Ultraviolet

by Yvonne Navarro

  And then he was still.

  Violet hadn’t even realized she’d started crying until a teardrop ran from her eye to hang on the end of her nose, then slipped off and dropped onto the child’s nose. It was too late—he was beyond knowing how wretched she felt to lose him. Instinct made Violet want to wail Six’s name, scream it as loud as she could, but the commonsense part of her logic reminded her that it was useless, a wasted expenditure of energy that her body simply no longer had. No amount of calling out or grief would make this small boy see her face or hear her voice anymore, and it certainly wouldn’t bring him back.

  Now she and Six were surrounded so tightly by the soldiers that she couldn’t see past the ring of bodies. They pressed forward, stupidly unaware of just how quickly she could kill them. A lightning-fast jump to her feet, a faster unsheathing of her sword, and the first two rows would fall over like a house of cards.

  Or maybe . . . these assassins had more awareness than that which she credited to them. Kill them? She didn’t want to kill anything, or anyone. This boy . . . he was it, the last of everything that had been worth fighting for in her miserably short life. If it had all come down to him, and if she really had given everything she could to help him and failed . . . well, then why bother with any of it?

  In her peripheral vision, Violet saw a sudden break in the circle of soldiers pressing on her, then Daxus pushed his way inside. Although he loomed over her like some kind of silhouetted vision of destruction, Violet felt oddly unaffected by his presence, completely unafraid. After all, what could he now do to her that would hurt her more than Six’s death? She had endured so much, but the end of this child . . . well, it was the end of her.

  At Daxus’s side were a couple of Hazmat-outfitted paramedics. When they saw the child lying limply on Violet’s lap, they surged past the Vice-Cardinal and bent over him. It only took a moment for both of them to lean back and look up at their boss. “It’s too late,” one of them said. Behind his breather mask, his voice sounded foggy and cold, like a subdued underwater echo. “The boy’s gone.”

  It was getting darker by the moment but Violet could still see Daxus’s face fold into a scowl and his cheeks as they flushed nearly crimson. “Damn it!” He jerked his head up, then swept his gaze over the park area. “Quarantine the corpse and get it back to the ArchMinistry as soon as possible. Maybe we can salvage something out of it.”

  Violet tried to hang on to Six, but she didn’t seem to have any strength left—she was so tired. Her hands were pushed aside by the gloved Enforcers, then Six’s body was lifted off her lap and whisked away. She was through fighting, through trying. She just sat there, silently marveling at how strange it felt to have the warm weight of the child gone from her lap. It brought to mind memories, old and indescribably painful, from many years ago. So many hellish things that she’d rather leave unremembered, especially when she had so much more in the present than she could handle.

  One of the Security Enforcers stepped forward. The patch on his uniform marked him as the unit’s leader and his long weapon gleamed in the dusk. “And her, sir?”

  Daxus whirled so quickly that the heel of one boot sent up a clot of dirt and grass. He glared at Violet, so furious that for a few seconds he couldn’t even speak. Then, without bothering to say anything, he leaned over and reached around the soldier’s main weapon, yanking the sidearm out of the leader’s leg holster. Without hesitating, he turned back and delivered a vicious kick to Violet’s ribs, a blow hard enough to send her toppling sideways onto the grass.

  But Violet was still done with the fighting, with the struggling. Now she just lay at Daxus’s feet, her body curled in a fetal position. The grass was cool and prickly against her cheek; she could smell the greenness of it, the undercurrent of earth, and that made her think of the passage from the old Christian Bible.

  Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

  As Daxus stared down at her, Violet turned her head just enough so that she could catch a last glimpse of the setting sun. It looked like a bloody red ball as it finally dropped below the top of the last building blocking it from view. The only thing between her and it was a single, crumpled piece of paper.

  Not surprisingly, Violet’s disinterest just made Daxus all the more angry, and he leaned over and pointed his borrowed gun at Violet’s head.

  Nothing.

