Blood Demons

  By then she had jammed the towel deep into her mouth so the Marines sleeping outside would not be disturbed by her moans and gasps. She had taken all of him, and her inner walls seemed to consist of twenty of Lailani’s expert fingers. Daniels had been hard-pressed to time their release right, but somehow he managed.

  But finally she undulated, contorted, and stretched beneath him, clamping him to her—the cry coming from beneath the towel like a kitten on its ninth life. Only then did she collapse, coo, and cuddle, all seemingly at the same time.

  As she buried her face in the crook of his arm and chest, he caught the scent of her again. And there was that last aroma, even sharper this time. But he still couldn’t place it.

  “Rita,” he said, for the want of anything better to say. “What sort of name is that?”

  “Sanskrit,” she immediately, absently, replied, her legs, feet, arms, and hands almost everywhere across and around him. “I guess I was created to return to this area of the world. It means ‘brave.’”

  Her lips started suckling on him—on his wrist, forearm, shoulder. “And Jayson,” he wondered. “Sanskrit as well?”

  “Sinhalese,” he heard her murmur as she kissed his right clavicle.

  “Sin,” he breathed, not recognizing the region. “Well named.”

  Her giggle was both charming and ravening. “I was named for Ritigala Jayasena,” she said softly, raising the hairs on his back. “A fierce warrior.”

  “I’ll buy that,” he acknowledged as her fingers started to curl around his chin and neck. Her nails began to both tickle and scratch. “Hey,” he said as her lips adhered to his Chain-silk undershirt.

  He felt something thin, sharp, and strong stab at the top of his spine. Then he heard a sound that seemed to combine a drowning bat’s shriek with a frightened wolf. The cot bounced, even with him on it, and the next second he was alone in the room.

  Daniels looked everywhere, but the door was still closed. It was even still locked. Her clothes were gone. It was as if she had never been there at all.

  Normally he might have gone after her, but this was far from normal. Especially since he finally recognized the final aroma of her scent. He had smelled it often enough on all the battlefields he had walked away from, but it had taken him too long to separate it from the stench of piss and shit that always overwhelmed it.

  It was the scent of freshly dead flesh.

  Chapter 23

  “I’m already dead, aren’t I?”

  Eshe Rahal stared at Josiah Key through the clear, electrically conductive polymethylmethacrylate wall of the cube that had recently housed Craven. The electric chair he had been strapped into was still there, but Craven was not. He was back in the padded box they had transported him in from Varanasi. Or at least the husk that was left of him. Rahal was now strapped in the chair.

  After having shot her in the face with the lightning gun, Key had dragged her there himself and started strapping even as the others had run around babbling questions and expressing confusion. But the security footage soon bore out Key’s fears. On it they could see a “smudged” Rahal do something to the top of Craven’s spine, then send Dr. Helen to the floor when the old woman tried to intervene.

  Key looked at the doctor now. Her face still bore the bruise of Rahal’s slap, but her expression obviously bore something worse for her—the shame of not having known Rahal’s condition even after all her tests. As much as the others had assured her that she had not lost face—an important aspect of respect in her culture—she was the final arbiter, and, apparently, had found herself guilty.

  She had tried to make up for it by immediately performing a more thorough, front and back, acupuncture examination on the creature known as Craven, which eventually became a complete autopsy as well. The findings of both had done little to make her feel that she had regained any face.

  “Mei yinying,” she had said unhappily.

  “Chhaaya nahin,” the translating machine’s voice had said.

  Key had shown consternation for the first time in a very long time when he remembered that Safar was not there, then went to the machine’s controls to find that it was still set to Hindi dialects. He yanked the controls over to English, then made a “repeat” motion at the old woman.

  “Mei yinying,” Dr. Helen had said again.

  This time the voice in the air said “no shadow.” When Key had looked perplexed, Dr. Helen had gone to the control’s keyboard and started typing. The machine’s voice had done its best to translate as she went.

