by Kailin Gow
“Hold on, boys,” Kalina said, turning to Octavius. “And Max. I don't think we should split up; it's a bad idea. We need to stick together if we want to stay safe. I can't defend Stuart on my own; now that he's only human he's in more danger than ever before.” Kalina didn't mention that she feared Stuart was in just as much danger from her as he was in from vampires proper. “If you two leave to find other Carriers we'll be in danger. Let's get to Molotov first, try to break the spell. Then we can all seek out Carriers together. And maybe there will be some older Carriers among the ones in captivity – we can kill two birds with one stone.”
Max and Octavius looked at each other, reconsidering their plan. Although their telepathy was weaker than it had been, Kalina could faintly make out what was going on inside Octavius’ head.
But no, Kalina, my sweet Kalina, how can you put me through such torment? How can you ask me to be by your side, to tolerate proximity, when all I want to do is kiss you, and lose myself in your sweet love? I want to take you right here, right now, the others be damned...
Kalina blushed scarlet, hoping that the others didn't see the fruits of her desire spreading out across her rosy face. She felt exactly as Octavius did. But she hoped that having both Stuart and Octavius near her would counteract each of her attractions; wanting them both, she would be able to go after neither.
“Kalina has a point,” concluded Max, her jaw and expression decisive. “We can't risk leaving them alone. We're strongest as a team – and as a team we should stay. I can track Justin – Kalina can make out the Carriers. And Stuart's nose was once effective at this sort of thing...”
“No longer,” Stuart bowed his head.
“No, Stuart – you'll just have to try harder.” Max wasn't in the mood for understanding. “Human or vampire, you know what Life's Blood smells like, and we need all the help we can get. Now, before we were side-tracked, we were making our way through the Devil's Mouth, one of the most dangerous mountain passes in the Alps. We'll need to dress warmly, to bring supplies, and to stock up on weapons. This is no easy place for humans – Stuart, you may want to hang back...”
“Not a chance,” said Stuart. “If I die, I die fighting the good fight.”
“Then understand,” Max began, in that swift, business-like way of hers, “that if you are taken prisoner, we cannot risk our position to save you. Even if they threaten to turn you again. You come at your own risk.”
Stuart turned white with fear, and Kalina felt her color draining in response. But he nodded anyway. “I understand the risks,” he said. “I take them gladly. Whatever I can do to help Kalina here.”
He turned his wide eyes to her, and once again Kalina began to feel overwhelmed at the enormity of Stuart's love. He was a good man, she knew – one that truly deserved her love. She knew now that he did not love her merely for her blood, as she had feared, but indeed for herself, for even though he was human he was willing to risk all that for a chance to convince her that he, and not Octavius or Jaegar, was the one she really loved. Was he really willing to risk everything if it meant a shot at getting her back? Kalina's eyes filled with tears, so greatly did his actions touch her.
“Thanks, Stuart,” she squeezed his hand. “You're a real...”
But she stopped herself before saying friend. Was Stuart not more than a friend to her – after all, if Molotov hadn't come in when he had, she might have given herself to Stuart, totally and completely? She certainly felt an attraction to him. And hadn't Max said that Kalina's troubled feelings might be a result not of indecision but of her youth – maybe she just wasn't ready to settle down with Stuart, but might be one day? Had not Max done something similar with Kalina's own father?
Kalina sighed. “Never mind,” she said quietly. “Let's go. We have some Carriers to save.”
“Let's go!” They all echoed. “For the Carriers! For Justin!”
Chapter 14
And so they decided to set off for the Devil's Mouth. Stuart and Octavius both strained their noses, but ultimately it was Max who best knew the way. They had spent a few hours getting ready, collecting supplies from a safe-house Max and Stuart had used in the area, but now they were hot on the trail just as dawn began to illuminate their path. Octavius was slightly bristling under the sun, even though his Life's Blood ring was on his finger, keeping him safe from the true power of the rays. But he did not complain. If he was uncomfortable under the sun, even while wearing a Life's Blood ring, then other vampire guards would be equally – if not more – weakened. At daytime he had only to worry about the Life's Blood vampires – those who had drunk Carrier blood and were able to walk in the sunlight even without the rings. He knew that Kalina and he had staked most of the Life's Blood vampires back in Mongolia; the ruby stakes they all carried would take care of the rest. He doubted there would be many left of Molotov's old army; Molotov couldn't have access to more than a few Life's Blood rings, bought – he imagined – on the black market, or else stolen by Mal's men from the Consortium during the time of the great slaughter in Rome. Octavius narrowed his gaze and frowned as he remembered that terrible night, as he watched all his trusted friends and comrades, fellow-generals all, die before his very eyes. Die for Kalina's sake – and for his. They had fought well until the end, he knew. Fought bravely. But that did not make their loss any easier. He still missed them; their loss was still torture to him. The final end of his centuries of work filled his dreams with agony, and made him wake up in the middle of the day, sweating out nightmares.
