by D. N. Hoxa
“Pretty sure,” Bugz said, and she never stopped running. I hadn’t even bothered to look at the map in days.
We took shelter wherever we found it. This part of the world was worse than I thought it would be. We usually spent the days under ground. Basements, rocks, whatever we found. We hadn’t fed in a few days, but no one was complaining yet. Our poisons were almost gone, too.
When we woke up one night, Bugz wasn’t there.
We waited for half an hour before I went out of the building we were in to look for her. She’d never disappeared like that before. But just as I was about to start running, she ran into me.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“To look for humans,” she mumbled.
“On your own?”
We’d looked for humans together in the past.
“Yes, M. On my own. I wanted to see if there was anyone around here.”
“You can’t just disappear like that, Bugz.”
“You’re right,” she said, right when I expected her to start shouting. “I’m sorry. I was just so thirsty, I didn’t stop to think.”
I wasn’t used to her telling me I was right, so I wasn’t sure how to act.
“Did you find blood?” Lance asked as he came out, too.
“I did. It’s minutes away. Three humans, so we have to be careful.”
“We should get going. It’ll be a long time before they fall asleep for us to feed,” I said. Time we didn’t have.
“I could use some blood,” Tif said. His eyes had a silver hue to them already.
“We all could, but we’ll find someone else on the way.”
We were so close. We couldn’t stop now.
“I think we should wait. Who knows how long before we run into others?” Bugz said.
“It hasn’t been that long since we last fed.”
Four days. We’d lasted longer.
“Yeah, but we’re close. If we feed now, we won’t have to stop again.”
I sighed. “If you insist.”
I couldn’t drag them all behind me like I wanted to, so I agreed. We waited for five hours until the humans fell asleep.
***
Two days away from our destination, according to Bugz. We found a nice house to spend the night in, and Penny stayed with me, same as she had the past three nights. We were well fed, and the plan was to start running as soon as we woke up. But when consciousness breathed life into me, Bugz wasn’t there.
I expected her to show up just as she did before, right before I started looking for her. She didn’t, so I circled around the house we’d stayed in, once, twice, and heard nothing.
The others stayed behind and waited while I ran a wider circle. It took fifteen minutes to finally find her. And she wasn’t on her own.
“It’s right there,” a vampire was saying. His was a voice I hadn’t heard before.
“There must be no mistakes, Zane. None,” Bugz said. “Too much is at stake here.”
“Yes, we know. We’ll be ready whenever you are,” Zane said. He was grinning.
They were on the top floor of a four-story building.
“Will he be there, too?” Bugz asked. She said something else, too, but she whispered so slowly that I didn’t catch it.
“… said so. Probably. But that’s not your concern,” Zane said. “And I should get going.”
“If anything goes wrong—”
“Nothing will. Just do your part, and let us do ours.”
What the hell was happening?
I waited right where I was for the both of them, but only Bugz came out the front door. When she saw me, she looked like she’d just seen a ghost. Zane must’ve jumped off the roof. I ran out, too, to try and catch him, see his face, but there was no one around.
“M, what are you doing?” Bugz said.
“What am I doing? What the hell were you doing?” I hissed.
“Getting us help,” she said, looking around.
“Help?” I laughed.
“Yes, M. Help,” she hissed.
“Then why the hell are you hiding?”
“Let’s just find the others.”
She started to turn away. I grabbed her arm and spun her around.
“You tell me right now what the fuck you’re hiding from me.”
She jerked her arm, but I didn’t intend to let go. Her eyes became silver as I was sure mine were, too.
“Because they can’t know how many we are!” she hissed. “We need to be prepared if they decide at the last second that they don’t want to help us.”
I let her go. My thoughts were all over the place.
“Listen to me, M. You’re the one who asked me for my help. That’s exactly what I’m doing.” She stopped in front of me and took my mask off. “Look at me. No matter what’s going on in that stubborn head of yours, I am helping you. I am helping you in the only way I know how, so think about that before you shout at me.”
She was right. Fucking hell, I felt like shit.
“Look, I’m sorry. I know you’re trying to help me, but this is the second time I wake up and don’t see you there. And then that talk with Zane...” It all made sense now. “It sounded so bad when I didn’t know.”
Her chin was shaking. I was a shitty damn friend.
“They’re going to help us,” she said, before she handed over the mask and turned her back to me. “How much of my talk with Zane did you hear?”
So many questions popped into my head, but I held my tongue. I was making shit up, and I needed to stop.
“Not much. Just the end. What exactly did he say?” I said reluctantly. “Who is he anyway?”
“Someone I used to know. He told me where Chandra is staying. It’s a goddamn fortress.” She sighed. “He owes me, so he’ll help sneak us in.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s just get going,” she said, and began to run back to the others.
“Who was he?” I called, and she stopped again.
“What?”
“He. You asked Zane if he was going to be there. Who were you talking about?”
I didn’t want to piss her off even more, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Someone else I used to know,” she said reluctantly.
I didn’t ask her again.