  “No blood. No electrical activity. Empty.”

  Everyone remaining in Cerberus headquarters had seen their share of corpses. And when the bodies were undamaged, they all looked like humanoid-shaped flesh and bone vehicles devoid of any drivers or crews. But Eshe Rahal looked nothing like that. Even strapped in the electric chair, she looked as alive and thoughtful as she had on the first day Key had seen her.

  Key sniffed, cleared his throat, and answered her question. “Seems that way,” he told her. As always, he saw no reason to lie. “What did Dearden do to you, and when?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I must have dozed off in the ambulance or his office. It could have happened then, but I don’t know. I felt no different either before or after.”

  “What did you do to Craven?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What were you about to do to Dr. Helen?”

  “I don’t know!” she cried. “I wish I did. I’ve been wracking my brain ever since I woke up, but I can’t remember. I really want to, but I really can’t.” Her beseeching eyes ratcheted around the room, then returned to Key. “It’s like—it’s like I’ve become a visitor here. I’m sitting in the waiting room of my mind and the rest of my brain is controlling my body.”

  Key inhaled and exhaled deeply again. There were really only a few options. She was lying or she wasn’t. Dearden was controlling her or he wasn’t. Key decided, at least for now, she and Dearden weren’t.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  She looked honestly puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s start with your immediate comfort. The electrical current running through you is elevated for a normal person.”

  She snorted with mild derision. “I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything but hunger. Like I haven’t eaten all day.”

  Key shook his head sadly. “You must have fed on Craven,” he surmised. “Drained his life force. That would explain both your conditions.”

  Her head dropped, her face etched with misery. “I thought they’d target Morty. All he has is weaknesses.”

  “No,” Key corrected her. “All he has is vices. They only become weaknesses if he starts being ashamed of them.”

  “Allaanah,” she cursed. Tears began to form in her deep brown eyes. “I should have listened to you. You were right. It’s because I wouldn’t believe in them that I was vulnerable to them. Allaanah!”

  Key could tell she wasn’t trying for pity. She was just trying to come to terms with her predicament. What made it all the more tragic and effecting was that he couldn’t disagree.

  “All right, all right,” she gasped through her tears. “Talk to me, Joe. Keep me sane. You said ‘let’s start’ with my immediate comfort. What else?”

  “How do you feel?” he repeated. “Try to get beyond the hunger and your mind’s waiting room. What does it feel like to become—” He had to stop there, unable to find the right term—or deal with the thickening in his throat.

  “Shaytan alddam,” she said for him. “Blood demon. The hunger grows each time I think about it. It’s a want—not yet a need. But I feel the need coming. I still can’t decide whether the need will be a physical necessity, like air, or a loud, insistent, mental demand.” Her eyebrows raised. “It’s like desire.”

  “How?” Key managed to
choke out.

  “Well, like, we don’t need sex, but we want it. Sometimes really bad. And the more we have, the more we want, to recapture the first rush or see if there’s even more.”

  “How does this kind of desire feel?” Key asked, studying her all the closer.

  Her tears cleared again and she stared at him wide-eyed. “That’s it. That’s it. The hunger is physical and mental, not physical or mental. It’s a mix of sustenance and sensuality. Hunger and desire as one, building, threatening, overwhelming thing. Want-based need. Oh, shit, oh shit—”

  “What?”

  She started to cry again, beginning to writhe in the chair. “I lied to you, Joe. Back near the very beginning of all this.” Her sobs became worse and worse, the wracking overtaking her words.

  “How, Eshe?” he interjected. “Tell me how.”

  “I—I—saw Angela’s true face,” she gasped. “From the very start.” She stared at him, her fingers clawing the air. “It was worse than just seeing it. It was a frightening sensation, a dreadful feeling, an unformed, desperate emotion.” Her head dropped, her chest heaving. “But—but I kept it to myself. I wanted so badly to prove you wrong. I just had to show you she wasn’t a monster, she was just sick—”

  Rahal suddenly spasmed, her body exploding off the chair, the straps barely holding her. “Like me!’ she screeched. “Now, like me!”

