by Drew Hayes
“You are not an easy man to get to, Fredrick Fletcher. It seems the longer I leave you alone, the more connections you make. Once the dragon liked you, I nearly gave up hope of ever setting eyes on you again, but then you turn up here, in my backyard, staying in a house I was already preparing to infiltrate. Truly, the gods smiled upon me this day.”
“If it was this hard for you to catch an accountant, you might be losing your touch.” I would like to claim this defiance as bravery; however, in truth, it was simply terror worming its way out. With the certainty of death gone, I’d realized that Quinn was capable of doing far worse than ending me, and my panic had returned. All I could think was to buy time, keep him talking, wait for someone to arrive. It was a poor plan, admittedly, yet it was all I had to keep me going.
“I see your bitch’s rudeness has been rubbing off on you.” Quinn smirked as I struggled against the other vampires. If they’d let me go, I doubt I could have done anything, but something still compelled me to try after he spoke about Krystal like that. “Oh, Fredrick, defiant as always. Why couldn’t you just do what you were supposed to and go on a murder spree? I had so many plans to put into place while you were drawing the agents’ attention. Do you even know how many people like you I had to kill before one of you finally turned? And of course, it was you, the one who wanted to play nice.”
“Wait . . . what do you mean, people like me? There were others?” It was not the most salient piece of the discussion, I’ll own up to that, but it served the purpose of keeping him talking. Besides, I wanted to know what the hell he was talking about. It’s human nature to be curious about our origins, after all.
Quinn laughed, and as he did, the other vampires seemed to shake, like they were chuckling as well, though no sound escaped their snarled lips. “Oh my, have none of your dear friends told you yet? Turning a human into a vampire is a difficult, imprecise process. No one is ever entirely sure why. Some believe it to be a curse placed on our kind to keep us from growing our numbers too fast. Generally speaking, only about one in every hundred people will actually turn into a vampire when properly drained and fed. The rest simply die.”
I looked away from Quinn for the first time, glancing at the four vampires still holding me still. One in a hundred didn’t mean he’d had to kill four hundred to make them, I understood statistics well enough to know that, but it did mean he’d probably killed a lot of people to form this little army of his.
“You like them? I had to work my way through quite a few transients and drifters to shore up my ranks without catching the Agency’s attention. Although, I will say this, Fredrick, you were a lesson for me. I no longer trust my spawn to act properly on their own. That’s why I took some time off to acquire the lovely accessory around my neck.” Quinn stepped closer, and as he did, I could see red lines running between the runes on his necklace, just like the ones in the vampires’ eyes. “Sires naturally have some control over their creations, you see, but those with strong wills can fight it. While I hardly expected you to qualify, it was a lesson worth learning. No longer do I take chances. Instead, this useful tool exponentially increases my control over my spawn. They follow my orders perfectly, even if I’m not in earshot. That’s why they were waiting for you, by the way, and why they work as such a well-oiled machine.”
A few moment’s prior, I’d thought death was scary, but the idea of having my willpower stripped away and being forced to serve Quinn as a mindless puppet . . . that was a whole other level of terrifying. Quinn seemed to drink in my fear, grinning wider as he sheathed his sword and stepped closer.
“I’m sure you were hoping to stretch this talk indefinitely so that help would arrive, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut this short, Fredrick,” Quinn said. “For a long time, I dreamed about killing you as payback for what you cost me, but ultimately, I decided against it. That’s too quick for you and your little clan. No, I think instead, you’re going to be found, wounded yet alive, and brought home. Once there, you’ll be the one to start killing off those friends of yours. One by one, until eventually, the bitch who took my arm is forced to put you down. Now that feels like a more appropriate punishment, don’t you think?”
