Urban Enemies

by Jim Butcher

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think that at all.”

  “What . . . you don’t believe in God?”

  “No, darling, I don’t believe I’ll be saved. If you know so much about me, then you know that I’m beyond redemption.”

  “I thought Jesus was all about cleansing sins.”

  “Surely there’s a limit, and I can say without fear of contradiction that I’m well over the mark.”

  She studied him, and he saw something flicker in her eyes. It looked like sadness, like the kind of raw emotion he’d seen in her before. But it was there and gone.

  “Do you know what I’ve been doing all this time?” she asked.

  “Other than following me? No.”

  “Oh, I mean what I’ve been doing my whole life. Since before you even met my sister.”

  “What . . . ah . . . field of study?”

  The sadness in her face shifted, darkened. “I followed in my sister’s footsteps.”

  “Oh, God . . .”

  “There’s no real name for the field. Amirah was pioneering new ground. She called it ‘transformative biology,’ but that was for lack of something else to call it.” Aayun paused and shrugged. “As good a name as any, I suppose.”

  She gave the crowbar another fierce pull, and the front of the packing case leaned outward, seemed to pause for a moment, and then fell with a crash.

  The case was filled with madness.

  7.

  Toys had to fight back the scream that rose to his mouth.

  Inside the crate was a cylinder of heavy reinforced glass seated in a metal base upon which was a computer control pad. Wires and thick cables snaked up to the lid, and hoses dangled down inside. The lights on the control panel glowed in vibrant shades of red and green. A monitor beeped softly.

  The cylinder was filled with liquid, and inside the liquid, standing like a golem from some mad story, was a naked figure. A man.

  A man Toys recognized.

  His name was—or had been—Abdul Fazir. Like Amirah, he was a scientist, and a good one, specializing in virology and infectious diseases. He had helped Amirah modify Seif al Din to bring its level of communicability to near 100 percent. The last time Toys had seen Fazir was the day he and Sebastian had sabotaged the geothermal vents in Amirah’s lab beneath the sands in Iraq. Fazir had already been infected with the latest generation of the pathogen. Not the version that created the mindless and murderous living dead, but the strain that let the victims retain their personalities, even at the cost of their sanity and humanity. It was the strain that Amirah had used on herself and that had given El Mujahid the power to nearly kill Joe Ledger.

  And now here Fazir was. Suspended in liquid, but awake. Dead, but not dead. Living dead. Staring with milky eyes through the curved wall of glass at Toys.

  “What have you done . . . ?” he whispered.

  Aayun bent and rested her forehead against the glass. Fazir’s hand moved and touched the inside of the cylinder. His fingers twitched as if caressing her hair. She spoke without looking at Toys. “He’s the last of my family,” she murmured. “Uncle Abdul . . .”

  There must have been some kind of speaker attached to the tube, because when she mentioned his name, the dead man smiled. His teeth were rotted to jagged green stumps, and there was a look of dreadful, bottomless hunger in his eyes. His bloodless lips formed a single word.

  Aayun.

  He said it to her, but he was looking at Toys. Then his eyes shifted away, and Toys turned to follow his gaze. At least half of the crates were of the same size and shape as the box in which Fazir’s cylinder stood. Toys’s mouth went dry. There were at least forty of them. Maybe more.

  “No . . . ,” he breathed.

  When he looked back at Fazir, the dead man was grinning at him. A tongue the color of an old mushroom lolled out from between those jagged teeth and licked the rubbery lips with great, slow relish.

  “Aayun!” cried Toys. “Aayun, what is all this? Why did you bring them here? Why did you bring me here?”

  She pushed off from the cylinder, walked back to him, and stood so close that he could smell dried sweat and sex on her from last night. Aayun caressed his cheek with the backs of her fingers.

  “I’m dying,” she said.

  He gaped at her. “What . . . ?”

