Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (8 page)

As he looks at me for a reaction, almost inviting me to say something, he pulls Sabetha closer to him by the back of her neck.  I tense and try to keep still but without enough control, I take a step forward.  She pulls away from his hand which held her chin delicately, but her eyes have been growing steadily more enticed by the blood.  I know it has been too long since last she fed.  She tries to deny it sometimes, the human winning over the vampire.  I guess Carlos could see this in her and thinks perhaps she is weakest now.  Her instincts blind her to the ilk girl and allow only the blood to be seen.  Smelt.  Carlos dares me with his eyes and I clench my fist, lowering my gaze at him.  I’m growing tired of seeing my sister used for his amusement.  He doesn’t know how thin the ice is upon which he treads.

Carlos tosses the girl off the table with a light thud and claps his hands twice.  He keeps looking at me the whole time while dabbing his mouth.  A large naked muscular ilk man resembling an ancient stone statue comes forth, carrying a tray of clean napkins.  Carlos knocks the tray from the servant’s hands with a swift strike and then looks to Sabetha.  She licks her lips and looks to the man who, despite his body-builder physique, cowers away from his master.  Carlos holds out his palm and waits till the servant places his hand in it.  He drags a fingernail down the wrist and after the slightest offering Sabetha takes the dripping limb into her mouth and begins to pull hard on the wound.  Quickly the man grows pale, beginning to lose his balance.

Carlos slowly takes the hand away from Sabetha as the servant collapses.  Having become aware of her actions she looks embarrassedly around the room, breathing deeply.  He leans closer to her, looking directly into her eyes and says, “You must not deny your desires.”

I lift him up by the neck as high as my arm will reach, then put him through the oak table to the floor. I growl at him from an inch away even before the debris has settled, but he starts to laugh snidely as the shock wears off.  I grip tighter on his throat and try not to allow myself to tear it out.

“A violation of sanctuary?” he asks me.  I think really hard about killing him right here but decide to cut my losses for tonight.

Sabetha is in a daze as I take a hold of her arm, storming out of the room.  I grab her coat from the attendant as we get to the front doors, but the two goons from the front door block our exit.  One of them puts his hand out to stop us, but before it reaches my lapel, I snap the elbow joint so hard, his forearm dangles from the end of his bicep like a wind chime.  He doesn’t even register the wound for one and a tenth of second.  In the meantime his partner reaches for his gun in an underarm holster.  I jam in, pin his elbow to his stomach and slam my fist down on the top of his shoulder with a hammer blow, breaking the collar bone and dropping the shoulder out of its fractured socket. 

The first guard, finally aware I’ve made a move, hisses and bares his fangs.  I hold the top of his head and leap into the air, driving my knee up through his chin so fast the mandibles snap and all but three teeth shatter.  As he drops to the ground, I throw a no-look back kick into the second guard’s neck, smashing his head through a mirror on the wall.

From the hallway behind me, Carlos walks with his hand along the wall for support.  “I’ll be seeing you, my dear,” he calls to Sabetha with a smile.

“
W
hat the fuck were you thinking?”  She yells at me, her senses returning.

I sit in the driver’s seat, speeding back home while she regains herself.  “I could ask the same of you.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Do you really want to be like
that
? Like
him
?” I yell.

“It’s my choice either way!”

“Don’t you remember the Viscount?  The one that made you?”

“I remember that
you
interfered and started the first blood war!” she roars at me.  I slam on the breaks and send Rolla into a spiral.  When we lurch to a stop I throw open the door and walk over to the passenger side, grabbing Sabetha by the collar and pulling her onto the street.

“That was a low blow
Sabbath
,” I taunt, using the nickname he once had for her. 