Quinn’s hand gripped my chin, pulling my gaze upward until our eyes locked. Too late, I realized what he was doing and tried to shut them, but the powerful hands from my captors lifted my eyelids. His gaze burned into mine, and the collar glowed brighter. “Don’t worry, I only need eye contact the first time. After this, you’ll do what I say whenever I say it. You, Fredrick, are finally going to be the obedient, useful spawn you were always meant to be.” The collar brightened even more, to the point where it was hurting my eyes to look upon it. I’d have blinked the pain away if I could have, but instead, I tried to ignore it. Whatever he was doing, I needed to fight it. I needed to stay in control. I couldn’t . . . couldn’t let myself be a puppet. Especially not one he might use to hurt my friends.
“Hear me well, Fredrick, spawn of Quinn,” he said, voice low and heavy. The collar flashed, so bright I couldn’t see anything else. It felt like my eyes were going to burn in their sockets. “Hear me, and obey.”
7.
**Author’s Note: While I was running from Quinn, there were quite a few significant events going on overhead, so I’m going to pass things off to someone who was actually there to tell what happened.**
Every time I die, I have the same dream. Maybe it’s a memory, but so many years have passed that I can’t recall what the moment was truly like anymore. All I have is the dream that haunts me in the fleeting instants of death. She’s there, of course. Lying on the ground, body shriveled and weak. Still beautiful, though. No matter how much time passes, no matter what happens between us, I’ll always remember her as she was then, a perfect vision of kind, gentle loveliness. Were it just her, it might be a nice dream, even in the context of that particular moment. But it’s not just her. I’m there too, and so is it. Dark wings spreading like dusk, gleaming eyes staring down at me, the scent of cinders and sulfur filling the air. I reach out to take one of its clawed, yet surprisingly graceful hands. A handshake. Such a simple gesture, with so much power behind it. Just as I take grip of those slender fingers, she looks up at the two of us from the ground and starts to cry out.
“Don’t! Please, don’t do this Arch—”
And then, as they always have since that day, my eyes snap open. Decapitation is a son of a bitch. Most wounds, I can shake off, they’ve self-repaired before I can fully notice them, but losing connection to the brain is another matter. Headshots and decapitation take me out of the action for a full ten seconds. If that doesn’t seem like a long time to you, then I’m guessing you’ve never squared off against violent parahumans out for blood. Ten seconds is a lifetime, sometimes quite literally.
I didn’t move. That lesson took me longer than I’m proud to admit, but eventually, I figured out that people ignore corpses. If I leapt up unprepared, Beauregard would rush me again, and I’d probably end up losing another ten seconds and starting right back on the ground again. Instead, I listened. There’s an art to listening, to shutting out the world and yourself, focusing only on the certain sounds you want to track. It took me years to master, studying with some monks who’d dedicated lifetimes to it, but it was worth the effort. Besides, time is the one thing I have plenty of.
Beauregard was still nearby; he’d gone back to guarding the door, and had left my body in the hall. That was good luck for me; even someone that out of it would have noticed a head rejoining to its neck. Quinn had obviously done something to these vampires; the exact method he’d used was a mystery, but I got the general gist: he’d traded their intellect for stalwart obedience. He was hardly the first tyrant to do so, but it was a strategy that came with a lot of faults. Followers like that weren’t soldiers, they were fodder. Extra hands attached to one mind that couldn’t properly control them all. The big vampire blocking the door was no exception. If he’d had access to
his own brain, he might have swept the area occasionally instead of just standing in the open waiting for trouble to come to him.
Faintly, I could hear footsteps hurrying down the stairs, and another set going at a slower pace behind them. Good, if Fred was still running, then he wasn’t dead yet. Had I dropped in a more covert place, I’d have taken off after him, but my legs sticking into the part of the hallway facing the remains of the front door meant that the moment I twitched, the brute would be on me again. Helping Fred meant taking Beauregard down first.
One of the few upsides of dying: people tend to talk more freely to someone they think is being swept off the game board. Quinn was nice enough to give away why my bullets didn’t work: subdermal armor. I doubted it was anything sophisticated; given Beauregard’s misshapen frame, it was probably just lumps of metal or other hard material surgically placed below the skin. The poor guy had clearly been the test subject for a lot of Quinn’s “upgrades,” so I needed to be ready for anything. I was going to have to kill him, and while I took no joy in offing someone under obvious mental control, some part of me suspected that if the real person in there could speak, they’d have begged me to end it for them. Maybe that was a fantasy I concocted to ease my conscience, but I doubt it. I’ve been an agent for loads of years, and I did other work before that. My conscience made peace with this sort of necessity a long time ago.