The Consortium had once been a thing of greatness, Octavius knew. A group of vampires all working together, dedicated to eradicating the evil and chaos they saw in the world. Dedicating to preserving the lives and blood of Carriers. All good and true men and women, willing to sacrifice their desires for the good of the many. Men he had himself turned, condemning them to an eternity of tortuous hunger, and yet they never blamed him. They never resented him for their turning. They simply served him well.
And now they were dead – gone. Staked into nothingness – for if there was an afterlife for vampires, Octavius had never heard of it. Indeed, the vampires he knew feared death even more than humans did – perhaps their immortality destroyed in them any faith in the hereafter. It had been Mal who had staked them, but he had done so at Molotov's bidding. Molotov was behind the destruction of the Consortium – his greed had known no bounds of decency or honor. Octavius grimaced. Molotov might pretend to be an honorable, reasonable vampire – a more noble creature than the mad blood-thirsty rogues who wandered the streets at night willy-nilly, looking for victims – but really he was no better than the rest. No, Octavius thought to himself as they made their way towards the Devil's Mouth once more, this meeting with Molotov would be a personal one. This was no longer a theoretical battle – a battle for power between two evenly-matched vampires. This was a chance for revenge. To avenge the Consortium, to avenge Justin...
It was personal, now.
He carried a normal stake in his left hand, but slung over his right arm was a machine-gun cleverly outfitted to dispense flying ruby-encrusted stakes at hundreds of miles an hour. Molotov may be weakened, Octavius knew, but this time he wasn't going to take any chances. It was time for the ragged remnants of the Consortium to go high-tech; now stake-guns and sprayers dispensing powdered rubies served them just as well as the traditional stake of wood.
Because Octavius wasn't going to risk losing. The fate of the Carriers, of Justin, of whatever future the Consortium held, depended upon their victory. He was going to make Molotov pay.
Yet the absence of vampires at dawn slightly perturbed him. If it was true that the Carriers were being kept here, surely the vampires commissioned to stand guard wouldn't have been able to resist taking a sip or two of fresh Carrier blood – and surely in that case there would be plenty of guards standing about in the morning, instead of going to ground as they seemed to have done. The eerie silence seemed to presage stillness, a false, dead end. But Max insisted t
hat she smelled Carrier blood in the air and led them onwards.
The Devil's Mouth was a savage, terrifying place. Jagged mountainsides, like skeletons or knife-edges, rose up above them. White snow beds, untouched and yet terrifying in their whiteness, seemed to surround them on all sides, so that not five miles into their journey Kalina and the others lost all sense of direction or orientation. Everything was white; everything was mountainous; everything was snow. This place was like a labyrinth, drawing them in deeper, closing up all around them, so that even the tracks they meticulously tried to leave in the snow vanished within minutes as more avalanches and snowfall buried the footprints in new layers of snow. Kalina shuddered as she sniffed the air, picking up on the scent of Life's Blood. Had Mal really hidden children here? At eighteen, she still found this place daunting; it gave her the chills. But to leave children – some as young as eight or ten – in a place like that? Such cruelty astounded her.
“I can't believe it,” Kalina sighed. “I always knew that Mal was evil, but even I could never imagine that he'd be this bad. Rotten, through and through.” She remembered what Mal had done to her and grimaced. The tortures he had put her through still gave her nightmares. But no matter what Mal had done to her, at least she was seventeen when it had happened. Old enough to pull herself together and make it through. Kalina thought back to her childhood. As a ten-year-old, she knew, she never would have been able to find the strength to get out of there alive...
“They're just kids,” Kalina said aloud, the wind of the mountains almost swallowing up her words.
“I know,” Stuart shuddered. “Awful, isn't it? Mal was truly...a monster. Many vampires have some good in them, however deep down, but not Mal. Who knows what he was like in life? I'd guess that even before he was turned, he was a piece of...”
Max cut in. “Even if the Carriers managed to escape,” she said, “they wouldn't survive long out here. Not under conditions like this. Kids with no understanding of who they were or what they were, no idea how to navigate a mountain or climb...it would probably kill a Carrier, let alone a normal child.”
“Unless that's why there are no guards standing out here,” Octavius said. “I was wondering about that myself. Why would Mal risk the children escaping? Unless that was part of his plan...”
“What do you mean?” Kalina asked.
“Yes, it all makes sense now,” Octavius nodded. “Mal wanted them to try to escape. He knew the Carriers would make it out – eventually – at least, most of them would. And that the humans would die trying. He's probably sent guards to find them eventually...but not until the humans have been killed off by the cold and the snow and the other animals out here.”
The howling of a wolf in the distance punctuated this last remark.
“Then he wouldn't have to spend money and time on dealing with humans,” said Kalina. “He could focus on the ones he was sure were Carriers – by letting children die!” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “That really is despicable.”
“It also means that our job is that much harder,” said Octavius. “If Carriers are out here, then they're probably spread out at this point, not left in a single place. And we can only sniff out Carriers – if there are any human girls left out here at this rate, we won't be able to identify their blood as easily. I can sniff out humans to some extent – but their blood's nowhere near as strong as Carrier blood.”
