The Children of the Sun (56 page)

“Is that your best, Manuel?” she screamed as he stumbled. “I’m going to eat your heart, do you hear me? I’m going to punch through your chest and eat your fucking heart!”

She leapt forward again, and when the man raised his arms to ward off the incoming blow she instead dipped low and spun, kicking out with one foot and knocking the legs out from underneath him. Even as he began to fall, she lunged up and forward, hitting him in the side with her knee. There was a cracking noise as the man’s ribs broke, and he bellowed in pain. Tori threw him to the floor and stepped on his neck.

“Look at you,” she snarled. “The Emperor’s personal guard and … who was that, Major Bishop? Good thing
he
stuck around. He almost managed to take out
one
of us before getting himself killed.”

“Betrayer!” Manuel choked out. “How dare you come here and—”

“Fuck you,” Tori said, and now her voice had grown icy cold. “Were you there with them, Manuel? I bet you were. They don’t mention you in the emails, but no one ever mentions you, do they? You’re just there. Did you hold one of my parents down while they did it? Did you?!”

“I do whatever my Emperor commands!”

Tori stared at him for a long moment, her eyes pulled tight in disgusted slits. At last she said, “Not anymore you don’t,” and she stomped down with her leg. There was a sound like a bundle of small twigs being broken over someone’s knee, and Manuel made a strangled grunt.

Two could see his eyes as they went distant. She tried to think of all of this as necessary, but she wanted so badly for it to be over. She wanted to go home and lie down – the idea of sleeping seemed very appealing to her right now.

“Theroen, buddy, your girl ain’t looking so hot,” Thomas said from somewhere behind Two, and Theroen turned back to her with concern.

“Hey, baby,” Two murmured, her eyes half lidded.

“Two, stay with us,” he said, and with an expression of sorrow he shook her slightly. Two shouted as pain lanced through her again, but she could feel herself come fully back to consciousness.

Tori spun around and stalked over, kneeling next to Theroen.

“Did it occur to either of you to put anything on the wound? Oh, for … get out of the way. Thomas, go get Manuel’s shirt. It’s huge. Cut it off him.”

She handed Thomas one of her blades and he headed in the direction of Manuel’s corpse. Tori looked back down at Two.

“I’m fucked up pretty good, huh?” Two asked, and Tori nodded.

“Yes, but you’re also lucky. If he’d been using incendiary rounds, the bullet would’ve exploded somewhere inside your small intestine, lit most of your abdominal cavity on fire, and you’d probably already be dead.”

“Hey, thanks for the pep talk,” Two wheezed, and she caught Tori stifling a slight grin.

“The good news is that the bullet came all the way through, so we don’t have to go digging for it. Now shut up and save your strength.”

Thomas returned with the tattered shirt and Tori took the bulk of it, folded it up into a compress, and handed it to Theroen. “Press that against the wound.”

“Is that going to hurt?” Two asked.

“Yes,” Tori said, and without further hesitation she grabbed Theroen’s hands and forced them down against Two’s abdomen.

“OH, JESUS FUCK!” Two screamed, involuntarily arching her back and clawing at the floor. She could feel the stone tiles grinding against her fingernails, a sensation that, in another time and place, would have sent chills rolling down her spine. Now, she found herself focusing on it, savoring it. Anything to help take her mind off the pain.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Tori said. “Theroen, keep pressure on it.”

She tore a long strip from what remained of the shirt and folded the rest of it into another compress.

“OK,” she said, “I need to lift her up and get this under her.”

“Oh, God, wait. Don’t—oh you fucking
bitch
!”

“Thomas, get her hands off me. Get them … thank you.”

“Is all this strictly necessary?” Theroen asked, his voice tight.

“Not strictly,” Tori said as she shoved the second compress under Two and began to loop the strip of fabric around Two’s midsection. “I could let her bleed out while I go after the Emperor. If you want her to live, it’s necessary. Now grab this.”

She handed him one side of the long fabric strip, snaked the other underneath and around Two one more time, and brought it back to the end that Theroen held.

“Tie it off. Tight. Sorry, Two.”

Two could do little more than whimper at this point. She could feel sweat pouring from every part of her, and her entire body felt like it was on fire, with the core of the blaze centered in her abdomen. Her vision was fading in and out and her heart was beating so fast she feared it might burst.

Tori leaned back and surveyed her work, but after a moment more she shook her head. “This isn’t enough. There’s too much trauma. If we had a surgeon and some supplies we could get the bleeding stopped, but I’m trained to take the blood
out
of people. I … wait, I’m an idiot. Blood. She needs blood!”

“She can have every drop,” Theroen said, moving forward and holding out his wrist, but Tori grabbed his arm.

“Not you. I want you at full strength.”

There was a slight pause as both of them looked over at the man crouched behind Two, still holding her arms down.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Thomas said, letting go of her wrists, and Two coughed out laughter even though it hurt to do so.

“Thomas, please,” Theroen said.

“Dude, I was getting ready to fuckin’ kill you people not ten weeks ago. Now you want me to let her chomp down on my neck?”

“The wrist will do,” Tori said, her voice dry.

“Look, I like Two … but I like being alive better. No offense.”

“Thomas—” Theroen began again, and Two reached out a hand and grabbed his arm, stopping him. She rolled her eyes back, looking up at Thomas.

“How many people has Naomi killed in your bathroom?” she asked him, and at first he only stared back at her, jaw clenched. Then he sighed.

“You owe me for this. I don’t even know what, but you owe me something.”

“You’re a good man,” Two said, taking his arm in her hands and drawing it toward her mouth.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t tell anybody else that. Is this gonna hurt?”

Two smiled. “Not for long.”

