Sanguine Series (Book 1): The Fall

by Chris Laughton

  Aidan raised his head, and looked at Trevor, snapping him back to reality. Trevor checked the compass and saw that the needle was indeed moving ever so slightly. Trevor opened the back doors of the van and shielded his eyes against the morning sun for a moment while they adjusted. He and Aidan climbed out of the van and walked down the alley to the street and split off in opposite directions, leaving the van doors ajar. Jackson would remain with the vehicle. Trevor walked along the street, trying to appear disinterested in the passerby, looking down at his compass. The needle began to move to the right. Trevor looked up and scanned faces until he found Mason. He waited for him to pass and then reversed course to follow. Looking ahead, he couldn’t find Aidan, but this didn’t worry him. As they approached the alley, his pulse quickened. Even after all these years, he still wasn’t numb to any of this. He wondered what would happen at the moment of confrontation. Part of him expected Mason to literally take flight and soar away to safety. Part of him expected the man to move faster than he could see and simply disappear. Dr. Monroe had built him up to be some world-altering force and Trevor was eager to see what that looked like. It seemed Mason would pass the alley, but then Aidan appeared in front of him, blocking his path, a gun mostly hidden from sight beneath his jacket unless you were standing directly in front of him like Mason was. He nodded his head towards the alley. “What’s say we have a chat?” he asked rhetorically.

  Mason didn’t hesitate, he merely turned around to walk the other way, but this time it was Trevor’s turn to block his way. Mason locked eyes with him for a split second, but Trevor couldn’t read the expression; not fear or anger, but something else. When the moment had passed, Mason turned to walk into the alley. When they were a few steps from the street, he said, “I don’t carry any of my coins and I’m afraid that beyond my watch and phone, I don’t have much of value on me.” He turned to face Trevor and Aidan.

  “Mr. Rayne, you mistake our intentions.” Trevor’s use of Mason’s last name had frozen the man. Now there was a touch of fear in his eyes. Disappointing. When faced with two attackers each carrying only a single small-caliber pistol, the man that Dr. Monroe said was the greatest specimen the world had ever known appeared to be slipping toward cowardice. Trevor continued, “We would just like to have a talk with you.” He raised his chin to signal the open van.

  Mason looked over his shoulder and then back at them. His face had changed. The fear was gone, and there was just a touch of rage now. Better. “And what if I say ‘no’?”

  Aidan smiled and brought his gun just slightly further out of his jacket. “We’d insist.”

  Mason appeared to weigh his options, even glancing between Trevor and Aidan back at the street they’d taken him from before turning and climbing into the van.

  “Please put on the restraints,” Trevor instructed.

  Mason dutifully complied, sitting on the bench and fastening the shackles first to his ankles, then his wrists. Trevor and Aidan climbed in and closed the doors instantly locking the three of them in with just the small overhead light preventing total blackness. They took their seats at the back of the van, far out of reach of their shackled prisoner. Trevor banged his fist against the side of the van twice and heard Jackson start the engine. Within moments they were back on the road, but not on the days long trip towards their compound, just an abandoned warehouse where they could talk with Mason.

  Trevor introduced himself, “Mr. Rayne, my name is Trevor Sanders, and this is Aidan…,” he struggled for a second, “I don’t actually know his last name.” He paused for a moment, but Aidan wasn’t volunteering it. “Anyway, we would just like to talk with you for a few moments about something you can help us with.”

  “So talk,” Mason replied. Trevor could no longer read anything from his face, which was saying something. Aidan may be the one who enjoyed interrogation, but Trevor was the one who could read details from the slightest reaction, and except for glimpses in the alley, Mason’s face betrayed nothing.

  “We actually have a few more people waiting for us. They wouldn’t appreciate it very much if I spoiled the surprise before we got there.” Mason said nothing. Trevor smirked to himself. Mason might think he was being kidnapped, but he was actually about to have his entire worldview blown apart. ‘Vampires are real, and we need you to help us kill them all.’ Then again, the guy was apparently used to walking away from deadly car crashes; vampires might not faze him. He couldn’t think of anything to say that would put Mason at ease without also sounding like exactly what someone who meant him harm would say, so he stayed silent.

