The II AM Trilogy Collection

by Christopher Buecheler

  Now was the time to press. Two advanced on him with all the formidable speed that Theroen’s blood had given her, blade flashing as she swung back and forth, clashing with Mike’s desperate attempts to parry. There wasn’t much room left; in a moment more she would have him on the ropes, impeding his ability to move his arms. Mike glanced quickly over his shoulder, realized this, and attempted to circle to the left. Two lunged in that direction, cutting him off. She could hear people shouting behind her, but she didn’t care what they were saying. The fight would be won or lost here, and if she was making a mistake, then so be it.

  Mike executed a pretty spin away from her blade and swung his own outward toward Two’s exposed right flank. A slower vampire would have been hit, and even for Two it was close, but at the last moment she pulled her knee all the way up to her stomach and the sword passed by her flesh and hit the canvas. Two brought her own blade back up in a backhand slash, and to save his neck Mike had no choice but to pull his shoulder up and take the hit. Two’s blade cut into his upper bicep and he shouted in pain. Two took the opportunity to shove him hard in the direction he was already leaning, and, as she had hoped, Mike went crashing to the floor. Two pressed the point of her blade against his chest.

  “Yield?” she asked. Mike glared up at her, clearly pissed off but also impressed.

  “You doing anything later?” he asked.

  “Hanging out with my boyfriend,” Two told him.

  “Yeah, that’s my luck. I yield.”

  He let go of his sword, holding his open hands up, and Two took the point of her weapon away. She reached out, took his left hand in hers, and helped him to his feet. Behind her, she could hear people approaching.

  “Good fight,” she said, and Mike nodded.

  “Yeah. You’re really fast.”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “I’m gonna want a rematch next time. Still pretty sure I can beat you.”

  Two grinned, stepping aside as Mike’s patron arrived to tend to his wound.

  “I look forward to proving you wrong.”

  * * *

  “Other than completely ignoring my advice, I thought you did very well,” Jakob said. They were sitting on the bleachers again. Two was freshly showered and back in her street clothes. She laughed.

  “I didn’t ignore it … I just didn’t think I was going to beat him with technique. He had a counter for every move I made!”

  “Yes, but he executed several of them poorly. We’ll have to teach you to look for that.”

  “I know I have a lot to learn, Jakob. I’m not giving up on my lessons just because I won a rookie fight.”

  Jakob nodded. He glanced at Theroen, who was sitting on Two’s other side, half listening to them and half watching the fight.

  “What did you think?” Jakob asked him, and Theroen turned to give them his full attention.

  “Yeah, did I look OK up there?” Two asked.

  Theroen considered this for a moment and then smiled. “I enjoyed the part where you retained all of your blood.”

  “Me too!”

  “I was proud of you,” Theroen continued. “Proud because you are talented, but also because of the efforts you have made. When I first encountered you, you were spending most of your energy and willpower just keeping yourself from being swallowed by despair. As I watched, I saw in you the person you could be if you could harness your strength. You are doing so now, and it is … well, quite nerve wracking at times, but also very enjoyable.”

  Two felt herself blushing, unaccustomed to such naked praise. “I guess. I mean … it’s just some sword fighting.”

  Jakob spoke up. “Sword fighting and karate, and intense physical training that most people would have given up after a week, and dealing with Stephen and then me for more than three years, and keeping yourself in peak shape, and—”

  “All right, I get it!” Two exclaimed. “I’m awesome. Message received. Thanks, you guys.”

  “You’ve become the person you were supposed to be,” Theroen said.

  “Long as you still like that person,” Two replied.

  “Very much.”

  Two glanced at Jakob. “You should totally look away now so we can make out.”

  “This is possibly the least appropriate place in the world for that activity,” Jakob replied, his voice dry, and Two grinned.

  “Oh, fine. Hey, what happened to Sasha? Did she leave?”

  “No, she watched and told me to congratulate you. She’s in the locker room now, changing.”

  “She still fights?”

  Jakob shrugged. “She’s right-handed. Certainly she’s lost a few maneuvers by not being able to switch hands, but then again, she no longer has to worry about protecting her left arm, either.”

  Two shook her head in admiration. “If I only had one hand, I’d be like ‘no thanks, I’m going to learn to crochet.’”

  “Crotchet requires two hands,” Jakob said in an odd, gentle voice. For a moment there was silence, and then Two burst out laughing, covering her mouth with her hands.

  “That was the dumbest thing I’ve ever said!”

  “Oh, if only …” Theroen murmured, and Two whirled on him, still laughing.

  “What did you just say?!”

  “It must have been the wind,” Theroen replied, and Two punched him in the shoulder. Jakob was watching them, smiling.

  “Sasha has been fighting for more than a century. It’s what she likes to do. She’d probably find a way to keep doing it even if she lost both arms. Besides, the speed at which prosthetics are advancing is truly remarkable. She may well be back to dual-handed fighting before long.”

