I’d had no idea that that was going to prove useful someday. Of course, it had never even crossed my mind that I would help humans. I was a traitor of my kind, yes, but I couldn’t turn my back on humans. I’d been one, too, once. All of us were human first.
“We can have this ready in a week with all these details,” Sharps said. He’d aged so much since the first time I’d seen him. His hair was completely white now, and he couldn’t walk straight anymore, but he was still tough.
“Let’s hope so. The more we can get done fast, the better.” No one knew when or how vampires would try to cross the walls.
“What is that?”
The voice came from behind us, and we turned around to look at the little boy, half hiding behind the wall.
“Hey there, little David,” I said, grinning.
“It’s David Junior,” he said.
“Okay, Junior. Come here.” The boy who was barely six years old looked at his father, and David Senior nodded, smiling. I had no idea how he’d been able to father Junior at that old age, but didn’t think it was polite to ask.
The boy dragged his feet to us, and I pulled him up and sat him on the table in front of me.
“What’s that?” he said, pointing at the paper in his father’s hand.
“That’s a very special blanket.”
“Blanket?” he asked. The curiosity grew in his eyes.
“A very special one. It keeps you very warm,” I said, amused by the surprised look on his face.
“Can I have one?”
“You can have plenty, as soon as they’re done, Junior.”
“I’ll be right back,” Sharps said, smiling and shaking his head, and he left to take the drawing I’d made downstairs to the engineers.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that he left me alone with his only son, but it did. It sucked to know that I probably never would have, if it were my boy. Too bad I’d never know what that was like.
“Hey, you wanna see something cool?” I asked, and he immediately nodded. I pulled him up and sat him on my shoulders. His small feet dangled on my chest and his warm hands locked tightly under my chin. I felt his heart, but the craving was just a distant need. His blood was too pure for me.
I took him to the next room and the windows. They were really high on the wall and I doubted he’d ever looked through them. We were on the ninth floor of the RONY building, and Manhattan stretched beautifully under us.
“Wow,” Junior said.
“Cool, isn’t it?” I had to stand on the tips of my toes to look. It was really cool.
“Can we go out there?” Junior said.
“You were out there a few hours ago, weren’t you?” He’d returned from kindergarten an hour before I woke up.
“Yes, but it looks prettier now.”
“It’s the lights,” I said. “The lights make it prettier.”
“Where do the lights come from?” he asked, as curious as ever. I loved that about him. I’d known him since he was four years old, and it had always been there.
“Electricity,” I said.
“I want to learn how to make them,” he said. His heart pounded with excitement.
“You can. Have you decided what you want to be when you grow up yet? Maybe you can be an engineer and make pretty lights like this.”
“I can’t,” he said, sighing. ”I’ve already decided something else.”
“What is it?”
“You. When I grow up, I want to be just like you.”
XXXVI
I smelled him outside the door and opened it before he could knock. When I saw his face again, I saw the little boy.
David Junior Sharps. I didn’t understand the feelings that suddenly spread through my whole body at first. Hammer had loved that little boy. Was it weird that I loved the man he’d become?
“What?” Sharps said, narrowing his brows at the stupid smile on my face.
“Hi, Junior.” He paled the next second, and his heart picked up the beating. “I remembered you. I remembered you when you were six years old and sitting on my shoulders.”
“Good for you,” he spit. His words were filled with anger.
“Do you want to tell me
why you’re so angry with me?”
He laughed dryly. “Sean is waiting. We need to get going,” he said, and turned his back to me. So it was a no.
I analyzed every inch of him and the more my eyes got used to the way he held himself, the way he walked, the more my chest remembered what it was like to think about him. I’m not even going to try and explain that, because I didn’t understand how it was possible myself, but maybe, the memory hadn’t come alone. Maybe, all the memories came back to me together with the feelings.
I followed Junior down a flight of stairs and into a room much bigger than the one we’d been in the night before. This one had a huge screen mounted on the head wall, thought it didn’t show anything.
“Good morning, Hammer,” Sean said.
“The meeting went well?” I asked instead.
“Not entirely, but that’s not something to worry about.”
“What did they say?”
He shrugged. “Boston thought that you were trying to play us, but Washington believes you’ll help us again.”
“Why don’t you let me talk to the ROB? We’re going to need every bit of help we can get.”
“You will, just not yet. We’ll talk to them as soon as we have some proof,” Sean said.
“How are we going to get proof?”
“You’re going there for your friends, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but we’re going for my friends only. We won’t have the time to search for anything.”
I wasn’t even sure we would have time to get them out. It didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try.
“Just leave that to me,” Sharps said.
“You’re not going.” He was definitely not going with me.
“Of course I’m going,” he said.
“You’re not.”
“Sharps is the best we have. He has to come with you,” Sean said.
“That’s why he can’t come. There’s no guarantee we’ll make it out of there alive.”
“I’ll decide for myself, Hammer. I’m not asking you,” Sharps said. “And we’re not going to get anywhere with talking.”
“If you can’t get any proof this time, we’ll get it when we find the vampire. She was close enough to steal from them, wasn’t she? She can tell us, even show us what she took,” Sean said.
“There you have it. I think I should go alone to Brazil for my friends. Then we find Morta.”
“We can talk about this until morning. I’m still going,” Sharps said.
“Gentlemen,” Carson said, as he entered the room in toe with Wyatt.
“Are they ready?” Sean asked.
“Yes, sir. We have the whole wall covered now,” Carson said.
“What did you find yesterday?” I asked.
“A bunch of weird shit. A sack of grey flour, a huge dead snake that has no business being here, a broken stereo—”
“How could you have not seen a broken stereo until last night?” Sharps asked.
“We did see it. We just didn’t think…” Carson’s voice trailed off.
