Wormwood Echoes

by Laken Cane

  They all nodded, then stared at the ground.

  “You don’t have to worry about us hurting nobody,” the man who’d asked for burgers said. “We don’t hurt nobody.”

  Rune gave Lou one last look and turned away. “What message from the Annex?” she asked, as they walked back to their cars.

  “Just for all of us to see Eugene immediately,” Owen answered.

  Raze glared at nothing, his eyes glittering beneath the streetlights.

  “What’s wrong, baby? Pissed that we didn’t get to fight?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

  “Maybe Eugene will rectify that,” Denim said.

  “You’re worried about Jill,” Lex said.

  “I wonder what her story is,” Rune replied.

  “I could have touched her,” Lex said, “but some get offended when I do that.”

  “People like to keep their secrets,” Rune said, and refrained from looking at Owen.

  “And that’s their right,” Jack said.

  She shrugged. “Yeah. Sorry, Jack.”

  “Sorry about what?” Levi asked.

  “Quiet,” Rune said, and held up a hand. “Listen.”

  The crew halted immediately, hands full of silver, ready.

  “It’s…” Lex began, then stopped and frowned.

  “A fight,” Rune answered.

  The air was full of blood.

  And she wanted it.

  Suddenly, the street was teeming with Others—shifters, wolves, vampires—steaming through yards, bodies ramming houses, hitting, biting, clawing…

  Fighting each other.

  “Fuck me,” Rune whispered.

  “What the hell happened?” Jack asked. “What’s happening?”

  “Others against vampires,” Rune said. “It’s got something to do with the sickness.”

  “It started with the vampires,” Raze said. “And the Others are going to try to cut it off at its source.”

  “What do we do?” Lex asked.

  Owen smiled, his gaze hot and eager beneath the battered brim of his hat. “We figure out which side we want to fight for.”

  “We’re on the side of the humans in this fight,” Rune said. “Protect the humans. The Others need to have this out.” Then she grinned. “But I won’t order you not to pick a side and fuck somebody up.”

  She dropped her fangs and shot out her claws, then ran with her crew into the fray of the battle.

  She and her crew needed a fight, and it was their lucky night.

  Chapter Thirteen

  She’d had good intentions—to make sure no humans were caught in the middle of a vicious Other battle—but once she was in the thick of the fight, and blood was spraying, pain hitting her with comforting familiarity, rage and hunger took over.

  Then all she wanted to do was release her monster and kill.

  Feed, and kill.

  So she did.

  She didn’t discriminate. If it got in her way, she was either eating it or ripping it apart.

  She lost herself in the glory and the gory, as did her crew.

  It was what they’d been born for. What they thrived on.

  And when the battle limped to a halt, it was because dawn would soon be breaking and the vampires had to hide from the sun.

  Had it not been for that, the battle, which grew larger and more violent by the hour, might have gone on until the rotting sickness wouldn’t have had a chance to wipe them out. They were doing a great job of that all on their own.

  Rune stood on piles of dead as the sun pointed red fingers across the sky. The bloody ground seemed reflected in the heavens, and for a long moment she had to grind her teeth and wait for the need to cry to pass.

  The berserker hadn’t been there. He hadn’t come to help his crew, to wade into the battle with his familiar roar sounding and his deadly spear flashing.

  And that hurt just a little fucking bit.

  The streets were completely silent as the fighters still able surveyed the dead and began to think about the tasks ahead. They’d carry their dead and wounded home and those who had jobs would clean up and prepare for the workday.

  Business as usual.

  Except the panic had begun.

  Rune stared out at nothing, her face and body itchy with blood and gore. She was sticky and filthy but the wounds she’d sustained by being careless were healing rapidly.

  The high of the battle slunk away and left her empty and dejected.

  Her mind was black.

  “Rune,” Lex said, standing beside her. “Don’t let it take you.”

  Rune moved her eyes, slowly, to look at the little Other. She said nothing.

  “It’ll pass,” Lex continued. “The…” She spread her hands, struggling to find the right words. The words that would say exactly what she meant. Finally, she just shook her head. “Don’t let it take you.”

  But the silence had fled and Rune was dark.

  “Anyone hurt?” she asked, but her voice was dull.

  “Nothing major,” Jack answered, watching her.

  “The violence didn’t help,” she said suddenly.

  Owen stepped forward and stood close, so close she had to crane her neck to look into his eyes. “Maybe the sex will,” he murmured.

  And a spark of something interested and alive flared inside her. She shivered.

  The twins, surprising her, came toward her and Owen, moving as though they had the exact same thought and intention. They stopped on either side of Owen and waited until he took his gaze from Rune to look first at Levi, then Denim.

  “We’re not going to let you fuck her up,” Levi said, his voice almost too low to hear.

  “She’s not herself.” Denim’s stare was so cold it might have frozen a lesser man into a block of solid ice. “Not yet. So you’ll back off.”

  Rune opened her mouth, but no words came out. She was shocked, confused, and maybe just a little fucking relieved.

  She realized something right then. The berserker had been her protector. And her excuse.

