The Children of the Sun (17 page)

Carrie was crying now, but she laughed at this. “Oh, I wish, Ness. I wish that was what did this to me. That would’ve been so much better, but they never touched me. It was pieces of my dad’s skull that did all of this. Shrapnel. I got to have surgery after surgery so they could dig little bits of my father out of my face. There’s probably still some of him in there even now, and every time I look in the mirror with my one good eye, I get a nice reminder that I’m only alive because when they blew my dad’s head off, I took so much of the blast that they just left me for dead.

“No one even believed me, either. Not about the vampires, anyway. They figured I’d dreamt that shit up while lying half dead in a pool of my own blood. Tim – you know, Colonel Palowski? – came to me in the hospital after and asked whether I wanted to go live with my aunt, or ‘disappear’ and come learn how to kill the things. I mean … I don’t even have to ask what you would’ve chosen. You’re here for the same reason I am.”

Vanessa, who had not actually watched her parents die but only heard it from another tent, shook her head. “Not exactly the same.”

“No, but close enough. I didn’t even feel like there was a
choice
, you know? I couldn’t talk, because of the surgeries, so I wrote on my pad, ‘How many do I get to kill?’ and he goes, ‘As many as you want,’ and I wrote ‘I want to kill them all,’ and underlined it twice. He just took my hand and smiled like it was the best thing he’d heard in weeks.”

There was silence for a time. At last, Carrie gave an embarrassed laugh, wiping the tears from her face.

“So that’s why I hate vampires so much, and why I never got drunk and hooked up with anyone, even though pretty much everyone with the Children has banged at least one other member. I don’t … I don’t think I’m ever going to have sex with a guy. I don’t think I want to. Not really into girls, either.”

Vanessa, who had slept with three male members of the Children, plus a handful of civilians, kept her mouth shut.

“I still want to kill them all,” Carrie said. “Every single one, including
her
. I won’t ever go against the Emperor, but … that’s just how I feel.”

“It’s not like you’re alone,” Vanessa said. “She’s only got to get about five feet away before Janus starts in with his bullshit.”

“What about you? She almost seems to like you.”

Vanessa kept her voice carefully neutral. “I appreciate the Captain’s abilities and her dedication to the Emperor. I don’t know if she likes me … not sure she
likes
anyone. I’d say it’s more mutual respect.”

“That totally did not answer my question,” Carrie said, smiling, and Vanessa glanced over at her and shrugged.

“Closest you’re going to get, Sergeant. How about you worry a little more about memorizing those maps and a little less about whether or not the Captain and I are secret lovers?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Carrie said. She sat down on her bed and began flipping through her dossier. After a moment, Vanessa spoke again.

“Thank you for sharing your story with me.”

Carrie looked up, shrugged, and smiled again. “You never made fun of me, or called me names, or looked at me like I was some kind of freak. I’ve … I’ve wanted to tell the whole thing to someone else for a while, get it out, and I thought you were probably the someone. I just wasn’t sure how to bring it up.”

“Did you ever get to … you know, take care of those guys?”

“Colonel Palowski rounded up five of them. The sixth one was dead already. Took him about eighteen months to track them all down, but once he knew where they were, he gathered them up in just two nights. Then he brought them to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, and he chained them all up to posts. He set up a video camera, and then he doused them with kerosene and burned them alive. He never told them what they’d done, never told them what it was all about. He never spoke a single fucking word, just sat there while they screamed and burned, and smoked his cigar.

“He gave the tape to me on my sixteenth birthday, along with a fifth of whiskey. I watched it over and over again until I had to go puke from the booze. I ended up passing out on the bathroom floor, and when I woke up the tape and the rest of the whiskey were gone. It didn’t matter. It’ll always be up here.”

She tapped her forehead, and Vanessa nodded. “Sounds like a hell of a birthday.”

The woman across the room gave a short, harsh laugh.

“Best I’ve ever had.”

* * *

“Carrie’s got you all on the eye in the sky,” Soon Park said, his voice tinny in Vanessa’s ear. “I’ve got your vitals on the scanner. We’re ready to go.”

“Right,” Vanessa said. “Everyone in position? Count off.”

The numbers came in reverse order, from six to one. Vanessa spoke hers second to last and next to her, in a voice so emotionless she might have been ordering a combo meal from a value menu, the Captain said, “One.”

“That’s it, then. Let’s do this,” Vanessa said, and without further hesitation she kicked in the back door of the small bungalow in which their quarry was currently living.

She went in first, the Captain right behind her, Janus and Andrew Connors following. She could hear the crash in her earpiece as Burke kicked in the front door, where he would remain positioned until their withdrawal. Paulo would stay behind them at the rear entrance. The goal was to be in, out, and done before any security guards or other curious humans happened by.

The back door opened into the kitchen, a little-used room, dark and unoccupied. Vanessa turned on the flashlight attached to the end of her rifle. The others did the same, and they continued into the living room. It was well-appointed, filled with posh furniture and pieces of original art that the management company had secured. Vanessa felt a mild twinge of envy; the older ones were always so rich …

She pushed it out of her head, stepping out into the room. She could see Burke at the door; he shook his head once, indicating he’d seen nothing, and gestured down the hall. Vanessa nodded and took position at the edge of the wall with her weapon aimed at the bedroom door. Janus moved past her, checked the bathroom, and then positioned himself with his back against the wall. He glanced at Vanessa and then at the Captain.

“All yours,” he murmured into his headset, and the Captain made her move.

She wasn’t carrying a firearm; she never did. She was wearing all black, from her boots to her combat fatigues to the tight shirt made of leather with Kevlar reinforcements and darts of stretchy synthetic for flexibility. Her long, blonde hair was tied back and her forearms were covered with leather gauntlets girded in black metal rings. Hitched to her sides, as always, were her blades, and across the chest-plate was a bandolier filled with auto-injecting darts.

