Generation V

by M. L. Brennan

  I drew my gun and pointed it right at his head. “I’m very serious,” I said. “You aren’t going to take Amy.”

  Luca was completely shocked. His mouth dropped open and he gaped at me for a long moment; then he began to laugh hysterically, gesturing at me, miming me drawing the gun, as if this was the funniest thing he had ever seen. I didn’t say anything, just adjusted my stance and held the gun in a solid two-handed grip, careful never to lose my target, which was right between his eyes. I’d learned my lesson with Phillip—a stopping shot in this situation needed to be a kill shot.

  “My little American cousin,” Luca finally said, still gasping for breath between the last trickles of laughter, “I believe that you have been watching too many John Wayne movies.” He smiled. I didn’t. “Put the gun down,” he said.

  I cocked it, the sound loud in the suddenly quiet room.

  The smile slowly oozed off Luca’s face, and now there was something very dangerous looking back at me. He meant business now. “Put it down.”

  My fear was gone. It was if I’d finally overloaded myself on it, and now it didn’t even exist at all. There was no shaking in my hands, no confusion. The gray areas of morality that had forced me to sit and eat dinner at the same table as the woman who had killed my foster parents had no place here. Good was behind me, evil was in front of me, and now I had the means to do something about it. “This is your last warning,” I said, and I meant it.

  “You appear to misunderstand the situation.” Luca’s voice was vicious and velvet soft. “This is your last warning.”

  I sighted down and shot, my arms barely able to absorb the kick from the .45, which was significantly more than I’d ever experienced with the .38, but the bullet went right where I’d aimed it. But Luca was already moving, and the bullet hit the wall that had just moments before been where his head had been. I reacted, too slow, turning the gun to fire again, but Luca was already at my side, and he slammed one hand down hard on my wrists, loosening my grip enough that he could pull the gun out of my hands. With speed I couldn’t even dream of matching, he brought the gun whistling back across my face, bludgeoning me with a force that sent a bright shock of pain through my cheek; then his other hand was wrapped around the front of my shirt and with one flex of his arm I was flying through the air, thrown out the open doorway and into the living room. I fell hard, my hip slamming into an end table and sending a lamp to the floor in a shower of porcelain pieces. For a moment my body was a single throb of confused pain, but then I blinked and it was all in my back and hip, and I struggled to draw a breath into my shocked lungs, which had had all the wind knocked out of them.

  Luca walked out of the bedroom, now moving at a human-paced stroll. He held the gun in one hand loosely, like some filthy object you might find on your car after you leave it parked overnight in a bad area, staring at it with utter distaste. I rolled, struggling, forcing my body to move, and managed to haul myself up to my hands and knees.

  “That a vampire would even imagine to carry a human weapon like this is utterly incomprehensible,” he said, still looking at the gun. In my first year of college I’d lived in a coed dorm, and one day there had been a whole group of boys gathered around a trash can, staring at a used tampon with just that expression of revolted fascination. Then he shifted that look over to me. “You’re still an infant,” Luca said, and now I was clearly the tampon. “Barely more than a human. Look at you, crawling and mewling. I could crush you right now. It’s only as a favor to your mother, despite her useless advice, that I’ll let you walk away at all. But perhaps”—and now his eyes narrowed and his voice became coldly thoughtful—“a lesson might be in order.”

  I was struggling to get to my feet when Luca slammed one hand into my lower back, smashing me down to the floor again. I tried to roll away, but not fast enough to escape it when he kicked me in the side with enough force that I fell back. What followed was a horribly systematic beating, utterly unlike my earlier experiences with my muggers or even with Phillip. Luca hit me with his open hands, not fists, and he wasn’t wearing shoes, but he knew just how much force to put behind each strike so that it hurt, and I stayed down. He toyed with me, so that when I managed to slap away a hit coming down to my face, it would turn out to be a feint, and that the real strike was a kick to my kidneys. If I pulled away from a kick, it put me directly in line for a slap to my throat. Even as I struggled, and flailed, I knew that I had no way of stopping this, and that if I just rolled up and went limp it would probably end a lot sooner, but I couldn’t make myself do that. Not with Amy in another room.