  Key stepped back despite himself. He heard Dr. Helen typing furiously behind him, then heard the calm voice of the translation machine struggling to interpret.

  “Her responses surpassing human thresholds—”

  “Eshe!” Key yelled at her as, one by one, the straps holding her to the chair snapped. She somehow managed to stand, legs wide and arms outstretched, across, over, and in front of the electric chair—pure energy radiating all around her.

  He was about to shout her name again, but then, before Dr. Helen could stop him, he wrenched open the dividing door, stepped into the room, then locked the door behind him.

  “Eshe,” he repeated, standing directly in front of her.

  And suddenly she was herself again, her face showing confusion. But only for a split second. Then she became something far better, and far worse. He felt caressing fingers in his brain, softening his thoughts of her. She seemed to change inside his eyes, becoming sweeter, more attractive, and more needing of care.

  “Yes, Joe?” she asked in a voice that combined everything she ever was, or ever could be, to him.

  “Just wanted you to know,” he said flatly as he pulled his Sig Sauer 9mm automatic from under his jacket. “I love you.” Then, with an enormous feeling of déjà vu, he shot her directly between the eyes.

  * * * *

  It took what had been Rahal’s brain forty-five minutes to reconstitute after they had moved her body to the intensive care unit, then removed her short-lived Cerberus uniform.

  While it had reformed, Dr. Helen, through her tears, used both Western and Eastern medicine to check what the old Chinese woman called her newly formed gyonshiology—gyonshi being the Chinese term for vampire. Once again, she came up empty.

  Key had helped the Eshe thing along with a steady dose of electricity. He had conferred with Lancaster via comm-link about injecting some blood into her, but they decided against it.

  “Don’t wait for me,” Lancaster said from his jet en route from Bagram.

  “I won’t,” Key assured him, then had gone to prepare a wooden stake from the leg of a chair in the Hall of Mirrors. He placed the sharpened tip between Rahal’s beautiful breasts, and waited.

  He wouldn’t have cared if it had been hours, but, in the meantime, he watched the hole in her skull scab over, close, and develop skin as if his eyes were time-lapse cameras. He imagined the crater in the back of her skull was an even more impressive repair job. By the expression on Dr. Helen’s face, she had found out what future generations of her family would be studying for the foreseeable future.

  When Key returned his attention to the naked body on the examining table, Rahal’s eyes opened. She looked calmly at Key, then at the stake tip just under her sternum, then back at Key with growing hunger and despair, but also certainty.

  “Do it,” was all she said.

  Key did as she instructed.

  It didn’t take her heart as much time as her brain. In fact, it didn’t take her heart at all. After the sharpened tip of the wooden stake plunged through her body, she closed her eyes, obviously hoping it would work, but within minutes opened them again, reached up, gripped the stake’s shaft, and pulled it from her chest.

  “Well,” Key said sourly. “Worth a try.”

  “With no blood,” Rahal sighed. “No need for the heart.”

  “Yeah,” Key murmured. “Figured that when you didn’t bleed.”

  “Interesting sensations though,” Rahal told him from the table. “Both during the destruction and reconstruction. Too bad I didn’t have these heightened feelings when I was—human.”

  “How’s the hunger building?” he asked her quickly.

  She seemed to consider the question for a moment. “It’s there,” she admitted. “It seems to grow as fast as the flesh reconstitutes.” She frowned, gritting her teeth. “This is awful. It’s like my body is laughing at me. Like I have dual personalities—one me, one a monster who wants to be me. I feel it waiting, knowing it will win.”

  “If there was blood,” they heard the translator’s voice say, “we could test it, maybe find an antidote or cure, but—”

  Key glanced over to where Dr. Helen was typing furiously.

  “No blood,” Rahal finished for her, then looked directly at Key. “You have to kill me before the hunger overwhelms my reason.”

