Corrupting Alicia

by Tsoukalas, Evan

  Lucian raised an eyebrow, impressed that I was able to determine that Barrera already knew about Alicia's gender. "Yes. A small offering of good faith to grease the wheels, so to speak."

  "What's the premium?" Alicia asked, and from the look on both the Brothers' faces, they had not expected Alicia to speak at all. A stealth reconnaissance run beneath Lucian's shield told me that Alicia was of no real consequence to them. To borrow an expression from DeShawn, I was all the power in the glove. The Brothers did not expect her to leave this room alive, so they had no problem sharing information in front of her. In truth, Lucian was rather looking forward to proving his power over me by taking Alicia's blood (and her life) right in front of me.

  "Ten percent."

  Alicia nodded, expecting as much. "One year or two?" Her understanding of the business impressed him, but not her lack of fear. It should have tipped him off, but like most superior beings, he attributed it to her inability to grasp the situation that she was in. I suspected quite the opposite, but thanks to her shield, neither one of us could be certain.

  "One."

  "Not a bad deal," she offered with a shrug.

  "I’m glad it meets with your approval," Lucian retorted dryly, effectively dismissing Alicia by turning his head to address me once again. "Turn her over to us, agree never to return to our city without invitation, and you’re free to go."

  Alicia snorted, shaking her head, and it was only curiosity that kept me from laughing out loud, an event that would have put a swift end to this meeting. My impression of Lucian was that he could be a vindictive bastard when he wanted, so offering my freedom was out of character. That he offered it in exchange for the willing surrender of something he believed he could just as easily take made no sense at all. That was largesse, and as it offered them no advantage in the situation as they perceived it, I saw no reason for it.

  "Why let me go at all, Lucian?"

  Lucian and Innokentiy shared a surprised look, my words making Lucian wonder what he was missing. “Does it matter?" Lucian asked, wondering if any answer I gave could put the final puzzle piece into place.

  "Not really," I shrugged. "I just wouldn't have expected largesse from you."

  He chuckled heartily, his face lighting up. "We don’t always have to be cruel. There are plenty of times when it can’t be avoided, but this doesn’t have to be one of those times."

  I could tell that Innokentiy didn’t subscribe to that theory, but it was obvious that he knew the pecking order here. He would do whatever Lucian told him, regardless of his personal feelings on the matter.

  "There’s wisdom in your words, Lucian, but that's not why you've offered to spare my life."

  "Why are the young so impertinent?" Lucian sighed, looking upward. It wasn’t readily apparent whether the question was directed to Innokentiy or God, but as it was obviously rhetorical, I felt the need to further demonstrate my impertinence by answering it.

  "Because it's more fun." Innokentiy glared, Lucian laughed, and I finally picked up on the tremor within it. "You're afraid," I stated, awe making me voice the thought out loud.

  Was it instinct, or did he have a reason? Innokentiy cut my pondering short when he launched himself across the table with a savage growl. I had finally thrown a challenge he couldn’t ignore. It was a struggle to keep from retaliating, but I really wanted to know the answer, and I thought that the best way of getting it was to let Innokentiy demonstrate their superiority.

  We tumbled backward, Innokentiy raining powerful strokes on my face and chest. They hurt enough that it was not entirely an act as I grunted and growled in pain, but he had no chance of damaging me permanently. If he had not worked himself into such a rage, he would have noticed it, too.

  With every blow, I thought of a new and twisted way to torture Innokentiy once I revealed myself, and after about four minutes of Grade-A ass-whupin’ and daydreaming, I stopped retaliating and went fetal. After another minute, Lucian's voice pierced the sounds of struggle. "Enough, Kesha."

  Immediately, the blows halted and Innokentiy climbed off me, resuming his former position without a backward glance. Alicia's expression was the perfect semblance of complete confusion. She had no idea what was going through my mind, and it was actually worrying her; I winked at her as Lucian stood and approached me.