“You didn’t think it was weird? A fucking snake wasn’t weird?” Sharps shouted.
“We didn’t see the snake. Just the stereo. We thought the wind had brought it our way.” Carson was older than Sharps by at least ten years. In fact, Sharps didn’t look much older than me. But Sharps was definitely in command.
“Have men in front of the monitors at all times. Twenty-four seven,” Sharps said before he turned to me. “Let’s get the gear. We should head out soon.”
I followed him out of the room, together with Wyatt. The rest stayed behind.
“You’re not coming with me, Junior,” I said.
“Junior?” Wyatt said, raising his brows at me.
“Stick to my last name.” Sharps sounded angry. “And I’m coming.”
“You don’t understand. You can get killed—”
“If I do, it’ll be just another human on your conscience, won’t it?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means I’m coming, and you can’t stop me.”
He was angry, and I didn’t want to push it. If he wanted to come so badly, and if Sean thought he was the best they had, maybe it was a good idea. I didn’t like it, but maybe it was okay.
He took us down to a room with more than thirty people working inside. Even prepared to keep my nostrils from smelling the blood, I still heard the hearts. They were so fucking delicious, and so many. I wondered if I’d ever feel full if I drank all of them dry…
My fingernails dug into my palms. I couldn’t let myself think like that.
“Get him some blood, Wyatt. We don’t want him to start tearing throats.” Sharps had been watching me, and he saw the craving in my eyes. Wyatt grunted but left the next second.
“I’m not going to tear anything,” I said to Sharps. “Whatever you think you have against me, or Hammer, I’ll remind you that we’re here to work, so keep your childish anger to yourself. When it starts to affect your decisions, it’ll be too late.”
Sharps turned to look at me with raised brows, but he didn’t reply.
We went to the very end of the room, and everyone looked at me as we passed. Everyone. Some of them even smiled, but most just looked in confusion.
At the end, there was a door that led us to some kind of a showroom.
“This is where we keep all the original prototypes. Everything we’ve ever made is here.”
I stepped closer to the glass table that extended from one corner of the room to the other. I could see everything inside clearly.
“That’s the VS. Vampire Signal. It turns red when a vampire is within a mile,” Sharps said as I looked at a triangle-shaped device made of plastic. Close to it was another, similar looking, but smaller and round. “That’s pretty much the same. It’s more practical to throw everywhere, and it scans the whole area, building, people, vampires, everything.”
“That’s the screen from which we see what the round VS catches,” Sharps continued. The scanner was like a miniature TV with a rubber band attached to the back.
“Those are bullet samples,” Sharps said. It was a large box with seventeen silver bullets in it. There was one of every shape. Some were as big as my finger, some round and tiny.
“Do you have guns for all of these?”
“Yes, we do, but they’re not displayed here,” Sharps said. “These two are for hearing better and seeing in the dark.” A pair of dark glasses stood next to a small earpiece. “We had these before, so you didn’t make them.”
He sounded proud.
“Okay,” I said, stifling my smile. I moved on to the collection of knives.
“All of these are made of silver. The handles, everything,” Sharps said. “Hammer made them this way so no vampire could touch them, even if they fell from our hands.”
There were eight knives lined one after the other, though I suspected the last one was a sword. It was long and the tip was arched a bit.
“I think we can modify a couple of these. Like that one,” I said, and pointed at the third in line. It was the coolest knife I’d ever seen. It had two blades, both arched into hooks. The handle had four rings around it for the knuckles.
“We’ve never really used that one. It’s too dangerous for our men,” Sharps said.
“Can you cover the handle with anything?” I wanted that so badly.
“I’m sure we can work something out,” Sharps said.
“And that one. A lot of those,” I said, and pointed at the simple, small knife with a very thin blade. “All of these, in fact—as long as you can modify the handles.” I would need as many as I could get.
“Sure,” Sharps said.
“And the VS. Both of them, and guns for all those bullets in there.”
“So we’re just going to go there and see what happens?” Sharps said.
“Pretty much. We get there without a single sound. We scan the area with these things and find the way to go into the building. W
ait,” I said, as something occurred to me. “You do know where you took me from, right?”
“Of course,” Sharps said.
“Once we know which side we’ll go in, we’ll…go in.”
“Wow. What a plan,” Sharps mumbled.
“Do you have a better one?”
“I haven’t seen the place so, no, I don’t.”
“Then trust me when I tell you that there’s no other way to do this. We need to go in, hopefully unnoticed, get my friends, and get right back out of there.”
“Something tells me it’s not going to be that easy,” he said.
“It’s not. That’s why I think I should go in there alone. There will be less noise and less chance of getting spotted.”
“Don’t worry about us. We can take care of ourselves,” Sharps said.
“How? They’re going to hear your hearts from the next neighborhood!”
“Not exactly,” Sharps said and pointed at the very end of the table. “That right there is a soundproof vest. When we wear it, vampires can’t hear our heartbeats, not unless their ears are practically attached to our chests.”
I remembered them. I hadn’t heard the heartbeats of Elijah or Isaac until I’d gotten very close to them when they captured me. With that stupid silver blanket I remembered designing, which sat folded and innocent right next to the vest.
“This here,” Sharps pointed at some sort of a fabric next to the blanket, “is what we call a neck cloth. It lets you move normally, but it’s supposed to be resistant from vampire teeth.”
“Supposed?”
“Well, you didn’t stick around long enough to design it. You just gave us the idea. We’ve tested it with animals, but not vampires.”
“I can test it right now.”
“It has silver in it, too.”
“Why am I not surprised?” I mumbled. I did not want a silver-burnt tongue.
“We’ll take those, too. Just in case.” I moved on to two small balls next. “What are those?”
“When you press the button, it opens two seconds later and a net made of polyester and strings of silver wraps around the first objects in front of it.”