As we ran, I saw the first green tree. It wasn’t all green. It was mostly black, but some branches had green on them. It probably wasn’t much, but it made me smile, and stirred something in my chest…
… she was far away, but I heard the steady beating of her heart. I ran so fast that I barely caught sight of a tree with four almost completely green leafs on its branches. If I’d had the time, I’d have stopped to touch them. To remember what it was like when they were there, everywhere we looked, and we took them for granted.
But Morta was on her own. I had the mind to shout out at her, to tell her to stop. I was right behind her.
A second later, she stopped, as if she’d heard me.
A few steps later, I saw why. She hadn’t heard me. She was surrounded by lions.
“Bugz, go left. We’ll need distraction,” I said. She was running right next to me, so she heard me.
Morta screamed, and I pushed harder. Damn it, she wasn’t going to end up eaten by lions. Not a fucking chance.
They had surrounded her, and she kicked one to the side. It gave her enough space to get out of the circle, and she began to run again. I was so, so close, I could almost taste her.
She stopped running again. “Run!” I called, but she didn’t hear me. She hit a lion in his face with her small knuckles instead. It was fucking weird to feel proud because that was stupid, and because I had no business being proud of Morta, or any other vampire for that matter, but I was. I was damn proud as I watched her with her fists up, determination burning in her beautiful eyes. Four lions were in front of her, and she was going to fight them on her own.
Damn it, she was perfect.
I jumped higher than I ever had before, and land
ed right in front of her.
“What the hell are you doing?” she said, and pushed me, as I tried to get rid of the lions. They were beautiful, and it hurt to see them like that. If we stuck around long enough, I’d have to hurt them. I didn’t want that.
Bugz was in her weird dance thing she always did with her opponents, so I grabbed Morta by the arm, and pulled her back.
“They’ll catch us,” she hissed, but I didn’t stop or let go of her. I pulled her up the roof of the nearest building instead.
“Come on, we need to jump from building to building until we lose them,” I said, and kept her hand in mine.
“They can run as fast as I do. I was going to fight them…” she said, and I wanted to laugh. Yes, I’d seen her.
“You don’t fight lions, Morta,” I said. I wasn’t used to telling anyone any of the unwritten rules. I enjoyed telling her.
“Well, you do if you have no other choice. I ran and they caught me. I was doing fine on my own. I knocked one out, didn’t I?” she shouted. The mouth on her…
“We’ll talk when we’re safe,” I said, and pulled her to run faster.
No building or house was safe to stop, so we kept running. We ran until she couldn’t anymore. I put her arms around my neck and her legs around my hips. I had to be faster. The sun was minutes away from rising.
“We can stop here,” Bugz said from behind me.
“We can’t,” I said, looking at the sky. It had already began to turn gray.
“Hammer, you can’t carry her—”
“Don’t worry about me,” I cut her off.
“This is perfectly safe.” Bugz pointed at a house not twenty feet away. It was broken. Too broken. Safe for me and Bugz, but not safe for Morta. I couldn’t risk her beating heart. Who knew which vampire would get up early and hear it?
No, I couldn’t risk it. “It’s not safe for her.”
Bugz rolled her eyes. “You’re going to get burned,” she said.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I could make out buildings in front of us. Big ones, more solid. I ran as fast as I could, but I wasn’t worried. I’d get her to safety no matter what.
Sunrays came out when the closest building was barely five steps away from us. I threw Morta into the front door and inside, but I wasn’t fast enough myself. It caught my back, and excruciating pain blocked all thought from my head.
If felt like an eternity until I made it inside, the smell of burnt flesh deep in my nostrils. My legs barely held me. The pain of the sun didn’t go away as fast as other pain. It tortured my mind as I grabbed Morta and ran up the half-broken stairs until I found a safe enough looking room.
I laid her down and looked at her face. She looked dead, but her beating heart was my reassurance. She was fine. I pushed her hair away from her face, and fell to the floor next to her. The pain disappeared together with my consciousness.
***
“Talk to me, M! Come on,” Bugz said. The blackness in front of my eyes vanished, and I saw her face. I blinked fast a couple of times and looked around. We were in the middle of the street somewhere. I was standing in the middle, and they were all watching me with narrowed brows. My mask was not on my face.
“What happened?” I asked, and as the words left my mouth, I realized what had.
The memory. Morta, Bugz, lions. Holy shit, I’d had another one.
“You just stopped running and wouldn’t move,” Bugz said as she analyzed my face.
“I’m fine now,” I said, grinning. I’d touched her. I’d held her on my back. I’d talked to her, touched her face. I felt filled somehow. I felt whole.
“Are you sure?” Penny asked.
“Yes, I’m sure. Come on, let’s go!” I urged them. I needed to find her as fast as was possible. I needed to tell her that I remembered. She needed to know that I felt the exact same way now, when I looked at her face, as I did then. Exact same way.
“M, what the hell happened to you?” Bugz said.
“Nothing. Can we just get going? I have a feeling we’ll find her soon.”
As we picked up running, I looked everywhere. Maybe, if I saw something, it would trigger another memory of her. Another memory of myself, of how I’d been.
