“Maybe Patagonia isn’t so much a fortress as a favela of its own.” Tess had become serious now. “If Malfas is a vampire and not a demon, like you said, it’s possible he would love having a captive population of humans just hanging around to feed from who would protect him without knowing it.”
“Who wouldn’t?” I snorted. “Not so much the captive part, but who wouldn’t want a whole bunch of people protecting them, who didn’t necessarily know that was what they were doing? I mean, I’d rather they were living happy and healthy lives, not fighting for their lives on a daily basis, but I’m not a blood-sucking parasite.” I stood up. “We need to figure out if that’s what’s going on here or if we’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Okay, sure, we’ll just go ask the hotel concierge if there’s a nest of vampires in the nearest favela,” Kamila said, grinning to take the sting away from her words.
I stretched my back, grimacing as several vertebrae cracked. “Not exactly what I had in mind.”
Zarya pulled back a little. “Jason, you’re not suggesting we go into the local favela. It’s not safe, even for us. They behead people for fun in there.”
I glared at her. “They don’t do it for fun. They do it because they’re poor. If we don’t go in there looking like we’ve got anything they want, and we don’t go in there trying to take anything from anyone, we should be okay.”
“Says the guy who didn’t know what a favela was yesterday.” Tess raised an eyebrow at me. “Don’t get me wrong. I agree with you. I think we should absolutely go into the favela and get whatever information we can.”
“Wait, what?” Kamila turned to stare at Tess. “It’s the second most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life.”
“What about the time Logan wanted to befriend the people on that cannibal island?” Zarya challenged.
“Third most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life.” Kamila didn’t miss a beat. “You get my point. The whole thing is absurd—it’s a side trip that can get us good and dead.”
“Not absurd. We’re Ferin. We’re immortal. We have skills, which means it’s not a simple side trip. It’s a component that could lead us closer to my goal.”
Tess sighed. “I’m not so sure it is a side trip. Jason has a good point. We need information. If we look at the favela like vampire hunters, which is basically what we are, we have to admit they’re a perfect habitat for what we hunt. We might be able to get information while we’re there. At the very least, we’ll figure out why the vampires were willing to work so hard to keep us out of Brazil.”
Zarya looked over at Kamila. “I hate to admit it, but they’re right. Going into a favela makes my blood run cold. Not only is it dangerous, but I feel like a creepy voyeur. It’s not appropriate to go gawk at other people’s pain and then come back to our own lives, even if we are being hunted by fangers. That said, I think we need to get in there and get whatever information we can.”
I could see by Kamila’s softening eyes that she was wavering. I spoke up now. “Look, when we started this thing, we expected to have a lot more backup than we’ve had. Every piece of information is more ammunition for us.”
Kamila slumped. “Okay, you win.”
I smiled and hugged her. “Welcome aboard.”
“On board might be going a little far. It’s going to happen, and it probably should happen, but I don’t have to like it. Not without a clear plan, anyway.” Kamila’s lips turned down at the corners. She was thinking, and not pleased with her conclusions.
I took a deep breath. Right, a plan. Because from the sound of it, we were basically going into a war zone with no clear sides.
“First of all, we go during daylight.” I wasn’t willing to compromise on that one. “We don’t take any chances there. I’m confident enough about the presence of vampires that I’m not going in without the power of the sun behind us.”
“Makes sense.” Kamila nodded once, resolve stiffened. Now that she’d decided she agreed with the plan to go in, she was all in. “I think we should leave any and all jewelry behind, too. Nothing that looks expensive at all. No fancy clothes, no shiny leather. Tess, looking at you.”
Tess pretended to pout but nodded along after a second. “Yeah, I’m right here with you on that one. I’m confident we can handle any human trouble, but there’s no reason to borrow trouble. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, and they could always get a lucky shot in.”
“You’re not kidding.” Zarya rubbed at her neck. “I think we should try to minimize any use of our Ferin abilities, too. At least, we should minimize the use of those Ferin abilities that tend to involve danger to life and limb.”
I couldn’t have agreed with her more. “It makes perfect sense. The way those buildings are packed in there, a little blowback from a fireball could wind up a massacre. A blast of water could collapse a building. If we wind up fighting someone or something we weren’t expecting, we do what we have to do, but only as a last resort. None of these people chose to go live in a favela, fighting for their lives. We don’t need to be making their lives even harder, you know?”
“Agreed.” Kamila moistened her lips. “I’m not so keen on limiting myself, but you’re right. There are kids and old people in there. We don’t need to go hurting them or worse. And we’re supposed to be lying low here in Uruará. We don’t need to go drawing unwanted attention.”
Kamila had a good point. We were going into the favela to get information, not to pick a fight. The possibility of getting into a disagreement or needing to defend ourselves in some other way was always out there, but we had to be careful not to seek out confrontation.
It wouldn’t be easy. We’d been on a war footing for so long, it was entirely too easy to turn around and rip someone’s head off without thinking. We’d have to make extra sure we didn’t jump the gun or fly off the handle without proper cause when we went in.
