by Ramy Vance
Dragons loomed over the base, diving down and using their breath weapons. I watched as a red dragon released fire along the landing strip, enveloping several fighter planes and the pilots who were trying to get the metal birds off the ground.
A blue dragon sent a bolt of electricity at the control tower and I watched with horror as the lights went out and the structure buckled under the heat of the lightning.
And it wasn’t just dragons. At the far end of the field where the supply ships had been, a legion of valkyrie were engaging soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. That is, if you could call what was happening “hand to hand.” The valkyrie all wielded swords and were slicing through soldiers like they were playing a game of Fruit Ninja.
“This way,” screamed Jean, pausing as a yellow dragon flew overhead.
I had just enough time to wonder what yellow dragons breathed before it opened its mouth and vomited lava over several parked Humvees. Seriously, I thought, lava? No wonder the humans were scared.
“So,” I said to Jean as he opened the door to one of the Humvees that hadn’t just been puked on by a volcano, “I’m guessing the attack on the fleet was a diversion.” Then turning to Keiko, asked, “I don’t suppose your noro clout will be of use here?”
She shook her head and said, “Gaijin.”
Foreigners.
Yep, that about summed it up. These Others were of the Japanese variety and would respect an order from a noro priestess just about as much as they would an order from Captain Crunch.
With a sigh, we jumped into the Humvee and sped off.
↔
JEAN DROVE like a bat out of hell, dodging breath weapons and hurled swords as he made his way through the base’s open area.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To the ship,” he said. “But first I’m going to slay me a dragon.”
“Really?” I said, skeptical as I watched the red, yellow and blue dragons circle as they coordinated their next attack.
Jean sped the car away from the base and toward the shipyard on the other side of the base, well away from the action. It seemed like an old repair yard and from the looks of it, hadn’t been active for decades.
From the sight of all the Kanji, I gathered that this was actually a Japanese repair yard they’d probably used during the war and, because it had been one of their bases, the Americans had taken it over afterward.
Because we were away from the action, the dragons and valkyrie left us alone, figuring we were running away. Hell, I figured we were running away until Jean slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car.
We followed as he climbed up the ladder of a wooden ship. “You know that the Japanese are some of the fiercest whale hunters on the planet?” he said, pulling at a tarp to reveal a harpoon big enough to impale a bus. “This puppy is probably a hundred years old. I’ve been fixing it up,” he said, rubbing his hands along its exterior and patting it like a treasured pet. “Oiling it, replacing parts. Totally on my own time and dime. You see, I have a thing for old toys.”
He pulled at the gears, putting in a harpoon-cannon he’d pulled from a nearby crate. The harpoon, unlike its cannon, didn’t look to be old at all. For one thing, it was shiny and well-polished. For another, its tip beeped.
Jean pointed it at the yellow dragon, looked at his watch (which I noted was one of those old Mickey Mouse watches from back in the day) and muttered, “No magic,” before releasing the harpoon. The missile flew true, and it stuck the yellow dragon in the soft part where its wing met its body.
The yellow dragon grimaced in pain, but it didn’t go down, reacting more like one would when stung by a bee than impaled by a needle with a three-inch-wide tip. The dragon looked in our direction, flapping its wings as it flew toward us.
“Shit,” I yelled. “We’ve got to run.”
Jean shook his head. “Nah. You see, I also have a thing for things that go boom.” And as if it had heard him, the harpoon exploded and the dragon went down like a pheasant in a shoot.
It didn’t matter that I’d just watched that dragon spew lava; it hurt to watch a creature like that drop so ingloriously. It hit the ground with a thud so massive the ship beneath us shook.
“One down, two to go,” Jean said, putting in another harpoon and aiming at the red dragon. But dragons aren’t dumb; this one had seen Yellow go down and was ready. It dodged the harpoon, swooping to the left at the last second.
And I secretly hoped Red would make it, even if that meant it would come after us.
