by Martha Woods
“Don’t worry Amy, they’ll stay in one piece as long as I can help it, no arm ripping or anything like that going on just yet.”
“If it must be done though, I’m taking the short one,” Vincent said, “I don’t like the way he looks at me.”
“We can hear you talking about us!” George yelled, a tremor in his voice, “You can at least speak to us like men!”
“That would require for you to actually be men.” Vincent slinked around behind them, running his fingers along their shoulders and smirking as their heart beats sped up. “You’ve seen the things that vampires can do to a human body, but I doubt that you really know what we’re capable of. I could keep you alive for weeks, months even without your arms and legs, you’d look just like a blood bag.”
“Y-you wouldn’t…”
“No, I think I’m above that kind of brutality. But I wouldn’t have any qualms driving you out to the most feral clan that I could find in the northern hemisphere and leave you in their very capable hands.” Scratching his nails down their skin hard enough to draw blood, he leaned in until he was less than an inch from the side of Pete’s face. “Tell me what else you told them, and I won’t take your thumbs.”
“We didn’t tell them anything! I fucking swear!” Pete shook in his chair, trying to get as far away as he could but finding the legs bolted down to the floor. “They just told us to do that one thing, that’s it! You think they’d trust us with anything else?”
“You seem to think that they’ll trust you to grab more shifters for them, so you tell me. Which one is it? Are you too stupid to trust at all, or are you smart enough to keep doing jobs for them?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know all right? I’m telling you the truth, this shit began and ended with them taking her!”
Right as it seemed that Vincent may actually lay a hand on them, there came a knock at the door, all of us turning back to look as Julian pushed it open and stepped in cradling a drink. “Hello, hope I’m not interrupting,” He said, taking a sip of his cocktail, “Just wanted to see how my boys are going. You are being honest with our hosts, aren’t you?”
They said nothing to him, managing to stare up at him with even more hatred than they’d been looking at Damon and Vincent with, though I suppose it was understandable since he was the direct reason for their headaches. Damon shook his head, reaching out to shake Julian’s hand.
“Thanks for helping us out with this, it saved us a lot of trouble.”
“Oh don’t worry about it, ever since Tristian I figure we should all do our part to keep everything secure. I’ve got something that you’re going to like as well…” Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out an envelope so thick that it was straining to keep together. “I sent someone who knows where they’ve been staying to check everything out, found at least four of these envelopes, all filled with cash. Looks like they don’t have any funding left regardless of what happens here.”
“Wow,” Damon whistled, thumbing through the wad of cash, “How much do you think is there?”
“Enough to help fund the alliance pretty well, I figure that the werewolves and witches could use a few bonuses from the effort they’ve put in lately.”
“And you?”
“Oh don’t worry, I already took a few hundred from the envelope, I think I’m good.”
“You took our money?” George sighed, all the fight long having left him, “It’s not enough to betray everything, you have to steal from us too?”
“That’s pretty rich, considering where you got it from.” Julian walked over, slapping him across the face and grabbing his chin. “Look at me. Have you been telling them everything?”
“We don’t. Know. Anything,” He said, “we told them that before, they won’t listen either.”
“Hmm... “ He looked at each of them, tilting his head with interest before turning back to look at Damon and Vincent. “They know that you don’t want to hurt them, not really, they know that you don’t want to disappoint Amy.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because they’ve done their homework on all of you to some extent, and I did my homework before everyone. It’s obvious really, you three are inseparable, you don’t want to take any chances that you’ll alienate the others.” There was a click, all of us looking around for the source before he shrugged. “Lucky that I don’t really care I guess.”
Before we could react he pulled out his pistol and placed it against George’s knee, the bang deafening and the sudden shock impacting in my chest, all of us jumping back before Damon rushed over and slammed Julian against the wall, George and Pete screaming all the while.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Damon yelled, knocking the gun from his hands and kicking it across the floor. “We need them alive!”
“He’s still alive! Just probably wishes that he wasn’t right now.” Julian took a sip of his drink, miraculously unspilled before smiling. “They know that you won’t hurt them, but now they know that I don’t really have any problems doing so. So let me at ‘em.”
“Fuck! Fine you crazy shit fine, we’ll tell you!” Pete stared a them through gritted teeth, George next to him crying in pain. “You want to know what we told them, fine!”
“Now there’s a good boy.” Julian shook out of Damon’s grip, walking over and taking a seat in front of the two of them. “Go ahead, spill the beans.”
“One condition,” Pete said, flicking his head at George, “You let the two of us live after this, no questions asked.”