  Not physically, really—though he had taken on that responsibility as well—but he had been there. For her.

  Who cared as much as he did about what might happen to her?

  So when he left, she felt alone.

  But she was not alone.

  She smiled and hugged the twins to her, hard, and let herself find, for them, some peace.

  When she stumbled out of her own misery and fear and took a look at her people, she saw that Jack and Raze and Lex watched her with the same look the twins held.

  They’d known, and they were showing her. No matter that she might decide to take on Owen, no matter what she might do. They just wanted to let her know.

  Even if she didn’t need anyone to protect her—she was a bad fucking monster—to them she was just Rune.

  They loved her.

  She glanced at Owen and he grinned at her, nothing much in his eyes but understanding. And some desire. There was that, too.

  He said nothing.

  “I’m going to talk to Eugene,” she told them. “You all go home and get some sleep.”

  “Don’t be too long,” Lex said, “or Ellie won’t let us sleep.”

  Rune entered the Annex still covered with blood and smelling of death, but her mood had lifted and she didn’t care even a little bit about the shocked looks thrown her way.

  She rapped on Eugene’s door, walking in when she heard him call out.

  He stood up quickly when he saw her. “Jesus, Rune.”

  She grinned and lowered herself into a chair. “You’ll have to have someone clean this chair but I don’t feel like standing.”

  “I’ll have it replaced,” he said. “I’m glad you came in. I got reports, but I wanted to hear from you.”

  “Others were fighting the vampires. From what I could gather, the Others are pissed off and panicking because the vampires are spreading the rotting sickness.”

  He nodded, then gave a long, slow
blink.

  “Well fuck,” she said. “What is it?”

  “My people have been hard at work,” he said. “Coffee?”

  “Yeah.” She waited impatiently while he called for coffee.

  “Okay,” he said. “If the Others didn’t have the disease before the fight, they will have it now. The sickness is spread from humans to vampires through feeding. The vampires spread it to the Others through body fluids, blood…” he hesitated.

  “What?”

  “And air,” he continued. “It’s airborne.”

  She felt herself pale. “No.”

  He nodded, grim and solemn. “The Others don’t have a chance. They’re all going to die, and there’s not one fucking thing I can do about it.”

  She shook her head, unable to take it in. Unable to accept it.

  “The humans are carriers,” he went on, “but as far as we know, they don’t get sick. They pass it to the vampires through feeding—from what we know right now, the Others aren’t infected by the humans. They’re infected only by the vampires. So they’re right to blame the vampires.”

  She glared at him. “No. They’re not.”

  He spread his fingers. “I just meant the Others can’t catch it from humans. The humans are carriers, vehicles. The Others catch it from the vampires in every way possible. Contact, blood, air, touch, even. The vampires are like radiation. Being near them is lethal to the Others.”

  “If the vampires don’t feed from the humans, they’ll die.”

  “They’re going to die anyway.”

  “How are the humans getting the disease in the first place?”

  “A few of them were likely deliberately infected, and are spreading it to each other through the usual routes—contact, body fluids, sex, even picking it up from door handles and towels. It’s accelerated over the last few hours. The samples I had brought in are showing rapid decline.”

  “You’ll have to do a press conference.” She was almost unable to make her numb lips move. “Keep the humans from panicking.”

  She barely noticed when the coffee was brought in and handed to her. She drank half of it in one hot gulp.

  “Rune.” He leaned forward. “The humans will panic, no matter what I say. They’re calling the sick Others rotters. The Others are panicking as well. River County is about to fall into chaos. Be ready.”

  “What can I do?”

  He was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said, finally, and then, “I would ask that you just try to stay alive.”

  But he didn’t sound like he had any real confidence in her ability to do so.

  Part Two

  THE CHAOS

  Chapter Fourteen

  “How is she doing?” Rune asked, staring down at the sleeping child.

  Elizabeth stood stiff and silent, her hands at her sides. “She’s excellent.”

  “But?”

  Elizabeth looked at Rune, her eyes blank. “She’s determined to go wherever she went when she was locked inside the net. She will only say she belongs there. I see the longing in her eyes. She wants to be there as much as I want…” She trailed off and shook her head.

  Rune didn’t prompt her to continue. She knew what Elizabeth had been about to say. “As much as I want her to stay.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rune said.

  “I love her.” Elizabeth’s cool façade cracked, and sorrow oozed through the gap. “I shouldn’t have allowed myself to love her.”

  “Of course you should. We all do.” She patted Elizabeth’s arm. “Fie needs all the love we can give her.”

  Rune understood Fie completely. She felt the call too, and it was strong enough, at times, to take her breath. Fie was a child and not equipped to understand or handle the disappointments of not getting what she so desperately needed.

  Fie wanted to go. Rune did not.

  Rune had talked with the child once when Elizabeth had gone to get lunch.

  “Why don’t you just go there, Fie, like you did when you were in the net?”

  Fie’s look had been one of scorn. “I don’t want to leave my body here. I need all of me to go. I have to go with you.”