  Trevor looked up to see that Aidan and Mason were engaged in some sort of staring contest. Aidan wore his usual grin, but Mason was looking at the Irishman like an aristocrat evaluating art in a museum.

  Trevor broke the silence. “Gentlemen, am I interrupting something?”

  Aidan turned to answer. “’e knows I’m like ‘im. Wrappin’ ‘is ‘ead ‘round not bein’ unique.”

  Trevor chuckled. “Mr. Rayne, I daresay you have a few more surprises coming this morning.”

  23

  Mason had realized in the alley that this was not a kidnapping or a mugging. His captors had not been interested at all in patting him down for weapons or crypto keys, or telling him to call his kidnapping insurance line. He’d been thinking as fast as he could about a way to get out of this. Even if this ‘Trevor’ was telling the truth about letting him go, Mason could see no benefit in putting it to the test. The problem was, being shackled by both your wrists and ankles didn’t leave much room for creative thought. This almost had to be connected to his accident. His mind raced through the possibilities of what lay at the other end of this van ride. What if this was the start of what he’d always feared? He’d spend the rest of his life hooked up to needles and tubes and machines while his captors tried to coax the secret to immortality from him.

  There wasn’t any point in getting himself panicked in the back of this van, so he pushed those thoughts out of his mind, and focused on thinking through escape scenarios once they opened the van doors. There weren’t many.

  The van slowed and pulled off the main road. Mason could hear that they were on dirt now. It had only been several minutes, so they were still in the Seattle area. That had to be a good sign. The federal government was not as flush with money as it had once been, and it would have been a fantastic coincidence if they had a laboratory in the same city Mason happened to be staying in.

  When the van pulled to a stop, Aidan opened the van doors and Trevor spoke. “We’ll just be a moment.” So maybe this was just a stop on their journey and it was government after all. Everything was back on the table and Mason’s heart sank. His two captors disappeared from his view off to the side of the van doors. Mason heard a roll-up door that they must have passed through close somewhere in the warehouse. He could see a dusty concrete floor and natural light from what must have been windows higher up, but couldn’t make out any other details. Trevor returned to his view holding a key.

  “Mr. Rayne, this key will unlock your restraints from the bench so that you may join us. It will not, however, unlock your restraints themselves, as unfortunately, we need to make sure you don’t do anything silly before we have a chance to talk.” He waited a moment to see if this got a reaction from Mason, but when it didn’t, he shrugged and tossed the key into the van where it slid to just in front of Mason’s feet. Mason reached down and grabbed the key without taking his eyes off Trevor. Ignoring what Trevor had said, Mason tried the key in his restraints, but the man had been telling the truth. He reached down beneath the bench and fumbled until he felt the lock connecting his restraints to the bench. Inserting the key and turning, he removed the lock and stood as far as the van’s low roof would let him. Aidan was still out of his sight, but he saw Trevor had holstered his pistol and seemed to be in a fairly relaxed position. If he could just get that gun away from him he might have a chance at escape. Trevor stood ten feet away from the van, but Mason was
going to show him that wasn’t enough.

  “This way please,” Trevor was guiding him out of the van, but Mason took just a split second more and slowed his perception of time. Specks of dust hung in the air seemingly immune to gravity. Trevor began a blink, but his eyelids moved like molasses. Mason tuned into hearing, but still couldn’t detect anything else in the room. Perhaps Aidan had left; a vital misstep on their part. Mason slowly moved towards the open doors of the van, trying to appear as relaxed as possible, while he ramped up his adrenaline production. When he got to the edge, he kept his feet on the end of the van, but let himself fall forward. The fall was agonizingly slow, giving him time to look up and see Trevor’s eyes start to go wide, but he still wasn’t making a move for his weapon. At the last possible moment, Mason pushed off the bumper of the van, hard enough that he felt the van slide forward slightly and rocketed through the air. His inertia kept him from feeling the nausea of weightlessness, but shooting headfirst through the air while horizontal to the ground was still a strange sensation in slow motion. His shoulder drove straight into Trevor’s chest with a hollow thud as Mason knocked the wind from his captor. While Trevor was dazed, Mason grabbed the gun from the holster, pulling it free. He was bringing it to bear on Trevor’s face when he felt something press against the back of his head.

