Cheating Death

by April White

  Then the world exploded behind me, and I ran mindlessly up – away from the choking dust that filled the tunnels.

  Now, on the surface, I realized I was in London, my London, where mobile phones recorded everything and a bloody, dust-covered guy got too much attention on a pre-dawn city street.

  I slid around a corner, out of sight of the well-meaning Londoners. What had they seen? I looked down at myself, barely visible in the still-dark sky of early morning. I was filthy and covered in blood, but my 1940s clothes weren’t obviously anachronistic in this age. Outwardly, I probably still looked like the eighteen-year-old guy I was, not the ancient, battle-scarred horror I saw in my mind. I felt my chest, my torso, and my face where I’d been slammed against a wall in the blast. I was battered, but I’d heal after a day’s sleep.

  My body would heal anyway. I doubted the same could be said for the rest of me.

  “Tom?”

  I stiffened, and my fingers curled reflexively into weapons.

  “Tom, it’s Ava.”

  Ava, somewhere in the alley ahead of me. Her voice was a sound from the time before I knew what true pain was, before hope had fled … and that voice was coming closer.

  Panic rose up like a vise to squeeze my throat, and I turned to run. And then I remembered who I was and what I’d done. I wasn’t her poor little cousin with an emotionally abusive father and a mother who hated the sight of me because I reminded her of him and what he had done to her. I wasn’t anything weak or frail or good or right. There was nothing in me for her to care about and everything for her to fear. In fact, I thought dispassionately, I could kill my cousin now and then disappear as if I’d never been here at all.

  She stopped moving. Maybe she heard my thoughts. I took a step forward. “Ava?” My voice was definitely not my own, and I decided to use the croaking to sound helpless. “Is that really you?”

  I sensed her hesitation in the dark. I looked for her, but couldn’t see her outline – she was still too far away. I took another step forward.

  “Adam was in the tunnels when the bomb exploded,” she said. “I can’t See him.” I froze in place. There was a soft desperation in her voice. “I can’t See him underground – or Archer, or Tam.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. Tam? Archer? Adam, my cousin and best friend, was underground?

  I couldn’t let Adam see me. He would know in an instant what I’d become, and he would hate me. I knew I should wrap my hands around Ava’s throat, squeeze until she broke, and then find a spiral and just … go.

  There was a spiral below – the one I’d come through. Maybe it had survived the blast that had sent me scrambling up to the surface, away from the debris.

  Had Adam been down there when the tunnel exploded? I scraped together a vestige of my humanity and backed away from Ava. “I’ll go down there. I’ll go back down to find him.” The words came without conscious thought, and I wanted to take them back the moment I’d said them, because her sigh of relief sent a shiver through me. I turned away from her voice, and from the words I knew were coming.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  I stepped toward the alley entrance, still wondering why I didn’t break Ava’s neck and be done with this place.

  “I miss you, Tom,” she whispered in the darkness.

  I closed my eyes against the hope in her voice and then strode back out to the street.

  I made my way back to the Holborn station entrance, but the police had blocked it off with caution tape. A large crowd of onlookers were gathered on the street, all milling about, shooting video and photos with their mobile phones. There was a reporter with a microphone talking about “authorities unsure of the source of the explosion,” while words like “terrorism” and “another 7/7” were murmured around her. There were enough bystanders that ducking under the tape would draw attention, and with the hushed whispers of terrorism, attention was the last thing I needed. I would have to find another spiral to escape this place before anyone else knew I’d come back.

  Rough hands grabbed my shoulders, and the instinct I’d developed to survive a war took over. I turned with a roundhouse kick and my foot connected with a head. The guy went down with a grunt of pain.

  “I told you he’d be fast.”

  I knew that voice. It was the same one that laughed at me inside my head and called me worthless.