16
Before we went into the favela, we decided to scout it out. It only made sense. We were going into probable hostile territory. We didn’t want to go in blind, not knowing where we were going. It wasn’t like there was a map of the place. It changed too often for anyone to try, not that anyone would want to.
The cable car, which went out over a pretty section of rainforest and back again, passed slowly over the favela twice and gave us plenty of opportunity to get a bird’s eye view of it. Zarya had warned us about the poverty and the unsafe building conditions, but nothing could have prepared us for what we saw.
As near as I could tell, someone at one point in time had decided to bring American-style public housing to Brazil. If the architecture of the place was anything to go by, this choice had been made in maybe the mid-sixties. Whoever had started the project had gotten bored with it, or maybe ran out of money halfway through. We could see directly into the mid-rise apartment building because it had no roof.
This half-finished brick terror was the epicenter around which the favela had been built.
People had carved places for themselves in the tower, identified by the announcer as “The Big Cock” for the way it rose from the land. I could see how they’d put their own partitions into the unfinished building. All around The Big Cock, people had fashioned their own structures out of whatever they could find. Plenty of the buildings had been built from scraps salvaged from building renovations or stolen from new construction sites.
I’d expected the favela to be a big, gray mass, maybe with some rust color thrown in. I hadn’t counted on the Brazilian spirit. Even here, people had insisted on keeping their own color and individual personalities. Plenty of places had been left as gray steel or plain cinderblocks. Others had been painted in every color of the rainbow, sometimes all at once.
Tess called our attention to one section in particular. It lay near The Big Cock, but not too close. The buildings were the same style as the ones around them, but the materials looked a little more upscale than the others. The differences were subtle, or at least they look
ed subtle from this height, but they could still be seen. The roof was corrugated tin, just like everyone else’s, but the bolts holding it on weren’t rusty. The walls were cinderblock, but they’d been covered with something a little more solid and painted a cheery pink.
Most telling, though, was that someone had built a crappy fence around the little knot of buildings. They’d even planted some flowers around the fence, and no one had damaged them.
“It’s not much to go on,” I said after a second. “But it’s something. It’s a start.”
The others nodded. We could see vague paths through the building and debris to bring us to the house, so once we touched down at the end of our sky tour, we would head there.
Getting to the favela was an experience. No taxi driver would bring us closer than a mile away, and even that was done with reluctance. We walked in from there, our heads on a swivel as we made our way over the uneven ground. I noticed that the road from that one-mile marker on was unpaved. It didn’t bode well for the rest of the trip.
The favela wasn’t gated. It didn’t have to be. It was set off from the rest of Uruará by enough space that the demarcation was clear. People who lived there wouldn’t be able to get out easily, and the dust on their feet would show their origins if they showed up in the more acceptable parts of town. By the same token, anyone who was clean or healthy-looking was clearly marked as being an outsider.
The favela was crowded, and standing out from such a mass of people set my nerves tingling. Thousands of hostile eyes, all glued to you, were waiting for the slightest misstep. My palms broke out into a sweat that had nothing to do with humidity, and I wiped them on my pants. Vampires, I could understand. Desperate people I could not.
In other places I’d been, even when the people were poor, they accepted outsiders. Outsiders meant money coming into the community. Sometimes they meant outside investment. Sometimes they meant the arrival of critical services. Mainers could be hostile and indifferent, but we could also be pretty hospitable when we chose. Here, we were very clearly unwelcome. Even the children gazed at us with distrust.
I couldn’t expect anything different. Outsiders here meant tourists coming to stare at them, take pictures of them, and sneer. Sometimes outsiders probably meant missionaries coming to tell them their problems were all their own fault for not believing hard enough. And if we were right, outsiders often meant a violent death from blood loss.
I tried not to stare or even acknowledge the hostile locals. I might be able to sympathize with their reasons, but even a powerful Ferin couldn’t erase all those problems for them. And I couldn’t change their experiences, either.
They hated me as much as the vampires did. And I couldn’t do anything about it.
Shouts came from a corner up ahead, and I perked up. I could see a vicious fight, six against one. No, six against two. The locals, all young men between fifteen and twenty, had gathered in a circle around a white-looking tourist who’d already fallen to the ground. The tourist had curled into a little ball, trying to protect his vitals and his head, but I could see blood on the dusty ground.
Someone else had jumped in at some point to save him. I couldn’t tell much about this guy. He might not have even been a guy for all I knew, although I didn’t know many women that height. He wore black pants and a black hoodie that hid his face from me. He wasn’t with the tourist, whose clothes had been quite nice before being ripped and torn in the assault.
The assailants were locals. They wore the same mishmash of clothes as everyone else in the favela. Some had tattoos. Others just had scars. All of them had near-identical smiles of glee and bloodlust on their faces. They would cheerfully kill these men and leave the mess for whatever scavengers showed up, but only after picking them over. The favela was a perfect demonstration of Darwin at work. Predators and prey. The strong, and the weak.
Tess put her hand on my arm. “This isn’t why we’re here, Jason.” Her voice was tight, and I knew it wasn’t easy for her to see this. She was a fighter, and she was a helper. She didn’t like to see strangers suffer like this, but she was prioritizing our mission—and our safety.
