The Warrior

by Rebecca Royce

  “Would you like tea or coffee?”

  I cleared my throat and hid my shaking hands in my lap. “Pardon me?”

  “Tea or coffee?”

  “She just woke up, Rosemary. She may not want either of those things.”

  I slammed my hand on the table. “Someone is going to tell me what the heck is going on here before I freak out.”

  I hoped my words sounded tough because I felt as delicate as Keith’s baby. All someone would have to do would be to drop me on the floor and they’d cause permanent damage to my brain.

  “Hmmm.” Rosemary patted my shoulder, and I noticed that her nails were red. I gasped. “What is the matter with your hand?”

  “What?” She held up her hand to examine it. “What do you see?”

  I pointed. “Your nails are red. What happened to you? Is that blood?”

  Rosemary looked at Darren over my head. “How badly did she get hurt when that wall blew up?”

  “I think she’s just never seen it before. Genesis has different amenities, as you know.”

  “Oh.” She giggled into her hand. “Sweetheart, this is just nail polish. It’s like paint and I put it on my fingers on purpose. When it starts to chip, sometimes I pick a different color. You’ve seen this before. You’ll remember soon.”

  I didn’t like her words any more than I liked the fake red-as-blood-on-a-vampire’s-mouth color on her hands. I preferred my previous kidnappings. At least they had made sense.

  “I’m going to get her tea and chicken broth.” Rosemary turned on her heels and clicked out of the room.

  “Darren, please. I won’t run away. How could I? I’m weak and pathetic right now. But, please.” I’d used the word twice now and I hated saying it to him at all. “Can’t you please?” Three times. “Explain to me what is going on.”

  “No, they can’t, but I can.”

  I turned to look, shivers rolling up and down my spine. I’d somehow hoped that Noah would be the only Icahn I had to see during this kidnapping. His father was the last person I ever wanted to see in the world. Yet, here he was, once again proving to me that what I wanted mattered little to the universe. Isaac Icahn still called all the shots because he held all the power. As strong and tough as I am, I was nothing compared to him and I suspected that would always be the case.

  He looked exactly the same as he had the last time I’d seen him, which was when he’d given me to Payne, who I was glad was now dead, and condemned me to a life in the mines before death. I wasn’t looking forward to whatever he had in store for me now.

  The only difference a year had made in him, as far as I could see, was that he walked holding a cane. It was a large, black device with what looked like a devil head on the top of it. The demonic design stood out strikingly from the black cane, as it was bright red, like Rosemary’s nails. I wondered how he hurt himself and didn’t feel badly for wishing it had been in a horrible painful way.

  “Darren, could you excuse us for a while?” He sat in a chair next to me. Darren nodded to Icahn, bowed slightly, and left the room. I wondered where Rosemary had gone to get my tea. I would like any company in the room with me at that moment, even the woman with the blood red nails would do.

  “Look.” Sweat dripped down the back of my neck. Even being in this man’s presence made me unreasonably nervous. “I don’t think we have anything left to say to another. I realize you went to a lot of trouble to get me….”

  He shrugged. “Not much.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. “You blew up an outer wall in a habitat.”

  “Yes. It’s a rather simple maneuver, particularly when you designed the structure, as I did a long time ago.”

  “Right.” I nodded and sat back in my chair. “When you were planning the downfall of mankind and siding with the monsters to make yourself a god.”

  He arched an eyebrow and touched the top of his cane. “Is that what I did?”

  “Yes.” I wasn’t going to argue with this man or get caught in a web of lies that he created around the truth. The vampires worshiped him like he was a god and he had been responsible for Armageddon.

  “Do you think that one man could orchestrate such a thing on his own?”

  I fell silent before forcing myself to answer. “Yes.”

  Although now that he mentioned it, the idea seemed a little bit too simple. He would have needed to have help from someone….

  “You don’t remember pre-Armageddon so I don’t expect you to know this but before everything changed, it took a lot of bureaucratic tape to even get someone to show up and work on a job site. I couldn’t possibly have secretly masterminded such a plot without anyone else knowing about it. I mean, Rachel, I was a scientist, not a demigod.”

  There were a lot of things he said that I needed to focus on. This was the most chatty he had ever been about his role in the deaths of thousands of people. But one thing sort of stuck in my head, and I couldn’t make sense of anything else until I addressed it.

  “I don’t remember pre-Armageddon because I wasn’t there. I wasn’t born until thirty years after.”

  He tapped on the table. “Really? Is that what you think?”

  “Yes.” Had he lost all sense of reality? “My father lived through it but he was a small child. I came after that.”

  “Interesting. I would have thought your time out in the world doing all the things you’ve done over the past year would have eliminated a bit of the programming. I’m glad to see it still holds so tightly in your brain. It means we’re doing it exactly the right way.”

  “Programming? What does that mean?” My heart rate had kicked up again and it felt as if I’d just run a race.

  He reached out and touched my hand. “Relax. Don’t get upset. Nothing bad is going to happen to you here. I can promise you. The panic you are feeling now is the training kicking in. Your body is objecting to the path your brain wants to go down. Again, everything is as it should be.”

