Claws That Catch

by Lee Hayton

  Asha moved first. In the few steps it took her to move inside, she must have reached out with her strange power and begun to influence the man’s mind. I could see his struggle, the resistance he put up to fight off her influence. It was a useless cause. She overpowered him, using the chemicals in his own brain as a weapon to bring him to his knees.

  The thump as he crumpled to the floor would be enough to wake the people in the room beneath if they were light sleepers. I grabbed Percival’s hand and ran with him down the stairs. We didn’t have the luxury of time to waste.

  When we pushed open the door, an alarm sounded. I had no doubt that it would be wired up to an expensive monitoring company who would call through to double check before dispatching an emergency crew. Given the level of security in the gated community, there was a distinct possibility that those responders would be located near the grounds.

  A man started, pushing the covers back off his body and swinging his legs down onto the floor. Without a second thought, Percival attacked him, crunching into the man’s neck with a crunch of tendon and bone.

  On the other side of the bed, a woman took longer to stir. Judging from the bottle on the nightstand, she’d used a few chemical helpers to take her off to sleep, and they weren’t prepared to loosen their grip just yet. I moved around to her side, holding a pillow at the ready to stifle any cries. As I did so, the phone rang.

  With one motion, I slammed the pillow down on the woman’s face, holding it steady as she began to struggle against the threat. I recognized Asha’s footsteps running to intercept the call, then the low sound of her voice doing the best imitation of Mrs. Pennyworth that it could on such short notice.

  It didn’t matter what we tried. Somebody would be on their way.

  “Is he turned yet?” I asked Percival as the struggles from Mrs. Pennyworth intensified. He looked up at me, eyes glowing as brightly as stars, blood dripping down the lower half of his face.

  “He’s turned,” the vampire said in such a guttural voice that it seemed ripped straight from his belly. He crawled over Mr. Pennyworth’s prone body and tore away the pillow from the woman’s face.

  Even though I’d been holding it in place with all my strength, it barely took a flick of Percival’s hand to remove me. “So pretty,” he crooned, stroking down the side of the woman’s face with one hand. Her bleary eyes sharpened in focus on his face. They opened as wide as her mouth as she began to scream.

  The cry was cut off a second later, gone in the twist and suction applied to her throat, cutting straight through her windpipe. Asha appeared at the doorway, shaking. “The emergency crew is on their way.”

  Of course, they were.

  I turned, not wanting to bear witness to the horror that Percival wrought on the couple, even though the attack was at our bidding. For some reason, the planning that had gone into this act—the forethought—made every action a thousand times worse.

  “What have you done?” Mr. Pennyworth demanded in a strangled voice. I couldn’t tell if that was due to the mess made of his throat or to the depth of horror flooding through his soul. “I need to—”

  His body twisted and arched up off the bed, the spine bowed out so severely that he seemed folded almost in two the wrong way. The muscles of his body tensed, rock hard with strain, then collapsed all at once, concertinaing him back onto the bed.

  “Andrew?” Mrs. Pennyworth asked in a plaintive wail. Her eyes snapped open, bright red light spilling down onto the cheeks of her face. The glowing irises turned my way, her eyebrows raised in query. I shook my head and looked down at my feet. Now that the deed was done, I didn’t want to face the consequences of my actions.

  “Come on,” Asha called out in a voice padded full of worry. “If you’re finished in there, we need to get the fuck out of this place. When the services come, they’ll kill anybody who isn’t on their register.”

  I knew it was true, yet it was still hard to force my feet to move and carry me away. I reached out a hand, stretching it across an ocean to feel for Mrs. Pennyworth, then her body snapped backward in a contortion that echoed her husband’s, and my arm fell to my side, useless.

  Percival dragged me out. The scene was probably one that he’d born witness to many times before. When I still couldn’t propel myself forward, Pounce came to my rescue, picking me up and tossing me over his shoulder as he ran naked down the stairs.

  At least with the emergency responders heading straight for us, it relieved us of the necessity to sneak our way back out with the same care we’d shown heading in. Pounce pushed open the back doors on the ground floor, and ran out, shouting to Dory to activate the damn flying spell, “RIGHT THIS FUCKING MINUTE!”

  Only when we were soaring up to the heavens did I recover control over my physical body. I pushed away from Pounce and flew beside him, my heart heavy with all that we’d done—with all that we’d felt compelled to do.