  “Yes. Cancer. I’ve had it for years. My hair just grew back from the last round of chemo and radiation. They thought they’d gotten it all, but it’s back. I can feel it growing inside me. Imagine what that feels like, Toys, to have something consuming you from the inside out. My uterus, my breasts. The doctors said that they could try radical surgeries, but what’s the point? It’ll come back. They said that I have a twenty percent chance of remission this time. Twenty.”

  Despite everything, he felt tears burn in the corners of his eyes. She saw them, too, and shook her head.

  “Amirah wanted to transform the world, Toys,” said Aayun, leaning into the words, using the urgent tension in her body for emphasis. “She wanted to create a new kind of life using Generation Twelve of the Seif al Din pathogen. Transformation into a new state of existence. Not alive, not dead, but rather living death. A kind of immortality. Alive forever, but different, changed. Think about it, Toys. To never grow old, to never get sick again. To never die. It’s a wonderful thought.”

  Toys shook his head. “You have it wrong. Amirah turned herself into a monster. She was going to kill most of the world and turn the survivors into monsters like her. Like Fazir. That was the price of immortality.”

  “Yes,” agreed Aayun. “And if you’re alive, like you are, and healthy, like you are, with a future, like you have, it’s too high a price to pay. But think about it from where I stand. I’m dying. If I allow them to cut me open and scrape out my uterus and cut off my breasts, I’ll buy myself maybe another year. Maybe. Which means that in eighteen months I’ll be dead anyway. Dead forever. Dead and forgotten.”

  “Oh, please . . .”

  Aayun spread her arms wide. “If I embrace the transformation, I’ll live forever.”

  “As a monster!” he cried.

  “So what?” she snapped. “You’re a monster. You’re a soulless monster, Toys, and you know it. You’re no better than Amirah. You enabled what she did. You share in every one of her crimes, and you own so many more of your own. You’re a far greater monster than she ever was.”

  “She wanted to kill the world.”

  “She wanted to remake it.”

  “No.”

  “Yes!” said Aayun, pounding her thigh with a tight fist. “Not into the kind of world where someone like you would want to live. No. There wouldn’t be a place for monsters like you. For the damned.”

  Toys closed his eyes.

  “But it would be a world that would survive,” said Aayun softly, almost gently. “And that’s what I’m going to do. To finish her work, to ensure that her dream becomes the only enduring reality. I will build my lab right here. My uncle and the others I’ve already infected with his blood will provide me with all of the biological materials I need to perfect the pathogen, to bring it to Generation Thirteen, or higher. To remove some of the cognitive side effects, to create something that will help me bring about a wonderful new world. I mean . . . if God can’t or won’t save the world, if Jesus and Mohammad and all of those frauds can’t do it, then I will. Science is, after all, the only god whose existence can be proved.”

  Toys shook his head. “Aayun, please, you can’t do this.”

  “I’ve already started, Toys. It’s taken me years, but everything I need is in these boxes. I’ll have the lab set up in a month and I’ll have a working Generation Thirteen within weeks. Amirah’s lab was destroyed, but all of her research was backed up in the cloud. I have everything I need, and I have just enough time to do it before I’m too sick to work. And then . . . then I won’t be sick ever again. No one will. All disease will end for those who survive the Seif al Din release. No birth defects, no cancer, no A
lzheimer’s, no anything. The world will be purified of all of that.”

  He struggled against the duct tape, drawing shrieks of protest from the wooden chair. “Why tell me this, goddamn you? Why bring me here? Why not just cut my throat in bed? You could have, Aayun.”

  She looked surprised. “What? No . . . you don’t understand, Toys. I don’t want you dead.”

  “Then what, for fuck’s sake? Are you looking for a confessor? Sorry, sweetheart, but I’m no priest.”

  “Not that, either.”

  “Well, I’m running out of ideas. If you wanted to gloat or if you want a cheerleader, sorry, I’m the wrong choice for those, too.”

  Aayun took his face in both hands. “No, you idiot,” she said fiercely. “I want you to join me.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to be one with me. To become immortal. Let’s leave everything behind. God, sin, damnation, redemption. You can’t go to hell if you never ever die. I brought you here this way because I didn’t think you’d listen unless I made you. I wanted you to know that I was serious, that this is real, that I know what I’m doing. You’re like me, Toys—you’re damaged goods. You used up whatever this version of the world had to offer, so I’m offering something else. A new chance. A clean slate in a new world.”