  Then one moment came when he leaned in just a little too close, and by more luck than design one of my fists caught him across that perfect nose. He pulled back with an outraged snarl, and before I had any chance to feel a sense of pride at my Pyrrhic victory, he’d shot out a hand to grip my right forearm and lift me completely off the floor.

  He squeezed, just tightly enough that I could actually feel the bone begin to bend under the pressure, and he held it there, just a hairbreadth from the point where it would have to break.

  “Stupid child,” he spat in my face. “What were you imagining, coming here and threatening my property? What could something as weak as you possibly hope to do to me?”

  There was a roaring in my head when he called Amy his property, when he reduced her to something without value or spirit or worth, and for a moment all I could think of was Prudence and the way that she had treated my foster parents’ death as a particularly monotonous chore, with no sense of remorse or even awareness of their humanity. Or the way that Maria had looked when she walked out the door of my mother’s mansion, walking to her death and not even caring anymore after God only knows how many years of being treated like nothing more than an object to bite or abuse, with that last little spasm of hope she’d shown when I’d grabbed her so completely crushed, about to be thrown away now that she wasn’t useful anymore. And it didn’t matter what had just happened to my body; I needed to hurt Luca somehow. To make him lose something. And fortunately enough, I had a way.

  Blood from my nose had run into my mouth, but I spat it out and asked, in the most taunting voice I could muster, “Where’s Phillip today, Luca?” Luca froze, and I laughed, even while more blood ran down my face. “Ooh, big bad vampire doesn’t know where his pet is,” I heckled. “Someone went out last night and never came home, didn’t he?”

  Luca was pissed. In an instant his eyes were completely black, cold, and lethal. He threw me back against the wall, and I knew on impact that this time he hadn’t been holding back. A lot of drywall dust came with me as I slid down, and from the lightning pain running up my back I knew that I wasn’t getting up after this. “And what do you know about my creature?” Luca demanded, stalking forward.

  My voice was high and singsong when I said, “Should’ve put tags on your pet. According to the Humane Society, only five percent of lost cats ever make it back home.”

  Luca’s hand flashed down and wrapped around my shirtfront again, shaking me with a force that rattled my brains. “Idiot!” he yelled, and when he spoke again I could see that those needle fangs were now fully extended. “I felt Phillip die last night. What did your family do?”

  I smiled up at him. “Not them. Me. I killed Phillip.”

  Luca screamed, a sound of pure, unadulterated rage. The hand dropped from my shirt, and he slammed his fists into the wall above my head, sending down a rain of dust and chunks of drywall. “Twenty years!” He drove his fists in over and over, all control gone. “Twenty years to craft! Twenty years of feeding my own blood into those wretches, of watching them twitch and die and waste my blood! Twenty years of feeding from my father like an infant so that the experiments could continue! All to make one creature!” He screamed one last time, and then just stood, all action stopped, his breath heaving in and out, spittle gleaming whitely from his lips.

  “Back to square one, asshole,” I said.

  And then I meowed
like a cat.

  His hand was around my throat before I even saw him move, and he began to squeeze very slowly, like a constrictor. I ripped and yanked with my hands, but nothing made his grip even flinch. His eyes were wide and unblinking. “This I won’t forgive,” he crooned. “This will be worth the price paid for killing you.” My vision began to gray out at the edges, and my lungs were screaming for air. Blackness starting creeping in, but I held on to the fact that this had cost him, that I’d made him pay in some way for what he was doing. Then I couldn’t hold on to it, and all I could think about was that I needed air, and all I could see was the smile stretched across Luca’s face.

  There was a scrabbling of claws against hardwood, and a black shape slammed into Luca, knocking him back. The hand finally lost its grip, and I gasped in the breath I needed, rushing through starved lungs and clearing my brain. I slid sideways onto the floor, still gasping and gagging in air through a throat that felt like a partially clogged straw, but I was able to look and see what was happening.

