She pushed it out of her head, stepping out into the room. She could see Burke at the door; he shook his head once, indicating he’d seen nothing, and gestured down the hall. Vanessa nodded and took position at the edge of the wall with her weapon aimed at the bedroom door. Janus moved past her, checked the bathroom, and then positioned himself with his back against the wall. He glanced at Vanessa and then at the Captain.
“All yours,” he murmured into his headset, and the Captain made her move.
She wasn’t carrying a firearm; she never did. She was wearing all black, from her boots to her combat fatigues to the tight shirt made of leather with Kevlar reinforcements and darts of stretchy synthetic for flexibility. Her long, blonde hair was tied back and her forearms were covered with leather gauntlets girded in black metal rings. Hitched to her sides, as always, were her blades, and across the chest-plate was a bandolier filled with auto-injecting darts.
Captain Tori Perrault, former vampire and current elite soldier of the Children of the Sun, the Emperor’s Right Hand, strode up to the door at a pace almost leisurely. She stopped in front of it, took a single breath, and then shoved outward with both arms. The door did not so much open as blow inward in a spray of wooden chunks. What was left of it hit the doorstop so hard that the thin tube of metal punched into the wood of the door, stopping it from rebounding. The Captain stepped in, and Vanessa followed her.
Sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing a long and flowing gown of orange and turquoise and purple, was a woman who looked to be in her early twenties. She had dark skin covered in swirling tattoos and long hair pulled back in a high ponytail encircled with golden ringlets. She did not seem surprised by their arrival, nor did she look in the slightest bit concerned. If anything, she seemed to radiate a sense of serenity and peace, and Vanessa found it difficult to look at her for too long without becoming confused. Lightheaded.
“I wondered when you would come for me,” the woman said in a soft, melodious voice.
She was talking to the Captain, looking directly at her, seemingly uninterested in either Vanessa or Janus and Connors, who had come in to the room and taken flanking positions, aiming their weapons at her.
“Now you know,” the Captain said, and the tattooed woman nodded.
“I wonder also, child … do you know who I am?” she asked.
“I am not your child,” the Captain replied.
The woman nodded and gave her a small smile. “Forgive me – when you’ve lived for more than four thousand years, everyone seems very young.”
“If you want to impress me, you’ll need to try harder,” the Captain said, and the woman’s serenity seemed to falter for just a moment. A flicker of something – anger? fear? – crossed her face and disappeared, replaced again by calm and peace. Vanessa had seen it, though, and so had the Captain.
“Will you answer my question?” the tattooed woman asked.
“I know who you are,” the Captain said. “The rest of them don’t, but I do. I know exactly who you are, Ashayt-Sa, eotah acho ma jitte.”
Vanessa glanced at Janus, who shrugged. They had never learned the vampire language. The woman on the bed, however, narrowed her eyes.
“You were never taught that speech …”
“I was never taught anything by your kind,” the Captain replied. “Everything I know, I learned from my Emperor.”
“That is not possible.”
Here the Captain favored the woman with a bloodthirsty smile. “Many things are possible for the Emperor of the Sun.”
The tattooed woman considered this for a time and at last said, “You have come here to kill me.”
“Yes.”
“Do you expect me to accept that?”
“I don’t intend on giving you a choice.” The Captain reached down and unsheathed her two blades, holding them casually at her sides. The tattooed woman smiled at this and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, opened them again, and when she spoke next it seemed her voice came not from her mouth, but from the very walls around them, loud and reverberating as if through some gigantic set of hidden speakers.
“I am not accustomed to being threatened,” she murmured, but her words were like a physical force, pressing down upon them. A great wave of despair seemed to roll over Vanessa and she was gripped with a sudden and indisputable certainty that all of their efforts were foolhardy. There was no chance of success, she thought, and no hope for tomorrow. It made her want to fall to her knees and weep, and it was only through a supreme effort that she maintained her position.
She watched in shock as Connors actually dropped his weapon and held his hands to his ears, as if such a simple, futile gesture could contain the sound. Janus managed to control himself, holding on to his rifle but raising his lip in an unconscious snarl. Vanessa, too, kept her grip on her weapon, but she knew that if she told the muscles in her arms to raise it, they would not obey the command. The waves of despair rolling over her seemed ready to crush her, drown her, drag her into blackness.
Even the Captain was not unaffected. She bowed her head against the onslaught of the woman’s voice, and Vanessa saw the muscles in her arms tense, saw the blades waver just a bit, and wondered for the first time if their small task force would be enough. This woman was something beyond anything they had ever encountered, and it seemed her superiors had failed to prepare her for what she and her team would be up against.
Then the Captain lifted her head and grinned her angry grin. “If you want to live, your parlor tricks won’t be enough. You’ll have to kill me.”
The tattooed woman frowned at her. “I have not killed in—”
“Four thousand years,” the Captain snapped. “I know! I know what you are. I know that you are weak, that you have always been weak, and that you won’t take my life now even though I’m prepared to send you at last to the hell you deserve.”