Thomas swore when she bit into his wrist, and she could feel his arm tense in her grip, but he didn’t make any attempt to pull away. Two could feel the warm liquid gushing into her mouth, and not since the first time she had ever drank, standing on the street and latched to the neck of the man who had killed his wife, had the thirst been this strong. This desperate. She fought against the swoon that wanted to envelope her. She was not going to allow herself to kill this man.

At last she forced his arm away, grunting not with the effort of moving it, but of resisting the urge to latch back on. Thomas quickly hauled his arm back and asked, “Should I wrap this up, or something?”

“You don’t need to,” Tori told him. “Watch.”

“How are you feeling, Two?” Theroen asked, wiping sweat from her brow with his hand. The care she could feel in his touch made Two, still wrapped in the afterglow of feeding, feel like crying. Everything in the entire world seemed beautiful to her in these moments.

“Better,” she said. It was true; the pain in her side was lessening even as they spoke, and the strange waves of ethereal semiconsciousness had left her.

“Holy shit, wouldja look at that,” Thomas said, his voice tinged with amazement. Two glanced over and saw that he was staring at his own wrist, which had already healed to the point where there were only two small, red dots visible.

“We get magic spit,” she said. “It’s part of the deal.”

“Gross,” Thomas replied, but her turned to look at her and smiled. “You’re looking better, Two.”

“Yeah, thanks. You’re right, I owe you big.”

“OK,” Tori said. “A couple minutes more and we get you to your feet. We have to keep mov—”

She was cut off by the sound of slow applause, a single pair of hands clapping again and again as their owner emerged from the dark at the end of the hall.

Two looked over and saw coming into the light a man of less than six feet, slightly stooped but possessed of a solid, blocky frame. His hair was dark and straight, his skin reddish-brown and lined with shallow wrinkles. She could not immediately guess his age; he might have been forty, or perhaps much older. His eyes were little more than black slits, dug deeply into his face below heavy, dark brows and above a strong nose and thick, sensuous lips.

“
Losso mahjeton bestuti, losso mahjeton
,” he said, and his voice pronounced the vampire words with an accent that Two had never heard before. “How very resourceful you are.”

“You …” Tori said, and her voice held equal amounts of awe and disgust, a tone of reverence coupled with deep loathing. In a moment more, Two understood who it was standing before them.

“It’s him,” she said, her voice still hoarse. “It’s the Emperor of the Sun.”

“That is the name by which I have come to be known,” the man said. “Though it is a title that was, in truth, never meant for me. It was meant for a man long-dead, who sat atop his golden throne and looked down upon me, and did not know until it happened that his time on this planet had come to an end.”

The man grinned now, and it seemed to Two as though his mouth opened far wider than was humanly possible, and that there were too many teeth contained therein, and that each of them had been filed to a needle’s point. He opened his eyes wide and they seemed to flare yellow, luminescent, glowing out from their sockets in in that dim and cavernous chamber. She had seen these eyes before, though never so intense, and she knew them in an instant. It was a moment more, however, before she could find her voice. When at last she spoke, the words came out tiny and breathless.

“Holy shit,” she said. “He’s a vampire.”

Chapter 27
Awakening

“Get your hands off of him!” Vanessa Harper screamed, striking out at the vague and blurred figure above her. She had no idea where she was or what she had been doing, no idea why she had cried these words out, and yet it seemed important she give voice to her concerns. She tried to lunge forward and felt strong hands holding her shoulders, keeping her down on the ground.

“Ness, stop. It’s me,” a voice said, and for a moment more she had no idea what those noises meant. Then, slowly, her brain pieced them together into a coherent whole. It was the voice; she recognized it, and that helped her focus. It helped her think.

“Carrie?” she asked, blinking, trying to will away the blurriness that was plaguing her vision. For the moment, it wasn’t working.

“Yeah, it’s Carrie. Can you … God, what did they do to your face? Stop struggling. Lie back.”

“I have to help him. She’s going to …”

“Whoever you’re trying to help, you’re way too late. Ness,
lie down
!”

Vanessa did as she was instructed. She brought her hands up to her eyes, wanting to rub them, but the flesh around them cried out against this action, sending bolts of pain racing through her body.

“Jesus, don’t touch – Captain, you have to listen to me.”

Carrie had adopted a military tone, and Vanessa found herself reacting to it. She took her hands away from her aching eyes and said, “Give me … I don’t know, give me a status report, Sergeant. What the fuck is going on?”

“Well, you’re lying in a hallway with a bunch of dead people and you’ve got two black eyes. I’ll be amazed if you can see anything right now. Also, I’m pretty sure your nose is broken. I knew I’d find you here. I tried to get to you earlier, but there was so much fighting … I couldn’t get away until after they swarmed the Command Center. There’s not much time now.”

“Not much time until what?”

“Until the charges go off. We’ve got maybe twenty minutes. Ness … Captain, what happened?”

Vanessa searched her mind, trying to remember. After a moment, she sat bolt upright, ignoring the sharp stab of pain in her head and the twist of nausea in her gut.

“Shit, the Emperor! They’re going after the Emperor. We have to … oh, God …”

“Are you OK?” Carrie asked.

Vanessa didn’t have time to answer, shoving herself away from Carrie, twisting, holding herself up on the palms of her hands like a beached mermaid as she vomited on the cold, stone floor.

“Guess not,” Carrie said when it was done, and Vanessa gave a shaky, coughing laugh.

“I think I swallowed a lot of blood,” she said, turning away from the mess on the floor and rubbing the back of her arm across lips that felt parched and broken, split in a hundred places.

“Uh … you think?” Carrie asked.

“Probably a concussion, too. Second time I’ve been knocked out cold today.”

“Who was it? Bats?”

“Yeah,” Vanessa said. She was beginning to feel better now. Cleansed. “Bats and Captain Perrault and my traitor brother, just headed in for a little chat with the Emperor.”