Captain Tori Perrault, former vampire and current elite soldier of the Children of the Sun, the Emperor’s Right Hand, strode up to the door at a pace almost leisurely. She stopped in front of it, took a single breath, and then shoved outward with both arms. The door did not so much open as blow inward in a spray of wooden chunks. What was left of it hit the doorstop so hard that the thin tube of metal punched into the wood of the door, stopping it from rebounding. The Captain stepped in, and Vanessa followed her.

Sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing a long and flowing gown of orange and turquoise and purple, was a woman who looked to be in her early twenties. She had dark skin covered in swirling tattoos and long hair pulled back in a high ponytail encircled with golden ringlets. She did not seem surprised by their arrival, nor did she look in the slightest bit concerned. If anything, she seemed to radiate a sense of serenity and peace, and Vanessa found it difficult to look at her for too long without becoming confused. Lightheaded.

“I wondered when you would come for me,” the woman said in a soft, melodious voice.

She was talking to the Captain, looking directly at her, seemingly uninterested in either Vanessa or Janus and Connors, who had come in to the room and taken flanking positions, aiming their weapons at her.

“Now you know,” the Captain said, and the tattooed woman nodded.

“I wonder also, child … do you know who I am?” she asked.

“I am not your child,” the Captain replied.

The woman nodded and gave her a small smile. “Forgive me – when you’ve lived for more than four thousand years, everyone seems very young.”

“If you want to impress me, you’ll need to try harder,” the Captain said, and the woman’s serenity seemed to falter for just a moment. A flicker of something – anger? fear? – crossed her face and disappeared, replaced again by calm and peace. Vanessa had seen it, though, and so had the Captain.

“Will you answer my question?” the tattooed woman asked.

“I know who you are,” the Captain said. “The rest of them don’t, but I do. I know exactly who you are,
Ashayt-Sa, eotah acho ma jitte
.”

Vanessa glanced at Janus, who shrugged. They had never learned the vampire language. The woman on the bed, however, narrowed her eyes.

“You were never taught that speech …”

“I was never taught anything by your kind,” the Captain replied. “Everything I know, I learned from my Emperor.”

“That is not possible.”

Here the Captain favored the woman with a bloodthirsty smile. “Many things are possible for the Emperor of the Sun.”

The tattooed woman considered this for a time and at last said, “You have come here to kill me.”

“Yes.”

“Do you expect me to accept that?”

“I don’t intend on giving you a choice.” The Captain reached down and unsheathed her two blades, holding them casually at her sides. The tattooed woman smiled at this and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, opened them again, and when she spoke next it seemed her voice came not from her mouth, but from the very walls around them, loud and reverberating as if through some gigantic set of hidden speakers.

“I am not accustomed to being threatened,” she murmured, but her words were like a physical force, pressing down upon them. A great wave of despair seemed to roll over Vanessa and she was gripped with a sudden and indisputable certainty that all of their efforts were foolhardy. There was no chance of success, she thought, and no hope for tomorrow. It made her want to fall to her knees and weep, and it was only through a supreme effort that she maintained her position.

She watched in shock as Connors actually dropped his weapon and held his hands to his ears, as if such a simple, futile gesture could contain the sound. Janus managed to control himself, holding on to his rifle but raising his lip in an unconscious snarl. Vanessa, too, kept her grip on her weapon, but she knew that if she told the muscles in her arms to raise it, they would not obey the command. The waves of despair rolling over her seemed ready to crush her, drown her, drag her into blackness.

Even the Captain was not unaffected. She bowed her head against the onslaught of the woman’s voice, and Vanessa saw the
muscles in her arms
tense, saw the blades waver just a bit, and wondered for the first time if their small task force would be enough. This woman was something beyond anything they had ever encountered, and it seemed her superiors had failed to prepare her for what she and her team would be up against.

Then the Captain lifted her head and grinned her angry grin. “If you want to live, your parlor tricks won’t be enough. You’ll have to kill me.”

The tattooed woman frowned at her. “I have not killed in—”

“Four thousand years,” the Captain snapped. “I know! I know what you are. I know that you are weak, that you have
always
been weak, and that you won’t take my life now even though I’m prepared to send you at last to the hell you deserve.”

“You know nothing of me!” the vampire roared, and at this the Captain even managed a laugh.

“I know all that I need. I have read your scrolls. Do you hear me? I know that you will only flee or, if cornered like you are now, try to use your gifts against us. That’s always been enough for you, hasn’t it,
Mother Ashayt
? You’ve always been able to get by with those options.”

“I have never wished to use any other,” the woman said, and still her voice beat upon them like a physical force. If anything, it was even stronger now than it was before, and Vanessa could feel terror overtaking the despair. She struggled against it, trying to hold on, hoping the sensation would pass.

“Then I’ll not give you a reason!” the Captain cried, and with one swift motion she stepped forward and drove one of her blades deep into the woman’s side. The vampire’s eyes went wide and she tilted her head back, taking a deep, gasping breath. Vanessa felt the terror and despair dissipate instantly, leaving her weak in the knees.

“Amun Sa,” the vampire whispered, and her eyes were distant and glassy, filled with tears. “Oh … at last.”

The Captain regarded her with an expression that seemed to Vanessa nine parts contempt, but there was a curious sympathy there as well.

“Four thousand years,” she said. “All that time and you never had the strength to do what you should have done the very first night.”

The vampire’s head tilted forward again, and the tears that had been brimming in her eyes spilled down her cheeks. She smiled as she met the Captain’s gaze.