The cell phone started ringing again.
The sound made her jerk. “
Damn
it,” Violet hissed. She glared at it, but of course that didn’t make it shut up. All she wanted was some peace, some
quiet
—
She yanked up the phone and snapped it open. Before she could say anything, Garth’s voice shot through the earpiece.
“Violet, where have you been?”
he demanded.
“I’ve been calling and calling you.”
She didn’t bother to answer, just stared at the wall and gritted her teeth while she waited to hear what else he had to say. Didn’t it ever stop?
“Did you know you were famous?”
he finally asked.
“Check the box.”
For a long few seconds, she did nothing, then she sighed and reached for the remote on the dusty nightstand. She found the power button and flicked it to
ON
, then steered it around and finally found a spot on the dirty ceiling where the screen image would show and she didn’t have to put any effort into watching it. The quality was crappy—why wasn’t she surprised?—but it still wasn’t hard to make out the newscast. A couple of pushes on the volume button and she could hear a male reporter’s voice commenting on the picture unfolding over her head.
“This footage was taken earlier of a Hemophage with what is reportedly a human child.”
Violet dropped the remote and blinked as the image of a familiar playground came into view, faraway and obviously taken from an overhead position—a news helicopter, one of those roving things that people derisively called “flying ambulance chasers.” The camera’s high-powered viewpoint began to zoom in on the playground, closer and closer, until Violet could clearly recognize herself, sitting on the ground with Six draped across her lap. Her hands squeezed into fists as the scene in front of her widening eyes forced her to relive the heartache of Six dying in her arms. You had to appreciate the miracles of modern technology as, despite the distance, the camera still picked up the tears spilling down her cheeks, the moisture sparkling in the morning sunrise as it dripped onto Six’s unmoving face.
The camera view panned out a bit and Violet saw the wall of Security Enforcers that had surrounded her and Six—funny, she hadn’t even noticed they were there at the time, or if she had, she hadn’t cared. The three-deep circle of men parted suddenly, and Violet recognized Daxus as he pushed through and stared down at her. There was no mistaking his glittering eyes or the unadulterated hatred on his face as he turned and pulled a gun from the holster of the Security Enforcer nearest him. The reporter’s voice—Violet hadn’t been listening so she had no idea what he was saying—rose with excitement as Daxus pushed the muzzle of the gun against the side of her head, then the camera abruptly cut away to the reporter himself, blathering on at full speed about unnecessary violence and who were the real victims and God knew what else. In the hotel room, Violet just lay there with the cell phone pressed into one ear, staring but not really seeing the image, realizing she had just vicariously relived her own death . . . as had the millions of people watching the six o’clock news broadcast.
Garth’s voice yanked her back to reality.
“What do you think? Poster girl for a new era in human-vampire relations?”
He sounded ridiculously pleased with the whole thing.
Violet just kept staring at the ceiling, her mind working now, finally, going over and over what she had just seen, trying—again—to process everything that had happened over the last couple of days. Something wasn’t meshing about Six, about the way he’d been born and raised, about the way Daxus had insisted on getting him back after allowing the child to be moved in the first place.
“Violet, listen,”
Garth said.
“Listen, I think I’ve found something. Something
very
interesting.”
I’ll just bet you did, she thought suddenly. She yanked herself upright and swept the remote onto the floor, then glanced around the ratty motel room and curled her lip. “Where are you?” she demanded.
“Uh . . . northbound on the Kennedy.”
She could hear the surprise in his voice at her unexpected interest. Weakness suddenly spilled over her and she wobbled on the bed, nastily sick to her stomach for a few seconds. When it passed, Violet swung her legs over the side and found a steady enough footing to stand. She knew where he was headed; random travel was rare for the Hemophage trucks—at least as far as any of the human security forces knew—and Garth’s route on the Kennedy Expressway meant the secret docking area in Lincoln Park just to the south of the Lagoon. “Stay on course,” she said as she pulled on her coat and shoved the .357 into a flat-space holster. She ran a hand over her hair to smooth it down, winced as she skimmed the incision, then inhaled deeply. It took an immense effort to make her voice stay crisp and strong, but she damned well did it. “I’ll meet you.”
