The Children of the Sun (24 page)

Jakob paused for the merest instant, and Two had time to think,
Jesus … I never really beat him. He could have killed me in the first minute every time we fought
. Then the ponytailed man began to scream and Jakob was moving again, swinging his sword at the man’s neck. It was only thanks to Vanessa’s speed and proficiency that her soldier wasn’t immediately decapitated. She parried Jakob’s blow off to the right, and his sword hit the wall.

Sasha, meanwhile, had engaged with both of the other men at the same time, fighting with only one arm but nonetheless holding her own. Two caught up with her, having swung in that direction to avoid the gunfire, and attempted to stab the red-haired man in the back. He spun at the last moment, avoiding her blow and swinging his own sword at her neck. Two blocked, stepped sideways, swung again. The man met her attack and stepped away from Sasha and her opponent, clearing space.

“That’s fucking honorable,” he snarled at Two as their blades crashed. “Stab a guy in the back? Fucking vampires.”

“Honorable like blowing up a church full of people without warning?” Two snapped back. “Or like murdering a woman who hadn’t harmed a fly in four thousand years?”

Two glanced over toward the others and saw that Sasha was still engaged with her opponent but clearly overwhelming him. He was backing away, desperately parrying her blows, but had gotten turned around and was actually moving deeper into the office wing instead of back toward his fellow soldiers. In another moment, the two of them disappeared around a corner.

Jakob was now fighting both Vanessa and the man whose hand he had chopped off. He didn’t seem to be struggling. If anything, it appeared that the two humans were in deep trouble. Two turned back, not willing to take her eyes off her adversary any longer.

“Looking for help?” the red-haired man asked her, and Two gave a scoffing laugh.

“Dude, I’m just keeping you busy ‘til my friends kill off the rest of you assholes. Then I’ll finish the job.”

The man scowled at her. “Keep talking, bat. Keep fucking talking. I made it through before, and there were three of you then.”

Two could see that he was tiring. More and more of his movements were focused on defense rather than pressing forward. Between her training, strength, and stamina, Two wasn’t even winded. She almost felt bad, for a moment, before remembering that this man and his friends had already slaughtered half of the council.

“Getting tired of this, buddy,” she said. She hazarded another glance over her shoulder and saw Jakob slash his blade across the throat of the man with the missing hand. His head lolled backward and the gash opened wide, spraying blood like a fountain. The black woman screamed a name – Two couldn’t make it out – but there was nothing she could do; her fellow soldier was already falling to the ground, dead. Furious, she redoubled her efforts against Jakob. Two turned back to her assailant.

“I am
not
your buddy!” the man grunted, parrying another of her blows. The motion left his sword arm high up in the air, and that was all the opening that Two needed. She leapt forward, grabbing his right wrist with her left hand to prevent him from bringing his sword down, and drove her blade deep into his midsection. The man made a choking, gasping sound and his legs gave out. He dropped to his knees, and Two let him fall, moving with him.

“Drop the sword,” she told him. “Drop it and let me stop hurting you. Even now, even after everything you shitheads have done, I don’t want to hurt you more than I have to. Drop it and I’ll make it quick.”

The man with the red hair glared at her for a moment, rage and hatred clearly visible on his face, and then something inside of him seemed to break. He let go of his sword and it fell clattering to the ground behind him. He seemed to be looking past her now, to some place far away.

“Celia, I did my best,” he wheezed, blood-flecked spittle coating his lips. Two had no idea to whom the man was speaking, but it didn’t matter. She understood the meaning, understood that he was making peace with someone who had gone before him. He was about to die and he knew it; she had no intention of making it any harder on him.

The man closed his eyes and Two shoved herself to her feet, pulling her blade from his abdomen and burying it in the top of his skull. The man’s body seized for a moment, then went limp, and he fell to the side. Two pulled her blade out and glanced around to assess the situation.

