The Endangered (31 page)

Marcus holds the silver plated steel, his arms lowered by the weight of it.

I am torn between a sudden desire to hug him and an equally strong urge to rip his throat out. I split the difference and leave him alone with his demons.             

Epilogue

We proceed down the campus hallway. Every few feet, Xan stops to scan the crowd with a pair of thermal goggles; Dade and I are on his heels, watching the bystanders, looking for anything abnormal and trying not to raise many eyebrows in the process.

Which is damn near impossible given that we look like a team of Navy Seals.

The building’s hallway is wide enough to drive a tank through and is lined on the right with floor to ceiling glass windows. As such, we are covered head to toe in multiple layers of thick, non-permeable fabric.

The masks are the worst. Aside from making us look like convenient store robbers, they itch like hell. We look strange, for sure, but most students probably figure it is a frat-related stunt. Or maybe they are too absorbed in their own drama to care—a group of girls gossiping away at a nearby table don’t even look up as we pass.

Why do we even bother saving them? Some days I wonder.

The hallway opens into a coffee house. It is not very busy at the moment as it is getting late in the afternoon and most students have probably progressed from coffee to beer.

“Report?” Dade asks.

“All clear,” Xan confirms and we turn our attention to the floor below.

We are standing by a pair of escalators that lead into the lobby of the main entrance below. The coffee house juts out over a large seating area below that takes up half the lobby. The escalators face north of this lounge toward a hallway twice as wide as the one we’d just ventured down. This hallway is lined with doors—to classrooms, one could surmise.

Dade studies the building’s floor plan on his palm pilot. Xan, positioned a few yards ahead, suddenly backs away from the escalators and drops to a crouching position. We drop back, imitating his movements.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I think we have a positive ID.”

“Shit. Really?”

“I gotta get a better scan to be sure.”

Dade looks around. Xan shakes his head and points below us. Then he moves by the escalators and peers over the rail. I do the same and he pushes me back, motioning me to stay down. But not before I manage to glimpse our target. He is a tall cloaked figure leaning casually against the wall of the ground floor lobby.

“Got him. He’s roughly 30 yards away, east of the escalators.”

“Yeah. He’s registering 20 degrees C.”

Room temperature. Bingo.

“Let’s do this.” Dade reaches for his gun.

Xan waves him off.

“No way. There’s at least two dozen bystanders down there. We can’t just open fire. Too risky. We should follow him and see what he’s after.”

“We know what he’s after. He’s after what those two dozen people down there have to offer.” I am weighing our options.

This thing can travel even faster than us and is just as deadly. We need to act fast.

Xan hands me his goggles. “See for yourself.”

“Don’t need it; I can make out his silhouette.”

My “seeing” skills had improved and I was able to detect his presence without the aid of technology. I was pretty proud of myself, had to admit.

Standing upright now, he is watching someone very intently, out of my eye line. I move closer just as he starts walking. He hasn’t looked up; he’s been too focused on a target of his own. Time is not our ally. I remove my sunglasses and ski mask, shoving them into my back pocket.

“He’s on the move. Dade get the car. We’ll need a hasty exit.”

Dade looks from me to Xan.

“Are you nuts? What are you doing?” Xan protests.

“I’m taking him out. Go with Dade. I got this.”

“It’s reckless. We don’t know what we’re up against.”

“It’s an order. Now go.”

“Did she just pull rank on us?” Dade lets out a bemused laugh and follows Xan back through the hall.

I leap up onto the foot-wide divider between the two escalators. They are empty, but this made it possible to spring effortlessly down into the lobby. I charge the target, preparing to make use of the new gadget Jiro had just rigged: a retractable sword. The silver blade runs down half the length of my arm, pointed inward until I push in the trigger. It then swings out in a 180 degree arc to become an extension of my arm.

It slicees open the sleeve off my new leather jacket as it does this, an obvious cause and effect I hadn’t considered until it was too late.

***

The demon wears a hooded trench coat, similar to the cloak I’d just shed. He is easily a foot taller than me. He senses my approach and spins around, throwing open his coat. A red glow emits from his arm, nearly blinding me.

“Shit.”

I dive like I’m a baseball player who just rounded third and is determined to steal home plate. Except this catcher is armed.

Flames shoot past, over my head. I roll on my side and thrust the sword through his abdomen, into his chest at an upward angle, piercing the heart.

As the air cools above me, I crane my head upward to better assess the damage. I’d never seen a demon of this breed before. A vampire hybrid vulnerable to silver who, apparently, didn’t share our aversion to fire. And could hide in plain sight. Until he caught my blade, that is. 

Fangs line his entire mouth. I observe this first hand as I study his frozen expression, mouth agape. Perhaps he is the upgraded version. A new race of vampires.          

The creature stands rigid, smoke still rising from the device on his right hand as he moves it to his chest. His figure hardens slowly, then crumbles into a pile of dust. Slightly different from what I was expecting. But dead is dead.

