Jackson’s blood had settled into a slowing stream, running from his shoulder to his fingertips. Whatever had been done to him made his blood more like ours, though, so I didn’t find myself in a frenzy smelling it.
All but the Victorian’s third floor was in flames now. In the distance, I heard sirens rising.
“I hate this cloak-and-dagger stuff,” Jackson said. “Prefer open warfare. More honest.”
Jackson brought the tomahawk around like a batter swinging at a pitch, but before he could take off Nathan’s head, a third-floor window exploded.
Two more bayonet-fixed rifles flew toward Jackson. He would have again dodged them both, but Nathan grabbed him and held him in place as one lanced into Jackson’s stomach. Jackson dropped the tomahawk as he fell to the ground.
Gina and Cynthia came through the third-floor window they’d just thrown the rifles from. They scurried down to a lower roof, from which they could jump to the ground without shattering an ankle.
Jackson’s breathing was sharp as he lay on his side. The bayonet had run through him. To get it out of his gut, he jerked the heavy rifle away from him with a terrific effort.
Gina and Cynthia were rushing to Nathan’s side, but he gestured at them to attack Jackson instead.
I watched as my sisters moved toward him, hissing. No smile on Jackson’s face now, but his eyes were something like battleship steel.
“Come on,” he said, pulling his 1911.
I finally was strong enough to pull myself off the ground, and watched as Jackson fired at Gina and Cynthia.
Even with the agony radiating from my gut, I admired him. So smart a warrior, not wasting bullets on head or heart shots, but blasting away their kneecaps, dropping them into the snow. But in the end, a 1911 wasn’t an assault rifle, didn’t have thirty rounds in the magazine. His gun went dry after eight shots. Even with their kneecaps destroyed, Gina and Cynthia still had their arms and hands. They were strong, able to pull themselves quickly across the snow. Though he was badly wounded, Jackson punched their pretty faces, bursting their lips and knocking out one of Gina’s fangs.
Eventually, their sheer strength and ability to take punishment won. They anchored his arms, pinning him to the ground.
The wonder wasn’t that Jackson lost. It was that he’d lasted this long against a combined two centuries of undead strength.
Nathan was still on his knees, hands clutching his throat. The wound had knitted itself enough for his voice to rattle: “Finish him, Ginny. I want to watch you kill your friend with my blade.” Blood squirted from his neck with each syllable.
His voice had returned, but his power over me was still weakened. My mind was my own. But that was the only thing that was mine—I limped across the battlefield and picked up the saber as he ordered.
My will still couldn’t trump Nathan’s. But my predator mind could.
I began talking to it, as I woodenly walked over to Jackson.
“Nathan is going to kill me after this,” I thought.
Rising through its constant chant, my predator self replied: “This human will help his kind kill us all. Self-preservation comes in many forms, and while you may die, our races will live.”
“Look at what Jackson did,” I pleaded with it. “What other man could have fought Nathan and my sisters like that?”
“Which precisely proves how dangerous this human is to us.”
Like a windup toy, I kept walking toward where my sisters had Jackson pinned. Running out of time, the war inside me continued: “You saw that smile on his face, though. He enjoys this.”
“What of it? So do we.”
“Exactly. He’s like us.”
“He is nothing like us. He is a fraud made to mimic us.”
“Yes, altered by his own people. And won’t he hate them for it? Doesn’t he already? You heard what he said in the steam tunnels. How cut off he is.”
“What difference is this to us?”
I was maybe five feet from Jackson now. He stared coldly at me.
“He’s primed to break with them. All he needs is someone to gently guide him.”
“What benefit to us?”
Behind me, Nathan was seething. “Cleave his head.”
My thoughts came in a rush: “Imagine what he knows about them. Now imagine him, with all his strength and fury, using that knowledge to help us. Think of what he could do to them. Think of what he could do for us. A demon unchained.”
