“Where are they?” she demanded. It would be stupid to beat around the bush.
The taller of the two lifted his lip even more, creating an exaggerated sneer. “As if we’d tell
you.
” When she stepped toward him, he lifted his chin arrogantly. “Think what you’re doing, V.” He spoke like he knew her, but she wasn’t lulled by the false camaraderie. Soon this baby vampire would be nothing more than the next statistic in the long line of today’s deadly tally. “It’s not Blood Chinois you’re dealing with anymore.”
The second one nodded and lifted a finely shaped dark eyebrow. “We’re as fast and as strong as you.” His voice was full of smugness.
Violet’s mouth stretched into a dangerous, mocking smile. “Yeah . . . but are you even one-tenth as pissed
off
?”
But he had other things in mind than trading words. The roundhouse kick he sent toward her head was like lightning . . . but it still wasn’t fast enough.
Fueled by rage and her inexplicable desire to protect Six, even as much as she didn’t understand it herself, her retaliation was vicious, even for a vampire. She didn’t care if she got hurt—there was little anyone in this world could do to her physically that would equal what had been done to her emotionally, anyway. That utterly callous attitude came with certain advantages: if she took a blow, it didn’t matter; if she hit someone so hard she hurt herself, she didn’t feel it. A flurry of strikes, a series of rapid-fire kicks, and it took her all of thirty seconds to wipe out both of them. When the fighting was done, Violet stood over their broken, bloody bodies, victorious but breathing hard and knowing that each time she did this, she lost a little more of herself and what small amount of time she had left in this world. But that didn’t matter either—it was fitting even if it didn’t make sense to spend that time and body energy trying to gain a few more hours of existence for a doomed human child. A person had to fight for something in his or her life, and it had been too long since she’d been fighting for a doomed cause. She had thought she’d lost everyone worth loving a long time ago; finally she again had someone for whom she could be a champion.
Where to go now? She scanned the grim-looking tombstones, then her gaze stopped. About forty feet farther down the path, exactly in the center of the cemetery, was a small and picturesque stone chapel. Despite the neglect this gathering place for the dead had undergone, this tiny building was still a haven for anyone—doubtful—who might come here to mourn or visit those who had passed on. The outside surface was made of smooth, rounded river stones, the kind you didn’t see much in the more modern metropolitan cemeteries. The roof was made of heavy, iron-colored slate tiles, and it ran to a peak in the center, then up to a short steeple like an old-fashioned country church. At the very top of the steeple was a crucifix that in a burial place for Hemophages mocked the stupid old legends. Snowball bushes, their greenery ratty-looking but their flowers blooming magnificently, flanked the closed, unassuming wooden doors in the center of its front wall. She could smell their heavy, rich scent all the way out here, and it was to this little chapel, Violet realized, that the path she was on had led all along. Maybe her
life
had been designed to do just that—cycle around and bring her right here. Destiny wasn’t something that was always clear to the common person.
Despite her recent victory, Violet approached the chapel cautiously. She’d already once wrongly assumed all of Nerva’s henchmen were dead, and while she’d won the last battle, the war was far from over. The chapel itself wasn’t a big building, but looks meant nothing in the world of the dead—maybe it had an underground area, or passageways that led to catacombs much like those from the Ancient Ages, the ones that had been lined with the skulls and bony remains of thousands who had died centuries before. From where she was, Violet could only see the front—there might be a long, narrow extension in the back, an add-on built specifically to house coffins and which disappeared into the trees that backed up to it. As her hand closed over the tarnished, old-fashioned handle and her thumb pressed down on the latch, she knew she’d have to be very, very careful.
She pushed and the right door opened smoothly and silently, as if it had been recently oiled. An interesting concept, since it wasn’t safe for Hemophages to be seen in public anymore and no uninfected human would risk venturing into such a dirty place as a Hemophage cemetery. Once she was fully inside, it only took a few steps for Violet’s eyes to adjust to the darkness, maybe two more for her to realize that the statues lining the walls weren’t statues at all, but Hemophages, standing absolutely still, seeking refuge from her and the humans in the outside world. Really, it was the perfect place and the perfect type of camouflage.