When Dublin convinced me that I was indeed Hammer, I felt half. Like I didn’t know myself. Probably because I really didn’t. But having been inside Hammer’s head twice now, I realized, he wasn’t that different from me. I felt like it would be extremely easy to wear his shoes and guess what he would’ve done and said. That was exactly what I was going to learn to do. I was going to become Hammer again.
XXIX
The view in front of me wasn’t any different. I’d caught a lot more greenery, but none of it had triggered anything like the night before. Bugz let us know we were there. We passed a small town with a handful of vampires walking around before we stopped running and walked.
We found shelter soon.
“We need to separate,” I said. “Everyone check if all your weapons are in place.”
I checked mine. Six knives, one of them made of silver. A small gun—but no silver bullets—and a large dagger I could barely tie to the belt of my jeans. We’d taken all of it from Hammer’s house. He had a pretty impressive collection, and we’d taken whatever we could carry.
“What’s the plan?” Lance asked.
“The plan is simple. We look for Morta. If anyone finds her, you tell her that Hammer is looking for her, and bring her back here.” I pointed at the map, right where Bugz said we were. There was plenty of places to hide. A lot of buildings, and even some burnt trees in the distance.
“We’ll all go separately, but the destination is here.” Bugz pointed at the map. I was going to need to memorize it.
“If we don’t find her, we get back here, right in this building, before sunrise.”
“It should take us less than two hours to get there, so we’ll have plenty of time,” Bugz said.
“And if anything happens, anything at all, you run like hell right back where we came from,” I said. I’d put all of their lives in danger. I needed their help, but I also wanted them to run at the sight of danger. “No looking back. No waiting for anyone. You run, and you hide if something goes wrong.”
“Like what?” Tif asked. I had no idea, so I shrugged.
“Anything. If someone sees you and chases you. If you think someone’s following you.”
“What if we find Morta Fox, and she doesn’t come with us?” Penny asked.
“She will. Trust me, she will. Just tell her that Hammer sent you.” They all flinched. “Don’t worry. She’s not going to bite you.”
I probably shouldn’t have been so sure, but I was.
“I’ll tell each one of you exactly which way you’re going to go. Do not stray from your way, no matter what happens,” Bugz said.
“Why not?” Lance said, his brows narrowed.
“Because if we don’t find her the first night, we need to know which part we covered, so we don’t waste time,” Bugz said.
It made sense. We needed to be organized. We talked over the details for as long as we could stand.
My consciousness left me rather fast that night, and I welcomed it eagerly.
***
As soon as we woke up, we started to run. We’d all memorized the ways. It was dark and the farther we ran, the more burnt, broken trees were along the way. The smell was terrible.
When we separated, I strained my ears and listened as far as I could. I had the feeling I’d hear her beating heart any moment now. I imagined seeing her face, telling her I was him, telling her about the memory that had come back to me.
Did she remember it the way I did? When had that happened?
She would never have to be alone again. I’d help her with Mohg. We would try anything we thought would work to put a stop their madness. If everything went right, I predicted that in less than a year, I would be all alone with her, getting to know her from the very beginning. I
didn’t know how we were going to get to that point, but we were going to.
That thought was playing in my mind when I heard steps around me. I stopped moving.
As far as I could tell, there were three vampires…no, four vampires around me. Could it be that the others had lost their way?
It was dark around me. A ruined city was on one side, and trees on the other. I saw clearly, but there was no one there. I thought about calling out to ask who it was, but what if that got me in trouble? So I looked at the nearest, thickest tree instead, and prepared to jump on it. If I was high enough, maybe I could see better.
My feet never made it off the ground. I heard the sound of something coming at me, something small and light, but I had no idea from where, until it hit my back, right between my shoulder blades. I fell to my knees as the pain cut me in half, and it wouldn’t go away. It intensified instead, like it was covering more of my body with each second.
Then another came, this one a few inches below the first. I tried to call out, but my voice didn’t work. I could barely move. It must’ve been silver, because I was completely paralyzed.
I heard the footsteps again, this time much faster and much closer to me. My neck was frozen, and I couldn’t move it. I began to shake from head to toe, until someone put something on my head.
It was black, thick, and it stole my sight completely. Whoever put it there, tied it tightly around my neck to make sure it wouldn’t fall off. Two pairs of hands grabbed me by my arms and feet. I didn’t feel them. It was like my legs weren’t attached to me anymore.
The pain made me want to scream, but I bit my tongue. I swallowed and swallowed until I was able to say three words.
“Let me go.” My voice sounded different, but I expected as much.
But they, whoever they were, didn’t say anything. They started to drag me away. I tried to fight. I tried with all I had, but the silver in my body wouldn’t let me. And when I tried, the vampires put another two knives in both my forearms.
My body was completely paralyzed. My thoughts, too. They hung around the four spots in my body where it most hurt. Where the silver was. The flesh around them was already rotting and spreading fast. I knew…I knew that if they stayed inside me for another hour, the damage would be too big to repair.
