by Alana Melos
She took me at my word and looked at the open mouth of the alley. “We need to get out of sight, and fast,” she said. “Have you any ideas?”
“I’ve got the perfect place,” I said as I stood, brushing off her help. My body aches, but I could act on my own just fine. “We were just there earlier today.”
Her frown deepened for just a moment, then her eyes lit up and she nodded. “If it’s there,” she said, her tone edging into dubiousness.
“It should be,” I said. “From what I gather, my mother left. Without her, they couldn’t topple Uptown. Their base should still be there, though. Why not go your separate ways? Why not hide and retire? That’s what crooks do.”
“It’s a long shot,” Adira said, but she strode down the alley towards the nearest subway without waiting for me. I hurried to catch up to her.
“At least we’ll be underground and out of the public eye,” I said with a meaningful nod towards a streetcam. “If nothing else, those unused subway tunnels will be there even if the portal to their base isn’t.”
These streets hadn’t changed much from Imperial City. In the lab, I’d been too preoccupied with the power the drug had given me, but now I saw the other benefits. It didn’t just enhance a meta’s power, but the meta themselves. My pain receptors were turned down. My reactions were faster. My senses were keener, though not to the point of overpowering me. My mind was sharper. I worked quickly to come up with a couple of other plans in case this one failed.
It didn’t. Though we heard sirens, we were in the subway and on a train in a matter of a few minutes. Once we got off, we moved into the tunnels. From there, I found our way to where the portal to the base should be… and it was. Just like before, I opened the portal, then stepped in. Before I even looked around, I turned and authorized Adira’s entry as well. I felt awfully proud of myself until I heard Adira’s soft gasp, saw her eyes widening in surprise.
I turned, expecting an enemy. What I saw was carnage. It was old, certainly, but bodies lay strewn in the entry point, which I had deemed the lobby in my head. It wasn’t just that they were dead, but that they had been eviscerated and dismembered. Dessicated parts lay everywhere, denoting the mad battlefield. Old blood stained the walls, marking the blank grey concrete brown and black in places, even parts of the ceiling. Everything was dry, nothing was fresh. This had been here for years, perhaps decades.
“The heroes?” Adira asked.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “This was my mother.”
“Why?” she asked, looking to me.
I pointed to the side of the large room. There was one spot which lay undisturbed: a couch with a corpse laid upon it. We walked to it and I bit my lip. The corpse was of a large man wearing a tattered and rotted suit. His flesh had sunken in and putrefied, letting bits and pieces of his skeleton to poke through. The desiccation left him unrecognizable, but I knew who he had been from his clothing. This was my father, or he would have been in this dimension.
There was a bullet hole in his skull, a killing shot. “He was assassinated,” I said, my voice numb and distant. It had to have been a distance shot. If he had smelled a whiff of danger, he’d have transformed into his superpowered alter ego. In that form, he was pretty much immune to damage. “He was shot, and she must have brought him back here.”
“Why?” she asked again as she circled around the couch, careful not to disturb anything.
“When something upsets you, you go where you feel safe, don’t you?” I said as I knelt by the corpse. It fascinated me in a morbid way. My father was very much alive. Big, rough and tumble, quiet and strong. He was a guy you didn’t want to fuck with. A sniper shot would have been about the only way he could have been taken out.
“Then these would be her friends,” Adira said, her words soft. “Why kill them?”
I shook my head at that. “She’s crazy,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe they tried to… I don’t know. Do something. Pull her away from him.” I frowned deeply. “But trust me when I tell you this was her. It wasn’t the Sentinels. They would have cleaned this place up, taken it over, or at least emptied it out. It was her.”
“Then she escaped to Prime,” Adira prompted. “With you.”
“For a reason,” I breathed as I understood. “For a very specific reason.” I looked up at my vampire friend. “In Prime, she died. She was going to take the other’s place.” I paused and rubbed my head, almost wishing for the headache back instead of this awful knowledge which had bloomed. “This is so fucked up on so many levels I can’t even count.”