But the dragon’s evasive maneuvers didn’t do any good. The harpoon exploded as soon as it was next to Red and the blast was strong enough to send that dragon to the ground, too.
Jean shook his head. “They just caught us off guard, that’s all,” he said, more to himself than us. I thought he’d load a third harpoon, but he didn’t, just staring ahead.
Turning, I watched as several soldiers ran out of the bunker with shoulder RPGs and sent a barrage of missiles at the blue dragon. Their aim wasn’t as good as Jean’s and the explosive power wasn’t quite the same grade as his harpoons, but the sheer volume of the attack was enough to take the last dragon down.
In the distance, the last of the valkyrie was being taken down by machine gun fire as several of her compatriots took to the sky to escape. But they were also being picked off one by one by surface-to-air missiles from several tanks rolling onto the field.
I looked over at Keiko, who watched in horror as the whole scene unfolded. Her eyes were wide open as she took in everything. She spoke to herself as she watched the human soldiers manage to get themselves together and repel the attacks.
I didn’t need to lean in close to hear what she was saying. Her misting eyes told me exactly what she murmured: a prayer for the dead and dying.
↔
WE GOT into the Humvee and made our way back to where the fighting had been heaviest. As we got closer, I saw that the red dragon was still alive, its body badly mangled by the harpoon blast and fall, but also by several soldiers who were taunting it, taking turns stabbing it with Ka-Bars and bayonets. I’d seen this behavior before. In the fog of war, torturing your enemy became somehow acceptable because—well, who was going to stop you? There was a justification to punishing your enemy, an evil catharsis in making sure their last moments were spent in pain.
Besides, it was a dragon. To them that meant a beast—a non-thinking, non-feeling animal. But dragons were some of the smartest creatures on the planet, not that I could convince any one of these soldiers of that.
Jean sped up to the horrific scene. “Seriously,” I said, “it’s not enough that you destroyed that creature. Now you want to take part in the after-party, too?”
“You think you know me,” he said as he slammed the brakes, “but you don’t know shit.”
He got out of the truck and walked over to a soldier that was approaching the beast, a maniacal grin on his face. Without hesitation, I heard Jean say, “You think this is fun?” before punching the soldier square in the nose. Two other soldiers jumped Jean and I got out, kicking one of them in the chin before giving the other guy a well-placed punch in the center of his back.
Both of them went down, but then five more jumped in. Now it was Keiko who showed up, kicking one of them in the nose before doing some serious Krav Maga grappling with another. The two went down with a crunch.
This might have digressed into a full-on bar fight had it not been for an immaculately dressed older man who came onto the scene screaming with an obviously well-practiced battlefield voice. “Enough!”
We all stopped fighting.
“Don’t you all have somewhere to be? Clean up time, boys,” he yelled, sending everyone running.
Everyone but Jean, Keiko and me.
“And as for you,” the commander said, looking at Jean, “why is it that every time there’s a fight, it usually involves you defending one of these—these demons?”
Jean didn’t say anything, walking rig
ht up to the commander until their faces were an inch apart. Even though the commander didn’t back off, his expression unchanged, I could smell the fear on him (an ex-vampire thing; I can tell a lot about people from the way they smell). This guy was afraid of Jean, and after seeing how he’d taken down two dragons, I got it. I was starting to fear this Jean-Luc Matthias, too.
“I don’t know, Captain Donnelly,” Jean said, “maybe because they’re not demons, and I still have my soul?”
Jean moved forward, which caused the commander to flinch, and in that distracted second, Jean took the commander’s pistol from its holster. Showing the man his own gun, Jean said, “If you don’t mind.”
He stepped over to the dragon who was clearly in pain. The dragon reared its head, trying to get away from Jean, and that’s when the human did the last thing I expected him to do.
He started to sing.