  “You’ve become quite extraordinary, haven’t you, Tom? Something quite … different than before.” Seth Walters spoke with pride. There was no other way to describe the tone in his voice. I had exactly one second to decide what I was going to do with the father’s pride I’d never actually experienced before. With one word, I could embrace it and the legacy that was mine by rights: the Mongerness that I had pulled on and worn with a vengeance since I’d discovered who my biological father really was.

  “I never suspected just how useful a bastard bloodsucker would be to me.” He sounded impressed, and I turned to face the man responsible for my heritage. He wore the expensive Saville Row suit not like he was born to it – which was how my stepfather, Phillip Landers, wore clothes – but as though he had forced its submission and now it served him. Seth Walters did the same to the men who surrounded him – men as ferocious and submissive as beaten dogs. I knew he held their loyalty on a leash, because I’d once been on the end of it.

  My father smiled at me.

  I went for his throat.

  The fragile bones in his neck were my target. They would snap like firewood if I could get my hands on him, and the flash of fear in his eyes made me even more determined. One of his junkyard dogs yelled, and I was dimly aware of a gun, but I paid no attention until one of them shot me. I didn’t know who it was, nor did I particularly care, except that the gunshot slowed me down.

  Pain jackhammered through my body. Every wound I’d gotten since I drank Bishop Wilder’s Vampire blood hit me at once. War wounds, gunshots, stab wounds … I felt blood run in rivulets down my skin, and I rocked backward as I struggled to regain my balance. It was only a second, but it was enough to let dear old Dad slip out of my grasp.

  He stared at me, wide-eyed. Maybe because I suddenly looked like the walking dead, or maybe because I was determined to kill him, but he was definitely no longer happy to see me.

  His dogs closed ranks around him instantly, and I knew my chance was gone.

  The gunshot brought instant attention to our little tableau, and when the screams died down, the crowd began to move in for a better view.

  Seth clutched at one of his men – the one who had shot me – which was how I noticed the ruby ring on Seth’s finger. He’d never worn a ring before, and this one matched the Monger ring that Saira had described to me as we dug Léon’s grave in medieval Paris. Seth wore the ring to compel people with his words, she’d said. Like the Pied Piper with his flute. A wave of fury hit me squarely, and I made an instinctive move toward him as the shooter’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Don’t! He’s still useful,” Seth snarled.

  I would never allow myself be useful to him again. I bolted past a startled tourist who had presumably filmed the whole thing on his mobile.

  “It’s the bomber! Stop him!” Seth yelled with surprising ferocity, and there was a moment of pure silence as his words were processed in so many brains.

  And then pandemonium broke out.

  With the Monger ring on Seth’s finger, people took his words as truth.

  Shouting filled the air and frenzied hands grabbed at me. It was suddenly a fair imitation of a gauntlet-run, and I, ironically, felt like the lone human left to face a zombie apocalypse. I might have laughed if my sense of humor hadn’t fled long ago. Here I was, a Vampire, running from zombie Londoners who believed they were stopping a bloody terrorist.

  It was utterly surreal.

  I ran straight for the Holborn station entrance and got shot twice more for my trouble as I vaulted the police barricade. Again, the gunshots jackhammered me with
pain as all the old wounds flared, but worse than that, they slowed me down. It was time I couldn’t afford to lose. I swayed on my feet and braced myself against a wall while the wounds closed. The zombies were still coming, and oddly, the person who came to mind was Saira.

  The fury returned. Saira had sent me through that spiral – away from the man I was meant to kill. She had betrayed me, but she came to mind for a reason, and I forced myself to imagine what she would do. I pictured her freerunning from zombies, and I realized I could use the bannister-sliding trick she had taught us all so long ago.

  I made it to the platform well ahead of the few brainwashed Londoners who had followed me down, and dove off the platform onto the track. My strength was fading, though I wasn’t sure if it was from the gunshot wounds or from the coming dawn. I needed a safe place to hide.

  I turned down the spur toward the old Aldwych station and hoped that whatever police activity the explosion inspired wouldn’t follow me down an unused track. But I couldn’t see in the pitch black, and I tripped over cabling on the track. I went down with a muffled curse.