“It seems reasonable to me,” Adira said as she came round to stand by me again. When she spoke next, her voice had a curious lilt to it. “Love makes one do many strange things.”
“He tore Uptown apart, in Prime,” I said, putting the last pieces together. “For revenge. There wasn’t any… any plan to take down the Sentinels. No plan to stop them, or to destroy the world government… or… or anything. He did it for revenge.” He’d never been one for big plans, the kind of world domination plans super villains were known for. He’d always just wanted his payday and an island to retire on, both of which he’d gotten. Revenge was the only reason he’d do something like that, and he must have convinced the others as well. I rubbed my temple, trying to think of any old news footage I’d seen of the Fall of Uptown. I remembered him in his alter ego quite well. Had my mother been there too? Or had she not arrived yet with me in her arms? I couldn’t recall.
“Come,” she said, gripping my shoulder. “Who knows when this drug will wear off? Come. Stand up.”
I shook my head, trying to rid myself of this vague betrayed feeling. I studied the bullet wound, and decided the front was an exit wound. I’d thought that the Blackguard had attacked Upton because of something grand, something meaningful: an attempt and a success at changing the world. It was all for revenge? This couldn’t be right, but I knew it was.
Adira pulled me to my feet as gently as she could. I kept staring at the corpse, wanting to finger the bullet hole to see if it was real or I was hallucinating. “It has to mean more,” I whispered. “There has to be a purpose.”
“Away,” she said, her voice firm. I looked at her, wanting to understand. “Stop thinking about this. The drug will wear off and you will need attention, and food. Painkillers for certain. Come with me. Let’s find a quiet, clean spot.”
I let her lead me away as I tried to reconcile the differences in my mind, without much success.
Chapter Nine
The vampire had been quite right about needing painkillers when the drug I was on wore off. Strangely, it lasted much longer than the two pills I had taken earlier. I chalked it up to using my powers so much when I had taken them before. My adrenalin had been pumping too and, all in all, I’d exerted myself quite heavily.
She sat me down in what looked to be someone’s private quarters and then went to hunt for food and water. My mind spun around the facts I now knew, and I had so many questions for my parents. Towards the end of my contemplations, I decided the motivations didn’t matter. He had still torn down the city in the sky--whether alone or with her--and done a great deed which was still being talked about in hushed tones. Both had reputations which would be their legacy as two of the greatest super villains who had ever lived.
I was still going to try to top it. However, instead of destroying, I was going to create. Well, maybe steal and change might be more accurate. I had lain awake so many nights thinking about my dream, seeing it, building it in my mind. Did it matter that my father accomplished this great deed because he was pissed off? No. No, it really didn’t. I mean, I wouldn’t want to piss him off either. When my dad got something into his head, he followed it to completion. Whether he used guile or brute force, he always got what he wanted in the end.
Though logically it was sound, in reality, I still felt cheapened by the revelation. It must have been a confusing time for him, for her… for the both of them. Though it wasn’t somethin
g I thought of often, I knew they loved each other with quiet passion. It wasn’t something that ever needed to be said. It was shown in every touch and every look they shared. If that was all they wanted from life, then fine. I was going to have more, so much more.
Then, the Clarity wore off. Like before, it simply dropped away, leaving me first wincing in pain, then almost crying at the intensity of the withdrawal. By this time, Adira had found painkillers--no, it wasn’t smart to take more old drugs, but what choice did I have?--and water kept fresh by whatever filters they had here. Not only that, but she’d found a stock of MREs which would be fine to eat, in theory. We’d see later how that would go in practice.
