The Longest Night #3

by Heather Knox

  She pauses for a second that stretches into too many, herself stretching to become moonlight and stardust and shadow—to become past and present and future, the known and unknown at once. “It is time for you to die, Ezekiel Winter. You may join me now and take your place among the honored dead in Valhalla, or you may die forgotten. You have glimpsed the future through your Oracle. You know I speak the truth. You know what is to come.”

  “And what of my Oracle?”

  “She, too, will be offered a choice—but her fate is not yours.”

  NOT FAR FROM DONUT EMPORIUM, I CATCH THEIR scent long before I hear the commotion. The predator within me howls and I am caught off-guard, a sound I haven’t heard in the hollows of my body since my first time hunting with the Praedari pack Zeke and I infiltrated—a sound I manage to prevent my throat from echoing in this moment by clenching my jaw. Instead, a whimper escapes my lips, a paltry impersonation of what rattles inside me and causes the hairs on my body to stand at attention. Whether I’ve entered someone’s territory or they’ve entered mine is uncertain, arbitrary, as neither the Praedari nor the Keepers claim this strip as their own and no individual holds territory successfully without acknowledgment from their sect—regardless, a predator is a predator and mine aches for a fight.

  Commendable, the strength of those Praedari choosing to live as a pack, their Beast-selves learning to not only exist alongside one another but to hunt and thrive as a cohesive unit. Years of intensive training allow most Keepers to mingle with Everlasting other than their own Usher with whom they share blood, but even then our inner Beast only retreats for a while, allowing us to swallow the dark urges calling to us from deep within our psyches, chipping away at the delicate armor we’ve erected in an attempt to deny this part of ourselves. But the Praedari do not deny this second nature, do not require rigorous training to control the predator within and do not suffer the same way as a result. Keepers pay the high cost of denying this dual nature when they finally snap. In that we pose the greatest danger to ourselves and to our cause.

  Tonight, three distinct scents, each like a fingerprint, unique in subtle ways but always bearing the taint of one of the Everlasting; likely a Praedari pack hunting. Were they but passing through, the night would not betray them. No, they’ve been in the area long enough to saturate the streets with their stink. I haven’t faced a Praedari since the last of our host pack fell. I wonder if I could pass as one of them now.

  Then the commotion: shattering of glass, screams, gunfire.

  “HOW DO YOU EVEN SAY HER NAME?” JOHNNY asks his packmates with a sneer. “More-gawks?”

  “Come now, poppet, is that what you call customer service?” Pierce asks with a pout as he looks first to his bullet-riddled chest and then at the girl who stares at the three of them down the barrel of a handgun which trembles in her grasp. Her eyes wide, her dark brown visor now slid back and dangling from her ponytail as she backs towards the rear exit. “Trigger-happy twit . . . ” he mutters.

  “No wonder no one claims this litterbox of a territory—even the donut girl is packing heat,” Lydia announces as she steps through the now-shattered front window. “Can’t even get an easy meal . . . ” she laments to no one in particular.

  Johnny hops over the counter to stand in front of rows of metal trays of donuts. He raises his hand to cup his chin in exaggerated consideration.

  “What are you in the mood for, Lyd? A blueberry cobbler croissant donut? Butternut? Apple and spice? Maybe you want something filled with a little red . . . ”

  With that he grabs a jelly donut from the tray and stuffs it in his mouth, crumbs erupting from between his lips as he laughs. A glob of jelly oozes out of the end of the pastry and lands on the stubble covering his chin. In an instant he’s inhaled two glazed and half a butternut, the sugary fallout coating his palms, fingers sticky.

  In another instant red spews from between his lips as he wretches, covering the counter with blood and undigested donut chunks. Pierce glares at Johnny as the girl huddles with her back now against the wall, chamber empty but still she squeezes the trigger rhythmically, as if in a trance.

  “Gross, Johnny! It’s like The Exorcist up in here!” Lydia screeches in disgust from the relative safety of the illuminated storefront window cavity.

  “Worth . . . it . . . ” he manages from between spastic, wet heaves.

