Blood Hunt (61 page)

“He knew he couldn’t make love to me, and I think he believed that would eventually drive us apart. He never said it outright, and he never even tried asking me how I felt about it. I guess he didn’t believe that I could stop, even if I wanted to. He was probably right, and I don’t think he could stand the idea of me being with someone else in that way, not if the two of us were together. Not if I was ‘his.’

“We never talked about it again, after that night. I never stopped loving him, exactly, but I stopped wanting him and needing him in that way. Others came and went, like they have for so much of my life, and he never said anything. I always assumed that the truth of it was that he just didn’t feel that way about me. That’s what I thought right up until the night he died.”

“August eighteenth,” Two said, her voice barely more than a murmur. “That’s what he said, right? That since then there was only you.”

Naomi sobbed. Pressed her hands against her face. Nodded.

“He loved me all this time,” she cried. “He loved me, but he kept me away, and now he’s dead. I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I couldn’t do anything but stand there and watch him die!”

Two moved forward, standing up on tiptoes and putting her arms around her friend. Naomi stiffened at first, then hugged back, weeping. Eventually, with a great deal of effort, she regained control of herself.

“The two of you have something important,” she said, looking at each of them in turn. Her makeup had run, forming dark circles under her red-rimmed eyes. “Don’t lose it. Don’t walk away from it or forget it or let it die. Don’t let something stupid get in the way. Just … just love each other.”

“OK, Naomi.” Two said. “Is there anything we can do for you?”

Naomi shook her head. “I’m going to take Stephen’s ashes to Ireland. There will be another service there, and then I’m going to take him to that little strip of sand, and cast him into the wind. I think it’s what he would have wanted. Then I … I’ll be back. William is taking over the council, and he’ll need an apprentice. Making peace with the Burilgi is going to be a lot of work, and we still have to find your friend. There’s so much to do …”

“We’ll be here to help,” Two said. “Theroen and me and all of your other friends.”

Naomi gave Two a small, sad smile, but she nodded. “Yes. You and Jakob and Sasha. We’ll work together. Just forgive me if I … sometimes it’s … I don’t know.”

“It’s complicated,” Two said.

“Yes, exactly. Complicated.”

Someone called Naomi’s name and she glanced over her shoulder, gave a small wave, and turned back to Two and Theroen.

“I suppose I should mingle,” she said. Two nodded.

“Us, too. Have to introduce Theroen to, well, everyone.”

Naomi smiled, dabbed again at her eyes with the tissue, then rolled them when she saw the amount of eyeliner that had come away.

“I must look ridiculous. Oh, well. Stephen would laugh at me and then tell me to get over it.”

Two smiled, nodded. Naomi closed her eyes and breathed deeply. After a moment she opened them again, and Two could see a steadiness in her gaze that hadn’t been there before. Naomi the politician was back, shutters closed tight over the windows to her soul.

“I’ll see you both soon. Two, we need to introduce Theroen to
L’Obscurité
. I’m sure Thomas has missed us terribly.”

With that, Naomi turned and made her way off into the crowd. Theroen turned and gave Two an appraising look.

“What?” Two asked.

“Are you all right?”

“Well, I’m awkwardly patching things up with my ex, in front of my boyfriend, at a friend’s funeral,” Two said. “This is life, right?”

Theroen nodded. “This is life.”

“Yeah. Well, then I guess I’m all right.”

“I am pleased to hear it,” Theroen said.

“Good. OK, let’s go meet people. Let me know if you see Jakob, too. Stephen was going to teach me to fight, and I’m pretty sure he’d be pissed off if I didn’t see it through. I’m hoping Jakob will be up to the challenge.”

Theroen smiled, took her hand, and together they made their way toward the crowd of people gathered at the back of the cathedral.

* * *

“They cut off her arm?!” Molly cried. “No way!”

“I saw it happen … it was awful.” Two told her. She was sitting in an arm chair in Rhes and Sarah’s living room. Molly and her parents sat across from Two, on the couch. Two had spent most of the past hour and a half filling them in on what had happened since she had first encountered Naomi at
L’Obscurité
.