  “I’m trying,” he managed to grunt.

  “No, you’re not,” she told him as he looked away. “Not really. I understand the gun, and even the wooden stake, but we already know electricity and fire won’t work. There’s only one thing left. You know you should have already done it, but I know why you didn’t.”

  He felt her hand on his cheek. Finally he looked back at her, but still he couldn’t speak. So she did.

  “Every time I come back, there’s less of me. I don’t want to exist if it’s only for the hunger. I can already feel what it’s like. Aching, agonizing, all the time. Endless agony, endless urges. Only slaked when fed, and less and less every time.”

  Key nearly jumped back when her fingers clawed at his neck. When he looked down it was into the face of a drowning woman desperately trying to break the water’s surface, but not being able to. It was the worst helplessness he had ever felt.

  “They—” she gasped. “We—don’t steal the soul. We feed on it! Ealaa qayd alhaya walakun bila ruh!”

  He saw her go under, her last dying gasps only able to emerge in her native tongue. As the calm machine voice translated, Dr. Helen appeared beside him. With a simple, seemingly effortless touch she sent him flying ten feet across the room.

  So he watched from the floor between two chairs as the old woman raised the machete. At the same moment, he comprehended what the machine voice had translated.

  “Alive but soulless.”

  Dr. Helen brought the machete down on Eshe Rahal’s neck, separating her head from her body as easily as if she were preparing Peking duck.

  Chapter 24

  It was a completely different Patrick Logan who rode the command MV-22B Osprey tiltrotor copter over the peaks and valleys of the Hindu Kush Himalayan range—a difference both Morton Daniels and Terri Nichols studied carefully from their flanking positions just behind him.

  The redheaded corporal thought it was a difference that came from more than just being bumped up to brigadier general. The master sergeant thought it was a difference that came from more than just being within frequent proximity to Rita Jayson—who had been MIA since her exit from Daniels
’s room. Both Cerberus agents had already communicated their concerns to retired general Lancaster, who remained in constant communication through their ear-comms.

  Now, however, they all agreed the difference was in Logan’s conviction. His eyes were steady on the horizon, and his jaw was both jutted and set. As he had promised Lancaster, he had no intention of leaving these mountains without his quarry, and he wasn’t going to let anything or anyone distract him from his mission—least of all the Cerberus agents who shadowed him.

  All the troops behind them could clearly distinguish the difference between their commander and his reluctantly accepted “advisers.” Logan looked like John Wayne, ready to take on all enemy armies in full camo uniform, while the Cerberus duo looked like refugees from the latest sci-fi superhero flick in slightly glowing, sleekly armored Cali-brake. Logan had his Marine sidearm. The agents flanking him held weirder, less familiar weapons that seemed like mutated Tasers, or even videogame guns.

  As the copter started losing altitude, Daniels looked over to the Super Stallions beside and behind the command chopper—the bellies of which were each filled with fifty fully equipped troops. Including the twenty-five soldiers behind them, that seemed to be more than enough person-power to mop up the mountain folk who awaited them.

  “Prepping to land now,” Daniels muttered. He didn’t even hear the words over the Bell and Boeing engines, but Lancaster did, loud and clear.

  “A humbled Logan is a cautious one,” the retired general told his agents from nearby, in his own command post inside a Discrotor Jetcopter—an aircraft so advanced the military didn’t even know it existed yet. So much so, in fact, that Logan wouldn’t see it even if he was staring straight at it. The small, versatile, fast, Gonzales-perfected little beast had a first-generation cloaking device and anti-heat-seeking tech. “He’s trying to take no chances—at least from his limited imagination.”

  Daniels sniffed. “Very inspiring, sir. Thanks for the confidence.” The master sergeant had been testy since recognizing Jayson’s scent, a fact that had sent Cerberus into overdrive, but given everything that was happening with increasing speed, intensity, and need, that only resulted, as far as Daniels was concerned, in wheel-spinning.