Garth stood to the side and watched as Violet loaded up from the truck’s arsenal, shoving weapon after weapon into the bottomless storage areas of the flat-space holsters on her hips. He kept trying to meet her eyes, but Violet wouldn’t allow that—she didn’t need emotion right now, or the bindings that would go with it. What she would see there would be too painful, especially given that he’d probably told himself he would never see her again.
The driver glanced back at them. “ArchMinistry coming up,” he called. Garth scrubbed at his face but Violet just nodded her acknowledgment.
“V,” Garth said, “when I said I’d found something interesting, this is
not
what I was talking about.”
“I’m aware of that,” Violet said shortly. She kept on stockpiling, gun after gun, lasers, everything and anything she could think of that might come in handy. She was going to need it
all.
“Violet, you
can’t
go in there,” Garth said desperately. “It’s impossible—why do you think we went through so much trouble to have you intercept the case
before
it got back to the ArchMinistry from the L.L.D.D.?”
“He’s got Six in there.”
Garth spread his hands. “For God’s sake, V—the boy is
dead.
What’s the point?” When she didn’t answer, he paced back and forth in front of her, short, sharp steps that betrayed his frustration. “Retribution?” He jabbed a finger at her and she resisted the urge to slap it out of the way. “You’re throwing yourself away for
nothing.
”
Violet pressed her lips together tightly but still said nothing. What good would it do to remind him that there wasn’t much left of her life to begin with? Stepping directly into her path, Garth reached out and flipped over the meta-crystal hanging from her neck; now it was almost entirely, frighteningly black. Despite his efforts—the substitute Incendiary Team, the surgery, the transfusions—he still couldn’t stop the Hemophage virus. She was dying.
Violet ignored the anguished look he gave her and pushed him out of the way. They were pulling to a stop outside the main gate of the ArchMinistry now. “He’s not dead,” she said flatly.
Garth’s eyes widened, then his expression slid into a scowl. “What? What do you mean?”
There was a jerk and the air brakes hissed as their momentum slowed. Violet pushed open the back door a couple of inches, then paused and turned back to face him. “I mean Six is alive.”
Before he could respond, she opened the door the rest of the way, then jumped down from the back and headed around to the front of the truck and the gate. But if she’d thought that would be the end of the conversation, she was wrong. An instant later, Garth leaped out and followed. “How can he be alive?” When she kept going rather than answer, he lunged forward and grabbed her arm roughly enough to make her wince. “Violet,
wait!
”
Finally Violet paused and met his eyes. He knew even before he spoke that there was no changing her mind, but he had to try anyway. “Look, Violet. What the boy wrote on that paper—it’s the chemical foundation of what I’m certain is a cure for Hemophagia. Daxus’s researchers probably developed it years ago in that same lab in which he was bred. I’m not certain how he got hold of it, but just give me a little time. I can cure you. I
know
it.”
Violet stared at him. After a moment her granite expression softened and Garth actually thought she was going to relent. But no . . . she only reached out and gently placed her forefinger against his lips, silencing him.
Then she left him there and strode purposefully across the square toward the main entrance into the huge ArchMinistry building.
And there was nothing Garth could do but watch her go.
There was little that could be said about the cold lab other than just that—it was cold and sterile, a harsh, white environment that was never meant for anything alive. Six’s small body lay on an alcohol-washed white granite slab under a bank of high-powered surgical lamps, and his skin was covered with a fine, sparkling sheen of ice crystals. There were already a half-dozen doctors and technicians waiting as Daxus, dressed in a surgical thermal-liquid hazard suit and wearing a breathing mask, approached the slab bearing the boy’s body. He gave the other members of the medical team a calculating, deprecatory glance, then stared down at the child’s body.
“The antigen can’t survive without a living host,” he finally told them, even though all of the men and women in the room already knew this. “But we may still be able to salvage some viable basic protein analogs that will save us time in reculturing the antigen in another clone.” What they didn’t know, of course, was the true nature of the antigen Daxus was talking about—few people did—but that was as it should be. Few people were willing to take part in creating something that could kill them.
