The II AM Trilogy Collection

by Christopher Buecheler

“You’ve got a few hundred years on me, dude. I think you should be embarrassed that I beat you even once!”

  “He is,” Sasha said, walking up behind them. “You should have seen the email I got that night. Honestly, teenage girls wish they were so dramatic. Perhaps he’s lost his touch.”

  Jakob shook his head, smiling, and turned to face his apprentice. “Will I be seeing you in the ring soon, then, Sasha?”

  “The last time we fought, oh sire of mine, you came within a whisker’s breadth of severing my femoral artery. I believe that was in 2005.”

  “It was 2006, and you deserved it, leaving yourself open like that.”

  “I did,” Sasha said, nodding. “But it knocked me so far down the ladder that there’s been no point in challenging you since on the rare nights you deem it worth your time to fight. The line is miles long.”

  “I had no idea you were so in demand,” Two said.

  “Sasha is exaggerating,” Jakob said, glancing away, and Sasha gave a scoffing laugh.

  “Jakob is the best fighter on this side of the Atlantic,” she said. “He’s just too political to admit it.”

  “I prefer ‘modest,’” Jakob said.

  “You’re that good?” Two asked him. “No bullshit?”

  “Sasha’s claim is bolder than anything I would make, but I will admit I’ve not lost a fight in … quite some time,” Jakob replied.

  “Stephen said you were better than him,” Two said, thinking back to her days in London. “He said you were a more natural fighter.”

  Jakob shrugged. “I fought Stephen many times. I usually won, but near the end he was getting very good. Still too susceptible to taunting, though. I could always goad him out of his defense and get him to attack, and that always opened things up.”

  “That does sound like Stephen.”

  “I would say – if I try not to succumb to the aggrandizement of my loyal fledgling – that Stephen was ahead of me in aggression, roughly equal in skill, but far behind in control. I took advantage of that.”

  Two nodded. “And you don’t fight anymore?”

  “Not often,” Jakob said. “Of late I prefer to observe, and to train. You and Sasha are not the only students I’ve had, though I believe the two of you to be the best.”

  Two gave an incredulous laugh. “Sasha would carve me up like a turkey.”

  “Even with one arm,” Sasha agreed, smiling a little. “But Jakob didn’t say that we were equally skilled. I have a lot more training than you do, Two, but you have talent.”

  “Talent, drive, and the pedigree of your blood,” Jakob said. “Ay’Araf are stronger than Ashayt and faster than Eresh, at least those of equivalent age, but I’m not so sure about you, Theroen-Chen. You’re ridiculously fast and strong.”

  “I got lucky,” Two said, and she shrugged. It was the truth. She should have been dead, long ago, murdered by Abraham and burned to ashes. Everything after seemed to her a sort of inexplicable miracle.

  “Luck is what you make of it,” Theroen commented. He smiled, tilted his head, and regarded Two for a moment. “You have put in the work, my love.”

  Two grinned. “OK, I won’t deny that.”

  “And that,” Jakob said, “is why I’ve no doubt you will defeat Mike again and move on to your next challenger. So stop mooning over your boyfriend and go get ready to fight.”

  “But he’s so adorable!” Two exclaimed, and she laughed when Jakob gave her a cool, unimpressed look. “Fine, I’m going. I’m going!”

  She changed in the locker room, taking a few minutes to stretch before returning. She felt good –confident in her abilities, in her training, and in what Naomi had once phrased as her ‘utterly perplexing indestructibility.’ In a way, Two was looking forward to the opportunity to defeat Takahashi for the second time and prove that her first win was no fluke.

  By the time she arrived, Mike was already standing inside the ring, shirtless, leather bands wrapped around his wrists and neck. He watched as Two stepped through the ropes and smiled when she looked up at him.

  “I think I’ve got you this time,” he said, and Two felt herself reacting to the confidence in his voice. She forced herself to take a breath before responding and gave him a derisive smile.

  “Big talk from the guy who ended the last fight on his back.”

  “Everyone has a bad day.”

  “Well, get ready to have another,” Two said.