I recognized the song; it was an ancient Celtic song about the fall of night. I’d heard Deirdre sing it before at a funeral. The dragon stopped trying to crawl away and turned its head to face Jean. There, I saw acceptance as the human soldier stood close enough to the dragon’s jaws that it could have easily killed him, wounded or not.
But it didn’t. Instead it remained there as Jean continued the song. And when he was done, the dragon closed his eyes as Jean put the pistol against the soft part of its neck, where the spine met the back of its brain stem, and pulled the trigger.
The dragon died in an instant, its death painless and quick. Jean patted the dragon’s lifeless head. “Sorry it had to be this way.”
Damn, vicious and compassionate, I thought. In another life he would have been my kind of guy.
Not now. Now I tended to go just for compassionate.
Jean tossed Captain Donnelly his pistol. “Ship ready?”
The captain holstered his gun and pointed at a twelve-foot speed boat with three sailors on it. “It survived the attack.”
“Good.” Jean gestured for us to get on the boat.
The commander gave Jean a salute. “Godspeed.”
Jean gave a halfhearted salute back, not even looking at the man. “Yeah, yeah,” Jean said. “Speed of god and all that.”
And with that, we boarded the ship and sped off into the darkness of the sea.
BLACK HOLE SEA, WON’T YOU COME AND DROWN AWAY THE PAIN?
A s soon as the ship left the war-torn base, Keiko went below deck to meditate, leaving Jean and me to stand at the front of the ship, not talking, just watching the darkness approach but never get closer. It just kept going, and I wondered if this was an omen for what was to come.
Then again, it could just be because it’s night, I thought.
“Excuse me?” Jean said.
“Private thoughts. It’s a quirk of mine … I think out loud. A lot.”
Jean gave me a knowing look. “So it mentions in your file. Not that I’m surprised. A lot of vamps—well, ex-vamps—do. I guess it comes from spending centuries wandering this world alone.”
He spoke as if he knew me, and not just from a file, but really knew me. I don’t know if it was the tone, or everything that had just happened, but his familiarity annoyed me. And rather than taking the high road, I growled in just about the most childish tone I could muster, “You don’t know me.” Impulse control much, Kat?
“You’re right—I don’t. But I’m starting to, and I like what I see.” He lifted his hand before I could say anything. “And I don’t mean in a ‘what’s your sign, come here often?’ kind of way. You care, Kat. And you do something about it. Too many care but do nothing. And way, way, way too many simply don’t care.”
“Sounds like you figured me out,” I said in a sarcastic tone, and because I spent so much time with Deirdre and other Others, I figured it would go over his head like it did them. But Jean was human.
Humans get sarcasm.
“You’re right,” he said, “it is presumptuous of me to think I know you. I’m sorry.”
I felt bad. Here he was trying to reach out and I’d shot him down. So, turning around and finding the exit for the high road, I softened my voice. “I’m not the only one who cares.”
“Oh yeah, and what evidence do you have of that? Was it the two dragons I killed today that tipped you off?” He turned to look out at the sea again, as if the ever-approaching darkness would hide his shame.
“You’re a soldier defending your base. The way I see it, you had no choice.”
Jean shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Bella would say there is always a choice,” he said, his voice trailing off.
Who’s Bella? I wondered, but instead of saying anything else, he just kept looking out over the sea.
I thought the conversation was over, but he broke the silence with a heavy sigh. “I’m probably going to regret this, but since we’re two individuals with questionable people skills, I have a proposal. We each get to ask the other a question, and we both have to promise to answer the question honestly.”
“A question for a question?”
“With an honest answer for an honest answer,” he emphasized.
I nodded and stuck out my hand. He didn’t take it, instead saying, “Back in the interrogation room you said that you didn’t want our forgiveness because you’ll never forgive yourself. What did you mean exactly?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“I had assumed that you mean forgiving yourself for killing as a vampire, but I’ve met a lot of your kind. Hell, half of the special forces are ex-vamps. Those guys don’t seem to be bothered by killing. And not one of them ever expressed regret. So …” he let the last word linger.