  I jumped to my feet. “What kind of game are you playing?”

  The room tilted slightly, and I wished I hadn’t leapt like that. I was still recovering from the assault I’d taken when the wall had been destroyed in Genesis.

  “Do you know where you are, Rachel?’

  “No.” I threw my hands in the air. “Darren called it Redemption but there is no such habitat called Redemption unless you hid habitats that we knew nothing about.”

  “We recently renamed it, but that’s no matter. You wouldn’t have heard about it under its previous name either.” The door opened and Rosemary came in holding the tea. She placed the cup in front of me after she’d set down a napkin to make sure the table didn’t get wet. Smiling at us, she walked back out of the room again and shut the door quietly behind her.

  “So if I’ve not heard of it, why bother asking me stupid questions?”

  “I wanted to see if you remembered your last visit?”

  “Okay.” I walked to the other side of the room. “This is a sick game you’re playing. I’ve never been here before. Not ever. This is what Noah meant when he said you’d won. Fine, you win. I’m scared. Now cut it out.”

  Icahn groaned. “Noah. My son is nothing if not competitive and you did challenge him. What can I say? He’s not likely to get over your attitude or the fact that you killed his brother. Although, that was entirely Liam’s fault. If he had left with us he’d still be here.”

  “You’re a cold man to speak about your son like that.” I didn’t correct the assumption that I’d killed Liam. Keith had done the deed and Chad would have if Keith hadn’t gotten there first. I would have ended the man’s life, if either of them had given me the chance.

  “I’ve lost many people. More than you can possibly imagine. My wife, my daughter, all of my friends from before.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “You might say I’ve come to see death as what it is—the one thing left in the universe that we cannot control.”

  “Except you tried to. You tried to kill me. Several t
imes.”

  He raised an eyebrow and took the tea I hadn’t touched. He raised the glass to his lips with a shaky hand. “Did I?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  My mind whirled. Was he actually questioning whether or not he’d threatened to kill me more than once? I didn’t care what kind of master manipulator he was, he couldn’t rewrite history. He’d sent me out to die on my sixteenth birthday. He’d left me to die in the mines six months after that. End of story.

  “You wanted me to die on my first trip upward because my father was responsible for the death of your daughter.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I know that’s what you thought, what we let you think. It was simpler than the truth.”

  “What?”

  He rose, unsteadily, to his feet. “The truth is that you were supposed to run off with Jason and have babies. I never anticipated this latest course of events. Frankly, I’m not sure what to do about it.”

  Icahn shook his head and my mouth went dry. “I’m supposed to be having babies with Jason? You don’t get to take credit for Jason and me. You didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. What I didn’t have anything to do with was Andon’s behavior or the Evans boy. I didn’t see that one coming.”

  I pointed at him. “You’d better explain what you mean shortly, or I’ll take that cane and I’ll show you what it is that I’ve been trained to do with it.”

  “Father?” Noah poked his head in the door. “Everything okay?”

  “Yes, boy. Calm down.”

  I’d never think to call Noah a boy considering he had about thirty years on me, but I supposed he’d always be a boy to his father.

  “Rachel is having a bit of trouble listening to me. I think it might be better if I showed her.”

  Noah’s face brightened up. “How about if I help you, Dad?”

  His father shook his head. “I think you might like shoving her around a bit too much. Ask Darren to come back here, will you?”

  “Yes, sir.” I could tell by his tone that Noah did not like his father’s directions. Seconds later, Darren entered.

  “I’m ready to take her.”

  Icahn nodded. “Good.”

  Noah walked in and tried to grab his father’s arm but Isaac shoved him away. “I’m not crippled yet. I don’t want you holding me like I’m an invalid.”

  Darren grabbed my arm. “You’re not injured, Rachel. But I don’t trust you not to run. I’d really rather not have to send out the vamps to go get you back. Again.”

  “Again?” What the hell were these people talking about?

  This whole setup was clearly a plan set in motion by Isaac Icahn to mess with my mind. It amazed me to see just how invested all of them were. Darren, Rosemary, Noah…they were all invested in it. I hadn’t even been able to keep my scheme of blowing up the vampire lairs secret. How long had Icahn had total control of all these people that he could make them play along so well?

  “When I was twenty-two years old, it was the year 2012. Before Armageddon.”

  “Oh, are we having a history lesson now?” I scoffed, but secretly inside I thrilled at the chance to hear what he wanted to say. No one talked about pre-Armageddon mostly because no one was there—except for my father who had been a child and didn’t remember much.

  Icahn had the audacity to laugh at my comment. “Yes, Rachel. We’re having a history lesson.”

  “2012 was ten years before Armageddon. Is that right?” We’d stopped keeping a calendar year after that so 2022 was the last year ever officially counted. After that it was all about birthdays and ages so we could keep track of who had to become a Warrior when.

  “That’s right. But in 2012, I was just a research assistant working on my PhD in chemical engineering. It was my dream job to work for this particular pharmaceutical company. They were doing cutting edge work; making drugs no one else would take a chance making. And their shareholders were getting very rich in the process.”

