The Fall: Sanguine Series: Book One

by Chris Laughton

  Kai took in the smells of the cabin and noted how cold it was; the man must have just arrived. That fact meant Kai could follow the smell of him through the cabin, as he hadn’t been here long enough for his scent to be pervasive. With only slightly more caution this time, Kai moved slowly through the cabin, listening for any hint of a trap. Eventually Kai came to angled metal cellar doors strangely inside the cabin. They looked like what would lead into a storm cellar had they been outside, but now, Kai could smell that the man had gone down there to hide. Perhaps they were barred from the other side, but it was still a strange decision for the man to trap himself down there with no exit that wasn’t through Kai. If he was panicking, that was to Kai’s advantage. He stood to the side of the door and leaned to grab one of the handles. He gave it a slight pull, bringing the door partially up before letting it slam back down and straightening himself up to avoid any attack the man had readied, but none came. This was going to be too easy. Stepping in front of the doors, he put a hand on each handle, and pulled throwing them wide open.

  His eyes went wide as he realized what was on the other side. The man had his feet wedged under the top step, using them to keep himself upright and flush with the doors. Now that the doors were open, the man sprung forward, feet still locked in under the step and grabbed Kai by the coat. Kai brought his hands off the handles of the cellar doors, but it was too late. The man pulled backwards and down, flattening himself against the stairs, and slingshotting Kai past him into the cellar, sending him crashing hard onto its floor. He felt his right shoulder dislocate, but it was drowned out by the anger that was coursing through him. This human had dared to try to trick him? Alexander would be picking up the pieces of his prize when he came to collect.

  He rose off the floor and looked back up the stairs to see the light extinguishing as the doors slammed shut. Impossible. How had the man extricated himself from being wedged into the stairs and made it back into the cabin-proper before Kai could even get up off the floor? Kai ran up the stairs as fast as he could, ramming into the doors with all his might, and was surprised they flew open without any resistance. It hadn’t felt great on his shoulder, but he had been sure the man would’ve been bracing the doors closed. He flew into the wall opposite the doors and hit his arm against the table that was placed against it. It exploded into flying splinters from his impact, but his arm had hit the table first and pulled on his injured shoulder awkwardly, making him cry out in pain. He was still recovering from the shock when he felt that same arm wrenched behind him as new pain sung from muscles and cartilage tearing in the joint. The man was behind him now, holding that arm up behind Kai’s head and pinning him to the wall. Kai tried to pull it down, but he had no leverage and the muscles that would’ve been in charge of the task were too damaged right now to be of much use. Trying to engage them gave him tunnel vision from the anguish. Kai felt an impact behind one of his knees and felt the lower leg separate.

  The man was taking Kai apart joint by joint and he was doing it too fast for Kai to react. The man spun him around in a half circle to put him closer to the cellar doors again and Kai got a look at his face. There was no panic anywhere on it. In fact, there was an eerie calm. In the split second that followed, Kai realized how stupid he’d been. He’d rushed in, eager for the capture, never once heeding the alarm in the back of his head telling him that this was no ordinary prey. The man drew back, but he was standing on Kai’s feet, so when Kai tried to retreat, he began to topple backwards, his stomach rising into his throat from the momentary weightlessness. He had only tilted back a few inches when the man slammed his fists into Kai’s chest, breaking several ribs and sending him rocketing back into the cellar. This time, he hit with the back of his skull first, and felt a sickening crack. Whether it was from the head trauma, or the man closing the cellar doors again, everything slowly went black for Kai, but he didn’t mind. At least it meant a reprieve from his pain.

  30

  Trevor had returned with the rest of the Project’s team from their ill-fated attempt to woo Mason, but everyone was still searching for what came next. Mason had gone from unknown to their sole focus in the span of a week, and now he was back to being an afterthought; a cautionary tale of rushing a recruitment. For Trevor and Simone, what came next was being berated in Westfield’s office.

  “We drove half the team all that way for you to give some ten minute time-share pitch and blow any shot we had at recruiting him?” Dr. Westfield berated his daughter. “This is why I normally let Trevor handle recruitment. It takes a little more patience than you seem to have.”

  Trevor glanced at Simone, but she didn’t seem interested in offering up any defense of herself, so he did. “Sir, there are other reasons Mason said ‘no’ that we discussed while I gave him a ride. I’m not sure it mattered how convincing Simone was.” ‘Not that it was her finest moment,’ he thought to himself.

  All Trevor had done by speaking was direct Westfield’s attention to him. “And you! I guess we should switch seats, because you’re running the show now, eh? Don’t forget the reason you’re here, Mr. Sanders,” Westfield chastised him. Any time Westfield used your last name instead of your first, you knew he was angry. Trevor was somewhat surprised he hadn’t referred to Simone as ‘Ms. Westfield’, but the old man wasn’t done. “The next time I give an order, I expect your men to follow it without question. Is that understood?” Trevor chuckled to himself. It was a move he knew would set off Westfield, but he didn’t care. Sure enough, Westfield turned even redder, and the vein on his temple grew even more pronounced. “Is something amusing, Mr. Sanders!?”