The fire had reached the end of the hallway now, and the space was rapidly filling with great billows of smoke. Two could barely make out the figures at the end of it. As best she could tell, Jakob had driven Vanessa back almost to the raging flames. It seemed that in just a few more moments, he would either drive her into the fire or kill her. Two concluded that he was not in need of any immediate assistance and that she should check on Sasha first.

Two was about to turn toward the hallway down which she had seen Sasha disappear when she witnessed a thing so remarkable that for a moment it stopped her cold in her tracks. From beyond the flames, through the very inferno in which she would have sworn no living thing could have survived, a figured clothed entirely in black emerged, leaping into the fray with two blades drawn and engaging immediately with Jakob, keeping Vanessa from choosing between death by fire or by the sword.

Surprised as much by the speed and ferocity of this new adversary as by her sudden appearance, Jakob dropped back a few steps. Two tried to make her legs move, to go help him, but it seemed as if they were locked in place. There was something about this woman that seemed inhuman, as if Jakob were fighting another vampire. Though she could barely make out their forms, let alone any features, Two was suddenly sure she knew exactly who it was that he was fighting.

The two exchanged a series of lightning-fast blows, each countering the other’s strokes masterfully, and for a moment Two could do nothing more than watch, fascinated by this display of awe-inspiring speed, dexterity, and technique.

Vanessa had joined in now, hacking at Jakob, and still he was able to fend the two of them off, moving in a tight circle and keeping them at bay. He was better than them, better even than the new fighter. She could see it in the exchanges of swordplay, and Two knew he was biding his time, waiting for an advantage to present itself. Waiting for one of them to make a mistake.

Finding her will to move at last, Two raced forward, muttering “Shit, shit, shit” and preparing to enter into a battle she wanted no part of. She could see now that the new attacker had blonde hair, which only added to the obvious. Before Two could reach them, however, the woman made a sudden slapping motion at her own chest, then threw her arm forward. Without hesitation, she went back to fighting, swinging her swords with savage intent.

It was only when Jakob staggered that Two understood what had happened. The blonde woman, this new and aggressive fighter, had something strapped to her chest – a sort of bandolier filled with darts. She had thrown one at Jakob and it had hit him in the right pectoral muscle. Whatever was inside, it must have been toxic. Jakob took a stumbling step backward, barely avoiding one of the blonde woman’s blows, and this gave Vanessa an advantage. She lunged forward, hitting Jakob’s sword near its base and knocking it from his hands.

Two cried out his name in fear and despair. Hearing this, Jakob turned away from his opponents, and she saw that blood was already beginning to pour forth from his eyes and mouth.

“
Tenor, Ay’Araf
!” he cried out to her, and these words Two knew. “Tell her! Two, tell her … please … she must go on. Tell her she must—”

Before he could finish delivering these instructions, Vanessa leapt forward again and stabbed him in the back. Jakob arched in agony, mouth open in a sort of noiseless scream, and the other woman swung both of her blades at once in a crisscrossing motion. With this stroke, she severed Jakob’s head from his body.

Two saw it fly up into the air as if in slow motion, eyelids fluttering, blood fanning out in arcs from the neck, and it seemed to her in that moment that she was observing the entire event from someplace very far away. Jakob’s head looped twice in the air, and Two could hear the patter of individual droplets of blood as they landed on the walls and floor. Then it fell with a thud, and rolled once, and lay still. Two screamed his name but even her scream seemed distant, and as it dwindled away she wondered if it had come from her lungs at all.

The woman was on one knee now, below the smoke, breathing hard. Two was under no illusion that the fight was over. Indeed, in another moment the woman looked up, staring at Two, and for the first time her face was clearly visible. Two felt twin bolts of recognition and despair run through her body as what she had already guessed was confirmed.

“Oh, no,” she said, and now it seemed she had returned to her own body from the faraway place that she had gone. “Oh, Tori, what have you done?”

