Dead Matter (25 page)

The boy Campbell nodded and held back, though I could see on his face it was killing him. The boy was terrified. While she waited on her students, Allorah took stock of the science room. Not much going on for equipment this early in the semester, but …

There was something not
quite
human standing in the doorway to the classroom. I knew
what
it was. The taut, leathery skin pulled back over its face, the exposed fangs. Vampires had taken over the school, but that didn’t compute to the innocent Allorah of twenty years ago. She merely went with instinct. She threw on two of the nozzles sticking out of one of the lab tables and backed herself toward the open window. The creature blurred into motion toward her and she freaked the hell out, almost dropping the lighter she was fumbling in her hand. Her arm thrust forward, her thumb rolled over the wheel, and flame jumped to life, igniting the two jets of gas. The vampire was caught in the stream and immediately burst into flames itself, howling with an inhuman pain. Allorah gave it a weak kick with one of her boots as the last of her students went out the window and she followed, slamming the window shut behind her.

The kids were hauling ass down to the school’s courtyard below with Allorah close behind. When she reached the bottom, Allorah jumped the last ten feet from the hanging ladder of the fire escape to the ground. She looked around. The only exit from behind the school was actually going straight through it and out the front. That was chancy, but there was also …

“Campbell!” she whispered. “Help me lift the others over the back wall here.”

“Isn’t that like a consulate over there?” he said. The school was near the United Nations.

“Do you want to wait and see what’s on
this
side of the wall for you?” she asked. “I promise you, you’re better off dealing with consulate security. Now, get lifting.”

Campbell nodded and ran to the wall. He and Allorah started once again with the girls.

“I’m scared,” the second one said as they lifted her.

“It’s okay,” Allorah said. “We all are.”

Feeling Allorah’s waves of emotion hit me hard. This was not the steady and even-keeled Enchancellor I was getting to know. This was a scared woman in her early twenties freaking the hell out as the supernatural thrust itself into her world. People either accepted it or their minds snapped. If Allorah didn’t have the kids to think of, I think her sanity would have already made a trip to the latter state.

Now it was just her and Campbell. She lowered her hands, fingers interlocked, ready for his foot. He planted his shoe in her hand. A second later, only his shoe remained as the boy seemed to disappear from in front of her. “What … ?”

Allorah looked around. Two figures now stood in the center of the courtyard, both savagely gnawing the screaming boy’s neck. Allorah gasped, and put her hand on her chest … only to discover the cool of the silver chain around her neck. She looked down at the medallion hanging on it, which bore a concentric set of circles that resembled an eye carved into a good sized-metal disc.

Allorah had gotten the charm during spring break in Greece, the woman who sold it to her claiming it was a sixth-century BC apotropaic eye. Bizarre market trinket or not, it was meant to ward off evil spirits while drinking, and if something like these creatures didn’t qualify as evil, then what the hell did?

Allorah pulled the necklace from around her neck and ran forward. The creatures immediately reacted, dropping the now-lifeless boy to the paved stones of the courtyard.

“No!” she screamed out and swung the necklace in her hand. Like a table saw blade, the amulet spun around on the silver chain, the edge of it humming with an energy all its own. It caught one of the vampires, this one a male with tangled brown hair, in the cheek and sliced into it, sticking. The creature fell to the ground, clawing at its own face, and Allorah didn’t hesitate, her heart and mind vacillating between anger and fear. While the pained vampire was down, she ran to the wall and pulled down the school’s banner from its post, taking the post in both hands. Caught in a moment where she couldn’t take the time to think, Allorah plunged the post down into the creature’s chest, essentially staking it. It exploded with blood, covering her and sending her mind into total shock.

The sound of another approaching figure filled the doorway leading into the school.

“Stop playing with your food, already,” it said, and I had no trouble recognizing the voice. In fact, I had heard it earlier this evening. The vampire I knew as Brandon stepped out into the courtyard. He was transformed in full-on vamp mode and his features were terrifyingly stretched out, like a canvas pulled too tight over an artist’s frame. This was a far more horrific version of the kinder, gentler vampire I knew now. Monstrous as he looked, Brandon stared in horror at the blood of one of his fallen vampires. It was everywhere.