  "It’s common for the young to mistake caution for fear. Killing a revenant, especially one so young, is always risky. Being practical, I cannot be sure who might miss you enough to come looking for retribution. Elders so love their pets, and if there is such a one for you, and he is indeed as powerful as it would appear, that you deserved my wrath would not keep him from sending me to join you." Lucian bent his knees and crouched down beside me, gently rolling me onto my back so he could look at my face. I struggled to delay the healing power of my Blood and keep up the facade. He pressed a handkerchief into my hand, and that small courtesy made me wonder if I should spare his life.

  I used the handkerchief to wipe some of the Blood off my face, more as a stall tactic than anything else. I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed, or how much longer I wanted this charade to last. Most of me was eagerly awaiting the moment when I could shovel a big steaming pile of their own stupidity back into their faces. The longer I let them dangle, the better it would be, but Lucian’s decency made a small part of me hesitate. If it were just Innokentiy, it would have been an easy decision.

  “And if I told you that my Maker is dead, would that change anything?” I asked at length, giving Lucian one more chance to show me that he and Innokentiy were really the same, that he was just playing the good cop this time.

  Lucian had no idea what to make of my statement, his eyebrows furrowing. Inability to discern my motive for revealing that information bothered him. A revenant in my position would only give up a crucial tidbit like that if he was insane or it no longer mattered either way, and Lucian could neither decide which category I fell into, nor which was worse.

  “You are a curious one, fledgling. You attempt to manipulate this situation, quite skillfully I might add, in a direction that has no benefit for you. Why?”

  “Just because you can’t see it, Lucian, doesn’t mean it’s missing. Maybe I want to die, but I lack the balls to greet the dawn.”

  Lucian latched a hard look on me, his psyche extending to drill a hole into my shield. The probe was all brute force, and I almost smiled as I felt Innokentiy skillfully test for gaps in my shield while he thought I was preoccupied with Lucian’s direct assault. The finesse in the second probe took me by surprise; the patience and restraint it required was certainly not something I expected Innokentiy to possess.

  Lucian looked to Innokentiy, who shook his head back and forth once to indicate that he came up empty in the gap hunt, and then both withdrew their probes. It became clear to me in that moment that both Brothers had perfected their particular dance over many centuries, and I wondered if that included the roles they played.

  “I don’t think that’s the case,” Lucian continued. “I would say that you’re testing me, but again, there appears to be no suitable reason for it.” My eyebrow arched at his use of “appears to be” rather than “is.”

  “Maybe there is no reason, Lucian. Perhaps I’ve simply resigned myself to the inevitable, and I’m just trying to enjoy my last moments instead of panicking through them.”

  Lucian regarded me with a look usually saved for the mentally insane as he teetered on the brink of figuring out that I was mocking him and had been from the beginning. In the end, he discarded the possibility simply because he could fathom no reason for it. In that one respect, he should have been taking lessons from Innokentiy: sometimes, the why’s just don’t matter.

  "They don’t have to be your last moments,” Lucian offered softly. “Personally, I hate killing our kind unless in self-defense. At your age, you pose no threat to us, so killing you would be little more than cold-blooded murder. Many such actions stain my hands, so I’m somewhat reluctant to add anoth
er. Unless you force me." Wrapping a hand around my arm, he lifted me slowly to my feet. I found myself amazed by his beliefs, amazed that a fairly decent revenant would choose this profession.

  Regardless, his decency decided it: I would only kill him if he forced it.

  Placing a hand on his shoulder, I leaned in close and spoke softly. "You have a peculiar morality, Lucian. Peculiar and all too rare among our kind. That alone might save your life tonight." Punctuating my words, my hands blurred to clasp behind his head and slam his face into my rising knee. Blood splattered all around us, and my powerful upward momentum took us both into the air. Lucian summersaulted crazily through the air, and before he landed, Innokentiy had vaulted the table yet again.

  I caught the raging Ukrainian in midair, holding him aloft for several moments, our eyes locked. It was long enough for him to understand it all, but not long enough for him to come to terms with it before I pivoted to hurl him into the ground with lung-collapsing power. A savage kick to his head ensured that he would stay down while I dealt with Lucian.