  “Now that’s just rude,” Aidan mocked. Impossible. How had he been so close, but Mason couldn’t hear him? He had smelled that Aidan was like him, but even he wouldn’t have been able to muffle his heartbeat or breathing to the levels that Aidan must have to avoid detection while time was slowed.

  “One could say the same about kidnapping,” Mason retorted.

  Aidan ignored the comment. “Right now, you’re thinking, ‘if ‘e’s like me, am I fast enough to turn n’ get ‘is gun away from ‘im?’” The voice was far enough behind Mason, that it couldn’t have been a pistol held to his head. Aidan must have switched to a rifle after exiting the van. “I’m kinda ‘opin’ you’ll try.” Mason was slowly moving his hands to the side and setting the pistol on the ground when he heard another voice at the far end of the room.

  “Mason, I assure you, this is all entirely unnecessary.” Mason looked to the side to see a lovely woman who also had an assault rifle trained on him. Making a move on Trevor had been a poor choice, and now he found himself hoping they were the forgiving sort.

  “Sorry, cornered animal and all,” was the only defense of himself he could muster. Aidan had taken a step back, allowing Mason to get to his feet and keep his hands as high as he could in the shackles. Now that he was standing and out of the van, he could see the whole of the warehouse interior. The ceiling was easily thirty feet overhead with a row of windows at the top of the eastern wall that let the morning sunlight come streaming through. The western wall was dominated by four huge roll-up doors. A few panes were broken out of the windows and one of the tracks for the roll-up doors had started tearing away from the wall, but it was in surprisingly good shape for how long it must have been going unused.

  The lovely woman approached, lowering her weapon. “Well perhaps if you hadn’t chained him like a prisoner, he would’ve been more cooperative.” She had a voice like honey, but as she got closer, Mason could smell that she wasn’t quite normal human. Nothing like Aidan or himself, but still, there was something different about her. He’d gone his whole life without meeting anything but run-of-the-mill humans, and now he’d met two people who could claim to be more in the span of a morning.

  “Sorry, love, we were in something of a ‘urry. I would’ve sent ‘im an RSVP, but I didn’t ‘ave money for a stamp.” Aidan’s tone was even and light, and Mason knew he had sorely underestimated his counterpart.

  “Mason, my name is Simone,” the woman extended her hand. Mason hesitated for a moment, but shook it awkwardly as his left hand was still shackled to his right. “If you promise to behave, I think we can take care of those restraints.”

  Trevor was sitting up and dusting himself off while he caught his breath. “I’m fine, by the way,” he sarcastically replied to nobody. Aidan gave him a hand to get to his feet. Trevor said to Mason, “Well, I have to say Mr. Rayne, you come as advertised. I was a little disappointed in the beginning, but damn, you can move when you want to.”

  Simone smiled. “Let’s get you downstairs so you can hear our pitch and get on with your day, shall we?”

  24

  Simone was doing her best to appear her usual jovial self on the outside, always the hostess. On the inside, she was a nervous wreck. She tried to tell herself that they would be able to appeal to Mason’s sense of right; that he would be blown away by everything they had to show and tell him and that allure of purpose, the same one she had felt when she was younger, would get him to join their cause. It was a powerful thing, especially in this day and age, to give someone’s life meaning beyond just surviving. It was the scenario in which he declined that scared her. She and her father had gotten into a screaming match just before Trevor and Aidan arrived with Mason over what would happen in that case. She was begging for more time to talk it through with him, but her father, Dr. Westfield was insisting that Mason couldn’t leave alive unless it was with them.

