The Children of the Sun (18 page)

“I never dared hope it would be so easy,” she said, her voice breaking. A trickle of blood began to work its way from the corner of her lower lip to her chin.

“Now you know.”

“Listen to me, child,” the vampire said, and Vanessa saw that the Captain meant to object again to this word, but the tattooed woman held up her hand. “Listen. She will forgive you. She will forgive you without you even having to ask her.”

“I have no idea who you are talking about,” the Captain said.

“Will you forgive her? Can you forgive her?”

“Who?”

“Oh, my poor child, how will you ever be able to forgive yourself?”

At this last, the Captain bared her teeth and raised her second blade. “I’ve heard enough.”

“I’ve nothing more to say,” the vampire croaked.

“Then let me finish it. Let me end this.”

The woman seemed grateful to hear these words. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and she smiled, tilting her head back once again.

“I come to be with you at last, my love,” she whispered.

The Captain lunged forward again, this time swinging her right arm in a wide arc, bringing the carbon-steel blade rushing through the air. The tip of it bit into the vampire’s throat and, after a moment of palpable resistance, cut through, leaving a wide gash like a bloody grin and casting a spray of red against the far wall.

Gouts of crimson liquid gushed forth from the wound in great jets, but the vampire’s expression never changed. Her eyes remained closed, her head remained tilted back, and she was still smiling when she died.

* * *

“I have never felt anything like that in my entire life,” Janus said, and he threw back his shot of whiskey, grimaced, and slammed it down on the bar.

“Another round for my boy here,” Connors said, clapping him on the back. “We’ll make a fellow Irishman of you yet.”

“You’re about as Irish as my German mother’s tits, California boy,” Burke said, pouring from a bottle of Jameson into Janus’s glass.

“Yeah, well, your German mother had plenty of Irish in her, if you take my meaning,” Connors replied, grinning, and Burke pitched him the finger.

“If you’re playing bartender, Burke, Carrie and I could use a refill,” Vanessa said. Both women were drinking champagne, though the emotion Vanessa was feeling was something closer to relief than elation. She was not sure they should be celebrating.

“My pleasure, Ness,” Burke said, and Vanessa watched as he refilled both glasses.

“Much obliged,” she said when he was done, and Burke nodded.

“Anyone else? Park?” he asked, and Soon glanced up from his phone and shook his head.

“I’m set. Remind me to compliment the former owners on their choice of Scotch,” he said.

“I think they’re all dead,” Paulo said, and Park grinned.

“Even better,” he said, returning to his phone. “I won’t have to replace it.”

The Brazilian was sitting at the edge of the bar, drinking a glass of wine from a bottle old enough that its label had been illegible from dust when he had first pulled it from the cellar. Paulo rarely drank anything but red wine. The Blood of Christ, he claimed, was the only thing that interested him.

“Seriously though, Ness, you ever feel anything like that?” Janus asked. “It was fucking crazy. I couldn’t move.”

“Never,” Vanessa said, watching the bubbles in her champagne crawl up the sides of the glass.

“Carrie? Burke?”

“No one’s ever felt anything like that,” Connors said. “Jesus, dude, she was four thousand years old. You ever meet anyone else that old?”

“My grandma might’ve made it to three thousand,” Janus said, and then cackled at his own joke. He drained his glass and again slammed it to the bar. “Hit me, bro.”

Burke hit him, and poured a shot of his own.

“We actually lost radio contact for a few minutes there in the middle,” Park said. “Carrie will back me up.”

“S’true,” Carrie said, not looking up from her glass, which she hadn’t touched since Burke had refilled it.

“That could’ve been something in the van,” Vanessa said. “A problem with the equipment, maybe.”

“No, no way,” Park replied. “Our systems are triple-redundant and anyway, I checked everything over. There’s nothing wrong in the van.”

“It was the bat,” Carrie said, glancing over at Vanessa for a moment before turning back to her drink. “I felt it all the way in the car.”

“Shoulda been inside,” Janus told her. “Shit, I felt like I was going to start crying. Like everything we were doing was a complete waste, like … like …”

“Like they were going to win,” Vanessa finished for him. “Like it was all just a huge joke, because they were going to win.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Exactly,” Janus said, and for a moment there was silence. He glanced around at the others. “Captain rocked it, though. Say what you want … she fucking rocked it.”

“I wonder what some of you might say, if you said what you wanted,” a voice said from the far side of the room, and the group as a whole turned their heads to see the Captain coming toward the bar.

“Uh, nothin’ meant by that,” Janus tried, and the Captain smirked.

“Sure,” she said. “Tell me something, Janus. Have you ever eaten
blood pudding?”

Janus blanched, going pale, and his features took on a look of fear and mortification that Vanessa found entirely alien on his face.

“You, ah … you heard that?” he asked.

“I hear everything,” the Captain told him, and to Vanessa’s surprise, she smiled, not a hint of malice in her eyes. Moving further into the room, she pulled out the stool next to Janus and sat down. “For example, I heard that Burke is our bartender tonight.”

Burke had been staring at the Captain with an expression halfway between awe and fear, and he started now at the sound of his own name, but then regained his composure. “What do you need, Captain?”

“Tequila,” she replied. “Give me a shot and leave the bottle. You have any salt back there?”

None of the members of the squad had ever seen the woman drink, let alone act in such a casual manner. Vanessa found herself confused, unsure what to make of this display, and could see on the faces of the others that they felt the same.

Burke set the bottle of tequila down before the Captain and quickly found her a shaker of salt. The Captain took it, curled her left hand into a fist, and shook a generous helping of salt out onto the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. She turned and looked again at Janus.

“So did you mean it?” she asked, and he tilted his head.