  He stared at her, his mouth wide. There was such earnestness in her face, such deep pleading in her eyes, such total need, that it froze the world for a long, long moment.

  Toys leaned toward her as far as the tape would allow.

  “God . . . ,” he whispered, “yes.”

  It came out so fierce, so hot.

  “Yes . . . ?” she asked, her voice small, tremulous. Uncertain and afraid. There was hope, too, but it was tiny, fragile.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “Please, yes. I . . . need this. More than anything else in the world, I need this. To step back from the edge of the Pit. I . . . I . . . oh, please . . . yes.”

  Tears sprang into her eyes and rolled down her thin cheeks, and a strange, twisted, delighted laugh bubbled out of her. She showered his face with a hundred small kisses.

  And then she was tearing at the duct tape, ripping it, sometimes bending to bite it. When he was free she pulled him to her with surprising strength, kissing him, touching him. Her need burned furnace hot, and Toys felt himself getting hard despite the eyes of the monster in the tube.

  He stopped her as she shrugged off her lab coat. Toys took her face in his hands and kissed her long and deeply and sweetly.

  “Aayun,” he murmured. “I want you to be happy.”

  “I am now.”

  “Shhh, listen,” he said, still holding her face so that she had to look at him. “I was so lost before I met you. So lost. You brought light into my life when I thought that kind of thing was fairy-tale bullshit. You’re real, though. Talking with you over these last few weeks, making love with you last night . . . that’s made me feel more alive than anything has for years. I’ve been dead for so long. I just haven’t had the courage to lie down. I’ve been afraid of ending it all because of what I believe—what I know—is waiting for me. You, though, you made me realize why I need to be alive. To stay alive. To continue to live.”

  “I—”

  “I’m already a monster, Aayun,” he said.

  And with a savage twist of his hands, he snapped her neck.

  Inside the glass cylinder Abdul Fazir screamed a long and silent scream.

  Toys sat down on the wooden chair, leaned his forearms on his naked thighs, and stared at Aayun. He tried so hard to weep but could not.

  For him the tears did not start until after the place was burning.

  Until after he walked the seven blocks from the warehouse Aayun had leased to use as her lab.

  Until after he was in his lonely pew in the most remote corner of the church. The tears started then. He put his face in his hands and wept.

  And he lived for years and years and years.

  MAKE IT SNAPPY

  FAITH HUNTER

  “Make It Snappy” is set in the modern-day world of Jane Yellowrock, a Cherokee skinwalker, but a few years before Jane and Leo Pellissier meet. Leo, the vampire Master of the City of New Orleans, is attacked from a direction and by an enemy he never expected. This story introduces Katie (Leo’s vampire heir), George (his human primo), the outclan priestess Bethany, and Leo, before Jane and her Beast begin to tame the MOC. It is a time when Leo’s hubris runs free and his humans are little but cattle.

  “Make It Snappy” is a rare look at the backstory of Leo, one of the heroes . . . or villains . . . who started it all.

  Leo eased the girl’s blond head off his shoulder. She was asleep, dreaming blissfully about their encounter, his mesmerism and the power of his blood assuring her happiness. He ran a hand over her hip. Her body was rounded and plump, the perfect vision of beauty until modern times. Now when he visited those sworn to his service, he was often offered scrawny, bony creatures with no curves, no soft and pleasing warmth. She murmured in her sleep, pleasure in her voice and on her face.

  Many of his kind preferred the scent of fear, the unwilling, the blood-bound. He preferred his meals willing, even if only by bargain. This one came to him at dusk, when he woke, offering herself in return for a simple favor. He tried to remember her name as he dressed. Cynthia? Sharon? Simone? She had been an easy read, offering all of her past but for one small corner of her thoughts that was closed off and darkened, perhaps some trauma, some childhood fear. He’d left it there, in the depths of her mind, silent and untouched.