  In another instant the girl slumps against the wall, hitting the dingy off-white tile with a sickening thud.

  “DON’T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN!” HUNTER shouts, fists balled at his sides, face shifting from red to a sort of purple. “They’re pumping her full of vampire blood and we’re supposed to sit here waiting for them to—to what? To let us go? To eat us? To turn us into one of them?”

  “I’m tellin’ you . . . she looked a lot better. I’m not saying I agree—”

  The crash of wood-meeting-tile as a nightstand hits the floor interrupts Logan, the drawer yawning and spewing forth its contents: a notepad, a pen, a couple bottles of pills.

  “Dude, chill!” Kiley demands as a pill bottle rolls to her feet. She kicks it towards Hunter who stands amidst the immediate debris just a few feet away. The contents clatter to the floor, tiny orbs of pink and green and blue.

  “Chill?” Hunter takes a couple long strides towards her, drawing back one fist.

  Logan steps between them. Where his normally stockier build would typically dwarf Hunter’s slender frame, the latter, bolstered by his rage, seems nearly as large—and easily twice as reckless.

  The first punch Hunter throws glances off Logan’s neck, pitching Hunter’s center of gravity too far forward. Logan puffs out his chest in anticipation, letting his shoulder catch Hunter in the jaw with a snap as his upper and lower teeth come together too hard. Logan shoves Hunter, sending him toppling backwards to the floor.

  “Stop!” Kiley screams, but the two don’t seem to notice.

  Logan takes a few steps towards Hunter who clamors to his feet and takes a step back, hands up in front of him in surrender. As Logan lunges, Kiley launches herself onto his back, wrapping her legs around his waist and one arm around his neck.

  “I said stop!” she yells again as she starts pummeling Logan’s head with her clenched fist—more desperate in her flailing than exerting any real strength. “I. Don’t. Need. To. Be. Saved!” she yells, each word punctuated by a rap on Logan’s skull.

  “What the—?!” Logan spins around a few times, trying to loosen her grip on him.

  Hunter, now backed against a wall of the suite, starts laughing—at first quietly, then crescendoing to a deep belly laugh that has him doubled over. Kiley’s assault slows, her clenched fist now relaxed and its attached arm joins her other around Logan’s neck to hold herself on her non-consensual piggy-back ride.

  “What’re you laughing at?” she demands.

  “You! You’re . . . he’s . . . with your . . . ” Hunter imitates her flailing. “I don’t need to be saved!” He manages between laugh-choking breaths, flailing again.

  “Shut up!” she yells, stifling her own laughter and twisting in an attempt to get Logan to put her down. “Let me go!”

  “No way!” he laughs, clamping her legs with his arms. “I’ve got her—get her diary!” he calls to Hunter.

  “Don’t you dare!” she yells, resuming her flailing on the back of a chuckling Logan. She yanks his hair and he tries to cry out, but the sound is swallowed by his own laughter.

  Hunter scrambles for her bed, reaching under her pillow. He pulls out her black hardcover Moleskine journal and flips it open, reading aloud.

  “‘Things that kill them: sunlight, garlic?’ ‘Crosses’ is crossed out . . . ‘Ash when dead like on Buffy?’” Hunter rifles through a few pages, pausing a couple seconds on each to scan the contents. “‘Get Lydia’s story,’” he continues. “‘To Interview: Victor, Lydia, British guy, thug guy, others?’ Are these . . . notes?”

  Logan releases his hold on Kiley, letting her drop down. She lu
nges for Hunter and the journal, swiping it from his hands.

  “Obviously! What else would it be?” she hisses, clutching the journal to her chest and glaring at the two boys. “How is that even a question?” she mutters under her breath.

  “Kiley, do you really think that interviewing the people who kidnapped us is going to accomplish anything?” Logan asks, the concern in his voice mirrored in his gaze.

  Hunter scoffs. “She probably thinks she’ll be the next Anne Rice once we get out of here,” he mocks. “If we get out of here,” he adds, returning her glare.

  “Actually,” she announces, “I have a plan.”