She watched them with narrowed eyes, but when no one came toward her she went farther inside. There was something in the center of the chapel, something large and dark and round—a well, some kind of historical marker that had long since had the plaque denoting its original human history ripped away. The building had originally been constructed around it, but now it was going to serve a different purpose. There had once been a bucket hanging beneath the opening’s roof, probably a replica restrung on a new rope. The bucket had been ripped away and Violet glimpsed it off to the side, where it had been tossed against one wall after Nerva had sheared it from the rope. In its place was Six, the remaining rough hemp tied tightly around his waist; he hung there like a sack of rice, swaying slightly. The scene was disconcertingly close to a hanging, where the body sways gently back and forth, pushed by some unrealized breeze. The other end of the rope was wrapped around Nerva’s hand and he grinned and jiggled it playfully when he saw Violet. He’d pulled off his sunglasses in the dark room and a sort of manic glee shone in his ink-colored eyes. He jiggled the rope again and it slipped a couple of inches; Six gasped as he dropped slightly and Violet growled and automatically took a step forward.
“Huh-uh!” Nerva said sharply. This time he let the rope slide down a good half foot, stopping it with a jerk that made the rope dig into the boy’s stomach. A small, involuntary cry escaped Six’s lips, then Violet saw the muscles in his jaw grind together. Incredibly, the boy was trying not to show his fear as he shot Nerva a dark look.
Violet froze. If she rushed Nerva, he would let go of the rope and Six would likely plummet to his death—she had no way of knowing how deep the well was, but it was a good bet it went down at least sixty feet and perhaps as much as two hundred. There might be water somewhere at the bottom, and there might not. Even if there was, who could say the child knew how to swim? The odds were highly against it.
On the other hand, if she didn’t try for it . . . well, what good would it do to just stand here? Time—and life—was ticking away and Nerva was just evil enough to drop the child anyway. After all, hadn’t he wanted the boy dead all along?
Keeping her face carefully expressionless, Violet reached under her coat and drew a pistol out of a flat-space holster.
Nerva only grinned more widely at her. “Gunfire will attract the human security teams,” he reminded her. He jiggled the rope again and although Six didn’t make a sound, Violet’s heartbeat jumped for him in sympathy. “You might win the battle, but you’d lose the war, V.”
He was right, of course—and she’d thought the very same thing less than two minutes earlier. Besides, if she got pissed and shot the bastard just for the fun of it, he’d let go of the rope and Six would be killed anyway. Without taking her gaze from Nerva’s, Violet grimaced and tossed the gun aside in exasperation. For a long moment, she just stood there and stared at him. Her mind worked furiously, turning over option after option like a computer working out the moves in a chess match. She had never been so trapped before, never so caught in a battle she couldn’t find a way to win.
Well, except for when she’d been told she was infected with the Hemophage virus.
Damn it, if Six was going to die anyway, if there really was
nothing
she could do to save him, then why not die trying? And she would take Nerva and as many of the others with her as she could, her way, without intervention or misguided assistance from the humans who so despised her and those like her. The way of blood and steel rather than firepower.
This time, when she reached inside her coat, Violet’s hand came back out with a long, carved steel katana in it.
The response from the Hemophages stationed around the chapel was instantaneous—swords sang out all around her, the blades glittering in the muted light from the high, stained-glass windows along the chapel’s side walls. Ignoring them, Violet focused on Nerva, but before she could leap for him, he held up his free hand. “V, wait.” He sounded almost pleading. “Don’t you realize what this child has
in
him?”
Her fingers gripped the sword’s handle, trembling with anticipation, with the urge to kill. The metal warmed in her grip, thrumming with the energy bleeding off her body. “I don’t
care
what he has ‘in’ him,” she growled.
“It’s not a vampire antigen,” Nerva said quickly. His gaze flicked from left to right, making sure his soldiers stayed put. Violet knew he could call them down upon her with the merest blink of his eye. It was inevitable. “It’s a
human
antigen,” he continued. “Lethal enough to kill every human on the planet!”
Violet’s eyes narrowed until they were nothing more than slits. What kind of talk was this? Trash, that’s all, just more bullshit to stall the eventual bloodshed.