  “What the hell?” A voice from a different lifetime hovered somewhere over me, and for the barest moment I wondered if I’d somehow finally died.

  “Adam?”

  He dropped to his knees next to me and gripped my shirt. “Tom!” he whispered urgently. “What are you doing here?”

  “Leaving,” I croaked. Blood loss had taken a bigger toll on my strength than I’d realized. Just then, zombie voices echoed down the track behind me, and Adam hauled me to my feet.

  “Come on.” His voice was authoritative and firm and held a tone I didn’t recognize. This wasn’t the Adam I’d always known – so easy-going that his size was never a threat to the random drunks that picked fights with the big young guys in pubs.

  “Daisy, move the rest of them out to the other track,” Adam whispered to someone else as he pulled me into an open doorway. Adam held me up against the wall for a moment, and I let him. It almost felt good to be held in place by someone strong enough to keep me propped up, and when he closed the door behind us, my legs sagged for just a second.

  “Are you okay? Are you … hungry?” His whispered voice was still urgent, and as the sounds of shuffling feet died down, I realized that Adam had just protected other people from me. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew, but it hurt nonetheless.

  I shook my head, though he probably couldn’t see it in the dark. “You’re more in danger from my blood than you are from your own.”

  He let go of me with one hand and a torch flicked on. I flinched away from the sudden light, even though Adam had it pointed toward the ground.

  “Ah, bloody hell,” he said quietly. I watched Adam’s face as he studied me. There was pain, and maybe some sympathy there, but the thing I waited for, the thing I expected didn’t come.

  “I know I’m disgusting,” I managed to croak.

  His eyes opened wider and then they narrowed, right before he pulled me into his chest for a hug. Not the pull-in-and-two-slaps-on-the-back guy hug. It was a proper embrace, and I was so surprised I hugged him back.

  “You’re sodding filthy, covered in blood, and skinny as a rail. You’re a mess, Landers, but you’re definitely not disgusting,” Adam said quietly.

  The tears came then, and I pushed him away so he wouldn’t see them. I couldn’t stand his kindness and I made my voice as hard and cold as I could. “I thought about killing Ava tonight so she couldn’t tell you she’d seen me.” Adam flinched, and I thought it took some effort for him to shrug casually.

  “I think about killing Ava on a semi-regular basis, but in a family of Seers, it’s pretty pointless. Our lot knows everything.”

  A sob caught in my throat. The tears were going to come in earnest now. “Just stop! Nothing will wipe it away. You don’t know what I’ve done.” I swiped angrily at my eyes.

  Adam stepped back and then squatted on the dirt floor with his back to the wall. He sat the torch in the middle of the passage, light pointed up like a candle, draped his long arms over his bent knees, and looked up at me.

  “So tell me.” Adam’s voice was quiet, and I stared at him.

  He was serious.

  And he wasn’t horrified.

  The silence stretched between us. I scrubbed the tears away with the heels of both hands, then finally shook my head and squatted across from him with my back against the opposite wall.

  “Evidently you know I drank Wilder’s blood.” My insides clenched at the memory of having drained his dead body on the false medieval timeline.

  Adam nodded. “Saira told us.”

  Saira. Her name sent another bolt of anger through me and I glared at Adam. “So she also no doubt told you that she would have rescued me from that hell-hole if I hadn’t tried to change things.”

  He tilted his head and regarded me steadily. “She said your friend died and you blamed yourself.”

  I snorted angrily. “I blame myself? Of course I blame myself! The first time I killed him was pure murder. I was hungry and I drained him of every drop of blood.”

  “The first time?” Adam ground his jaw, which made me perversely glad. He should never be comfortable around me, no one should.

  I drove the knife in deeper. “The second time he died was my fault too. I threatened to murder his family unless he put me out of my misery, but he failed and Wilder broke him. I killed him in cold blood, and then I did it again.”