  A black fox was ripping and tearing into Luca’s face like a mad thing, teeth embedded just above one eye while those feet with their wickedly sharp claws, so strong and suited for digging, raked huge furrows into his flesh.

  It was Suzume.

  Luca screamed and slapped her with his hands, the force finally breaking her hold on his face, though even as she was thrown backward I could see her jaw snap shut, the gout of blood, and knew that she’d taken flesh with her. She tumbled in the air and, with the same freakish twist that a cat would use, landed on her paws, sinking down as those four furry legs acted like shock absorbers for her hard landing. In one motion she was bouncing forward again, those white fangs snapping wildly, and Luca stumbled back and out of range. She bounced forward again, and the same reaction. But then Luca shook his head, blood still streaming out of his face to leave droplets spattering across the walls, and he seemed to shrug off his horrendous injury. With the shock of Suzume’s sneak attack lost, I could see him evaluating her, and I could see the moment that he decided that she wasn’t something to be afraid of.

  Now he was the one lunging forward, those strong hands reaching for Suzume, and she leaped backward, barely evading them. Another grab, another jump and near miss. Grab, jump, grab, jump. Each time, Luca’s hand came within millimeters of that dark fur.

  I’d gotten myself up onto my elbows. I couldn’t seem to push myself up, and I started to crawl forward. With each jump Suzume was drawing Luca farther away from me, and across the room I met her brilliant black eyes. She yipped at me, a high, demanding sound, and suddenly I realized that she was doing all of this on purpose, that she was distracting Luca so that I could run.

  I looked around frantically. A dark spot caught my eye, and I focused on it. There was the gun, halfway under the sofa, where it must’ve been thrown out of Luca’s hand when Suzume slammed into him. I started crawling toward it.

  Then Suzume jumped back too slowly, and Luca had her. She made one agonized yelp as his hand closed on her back leg and squeezed, and then his other hand was around her throat and he was holding her off the floor. Her back left leg dangled, and I could see the white flash of bone sticking through her skin.

  I screamed her name.

  “Idiot vermin,” Luca said, and I could see his hand flex against her fur, knew that he was about to crush her throat.

  Suzume bared her teeth, snarling defiance.

  The gun was too far away; I was never going to reach it in time, but I pushed myself to crawl forward and then—

  There was a snapping feeling inside me, like a rubber band I’d never realized was holding things in place had suddenly broken. Everything around me slowed to a crawl—I looked at Luca’s hand and could see each muscle engaging to choke the life from Suzume, but they were all so slow. I could see beads of saliva forming in Suzume’s open mouth, but I knew that it would take them forever to form a single droplet.

  But if everything around me was slow, I was fast. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, but the beats were too close together for me to differentiate—it was a thunderous, deafening drumming. Everything was clearer to me now—the room that a moment before had been barely lit by the few tendrils of sunlight that could creep around the closed blinds now seemed as brightly lit as if I were outside under a noonday sun. There was the taste of blood in my mouth, but this had nothing to do with what had been running out of my nose and from a few cuts. This was hot, rich, and thick, a mouthful that I swallowed eagerly and that replenished itself instantly, so that I was drinking it down, and I could feel it spread throughout my body, brilliant and exciting. This blood wasn’t mine, wasn’t like anything I’d ever tasted before, and I felt a pang of sadness when I swallowed the last of it.

  Luca’s hand still moved on its inexorable move to squeeze; Suzume’s growl was a long series of individual motes of sound.

  I could still feel all the pain in my battered body, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore, and I could ignore it enough to do what I needed. The gun was still there, waiting under the sofa for my hand to wrap around it.

  For the first time in my life, I moved like a vampire.

  The gun was in my hand, and then I was beside Luca. I pressed the muzzle of the gun against Luca’s head, just above his ear. I didn’t say anything—there were no warnings. I pulled the trigger, and I saw each nanosecond of Luca’s head tearing apart as the impact mushroomed through his skull and his brains splattered on the wall. Somewhere in my brain I noted that Yuri had been absolutely right about what this bullet could do.