  “I don’t know half of what you said.”

  He sighed. “I know you don’t. Let’s just say I worked for a company that made a lot of drugs and people got rich if they invested in them.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “It was, but we didn’t know everything that was going on behind the scenes. Not yet anyway. I would learn about it shortly after that and the rest of my life has been defined by what I did and did not do after that. The rest of my life has been redemption.”

  “Like the name of this habitat.”

  I supposed when somebody was responsible for mass killings they probably did need redemption.

  “Exactly.” He nodded. “You’re starting to see.”

  I wasn’t. But we rounded a corner and entered a room with long beds lined up against a wall. They stood vertically, each one open with a glass top attached to them that, if closed, would look like a distorted pea pod. The room was cold, at least ten degrees colder than the others. But I didn’t shiver because I suddenly felt very hot, almost claustrophobic. I’d never liked being locked up in small places—not since I’d nearly died in Andon’s vampire holding box—and I hoped Icahn didn’t intend to torture me by sticking me in one of those weird beds.

  “Do you know this place?”

  “No.” I clenched my hands. “Stop asking me if I know places I couldn’t possibly know. I’ve never been here before.”

  “By the time I was thirty years old—yes, two years before Armageddon—we had developed certain technologies to keep people alive. That was always the goal in our industry. Keep the living alive so they could keep doing whatever it was that they did. Or, at the very least, keep the rich alive as long as possible and with as little pain as we could manage.”

  “How could that be? Everyone dies.”

  “No, they don’t.” Icahn limped over to the bed. “This chamber is where we can freeze a person. It stops them from aging. It keeps them alive until we can cure their disease…or until it’s a better time for them to wake up.”

  He frowned as he said the last words. Reaching out, he touched the side of the chamber like Tiffani caressed her son’s basinet.

  The idea that he could keep someone alive by freezing him or her blew my mind. It seemed downright impossible. I doubted it could work at all. Still, I didn’t really want to argue with him at the moment. He seemed calm, happy. Maybe he wouldn’t shove me into a mine with no air and leave me to die for a while if I kept him in this pleasant state of mind.

  “Did you design these things?”

  His eyes danced with laughter. I hadn’t meant to be amusing. Not at all.

  “No. This was not my field. I was a chemist. Someone else made these things. Someone who is long, long dead. But they work. Beautifully. And they’re cheap to run as long as we have fuel to keep doing it.”

  I suddenly remembered the mine I’d been in. What had we been doing there? Coal. That was right. Payne was desperately trying to keep a quota on coal. Why? What had he been powering?

  “I didn’t make these contraptions. Although, I’m grateful for them. And I didn’t make other things that make life happen when it would otherwise not be possible.” He stared off into space, as if he were witnessing a scene from somewhere else, someplace where the rest of us were not present. “I wanted to save life through chemistry and instead…I didn’t.”

  “What did you do?”

  He nodded toward the entranceway. “Walk with me. There is more to see.”

  Darren gripped my arm again. “Come on, Rachel.”

  I don’t think I would have run even if he had let me go. I knew it had to all be a load of garbage, but I found myself dying to hear more of Icahn’s story. I wasn’t exactly certain why that was.

  “We had this idea, my colleagues and I, that we could somehow halt the aging process using a very tiny virus—similar to the ones you catch when you get a cold. Maybe give people longer lives without disease. My job was the chemistry, not the manufacturing.�
�

  “What does this have to do with vampires and werewolves rising up?”

  “Rachel.” He stopped moving and turned around. “We made the vampires. There were no vampires before us. Vampires are a result of a science experiment gone completely wrong.”

  “That’s not true. There have always been vampires. Folklore says….”

  He waved away my concerns with a flick of his hand. “Folklore says many things. There is only science. Always science.”

  “And Werewolves? Did you make them, too?” I could hardly say the words because all I wanted to do was run away and find an empty bed where I could burrow under the covers. I wasn’t supposed to know this stuff. At worst, I was a seventeen-year-old girl with a boyfriend problem. At best, I was a Warrior with a destiny laid out before me where I could save people from monsters. Why was he telling me anyway?

  “We didn’t know about the Werewolves until after. Their reaction to the virus troubled us. For the longest time, probably too long, we researched and experimented trying to figure out what it was about the mutated virus that made such a small portion of the population turn into wolves. By the time we realized they’d been that way before, they’d turned all but feral. It was…troubling.”

  “No such thing as folklore, huh?”

  “Less attitude, please, Ms. Clancy. I’m doing you a courtesy of explaining. I could just drag you where I need you to go and wipe your mind. Call me old fashioned, but I’d rather have you understand and agree.”

  “Wipe my mind?”

  We stopped our momentum and he turned on me, standing too close to my personal space. “When I picked you out for Jason, I was so excited. You were it. The perfect girl to start the whole thing again. I don’t blame you, not at all. It’s not at all your fault that Andon Kenwood turned out to be a power hungry lunatic. After all the time we spent curing his pack, to have him turn around and deliberately expose them to the virus again? What could he have been thinking?”