My predator mind didn’t reply immediately, instead falling back to its background chatter. But it was louder, quicker, an argument among storm clouds or ancient gods.
My arms raised the saber above my head. I was too late. I was going to kill Jackson, and then Nathan would kill me.
I wanted to tell Jackson how sorry I was. I wanted him to know that I hadn’t meant to betray him, that it hadn’t been my choice, that I’d tried to stop myself.
Just then, my predator mind rendered its verdict: “HE COULD BE A KING!”
My arms swept the blade down, but instead of Jackson’s head, the blade cut into Gina’s arm, almost severing it.
Her scream filled the night air, and Jackson easily pulled his arm out from under her.
Unsure if I was truly free of Nathan’s hold, I tossed Jackson the saber. “Take it,” I said.
He grabbed it with his free hand, swung the blade into Cynthia’s ribs, then across into Gina’s mouth as she tried to bite him.
They rolled off him, but instead of finishing them, Jackson got to his feet and lunged for Nathan.
The blade sung through his neck as Nathan pulled himself up to meet the attack. His head rolled through the snow.
I had never heard a wail like as the one that came from Cynthia and Gina when Nathan died—as loud as peeling thunder, mournful as a dog crying for its absent master. I was surprised and sickened when I realized it was coming from me as well.
Cynthia, her remaining fang bared, held the side of her bleeding torso and screamed, “He’s in Hell now! You killed him and sent him to Hell!”
Jackson approached Cynthia, one hand gripping his wounded stomach, the other with the saber extended. The wound made him hunch over, and somehow he seemed all the more menacing for what he was prepared to endure in order to keep hurting others. “He’ll need company,” Jackson said.
He didn’t have the chance to make good on the threat. The fire engines were close now, their flashing lights visible against the dead trees despite the flame-engulfed house.
Cynthia’s knees were healing quickly. She picked up Gina over her shoulder, and made for the trees as fast as she could.
I looked at Jackson, not entirely sure he wasn’t going to kill me.
He extended his hand to me. “They’ll be here any second—let’s go.”
7
Epilogue
“You’re healing up fast,” Jackson said.
Sucking on blood packets like they were juice boxes had sped up the process. “You too,” I said, huddling on the dusty floor in his black coat.
Jackson had taken off his bloody T-shirt to examine his stomach and shoulder. His bayonet and saber wounds were now fresh, white skin. “Suppose I should thank you for that.”
“My pleasure.” And it had been. As with most of Jackson’s modifications, the process that had changed him had been good but not great. He had some enhanced healing, but I’d helped, literally licking his wounds. The same effect that heals a victim’s neck can go deeper, if you work it long enough.
We were beneath Ramsgate’s upper quad, in its steam tunnels. We’d eventually made it to Jackson’s jeep through the woods, and from there to campus. He had medical supplies in the backseat, including blood. It had been meant for an emergency self-transfusion for him, but I’d made good use of it.
“You know, this might have gone easier for you if you’d just brought some crosses,” I said.
“Can’t. Orders. Have to maintain my cover. Turned out to be the right call, since your sisters or girlfriend
s or whatever you want to call them lived to tell the tale.”
“You even obey orders that will get you killed?” I asked.
“Men throughout history have.” He looked at his watch. “Almost nighttime.”
“Once the sun’s down, I’ll break into the campus store,” I said. “Probably not a good idea to wander around campus naked. Then we can talk about what to do next.”
“I won’t hold you to helping me,” he said.
That surprised me. “Why not?”
“Your sire’s dead, so you’re free. Not much incentive for you to stick around. Mission’s going to be hard enough without wondering when you’re going to turn on me, so I’d rather just get it over with. Besides, I owe you for cutting me free there at the end.”
“And if I walk away now, what happens next time we meet?”
“One of us kills the other,” he said. “It’d probably be sooner rather than later since, again, I have to keep my cover.”
“Even without the threat, I’d rather stay with you, though.”
“You things are all about self-interest. What am I not seeing here? What’s in it for you now?”