  “Guess we’ll see,” Mike replied. He closed his eyes and stretched his arms out above him, tilting his head from side to side, then opened them and drew his sword. “You ready?”

  Two glanced over to her left and saw Theroen in the stands. Jakob was sitting to his left, looking severe, and Sasha was to the left of him. She met Two’s gaze and made a twirling gesture with her hand: get on with it. Two laughed.

  “Let’s do this,” she said, and she charged.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes in and both combatants were bloody, but neither was ready to concede the fight. Two had sustained the first blow, a brutal slash that began just above her left eyebrow, continued down across the bridge of her nose, and finished by slicing open her right cheek. She remembered hearing Theroen cry out her name as it happened, and the strange, simultaneous feeling of comfort and annoyance that his concern had brought to her. She had spun away from her opponent and touched her face, assessing the damage.

  “Yield?” Mike had asked, and Two had laughed at him.

  “I’ve still got both eyes …”

  Five minutes later, she’d enjoyed the satisfaction of giving back as good as she had gotten, catching Mike in the left bicep, her blade cutting so deeply that she’d felt it strike bone. Mike had shouted in pain and anger, but had managed to avoid her outstretched leg. Backpedaling, he’d glared at her and announced, “There is no fucking way I’m yielding to that. I don’t need that arm.”

  Two hadn’t bothered to answer, instead circling to her right, angling toward the arm she had hit in an attempt to make him switch his weapon to it. Mike had easily countered the move, and the fight had continued from there. Now Two found herself moving in a cautious semicircle, waiting for Mike to make the next move.

  “You’re starting to piss me off, Takahashi,” she said, switching her weapon from her right hand to her left as he angled in at her. Their swords clashed together for a moment and both took a step back.

  “Sorry, but I’m not losing to some midget chick who wasn’t even born when The Joshua Tree came out,” Mike growled.

  “Midget chick?!” Two cried. “I’m almost five-two! Also, fuck you, I was three when that album came out. Also, seriously, ‘midget chick?’ You’re like sixteen feet shorter than my boyfriend.”

  “Oh, here it is,” Mike said, grinning. “Here come the boyfriend comparisons. His royal highness over there can’t help you in here. Anyway, who says he’ll even want you when I cut the other half of your face off?”

  “You cut a quarter of my face off, tops. Are you done trying to rattle me with your ‘witty’ – and I use the term loosely – repartee?”

  Mike lunged forward, swinging his sword down, and Two ducked sideways, bringing her own weapon out in a wide arc that would have cut the hands off a slower opponent. Mike had already pulled backward, saving his wrists.

  “You’re not rattled?” he asked, and Two laughed, shaking her head.

  “Did you really think I would be?” she asked.

  “Nah,” he replied, this time using another one of the feints at which he was so adept. Two found herself moving to avoid a blow that never came, and she was barely able to parry his next attack.

  “Stop talking to him!” Jakob called from somewhere behind her, and she saw Mike’s grin widen.

  “But he’s such a stunning conversationalist!” Two shouted back, and she heard Jakob make a noise of frustration.

  “I think your boyfriend might be about to rush the ring,” Mike told her.

  “Well, you did cut off half my face. What, you t
hink I get by on my charm?”

  “You said it was only a quarter.”

  Two lunged forward again, executing a series of back-and-forth strokes with her blade, each of which Mike parried. From behind her she could hear Jakob shouting something about Mike’s left side.

  “Shut up,” Two muttered. “Shut up and let me do this.”

  “You’re not beating me,” Mike told her, and again their blades crashed together. Two thought she could feel the slightest tremor in Mike’s blows now, and hoped she wasn’t imagining it. For her part, she was not yet exhausted and found herself once again thankful for Stephen’s training and the maintenance schedule he had left her with.

  “You know—” Mike began, stepping away from her again, but he never finished his sentence. At that exact moment there was a great, rending crash and the sound of metal against metal. Shouts of surprise were coming from the vampires assembled around them, and both she and Mike turned to see what was happening. Some sort of armored vehicle had hit the side of the building and pierced it, coming to a stop several yards inside. Figures in black were pouring in from the gaping wound in the side of the gym.

