The silence made Violet look over nervously. “Are you okay?”
He blinked. “No,” he said quietly.
Violet jerked and sat up. His honesty was startling and carried a reminder she hadn’t really wanted. She had monitored it now and then, of course, but sometime during the last hour or so the meta-crystal on Six’s chest had slid away from the ominous dark gray that the stone had been holding all day and gone fully into undeniable, irreversible black.
But Six only turned his head to look at her and smiled faintly. “No—it’s all that spinning. I think it made me sick.”
Violet relaxed again, returning his smile as she let herself lean sideways onto the cool, soft grass. Her stance was a lie, of course—she knew full well that Six’s time was heartbreakingly short. But she wouldn’t show it, wouldn’t ruin the last bit of time he had, especially when he was so obviously enjoying himself. She propped herself on one elbow and locked away her emotions as she watched Six fold his hands behind his head, savoring the way he was immersing himself in this mini-slice of the world. She could see the deepening blue of the dusk sky reflected in his eyes as he watched the sun go down.
“Sunset,” he said suddenly, as though he could read her thoughts. “My first.” She started to agree with him, then realized that for all her efforts, she couldn’t speak around the lump that had blossomed in her throat. His first, yes . . . also his last. Even though she’d known all along that it was coming, the realization was a brutal one, crushing in its implications, in the way it highlighted her failure to help him. His next whispered words chased away the thoughts of self-recrimination and brought her mind back to completely focus on him. “But it’s so . . . dark.”
Violet pressed her lips together, fighting for enough control to speak without having her voice shake. “Six—”
“So dark,” the boy repeated, and this time she could barely hear his voice. He sighed.
“Six?” She yanked herself upright, then pulled the child into her arms. His body came up and onto her lap without resistence. Still warm, but little more than a rag doll covered in human skin. “Six?”
His eyes were looking right at her, but there was no . . . focus in them. No
seeing.
“Smaller,” he breathed.
“Six!”
she cried.
“Violet?” His blinded eyes fluttered. “Are you there, Violet?”
Abruptly the breeze picked up again, chilling the tears that were suddenly sliding down her cheeks. “Yes, Six.” She brushed a tiny, wayward lock of his hair off his forehead, a small clump of hairs that had somehow escaped the barber’s scissors. “Yes, Six, I’m here. I won’t leave. I’ll never leave.”
The breeze churned up another notch, turning into a surprising, sudden wind. The quickest of glances gave Violet the reason—human Security Enforcers, dropping from half a dozen sleek, black Whisperjet helicopters that had lowered to a hover position over their small spot in the park. She wasn’t surprised and she hadn’t forgotten; so much had happened since Six had come into her life, and she’d had so many plans, but she’d never found a way to get that damnable tracking device out of his body. She turned her gaze back to Six’s face and saw his brow furrow at the noise of the copters. She stroked his cheek, wishing she could do something,
anything,
to bring him more comfort than her sad and helpless presence. “Violet? What’s that sound?”
“Nothing,” she said as reassuringly as she could. The skin of his face was cold and clammy, chilled almost blue by his dropping body temperature and the roar of the helicopters around them. It was obvious that he didn’t feel it, and that made her heart crack a little more. She was forcing herself to stay outwardly calm, to keep anything but serenity from coming through in her voice. It was all so much—the boy dying in her arms, Daxus, her own impending death, the soldiers about to descend on her. She could no longer tell if the high-pitched whine in her ears was her own nerves or the scream of the helicopters’ engines. “It’s nothing—just the wind.”
One by one, the shadows of the Security Enforcers fell over her and the boy, like overlapping waves of impending doom edging closer and closer. Violet was glad Six couldn’t see them, that even though his eyes were open, his vision of anything in this world had already been obliterated. He was so innocent. He shouldn’t have to spend his last coherent moments in this world full of terror.
Six’s small hand moved up and waved in the air for a moment, the fingers fumbling until he found the top of Violet’s hand and covered it. “It’s okay, Violet.” She felt a sob rise in her chest and barely ground it away as Six’s eyes fluttered and closed. Now she could barely hear him. “It’s okay,” he repeated.
And then he was still.
