The Children of the Sun (54 page)

“I hate this,” she told her companions. “I hate all of it, so let’s go finish it. Let’s make sure that tonight’s the last night and whoever’s left tomorrow can celebrate that it’s over. Let’s burn the fucking roots out from under the Children and make sure they can’t ever come back to haunt us. Let’s go find the Emperor.”

* * *

The first sublevel smelled like death. There was gunpowder, acrid smoke, and ash from the explosives. There was blood, a scent Two knew well, and also the unpleasant tang of sweat, and bile, and other fluids of the body. Each of these she could pick out individually, but the combined whole was something she had never before experienced and hoped never to know again. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts, a stench that made her want to weep and retch and turn away.

“Dear Lord,” Theroen muttered as they made their way through the central hallway. Around them they could hear the sounds of battle: gunfire, the clash of metal on metal in up-close combat, and the screams of the dying. Tori was leading them, with Theroen next in line. Two was behind him and Thomas was bringing up the rear. He spoke now, his voice taut with emotion.

“Told you it was going to be like this.”

“I’m pretty sure you guys forfeited any chance at playing martyr sometime around the point where you blew up our cathedral,” Two said. “You want me to feel bad for these people? Well, mission accomplished, because I do – I wish they weren’t dead. I wish we weren’t here. I wish none of this shit had ever happened, but you weren’t in that fucking church, Thomas. You never had to smell your friends burning.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” Thomas said, and Two found herself bristling at the self-righteous tone in his voice. She stopped in her tracks and whirled on him.

“The fuck you didn’t!” she shouted, jabbing a finger at him. “You knew. You knew for years that we weren’t what they said we were. You knew and you didn’t do a fucking thing.”

“There was nothing I could have done!” Thomas shouted.

“Bullshit! You could have left. If nothing else, you could have left, but you didn’t. You just hung out and made your drinks and filed your reports, and it was only when they finally asked you to get your hands dirty that you decided you’d had enough. You wanna be sad and angry that your friends are getting killed? Fine, but if you’re going to start laying blame, then point that finger at your fucking self first.”

Thomas was silent, glaring at her, and Two forced herself to cut off all of the hateful, hurtful things she might have said next. She turned away from him but then swung back, unable to withhold one final outburst.

“We didn’t want this,” she snarled. “We never wanted this, and we never asked for this. We would have gone on for the rest of eternity letting you guys just take out the occasional rogue vampire that hurt humans. You’re the ones who made it bigger than that. You’re the ones who attacked us, not the other way around. Next time you have some fucking holier-than-thou comment on your lips, you think about that for a while.”

“Two …” Theroen put his hand on her shoulder and she whirled again, away from Thomas but refusing to look her lover in the eye.

“I’m done,” she growled. “I know, keep calm, stay rational … that’s how you roll, right Theroen?”

“If I wanted to be with someone who ‘rolled’ in the manner that I do,” Theroen said, “you would have been the very last person I chose.”

“Fucking right,” Two said, but now she glanced up at him and saw that he was smiling.

“The point I was trying to make is that everyone here has been through terrible experiences in the recent past. It might behoove all of us to tread carefully with each other. Thomas is a friend.”

“Is he?” Two asked, and she swung back around to Thomas. “Are you?”

“I don’t know what the fuck I am,” Thomas said. “For the past few years I was the best bartender at one of Manhattan’s best clubs. I was also an undercover agent spying on an important member of an enemy council. Now? At worst I’m a traitor and a disgrace to my people. At best I’m just some asshole.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Two said. “But it’s a shitty one. You’re not just some asshole and you’re only a disgrace if you actually believe the Emperor’s bullshit, which you obviously don’t.”

“The only thing I believe right now is that if the Emperor’s still alive come the morning, I’m a dead man,” Thomas said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Fine,” Two said. “I’ll stop preaching if you’ll stop complaining about these people getting what they deserve. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“Good. Let’s just do this.”

They continued down the hallway in silence, Tori leading the group. In front of them, packs of Burilgi lead by Ay’Araf warriors were wreaking havoc on the Children’s forces, the combat occasionally spilling out into the hallway from the rooms on either side. Eventually they reached the staircase at the far end of the hall.

“They will have broken through to the second sublevel on the other end, by now,” Theroen commented, and Tori nodded.

“Yeah. Hopefully they’re giving the Command Center all they can handle. That will keep the colonels busy for a while, at least until they realize it’s hopeless and retreat. I can get us to the Emperor’s chambers. After that … I’ve never been inside and I don’t know what to expect. I imagine there will be reinforcements.”

“You don’t sound real concerned,” Two said, and Tori flashed her a bloodthirsty grin but opted to give no other response.

“What if he has already been evacuated?” Theroen asked, and Tori shook her head.

“I don’t think he’ll go. Not without … no, he won’t. Trust me.”

“He won’t go without his weapon,” Thomas said. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Captain? He won’t go without you.”

“I’m the key,” she replied. “Everything he’s spent his entire life building toward is in his grasp, but only if he’s got me. It’s not just the fighting – but that’s a big part of it. I can go to the places he can’t go, do the things he can’t do. I’m not just his weapon, I’m his Right Hand. He needs me and he needs your sister.”

“The fuck does my sister have to do with anything?” Thomas asked, and Tori gave a small laugh. She began to descend the staircase, but spoke as she went.

“You don’t get much gossip down in Cellblock, huh?”

“Vanessa came to tell me when Charles passed, but other than that, no … not so much.”

“Right. So you know the Emperor needs a new Left Hand. You wanna take a guess who Charles nominated?”