  Lucian shook his head to clear it, but he had not succeeded by the time I lifted him off the floor. His feet dragged behind him, unable to hold his weight. "Earlier you said that a man in my position would find your offer fair. Do you still believe that?"

  "No," Lucian ground out against the pressure of my hand at his throat.

  "Do you believe that you deserve the same terms?"

  "No."

  "Why not?" I asked, lowering Lucian gently to his knees and releasing him. He coughed and gagged a couple of times, one hand at his throat and the other on the floor to keep him from pitching forward onto his face.

  "Ignorance led me to challenge the strongest of us. Such a fool does not deserve eternity."

  "You know who I am." A statement, not a question.

  "I know what you are. I believed your existence to be a myth, so it is not without irony that I face the end of mine at your hand."

  I fixed him with a look that was part humor, part satisfaction and part humbled reverence. I can only hope that I have the grace to face my second death with such serenity. "What an interesting and poetic creature you are, Lucian. I’ll get no pleasure from destroying you."

  I heard Alicia's approach. Funny how I had forgotten she was even here. She stopped at Innokentiy's prone form long enough to leave boot marks on the side of his face. I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I was suddenly very happy to be shielded from her thoughts.

  She appeared at my side, running a hand along my shoulder and across the nape of my neck. It sent chills down my back, and I barely managed to suppress a shudder.

  "Well, well, well, Lucian," she began, spitting his name out of her mouth like it didn't taste very good. "After all the pontificating windbagism I had to suffer through, it'll certainly give me a thrill to see it happen." I turned to see if she was joking, and the mania flashing in her eyes made the opposite quite clear.

  She leaned in close to his face. "Revenant or not, you men are all the same. You can't recognize real danger when you see it. You have such power, but it's wasted on you..."

  Faster than I thought her capable, she had her MP5 out and pressed against Lucian's throat. His head retreated as far as it could without causing him to fall over backward. Fear and impotent rage danced in his eyes, and unfortunately, Alicia saw them both.

  "There are enough bullets in this magazine to take your head clean off." She paused, giving the weapon a not-so-gentle forward thrust into the meat of his throat for emphasis. I suppose I knew what she meant to do when she approached, and aside from a small amount of morbid fascination, I’d let her continue only because a part of me fervently hoped that she would come to her senses and pull herself back from the brink.

  In giving her that chance, and actually believing she might take it, I made a last-ditch effort to deny the monster she had become - the monster I helped create. If Lucian were mortal, I could have tolerated his humiliation and sustained my denial for a bit longer, but being what he was, being what I was, I had to put an end to this.

  And just like that, denial was back to being just a river in Egypt.

  "No!" I commanded firmly, slapping the gun from her hand with such force that it flew across the room and clattered against the far wall.

  "What the fuck?!" Alicia yelled, turning on me like a wild animal.

  "You forget yourself, Alicia," I growled, my tone all sharp edges.

  "And you forget yourself, vampire! You're not mercy! You are cruelty; you are suffering; YOU ARE DEATH!!!" she shouted, her harsh voice echoing off the walls. The disgust in her tone was a dagger into the struggling heart of our relationship, and it was only a matter of time before we bled out. "You are those things when it suits you, but not when it suits me! You say you love me, but you refuse to give me what I ask for! What I need!"

  Hatred and disgust fueled the fire in her eyes. Her face was a feral mask, her voice shrill and so alien that I could almost believe a demon had possessed her, but there was no getting around my culpability now. The only demon inside her was the one I had put there. "You don't love me. You use me," she finished, the words blanketed in subzero temperatures.

  I stared at her in complete paralysis, shock and shades of despair shutting down all movement, thought and speech. I was powerless, with nothing to do but watch as our love began to gasp its final, ragged breaths. I heard a sharp intake of breath, and I thought my heart was adding sound effects until I realized that it came from Lucian. Turning my attention to him, it was quickly apparent that he had also witnessed the dying, and his perception saddened me.