Tori didn’t seem to hear her, and after a moment more she glanced at Vanessa and stood. The soldiers began to advance on Two.

Well, here it comes,
Two thought, backing up as the women advanced on her, weapons held out.
Guess I’d rather Tori kill me than some asshole I don’t even know.

There was no question of fighting with these women; if Jakob had been unable to defeat them, then Two’s efforts would be laughable at best. She could run, and she knew that in a moment more she would do just that, but to what end? Whatever exit Jakob had known about, he had brought that knowledge with him to a place beyond retrieval. Even if Sasha was somewhere further down the hall, Two didn’t think it would be enough; whatever Tori had in those darts, it swung the fight heavily in her favor.

Two was about to turn and run when Tori stopped in her tracks, the movement so abrupt that Vanessa nearly ran into her. She stepped sideways instead and stopped as well, turning to look at her companion.

“Captain?” she asked, but Tori wasn’t paying her any attention. She was instead staring at Two, head cocked to one side, eyes narrowed in an expression of confused wariness.

“I’ve seen you before …” Tori said, a note of surprise in her voice, and Two was so startled by the statement that she laughed.

“Uh, yeah, you sure have,” she said.

“Where?”

“Tori … what the fuck? It’s me! It’s Two!”

Tori was shaking her head slowly now, and she touched a hand to her brow. The expression on her face had moved from confusion to something that looked like panic.

“No, I … I can’t … why can’t I remember? What’s happening?”

“Captain, you probably saw her in surveillance photos,” Vanessa suggested, but Tori was still shaking her head, and she took a step backward now, visibly shaken. For one crazy moment, Two thought she would turn and sprint back into the flames from which she had come. Instead, she looked up at Two.

“Who
are
you?!” she shouted.

“Oh, Tori, what did they
do
to you?” Two asked.

The fire was encroaching on their space now, filling the hallway with thick smoke, and Two’s eyes were stinging. Her lungs burned, and not from the exertion of fighting. Something had to happen, soon, or they were all going to die from smoke inhalation. Vanessa seemed to understand this as well.

“Captain?” she asked, her tone uncertain, and Two doubted she had ever seen Tori behave like this before.

“For God’s sake, just … just
kill
her, Vanessa!” Tori snarled, and now it seemed as if she was afraid even to look at Two. She was staring at the ground, eyes wide and distant, as if searching back through her memories and trying to place Two’s face.

“Yes, ma’am!” Vanessa snapped, and without further hesitation she began again to advance. Two held her weapon up, preparing to fight, when she heard a voice calling her name. She glanced over her shoulder and to her surprise saw not Sasha, but Leonore, the raven-haired Eresh who Two had assumed was long dead.

“Come on!” Leonore shouted at her, and Two thought this was the best piece of advice she’d heard all day. Before Vanessa could advance on her, Two turned and began to run toward Leonore. She could hear the human giving chase but knew that she was faster, and was listening not for those footsteps but for a pair further away that would mean Tori, too, was in pursuit.

She had not heard that second pair of footsteps join the first when she reached Leonore, who grabbed her by the arm and hauled her around the corner.

“Where did you … what the fuck?” Two panted, coughing in the smoke. She wanted to stop, to look around and get her bearings, but Leonore’s grip was like iron on her arm.

“Secret door,” Leonore said, pulling her along the hallway. “Stop asking stupid questions and run!”

They passed a body on the ground, lying in a pool of blood, which Two recognized as the dark-haired man that had been fighting with Sasha. One of his legs had been amputated just above the knee, and a blade had been driven into his back where he had fallen and stood there still, pointing toward the ceiling. Two glanced up and saw that the hallway ended in what looked like a flat stone wall. They reached its edge and Leonore flipped open a small panel, concealed in the wall, revealing a numeric keypad. She tapped in a code, and from behind the wall there was a heavy thud and a section of it began to swing inward. Two saw Sasha standing just inside.