In the jeep, I had explained to him that I’d been able to argue with my predator mind, to reason with it to allow me to disobey Nathan. But I hadn’t told Jackson what my winning argument had been.
“We’re also into deviancy. Betraying my own kind to help a rogue warrior whose own people dropped him into all this evil? Sounds hot.”
He smiled. “Fair enough.”
That was a lie, of course. Deviancy is cheap, easy to find. I was in this for something more.
My predator mind had said that Jackson could be King of the Nightfallen one day. Handsome, strong, and violent—how could I not want to be his queen?
• • •
Stealing Night
(Nightfallen #2)
1
Night Work
“If you were still alive, Ginny, what do you think you’d be doing right now?” Jackson asked as we drove.
We were heading toward an abandoned foundry. The full moon shined down, making it look like the ruins of a medieval castle.
Jackson’s question surprised me. Like most teenage girls, I used to think in terms of what-ifs all the time. Since becoming Nightfallen, though, I really hadn’t wondered about roads not taken.
Maybe that was an evolutionarily selected trait among the undead. Thinking about what might have been leads to regret. That could serve an adaptive purpose for the living—you can learn from your mistakes, change, become a better person. But when you’re damned no matter what you do, regret is at best a distraction, and at worst a survival disadvantage.
“I’d be in college by now,” I said. “Before I died, I was on track to graduate high school early. I’d probably be a sophomore.”
“It’s a weekend night. Think you’d be stumbling home drunk from the bar right now?” Jackson asked.
“I was a shy thing back then. Science dweeb. I actually believed that chaste, Southern-belle foolishness my parents raised me on. No, I’d probably be in my dorm, either asleep already or studying for an organic-chem or biology exam. I certainly wouldn’t be doing anything like this. What about you? If you weren’t undercover, what would you be doing?”
“I’d probably be getting ferried across some Muslim shithole in a Blackhawk. It’s daytime in Afghanistan right now. I could be in the sun without going into toxic shock.”
“Is it that different? You’d still be risking your life for a government.”
“For my country,” Jackson said. “Yeah, it would be different. Over there, I’d be fighting figurative monsters. Now, I’m fighting actual ones and pretending to be one myself.”
I wouldn’t mind him becoming a monster. I was one, after all. Really, I hoped for it. “At least now if you get shot, you’ll heal faster,” I said.
“Double-edged sword, that. The bad guys I would have been dealing with over there would die when shot. Lot easier to take someone out at a distance than up close, hand-to-hand. Lot easier to pull a trigger than to run a piece of wood through a man’s chest or chop off his damn head.”
“I guess there’s some overlap. Jihadists probably don’t like crosses either.”
“I wouldn’t know. The way the Army is going, if we showed them one, we’d have been court martialed for a hate crime “
“Well, if things hadn’t gone the way they did, we never would have met.”
We arrived at the old Pike Crest Foundry, its crumbling edifice looming before us. “I’m sure all the people you’ve killed over the years would have rather you’d been just another college girl,” he said, cutting off his jeep’s engine.
This was my life now, working with Jackson Wheel. He was a former sergeant in the U.S. Army’s Airborne Rangers. Now he was a Defense Department science experiment, transformed so he could blend in with the Nightfallen, the better to spy on us. His family and friends thought he was dead, and only a handful of government people knew about the mission. He had, what I gathered, a CIA handler—a man called McBride—but they didn’t seem to have regular contact. So Jackson was all alone out here.
All alone, that was, except for me.
He needed me. Whatever genetic modifications the Pentagon had given him were good. He had better than average strength, enhanced vision, and the ability to extend and retract his canines.
The changes weren’t perfect, though.
Crosses didn’t blind him, but that was easy enough to fake. He also didn’t have a predator mind, that primal part of our undead psyches that is alternately a satanic instinct to do evil and an animal instinct for self-preservation. But that was hardly a giveaway, since mind reading wasn’t in any vampire races’ repertoire.