  “Should we land away from the gym and walk back there?” Pounce asked, always thinking of the most strategic method of getting the job done. I was grateful for his clear and quick thinking and nodded. It also gave us some extra time as we slunk in our feline form through the streets back to our decrepit home.

  “I really love what you’ve done with the place,” Pounce whispered with a laugh as we shifted aside the board on the window to push our way indoors. One by one, the crew who’d been fit enough to leave on the expedition, turned up again and snuck indoors.

  “How about a celebration?” Asha said. “We might not know for a few weeks, or months if what we did will turn out to be the change that we hoped for, but at least for tonight, we’ve done everything we set out to do.”

  That was true, and I couldn’t help but agree with her. After seeing what Percival had done to the average man, I’d formulated the plan. Once upon a time, we’d been scared that the vampires of the city would turn a generation of reluctant teenagers and start a revolution because there was no way that their parents would ever allow them to be enslaved.

  All I’d suggested was we flip that on its head. If the head of the slave pits were themselves vampires, they couldn’t possibly continue to support the legislation. With the threat of becoming slaves hanging over the heads of the most powerful woman in the city, I didn’t believe for a second that the status quo would continue.

  Mrs. Pennyworth might still surprise us. In the past few months, she’d had her store of surprises for us all. At the heart of everything she did was a cold ruthlessness that added up the worth of everything while leaving aside its value.

  To perform the same calculation on herself would require a paradigm shift in her thinking. Come sunrise, and the realization that being turned into a vampire wasn’t something that could be cured with a donation to the local hospital, I hoped that certain wheels would be put into motion.

  Of course, the Pennyworths might just be cut down, a sacrifice made by the next head of the serpent as it took pole position. Only time would tell, but for the moment, we’d made the best shot we had for the slaves to become free by making the freest couple in the city into slaves.

  So, yeah, I’d toast to that.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was a steep climb to the top of the hill, but we all managed it in record time. In actuality, hill probably wasn’t the appropriate name for what amounted to dirt affixing to an old pile of tires, but that was what the locals referred to it as, and tonight was our last night as locals.

  The city lights beneath us were bright and twinkling, quite unlike the stars in the smoggy sky above. If the hill had actually been a natural thing, it probably would have lifted us too high up to appreciate the view.

  A row of floodlights lit some of the work sites where vampires were busy reconstructing some of the oldest areas of the city. Although the legislation still moved at a tortoise pace, those who were working down there were freely employed and earning money, rather than being forced to perform.

  It stood to reason that the vampires would still he
adline the construction crews. After decades of being pretty much the only employees in that field, nobody else was qualified. Add to that, the increased pressure on affordable housing with the influx of ex-slaves to the suburbs and the demand for construction kept growing at a steady pace.

  Percival was free to join us in our scramble up the hillside, but his wiser head had prevailed, and tonight he rested down at the base, waiting for us to say our goodbyes. For all that my time in this place had been one disaster and disappointment after another, I still felt a pang of loss that we’d leave tonight, perhaps never to return.

  The sight of a vampire out at night with no cares in the world was still something that I was getting used to. The Pennyworths turning had changed many things in this town, mostly for the better as far as I was concerned.

  They still held onto control of their large private enterprise, but it was by their fingertips. If they ever put one foot wrong, and surely they would at one point or other, then the entire conglomeration of companies that they’d built off the sweat of others would show no compunction about declaring them unfit and forcing them out.

  If that happened, this city and others like it would be thrown into utter chaos. My rebel heart ached with longing for that day.

  For us, there were enough threats in the city still to make a move the most attractive choice on offer. After spending so much of our lives living under the radar, it would be a struggle for any of us to apply for and work a steady job. The alternatives were drying up now that the empire had lessened its power and the influence of the private sector hadn’t stepped fully into the breach.

  One day, I expected that everyone would find their footing again, and the city would descend into its previous rigid horror. For the present time, there was a brief rush of freedom.

  The average man had made one last appearance in my life—at least, I hoped it was the last. He’d turned up on our doorstep a few days after Percival turned the Pennyworths, holding out an envelope of coin and asking for some help.

  His appearance had been so shockingly different than usual, that it took me several seconds after answering his knock to work out who he was. No trace of the old, immaculate man remained. In his place stood a disheveled and confused monster.