  He strapped a small blade to each wrist, positioning the hilts in their spring-loaded scabbards. Shrugged into his crisp dove-gray shirt and black suit. Tied the contrasting charcoal tie. No denim or T-shirts for him. He had worked too hard for too many centuries to dress down in casual clothing, using comfort as an excuse for a crass lack of style. His uncle had taught him the social advantages of education, intelligence, and elegance, and while he was delighted the old Master of the City was dead, he wouldn’t toss out the lessons learned at the knee of a dominant, successful Mithran, particularly his sire.

  He smoothed back his hair as he walked toward the door. The sheets on the bed shifted when he reached the entrance, and he paused to look back. The young woman was sitting up, watching him, a hand at her throat where his fangs had pierced her as he fed. Her face was wan and uncertain. “You won’t forget?”

  Forget? His brow quirked up in amusement. The woman was his, with or without his compliance in her little family matter, her useless bargain. Women were such an easy indulgence. But still, he was concerned with her “favor” for business reasons, and it would not take him long to resolve it. “I shall do more than remember. I shall accomplish your request before the sun, ma chérie. Marcoise will no longer have the power to cause pain.” A small smile lifted his lips. “Perhaps we may meet for dinner, just before dawn, d’accord?”

  “C’est possible,” she said in a schoolgirl French accent. She ducked her head, her long hair sliding forward to curl around her breast. “You know where to find me.”

  “I do.” She had recently come to work in the Royal Mojo Blues Company, a music, dance, and cocktail bar catering to Mithrans, the vampire masters of New Orleans. As the Master of the City, he had right of first taste of all the new blood. Mixed with wine, he had found hers to be piquant, saucy, with undertones of currants and laughter. When she had begged a favor in return for a night in his arms, he had readily agreed.

  Leo tapped down the stairs of the townhouse she shared with another girl from Royal Mojo Blues and out the door, into the street. His guards gathered close, summoned on the cellular telephone used by George, his primo blood-servant. Security was much easier since the invention of the devices, though at some point his enemies would discover them, he was certain.

  The limousine approached quietly from down the street, riding low, the weight of the armor holding it close to the asphalt. Once inside, Leo said, “One more stop tonight. Bac
k to the club.” The club where Marcoise worked as head bartender. Where his bargain with the girl would be satisfied.

  “Why, boss?” George asked, his upper-class London accent deliberately coarsened to fit his new persona, his new identity. Like most blood-servants, George had outlived his natural life, his papers and his past reinvented again and again.

  “The sister of ma petite fleur received an inappropriate and unwanted advance from Marcoise.”

  George’s brows drew down.

  “According to la fille, several of the other girls were similarly approached, with the implication that they would lose their employment if they refused his attention, a clear violation of his service to me.”

  George shifted his eyes from the street to meet Leo’s. “Inappropriate and unwanted advances? And that becomes problematic to you, my master?”

  Leo lifted an eyebrow at what might have been censure in the tone. “They are mine. When would I not protect what belongs to me?”

  George bowed his head, the gesture formal, the gaze between them broken. “My apologies, my master. It’s of no matter.”

  Leo thought otherwise. George was conflicted and wished to speak, but was holding his tongue, his scent burning with an internal struggle. He was known to have a tender heart for females, having seen his sister abused and his mother killed by those who used them. They would speak of this later, after the situation with Marcoise was addressed. “Her sister acquiesced and has not been seen since their date. I shall attend to the issue.”

  George scanned the street and the sidewalks to either side as they drove, searching for enemies, problems, threats. Such loyalty as existed between them was rare, but their relationship began in death and violence and had joined them closer than most. Leo knew his primo’s mind and heart; they were bound, body and soul.

  They pulled up in front of the club, the lights bright inside as the cleanup crew attended to post-closing duties. Leo lifted his cuff and checked the time on his Versace Reve Chrono, though he knew, almost to the second, when the sun would rise. His kind always did. “I’ll be only a moment. Security will wait outside.”