I had been human more recently than she had. I couldn’t just walk idly by. “Sorry, Tess.”
I ran forward and jumped into the fray, fists flying.
The thing about being Ferin was our senses were more intense than they were in our previous life. I found myself noticing a thousand little details I’d never have picked up on before. In a fight with a vampire, that wasn’t so much the case because they could move faster than a Ferin and there wasn’t time.
These folks were human. I had time to notice the tourist on the ground had a concussion. His pupils were two different sizes, and that wasn’t good. The other guy’s knuckles were bloody, and he was staggering a bit, but he was still upright. He’d have to do.
The locals were fighting not just with their fists and feet, but with everything they could find. One of them had a two-by-four. Another had a pipe of some kind. I went after them first, since I was fresh in the fight and the guy with the hoodie was clearly injured.
I punched the one with the pipe three times; twice in the head, and once in the nose as he fell. That sent him flying backward, senseless. I didn’t pause to admire my handiwork but turned my attention to his taller friend with the two-by-four.
The attacker tried to speak to me, but whatever he said went in one ear and out the other. He was probably trying to intimidate me, but it didn’t matter because it was all incomprehensible. I wasn’t even sure he was speaking Portuguese, and I didn’t care. I relied on my unnatural speed to wrest the two-by-four from him, and my strength to slam it into the back of his head. He went down like a sack of wet grain, face first and silent.
I let my momentum carry me into the next attacker, who’d found a knife somewhere. I had to admit it was probably pretty decent of him not to have broken that thing out during the earlier fight, but the knife was a significant threat, and I needed to take it out right now.
I grabbed the hand with the knife in it and twisted it up behind his back. I wasn’t gentle, and I felt the elbow snap. He screamed and dropped the knife. I didn’t stop there, but deliberately broke the other arm too. I didn’t want to kill him. I wasn’t a murderer, but I needed to be safe from this guy. It wasn’t personal. Just business.
Behind me, Hoodie Guy had taken on another one of the assailants. He was relying much more on his legs and elbows than on his hands. Later on, I’d be interested in that style of fighting. Right now, I didn’t have time to think about it. I could only be impressed by the way he shattered his attacker’s leg with a vicious kick.
There were two left. I slammed my fist into the face of the one closest to me. He tried to duck out of the way, but I moved so much faster than he could. I had time to take on the next one before Hoodie Guy was able to recover from a vicious kick. As I stood there standing over unconscious or seriously injured bodies, I realized that this was one of the reasons why Ferin avoided humans.
There was no logical explanation for what had just happened. I hadn’t used any of my flashier powers, but I’d just given a graphic demonstration that I wasn’t human. No human could have moved that fast or been that strong.
Well, shit.
I’d had the best of intentions, but those didn’t matter when I had a bunch of men lying in a filthy street unconscious. If a Ferin did something like this in a bar fight, no one would be able to forget it.
Was that why Captain Logan, Zarya, and Kamila had parted ways?
I couldn’t spend time fretting about it now. What was done was done, and the tourist had at least been saved. I helped the poor guy up. His curly red hair was matted with blood, and his expensive designer clothing was ripped and torn. I wanted to shake him. I knew I shouldn’t blame the victim, but what had he expected when he came wandering into someone else’s neighborhood to gawk at their misfortune?
I handed him off to Hoodie Guy. “Get out of the favela. It’s
no place for either of you.” I had no idea if either of them spoke English, but at least I’d said what I had to say.
The tourist nodded and staggered away but stumbled after only a couple of steps. Hoodie Guy caught him. They had a long walk ahead of them. The tourist needed an ambulance, but none would come out here. Even if they were willing to make the drive, which they wouldn’t be, the ambulance would be stripped down and recycled in a matter of seconds.
Hoodie Guy didn’t turn, but I heard him clearly. “I know why you’re here,” he said in heavily accented English, his voice light. “You’ll find it in the northwest corner of the favela. Not that you should go there. It’s not any place for you, either.” With that, he got the tourist’s arm over his shoulders and bustled him toward the route out.
Tess gave me a long, measuring look. “Feel better now?”
I rejoined the group. “As a matter of fact, I do. Let’s go northwest.”
17
I didn’t know why I trusted the word of some random vigilante in a hoodie, but something about his direction made me want to follow it. I didn’t necessarily have a reason not to follow the instructions either. Even if Hoodie Guy hadn’t been from the favela, he had known his way around well enough. And he hadn’t hesitated to jump in and try to save a tourist from the locals, when any normal person would have stayed back.
“Do we have any idea where that is?” Kamila might have had her concerns about my directional skills, but she didn’t question why I wanted to go that way. Maybe she just didn’t mind whichever way we went. We were all a little turned around in the favela now that we were on the ground down here. Seeing the place from the sky had been one thing, but down here in the mud and sludge was something else. Kamila hadn’t made any comments about the fight, not yet. I was sure she would when we got back to the hotel. Here in public wasn’t the place to get into those issues.
Forever Young - Book 3 Page 9