“Don’t you ever fucking call me that!” she charges in but I drive a fist through her chin. 
Her feet lift off the ground with the force but she backflips, recovers, and comes around with a long leg across my neck.  We engage in a barrage of punches but in both of our rages spend little time defending and wind up slugging the wits out of one another.  I get sent backwards over a bench by an uppercut but I get her back with a tackle which sends her through a parking meter with a shower of quarters.  She kicks twice.  The first one is more of a knee to the ribs but I catch the second one and throw her down the sidewalk like a cat by the tail.  She lands hard but rolls gracefully back to her feet before running into me and shoving me towards the car.  I land against Rolla with my elbow and shatter the back triangular window.  Suddenly not caring about her next attack I look disheartened at the broken glass.  Sabetha walks over and casually picks up some of the diamond-like shards off the cement.

“Ah, shit,” she says.

I look over my shoulder at her and she looks back.  “Come on,” I say softly, heading to the driver’s side.  “Sun’s almost up.”

Sisters…

I
t’s now six nights since the break in and in retrospect, we have reacted pretty frantically.  What we would normally accomplish in a month or two has taken us under a week, and I’m starting to remember why we usually drag our feet.  Though no closer to figuring out the mysterious attack, things are already starting to wind down, and it feels like Christmas afternoon when there’s no more presents to open.  The immortal tendency toward melodrama is both an unfortunate side effect of age and ego, and a deliberate need to create risk.  Sadly, we haven’t milked the break-in enough, and as a result, are now growing bored. 

We check on my sentiners but they’ve turned up nothing useful.  With little hope for better prospects, we head to the subway.  Lezar is now employing a zip line instead of the truck to get people off the trains and, I have to admit, it turns out to be the highlight of our evening, Lezar having turned up nothing new.  My hypothesis is that this is just a kharmatic hiccup, and
it’s beginning to seem truer and truer.  The city’s essence, the consciousness, sometimes takes a swing at people like me, but since we have too much of a footing, too much of our own kharma to counteract the usual shit, Cycle’s usual methods like a car accident won’t do it.  To get us, things have to build up over time until when it does break through the gauntlet between kharma and reality, like our friend Janus the flesh golem, it’s pretty disgusting.

We leave Lezar’s hall with half the night ahead of us and nothing to do but wait.  And for an immortal and a sentiner at that, I’m abnormally intolerant of waiting.  Bullworth, a high ranking soldier in the court and an old friend of ours, is escorting Sabetha and me on a safe route out.  He’s a big guy to begin with, so as a millitus he looks like a twelve foot long
hyena.  A rarity but not unheard of, Bullworth has mastered his beast and can act rationally while a millitus.  As if this alone didn’t make him a welcome guide through the tunnels, his senses, not affected by the kharmatic fog like mine, remain sharp. 

Note to self: buy some of those specially crafted green flares.

We make a right out of a perimeter tunnel and begin walking down a raised cement walkway that Bullworth barely fits on, next to a set of tracks.  A few minutes go by before he stops suddenly and sniffs the air.  Freezing in place, we allow him to scan the area without distraction, but soon I can feel my pulse quicken in my fingertips as they rest against the gritty cement wall.  Something is slowly building in my gut like that unsettling tremble and surge of saliva right before you lean over to purge.  But I don’t vomit.  Instead I gasp.  Leaning into myself, clutching my chest, Sabetha grabs a hold of my arm.

“Again?” she hisses.

I manage a nod.

“Bull.
Move
,” she orders, slinging the duffle bag over her shoulder and pulling the strap tight across her chest like a seatbelt.  With an iron clamp on my bicep she starts down the track.  I limp on, then get my wind back and soon we’re nearing a station platform’s light.

There’s a rumbling behind us, and then a growl.  As Betha and I jump down and sprint across the tracks, I hear Bullworth skid to a halt, undoubtedly wanting to engage the unknown rather than flee from it.  The vacant platform is just another hundred paces away and my senses are redoubling every foot closer we get to the lights and away from the unnatural darkness.  As we both leap the last twenty-nine feet up and onto the platform in a single stride, a deep thunder trembles behind us.