Julian sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose before chuckling to himself. Rather than answer them with a sentence, he shot his foot out and smashed what was left of George’s knee, rising above them and grabbing Pete’s face between his hands. “You will tell me everything that I want to know, and I’ll decide whatever I want to do with you after. You don’t have anything to bargain with, I’ll get it out of you, it just depends on how much you want to lose first.”
“Ways in!” Pete screamed, “We told them ways into the city, sewers, back roads, shit that normally we don’t watch for! They wanted information as a fallback just in case, so we told them how they could get into the city without being seen, that’s all! I swear on my fucking life, that’s all that we told them! I swear!”
He stared down at him, his eyes honestly scarier than I’d ever seen them on Vincent or Damon, he looked more like a predator than some of the things that I’d seen literally tear people limb from limb. “Fine, I believe you. You’re not enough of a man to keep anything secret after that, neither of you are. You’re just cowards.”
“So is that it?” I asked, “That’s all that they know?”
“That’s all that they know, now we just need to clean up the mess.” Julian bowed his head in apology to Alexis. “I’m sorry about the blood, there’s enough money in the envelope to cover cleaning if you need it.”
“Don’t worry too much about it,” She said, “I’ve been looking into redecorating these rooms for a while now anyway. I suppose that my only question is if this is as big as the mess gets, or if we’ll need a more thorough clean after.”
And there it was, the question that all of us had on our minds the entire night: Just what are we going to do with them now that we have what we want? I hadn’t been able to figure out a satisfactory answer, neither had Damon or Vincent, killing them seemed to be the easiest solution but… it just didn’t sit well with us, regardless of what they’d done or what they’d been planning to do. But we couldn’t just pretend like nothing had happened, clearly they were dangerous enough to try and turn against us, and it wasn’t like we could just welcome them back into the fold now that they’d tried to kill us and we’d shot them.
“If you don’t want to make the decision,” Julian said, “I can take care of it pretty easily, no skin off my back.”
“I don’t want to kill them, not like this,” I said, “it's not dignified at all, killing them out there, if they were a threat… that’s somet
hing that I can understand. But now that they’re tied down to chairs in a back room somewhere? That’s not who I want to be.”
Pete scoffed, “Typical…”
“She’s the only thing keeping you alive so far rat,” Julian said, pressing his foot against a whimpering George’s wound, “So I’d mind your tongue.”
“Amy, I don’t want to have to say this…” Damon took my hand, running his thumb along my knuckles. “We might have to do it, just so that we can keep everyone safe. I know it’s ugly, and I know no one wants to do it, but it might be the only option that we really have.”
“What about cutting them loose?” Tabitha asked, looking at them the same way you might look at a bug, “Toss them out into the middle of nowhere and let them try to make it as far as they can.”
“They could just link up with some hunters like them again, we can’t let that happen.”
“What if you took away their protection?” She asked, looking at me rather than the others, “We don’t just kick them out, we give them half a day and then the vampires, the werewolves, whoever wants to have a shot at them can go after them if they want. How much of a threat are they going to be if they know that they’ll probably always be watched.”
That… sounded marginally less than a death sentence, but at least it came with a chance. It was just about the best option that I could think of at least, there was no way that they’d be welcomed back, and giving them even a modicum of protection after expelling them… that just sounded insulting to everyone else.
“Call Joseph and Christine,” I said, “tell them that after twelve hours these two are fair game, I don’t want to hear about anything that happens to them once I walk out the door, if they live or die isn’t our problem anymore.”
It still felt dirty, like there was something else that I could have done… but I guess sometimes there really isn’t a clean option, not when the fate of everyone else is at stake. Decisions that you don’t necessarily like are still ones that need to be taken.
“If you would allow me, it would be my pleasure to take them out of your hair,” Julian said, placing his hands on their shoulders, “Don’t worry, I won’t shoot them. I just want to make sure that they understand what it is that they’ve done.”
“Tabitha, can you go with him and make sure that they make it out of the city in one piece?” I looked down at George’s knee, or at least what was left of it. “Well, more or less one piece.”
The two of them hauled the hunters out of there, Tabitha’s strength having greatly increased since her injuries months before, leaving me standing in the room with Vincent, Damon and Alexis. And a blood stain.
“I think that was maybe the best option we had,” Vincent said, “there were no easy decisions, but this is the best I think.”
“An open season hunt? It doesn’t sound very dignified.”
“Neither does selling out your comrades to cover gambling debts, yet here we are.” Damon shrugged, stretching his arms above his head and groaning, “Another long night, I can’t wait till we get an actual break from all of this.”
“Don’t relax just yet, we’ve still got a long road ahead of us,” Alexis sighed, “and mine apparently starts with calling the cleaners.”