Allorah was already down on her knees and scrabbling to find her amulet, paying no attention to the other remaining vampire that had been feeding on poor Campbell. It was a female vampire and she grabbed Allorah by the hair and started to lift her. I knew the face of this vampire. It was the woman from the portrait over the fireplace in Brandon’s private chambers. Damaris.

Allorah’s hand found the amulet, and she grabbed it and slashed up and across the throat of the female vampire. The vampire clutched for its neck, but its head was already rolling back and separating from the cut. She hadn’t fed yet because her body fell to the ground and seemed to shrivel up into itself without much of a mess.

Brandon walked forward, stunned, but there was a haughty anger about him that I found terrifying. “What have you
done
?” he hissed out. I knew how important family was to the now-reformed Brandon, but I doubted that much of anyone challenged his authority back then, and to have two of his companions (three if you counted the one burning upstairs still) struck down by a schoolteacher …

Allorah, scared as she was and on the verge of tears, laughed with bitter anger in it. “What have
I
done? Are you kidding me?”

Brandon’s face was almost skeletal as he pushed a wave of emotional anger out from himself. “How dare you speak … ?”

Allorah was already swinging her staking post wildly at him. “These were
children
!” she screamed at him. “This is a school, for Christ’s sake!”

The town house was fully ablaze now, lighting up the once-dark courtyard.

Allorah dropped the post and started swinging the amulet again as she stepped forward through what remained of Brandon’s other vampires. The amulet whirred like it was an electric power saw, and Brandon’s face turned back to human. Flesh filled in the holes where muscle had barely covered bone. When his face finished forming, Brandon looked scared. Caught off guard, this other version of Brandon seemed afraid behind all the bluff and bluster of his powers. “Please,” he pleaded. “Don’t …”

Allorah wasn’t having it. All I could feel in her now was anger. She charged forward, brandishing the amulet like she was a knight carrying a Morningstar into battle.

Brandon had no choice but to shoot up into the sky, but so close to the fire of the building that his clothes were already aflame. Allorah watched as he flew away like some half-ignited human torch, hoping the flames would finish the job, but I knew that wasn’t the case.

Her mind had wanted to shut down just then, but there was still one last thing she had to do. Allorah cradled Campbell in her arms and brought him to the flames as well. She couldn’t leave him there, lying like that. She just couldn’t. As the flames laid claim to the boy, I found that I couldn’t take any more of it and pulled myself out of the vision and back into Allorah’s office lab.

My body was exhausted and my head hurt. First things first, though. I went into my coat pocket and started upping my waning blood sugar with Life Savers. I chewed them in between my erratic breathing.

Allorah was standing next to the chair I had sat in before triggering my power. She looked down at me, concerned and grim. “You okay, Canderous?”

“Yeah,” I said, catching my breath. “Thank you for that.”

She kneeled down next to me and looked me in the eyes. There was a sense of sadness and wonder to the look on her face. “You saw it all?” she asked. “The school? The kids? You felt everything I felt, right?”

I nodded, taking in huge gulps of air. “I understand now.” I handed back her apotropaic eye. Allorah stood and walked back to her microscope, laying the medallion next to it while she went back to work.

“When that night was over,” Allorah said, her voice flat, “I was still a teacher, just of a different subject …”

I understood her now, but the matter between the vamps and humans just got a whole lot more complex. Knowing what I knew now, I was even less inclined to let her get near the vampires. Parts of what I knew about them started to make sense to me. Even though Brandon had been a monster back then, these were not the vampires I knew now. Brandon and his people had changed. I had a pretty good idea that maybe that night at the private school had been the turning point for him. The loss of Damaris had touched something still human deep inside, changing him, making him go from an arrogant killing machine to a scholar interested in the preservation of his people.

Even the timing of it all seemed to make sense. The loss of Damaris was when he started giving a shit about the prophecies, deciphering them. It even fit with when Brandon had hired the gypsies to grab Aidan. It was hard to have seen him as that monster, but that wasn’t the vampire I knew. I trusted Brandon now, but if Allorah ever saw him again, there would simply be no reasoning with her.