Other things, however, were bigger issues. He couldn’t turn on his “headlights”—that’s what we call the hypnotic effect of our eyes. And the fact that his saliva couldn’t heal a bite mark on a victim was a dead giveaway.
When I learned he was a spy, I agreed to help him blend in if he killed Nathan, my sire—the one that made me. Jackson had held up his end of the deal, and now I was holding up mine.
He didn’t realize the real reason I was sticking around, though.
I’d seen him fight Nathan. We get stronger as we age, and at 160, Nathan had been incredibly powerful. In the end, Jackson hadn’t just beaten him. He’d done it with a sick combination of ferocity and enjoyment.
Handsome, strong, and knowledgeable of the U.S. government’s designs on us—a lot of potential there, if only someone could switch his allegiance from the living to us.
Why not me? I was three years Nightfallen, and forever sixteen. Being jailbait for eternity has its advantages.
It was early February, with a few inches of packed snow on the ground. We sat in his jeep as he looked over the scene. The ceiling of the foundry looked like it might fall in at any time. From where we were, I could see down into Echo Valley. The Ramsgate College campus was the town’s heart, its most lit part. The mountains ringing Echo Valley were like whitewashed castle walls in the moonlight.
“Nice place for an ambush,” Jackson said.
“What did you expect? That the meet-up would be at a coffee shop?”
“Why not? That’s where you and I usually hang out,” Jackson said.
“Remember, there’s more than one subspecies of vampire. There’s an entire class system, each with its own traditions, abilities, and limitations. Our race—well, the kind I am and that you pretend to be—mingles with the living a lot. We’re about to meet a Stoker class.”
“‘Stoker’? As in Bram?”
I was surprised he got the literary reference. Jackson didn’t strike me as someone that would waste time reading something unless it contained schematics for improvised munitions or gun reviews.
“The classification names change over time. In Victorian England, it was all names like ‘Dragons’ and ‘Lions’ and ‘Rams.’ That’s what Nathan told me once,
at any rate.”
“Sounds like old-school football-team names,” Jackson said.
“Some snobs insist on using the original Sumerian. But in America, we’re more pop culture, and the past few decades the names of authors and actors have been in vogue. So you’ve got Stokers, Kings, Lees, Blaskos, and others.”
“‘Blasko’?” Jackson asked.
“Bela Lugosi’s real last name.”
“So what is your kind called?”
“Mathesons.”
“Another actor?”
“Writer. I Am Legend. The book is about vampires, not mutants like the movie. Evidently, the novel was a big hit in the fifties.”
“That’s kind of obscure. How often are the names updated?”
“It varies. Maybe we’ll be reclassified as Whedons or Chrismoores eventually.”
He looked at me, confused, these references lost on him.
“Anyway, Stokers conceive of themselves as royalty,” I said, “and they can back it up. Royalty likes grandeur, not to mention the dramatic. What better place for one than some gothic ruins?”
Jackson gestured toward the foundry. “Or the American economy’s equivalent. You said they can back it up. They’re more powerful than you?”
“They can transform into beasts and control vermin. Mathesons, like me, can’t.”
“What kinds of things can they turn into?”
“I’ve never seen it, myself, but I hear into larger, more horrific versions of the animals they can control.”
“Terrific. Any mind control?”
“Yes, but it’s not in their eyes. They can control those they drink blood from, assuming it’s the opposite gender,” I said.
“Not very politically correct in the age of same-sex everything.”
“They’re traditionalists.”
“Anything else I need to know?” Jackson asked.
“I hope not,” I said, “because that’s all I know about them. The different races rarely interact.”
“Why not?”
“Tradition and self-preservation. All individual Nightfallen only act out of self-interest, but among each subspecies there’s at least a common bond. You’re all the same kind, part of the same group. Aren’t you more likely to betray something that isn’t your own kind?”
Nightfallen (Vol. 1): Books 1-4 Page 5