“That sucks,” Molly said. “Is she going to be OK?”

“I think so. They stitched her up and gave her some blood and sent her home. At least she’s still alive. Aros killed my friend Stephen.”

It still hurt, saying this out loud, but Two knew she had to acknowledge it. She had to accept it, had to deal with the pain and the grief that Stephen’s death brought her. She rubbed her arm across her eyes, which had gone suddenly wet with tears.

“I’m sorry you lost your friend, Two,” Sarah said.

Two nodded, shrugged. “It happened. It’s awful, and I wish I could change it somehow, but I can’t. Aros got what was coming to him. Jakob shot him twice in the head, and the rest of his people took off.”

“He didn’t deserve any better,” Rhes said.

“No, probably not,” Two said. “I just wish …”

“That it hadn’t cost so much,” Sarah said.

“Yeah.”

“But now it’s over?” Rhes asked. “I mean, no offense, Two, but we’d really love to get back to normal life. Sarah almost lost her job, Molly missed a week of school, and I got to lie to our other friends and tell them that I surprised the girls with an unplanned trip upstate, where Sarah and I somehow managed to both lose our cell phones.”

Two put a hand to her forehead. “Christ … yeah, I wouldn’t blame you if you just wanted me out of your life entirely.”

“The thought has crossed our minds,” Sarah said.

“Not mine,” Molly said. “I don’t want you to disappear again, Two!”

“I wasn’t serious,” Sarah said. “At least, mostly. For better or for worse, Two, you’re our friend. You’re in our lives, and we like that. It was because we wanted you in our lives that we went out and got involved in this in the first place.”

“OK,” said Two. “And thanks. Honestly, though, it’s going to be weird. I mean … I’m a vampire. It still feels strange to say that, especially to all of you, but it’s not like you don’t know it. I can move faster and lift more than I’m supposed to. I’m not going to get sick or age. Sunlight makes me tired and kinda burns when it touches me. I drink
blood
for Christ’s sake. I had some on the way here.”

“You didn’t, ah … kill anyone, did you?” Rhes asked.

Two smiled a little, shaking her head. “No … whatever it is that Theroen made me, it’s not like before. I don’t need that much and I can break away pretty easy. I just lured a guy into a Starbucks bathroom. I’m …
pretty
sure he enjoyed it. He made kind of a mess.”

“OK, that’s gross,” Sarah said. “Moving on …”

“I think you’re going to have to be, like …” Rhes found himself searching for a way to explain. “You know that crazy uncle in The Nutcracker?”

“Drosselmeyer,” Sarah said.

“Right, him. The guy who swings by once or twice a year with tales of exotic trips and brings weird gifts. Magical nutcrackers and talking coconut monkey heads and all the crazy shit that we’re not supposed to believe in, but now we don’t have any choice because our friend’s a friggin’ vampire.”

“Too much exposure to me would be bad for your kids,” Two said, smiling archly.

“It’d be bad for the illusion of normalcy is more the problem,” Sarah said. “You’re hardly the worst thing our kid has been exposed to.”

“One time this guy on the J Train exposed himself to me,” Molly said. There was a moment of silence following this declaration before Two burst into laughter, then clapped her hands over her mouth. Molly looked perplexed.

“What?” she asked. “He did!”

“We believe you, dear,” Sarah said. “It’s just not the best thing to mention in polite company.”

“Since when am I polite company?” asked Two.

“Since we promised the state that we’d take care of Molly and try to raise her right,” Rhes said, grinning. He leaned back on the couch, yawned, glanced around at the others. “So … what now?”

“I think now I get out of here and leave you guys alone for a while,” Two said. “You need to go back to real life. Theroen and I … we don’t know what’s going to happen yet. I don’t have an apartment anymore, so we’re staying at a hotel, but we’ll probably find someplace to live and get my stuff out of storage pretty soon.”

“You going to bring him around some time?” Sarah asked. “We didn’t have much chance to meet him.”

“Definitely. He thought maybe you wouldn’t want
two
vampires showing up so soon after the whole … Aros thing.”

“Sounds like a considerate guy,” Rhes said.