  “What if I can’t go?”

  “You can if you want to. Don’t you want to?”

  No. No, she didn’t want to.

  And Fie had known that.

  Her cell rang and she answered it, glad to have a distraction from Elizabeth’s misery.

  “Rune,” Bill Rice said, “are you close?”

  “I’m in the building. What do you need?”

  “Come see me.”

  She hung up, said goodbye to Elizabeth, and left the room. Bill had coffee waiting when she walked into his office five minutes later.

  Bill nodded at the television screen on his wall, and she turned to watch after grabbing a coffee off his desk.

  “Nothing new?” she asked.

  “Not exactly new,” he answered. “Just worse.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Fifteen human infants have been taken from hospitals, clinics, and from new parents just arriving home. Seventeen pregnant women were abducted. From Ohio. Since Tuesday.”

  She closed her eyes. They’d known it would come to that. The human unborn and newborn babies were not infected.

  The vampires needed them to feed from.

  And new groups of human garbage were taking and selling the infants and pregnant women to the vampires.

  Not just in River County.

  All over the world. It had spread that quickly.

  “Last night,” Bill continued, “six vampires entered the Spiritgrove hospital and stole four newborns.”

  “Fuck,” Rune muttered.

  He nodded.

  “Now,” she said. “Now we’ll have to purge the fucking bloodsuckers.”

  “Yes. We can’t wait for the sickness to annihilate them all. Not when they’re taking human children to feed from.”

  “They’re desperate. Starving, dying, rotting—”

  “Are you defending the vampires, Rune?”

  She shot him a sharp glance. “Fuck you, Bill.”

  He sighed and rubbed his temples. “I’m sorry. It’s…unimaginable. Things are changing too quickly. There’s no time to try to fix it, because the world is going crazy too fast.”

  “Yeah. Chaos.”

  “Eugene is going to send you after Kelic and his children. Tonight.”

  She didn’t say anything, just stared at the television screen with its horrific images of piles of rotted Others, dead human women, their wrists still cuffed, found in ditches after their full-term babies had been cut from their wombs.

  Girls were being abducted and impregnated by human men, then sold. No matter if the girls or the seed donators were carriers of the sickness, the infants would not be.

  It had been discovered that no child under one year old carried the sickness.

  Infants were in high demand.

  Fear and panic had taken hold of the country, and it wasn’t letting go anytime soon.

  “Though the Others are rotting,” Rice said, “they are forming alliances to stay alive, to protect each other until…”

  “There is no until.” She shook her head. “Nothing will ever fix this. They will never be forgiven for what they’re doing now. No matter what. You could find a cure tomorrow and the Others will still be hunted for the rest of forever.”

  “No,” Bill disagreed. “It will only seem like forever. You know how people forget. How history repeats itself. Eventually, the Others and humans will live once again in a strange sort of harmony.”

  Chaos.

  Chaos and doom.

  The world, in a few short weeks, had completely changed.

  “Still no word from Strad?” Bill asked, his voice tired.

  She shook her head.

  No. No word from Strad.

  “He’s gone to battle his personal demons, Bill. I don’t know if there will ever again be any word from the berserker.”


  He stood and went to stand beside her. “Rune, I’d like to tell you something about love.”

  “Love?” she said, and snorted. But damn if she didn’t have to fight to keep her bloody tears at bay.

  From the corner of her eye she saw his lips move as he smiled. “Strad Matheson loves you more than I’ve ever seen a man love a woman. And I know a little something about love. It might not be smart, or good, or right. It just is.”

  He paused and waited until she looked at him before he continued. Maybe he wanted her to not only hear his truth, but to see it in his eyes. “Love like that will always come back, Rune. No matter where it goes or how long it stays away. Always.”

  “Damn you, Bill,” she whispered, and dug her fingernails into her thigh. “What you’re calling love is just obsession. Need. Addiction.”

  “My dear,” he said, his eyebrows high. “What do you think love is?”

  She couldn’t reply.

  He patted her shoulder with a heavy hand then went back to his desk. “Let’s put love on the back burner and worry about evil.”

  She squared her shoulders. “Yes. And what we’re going to do to defeat the son of a bitch.”

  “After the purge is successful, Eugene has plans to send Shiv Crew to do takedowns of known traffickers. You’ll have kill orders.”

  “Good. Those are some kills I’ll look forward to.”

  “When don’t you?” Then he shrugged before she could retort. “He’s also sending you to do purges and extract human babies and women from vampire clans all over Ohio.”

  “What? Leave River County?”

  “After the purge.”

  “Shit.”

  “Why are you reluctant to leave the county?”

  “Because we’re needed here.”

  “You’re needed everywhere, Rune. Humans are being slaughtered. Human babies.”

  “Yeah. I know. But every county has its own fucking crews. If we’re not here to defend ours, you know what can happen.”

  “Talk to him. Tell him your concerns. He can send other crews. Not,” he said, smiling slightly, “as good as your crew, but good enough to hunt vampires.”

  He watched her with a sharp, knowing expression.