Quite unlike times before, Adira didn’t offer me her blood to help heal my wounds. Instead, she seemed content to let the drugs do their job. They’d lost some potency over time. Eventually they kicked in, and I went to sleep. When I woke, my head still pounded and my shoulders still ached, but the worst was the stab wound in my side. During all my exertions, it had broken open and I hadn’t noticed through everything else. We went through the process of stitching it up and sterilizing it, then I rested some more. Since the Sentinels hadn’t busted in already, we were safe. They’d never found this place in either world. Bully for us.
What clanged around in my head over the next few days wasn’t the revelations that I’d discovered, or that my dad had given into one of the simplest of motivations to rip Uptown from the sky. It was the fact that had gotten shoved aside in all the excitement and confusion: I was a clone. I was just a copy. My waking hours found me sitting in the lobby across from my “dad’s” corpse staring at him, wondering what I was. In the span of a single day, everything I had known about myself had been torn away. It wasn’t the lies he had told me. I was the lie.
I found myself in a mood I’d never been in before. I sat there, trying to wrap my mind around it. All these big plans I had seemed like nothing now. What was the point? They weren’t really my parents. I was just a carbon copy of some failed guardian experiment, and a weaker one at that. Even when I told myself to just move on and forget about it, a few minutes later I found myself thinking the exact same thing, over and over again like a skipping record.
On the dawn of the third ‘day’--I say that loosely because it was the third time I slept, but who knew how long it actually was--I awoke to find Adira sitting on the edge of the bed I’d commandeered, looking at me with a grave face.
“What?” I asked as I pushed the covers off.
“We need to make a plan,” she said. “We cannot stay here indefinitely.”
“We’ll use the portal to get home,” I replied as I sat up. While dusty, the beds here had been pretty comfortable, and there wasn’t a single rodent or bug to be found.
“I know that,” she said, her voice patient. “What after that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I grumped, already wanting her to leave me alone. This brooding malaise had infected me. I didn’t like it, but I also didn’t see a way out of it either.
“It does,” she insisted. “The Siren has been captured. You were weak and needed time, but enough has passed now that decisions have to be made.”
“Then make them,” I said as I stood up. I looked at my clothes and sighed. I didn’t really want to put them on, so I just sat back down on the bed, naked.
“You are the leader, and you need to make the decisions.”
I looked at her, still frowning. “You were Nazferatu’s second in command, so you’ve made enough decisions in your time,” I said. “You didn’t have to follow me here.”
“It’s a good thing I did,” she said. “And it wasn’t my first choice. Things moved too quickly for me to get more than a message off. People are waiting to hear from us. From you.”
“Wait, back up, what do you mean?” I asked.
At the question, she gave me the barest of smiles, a brief curve of her lips. “When I woke, my phone was broken. Since I did not know where you were, and I knew you would not leave me there unconscious, I knew you were captured. I followed you first, and, when I found you, I telephoned Rory with the location after taking someone else’s cell. When I returned to the warehouse, those people arrived… and I shadowstepped to follow you through the portal.” She pursed her lips for just a moment, then shook her head, letting her long black locks fall forward. “They are waiting for us on Prime, no doubt, or trying to search for us. They have no way to know we are here, and that Rebekah is elsewhere.”
“In the Reich,” I muttered and winced. Richter was probably not treating her kindly in the couple days it had been. The mad scientist had probably sawed off limbs to replace them with drills or knives or something else equally awful by now.
She winced with me, but nodded. “I had surmised as much. So, you need to make a decision on what we are to do.”
“Why me?” I asked, glaring at her.
“Because you’re the leader,” she said simply.
Shaking my head, I scowled at her, but I wasn’t really angry. For the first time in what seemed to be always, I wasn’t angry at anything. It felt too hard to feel much of anything other than this ennui which had fallen over me. I wanted to feel angry. I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself and to leave me alone, or to take my sword and slice until she was nothing but little bits. The emotion wouldn’t come, no matter how hard I tried to make it. I sat there with my hands in my lap, my mind going back to the circles it had been running in.
