Daxus scrambled backward, knocking aside a cart covered in medical implements. It crashed to the floor, but he didn’t notice, even when his feet nearly tangled in the metal pieces. “Violet, for God’s sake!” he said again. “I’m unarmed!”
But she only gave him another hideously dark grin and stared pointedly at each of his arms. “No,” she said mockingly. She’d switched her weapon to her other hand, and a jerk of her uninjured wrist made her sword blade vibrate in the air between them. “Not yet, you’re not.”
“Wait!” Daxus held up a hand, then hastily yanked it back and shoved it behind him, trying to steady himself. He looked at her with naked curiosity. He just had to ask. “What happened?”
She gazed back at him and knew exactly what he meant. “I found a way back,” she said simply. He stared at her but it was clear he didn’t understand. That was all right, because neither did she, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell him about Garth. In fact, she didn’t care to tell him about anything else at all.
But before she could move, Daxus’s hand snapped forward again, and this time it held a flame-throwing pistol, one of those unpleasant little surprises that Violet had tried her best to avoid by coming into this lab so cautiously. Clearly she hadn’t been careful enough.
“Oh, no,” Daxus said when she started to step to the side. He smiled, quite pleased with himself and the way things had shifted in his favor. He waggled it in the air between them, always making sure its barrel was aimed at her face.
She shrugged, then suddenly flicked her injured hand at him. With an almost slow-motion beauty, she—and Daxus—watched a thin spray of blood droplets sail across the distance separating them, flowing like a small crimson shower. He opened his mouth to scream, then gasped and reeled backward instead, scrubbing frantically at his face with his left hand. “Blood!” he cried. “You got your blood on me!” Rage suffused his face, making his skin go purple. The flame pistol’s muzzle had wandered upward, and now he jerked it back in Violet’s direction and squeezed the trigger—
—but Violet was faster.
She snapped her sword up in front of her and turned the blade so that the flat of it faced Daxus’s weapon. The stream of thickened petroleum fuel that shot out of the flame pistol’s barrel hit dead center on the blade, then sprayed harmlessly to either side.
Daxus growled in frustration and yanked the gun to eye level as he backed up—there, splattered over the pilot light on the ignition switch, was a dime-sized drop of Violet’s blood.
If he expected her to comment, he was going to wait a long time—she only looked calmly back at him. Furious, Daxus threw the weapon aside and with a murderous look in her direction, he dived to the other side of the cold granite slab holding Six’s covered body. Before Violet could go after him, he reappeared; held triumphantly—and expertly—in his right hand was a long and wickedly sharp Turkish sword.
Another one of Daxus’s ugly secrets, but that was okay—she was always up for a good sword fight. He lunged at her but Violet parried his attack easily, and each used the first few moments of swordplay to measure the skill of the other. Again and again, in and out, and as they circled the slab, Violet’s gaze flicked to something on his arm—blood. He was cut. A corner of her mouth lifted.
Daxus took a half second to follow her gaze, but he only shrugged. “Yes,” he agreed. “No doubt in a fair fight you would beat me.” He shook his head and gave her a tooth-filled grin. “But that’s not how I got where I am today.”
Before she could retort, he smacked the top of the diamond biohazard ring he wore on one hand with the hilt of his sword. Violet jerked as one by one the high windows around the top of the lab began to black out—that damned ring must have had a remote built into it. In only a few seconds, the room was plunged into darkness.
Damn.
Violet’s head snapped to the right as a sudden, faint whirring sound split the silence. She identified the noise instantly: Starlight Goggles adjusting to what little light there was in the room. The amount certainly wasn’t enough to do her any good but the goggles would amplify it to give the wearer—Daxus—a pretty damned clear picture of the interior of the room.
And whoever was in it.
“Can you see me, Violet?” Daxus’s voice was full of contempt and . . . entertainment. The bastard was actually having fun. “Because I can see you. Too bad you’re the freak who converted with only mild photokemia.”
