The Guard

by Harri Aburrow-Newman

  “They were human children, Beth. Children! Dozens of innocent young humans and you slaughtered them.”

  He was breathing hard, struggling to contain his emotions.

  “I think about it now, and I wonder what the hell was wrong with me when I agreed to work with vampires. To work with monsters.”

  My temper flared again as he used the word ‘monsters’ for a second time and I swallowed a growl.

  “I will not apologise for what I am Michael. You cannot aim your anger at vampires in general like that. We are not monsters. We are not inherently evil. And anything that I am now, I always was. Even when human. I’ve told you before that I could never stoop too low if it means saving the people I care about. People like you and Glen and your soldiers. You’re good people… I know I’m not. But I never really have been… so it was better that that stain went on my conscience than any of yours. Those children would have killed you, or you would have been forced to kill them. And you never would have forgiven yourself.”

  “So you expect me to just forgive you?!”

  Michael looked incredulously at me.

  “No, but maybe I expect you to understand. Just a little. And accept that it had to happen.”

  “I don’t believe that. With all your power, and Ysabel’s power, I don’t believe that there wasn’t some way around killing them.”

  “There wasn’t,” I said quietly, “I promise you. The only way to release a thrall is to force the vampire holding them to let go. In the ferals’ case, that probably would have meant killing them. But we had no idea where they were and no way to find them quickly enough to save you.”

  Michael sighed heavily through his nose, and a muscle in his jaw twitched as he ground his teeth together.

  “How am I supposed to trust you now? How am I supposed to trust any vampires?”

  “I don’t know. But you need to work out a way. We need each other in this.”

  Michael didn’t say anything, just continued to look at me, although his thoughts were a little less furious than before.

  I dithered, wondering how much to tell him.

  “Look, if you want, I’ll give you full disclosure. I will show you exactly why I am the way I am, because I was born of human evil. Not vampire. Ysabel has the kindest, most beautiful soul that I’ve ever encountered. And there are so many others like her. I don’t want you thinking that my…” I grasped for the right words, “…somewhat laissez faire attitude towards mortal lives is the norm. That I’m the norm. Because I’m really not. My people deserve life, just as much as yours.”

  Again, Michael said nothing. Just nodded his head once, a quick, nervous jerk. I reached past him to pick up his laptop, typing in a search and scrolling down to the page I wanted.

  In the top right corner of the webpage was a beautifully detailed, black ink drawing of a young woman. It was me; a picture that Melissa had drawn not long before she was killed. I remembered it had been an unseasonably mild day, so we had sat in the woods and had a picnic. We took a loaf of fresh baked bread and a small round of goats’ cheese, as well as a couple of sweet, late season apples. We washed down our pre-spring feast with a small bottle of wine that we had kept hidden at the back of our modest larder for a special occasion. After we had finished our meal, I had leaned back against a tree in a patch of dappled sunlight, tilting my face back to make the most of the warmth, watching Melissa as she sketched in the diary that she took everywhere with her. She had shown me the picture she had drawn later that night, as we lay next to each other, warm and content in our simple bed. It was a three-quarter profile of me; I had my eyes open, looking out of the page, and a slight smile on my face. A few strands of my hair were blowing across my face, and just below my ear was a leaf that had fallen from the tree and gotten caught…

  I sighed at the memory, running my finger over the drawing, then handed the laptop back to Michael.

  “Melissa kept a diary, religiously. After she died I kept it with me, adding my own entries on occasion, but I lost it at some point after the chaos with the ferals began. Someone found it and began doing research, looking into the history of the people and places mentioned, and eventually that research and some of the diary entries found their way onto the internet.”

  Michael frowned at me, not yet reading the information.

  “Why are you showing me?”