“I hate myself for all the lives I took—”
He lifted a scolding finger. “Honest answer, remember?”
“You’re worse than Mergen. The truth … fine. Here it is: as a vampire I must have killed dozens of humans, and almost every single one of them I hunted down in some perverted cat-and-mouse game. I was the damsel in distress. ‘Oh mister, I must get home but the way there is so dark. I’m afraid. You’re big and strong. Will you be a gentleman and escort me?’ ” I mimicked a dainty girl calling for help. “I also played the huntress, giving my prey a full minute’s head start. And then there was the temptress. My favorite, because back then I was a fifteen-year-old girl and the way I figured it, any guy willing to take me to bed deserved to die.”
Jean gave me a questioning look.
“And yes, before you ask, the gentlemen who turned me down did get to live. Most of them, anyway. But that’s not my point. My point is I enjoyed killing and now that I’m human again, I hate it. I hate that part of me.
“Not the killing, mind you. That bothers me, but I can accept that it was kill or die. That part of being a vampire was somehow justifiable. It was the part of me that enjoyed the killing. That’s the part I’ll never forgive because, even though I’m human again, I still love the hunt.” I looked up at Jean. “Was that truth enough for you?”
“Yeah.”
“Your turn.”
“You know, I’m more of a dare guy.”
“Ah, ah, ah.” I waggled a finger. “We had a deal.”
He groaned. “Fine. What’s your question?”
“Who are you?”
“Humph.” He smiled. “That’s easy. I’m Jean.”
My face went stoic as I waited patiently for the answer.
“Jean-Luc Matthias. And before you make the joke—yes, I am only missing the Mark. Ha-ha.”
I made it painfully obvious that I didn’t get the joke—if there was one in there to begin with.
“You know,” he explained, “Jean-Luc Matthias. John, Luke and Matthew. From the gospels, but I’m missing the Mark. Again, ha-ha.”
“You know, you’re not very funny.”
“I am in Paradise Lot,” he muttered.
“And you’re not keeping your end of the bargain. Who are you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes you d
o,” I said. “You’ve spent enough time with Others to know exactly what I mean. And as a former Other, I mean it in that way. Who are you?”
I was certain he knew what I was doing. When an Other asked you who you were, they weren’t searching for a name or race, creed or species. They were asking you to unveil every aspect of who you were. They were asking to know you like you knew yourself.
Sure, you might not know who you are. Not fully. But if you were to answer the question honestly, you were on the hook to voice every conclusion you’d ever come to when reflecting on who you were.
He paused, understanding and regret painting his face. “Clever girl,” he said, “packing so much into one question like that.”
Oh boy, back to the “clever girl” stuff.
“So?” Now it was my turn to let the word linger.
“Very well. I’m human. Not a drop of anything else in me. When the gods left, they killed my grandfather. Sure, it was an accident caused by the confusion of the gods’ departure, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s dead because of them.
“So I picked up a weapon and joined the fight, and discovered that I’m damn good at it. I don’t get scared. I don’t clam up. I just do whatever it takes to bring my targets down. It was like these hands were meant for killing. So who am I? I am anger. I am vengeance. And I’m amazing at it.”
He stopped talking and I thought that might have been everything. That this man’s entire self-reflection boiled down to one thing: hate.
But then he sighed, touching his wedding ring. “But the best part of me isn’t what I think of myself. It’s what she thinks of me. She keeps saying that I am love and compassion, and she’s said it enough times that I’m starting to believe her. So because of her, I am vengeance and compassion. I am anger and forgiveness. In other words, I’m fucked up.”
“Aren’t we all?” I said. “I think that’s what it means to be human.”
We stood together for a long moment, staring into the darkness of the sea. Two fucked up humans trying to find our way. We might not have been friends, but we shared the unbreakable bond of trying to be something we weren’t.