  Two nodded. Sasha’s prosthetic arm, which she wore most of the time, was a far cry from a piece of wood with a hook at the end. A myoelectric device, it contained a core made of steel rods and cables, and was covered by layers of carbon fiber and silicone. The fingers on the hand were individually jointed, and Sasha could bend the arm at the elbow, close the fingers into a fist, and perform other actions by flexing different muscles in her upper arm. It was not quite a sci-fi bionic limb, but it wasn’t so far away, either.

  “Can we stay and watch her, Theroen?” Two asked.

  “We can stay as long as you would like,” he replied.

  “She’s very good,” Jakob said. “After the injury there was a string of challengers who had no business stepping into the ring with her. I suppose they thought that the loss of the arm would give them an edge. They were quite wrong.’

  “Cool. You must be proud of her.”

  “Sasha has always made me proud,” Jakob said. “We have few women here, and yet she has integrated herself so well that few of our members even think about her gender anymore.”

  There were four women there that night, including Two. The Ay’Araf were largely male, in part because so many of them placed such emphasis on physical combat and competition. Just as in human sports, male physiology presented more inherent advantages. Less acknowledged was a sort of quiet discrimination: most Ay’Araf vampires never even considered women as fledglings.

  Jakob had made Sasha his fledgling only after living with her for several years, becoming more and more certain that the hardships she had suffered had forged within her an indomitable will and work ethic. Like Two, she had endured a brutal training regimen and come out on the other side even more determined to be a fighter. When he had seen this, Jakob had given her the blood, and Two knew he had never regretted doing so.

  Often cold and direct, Sasha sometimes seemed to Two more like a machine than a person. Two wouldn’t have believed the woman capable of empathy if not for Sasha’s relationship with Two’s friend Molly Thompson. Molly had ended up in Sasha’s care when a group of Burilgi vampires had kidnapped both Jakob and Molly’s adoptive parents, Rhes and Sarah. Over the course of that time, Sasha and Molly had become close friends.

  Sasha still kept in touch with the girl, who was now almost seventeen, mostly via email but occa
sionally in person. Several times in the past two and a half years, Molly had been in serious danger of relapsing into her heroin addiction. Like any sixteen-year-old girl, she was undergoing extensive changes not only in her outer life, but in her body chemistry as well. Unlike most sixteen-year-old girls, she had also been subject to a great deal of neglect and abuse, falling into prostitution and drugs before her twelfth birthday. Her life had been stable since coming to live with Rhes and Sarah, and she loved them fiercely, but she still sometimes experienced periods of depression, anger, and self-loathing. Finding solace in the needle was a constant temptation.

  Molly hated talking about her past with her parents. She didn’t want them even to think about it. So instead she turned to Sasha, and had spent many late nights at the vampire’s apartment talking, and crying, and explaining to Sasha in exacting detail how her body seemed to be screaming out for the drug. Sasha had never once turned the girl away, cancelling or rescheduling anything and everything else on her agenda at a moment’s notice to be there for her friend. On one occasion, Sasha had even dragged herself out during the day and into bright sunlight to meet with Molly, an experience she had later compared to being doused with acid.

  Two cared for Molly and wanted to be there for her, but Molly found it impossible to view Two as normal in light of their shared experiences. Two understood; she had shot up with Molly, gone through withdrawal sickness with Molly, done more than one group job with Molly. For better or for worse, Molly would always see Two as a fellow junkie. Sasha, a two-hundred-year-old Russian vampire with one arm, was the “normal” one.

  Two laughed a little at this latter thought, and Theroen turned to her, raising a questioning eyebrow. Two shook her head, smiling, and leaned forward to give him a quick kiss.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just thinking.”

  Looking mildly perplexed, Theroen said nothing. Two, content to keep her thoughts to herself, took his hand in hers and turned her attention to the fights.

  Chapter 4

  Warning

  “Welcome again, all of you,” William Alban said to the assembled vampires before him, and then paused for a moment, as if considering his next words carefully. At last he continued.

  “I have led this council now for some time, during which we have enjoyed a period of relative calm, quiet, and peace. It seems now that this peace, always fragile and under threat, has been shattered. We face a danger greater perhaps than any we have known since the Middle Ages, when humans hunted our kind and destroyed them in great numbers.”

  The American council of vampires was composed of twenty members and held representatives from all five strains. There were ten Ay’Araf along with two Burilgi, two Eresh, and four Ashayt. Two and Theroen, the only members of their new vampire race, made up the last tenth.

  “We have a guest in attendance this evening,” William said. “While I would welcome his presence at any time, I wish truly that he did not have to be here tonight. Mister Matthias Vanden is a visitor to our country, and it has treated him in a manner that is unspeakable. I have asked him to come before you all and tell his story. I would have you hear this firsthand account of the threat we face. Matthias, please …”

  They had all noticed the vampire sitting in the shadows away from the main ring of chairs, and had wondered why he had not partaken in the mingling over wine and blood that preceded each council meeting. Now they understood: this man had borne witness to something terrible and was in no mood to exchange pleasantries.

  He stood, a man who might have been twenty-five and yet moved like someone much older, as if weighed down by a great load. Matthias would have told them, had he been asked, that it was only within the last week that he had come to move in this manner. He felt as if he had aged all six of the centuries through which he had survived in the seven days since his children’s deaths.