  “Because it tells my story, or at least a very human and very defining part of it. My human life sets me apart from other vampires. Most of us are chosen from a select group of human allies, who are brought up in colonies run by the vampires. They spend their lives protected, knowing they’re loved and special. I was an unsanctioned turn, stolen away from Nottingham city about a year after Melissa died by a rogue high vampire. Then turned and abandoned.” I shrugged, “although as far as I’m concerned, he set me free.”

  I gestured again to the laptop and Michael finally began to read, his frown only growing deeper as he did. He finished quickly; the information was concise, and sat back, not looking at me.

  “I don’t understand how this is meant to make me trust you.”

  “It’s not. It’s meant to make you see that humans made me how I am, not vampires. I’m not trying to make you change your opinion of me, just my people. And Ysabel. I am actually not so egotistical as it may seem sometimes – I care little for my own fate.”

  “Why did they think Melissa was a witch? And why did you kill their families?”

  “They said that she must have bewitched me, because why would I have chosen another woman over my own family? And as for my revenge,” I shrugged again, “an eye for an eye. Death felt too good for them, so I did exactly what they did to me, and took everyone they loved.”

  I stood up from my perch on the arm of the sofa and shook out my wings.

  “You may not like it Michael, or me for that matter. But we do need each other, or the ferals will do much worse than I have ever done. And they will never stop to think about the error of their ways.”

  Chapter 35

  Michael

  Beth turned to leave, her wings whispering behind her as she made to launch herself off of the small balcony. I wasn’t sure what to think, my mind stuttering at every turn, contradicting itself. Every part of me that had wanted to join the military, the parts that wanted to protect my country and my people at all costs were screaming out to destroy the unholy fucking monster in front of me. But something else stopped me, just wouldn’t let me pull the trigger, even though I could tell from the obvious, unfettered curve of her torso that she wasn’t wearing her combat shirt. What do you do with a creature that feeds off of humans and doesn’t even blink when forced to kill dozens of children, yet is fighting a war to protect them?

  “Do you kill them?” the question tumbled off my tongue before it had even properly registered as wanting to be asked. Beth stopped and looked around, her forehead wrinkled in a slight frown,

  “Who?”

  “What, you’re not in my head?”

  She smiled wryly at me,

  “No Michael, I’ve told you plenty of times that I tend to make a point of not being ‘in your head’ all the time. It’s rather bad manners don’t you think?” She shrugged.

  “Hm. I meant when you… feed... Do you kill?”

  Her forehead wrinkled once more in a frown and she turned back to face me completely again, crossing her arms loosely across her chest,

  “Why would you want to know that?” she asked, seeming genuinely perplexed.

  That stumped me, I wasn’t really sure why that question had popped into my head, it had just seemed important at the time. I shrugged,

  “I suppose because it’s suddenly important to me to know how blasé you actually are about taking human lives. You have to see this from my perspective, surely? I don’t know whether you’re a help or a hindrance to the human race in general and I don’t actually know what to do about you.” I shrugged my shoulders again, Beth’s intense stare making me feel slightly
uncomfortable. I tried to shake the feeling off and keep eye contact, but my gaze kept sliding off of hers against my will, my animal body recognising the danger in her even as my mind tried to ignore it. I had known her long enough now to know what she was doing; she was assessing whether or not to tell me the truth. Whether that was because the truth was uncomfortable for her to tell or me to hear was always the fuzzy area. In this case, it turns out, it was for me. Her eyes hardened as she came to a decision and I felt my gut churn uneasily, already knowing the answer.

  “Yes. Usually warrior class vampires kill when they feed, although our control gets better as we get older. We need to feed less as we get older as well…” she held up a hand as I felt a fresh wave of disgust ripple through me and opened my mouth to tell her to get the hell out, “but… yes, there’s a ‘but’… we’re very picky about who we feed on. We don’t just go and kill any random person on the street. We just take the scum off the surface, your rapists and murderers and the like… leave mankind a little purer and a little safer whilst we take our fill. And honestly, you’re in the SAS, for god’s sake. How many humans have you killed?”