  “… the fuck?” Mike had time to ask, and then a long, metal shaft came screaming through the air and hit him in the chest, throwing him backwards into the ropes, where he became tangled. He opened his mouth, perhaps to voice some sort of protest at this treatment, and instead of words a tide of blood belched forth, covering his bare torso in gore.

  Two cried out his name, feeling suddenly slow and stupid. She heard another screaming noise and was dimly aware that one of the metal spears had passed only inches away from her left temple, its passage fanning the short strands of her hair. She turned in the direction it had come from and saw on the roof of the armored vehicle a sort of gun, already being reloaded and aimed at her again.

  Acting on instinct, as she had so many times in her life, Two threw herself to the rough canvas, seconds before another spear was launched in her direction. Staying on her belly, she crawled forward and stopped near Mike, looking up and trying to gauge the severity of his injuries. Mike was looking down at her.

  “I’m sorry about your face,” he said, and then turned away, coughing blood out onto the mat.

  “No one cares about my face,” Two told him. She pulled herself to a crouch, looking around and trying to figure out what was happening. The gym had descended into pandemonium, vampires and black-clad figures clashing in groups, but at least the person who’d been firing the spear gun was no longer doing so.

  Two stood up and tugged at the ropes, looking back at her former adversary. “You’re going to be OK, Mike.”

  “You’re an amazingly shitty liar,” Mike told her, and she could hear in his voice that he was fading. Two could see that the metal shaft, pointed and barbed at one end, had pierced all the way through his body.

  “You’re an amazingly shitty fighter!” Two snapped back. “Now shut up and … here, pull your arm out. Just … Mike?”

  “Your boyfriend needs help,” Mike said, ignoring her commands. “Look over there.”

  He made a feeble motion with his free arm and Two turned her gaze in that direction. To her dismay, she saw Theroen fending off three enemy combatants, avoiding their attacks, retreating backward and rapidly running out of space. Soon, his back would be against the gym’s wall and he would be trapped there with no weapon.

  “Shit,” she growled, looking back and forth between Mike and Theroen. “Mike, come on. We have to—”

  “Go help him,” Mike said, and he pushed her gently away. “Two … go on.”

  She looked him in the eyes and could see that he was afraid, but also that he was ready. Mike knew he was going to die and had somehow, in these last moments, made peace with that fact.

  God, please, I can’t do this anymore, Two thought, and Mike smiled as if he had heard this.

  “Go help him,” he said again. “Go help … help h-k—”

  Two watched him die, as she had watched Stephen and Melissa and Samantha. Aros and Abraham. Darren. Not yet twenty-four years old, Two had stared death in the eye over and over again, and here now was one more name for the list. Mike Takahashi, Ay’Araf, dead at an age that wouldn’t be considered old even for a human.

  It wasn’t fair, and there wasn’t any way to make it fair, and there wasn’t even time to say something to mark his passing. That made it worse, and Two felt her teeth clench in anger and hatred for these people that had killed a man and not had enough respect even to give her time to acknowledge his death. She clenched her first around her blade and left him there, hanging from the ropes, and went to help her lover.

  * * *

  Two took the first without warning, unconcerned with what was fair or right or honorable. She stabbed the man from behind with her sword and, when he arched his back in agony, reached around with the nails of her left hand, sharp now and hard as iron, and tore his throat out before he had time even to scream.

  “Get the fuck away from him!” Two roared, turning to the others. Startled, they spun for a moment away from Theroen, and he took the opportunity to lash out, punching the man in the side of the head. The man dropped to the ground, dead before he landed, and the woman’s eyes went wide in surprise and sudden terror.

  “You can’t!” she cried, as if by not simply giving up, Two and Theroen had done something deeply offensive to her.