Normally it would be foolish to turn and identify the cause of a noise before getting to safety, but Bullworth is still in the darkness.  And though the idea of him being in grave danger is hard to imagine, Sabetha and I have survived this long by always keeping an open mind.  Still, I can only sense a spitting distance into the gloom while standing on the platform.  Waiting too long is just asking for it.  A second later I grab Betha and head for the stairs.

A step into my movement, Bullworth comes soaring out of the darkness, crashing across the platform and through one of the cement divider walls. 
I try to picture what could have done such a thing to a two-thousand pound werewolf, but then get the answer to my question as I stop at the foot of the stairs to the street.

The largest tunnel dweller I have ever seen is snarling at us from just outside the light and in the next instant the creature is airborne and flying towards us.  To my side there is a great roar as an enraged Bullworth explodes from a pile of cement and I am caught in the middle of it all like a deer in headlights.  Sabetha has her hand on my collar and pulls me back into the cover of the stairway wall.  In the split second that our attacker is illuminated, my abilities instinctively kick-in and slow everything down. 

It’s a mostly black and cancerous looking blob of flesh about the size of a large SUV, but with stubby, muscular frog legs.  The rest of it is almost unidentifiable.  A single red-orange eye, the diameter of a trash can, looks at me from roughly the side of a face, though none of the other important parts of a face are present.  As the creature leaps past us, smashing a chunk out of the stairway wall, I can see that its arms, while ape-like with big humanish hands, are not parallel with the rest of its body.  Instead, the shoulders seem to be perpendicular to the hips: one arm on its chest, the other on its back.

And then it’s gone, past my field of view as it soars over the platform.  Sabetha has pulled us to the top of the stairs.  Seeing me still dazed, she grabs my pistol from its holster and steps in front of the next car to near us.

“Get out,” she says leveling the barrel at the driver; it’s his only chance to cooperate. Three seconds later he is still frozen in fear.  She fires and then pulls the dead man from his vehicle.  With a heave, she tosses me into the passenger seat.  I sit upright just in time to see the creature leap from underground through the stairway, its massive body smashing the sides of the subway entrance with an explosive, ground-quaking
boom
. 

It sails over the small sedan, taking Sabetha with it in a blur and showering everything in debris and pulverized cement.  Tracking it through the air, I sense Sabetha squirm free and land a good distance away.  The dweller hits a building front with a crash of windows and bricks and pushes off, rebounding at the car.  I duck across the driver’s side seat and hit the accelerator with my hand.  The car bucks and leaps forward as the dweller lands on the vehicle’s shadow.  Without sitting up, I begin to steer the car away, using my supernatural awareness to navigate.  In a second, I get into position and sense that the creature is still following me.  I catch it in the rearview mirror, tumbling along in pursuit, using its limbs
like tentacles to guide its sloppy summersaults.  It repeatedly rolls ass over head while its legs and arms flop on the road to direct its chase.  With every rotation, that big orange eye comes around and it re-adjusts its course.

This piece of shit car is too slow and I have to swerve through a vacant pedestrian walkway to avoid an entanglement with the cyclops.  The monster keeps rolling towards me, eating up café furniture and cement posts as it goes.  There’s a father and teenage son up ahead - I can sense the bond between them.  Tension is being mended over a midnight stroll.  There’s no way for me to get back on the street without hitting one of them.

“Fuck!” I lift the e-brake and cut the wheel right with all my frustration.  The car makes a sharp 90 and comes to a stop on the far side of a handicap ramp so the top is only inches above the landing and sheltered from the cyclops.   

Seven-tenths of a seconds later, the dweller leaps into the air like a frog and comes down on me, blasting through the ramp and crushing the back end of the car. I am launched up from my seat hard enough to make a nice bust relief on the metal the roof.  Then the creature gets a good grip on the rear doors and hurls the car to the other side of the street.  I sweep through the corner window of a bank lobby in a shower of glass and the wailing of an alarm, rolling sideways once, spinning around and coming to rest upside down.  I bail out through the shattered windshield.