  “You couldn’t help it,” Adam finally said. His voice sounded weak to my ears – as weak as the feeble excuse he made for me.

  My eyes narrowed. “You forget that half of me is Monger. Maybe I couldn’t help the first murder, but the tenth …? And certainly by the twentieth or thirtieth, I should have gained a little impulse control.” My tone was laced with irony and bitterness.

  Adam watched me for a long moment, then he leaned forward and looked me squarely in the eyes. “You hate yourself enough for both of us, Tom. I can’t compete with that, and I have no interest in trying.” He stood up and brushed the dirt off his jeans, then held a hand out to help me up. I ignored his hand and stood on my own.

  “Who’s after you, then?” His casual tone startled me into an answer.

  “Zombies.”

  Adam scoffed. “Because a Vampire in the London Underground isn’t bad enough?”

  I winced automatically. “Walters is up above. He’s wearing that ruby ring and has everyone convinced I’m a terrorist bomber. They follow the ring so mindlessly, they’re like zombies.”

  Adam sobered instantly. “Seth Walters is out of hiding?”

  “If he’s hiding, he’s doing a piss-poor job of it.”

  Adam muttered a curse under his breath. “I’ll be right back.” He strode to the far end of the passage and opened the door to speak to someone. Their voices were quiet, but I caught the words “Monger” and “Aldwych station.” A few moments later he returned, and the adult confidence was back on him. “That ring’s a problem.”

  “For me, yeah. But why is it a problem for you? Your mother is scary enough to keep Walters leashed, at least around her precious son.”

  Adam studied me silently, then changed the subject. “Where did you come through? Did Saira bring you with her?”

  “I have no clue where Saira is, nor do I care,” I growled.

  Adam actually looked shocked for the first time since I’d stumbled into his world. “She didn’t find you?”

  “She found me. Walters wouldn’t be a problem now, though, if she hadn’t. If Saira had let me kill his grandfather as I’d planned, that ring wouldn’t even be an issue.”

  Whatever Adam was going to say was lost in the commotion of a naked kid running toward us. “Adam! Is Connor with you? Where’s Archer?”

  I presumed the kid was Connor Edwards’ younger brother, and therefore a Shifter, which explained the nudity. “Slow down, Logan,” Adam said. “You should be home. Your mum’s going to freak out.” He sound
ed worried.

  Logan glared at him, then shimmered for half a second and suddenly a huge, maned Lion stood in front of us. It roared so loudly we both literally hit the walls behind us, and for the first time in a very long time I felt actual fear. Half a second later, the naked boy was in front of us again, so mad his fists were balled up at his sides and his eyes brimmed with angry tears.

  “Connor and Archer are missing!” he snarled, in a fair boy version of the Lion’s roar. “I looked everywhere. If they’re not with you, they’re under a wall of rubble so solid not even my Stink Bug could get through.”

  I stared at Logan, and wasn’t sure why the words came out. “You have a stink bug?”

  I got the full weight of his death-glare. “I am a Stink Bug. Who are you?”

  Adam ignored our exchange. “You went back to the blast site?”

  Logan nodded vigorously. “The whole British Museum station spur is blocked by rubble. I made myself as small as I could and wound my way through the rocks, but all I found was a dead Monger near the entrance. He was crushed in the cave-in.”

  “How do you know it was a Monger?”

  Logan wrinkled his nose. “They stink.” He turned back to me. “You stink too, but not as bad as regular Mongers do.”

  “So I’ve got that going for me,” I muttered under my breath. Logan looked sharply at me.

  “Who are you?”

  “This is my cousin, Tom,” Adam said, dismissing the question with a wave of his hand. It may have been unimportant to him, but the easy way he owned our relationship meant everything to me.

  Logan’s eyebrows furrowed as he studied me, then he shrugged. “Connor told me about you. You’re here for the cure?” he asked in a tone that let us know there were far more important things to be discussing.

  Adam suddenly studied me with interest. “Are you?”

  I scowled. “Am I what?”