“I’m sorry, ma’am?”

“‘Captain rocked it, though,’” she quoted, her voice dropping an octave and taking on an eerie impersonation of Janus’s Mississippi accent. “‘She fucking rocked it.’”

Janus considered the question and then nodded. “I did, yeah. I was ready to run, OK? That’s the fuckin’ truth, Captain. If you’d lowered those blades, I would’ve been gone, and I’m not ashamed to say it because I think everyone else felt the same.”

There were murmurs of assent. Vanessa found herself nodding, knowing it was true.

“All right, then,” the Captain said, and she raised her fist to her lips, licking the salt away and chasing it with the shot of tequila. Finished, she closed her eyes and set the glass down in front of her, taking a long breath. At last she opened her eyes again and looked at them.

“But none of you ran,” she said. “You held strong in the face of someone who could have torn every one of you to shreds. She went easy. I knew she would, but I knew she’d try to use her powers first. Some other squad … one of the shit ones they send out to clean up … those people would’ve wet their pants and fallen to their knees crying. Do you understand?

“Charles told me you could handle it, and he was right. You stood your ground, you didn’t abandon your posts and give up on your duty to the Emperor. You don’t even know what you’ve done. It was the hardest thing you’ll ever do, and you did it, and you helped me do what I needed to do.”

There was silence, now, but they were all looking at her. The Captain, for her part, was staring at her left hand, still closed into a fist.

“Thank you,” she said at last, and with that she opened her hand and reached again for the bottle, looking over at them again.

“Who’ll do a shot with me?” she asked. “One shot, and then I’ll take this bottle and head upstairs, but I’m tired of drinking alone.”

Janus grinned, took the bottle from her, and filled first her glass and then his own. Burke began laying shot glasses out for the rest of the team, and one by one Janus filled them with tequila. The Captain passed the salt down along the line.

It was only after Vanessa had slammed her shot glass down against the wood of the bar with the rest of them that she realized what she had seen out of the corner of her eye. Carrie Brennan had raised her glass up along with the rest of them, but Vanessa was sure, absolutely sure, that she had seen the woman pour the tequila out on the carpeted floor.

Part III

Chapter 9
First Encounter

“Mike again?!” Two asked, glancing over the list of challengers, and Jakob laughed.

“He’s been waiting for you to come back. He, well … the Ay’Araf don’t take well to losing. Especially to a first-timer.”

“Life’s a bitch,” Two said. “Come on … I want to fight someone else.”

“So beat him again,” Jakob said. “If he loses two in a row, he’s not allowed to challenge you again until you lose a match. House rules.”

“Is it like that at all of your clubs?” Theroen asked. He was standing slightly behind Two, arms crossed, watching the fighters in the veteran ring.

“Not all of them, but most,” Jakob said. “Each club has its own rules, but we all get tired of the same fighters competing against each other over and over. If one is clearly superior, it’s time to move up. It’s the only way to learn.”

“So you learn by losing?” Two asked, and Jakob raised an eyebrow.

“What do you think you’ve been doing these past thirty-six months?” he asked. Two favored him with a cool glance.

“You’ve got a few hundred years on me, dude. I think you should be embarrassed that I beat you even once!”

“He is,” Sasha said, walking up behind them. “You should have seen the email I got that night. Honestly, teenage girls wish they were so dramatic. Perhaps he’s lost his touch.”

Jakob shook his head, smiling, and turned to face his apprentice. “Will I be seeing you in the ring soon, then, Sasha?”

“The last time we fought, oh sire of mine, you came within a whisker’s breadth of severing my femoral artery. I believe that was in 2005.”

“It was 2006, and you deserved it, leaving yourself open like that.”

“I did,” Sasha said, nodding. “But it knocked me so far down the ladder that there’s been no point in challenging you since on the rare nights you deem it worth your time to fight. The line is miles long.”

“I had no idea you were so in demand,” Two said.

“Sasha is exaggerating,” Jakob said, glancing away, and Sasha gave a scoffing laugh.

“Jakob is the best fighter on this side of the Atlantic,” she said. “He’s just too political to admit it.”

“I prefer ‘modest,’” Jakob said.

“You’re that good?” Two asked him. “No bullshit?”

“Sasha’s claim is bolder than anything I would make, but I will admit I’ve not lost a fight in … quite some time,” Jakob replied.

“Stephen said you were better than him,” Two said, thinking back to her days in London. “He said you were a more natural fighter.”

Jakob shrugged. “I fought Stephen many times. I usually won, but near the end he was getting very good. Still too susceptible to taunting, though. I could always goad him out of his defense and get him to attack, and that always opened things up.”

“That does sound like Stephen.”

“I would say – if I try not to succumb to the aggrandizement of my loyal fledgling – that Stephen was ahead of me in aggression, roughly equal in skill, but far behind in control. I took advantage of that.”

Two nodded. “And you don’t fight anymore?”

“Not often,” Jakob said. “Of late I prefer to observe, and to train. You and Sasha are not the only students I’ve had, though I believe the two of you to be the best.”

Two gave an incredulous laugh. “Sasha would carve me up like a turkey.”

“Even with one arm,” Sasha agreed, smiling a little. “But Jakob didn’t say that we were equally skilled. I have a lot more training than you do, Two, but you have talent.”

“Talent, drive, and the pedigree of your blood,” Jakob said. “Ay’Araf are stronger than Ashayt and faster than Eresh, at least those of equivalent age, but I’m not so sure about you,
Theroen-Chen
. You’re ridiculously fast and strong.”

“I got lucky,” Two said, and she shrugged. It was the truth. She should have been dead, long ago, murdered by Abraham and burned to ashes. Everything after seemed to her a sort of inexplicable miracle.