  He pushed the barrel against her scalp, hard enough to be painful, wanting to see a reaction from her, needing to see her fear. But to Violet’s eyes and mind, that was just what she felt . . . nothing. Her world and emotions and everything that she was had finally been narrowed down to this single, defining moment. In another two seconds her life would be over and the last thing she’d ever see was that sad scrap of paper lying just a few inches away from her face on the ground—Six’s drawing of his mythical playground. It rocked in the wind, but she could enjoy her last, satisfied smile. At least in that she hadn’t failed him.

  “You’ve outlived your usefulness,” Daxus ground out.

  And shot Violet in the head.

  Daxus turned his back on Violet’s body and stepped toward the Security Enforcer whose gun he’d taken. He tossed the weapon back to him, then distastefully stripped off the gloves he was wearing—they were splattered with Violet’s infected blood—and dropped them on top of her body with a grimace. “Have an Incendiary Team sanitize this area immediately,” he ordered. He sent a last, withering look in the direction of Violet’s corpse, then strode away, heading for his waiting vehicle. There was a lightness to his step that he hadn’t felt in months—Violet had been the sharp thorn in his lion’s paw for longer than he cared to admit, and at last,at last, he was rid of her for good. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long until he was rid of all the damned vampires.

  Behind him, the paramedics were spraying Six’s body with safety preservation foam; the fluffy white material began to harden almost instantly around the child’s form and ultimately took on a shape like a gigantic cocoon. When the sterile foam had solidified enough, they pushed handles into the sides of the mass and lifted it, hustling toward another larger wagon.

  Standing outside his armored limousine as the white-suited Incendiary Team took their places around the playground, Daxus let them set up to do their dirty business while he carefully sanitized his hands—twice. Then he directed his attention to his waiting security and medical staff. “Get the boy’s body on ice and prepped for disassembly,” he instructed. “We’ll go in for salvage at daybreak.” The other members of the sanitation team didn’t need supervision or specific orders to know what to do, so without another word, Daxus climbed into the vehicle and shut the door firmly behind him.

  As he and his team members pulled away, a wall of blue and orange flames surged high into the air behind them and separated them from the view of Violet’s body.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Above the mouth that Violet knew and loved so well, her husband’s black eyes flashed with indignation and anger. Furious color rode high in his cheeks and his dark hair was wild and standing in unevenly cut tufts—once such a fastidious and appearance-conscious man, since they had locked her away, Song jat had put little thought into what others thought of him or how he looked. Instead, the doctor had devoted himself to two things: his career—the thing that had always both distracted and upheld him—and trying to find a way to get his wife back. His job kept him from going completely crazy, gave him something on which to focus so much of the frustrated energy that was generated by their situation. That was probably a good thing, but this battle in which they were entangled didn’t look to be getting any better.

  Ever.

  Right now Song jat was again at the detainee hospital and well into another of the seemingly endless arguments he’d been having on a daily basis with everyone from physicians to nurses to orderlies, all of whom seemed to have unlimited amounts of that one thing he wanted so badly: time with his wife, Violet. If he could have found someone on the custodial staff with the right set of
keys, he would have tried buying his way into the isolation ward . . . or maybe he would have simply hit the man over the head and taken the damned things.

  “But she’s my wife!” The last word came out at nearly a bellow, and other people—staff, patients, he didn’t care who—turned to look in his direction. The woman in front of him—he didn’t have a clue what her name was because there had been so many and he’d stopped bothering with the damned name tags months ago—looked appropriately aghast at the volume level of his voice. Her response was immediate and full of righteousness, the tone of someone who believes to their bones that the person with whom they’re having a confrontation is dead wrong, even when they have nothing on which to base their own position but the statements of someone else “in charge.” “Dr. Song jat Sharif, you need to restrain yourself!”

  “I’m a fucking medical professional,” he snarled. “I don’t need to restrain myself. You haven’t let me see my wife in four months!”