“You know nothing of me!” the vampire roared, and at this the Captain even managed a laugh.
“I know all that I need. I have read your scrolls. Do you hear me? I know that you will only flee or, if cornered like you are now, try to use your gifts against us. That’s always been enough for you, hasn’t it, Mother Ashayt? You’ve always been able to get by with those options.”
“I have never wished to use any other,” the woman said, and still her voice beat upon them like a physical force. If anything, it was even stronger now than it was before, and Vanessa could feel terror overtaking the despair. She struggled against it, trying to hold on, hoping the sensation would pass.
“Then I’ll not give you a reason!” the Captain cried, and with one swift motion she stepped forward and drove one of her blades deep into the woman’s side. The vampire’s eyes went wide and she tilted her head back, taking a deep, gasping breath. Vanessa felt the terror and despair dissipate instantly, leaving her weak in the knees.
“Amun Sa,” the vampire whispered, and her eyes were distant and glassy, filled with tears. “Oh … at last.”
The Captain regarded her with an expression that seemed to Vanessa nine parts contempt, but there was a curious sympathy there as well.
“Four thousand years,” she said. “All that time and you never had the strength to do what you should have done the very first night.”
The vampire’s head tilted forward again, and the tears that had been brimming in her eyes spilled down her cheeks. She smiled as she met the Captain’s gaze.
“I never dared hope it would be so easy,” she said, her voice breaking. A trickle of blood began to work its way from the corner of her lower lip to her chin.
“Now you know.”
“Listen to me, child,” the vampire said, and Vanessa saw that the Captain meant to object again to this word, but the tattooed woman held up her hand. “Listen. She will forgive you. She will forgive you without you even having to ask her.”
“I have no idea who you are talking about,” the Captain said.
“Will you forgive her? Can you forgive her?”
“Who?”
“Oh, my poor child, how will you ever be able to forgive yourself?”
At this last, the Captain bared her teeth and raised her second blade. “I’ve heard enough.”
“I’ve nothing more to say,” the vampire croaked.
“Then let me finish it. Let me end this.”
The woman seemed grateful to hear these words. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and she smiled, tilting her head back once again.
“I come to be with you at last, my love,” she whispered.
The Captain lunged forward again, this time swinging her right arm in a wide arc, bringing the carbon-steel blade rushing through the air. The tip of it bit into the vampire’s throat and, after a moment of palpable resistance, cut through, leaving a wide gash like a bloody grin and casting a spray of red against the far wall.
Gouts of crimson liquid gushed forth from the wound in great jets, but the vampire’s expression never changed. Her eyes remained closed, her head remained tilted back, and she was still smiling when she died.
* * *
“I have never felt anything like that in my entire life,” Janus said, and he threw back his shot of whiskey, grimaced, and slammed it down on the bar.
“Another round for my boy here,” Connors said, clapping him on the back. “We’ll make a fellow Irishman of you yet.”
“You’re about as Irish as my German mother’s tits, California boy,” Burke said, pouring from a bottle of Jameson into Janus’s glass.
“Yeah, well, your German mother had plenty of Irish in her, if you take my meaning,” Connors replied, grinning, and Burke pitched him the finger.
“If you’re playing bartender, Burke, Carrie and I could use a refill,” Vanessa said. Both women were drinking champagne, though the emotion Vanessa was feeling was something closer to relief than elation. She was not sure they should be celebrating.
“My pleasure, Ness,” Burke said, and Vanessa watched as he refilled both glasses.
“Much obliged,” she said when he was done, and Burke nodded.
“Anyone else? Park?” he asked, and Soon glanced up from his phone and shook his head.
“I’m set. Remind me to compliment the former owners on their choice of Scotch,” he said.
“I think they’re all dead,” Paulo said, and Park grinned.
“Even better,” he said, returning to his phone. “I won’t have to replace it.”
The Brazilian was sitting at the edge of the bar, drinking a glass of wine from a bottle old enough that its label had been illegible from dust when he had first pulled it from the cellar. Paulo rarely drank anything but red wine. The Blood of Christ, he claimed, was the only thing that interested him.
“Seriously though, Ness, you ever feel anything like that?” Janus asked. “It was fucking crazy. I couldn’t move.”
“Never,” Vanessa said, watching the bubbles in her champagne crawl up the sides of the glass.
“Carrie? Burke?”
“No one’s ever felt anything like that,” Connors said. “Jesus, dude, she was four thousand years old. You ever meet anyone else that old?”
“My grandma might’ve made it to three thousand,” Janus said, and then cackled at his own joke. He drained his glass and again slammed it to the bar. “Hit me, bro.”
Burke hit him, and poured a shot of his own.
“We actually lost radio contact for a few minutes there in the middle,” Park said. “Carrie will back me up.”
“S’true,” Carrie said, not looking up from her glass, which she hadn’t touched since Burke had refilled it.
“That could’ve been something in the van,” Vanessa said. “A problem with the equipment, maybe.”
“No, no way,” Park replied. “Our systems are triple-redundant and anyway, I checked everything over. There’s nothing wrong in the van.”