  “’The next time’,” Trevor mocked. “The next time you give my men an order to kill someone who isn’t a vampire, helping them, or hell, even showing an inclination towards helping them, I will relieve you of command and give Simone a field promotion. Is that understood?” Trevor stood so he could lean over the desk. The pause was partly to collect himself. His voice had begun to rise, and he didn’t want the men outside to hear his little rebellion. In a calmer tone, he continued, “You recruited me under the auspices of fighting the good fight, protecting humanity, averting extinction; all that nonsense. I’ve been here too long to still have stars in my eyes, but until now, I still thought you were on the right side. In my fifteen years here, my team and I have been the ones in the field, doing the actual killing. I’ve never seen you lay a hand on a vampire, and now, a decade and a half in, the first time I see you try to kill something, it’s a person? Simone was right. That’s not who we are, so you better think long and hard about who you are.”

  Simone looked up at him and lightly placed her hand on his shoulder. The look was clear: don’t cross any lines you can’t come back from.

  Westfield crossed his arms. “So that’s it, eh? Took you long enough, but you’re finally making your move for my job.”

  “I didn’t even want this job,” Trevor said truthfully.

  Twelve years ago, the former Head of Combat Operations had gotten killed on what should have been a fairly routine operation. Westfield had approached Trevor afterwards and appealed to his sense of duty. “It doesn’t matter if it’s what you want,” Westfield had said back then, “it’s what the cause needs.” Words Trevor was all too happy to remember now.

  “But it’s what the cause needed. Just like the cause needs someone now to remind you of what it is we do here. We have one enemy: Alexander. Anyone helping him has to go, but anyone who isn’t, is not. our. enemy,” he stressed the last words emphatically.

  Westfield was momentarily stunned at being given what was essentially a direct order. Trevor, however, had made his point and was tired of this argument. “I’m going to check on Maya.”

  Westfield chortled and regained a bit of his haughtiness. “You mean the vampire? One of the vampires you just so expertly explained were the real enemy? Yet another kill you refuse to make? Jesus, everyone here’s gone soft. None of you realize you might have to get your hands dirty to win this w
ar.”

  Trevor ignored his tangent. “Yes, the vampire. The vampire who led us to Mason in the first place, who, if we’d managed to bring him on board,” he turned to Simone for an aside, “no offense, ma’am,” before returning his attention to Westfield, “would’ve been an amazing asset to our cause. It seems a lot easier to just lead Alexander to Mason if she was really trying to help the vampires.”

  “Or maybe she knew Mason would never join us and just did a masterful job of wasting our time and ruining our momentum after we’d killed more vampires in the previous week than the previous year.”

  It was a thought that had crossed Trevor’s mind as well. In the end, he had to trust his gut. And his gut told him that Maya wanted the same thing he did. “Even if Maya knew Mason wouldn’t join us, that means she can see the future, and do you really think Alexander would intentionally give us that ability just to waste a week of our time?” He rose to his feet and opened the door to the office again. “Simone?”

  Simone glanced between the two of them for a tense second, before getting up and slinking past Trevor through the open door. Westfield stared daggers at the two of them at least until Trevor turned and closed the door behind him.

  “I’m sorry if I put you in an awkward position back there,” Trevor said to Simone as they walked to Maya’s room.

  “No, it’s fine. It needed to happen. You and I both know my father isn’t the same man he was when you joined us. Even aging at his rate, he’s an old man now, and he’s frustrated. I don’t think he realized sixty years ago that he’d still be working on this today, but that’s no excuse for trying to kill someone in pretty much cold blood.”

  Trevor was secretly pleased to hear Simone take his side. Even when you knew you were right, it was still nice to not be on an island. If Westfield pressed this issue and his men had any question about where they landed, Simone lending her weight would give him real credibility.

  As they approached the heavily barricaded door to Maya’s room, Trevor started thinking about how he would be able to tell if it was Maya in that room, or… other Maya. He wasn’t close enough yet to knock on the door, but he still heard her voice as he approached.

  “The girl can’t come with him,” she said, just loudly enough to be heard through the door.

  31

  Mason had actually started to believe that everything could go back to normal. That if Trevor kept his word, The Project would fade into a distant memory and he could get on with his life. The life that he had been thinking more and more would involve Rebekah. He’d been at the cabin this weekend ostensibly checking to see if he wanted to buy it, but really trying to figure out what his ‘dreams’ had been about. And then that… thing had showed up in front of the cabin, as if it could hide what it was with some story about car trouble. Thankfully, Mason had been downwind of him. There was definitely something off about him, but if it weren’t for the smell, Mason may have never paid enough attention to look at the tracks in the snow and see how they hurriedly joined the trail about two hundred yards behind where the creature had been standing. What stranded motorist would take off through woods? The thing had obviously underestimated him, and lay bleeding (dying?) at the bottom of the cellar stairs because of it. Mason doubted he would get so lucky to be underestimated again, and if he’d just burned his one ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, then he needed to disappear. Perhaps Cut Bank wasn’t so bad after all. Well no, there was no way ‘The Coldest Place in the Nation’ wasn’t just awful, but it might be the best option left.