  I AM JUST BLOCKS FROM THE ALLEY WHERE ZEKE DIED when I hear the glass shatter—alone, not something I’m too concerned with in this neighborhood, but when gunshots erupt into the otherwise quiet night I feel as though the breath I no longer draw has been knocked from me. I remember the girl working at Donut Emporium from a few nights ago, firearm tucked into the small of her back and covered by her polo, not hidden but out of sight.

  Zeke called episodes like these omens—not quite a vision but a feeling, my predator within responding to something unseen or, in some instances, something that has not quite come to pass. When feeling optimistic, I call them impressions; more often than not, I call them distractions—what good in knowing there will be a tornado but not where it might strike?

  Tonight, though, I heed my inner Beast, knowing it likely a pack of Praedari are on the hunt. I jog towards the sound and, sure enough, the sidewalk in front of the illuminated windowfront of the Donut Emporium glitters with glass shards. A quick survey reveals the front counter covered in sticky red and a single whiff of the metallic tang tells me what I need to know: they were here and, judging by the quantity of blood, got what they came for. I turn and dart to the end of the building, ducking into the narrow passage leading to the alley.

  I press my back against the exposed brick of the wall, cool and rough on my flesh. Hushed voices quarrel, punctuated by whimpers muffled by something soft. I lean forward to peer around the corner: near an unmarked dark blue van, a man—large in build, almost Herculean even from this distance—covered in blood hoists a squirming young woman over his shoulder, bound at the ankles and wrists with zip ties and gagged half-heartedly with something tied loosely around her jaw.

  “I don’t see why I can’t have a taste. I’m hungry.” He speaks to someone I can’t see and the van’s engine roars to life, headlights bathing the dumpster in bright. The dark color of the captive’s shirt makes it impossible to gauge the extent of her blood loss, but if the mess inside is any indicator, it’s a miracle she has this much fight left in her—unless this pack recruits rather than hunts this night.

  “That’s because of the digestive pyrotechnics you thought would be so incredibly funny—” a voice from inside the van retorts.

  “It was!” The large man guffaws, obviously amused with some earlier shenanigans that the unseen person references.

  I sniff: the familiar stink that awoke my predator within to howling is now overbearing. Three distinct scents, the same I’ve been tracking, but also something else, at once familiar and new, Everlasting and not. The girl? Did they forgo their barbaric Rite of Becoming, turning her here? Are the Praedari that desperate for numbers that they’d neglect their savage customs? Unable to rely on my sense of smell, I try to see if the girl is breathing. If she is breathing, she is still human. But I can’t tell if her chest rises because she is squirming too much.

  Hidden from sight by the dumpster, I don’t see her until she has already called her packmates’ attention to me—another young woman, no older than the one slung over her packmate’s shoulder, dressed in torn jeans and a dark T-shirt that probably boasted some band but the screenprint has long since crumbled. Her hair’s pulled on top of her head in a messy knot, wisps of it having fallen out of place now framing her face. She brandishes a long hunting knife with a devilish grin, popping a bubble of her gum as she takes a few measured strides in my direction. I feel that dark part of myself start to swell, filling me in response to being discovered. I swallow it down, save for a growl that escapes my throat.

  “And what have we here?” she asks, sniffing. “A pretty little Keeper so far from home? And what’s that?” She sniffs again. “She brought a friend along to play?”

  A second man steps from the van, leaving the door agape, and makes his way towards her with a casual gait. As soon as I catch his eye I find myself, for a moment, unable to look away: one eye a medium brownish-red, the color of a red fox’s fur, and the other bright blue, the effect startling against the dark of his skin. I glance around the alley, counting their distance to me in the reduced seconds of an Everlasting’s reflexes. I step into the alley, away from the corner I’d been tucked behind, planting my feet firmly to meet them. I cross my arms over my chest, gaze unflinching.

  “Manners, Lydia. You don’t know she’s a Keeper,” he rebukes. “But she is right—you are lovely,” he adds with a thick accent and charming warmth, smiling at me.