Kalina felt her gorge rise. She had seen plenty of evil and cruel things since learning about the vampire world, but this was beyond horrendous.
At last they came to a cliffside – a jagged rock from which a thousand-foot plummeted beneath them.
“We'll have to fly,” Max said darkly. “Octavius, you take Stuart. Kal, can you...”
“Yes, moth...” Kalina stopped herself short. Calling Max Mom was still weird to her - “mother” was still the framed photograph of Mrs. Calloway that stood on her nightstand. “Max,” she finished abruptly. “I can fly.”
“Good,” said Max. “We can't have you falling.” She shuffled her feet to the edge of the cliff. Kalina looked down at the drop, her stomach plummeting. She had been able to fly before, in Mongolia. But would she be able to do it again now? After all, she'd been unable to fly after Molotov had weakened her...
She looked up at Max, but Max was looking straight ahead. “One...” Max began. “Two...”
It was now or never, Kalina decided. She wasn't going to let anyone – especially Max – see her weak.
“Three!”
They all jumped in unison. Octavius was the first to break his fall, slowing his descent and gliding gracefully to the snowy bottom of the peak, Stuart in tow. Max, too, was able to control her fall. But Kalina felt the world grow blurry around her, the ground expanding beneath her as it grew ever-closer, gravity pulling and clutching at her...
She wasn't flying. Kalina's heart stopped. She was falling – falling a thousand feet, faster and faster...
Use the blood.
It was Max's voice – her mother's voice – echoing within her head. Kalina looked up, confused. Max had never used telepathy before.
Use the blood, daughter.
Kalina closed her eyes and concentrated. Instantly she stopped falling, instead standing suspended in space. Her blood grew hot, warming her even in this chilling Alpine cold. And then she was slowly descending to earth, her body moving gracefully towards the others – floating down to join them as if she was being carried on wings.
“Well done,” said Max, smiling. But when the others were out of earshot, Max's smile grew wry. “Don't be so afraid to ask for help when you need it. There's no shame in that. Next time, I'll carry you.”
And with that, they continued through the snow banks, towards the ever-strengthening scent of the Carriers.
Chapter 15
From their new position at the bottom of the cliff, Kalina, Max, Octavius, and Stuart could better make out the terrain ahead of them. “Disgusting,” Max was saying with a grimace. “I can sense it – we're getting closer. Wherever Mal left them, he left them so far down the mountain that they'd have to fly in order to get out. And I don't know a single Carrier under sixteen with those kinds of abilities. Unless...” She bit her lip.
“Unless what?” Kalina pressed further.
“Unless the kind of blood that we used on you and the other test babies – it's not like normal Life's Blood, we know that. But what if Mal thought that there was a chance that this special Life's Blood would manifest itself early. We know that adrenaline causes the Blood to reveal itself – maybe he thought that putting these girls in life-threatening situations would force their blood to respond.” Max scanned the horizon. Before them was a vast expanse of pine trees lying across the valley, an enormous swarm of greenery. Kalina could smell the fragrance of pine fir in the end. It smelled like Christmas, Kalina thought grimly. She associated this smell with warmth, home, security. But for the girls out there, this was the smell of wilderness, or death. Her heart ached for these Carriers – taken away from their homes, from their lives. Most of them were missing parents, siblings (at the thought of siblings, Kalina felt tears stinging at the corners of her eyes), friends – fearing for their very lives. How could anyone, human or vampire, do something so unimaginably cruel?
She looked up at Octavius, who was staring out over the horizon. For so long she had thought of Octavius as nothing but her lover – a kind, strong man who happened to be a vampire. But now she regarded him with new fear. In the actions of this Malvolio – not to mention Molotov – Kalina saw a vampire capacity for cruelty she could never have imagined. Was Octavius, too, capable of such a deed? Was Jaegar? Stuart, she knew, had once been the Dark Knight, a killer of women and children as well as men. But she had never really understood the enormity of vampire potential for evil until now. Could her wonderful, kind Octavius, who always protected her through anything, be capable of such atrocities? The idea made Kalina shiver with horror. And if Kalina was beginning to take on vampi
re qualities, did that mean that one day she, too, would be capable of performing such acts as these?
“Fear not, my darling Kalina,” Octavius said as they proceeded towards the forest, her thoughts evidently clear on her face. “Mal was not just a vampire. Even as a man, I have no doubt, Mal was cruel and immoral. Most vampires have terrible urges, but they know in their heart of hearts that such urges are wrong. Malvolio had no such compunctions. He never felt any guilt. And believe me when I tell you, Kalina, that vampires nearly all feel guilt, even the terrible ones. You needn't worry, my darling. This is not the natural outcome of vampire hunger. It is something far worse.”
They stopped short at the beginning of the forest as Max sniffed the air. “There,” she said. “I can smell it. They're in there – not more than a ten-minute walk at most.”
“You can sense their location so precisely?” Kalina looked at her mother in wonder. “From so far away, I mean? I can smell a generic Life's Blood in the air, but no more than that.”