  This was back before the emancipation agreement began to be hammered out by the empire. Well before it passed with a majority vote and the process of emptying the slave pits into the city ghettos had revved into high gear.

  He called by the gym at night because that was his only option. The average man no longer looked average. He stood out, not the least because he seemed so scared.

  The lines from terror were already etching permanent marks into his face. With his new vampire form, the man could reasonably expect to be wearing them for another couple of hundred years. His voice had been low and gruff—worn down either by having his throat torn out or by the effort of surviving alone on the streets for a few nights.

  “Please let me stay with you,” he’d begged, holding out a hand to grip mine as he pleaded with me. “I don’t have the contacts in place to survive out here. I’ll pay top dollar, but I just need somewhere to use as a base.”

  I’d taken the bag of money and ushered him inside, but the last time really had been the last time as far as I was concerned. It took me a long time to learn my lesson, but I’d finally learned it good.

  While I left him chatting nervously to Asha, I’d slipped up to the mezzanine level, made sure Percival was well out of sight, then called in his sighting to the local police. They mightn’t have bothered to attend the night our apartment exploded, but they were eagerly pulling up outside in minutes when the promise of an easy arrest came their way.

  I suppose that the empire or the Pennyworths paid them bonuses for any new slaves that they could add to the city coffers. As they led the average man—now the scared vampire man—away in handcuffs of silver, I didn’t care as long as they took him so far away that I’d never need to see him again.

  Wherever the cops took him, he didn’t have to suffer the rigors of captivity for long. As the police drove him away, the machinations for freedom were already in place. Nobody could ever accuse the Pennyworths of sitting on a decision. In their new form, they lobbied, and they did it quick and hard, soon earning a concession for themselves, then for all their brethren across the land.

  In the months since, the city had been in a state of constant change with the new arrivals displacing the older, established poor. A fight for scraps had to transform into a new direction sooner or later, and that had happened with the input from a lot of souls with more goodwill and free time in their hearts than me.

  The blood banks had started up in operation again as soon as the Pennyworths changed. They’d been using them as a bargaining chip to gain more profit and control over the parts of the slavery operation still retained by the empire. Suddenly, that came low on their list of personal priorities.

  Many of the visitors who donated now did so without the expectation of payment. It was needed, and they were kind. Although I’d never visited one of the places myself, I could imagine that they were full of liberal do-gooders. Not strong enough to band together and act to free the slaves, but now willing to do their part.

  In time, they’d move on to other noble pursuits with low bars to entry, and the blood banks would change back to a payee model. Already, some of the collection facilities in the upper east side had moved to that system, and I could foresee how quickly the change would come.

  I sighed and gave Norman a small shove in the shoulder just because he was within reaching distance. He slapped my hand away and shoved me back until we were squabbling like a couple of kids.

  Well, cats need to use up their natural exuberance somehow.

  It was our last night in the city because we’re pooled together our resources—mostly Asha’s, stolen from weakly secured online bank accounts—and paid for a parcel of farmland. It was located close to where Percival had lived alone for going on a hundred years. Near the place that Norman had been born and raised, even though he no longer called it home.

  Asha was good at forecasting economic situations, even if she didn’t often put her skills to good use. The current situation was stable but deteriorating, and she had told us the country was poised on the edge of a period of hyperinflation.

  That’s not the kind of economy that the down and outs in a city can survive.

  Out in the country, we’d be able to work the land for our food and income. Barter isn’t as susceptible to inflation as the standard currency. We should do fine unless the country really plummeted to a new low.

  “Do you think we’ll ever come back here?” Asha asked, linking her hand through mine on one side and Dory’s on the other.

  I squeezed her fingers and nodded, though in truth I should have shaken my head. No, I didn’t believe that we’d come back here, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t leave the option open.

  After one last glance down at the city that had been our home for too long, we stumbled back down the steep slope to rejoin Percival at the bottom. It was time for our band of misfits to move on with our lives.

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  About the Author - Lee Hayton

  Lee Hayton (a USA Today bestselling author) is the nom-de-plume of Katherine Hayton—a middle-aged woman who works in insurance, doesn't have children or pets, can't drive, has lived in Christchurch her entire life, and currently resides a two-minute walk from where she was born.

  For some reason, she's developed a rich fantasy life.

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