He was right about that—her brethren were able to see in the dark much better than she. But answering would only give her position away that much sooner—at least if she was quiet she could try to hide, to duck down behind the body slab and work her way around it or under it. Desperately, Violet tried to build a mental picture that would remind her of what else was in the lab—if Daxus had been directly in front of her on the other side of the slab, the cart that he had overturned should be slightly to her left. She needed to try to avoid it, as well as the implements that had spilled on the floor. Not only were they sharp, they would be noisy against the tile floor and—
Violet spun in the darkness as she heard Daxus break into a run, but she couldn’t tell from which direction he was coming—
Until he put a long strip of fire along her left back shoulder blade.
Violet cried out and instinctively ducked away, then heard Daxus’s blade whistle over her head as she rolled on the floor—a second too late and she’d probably be dead. Something sharp and wrapped in plastic poked at the rear of her thighs—one of the scalpels that had hit the floor from the fallen cart. She snatched it up as she kept rolling, then crawling, trying to find her way around the granite slab that had suddenly become a barrier to the path of safety rather than something behind which she could hide.
Desperate to distract him, she tossed the scalpel into the darkness, hoping he would follow its sound. No such luck—he ignored it completely.
“Oooh,” Daxus said complacently. “Bet that stung.”
As much as she wanted to snipe back at him, Violet didn’t dare answer. Did he know where she was? Of course he did, but she still couldn’t see a damned thing. There was a hiss in the air, the unmistakable sound of a blade, and reflex made her jerk backward. Too late, and she gave another outraged cry as Daxus’s sword parted leather, fabric, and skin across her rib cage—if she hadn’t backed up, the bastard would have easily eviscerated her. She wasn’t doing so hot in this confrontation.
“Don’t worry,” Daxus said smugly. “I didn’t hit anything vital . . . yet. We’re saving that—” Instead of finishing his sentence, he managed to cut her again, this time catching her down the side of one leg. The pain was too much, unexpected, and Violet couldn’t stop another scream from escaping her lips.
Damn it, she would not be filleted by a lowly veterinarian turned homicidal maniac—it was a vulgar, embarrassing way to die and she would not have him standing and gloating over her corpse again the way he had back in the playground. She had seen that on video and she didn’t need to imagine the things he might do to her here, where he was positive there were no cameras to record his atrocities.
She strained her eyes again, but it was useless. She simply could not see in here, not without some kind of light. Her hands scrabbled across the floor, the cold stone tiles that were easy to clean of blood and body fluids—
Oh, yeah.
With her mouth pulled into a rictus grin, Violet brought up the sword she was still holding on to, then whacked its edge against the floor, hard. A fistful of sparks flew from the blade where it kissed the stone beneath her knees. She heard Daxus grunt in surprise from the other side of the room as the flare of unexpected light stung his eyes before the super-sensitive goggles could adjust to it. He couldn’t make it to her position in time to stop her from doing it again, slightly to the right of the first hit. This time the sparks bounced onto what she needed, a splattering off the main puddle of petroleum fuel.
Whoooosh.
Fire blossomed along her blade, rich and
red-orange, fed by the fuel still coating the steel. It was more than enough light for Violet to see by, and when Daxus charged toward her, her weapon was already raised and on the offense. She met him strike for strike, instantly igniting his blade as the fuel jumped from one metal to the other. With his advantage gone, after the first strike Daxus tore off the cumbersome Starlight Goggles and tossed them angrily aside. He flailed at Violet with an intensity that she suddenly couldn’t match—her energy and strength were waning, being sucked away by the ever-present disease and the nonstop battles she had fought over the last several days. Violet could see the blood-covered parts of her own body every time Daxus swiped at her, every time his blade connected and made a wound that was instantly cauterized by the flames. All the flash-views did was remind her of the pain, and her exhaustion. Had she even hurt him in return? Cut him even once?
Tchiiiiing!
And then her sword was suddenly gone.