  Matthias took the stage to polite applause. He looked out over the assembled members of the American council and spoke in his heavily accented English.

  “I will tell you my tale. At the end of it, I will give you the message that I have been ordered to deliver. I will save it until the end in the hope that you will understand at what terrible cost it comes.”

  Matthias took a deep breath, closed his eyes, collected himself, and began.

  “Seven days ago, both of my fledglings were murdered before my eyes by a human woman,” he began. The story came out of him in fits and starts, and several times he paused to hold back tears.

  Matthias didn’t know if his tale had any effect on the assembled vampires or not. He didn’t care. He had been tasked with delivering a message, and so he would because he had understood in the blonde woman’s parting stare one simple fact: if he failed in this duty, she would hunt him to the ends of the Earth in retribution. She would hunt him until she found him, and when she did, she would take her time killing him.

  “She gave me a message,” he told them, this silent group of vampires who would be tasked with responding to what the blonde woman had said. “She told me to inform the council that the day of reckoning is at hand.”

  Matthias paused now, looking out over the members of the council. At last he spoke again.

  “I can tell you no more. They left, and I do not know where they went. I know only that they chose me as their messenger, and that they wrote their words in the blood of my sons and of three innocent humans.”

  He sighed again and shook his head, wishing that he had the words to tell them how it had been, how she had been.

  “God help me. God help us all.”

  He stepped away from the podium. There was no applause this time, only a deafening silence as the assembled vampires tried to digest the story he had told. Matthias sat back down on his pew in the dark, put his face in his hands, and tried not to weep. He heard William step back to the podium and clear his throat.

  “I do not think, my friends, that I need to tell you what this means,” he said, and there was a murmur from the audience.

  “It was Tori,” someone said, and Matthias looked up at this. The council’s attention seemed focused on a petite girl with short, messy blonde hair.

  “Yes, Two,” William said. “It does seem that way.”

  Matthias stood up, peering at the speaker. “This woman … you know her?”

  The girl who William had called Two nodded. “Yes, I think so. Her name is Tori Perrault, and she used to be a vampire. I saved her life, I guess, and she saved mine. I left her in Ohio where I thought she’d be safe, but the Children of the Sun found her. I don’t know what they did, or how they did it, but they changed her. They made her hate us. I wouldn’t have left her, if I’d known, I … I’m so sorry.”

  Matthias closed his eyes, sat back down in his chair, and put his hands back against his face.

  * * *

  “Thomas is gone,” Naomi said, and Two glanced up at her in surprise. These were the first words Naomi had spoken to her since the kiss nearly four weeks ago, and they were not what Two had been expecting when she saw Naomi approach.

  “Wha—why? I mean … where did he go?” Two asked, and Naomi shrugged.

  “I assume he was called back.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe he took a vacation or something?”

  “The new bartender said he put in his two weeks’ notice and left, never telling anyone where he was going. The staff thought a competitor had lured him away, but that’s absurd. He would have told me if he was going somewhere else.”

  “Yeah.” Two sipped at her glass, filled with warm blood kept thin with anticoagulants, and pondered this news. “Anyway, it would make no sense for him to go to another bar. There’s no better place to watch you than where he was.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well … shit,” Two said. “I kind of hoped that when it all went down, he might decide he liked being a bartender.”

  “As did I. It seems, though, that he remains loyal to his masters.”

  Two thought she could hear a sligh
t ache in Naomi’s voice, a sadness that hadn’t been there before, but it was hard to say; there was already so much grief in Naomi’s voice these days that the addition of another layer made little difference.

  “Are you OK?” she asked, and Naomi smiled a little.

  “I’d like you to stop asking me that.”

  “I’m your friend, and I’m not going to stop giving a shit about you.”

  “I know. Two, I … please, I’m only asking that you do me the favor of pretending that it’s not so obvious.”

  Two bit her lip, considered, and nodded. “Well … that sucks. It sucks that he’s gone. He didn’t even say goodbye!”

  “I doubt he wanted to tip us off,” Naomi replied.

  “No, I guess not. This is bad, Naomi, all this stuff with Tori … I feel so fucking awful for that Matthias guy.”

  “I do, too. The council made a terrible mistake. We knew where Tori was, and we did nothing about it. When her parents were killed, still we opted to wait and see. Well … now we’ve seen. The Children have taken her and turned her into their weapon against us, and this time it will not simply be a few Burilgi that disappear.”

  “They’re coming right at us,” Two said. “Not only that, but they’re so confident that they’re telling us ahead of time. They want us to be ready because it will be more fun for her that way.”

  “If she’s this dangerous, it may not matter whether we’re ready or not.”

  Theroen had wandered up next to Two as they were talking, and he spoke up now. “Tori was ruthless as a vampire. Efficient. Built for killing. If the Children have added training and discipline to her speed, strength, and ferocity, she is going to be dangerous even to the oldest and strongest vampires.”

  Two made a noise of frustration. “We have to find her and talk her out of this. It’s crazy. She’s killing people!”

  “She has been killing people since three hours after Abraham turned her,” Theroen said.