Carefully, I tested my hands and found my weapons still in them. The body naturally seizes up in death, so I’d long ago gotten into the habit of taking firm grips on my tools when I was slipping over. Habits were important, almost as important as training. I took a slow, steady breath as I lay on the floor, mentally picturing how the fight would go. I’d move, he’d charge again, and the next few seconds would be crucial. Beauregard was faster, stronger, and tougher than I was. But those were odds I was accustomed to facing. Fred’s steps were getting fainter; he was probably near the bottom of the stairs. I needed to hurry.
In a single, near-silent maneuver, I rolled my legs overhead and flipped into a standing position. Some part of me hoped that maybe Beauregard would be looking away at that particular moment, but the sound of his lumbering stride said that my usual amount of luck (none) was holding strong. This time would be different, though. This time, I didn’t have to try to protect a civilian and fight.
The walls snapped and cracked as Beauregard slammed into them, showing about as much grace as I expected from someone his size. He whirled around, reaching for my head, but I’d dropped into a crouch and darted forward. Pain was going to be my friend in this fight. My enemy was irrational and incapable of complex thought, so the first step was to injure him and make him even more erratic. Without knowing where Quinn had shoved armor into the skin, I had to gamble that since Beauregard wasn’t moving slow, he hadn’t picked any spots that compromised maneuverability.
I pressed my gun’s muzzle into the back of Beauregard’s right knee and fired twice. Unlike when I went for the torso, these rounds went right through, expanding as they flew and nearly severing everything below the shin. I expected a howl of pain, but he barely grunted, even as he began to slump over. I guess Quinn knew that pain was easy to exploit as well, and had turned down Beauregard’s sense of it. Inconvenient, yes, although it did mean no screams to alert Quinn that he was under attack again. Plus, Beauregard had lost the ability to maneuver, and that was really all the advantage I needed.
I kept my movement going, racing between his legs to the other side. Beauregard kept after me, spinning in place and tearing off more pieces of the already destroyed knee. He probably planned to snare me and drain me to repair the damage, but when he finished the turn, I was right there waiting for him. The gun was aiming down at his other knee, and even in his primal state, he understood the threat. Beauregard lunged for my right hand just as I’d hoped, leaving my left completely unattended.
Throats are another piece of the body it’s hard to armor. Too many delicate pieces in there, even for vampires. A zombie might be one thing, but vampires live by drinking. Maybe one day, Quinn would find a way to reinforce that part of the body; he certainly seemed adept at this sort of horrible work. This experiment, however, was still vulnerable there, and I took full advantage of it. Slitting a vampire’s throat won’t actually do much, mind you, aside from annoy and momentarily injure them. Jamming a silver-composite blade through the throat and up into their brain is another matter entirely. My left hand finished the work before Beauregard could even lay a claw on my right, and he fell to the ground, heavy and limp.
I’ll spare you all the gory details. Suffice it to say I quickly recovered my weapon and made sure Beauregard wouldn’t be getting back up, then moved for the stairs. I could hear Quinn’s voice; he was monologuing, and I found myself entirely unsurprised by that fact. It did give me some hope, however. If all he had brought with him were puppets, then that meant the only person worth talking to was Fred. All Fred had to do was keep him talking for a little longer, and I could get there to even things up. Quinn had gotten the drop on me before, I’m man enough to admit when I’ve been bested, but he’d find me a much tougher challenge when I didn’t have to worry about a brute clawing my friend to death.