She dived into the darkness without hesitating, knowing it was her only refuge. Daxus’s Starlight Goggles were down here somewhere, but they wouldn’t do any good while there was firelight. All she had going for her right now was the darkness itself—the flaming sword that Daxus was using as a torch would hinder his eyesight more than help it. Even so, it was only a matter of time until he found her.
“Do you hope God’s merciful, Violet?” he asked in a taunting voice. He sounded outright gleeful. “Do you think He’ll welcome you into His arms, like the so very many you’ve sent His way?”
Violet’s bruised fingers brushed lightly against something on the floor. Her fingers closed around the object instinctively, then she lifted it, careful to stay silent. She let him ramble on but didn’t bother to follow the words as she smiled and rose in the darkness behind him. “I know He will,” she said calmly. Daxus jerked around, trying to squint past his burning blade so he could see her. “Do you know why?” Before he could answer, Violet brought her hand around from where she’d been holding it behind her back. “Because God’s a girl.”
Daxus moved his sword to the side, then his eyes bulged as he realized she was pointing the flame pistol right at him. It wouldn’t light, of course, but who needed a light when there was already fire?
“Let there be light,” Violet said softly, and squeezed the trigger.
Petroleum fuel arced out of the muzzle and past his sword, catching Daxus full in the face and chest. He screamed but he didn’t even have enough time to take a breath for a second cry—his lungs fried and he went up in flames instantly as the fuel streamed past the fire on his weapon. Mouth wide in agony, flesh already blackening and blistering, he reached for Violet one final time—
Her sword snapped forward and she sliced off the fingers of Daxus’s hand.
His biohazard ring slid free and sailed upward. Violet snatched it out of the air, and when Daxus’s flaming body would have fallen toward her, Violet’s well-timed kick pushed it backward and away from her and the granite slab on which Six lay. Daxus crashed against the wall, then curled up and sank to the ground. The stench of cooked flesh spun in the air but Violet ignored it, letting only enough time pass to make sure he wasn’t going to somehow rise again. When she was certain that he was finally, finally dead, she turned and pressed the surface of the ring. “Let there be life,” she said softly.
And one by one the windows faded from black to transparent, and let the dawn shine into the Mortal Sciences Lab.
AT THE END . . .
Taking Six off the dissection slab had been harder than Violet had imagined it would be. She had convinced herself that the child was alive, and while she still believed that was true, even her rock-solid faith started to falter when she lifted his ice-covered flesh from the unyielding surface and cradled him in her arms. There was something about deadweight that was . . . undeniable, and if there was ever a time when the religious people of the world could have preached about the meaning of believing in something mankind couldn’t see, about faith, this was sure it. The boy’s neck stretched out and his head hung straight back and down, while his body stayed limp and completely unresponsive—he had all the appeal and warmth of a cold fish taken out of the refrigerator.
But one thing kept Violet going, and that was the still-remembered knowledge that was rooted in her old medical background. By now, if Six was truly dead, his body should have been stiff and exhibiting full rigor mortis. Most laypeople thought that once a body got that way, that’s how it stayed. But that wasn’t true. There was a certain timetable that death followed, a predictable one that had helped both doctors and the police calculate the time of death for centuries: a dead body was pliable for so long, it was stiff for so much longer, and then it was forever limp, amen. By now Six’s “corpse” should be well into the proverbial stiff as a board realm. He should look a lot like the cadavers generally seen in the funeral home caskets, except without the makeup and dress-up duds for burial. But he didn’t, and to Violet that meant he wasn’t dead, that what she had seen on that video of her and the child in the park was true. He wasn’t dead at all.
He was just . . . waiting.
She had to admit that she had no idea how or when to bring him out of this state of . . . whatever it was. Coma? Suspended animation? She knew only that she was positive he was in it. Daxus had no doubt gone by the seemingly inescapable evidence of the meta-crystal that had hung around the child’s neck. It was gone now, probably disposed of by his medical team, but Violet clearly remembered its solid black color as the last seeming spark of life had left Six’s body—Daxus would have taken that visual evidence as nothing short of biblical truth. And under normal circumstances, he would have been right. But these were anything but normal circumstances, weren’t they? Now the normal was abnormal, and based on that, all that was left was for Violet to help Six somehow find a way back as Garth had helped her.