Her cool, smooth touch across my naked shoulders startled me. I hadn’t heard her move. “It’s alright,” she said, her voice soft and understanding.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “I’m not real. I’m just a copy. I’m not… I’m not real.” I didn’t know how else to put it. My whole life had been a lie. I knew I shouldn’t care about it, but I did, nevertheless. Knowing what I should be thinking or feeling and actually doing it were completely different things.
She squeezed my shoulders. “You feel real to me.”
I shook my head. “No, Alistair said that clones don’t have souls, and…” My voice wavered. I didn’t really want to share these things, but I had nothing left to do but talk. I told her everything. I told her about my upbringing, about my parents, about the great plans I had… about how I wanted to beat them, to beat my mother and show her I was better. All the while, she sat next to me and listened without uttering a word. And saying these things out loud, I knew it shouldn’t be bothering me so much, yet I couldn’t shake this feeling either simply by willing it so.
When I finished, Adira put a hand on my cheek and turned me to her. “None of this matters,” she said, her faint accent curling around her words. “You are strong and deadly. What you do in this world isn’t because of your family or because of a soul… it’s because you want to do it. Though I have known many vampires and werewolves, none have a greater hunger than you.” She left off the words ‘so sate it’, but I heard them anyway, echoed in her dark eyes.
I’d said before that I’ve been a loner for ages. Even when I did live with my folks, I kept to myself. It was easy, having a whole island to lose yourself in. After I left, I worked alone, unless I had to have a partner… then it was business only. I’d always thought of having “loved ones” or friends as a weakness. It was terrific for threatening people. They would often crumple at the thought of a hurt being done to their wife or child when they wouldn’t give into torture on their own. It was only recently I’d begun to think of people as more than things to sate my hunger or desire.
Her words cut through the fog, and I blinked at her while I considered. Even though she had said the same thing I had been telling myself, somehow, simply because it came from her, it held more meaning. Those words became like a talisman, a shining object of healing and mercy. She expected me to rise above it because she knew I could. I finally understood why folks bothered with other people. There was a great strength to be drawn from them. You pushed yourself the extra mile because they believed you could. Those tho
ughts cascaded, bringing to mind everything I’d done since I’d run away and how I trembled on the threshold of the first steps to my grand dream. It didn’t matter if I had the same genetic legacy because everything of importance I’d done had been on by myself, on my own terms. I might have been like her, but I wasn’t her. We were completely different people. I wasn’t going to let her dictate my life. It was something I’d known for a long time, and I was just now remembering it. When I focused on Adira again, her patient expression took on a new meaning.
I leaned over and kissed her, brushing my lips over hers. Adira responded with gentleness instead of intensity, keeping the kiss light. She leaned me back until we lay on the bed and wrapped her arms around me, embracing me as we kissed. Though my desire sprang to life--it was never far from the surface--I found that I hungered after the embrace more than a climax. There was a simple comfort in just being held by someone, whether they cared about you or not. It was a balm to my mind, a cut which let out some of the poison of indecision which had been paralyzing me. Our fingers intertwined as we kissed, her cool dead lips against my warm living ones. The dichotomy between the living and the dead had always enthralled me, ever since I realized I could be as rough with the undead as I wished. That was with Nosferatu though, my dark lover who craved pain as much as I did, who reveled in blood.
Adira was not Nosferatu, though I’m sure I could have done anything I wanted with her. Her quiet strength seeped into me, emboldening me so that I rolled her over and lay atop, taking control of our kiss, demanding more from her. She gave it all to me, whatever I wanted and more. When I broke from her and stared into her crimson eyes, I realized that it wasn’t just loyalty or lust which kept her by my side: it was love. We remained locked together this way as I wondered at her emotion, wondered what it looked like. I reached for her with care, mindful of the pain from before. A few faint threads came into my sight, foremost among them the pink I’d come to associate with great caring. Though I couldn’t feel it as I wished to, nor see it very clearly, it was there, nestled among her thoughts.