  The other doctor drew herself up stiffly and still refused to move out of his way. Her face was like stone and she kept moving from left to right across the floor, continually managing to keep her body squarely in his path so that he couldn’t duck around her. “Doctor, we are at the early stages of what appears to be an epidemic of potentially staggering proportions.” She waved her arm vaguely in the direction of the quarantine area, and Sharif’s gaze cut again—as it so often did—to the heavy locking system across the double doors just behind her. “As one of the ground zero victims, your wife needs to be studied. Seeing you could cause an emotional reaction that could adversely affect her condition.”

  Song glared at the woman, then he lost patience and bodily pushed her aside so he could press the front of his chest and face against the unbreakable one-way viewing glass that separated him from Violet. He could see her right there—so damned close—but he couldn’t touch her, couldn’t talk to her. God, he needed her so badly, and he could see she needed him. His pleasantly plump wife had disappeared; now Violet’s form had thinned out and her eyes were open, but she clearly wasn’t aware of him or anyone else; her pupils were half-dilated and glassy, heavy with drugs. Her arms lay limply at her sides and her waist, the bulge of pregnancy gone and covered by a sheet. Even so, he could still make out the lines that showed through the fabric, those of thick leather restraining straps around her wrists. Why did they have to do that? Unless—

  “What about the baby?” he demanded suddenly.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Sharif,” the woman said. Her voice was bland, as though she were reciting a well-rehearsed litany, one she had practiced many times in her head in case the need arose. A well-rehearsed lie. “Your son was lost due to complications shortly after birth.” She didn’t blink, but he thought he saw her hold on the clipboard she was hugging tighten. It was a nearly imperceptible movement, a barely noticeable whiteness in her knuckles, but he had been a doctor for too long to miss that oh-so-rapid bit of body language.

  He stared at her as the weight of her words rolled over him. Son? He and Violet had had a son? God—he’d never even been told, never even known that Violet had gone into labor. He should have been there with her, to hold her hand through the pain, to see the child come into the world, to hold him. If the boy had died, he and Violet should have been given the right to bury him, to name him and lay him to rest. They had plots, for God’s sake, a family mausoleum. And Violet had been so healthy—what kind of complications?

  Without warning, Song jat yanked the clipboard out of the doctor’s stiff grasp and riffled through the medical charts on it, turning his back and shouldering her aside when she tried to grab at it from around his back. “Dr. Sharif—that is confidential medical information!” The tone of her voice had changed to desperation.

  Confidential? Bullshit—this was his wife’s chart. And Song jat had been in the medical profession for decades anyway. He was very good at what he did, and he only needed a few seconds to scan the charts and find the information he wanted. When his gaze stopped on the words, it took another second, a strange sort of fast eternity, for their meaning to sink into his brain. Then he gasped.

  “Fentanyl?” For a long, terrible moment, the stress of the truth he’d discovered made it impossible for him to make the connection between this one particular word and its consequences. He couldn’t recall what exactly the drug did, why they would give it to . . .

  Of course he couldn’t remember. He didn’t want to.

  But he knew.

  Oh, God, he knew.

  “Fentanyl,” he repeated. He felt like he was moving through ice as he turned to face the other physician. She seemed to be paralyzed with fear as she stared at him with wide eyes. Her throat worked but no sound came out of her mouth. Where the skin on his face had previously been red from anger, now Song jat felt the blood drain away. His flesh went cold and he took a step toward her.

  “Security!” she finally squawked. She stumbled backward, trying to stay out of his reach as he brought up the clipboard and shook it at her.

  “You euthanized my son with Fentanyl!” Song jat was more than bellowing now, he was screaming, his lungs and body feeding the rage and hate he’d bottled up for so long.

  “It’s not our policy!” the doctor shouted back at him. While she might have just been trying to be heard over his fury, raising her voice only fueled the fire in Violet’s husband. “It’s that new Office of Medicine and Politics! He was born with the disease—what kind of life would that have been?” Her voice rose another notch, climbing into screech range. “Security!”