  I nodded slowly, still not sure if that clarified anything or just made me more confused, and her final barbed comment hit uncomfortably close to home,

  “Fine. I need to think, Beth. I’ll contact you soon.”

  I turned away before she did and marched into the kitchen where I couldn’t see her. Her voice followed me anyway, quiet and hard,

  “Better the demon you know, Michael”.

  I didn’t respond, clenching my fists with the effort, until the soft click of the French doors and the concussive thump of wings told me that she had left.

  Just seconds later a howl echoed down from the sky, high pitched and unearthly, that set every nerve jangling. The kind of sound that makes you want to hide and never come out again. It was followed by a loud, erratic flapping and cracking, a bit like the noise a kite makes when it’s being forced to cut across the wind… I was stood, frozen, until there was the dull thud of a body hitting the ground, and a very faint, more human sounding cry came from somewhere around the base of the building. With the human cry came a wave of pain that made me double over and wretch. Somehow I recognised the pain as Beth’s, not my own, and as suddenly as it had hit me, it was gone. I forced myself into action; throwing myself out of the French doors with such force that I crashed into the balcony railings at a speed that almost tipped me over them. I scanned the sky, gun in hand, searching for whatever had injured Beth, as troops from all over the compound began to come to life and converge on the area, alerted by her scream and the guards who had seen her fall.

  I soon gave up searching the skies, recognising the task as pointless. If there were vampires up there and they didn’t want to seen then I didn’t have a hope of spotting them. I turned my gaze downwards, looking for where Beth had fallen. The troops on the ground had also had the same idea and were fanning out, jogging steadily to cover more ground. Being high up, it was me who spotted Beth first. Her black wings and dark clothing made her hard to spot, but the white skin of her face and hands were like beacons. She had fallen into the shadow of the building, hidden from the approaching soldiers by a low hedge and a couple of scrubby trees. I yelled at the top of my lungs, waving until someone looked in the right direction then gestured to where she was, sending several men out of their formation and jogging towards the hedge. I looked back to Beth for a moment, and then ran for the stairs.

  I burst through the main doors of the building at a run, rounding the corner and following the wall to where a dozen or so men had now gathered around the stricken vampire. I pushed through them, feeling the resistance fall away as they noticed who I was and moved aside. Lexi was in the front row, having been in the nearest guard post with Glen, who she was leaning against. He had his arm around her shoulders, and tears were fresh on her face,

  “She was convulsing,” She explained, “like an epileptic fit only… faster, more violent… she only stopped a moment ago”.

  I moved closer to Beth slowly, she was lying on her back with her wings twisted underneath her, one of them seemed to have been almost totally torn away from her body. The right side of her head was caved in and didn’t seem to be healing, and the bone of her right lower leg had ripped through flesh and fabric to protrude as a jagged, white spear. Her eyes were open and black, blood was streaking down her cheeks from them, and her lips had been torn to shreds by her fangs, her breath wheezing past them unevenly. Her entire body was shaking and every so often jerked sickeningly.

  I knelt down next to her and called her name softly, reaching out to touch her shoulder, trying to ignore the nauseous feeling in my stomach that had grown as I’d gotten closer to her. Touching her seemed to alert her to our presence, her eyes fixed on my face briefly before they fluttered closed and a low groan escaped her lips as her torso jerked off of the ground again at vampiric speed, so fast that I barely registered the movement.

  “Beth, come on, why aren’t you healing?” I asked. Then, swallowing against the lump that had appeared in my throat with the thought, “do you need blood?”.

  Her breath hitched and she turned her head away painfully, as she did, she groaned again, but this time I caught a word.

  “Ysabel? Is she ok? Beth?”

  I would have thought that if Ysabel had been with Beth when they came to see me, she would have come in, but that didn’t mean to say that she might not have been waiting on the balcony or in the sky for her. Oh, or maybe she just wanted Ysabel to come now… I almost slapped myself for not catching onto that straight away, my brain was obviously more frazzled by the situation that I thought,

  “Glen,” I spun round on my haunches to talk to him, “see if you can get hold of Ysabel.”