  “Oh, fuck you,” Two replied, temporarily drained of witty responses, and swung her sword in a wide arc that caught the woman in the side as she turned to flee. Blood sprayed, the woman shrieked, and Two felt nothing, neither elation nor sympathy. There was only the anger, coursing through her in waves that seemed to tint her vision crimson, and a sort of mute despair that it had once again come to this, that she must see and do and feel yet more violence before finally finding peace.

  Two pulled her sword from the woman’s side and kicked her in the back. When the woman went sprawling out before her, Two spun the sword in her grip in a smooth arc and buried it between the woman’s shoulder blades. She pulled it out and hacked forward, this time cutting into the woman’s neck. Again and again she attacked, becoming aware at some point that she was shouting obscenities at the body.

  Theroen grabbed her arm, stopping her from delivering yet another blow to the woman’s corpse, and said her name in that same calm voice that she had come to expect from him. Two burst into tears.

  “They killed Mike!” she cried, turning toward him, rubbing angrily at her eyes with the back of her arm. “They didn’t even give him a chance to fight!”

  “I saw that,” Theroen said. “I saw them hit him, and I saw them miss you by mere inches. Are you all right?”

  “Oh, I’m just fucking great!” Two told him. “Another person’s dead for no reason except that I was there, and people fucking die when I’m around. Other than that, my face is on fire, I just stabbed two people to death for I-don’t-even-know-why, and we’re probably going to die in here. Everything’s awesome, Theroen.”

  “Good. Perhaps after this we can go for ice cream,” Theroen said, his voice never wavering from its tone of deadly seriousness, and Two gaped at him for a moment before sobbing and laughing at the same time.

  “I love you so much, you asshole,” she said, and Theroen smiled.

  “We need to get out of here,” he said.

  “Yeah. Can you … what the fuck is even happening?”

  She turned around and looked at the gym full of combatants. It seemed that for the moment, she and her lover had been forgotten. The armored vehicle had been driven out of the building, and with it the spear gun that had killed Mike and nearly killed her. Many of the remaining black-clad figures were pulling back through the hole.

  “I think it must be the Children,” Theroen said. “I cannot imagine who else would do this.”

  As Two watched, a crowd of the humans scattered, and from the midst of them emerged Jakob, wielding not one but two blades, covered in blood and roaring
tactical information in the vampire language. Sasha was behind him, also shouting, her blade moving so quickly that it seemed almost a solid sheet of metal. The two Ay’Araf made their way toward her and Theroen, fending off attacks the entire way. As they got close to the ring where Mike’s body still hung, Sasha reached out with her prosthetic arm, grabbing Mike’s sword and flinging it toward Theroen.

  As soon as she knew Theroen was armed, Two leapt forward, joining the fight. Theroen was right behind them, and the four of them quickly dispatched enough of the attackers to convince the rest to retreat.

  “We need to make our way to the front door,” Jakob said. “They’ve already blocked the emergency exit and they’re holding the hole in the wall, but the front door was still open last I saw it.”

  “What about the others?” Two asked. From the corner of her eyes she saw someone that she recognized – she thought it was one of the Janssen twins – fall to his knees after a blow to his midsection. Several blades immediately cleaved him to pieces.

  “They will fight their way out or die,” Sasha said. “Jakob, they’re setting the club on fire.”

  As soon as Sasha said the words, Two became aware of an acrid odor in the air, the scent of wood smoke and something else that she thought might be the melting paint on the walls. Indeed, the last of their adversaries were now in retreat, moving toward the front door.

  “We’re not going to get out that way,” she said.

  “I’m open to suggestions if you have any,” Jakob said. He sheathed one sword and ran a hand across his brow, leaving streaks in the blood that covered his face.

  “I am unenthusiastic about burning to death,” Theroen said, and Jakob cast him a sidelong glance.

  “As am I.”

  “There aren’t any other exits?” Theroen asked.

  “Not unless you can fit through a nine-inch drainage gate,” Sasha said. She was glancing around, as if seeking to prove her own statement false. Two could see flames licking at the walls.

  “Where’s the roof access?” she asked. “Don’t tell me there isn’t any … this building’s flat. You have to be able to go up and shovel in the winter.”