  Then time was moving again. Luca was on the floor, Suzume was as well, rolling back to her feet from where the spasm of Luca’s hand had dropped her. A big chunk of Luca’s head was missing, but I stood over him and squeezed off two more shots until his head above his jaw was simply gone, just a pile of meat on the floor. Luca’s arms and legs were lashing out, kicking and flopping violently, and I stepped back, horrified, wondering if this was like the decapitated running chicken phenomena that I’d read about in so many Gary Larson comics, but then Suzume was moving forward on her three good legs, hopping with amazing ease, and with her front two feet she began to dig frantically at Luca’s chest, his skin flying away like pieces of dirt in a garden, and I remembered what she’d once told me about what it took to kill a vampire.

  The movements of his limbs took on a new horror, and I pushed Suzume back from his chest. I pressed the gun point-blank against the spot she’d been digging and unloaded the rest of the clip into him, feeling the body heave as each bullet slammed into him and blood spattered upward and onto me. Four more shots and my gun clicked empty, and I slid backward onto my ass. Luca’s movements stopped, and for a moment we both just stared at him.

  I turned to look at Suzume. Her silky black fur was matted with blood, and her back leg was dragging grotesquely. I reached out and brushed my fingertips against her jaw, not daring to touch any more in case it hurt her, and I whispered, “Suze. You came.”

  She gave a little throaty gurgle, her pink tongue sneaking out to give my fingers a quick lick; then she let out a loud, bossy yip and pointed that long muzzle decisively toward the bedroom.

  I scrambled back to my feet while she scampered off on three paws in the other direction. I staggered as I moved, reeling almost drunkenly. The pain was harder to ignore, like a loud knocking on the back door of my brain, but what I had to do next was too important for distractions. I heard a loud scuffling and breaking sounds from the kitchen, but I even ignored whatever the hell Suzume was doing, and focused on getting back into that bedroom.

  Amy Grann was exactly where I’d left her, sitting inside her cage, the door still swinging open. Her body was fixed and frozen, and she’d covered her eyes with her hands, not daring to see who was coming back to get her.

  I’d been her age when Brian and Jill were murdered. I remember what it felt like when Prudence forced me to look at their bodies, forced me to put my hand in the blood that was stil
l warm while she told me that this was all my fault, that if it wasn’t for my actions they would have been alive and well. That she was the train that hit them, but I was the one who tied them to the tracks. I remember the nights of sitting alone in my room, the fear so bad that I couldn’t even move far enough to flip the light switch. I remember those dreams that have never gone away.

  I couldn’t stop any of that for Amy. Her world had been torn away as well, with blood and violence, and she’d have all of those moments, along with the horrible crippling guilt of being the one who lived. I couldn’t help her with any of it.

  But I could do one thing for her. Something that I’d never had.

  I crouched down and called to her. “The monster is dead, Amy,” I said. “He can never hurt you. Not ever again.” Slowly she took her hands down, and she looked at me with her eyes that would never be nine years old again. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t pull back when I reached inside the cage and took her out. She didn’t resist when I picked her up and cradled her against my chest, my hands smearing blood all over the clothes that he’d dressed her in.

  I carried her out of the bedroom, but I didn’t cover her eyes or hurry her out of the house. Instead I carried her right over to the body and put her down. She didn’t flinch back; she just stared.

  “He’s really dead, Amy,” I told her, giving her something that she’d always be able to cling to on those long nights of fear. “He is never going to touch you again.”

  Amy got down on her knees and leaned over him. Every movement she made was slow and absolutely precise. Someday she might be spontaneous again, but not now, and she’d never move with a child’s scattered motions ever again. Carefully, never touching Luca’s skin, she tugged at those hideous satin harem pants of his, tugging the waistband down about an inch to reveal a large brown birthmark. She looked at it for a long minute, then looked back up to me and met my eyes.