  I was about to turn back to Beth when Lexi’s eyes snapped up to mine and her dark skin visibly paled, all the colour draining from her cheeks in an instant,

  “oh my god,” she whispered, “of course, Yzzy…” her eyes were open wide with shock and she stared down at Beth again with new tears leaping from her eyes. I stood up then to face her,

  “What? Lexi, talk to me, do you know what’s happened?”

  She just looked at me for a moment, then back at Beth, then back to me… seeming to struggle with something within herself,

  “Oh, Beth I’m sorry,” she directed at the prone figure. Looking at me again, she said solemnly and quietly, moving nearer to me so that soldiers behind her wouldn’t hear,

  “Beth and Ysabel are bonded. The only reason I know of that she could be like this is that Ysabel has been injured, seriously. She may even be dead.” The last part she whispered, before putting a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob.

  Chapter 36

  Beth

  The pain that cut through my chest as I winged away from Michael's apartment was unlike anything I had ever felt in all my years of walking this earth. It wiped my mind clean so that I knew nothing but the agony, searing through the fibres of my body like the very flames of hell. The only thought that remained to me was Ysabel. Ysabel, Ysabel, Ysabel. When you bond with your mate, you know in your marrow that there is only one thing that could cause such pain. What I felt wasn’t my own, it was flooding through our bond, calling me to her, but then the bond was severed, and I fell.

  I drifted in and out of consciousness, the only difference being that when conscious I could vaguely hear the sound of the world turning around me. A whisper in the room next door, Michael or Lexi or Glen’s breathing as they sat next to me, the far off chime of a clock. Waves of black agony crashed over me, each one spotted with splashes of red or a spark of electric, adding an extra sharp torment to the drone of the pain that I couldn’t escape. Occasionally Nathanial came in, and his nasal Texan accent added a layer of irritation that momentarily added some interest until it too, was lost. I felt like I should be making some attempt to side line the pain to make it bearable enough that I could function properly. Carry on,
keep fighting, get revenge… but then the loss would reawaken, and I would find myself sinking again with a cry that I couldn’t hold in. Why would I want to exist in a world without her?

  I hated the world then, hated my body and my mind for not following her where she went. But most of all I hated the creature that had taken her from me, that had swallowed her light and hidden it in the dark where my eyes couldn’t reach.

  Chapter 37

  Michael

  I sat quietly next to Beth, watching her ever quivering body, like the plucked string of a bow. We had lain her on a hospital bed in a quiet room away from the main drag of the base, and myself, Lexi and Glen were working to an informal rota of keeping watch over her, that we nevertheless stuck to like to like it was set in law. It was a harrowing watch. When possible, two of us sat with her simply to support each other. Her eyes were always open and black, and the horrific injuries that she had sustained during her fall never healed. We had tried getting her to drink some blood, but although she did reflexively swallow some of it, it didn’t seem to make a difference. The worst thing though was the sounds, sometimes it was a low, heart breaking keening sound that could continue for hours on end. Other times, a short sharp cry that was so full of pain it was almost like a physical knife to your gut.

  I still couldn’t fully comprehend that she and Ysabel were bonded. Both of them had been so vehemently opposed to the guard bonding that it didn’t occur to me that they could have broken their own rules. And it was another lie that Beth had told us. I was ashamed when I thought of the conversation I had with Lexi about it; I had condemned them for fools, angry in my grief. Lexi was furious, and after slapping me, twice, explained in a voice shaking with fury that the bonding wasn’t always intentional or controllable, and that Beth and Ysabel had worked insanely hard to never let it affect their work as guards, which caused great discomfort for both of them. When I remembered what Beth was like when I first met her; edgy and even more short tempered, forever with a cigarette in her mouth, I supposed it made sense how much she had changed after Ysabel’s arrival from America.