  “If we let him walk out of here, we’ll never find him this easily again. Dr. Monroe said that little compass of his would only work for so long. He can’t be allowed to potentially fall into Alexander’s hands. Full stop,” declared her father.

  “Even if you dismiss my reasons, doesn’t it concern you that it would close the door on him ever joining us? Who’s to say he doesn’t sleep on it and show up at our door tomorrow? We’re not exactly winning this fight handily; we can’t afford to cut off our nose to spite our face.”

  This had upset her father. “We are winning! Every day that humans decide their own fate without that megalomaniac herding us like cattle is a victory! We have his pet fortune-teller! We killed one of his oldest offspring! Just because we haven’t won doesn’t mean we aren’t winning!” He was screaming, and most of the team members that had accompanied them nervously milled about, pretending to not hear the argument.

  Simone checked her phone and saw that the van was pulling in upstairs now. “They’re here. Just promise me we won’t do anything today. Put as many tails on him as you want so that you always have the option.”

  Her father had shaken his head, “I can’t promise that.”

  Now, Simone was leading Trevor, Aidan, and Mason (still shackled, and making quite a racket as he shuffled along) downstairs, and she had no idea how to tell Trevor that he needed to be ready to stop her father without dashing the small amount of trust Mason had in them. She would just have to focus on convincing Mason to join them so that it never became an issue.

  Everything should have been in place for that to happen. Battery operated lights were in each corner of the basement to keep it as professional as possible. They hadn’t bothered cleaning the old, faded linoleum flooring, however, so the air still smelled of dust. Dr. Monroe had brought a laptop and projector, also hooked up to a battery pack to show Mason what he was capable of. Trevor’s team had captured a vampire to use as an example when they explained everything. They believed him to be one of Alexander’s trackers, although a young one. Still, if Alexander had trackers in the area, it meant The Project wasn’t that far ahead of him in finding Mason. That fact had only hardened her father’s resolve, so she almost wished they didn’t have a vampire here, but it was necessary.

  Admittedly, the news that vampires existed would probably be a little hard to accept merely through conversation, so having an actual live vampire was crucial. It’s not like the vampire would be a willing participant, but they could still demonstrate their healing ability and sensitivity to UV light. The vampire now stood bound and gagged in a cage in the center of the warehouse’s basement, the centerpiece of the presentation. They had it shirtless (to give them easily visible skin with which to display its healing) and its hands restrained behind its back, shackled
to the bars of the cage. It had no way to adjust the gag that was uncomfortably tight, and pulling at the corners of its mouth. Of course, knowing that the thing would kill everyone in the room if given the chance lessened any sympathy it might have gotten.

  Most of The Project had remained behind, so it was just a small group present for this little meet & greet, another play by Simone for her father to let Mason walk away if he wanted: the fewer of them he could recognize minimized exposure for The Project. Still it was a larger delegation than usual for a recruitment, and the Westfield’s presence alone signified this was more important than the average new soldier. This was a site they had never used before and had no intention of using again, just a random, abandoned warehouse with a basement. Should Mason leave, the actionable intel he would have on them would be minimal, but her father had been concerned with Mason’s potential if he was made a vampire, not the information that could fall into Alexander’s hands, so these precautions were largely futile in convincing him.

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Mason barely swept his gaze across the room and the assorted team members before locking onto the vampire. He seemed to sniff the air a bit and his eyes narrowed. The vampire tried to yell something through the gag, but Mason paid it no mind.

  Simone sought to ease the tension that a prisoner would add to Mason’s thoughts. “I know it must seem a little strange that we have a man caged, but you should know that-,”

  Mason cut her off, “It isn’t human.” He did his shackle-shuffle over to where he could be closer to the cage and examine the vampire. Everyone had a script in their minds of how this would go, and Mason had blown every version apart within seconds.