“You can’t just… make it go away?” Damon asked, “I’ve seen some witches that can do that.”
“I’m just a witch Damon, I’m not Mary Poppins.” She led us out, closing the door behind her and glancing outside. “Still a few hours of night left, more than enough for all of you to get home safely. I’ll keep you informed of anything that I find out, you just focus on what it is that needs to be done next, that’s what’s important.”
“Will do,” I said, patting the back of her hand and smiling, “Thank you for helping us.”
“It’s the least that I can do,” She replied, “you can pay me back by not dying.”
That seemed to be a fair deal.
The next day found us waking in the afternoon, my sleep having been delayed by a few hours as I took calls from Joseph and Christine both, wanting absolute confirmation about what was going to be done with George and Pete. I told them that whatever it was that people decided they wanted to do was purely in their hands, not mine, and I wanted it to stay that way. With how angry Julian had been last night, I don’t doubt that there were going to be at least a few hunters looking to join in on the hunt as well. I’m sure that Damon and Vincent would give a thought to going if they weren’t needed by my side.
But after those calls had ended I had collapsed into bed and stayed unmoving for a good eight hours, the events of the last few days really catching up to me and sinking deep into my bones, my entire body just going dead from the neck down and my eyes feeling as heavy as cinder blocks. Damon and Vincent were the exact same, neither of them moving even as I nearly collapsed right on top of them, both of them in the exact same position the next time that I opened my eyes.
“Mmm…” I moaned, stretching myself out and feeling for the first time in a while my back pop with a complete lack of stress, the muscles tightening then relaxing, my head falling back down against the pillow to rest for the next few hours.
My phone started to ring, the shrill beeping just what I’d been hoping not to hear today, knowing that just on the other side of that line was some kind of problem that needed to be solved lest we all end up perishing in a massive fire of violence and death. Or maybe it was just Cara wanting to catch up for lunch, I could at least hope that it was the latter.
“Hello?” I answered, pressing the phone against my ear and making my displeasure known, “Sorry if I don’t sound like I’m in the mood.”
“You sound tired,” Claire replied, smile in her voice, “I guess I’m partially to blame for that, if you really got rid of those spies.”
“Yeah, we took care of that little problem,” I said, sitting up and rubbing at my eyes, “Thank you for the tip off, it might have avoided us getting a very unpleasant surprise in the future.”
“Don’t worry about it, so long as you’re keeping my brother safe that’s all that matters to me. And that other one that’s always with you, but I’ve never really spoken to him. Would he be my brother in law? In spirit at least?”
“I don’t know what he’d be to you, even if any of this was in any way normal. Let’s just say yes so you can have something to bond over.” Slipping out of bed, careful not to wake either of them as I passed over them, I padded my way out into the living room and looked out through the window. “Why are you calling Claire? Have you found out something else?”
“I can’t just call up my brother’s girlfriend and try to get to know her better? I’ve always got to have some kind of goal?”
I snorted, “I’d be flattered if you just wanted to find out more about me, but we know that you’re pretty focused on your goals. You wouldn’t call unless it was important, not while this is still going on.”
I swear that I could hear her pouting through the phone line. “Fiend, I guess you’ve got me there. There’ll be time to learn more about you over coffee once this is all over, but for now I guess yeah, I’ve got some news to give you.”
Pulling out a seat, I sat down and placed my elbow against the table, waiting patiently for her to continue.
“How much do you know about the shifters?”
“Its run by a madman, the same hunter who took you in and made your brother believe that you were dead. The same one who had a pretty bad reputation even when he was a hunter, bad enough to make multiple groups who hated each other band together just for the chance to kill him.”
“Well, that’s all correct so far, but you’re missing one pretty important part,” She said, “remember when he got married? Or at least as close as someone can get, to the woman who saved his life and gave him something to fight for again, who lost her father so long ago to their now mortal enemies?”
“That rings a bell, yes. I think that I would remember that pretty vividly.”
“We
ll, I’ve got some pretty bad news to give you Amy, it turns out that he made a few calls back home. He’s not thrilled with the progress that we’ve made so far, he figured that you might have given them up to us by this point.”
I had a feeling that I knew where this was going, and it was in a direction that I was definitely not liking. “Who were the calls to?”
“He decided to call his wife, and inform her of the situation,” She said, “so she’s going to be coming down personally to sort everything out, and she’s bringing some friends with her. This is not something that I would say that you want.”
The whole family was turning out for the occasion, how wonderful. As much as I had to say about this, as many feelings as I felt I could express at the circumstances that we found ourselves in and the effects that could be felt after all of this, there were really only two words that I could utter to get across my feelings.
“Well,” I said, “shit.”
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