No one tried to stop her as she carried Six up to the rooftop. Had she really killed Daxus’s entire army? She doubted it, but she could picture him ordering all those men to their deaths without explaining his motives to his higher-ups—and there were, of course, others who were superior to him. They might be silent and out of sight, but they were there—they always were. If that was the case, Daxus’s death—he likely had a life monitor embedded in the base of his brain and tied into the ArchMinistry’s main motherboard—would have brought to a halt any and all of his ugly, secret little enterprises . . . such as the plan to virtually enslave mankind. In any case, here she was—a vampire—standing on the roof of the ArchMinistry in the light of the morning sun, like some kind of a goddess offering up the body of a child in return for untold favors.
Behind her sunglasses, Violet could see across most of the city’s sprawl from her position. It was so quiet in the morning light, so blissfully serene—full of foolish people ignorant of the evil residing within its seemingly peaceful boundaries. She knelt facing the east, feeling the rays of the sun on her own skin at the same time that they touched Six’s flesh, warming the skin and melting the thin layer of ice crystals still covering parts of his body. The droplets crawled toward the ground, wetting his hair and soaking into her leather coat. Like the city, he looked so peaceful, so quiet . . . but she knew he was in there. She knew.
Violet smiled and brushed his cheek tenderly with her fingertips. “Six,” she whispered. “Six. Wake up, Six.”
For a long, painful moment, there was nothing. Had she been wrong about this? Had she done so much, and killed so many, just to get to this point only to discover Garth was right?
Then, without actually opening his eyelids, Six blinked.
Another blink, and another, like he was stranded in REM sleep and fighting to get out, just as she had when Garth had brought her back from Daxus’s fatal shot. It seemed to take forever, but finally the boy opened his eyes and focused on her. She’d been the last thing he’d seen back at the playground, and it was only fitting that she be the first thing he saw now. Her smile widened.
“V-Violet?” S
ix’s voice was hoarse, barely audible. He swallowed with effort. “I t-thought I was dead.”
Violet shook her head and pulled him into a half-sitting position so she could rock him like a baby. “No, no,” she assured him. He felt good in her arms, like he belonged there. “No, my dear.”
Yes, she’d been right about what she’d glimpsed on that news footage. God love the freedom of the press and their ability to broadcast the evil of the world. Even they hadn’t realized what they had filmed, and amid all the excitement and fervor in the playground, Daxus, for all his phobias and sterility, had missed that one tiny thing—
A tear, one of Violet’s, that had fallen onto Six’s nose and slid unnoticed into the boy’s half-open eye.
Without realizing it, without intending it, Violet had done the one thing that would, at least for the next decade, give Six the strength and stamina he would need to fight off the deadly antigen his barely human father had embedded in his blood: the Hemophage virus.
His eyes started to clear. When Six looked up at her quizzically, Violet smiled again. “You’ve just been reborn,” she told him firmly. After a moment he returned her smile, then she released her hold and stood. She held out a hand and he took it, giving himself a few seconds to climb to his feet. He was unsteady at first, but it wasn’t long before his balance returned and he could stand on his own and gaze out at the lightening cityscape with undisguised wonder. There was, Violet suddenly realized, an entire world out there that he had never even known about. Playgrounds? They were the least of it. There were schools and museums and stores and movies and countless other avenues of knowledge and entertainment. This was a child who’d been fed only food substitute and a few vending machine items—wait until he tasted fresh fruit, pizza, and popcorn. There were so many things waiting for him. She might not be here to share them with him, or she might, but in either case she refused to think of what was waiting since he had only ten years to experience it. If she could take Garth’s words to heart, that ten-year period might hold a miracle for Six and the rest of her kind.
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