And here we were prepping for the hunt. I had to find a more proactive way to keep her occupied. “Any luck with the sample?”

Allorah went back to her lab equipment and I stood on shaky legs to follow. When I got to her, Allorah was already bent over one of her microscopes again.

“The concentration level of viral activity is off the chart compared to the samples off your clothes,” she said.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

Allorah nodded.

She looked so serious. The change from who I had experienced just minutes ago had me seriously missing that version of her. I felt such deep sadness.

“It gives me a lot more to work with,” she said. “If I can find a weakness to these monsters, we can find a better way to destroy them.”

I could feel the tension rising in my shoulders at the thought of the bloodbath that would come on both sides of that effort. I had to try to change how this was going to be handled. All-out war didn’t seem like the healthiest of options for either side, but with the general black-or-white ideology of the Enchancellorship possibly making decisions on this, I was worried about Manhattan becoming a ghost town.

“What about other alternatives?” I asked.

Allorah looked at me like I was crazy. “Like what?”

“I mean, we
could
potentially try and make an antivirus, couldn’t we?”

Allorah stood up from the microscope and gave me her full attention. She crossed her arms. “Now, why would we want to do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, dodging the question. “I mean, wouldn’t a regular vampire be easier to contend with than these mutated
things
? If we were able to tone down this vampire variant, maybe we’d stand a better chance of eliminating them. Personally, I’d rather fight a guy in a dinner jacket, cummerbund, and cape than these clawed snaggletooths.”

I didn’t want anyone dead if I could help it, but taking this tack would at least help soften Allorah to the idea. I hoped. I stood there, maintaining my composure as she thought it over.

Thankfully, the stillness in the room was broken when she closed her eyes and nodded. “You have a point,” Allorah said. She put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “They’re vicious enough in normal form. I can’t imagine how powerful this new breed is. If they’re as savage as you described, you’re right. We need to do what we can to reverse the virus. I’ll get to work on it.”

Allorah went back to work with the same extreme intensity, but as I backed myself out of the room without her even noticing, I was at least happy that her preparation was now pointed toward more science and less slaying. Some days it was the small victories that got you by.

Back at the Gibson-Case Center, I was thrilled to see that the living statues didn’t give me any trouble when I returned to the elevators leading back up to Nicholas’s control center. When I got up there, I found Nicholas hunched forward in front of the main console that hooked up to the full-wall monitor system. His hair had fallen out of his ponytail and hung in his face like he had been pulling an all-nighter … or all-dayer, in his case.

“Anything?” I asked, hoping for a bit of positive news to offset the whole prophecy thing in my brain. “Find my girlfriend yet? How ’bout whoever released all those ferals?”

He pulled his eyes away from the console, turned to me, and shook his head. “Nothing yet on either account, I’m afraid. I see you found your way up here all by yourself.”

“I’m a quick study,” I said. “Actually, I would have gotten lost if the monorail hadn’t taken me through most of the mall.”

Nicholas cocked his head at me and cringed. “Please don’t call this a
mall
. It offends my architectural sensibilities.”

“I had no idea,” I said. I held up my hands. “I’m sorry.”

Nicholas still looked incensed. “Would you call the Concorde a paper plane?” he asked, his voice getting louder and louder. “Or the Sistine Chapel a paint-by-number?”

“No,” I said, resisting the urge to reach for the security of my bat, only to remember I didn’t have it anymore.

“Then call it what it
is
, then,” he said, standing. “An
arcology
. A hyperstructure featuring computer systems that border on sentient.” He pointed over at the large bank of windows opposite the giant monitor, walking there. I followed and looked down at the shopping concourse far below. People were scurrying around like worker ants on a mission from the queen. “Here the living, the unliving, and technology interact all like organs in one whole being. Self-sustainability! Stores, restaurants, offices, apartments, theaters, greenhouses, schools, hospitals,
blood banks
… everything to maintain life for all involved.
Not
a mall.”