He nodded at the lead surgeon, who in turn began barking orders to the other techs and doctors. They scurried around the laboratory like the well-trained rats they were, each performing a specific function to prepare for the coming dissection. It was only a matter of minutes before the elder medical member of the team stood at the head of the slab ready to unwrap the sterile steel bone saw he held in his left hand.
Daxus smiled. He always found it so interesting to see what the inside of a human body looked like.
Especially the brain.
Standing silently behind the guard, Violet had had more than enough time to examine him. The man’s body was silhouetted by the rising sun, and he was probably squinting out at his post, worrying more about the sting of the light in his watering eyes than the unlikely notion that someone might come up behind him. No doubt he took for granted being able to stand in the sunlight each day and thought himself capable and highly trained. Having a position guarding the perimeter probably made him think highly of himself, although it was likely he had no more than a high school diploma.
Foolish human, Violet thought derisively. This is the price you will pay for your overconfidence.
She decapitated him.
He never knew it was coming, so at least in that his death at her hands was merciful—no pain, no anticipation of the killing or dread of the unknown. Just a simple, clean swipe of her sword and his soul—if there was such a thing—was on its way to the hereafter . . . if there was such a thing as
that,
either.
As the sentry’s body slumped sideways and went down, Violet reached forward and caught him by the arm, stopping his machine pistol before it could clatter to the ground and draw anyone else’s attention. She let the corpse fall the rest of the way and regarded the weapon for a moment, then shrugged and tucked it under one arm—as long as it was loaded, there was never such a thing as a useless weapon. She glanced around but there was no one else with whom she’d have to deal, at least on a one-to-one basis. And let’s face it: the only way in was the front door. Everything else—windows, doors, even the delivery areas—were covered with titanium bars or alloy mesh, all heavily wired and laser-sensored. Not only would she never make it undetected, nothing short of a bomb would get her through one of those entrances to begin with.
So . . . the front door it was.
No one could say that the entrance to the ArchMinistry wasn’t heavily guarded—the dozen men standing at the ready as she approached were proof that it was. But even the largest army has its failings, and usually in communication—either they were so startled that Violet walked right up to them or Daxus hadn’t bothered to circulate her identity down the ranks. And why should he? He believed to his bones that he had put the fatal shot into her skull.
In any event, that’s all they did—watch—as she approached the archway of the high-tech weapons scanner, then stepped into it. The man assigned to reading the scan glanced at her with a bored expression on his face, then looked over at the screen a few inches in front of him. The blue and white display hesitated as the software tried to figure out what to do about the flat space it was reading, then it began cycling rapidly through the weaponry Violet had loaded into her flat-space holsters. The text ticked rapidly across the screen like wild digital confetti. The guard’s jaw dropped.
“I’m here to see the Vice-Cardinal,” Violet said simply, right before the alarms blared.
In the cold lab, Daxus watched as the lead surgeon pressed the
ON
button on the bone saw and carefully lowered it to Six’s forehead. He would start with a thin cut down the center line, then follow it across—
Through the speakers hidden in the ceiling tiles, the alarms began shrieking. The surgeon jerked the saw up and looked around, not sure what to do. The rest of the people in the room shuffled like nervous lemmings, looking anxiously to Daxus for guidance.
The Vice-Cardinal spun as the double doors at the far end of the lab burst open and a Security Tech barreled into the room, completely forgetting that it was supposed to stay a sterile environment. “It’s her!” he cried breathlessly. His eyes were wide and panicked.
Daxus ripped off the hood of his hazard suit and stared at him. “But she’s
dead!”
The other man sputtered and couldn’t find the words, so instead he yanked a mini Flex-Screen out of his side pocket and shoved it in front of Daxus’s face. Daxus squinted at it, then jerked it out of the guard’s hands and held it up higher so he could see . . . because he couldn’t possibly be seeing what he thought he was. He just
couldn’t.