“It was the bat,” Carrie said, glancing over at Vanessa for a moment before turning back to her drink. “I felt it all the way in the car.”
“Shoulda been inside,” Janus told her. “Shit, I felt like I was going to start crying. Like everything we were doing was a complete waste, like … like …”
“Like they were going to win,” Vanessa finished for him. “Like it was all just a huge joke, because they were going to win.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Exactly,” Janus said, and for a moment there was silence. He glanced around at the others. “Captain rocked it, though. Say what you want … she fucking rocked it.”
“I wonder what some of you might say, if you said what you wanted,” a voice said from the far side of the room, and the group as a whole turned their heads to see the Captain coming toward the bar.
“Uh, nothin’ meant by that,” Janus tried, and the Captain smirked.
“Sure,” she said. “Tell me something, Janus. Have you ever eaten blood pudding?”
Janus blanched, going pale, and his features took on a look of fear and mortification that Vanessa found entirely alien on his face.
“You, ah … you heard that?” he asked.
“I hear everything,” the Captain told him, and to Vanessa’s surprise, she smiled, not a hint of malice in her eyes. Moving further into the room, she pulled out the stool next to Janus and sat down. “For example, I heard that Burke is our bartender tonight.”
Burke had been staring at the Captain with an expression halfway between awe and fear, and he started now at the sound of his own name, but then regained his composure. “What do you need, Captain?”
“Tequila,” she replied. “Give me a shot and leave the bottle. You have any salt back there?”
None of the members of the squad had ever seen the woman drink, let alone act in such a casual manner. Vanessa found herself confused, unsure what to make of this display, and could see on the faces of the others that they felt the same.
Burke set the bottle of tequila down before the Captain and quickly found her a shaker of salt. The Captain took it, curled her left hand into a fist, and shook a generous helping of salt out onto the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. She turned and looked again at Janus.
“So did you mean it?” she asked, and he tilted his head.
“I’m sorry, ma’am?”
“‘Captain rocked it, though,’” she quoted, her voice dropping an octave and taking on an eerie impersonation of Janus’s Mississippi accent. “‘She fucking rocked it.’”
Janus considered the question and then nodded. “I did, yeah. I was ready to run, OK? That’s the fuckin’ truth, Captain. If you’d lowered those blades, I would’ve been gone, and I’m not ashamed to say it because I think everyone else felt the same.”
There were murmurs of assent. Vanessa found herself nodding, knowing it was true.
“All right, then,” the Captain said, and she raised her fist to her lips, licking the salt away and chasing it with the shot of tequila. Finished, she closed her eyes and set the glass down in front of her, taking a long breath. At last she opened her eyes again and looked at them.
“But none of you ran,” she said. “You held strong in the face of someone who could have torn every one of you to shreds. She went easy. I knew she would, but I knew she’d try to use her powers first. Some other squad … one of the shit ones they send out to clean up … those people would’ve wet their pants and fallen to their knees crying. Do you understand?
“Charles told me you could handle it, and he was right. You stood your ground, you didn’t abandon your posts and give up on your duty to the Emperor. You don’t even know what you’ve done. It was the hardest thing you’ll ever do, and you did it, and you helped me do what I needed to do.”
There was silence, now, but they were all looking at her. The Captain, for her part, was staring at her left hand, still closed into a fist.
“Thank you,” she said at last, and with that she opened her hand and reached again for the bottle, looking over at them again.
“Who’ll do a shot with me?” she asked. “On
e shot, and then I’ll take this bottle and head upstairs, but I’m tired of drinking alone.”
Janus grinned, took the bottle from her, and filled first her glass and then his own. Burke began laying shot glasses out for the rest of the team, and one by one Janus filled them with tequila. The Captain passed the salt down along the line.
It was only after Vanessa had slammed her shot glass down against the wood of the bar with the rest of them that she realized what she had seen out of the corner of her eye. Carrie Brennan had raised her glass up along with the rest of them, but Vanessa was sure, absolutely sure, that she had seen the woman pour the tequila out on the carpeted floor.
Part III
Chapter 9
First Encounter
“Mike again?!” Two asked, glancing over the list of challengers, and Jakob laughed.
“He’s been waiting for you to come back. He, well … the Ay’Araf don’t take well to losing. Especially to a first-timer.”
“Life’s a bitch,” Two said. “Come on … I want to fight someone else.”
“So beat him again,” Jakob said. “If he loses two in a row, he’s not allowed to challenge you again until you lose a match. House rules.”
“Is it like that at all of your clubs?” Theroen asked. He was standing slightly behind Two, arms crossed, watching the fighters in the veteran ring.
“Not all of them, but most,” Jakob said. “Each club has its own rules, but we all get tired of the same fighters competing against each other over and over. If one is clearly superior, it’s time to move up. It’s the only way to learn.”
“So you learn by losing?” Two asked, and Jakob raised an eyebrow.
“What do you think you’ve been doing these past thirty-six months?” he asked. Two favored him with a cool glance.
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