  “Violet!” Dr. Sharif yelled suddenly. Still hanging on to the medical clipboard, he shoved the doctor aside when she tried again to take it from him, this time knocking her sideways hard enough to make her stagger against the wall. Then he was there, at the glass window, and using the clipboard to hammer wildly on its surface. “Violet—VIOLET!” In another five seconds, two burly security guards were grabbing him painfully by each of his arms and hauling him backward. The clipboard clattered to the floor and he still kept shouting—

  “Violet! VIOLET!”

  —but she didn’t hear him, she didn’t see him, she didn’t do anything. He kept his gaze pinned on her face as they pulled him away, trying to wait, trying to hope for some response, but there was nothing—

  “Violet! Violet!”

  She heard the voice from far away—farther away than anyone, human or vampire, had a right to hear, in fact, as though someone had implanted hearing aid amplifiers deep into her eardrums.

  The voice was annoying, and she tried to ignore it. After all, she was cool and comfortable, and it was dark; it had been a long time since she hadn’t woken with a hundred nagging aches and pains from the constant physical battles, with the sting of God’s good sunlight trying to blister her oversensitive eyes. Such a very, very long time since she had been . . . content.

  But . . .

  “Violet?”

  . . . that voice, that damnable noise. It would not be ignored. It just kept nagging at her, on and on, worrying at her consciousness like one of those nasty, yappy little old-woman dogs that chews at the ankles of visitors. Against her will, her eyelids fluttered and tried to open, but she squeezed them tightly against the irritating noise.

  “Violet!”

  But that movement—the one, stupidly simple little act of using the muscles in her eyes and face—was the worst possible thing she could have done. It was her undoing, that dreaded straw that broke her iron will. It was the thing that forced blood to circulate and muscles to wake, that made sensation spread through the surface and subsurface of her skin until awareness crawled across her nerve endings edge to edge as though she were a giant spiderweb.

  “Violet!”

  There was no fighting it, no resisting. At last, she surrendered to her body and let her eyelids slowly open. There was a shadow across her vision, someone standing over her—a hazy figure who seemed vaguely familiar. That face . . .

  “G-Garth
. . .”

  Her voice was a raspy whisper, like air being forced through a grate clogged with old debris. He stared down at her, his eyes wide and eager as he scanned her face and examined her pupils. He looked absurdly pleased. “Your recuperative powers are nothing short of amazing,” he said with a wide grin.

  Violet blinked back at him. The edges of her eyelids and her lashes were crusty and slightly sticky, as though she’d been sleeping for a very long time. Her body felt stiff and cold, unwilling to move. None of it felt good, none of it felt like she would have expected. “Is this . . .?”

  “Heaven?” Garth’s grin faded into a small, sad smile, but his eyes were bright and victorious. “No.” He inclined his head toward something to his left and Violet forced her own head to turn so she could see. The movement was grating, like making a wheel turn on ungreased gears, and there was pain in her head, intense enough to border on vicious. Still, her vision was finally clearing and she could just make out two wriggling forms on the floor—humans, bound and gagged and wearing Incendiary Team uniforms. The avenues of thought were stuck on foggy in her brain, but things were grudgingly beginning to sort themselves out . . . and she wasn’t very pleased with the results. “We very thoughtfully subbed in for the Incendiary Team,” Garth told her, then shrugged. Now his expression had morphed into an obviously pleased-with-himself grin.

  “But . . .” Violet’s voice was still raspy, more like a croak; she cleared her throat and tried again. “I thought . . .”

  “You were,” Garth said and nodded energetically. Feeling had returned to all her limbs and for the first time she registered that he was wearing a surgical outfit, full green scrubs and latex gloves that he now peeled off and tossed into a trash can she couldn’t see. “Your heart stopped three times,” he continued. “But four hours of surgery and . . .” He shrugged and lifted his chin almost arrogantly. “A lot of prayer, and we managed to save your life.”