  There was another option of course. He could try to get back in touch with The Osiris Project and see if Trevor could shed any light on this. How had they found him? It couldn’t be coincidence that he’d gone his entire life without knowing anything about vampires or The Project, and now, within a week, he’d been introduced to both, could it? And if it wasn’t a coincidence, could he trust Trevor? He wasn’t comfortable flying blind on this one, so it wasn’t like he had much choice. Even if The Project was still a threat, Mason didn’t think Trevor was. There was no logical reason to protect him in the meeting and then turn vampires loose on him, so at the very least, Trevor should be someone Mason could count on.

  Right now, however, he had a more pressing matter to attend to. If the vampires had figured out where he was, it wouldn’t exactly be a huge intellectual leap for them to head to the rental office and try to get his info. Luckily, he had options. The elderly couple who rented out the cabin were super old-school. “Don’t trust ‘em,” the man had said when Mason asked if he took credit a few months back when he rented the cabin for the first time. The fact that he had referred to them in the plural, as if they were still the physical cards people used to carry revealed just how off the grid he lived. The man dealt only in physical, printed off identification information, which was no small feat given how electronic everything was, even now. Born a hundred years too late, the man probably took in half the bookings he could if he modernized. Of course, he still had to get paid in crypto coins. He might’ve been old-school, but he wasn’t stupid: he wouldn’t have been able to use government money for anything besides kindling. His wife, on the other hand, would’ve been comfortable in almost any era of history. All she wanted to do was clean the cabins the two of them owned and rented out, cook or bake (there were always fresh cookies in the rental office!), and spend time with her husband. He hadn’t asked their ages, but they spoke about things they had done as adults pre-Fall which meant no matter how you did the math, it was still impressive how well they got around. They had been so apologetic when Mason had told them about the dead skunk in the cellar. Really, he just hadn’t wanted them to blame him for any cleanup they had to do, but they had insisted on letting him have the place again for free at some point. He’d taken them up on it this weekend.

  He had been rather fond of the couple, which made what he was going to do them that much harder: he needed to steal the information they had on him. In and of itself, taking the copy of his identification wasn’t really that detestable: they had it to protect themselves against any damage he might do to the property, and he had done none (although he could only hope the vampire he trapped in the cellar didn’t tear the place up too badly while escaping). No, the unfortunate part was that when the vampires came to the couple to try to track down Mason, as they were sure to do, it was probable that their only hope of getting through the encounter alive would be if they had information to give that would lead the vampires to Mason, the same information he was about to do his best to remove.

  It was a decision Mason was pretending to struggle with, but really, he had no choice. If the vampires learned his identity, then it wasn’t just him at risk, it was everyone he knew. Rebekah, her sister Gwen, her niece Louise, hell, even just coworkers could be put in danger. Once they knew who he was, the longer he evaded them, the less of a connection someone would need to have with him to be at risk. The die had been cast the moment the vampire found him at the cabin: if they didn’t already know who he was, he had to steal the information and keep it that way.

  Mason had surmised that they didn’t know who he was. If they were after Mason Rayne, as far as anyone knew, he was still in Seattle. His trip to the cabin had been a surprise that he kept from even Rebekah, so it was either blind chance that the vampire had stumbled upon him, or they’d been watching that cabin without knowing who Mason was. He wasn’t sure which seemed more outrageous. The world was still a large place, and stumbling on him by chance would’ve been almost statistically impossible. But them watching the cabin itself made even less sense. If there was one place he hadn’t done anything to draw attention to himself, it was at the cabin.

  Mason slowed and pulled over to the side of the road while he was lost in thought. There was a third option that he hadn’t considered…

  He turned the wheel on the car, and started speeding back towards the cabin. He’d been so lost in his self-importance, even more bloated since his meeting with The Project where h
e was told he could be some kind of savior, that he hadn’t considered the obvious: this wasn’t part of some vampire conspiracy looking for him or watching the cabin. That had simply been a hungry vampire who misjudged the ease of a meal. It was only statistically impossible for a vampire to stumble on him, Mason Rayne, superhuman, but for a vampire to stumble upon an isolated human while hunting? That was downright probable. If he could get back to the cabin and kill that thing before it got loose, nobody had to be in danger; not him, not Rebekah, not even the old couple who rented out the cabins.

  A new plan began to form in Mason’s mind. He would return to the cabin, hopefully with the vampire still trapped in the cellar. It was barely an hour until dawn. He would simply keep the thing trapped until then, and then deal with it. The Project had shown him that the vampires of reality were just like the vampires of myth when it came to sunlight. There were windows everywhere on the main floor of the cabin. Waiting until dawn would limit the playing field to just the cellar and the creature would have nowhere to run. Once it was dead, he could dispose of the body and nothing really had to change. The idea of killing something, especially something that for all intents and purposes, at least looked human was not exactly a pleasant one, but after he’d spent the last few minutes weighing whose lives to risk, it seemed downright inconsequential.