“He is.”

“So what the hell are you doing with him?”

Two laughed, shook her head, shrugged. “No idea!”

“What about Tori?” Sarah asked.

“We’re going to work with the council to try and figure out where she is and what we can do to help her. I don’t know what the hell these Children of the Sun people have put in her head, but there’s gotta be a way to change her mind.”

“If you can find her,” Rhes said.

“Right. It sounds like that’s going to be tough. Jakob says it might take years to track them down.”

“Years? Wow. Well …” said Sarah, “at least you have the time.”

Two thought of Theroen waiting for her back at the hotel, sitting and reading or perhaps watching television, catching up on the time he had lost. She thought of the life they could now build together, free of Abraham, free of Aros. She thought of the things they might do, the places they might go, the sights they might see.

At last it was true. At last she had what Theroen had promised her more than two years ago. Love and safety and time; at last she had the time. Two smiled at her friends. Nodded.

“All the time in the world,” she said.

Epilogue

The wailing, cowering things that kneel before her are not human.

This is not a trick, not some mental exercise used to prepare herself for the things she is about to do. This is not self-deception, so often essential to the psychological health of those who kill for a living. This is not her living, but her very
being,
and she needs no such cerebral trickery.

The things that are huddled in the corner of the room, knowing they are dead but not yet ready to accept it as fact, are not human. Their teeth are sharp and built for piercing. Their internal organs can process only blood. All of them are pale; all are also twisted, their affliction having caused horrible growths, extended ears and fingers, other deformities.

She waits, not out of sympathy or any desire to prevent what is to come, but only because the order has not yet been given. These creatures’ cries mean nothing to her. In truth, she is unable at this point to equate them to anything human, or even anything alive. They are making the sounds of the dead. She has heard these sounds before, she thinks, though the past comes to her now only in flashes and fragments.

Memory is difficult. The day begins with meditation and the needle, ends with practice. For many months this practice was held against inanimate targets, machines, or even humans wearing protection. More recently, they have begun to bring her these things that scream, that spray when she stabs or slashes, that thrash and howl and beg when she shoots. Their bodies shake with seizures as they react to the poisons in her darts. In all cases, in the end, they die. This is her purpose, the thing for which she has been made, and she takes righteous and savage pleasure in performing her duties.

This journey began with death. She knows that, though she can no longer see the faces of those she seeks to avenge. She does not know if she would recognize them, even if shown a picture or video. It doesn’t matter. The past has been driven from her, or buried deep and locked tight. Now there is only her master, and her mission, and the dead.

Her body trembles. Excitement and rage, joy, a need that is almost like lust. These things wrestle within her, yearning for release, as she waits for the word that will let her unleash the hate within her. She will work until she is empty, a hollow vessel that, by this time the next day, will be full once again.

The voice of her master comes. “Kill.”

She leaps forward, and the wails become shrieks of terror. Her body sings with excitement and release. She works with the blades she holds in both hands, though she could just as easily use the guns at her side or the darts strapped to her chest. Each choice has its merits, each has its time.

Today she wants the blades. They are eighteen inches long and made of carbon steel, honed and cared for with reverence. They are not elegant weapons; there is little aesthetic value to their design. They are brutally effective devices, built to pierce and slash and kill, augmented only with the most rudimentary of hand-guards for catching or deflecting incoming attacks. She is capable of maneuvering the blades deftly, at startling speeds, with either hand.

The first vampire dies as she brings the right blade up in a long arc that begins just below his gut and ends with the very tip of the metal skidding along the bone of his sternum. The blade tastes air for a moment between the creature’s chest and chin, then cleaves through the flesh and bone of his skull. The head falls apart like two halves of a ripe melon.

The second of the creatures has time to scream a name, presumably that of the dead thing lying on the floor, still twitching. She hears this and her left arm, which had been pressing the pommel end of the weapon against her chest, shoots out and to the side, catching the vampire in the throat and impaling him against the wall. His cries become harsh coughing noises and his fingers scrabble at the blade for an instant before she yanks it sideways, ruining the neck and sending blood spattering against the opposite wall.