Violet hadn’t even realized she’d started crying until a teardrop ran from her eye to hang on the end of her nose, then slipped off and dropped onto the child’s nose. It was too late—he was beyond knowing how wretched she felt to lose him. Instinct made Violet want to wail Six’s name, scream it as loud as she could, but the commonsense part of her logic reminded her that it was useless, a wasted expenditure of energy that her body simply no longer had. No amount of calling out or grief would make this small boy see her face or hear her voice anymore, and it certainly wouldn’t bring him back.
Now she and Six were surrounded so tightly by the soldiers that she couldn’t see past the ring of bodies. They pressed forward, stupidly unaware of just how quickly she could kill them. A lightning-fast jump to her feet, a faster unsheathing of her sword, and the first two rows would fall over like a house of cards.
Or maybe . . . these assassins had more awareness than that which she credited to them. Kill them? She didn’t want to kill anything, or anyone. This boy . . . he was
it,
the last of everything that had been worth fighting for in her miserably short life. If it had all come down to him, and if she really had given everything she could to help him and failed . . . well, then why bother with any of it?
In her peripheral vision, Violet saw a sudden break in the circle of soldiers pressing on her, then Daxus pushed his way inside. Although he loomed over her like some kind of silhouetted vision of destruction, Violet felt oddly unaffected by his presence, completely unafraid. After all, what could he now do to her that would hurt her more than Six’s death? She had endured so much, but the end of this child . . . well, it was the end of her.
At Daxus’s side were a couple of Hazmat-outfitted paramedics. When they saw the child lying limply on Violet’s lap, they surged past the Vice-Cardinal and bent over him. It only took a moment for both of them to lean back and look up at their boss. “It’s too late,” one of them said. Behind his breather mask, his voice sounded foggy and cold, like a subdued underwater echo. “The boy’s gone.”
It was getting darker by the moment but Violet could still see Daxus’s face fold into a scowl and his cheeks as they flushed nearly crimson. “Damn it!” He jerked his head up, then swept his gaze over the park area. “Quarantine the corpse and get it back to the ArchMinistry as soon as possible. Maybe we can salvage something out of it.”
Violet tried to hang on to Six, but she didn’t seem to have any strength left—she was so
tired.
Her hands were pushed aside by the gloved Enforcers, then Six’s body was lifted off her lap and whisked away. She was through fighting, through trying. She just sat there, silently marveling at how strange it felt to have the warm weight of the child gone from her lap. It brought to mind memories, old and indescribably painful, from many years ago. So many hellish things that she’d rather leave unremembered, especially when she had so much more in the present than she could handle.
One of the Security Enforcers stepped forward. The patch on his uniform marked him as the unit’s leader and his long weapon gleamed in the dusk. “And her, sir?”
Daxus whirled so quickly that the heel of one boot sent up a clot of dirt and grass. He glared at Violet, so furious that for a few seconds he couldn’t even speak. Then, without bothering to say anything, he leaned over and reached around the soldier’s main weapon, yanking the sidearm out of the leader’s leg holster. Without hesitating, he turned back and delivered a vicious kick to Violet’s ribs, a blow hard enough to send her toppling sideways onto the grass.
But Violet was still done with the fighting, with the struggling. Now she just lay at Daxus’s feet, her body curled in a fetal position. The grass was cool and prickly against her cheek; she could smell the greenness of it, the undercurrent of earth, and that made her think of the passage from the old Christian Bible.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
As Daxus stared down at her, Violet turned her head just enough so that she could catch a last glimpse of the setting sun. It looked like a bloody red ball as it finally dropped below the top of the last building blocking it from view. The only thing between her and it was a single, crumpled piece of paper.
Not surprisingly, Violet’s disinterest just made Daxus all the more angry, and he leaned over and pointed his borrowed gun at Violet’s head.
Nothing.
He pushed the barrel against her scalp, hard enough to be painful, wanting to see a reaction from her,
needing
to see her fear. But to Violet’s eyes and mind, that was just what she felt . . . nothing. Her world and emotions and everything that she was had finally been narrowed down to this single, defining moment. In another two seconds her life would be over and the last thing she’d ever see was that sad scrap of paper lying just a few inches away from her face on the ground—Six’s drawing of his mythical playground. It rocked in the wind, but she could enjoy her last, satisfied smile. At least in that she hadn’t failed him.