“No shit?” Thomas asked.

“No shit. The Emperor needs someone who is very, very good, but still young enough to make his own.”

“And Charles decided on Vanessa?”

Tori shook her head. They had reached the second sublevel, and she peered through the window in the door before turning and answering Thomas’s question.

“Vanessa decided it for him. It’s a brilliant choice. She’s the best we – they – have.”

“Except you,” Two said, and Tori gave a small laugh, pushing her way through the door. The others followed.

“I’m the best they had at killing vampires, that’s all. I don’t have her breadth of talents and I don’t have her way with others. People are scared of me … they respect her. There are galaxies of distance between those two things.”

“So you think this man, Charles, made the right choice?” Theroen asked.

“I have no idea,” Tori said. “He made the
best
choice, but that doesn’t mean it was the right one. Now we’ll never know.”

“Why’s that?” Thomas asked, and Tori favored him with a glance that was almost sympathetic.

“Because we haven’t seen her yet, which means she’s down here somewhere. I’m guessing she’s going to come between me and the Emperor, and when that happens I’m probably going to have to cut her down to get to him.”

“This decision is getting worse by the minute,” Thomas muttered.

“Vanessa’s one of the few people in the world I respect,” Tori told him. “She’s a good soldier, and when I first heard that Charles had chosen her, I wasn’t surprised. I was impressed by his judgment. I won’t kill her unless I have to.”

“You’ll probably have to,” Thomas said. They had come to a stop in front of an ordinary-looking metal door, having met no resistance as they’d moved along the hallway. Whatever fighting was happening, it wasn’t happening here. Tori turned and glanced back at him.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

* * *

“If you and your people take another step forward, Captain Perrault, we’re going to have to open fire.”

The woman at the end of the hall was standing at the center of her soldiers in front of a massive pair of wooden doors. Two recognized her from the cathedral and, now that she and her brother were in the same room, could see the family resemblance.

“Vanessa,” Tori said, coming to a stop and indicating to the others to do the same. “Why the hostility?”

Vanessa looked unimpressed. “Even if I had somehow forgotten that those two are vampires who we were supposed to kill at the cathedral, it’d be pretty tough to miss that you’re hanging around with my traitor brother, who’s supposed to be rotting in jail right now. Let me ask you a question,
Tori
… did you help them hack our systems? Or did you sign up after that?”

“I didn’t help them,” Tori said. “I just figured out what they’d done as soon as I heard you captured these two. No way they could have gotten that deep if the cameras were working right, and frankly your security people should have figured that out hours ago.”

“Well, they didn’t. I guess when this is done, I’ll have a little chat with them – if any are left.”

“This won’t be done until the Emperor is dead,” Tori said.

“Why would you want to go and kill the man who gave you everything?” Vanessa asked, and there was a note of legitimate curiosity in her voice.

“Because he’s the real traitor here, to his people and his ideals.”

“‘His people,’ huh? Curious what you mean about that.”

“Humanity, Vanessa. When the chips came down, the Emperor sacrificed innocent human beings to get at me. Then he took me in, filled me with drugs, and taught me to hate vampires. He taught me to kill for him, and now he has to die for it. That’s the way it has to be.”

“There’s so much you don’t know,” Vanessa said, and she shook her head. “It’s almost sad. You have no idea.”

“I know enough.”

“You don’t know anything! You think you’ve got it all figured out, but you’re just stumbling around in the dark.”

“He murdered my parents!” Tori shouted. “He took them from me!”

“You didn’t even
want
them!” Vanessa cried. “You couldn’t even bear spending time with them anymore. All you wanted to do was go out and get drunk and whore around. My parents were killed too, you know, when I was just a kid. And my sister. Thomas and I lost everything! You think I’m supposed to feel sorry for you because you lost some people you didn’t even give a fuck about?”

For a moment there was silence. Tori stared at the woman in frank disbelief before finally speaking in a strange, low voice, the words coming out shaky and loaded with barely contained emotion. “How long have you known?”

“What difference does it make?” Vanessa asked. “What if I knew all along? What are you going to do, kill me harder?”

“Just tell me when you found out!” Tori was screaming now, out of control, and Two wondered how much longer it would be before she simply launched herself at the soldiers, guns or no. If it came to that, Two was unsure who would prevail.

Vanessa took a long, deep breath and shrugged. “Four weeks, Captain. I found out about it when I found out about everything else, when Charles told me what I was going to become. The only thing I’d ever heard before that was the same shit they told you, that the vampire council did it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What are we, best friends?” Vanessa asked. “Captain, in the last month I lost half my squad, found out I was going to be elected the Emperor’s new Left Hand, and got about six thousand pounds of information I never wanted dumped on my head by a dying man. Then I lost him before I could ask him even a tenth of the questions I had. You think I was in the best place to make decisions? It’s amazing I didn’t throw myself off the fucking roof.

“I haven’t said shit to anyone – about anything – for weeks, because I’ve been too busy trying to come to terms with everything that Charles told me. Maybe I would’ve found you eventually and told you the truth about your parents, but honestly it wasn’t that important to me. Turns out the Emperor and the Children have done plenty of terrible shit to get where they are now. Your parents are just a blip on the radar.”

“But you stayed with them anyway,” Tori said, and though her voice had returned to a normal level, Two could still hear deadly anger in it. “You’re standing here defending him even now.”

“They’ve given me everything I ever had. I have friends here, people I care about, a job, and a mission. You think it’s easy to walk away from all of that just because I found out that the Emperor’s not quite as nice a guy as we’ve always been told he was?”