  “Quit flirting, Pierce,” his packmate volleys, rolling her eyes.

  Behind them, their sneering packmate busies himself with loading the squirming, bound woman into the cargo area of the van, seeming to struggle with not knocking her head or limbs against the vehicle. The awkward way he tosses her around, nearly dropping her more than once and in quick succession, leads me to believe he’s not usually the careful one of the three.

  “What’s with the precious cargo?” I demand, indicating the captive with a quick shift of my eyes.

  That’s when I see shadow flicker underneath the van, cast from the far side, unnoticed by the man nearest it who’s finally wrestled the captive into the van with some muttered cussing—unnoticed, too, by the two whose attention I have. From my peripheral vision I see the large, black bird from the other night perched on the dumpster.

  She brought a friend along to play? the young woman had taunted when she discovered me. I caught the scent of the three of them and someone else—but what if the someone else wasn’t the girl they’d come for?

  That’s when I realize there’s something else here besides me and them.

  SOME SAY WHEN WE LET OUR INNER BEAST TAKE OVER we allow our ancestors in. For those Elders still alive—or Slumbering—we allow them to see through our eyes, to feel through our touch. We honor them, but in doing so we become vulnerable to them, more than one tale told of an Everlasting unable to recover from the bloodlust of their ancestors that sang in their veins.

  Most Keepers dismiss this as nonsense, but the Praedari live it, building elaborate rites around the idea of honoring one’s ancestors by embracing the predator within. Their Ritus Essendi, the Rite of Becoming, demonstrates the ultimate in submission to one’s ancestors: from the outside looking in, they succumb entirely to their bestial-self in a moment of desperation, scrambling to survive and, in doing so, proving themselves to their sect.

  In truth, they channel the strength of their ancestors. The scramble to survive allows their Elders to move through them, to be one with the earth again, to relive their own Becoming and honor their own ancestors, and so forth. Even those that fail to climb from the dirt to be reborn experience this connection with their ancestors and serve the sect in doing so. Those Elders in the Slumber experience through them their own Becoming, something the Praedari believe vital to keeping them loyal to the sect even as the passage of time may have otherwise jaded them to the cause.

  Politics aside, there’s beauty in this, that we may live again in those we created—that we may, in those we created, and in ourselves, summon those who’ve gone before. In this way we are never truly alone. In this way none of us ever truly dies. Our Final Moment becomes just another moment of many.

  FROM THE RITUS ESSENDI OF THE PRAEDARI:

  O Blood of our Blood

  and Blood of Before,

  all the way back to our Mother:

  we gather as Brothers and Sisters in noct
is,

  stars underneath Her moon,

  to light the darkness

  for those we buried.

  O Blood of our Blood

  and Blood of Before,

  the Longest Night has come.

  Theirs is not a mass grave,

  but a shared womb.

  Theirs is not to die,

  but to be reborn.

  And we shall receive them

  as they Become,

  O Blood of our Blood

  and Blood of Before,

  cradle them to our bosom,

  guide them in the Eternal Hunt.

  Amen.

  MY INNER BEAST SNARLS AS I SNARL, FANGS EMERGing as I subconsciously step aside and unleash this part of me for what might come. This is not the Keeper way, allowing the predator within to guide rather than lurk denied underneath the surface. No, this I learned while infiltrating their ranks. To defeat them I must, for now, become like them, unhindered by emotion and logic. In a way it feels good to let go, to step aside and allow myself to be someone else, something else. To allow those with whom I share Blood to sing their ancient wisdom through my actions—the secret to the predator within that the Praedari know and the Keepers will never.

  The girl notices the shift in me before the others, lunging for me blade-first before I can offer the first strike to catch them unaware. I snarl again and lunge in her direction, our bodies crashing against one another. I manage to narrowly avoid the blade itself as it slices the air just centimeters from the delicate flesh where my earlobe meets my neck.

  From the rear of the dark blue van I hear a low, vulgar whistle as I grab Lydia’s wrist and wrench her knife-wielding arm behind her back with a twist. Johnny slams the cargo doors of the van, leering.