“You’ve outlived your usefulness,” Daxus ground out.
And shot Violet in the head.
Daxus turned his back on Violet’s body and stepped toward the Security Enforcer whose gun he’d taken. He tossed the weapon back to him, then distastefully stripped off the gloves he was wearing—they were splattered with Violet’s infected blood—and dropped them on top of her body with a grimace. “Have an Incendiary Team sanitize this area immediately,” he ordered. He sent a last, withering look in the direction of Violet’s corpse, then strode away, heading for his waiting vehicle. There was a lightness to his step that he hadn’t felt in months—Violet had been the sharp thorn in his lion’s paw for longer than he cared to admit, and at last
,
at last
, he was rid of her for good. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long until he was rid of
all
the damned vampires.
Behind him, the paramedics were spraying Six’s body with safety preservation foam; the fluffy white material began to harden almost instantly around the child’s form and ultimately took on a shape like a gigantic cocoon. When the sterile foam had solidified enough, they pushed handles into the sides of the mass and lifted it, hustling toward another larger wagon.
Standing outside his armored limousine as the white-suited Incendiary Team took their places around the playground, Daxus let them set up to do their dirty business while he carefully sanitized his hands—twice. Then he directed his attention to his waiting security and medical staff. “Get the boy’s body on ice and prepped for disassembly,” he instructed. “We’ll go in for salvage at daybreak.” The other members of the sanitation team didn’t need supervision or specific orders to know what to do, so without another word, Daxus climbed into the vehicle and shut the door firmly behind him.
As he and his team members pulled away, a wall of blue and orange flames surged high into the air behind them and separated them from the view of Violet’s body.
A
bove the mouth that Violet knew and loved so well, her husband’s black eyes flashed with indignation and anger. Furious color rode high in his cheeks and his dark hair was wild and standing in unevenly cut tufts—once such a fastidious and appearance-conscious man, since they had locked her away, Song jat had put little thought into what others thought of him or how he looked. Instead, the doctor had devoted himself to two things: his career—the thing that had always both distracted and upheld him—and trying to find a way to get his wife back. His job kept him from going completely crazy, gave him something on which to focus so much of the frustrated energy that was generated by their situation. That was probably a good thing, but this battle in which they were entangled didn’t look to be getting any better.
Ever.
Right now Song jat was again at the detainee hospital and well into another of the seemingly endless arguments he’d been having on a daily basis with everyone from physicians to nurses to orderlies, all of whom seemed to have unlimited amounts of that one thing he wanted so badly: time with his wife, Violet. If he could have found someone on the custodial staff with the right set of keys, he would have tried buying his way into the isolation ward . . . or maybe he would have simply hit the man over the head and taken the damned things.
“But she’s my
wife!
” The last word came out at nearly a bellow, and other people—staff, patients, he didn’t care who—turned to look in his direction. The woman in front of him—he didn’t have a clue what her name was because there had been so many and he’d stopped bothering with the damned name tags months ago—looked appropriately aghast at the volume level of his voice. Her response was immediate and full of righteousness, the tone of someone who believes to their bones that the person with whom they’re having a confrontation is dead wrong, even when they have nothing on which to base their own position but the statements of someone else “in charge.” “Dr. Song jat Sharif, you need to restrain yourself!”
“I’m a fucking medical professional,” he snarled. “I don’t
need
to restrain myself. You haven’t let me see my wife in four
months
!”
The other doctor drew herself up stiffly and still refused to move out of his way. Her face was like stone and she kept moving from left to right across the floor, continually managing to keep her body squarely in his path so that he couldn’t duck around her. “Doctor, we are at the early stages of what appears to be an epidemic of potentially staggering proportions.” She waved her arm vaguely in the direction of the quarantine area, and Sharif’s gaze cut again—as it so often did—to the heavy locking system across the double doors just behind her. “As one of the ground zero victims, your wife needs to be studied. Seeing you could cause an emotional reaction that could adversely affect her condition.”