His
bloodshed. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Why would humans create a human antigen?”
Nerva smiled but it was edgy, trembling nervousnessly. Even so, his fingers playing idly along the rope that controlled Six’s life . . . or death. Whether he convinced her or not, he knew he held Six’s life in his hands . . . literally. “Sweetheart, humans have been busily devising more and more effective ways to kill each other since the beginning of time.” He licked his lips, his tongue momentarily probing the ends of his incisors in an oddly erotic gesture. “Why do I or even you care
why?
I just intend to help them finish the job.”
Violet stared at him, unsure. Even now, after all this time, it was so . . .
strange
to think of life as her against
them,
against the “humans.” What Nerva was saying now just fortified that—he talked as if humans and vampires had been warring for millennia, but she had been human less than ten years ago. He had, too. Did he truly want to kill all the humans? If he did, that would effectively end humans, uninfected or otherwise, as a life form on this planet. It was unthinkable. Because really, wasn’t she still just that—a human, but one with a disease? To kill off
all
the humans couldn’t be right, it
couldn’t
be. If he did that, their existence—
everyone’s
existence—would suddenly shorten to a mere ten years, and that was assuming the vampires were unaffected by this ultimate weapon. And didn’t people have a right to live longer than that?
“Why . . . didn’t you tell me then?” she asked. It wasn’t much of a question, but she was desperately trying to stall for time. God, she needed time to
think,
to work this out in her head and try to figure out the right thing to do. What was right and what was wrong, who should live and who should die—how had the responsibility to decide this on such a grand scale fallen on
her
shoulders?
“Because, darling, I didn’t know.” Nerva lifted his chin haughtily and gave her an oily smile, then shook his head. His long, curly hair flew around his head, making him look like an unruly wolf. “In the form of Daxus, the humans have offered us a most tempting proposal,” he continued. “One that would finally even the odds for us.” His gaze was piercing and the hint of a sneer tugged at one corner of his mouth. His expression said she should have known better. Violet’s stomach twisted; she just hated to be in a position where this bastard could lord it over her. “So just walk away, V.
Walk away.
”
Suddenly, something high on the wall behind Nerva lit up. Violet’s gaze shot to the source of the light, then stopped. It was a clock that she hadn’t noticed before, its mechanism built across a window of stained glass that matched the ones on the side walls. The clouds outside had finally parted and the sun was now bathing the clock window at just the right angle to throw Violet into a bright, multicolored spotlight. She turned her attention from the clock back to where Six dangled over the well and he caught her eye, then looked down at his feet. To the other people in the room, it looked like nothing more than her giving the boy a visual farewell before making her exit; only Violet saw him quietly push off his left shoe. It dropped unnoticed into the dark hole of the well and Violet’s gaze cut back to the clock. Time seemed to slow and she counted in her mind—
One one-thousand
Two one-thousand
Three one-thousand
Four one-thousand
Five one-thousand
There was a faint
smack
as the boy’s shoe finally hit water somewhere out of sight. It took her three more seconds to estimate twenty-seven armed Hemophages between her and where Nerva was holding Six’s rope over the well.
Without a word, Violet brought her sword up and spun it expertly in the air in an outright challenge.
Nerva’s mouth dropped open and his eyes widened. “Are you
insane?
” he asked incredulously.
As he had done only a few moments earlier, Violet lifted her chin with more confidence than she actually felt. “You need him more than I do,” she said flatly. “You won’t drop him.”
The dark Hemophage’s lip curled and his fingers went white around the rope in his hand.
“End her,”
he hissed.
A dozen of the Hemophages in the chapel charged her, springing from the long shadows against the wall like greased streaks of black. As they closed around her, Violet spun in the midst of them almost lazily, letting her mind and body go on instinct, parrying blows and striking in return with an almost ethereal precision. The kernel of doubt she had felt a few seconds ago bled away like water escaping a sponge. Such foolish, foolish brethren she had; by now she would have thought they’d known they could never win. Or maybe, like her—until she had found Six—they fought because they had nothing else left to live for. What a shame that your existence was so cheap that you could find no reason not to die.