  By correctly interpreting that my alliance with Alicia was ending, he realized that it was only a matter of time before her death would fail to bring me charging in to avenge her. After all, untimely demise was often a consequence of the business she had willingly chosen to involve herself in. In a few months, word of Alicia's passing would hurt incredibly, but pain alone would never be enough to overshadow my own foolishness for getting involved with her in the first place, or the shame from my inability to set her life back on the course it held prior to my interference.

  Letting him live was no longer an option.

  After recognizing his intentions, I could not allow him to survive long enough to implement them. I would never be able to live with myself otherwise, and faced with that intolerable burden, any regret over killing him became insignificant.

  "I wish you hadn’t seen that, Lucian. I’m sorry," I whispered, meaning it. He understood completely as I lowered my head to his neck and sank my fangs deep. He made no struggle, and out of respect, I took all six hundred twelve years of memories and vowed to keep them forever.

  When it was finished, I lowered him to the ground gently and then moved to where Innokentiy still lay unconscious. I set Lucian's empty shell ablaze as I walked away. The fire startled Alicia, and she backed away, unable to tear her eyes off the gruesome sight. The smell of burning flesh made her retch and gag, but still she continued to watch until Lucian was nothing more than a blackened pile of ash atop a greasy stain on the marble floor.

  Looking down on Innokentiy, I felt no regret about ending his life. Lucian had spent almost four hundred years trying to teach his uncommon morality to Innokentiy, and his failure had weighed upon him heavily. We shared a common failing, for he had been unable to find the strength to undo his mistake as well, and he considered his end at my hands a fitting penance for that.

  Without emotion, I stomped on Innokentiy's face, crushing his skull so badly that gray matter leaked from his ears and his eyes popped free of their sockets. That I had no problem with killing him was not a call for his suffering; he would not even feel the flames. I watched them consume him for a few seconds, turning away before he was completely ash.

  I walked past Alicia without a word, intent on leaving this miserable place behind. She called out to me, but her cries fell on deaf ears and what was left of my demolished heart.

  �
�◆◆

  As Marley screwed the Sound Tech "M-Can" silencer onto the Hart barrel of his custom Patriot Arms rifle, his mind was elsewhere. The assembly required no conscious thought on his part, but it was a serious breach of pre-kill ritual for his mind to be anywhere but in the same room with his body.

  Marley believed in nothing beyond this life. He was quite certain that nothing awaited the end of a person's existence save for the creatures of the earth that feasted on the empty husk. It was only one of the reasons he had no problem feeding them other human beings, because eventually, he too would join all those he had sent before. As is customary with such beliefs, he dismissed the existence of a God or Devil as most people believed in them. In his numerous observations, the only God or Devil he had ever seen lived inside those on the other end of his scope, and when he offered them to the earth, that deity died with them.

  But it was different now; he believed in the Devil. She had long, dark hair and even darker eyes. Her face kept flashing in and out of his mind, a flash of fangs that had since taken on almost mythic proportions, as if she were a monster pulled from ancient fables of evil. She wanted something from him, and if he did not deliver, she would take him instead.

  An icy bolt of fear shot the length of his spine, and his sure fingers spasmed, dropping the final hand-loaded, subsonic .308 round to the floor. He watched in silence as it tumbled a few times before settling still, and he found himself wondering why meeting the Devil had not brought with it a belief in God.

  ◆◆◆

  Alicia caught up with me outside. I stopped at the summit of the stone steps because I honestly had no idea where I was supposed to go now that I had evicted myself from the home I’d made with her. That it had been ready to collapse on its own was no comfort at all. She said nothing as she stood on the step below me, putting us at almost equal height. The ugliness had left her face, and the mania in her eyes had gone to sleep. She looked at me without recrimination or question, as if she were memorizing my face. I had no need to memorize her face, but I returned her gaze directly. We were unable to read each other's thoughts, but the eyes said enough.