I get to my feet, picking up a curious little black box that had been affixed to the creature’s ankle. Several students, their backs pressed against the wall, stand stunned, faces registering shock and horror.

Farther down the hall, others are fleeing out the exit.

Screams echo through the corridor.

I retract the sword and examine my jacket sleeve.

“Damn it, Jiro.”

“Freeze!”

I turn around to find a cop standing twenty feet away, his gun is trained on me with  shaking hands. Two more cops are running through the lobby entrance, guns drawn. Since when do campus security carry pistols? Times have changed.

I look down at the pile of ash that used to be a demon. Can’t help but wonder if the first cop on the scene had been privy to the before and after.

Certainly some students had witnessed an eyeful.

His expression says he had.

As the back-up cops close in, they catch site of the trashcan that’d fallen victim to the flame thrower. It burns steadily, flames shooting upward and outward.

Distracted by the fire, they look from me to it accusingly.

“Now
that
was not my fault,” I insist, pointing to the trashcan.

Without warning, I rush them, launching vertically and easily clearing the stunned cops, the trashcan, and half the escalator’s distance to the second floor.

As I bound up the remaining distance on the rail, one of the cops fires a shot. The bullet strikes the wall to the right of the escalators. Way off.

I pull my gun from the small of my back and fire at one of the ceiling-high windows, peppering the glass with bullets. I hit the weakened pane at full force, pulling on my mask as I dive into the daylight.

A black Escalade with tinted windows jumps the sidewalk and spins into the courtyard just as my feet strike the ground.

The door opens and I fling myself inside.      

Behind me, people are shouting. I imagine the cops come out as we pulled away, but I am too distracted by my burning arm to notice. With the sleeve ripped from Jiro’s contraption, my arm was left exposed to the sun. I hadn’t slipped on my ski mask completely, either; my neck seethes.

“Go! Go! Go!” I shout.

Pointless because we are already speeding away from campus.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

Xan is sitting shotgun, Dade at the wheel.

“Got him. Turned out he had a flame thrower.”

“Really? Damn.”

“And this.” I toss the black box at Xan.

“What, was he on house arrest or something?”

“I think it’s what made him invisible.”

“No kidding. Do you need blood?”

I consider the packet Xan offers but can already feel the burns healing.

“No, I’ll be fine. Cops will be after us, though.” I look back; the coast is clear, but sirens can be heard in the distance.

Dade is cursing at the GPS screen, jabbing it with his index finger. I lean over the front seats.

“It’s cool. Make a left down this road. Careful though, it’s got some sharp turns,” I caution.

***

After several unexplained deaths on campus, we’d started an investigation of our own. Xan had even cleaned up the remains of one victim. The less humans knew, the better. A serial killer draining the blood of his victims, eating flesh, removing organs, was best handled by professionals. The already dead kind.

In recent weeks I’d taken up residence on campus and explored the area sufficiently. I have several escape plans and we are executing one of them. The road curved sharply to the right, throwing us to the left.

“Buckle up,” Dade laughs.

I lean forward between the seats. “Maybe we should test that box out.”

Xan fumbles with it, pushing buttons.

“How do we know if it’s working?”

“We may know soon enough…See that gorge? Take us down into it.”

“Are you serious?” Xan sees where I am pointing.

Dade accelerates, sending us off-roading downhill into a rocky dried-up riverbed. We jostle along.

“If we blow a tire we’re screwed.” Xan has a death grip on his seatbelt.

I ignore him, looking around.

No sign of police pursuit; the sirens are fading.

The gorge leads us into a tunnel. A sunlight-free safe haven to lead us out of the city and back to base. We all let out a sigh of relief as the vehicle plows through its entrance and we are consumed in familiar darkness.

Presently, Stephanie L. Eaves is a graduate student at Drexel University, pursuing her MBA. She received her undergraduate degree in Film from University of Pittsburgh. Originally from from West Chester, PA, she lived in Pittsburgh and Minneapolis before returning to the Philadelphia area, where she currently resides. Stephanie's professional background is in marketing, primarily in media and publishing industries. She enjoys being in an environment that promotes creativity.

While attending University of Pittsburgh, Stephanie took a number of writing courses and earned a certificate in Professional Writing. Outside of writing, she also enjoys running and biking in her free time and readily confesses to being bit of a film and television junkie. When home, she's never without a book in arm’s reach.

Credits

This book is a work of art produced by Luthando Coeur,
an imprint of The Zharmae Publishing Press.

James Crewe

Editor-in-Chief

Rochelle Barainca

Editor

Vincent Sammy

Cover Artist

Star Foss

Cover Designer

Shaughnessey Marshall

Typesetter

Emily Roth

Copy Editor

Olivia Swenson

Proofreader

Dean Taylor

Reviewer

Allyson Schnabel

Managing Editor

Travis Robert Grundy

Publisher

The Zharmae Publishing Press

Spokane | July 2014