As much of a hurry as I was in, I still kept my pace steady and silent. Tipping Quinn off that reinforcements were coming wouldn’t help anyone; it might even get Fred killed. So I was quiet and careful as I descended, arriving at the bottom just in time to see Quinn grabbing Fred’s chin while a pair of his flunkies yanked Fred’s eyelids open. Whatever whammy he’d put on the others, he was about to put on Fred. I rushed forward, lifting my gun to aim just as Quinn was speaking.
“Hear me well, Fredrick, spawn of Quinn. Hear me, and obey.”
And just like that, I knew I was too late. See, it’s like I told you. Sometimes, ten seconds is a lifetime.
8.
**Author’s Note: Since Arch and I rejoined one another here, I’ll resume the telling of the story from this point.**
I felt the magic wash over me. It burned as it struck, not like standing in a fire, but like the soft, radiating pain of a sunburn. The sort of pain I’d never get to truly feel again. The sensation was quite unique, and hard to put into words. The best way I’ve found to describe it is that I could feel Quinn’s will surrounding me, burning me, intent on replacing my own sense of agency. I readied myself to fight it, to mentally scratch and claw for all I was worth in order to retain my sense of self.
And then . . . it faded away. Whatever latch it was looking to unhook in my mind hadn’t been there, and as the glow of the necklace faded, I noticed two things: a look of total shock on Quinn’s face, and Arch running forward from the stairs with gun raised. Honestly, it was hard to say which was more surprising, since I’d left Arch as a headless corpse in the hallway, but it was an easy choice to see which one was more pertinent.
“Arch! The necklace! They’re under Quinn’s control, and he’s using the necklace!” In hindsight, giving away Arch’s approach wasn’t the soundest tactical move, but since he’d somehow shrugged off a decapitation, I was far less worried about his health than that of the innocent vampires holding me.
Quinn whipped around, moving so fast even my enhanced vision failed to track him. I heard the dim pop of Arch’s muffled shot, but instead of a sudden hole appearing in Quinn, there was a sound of metal hitting metal. In the span of a blink, he’d drawn his blade and deflected the bullet. What on earth had he been drinking?
“You survived? My, my, you are quite the resourceful one. I think I’ll have to take a taste of you and see just what you’re made of.” Quinn didn’t sound nearly as nervous as I’d have liked him to. And why would he? He had a vampire squadron at the ready to do his bidding; one word, and they’d drop me to swarm onto Arch. Which meant they’d die, and Quinn would either use the chance to murder me, or slip away again, killing four more innocent people in the process.
I couldn’t let that happen. He’d already h
urt so many, me included. What he’d taken from these people was something they could never get back, but it didn’t have to be the end. I was proof that there could be life after Quinn—just not if he used Arch to off them. They’d already lost their lives once; they didn’t deserve to have their second chance taken as well. I wished I could think of something to do. With my arms and legs held tightly, all I had to use was my mouth, and while I might be able to manage some light taunting, I’d never summon the wit to distract Quinn from an agent with a gun. He was standing so close, too. If only I had one limb, one piece of my body to work with, I might be able to slow him down.
And then a memory flashed unbidden through my head, a snippet from the last time I’d had my entire body locked down like this—back at the high school reunion, when I’d been held on the shoulder of a werewolf/asshole. Maybe I wasn’t so helpless after all. Quinn might have taken care of every one of my limbs, but he’d left me a vampire’s most basic, powerful tool. With no time to think, I let the primal part of my brain do what it always wanted to do, what my kind were quite literally designed to do.
I bit. Specifically, I lurched forward and sank my fangs into the flesh of Quinn’s left calf. Truth be told, after the last time we fought, and I failed to so much as even scratch him, I’d been prepared for my teeth to bounce off his flesh. Maybe he was drinking different parahumans these days, or maybe the fangs of a vampire have more piercing power than I realized. Whatever the case, they slid in easily, and I locked my jaw as fiercely as I could. This was a terrible position to be in. With my head extended, one swipe of that sword would slice through my neck as easily as it had Arch’s, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be getting back up from it. But it was a distraction, damn it, and it was the most I had to offer. All I could do was put my faith in Arch and hang on for dear life.
