The II AM Trilogy Collection

by Christopher Buecheler

  “I am not your buddy!” the man grunted, parrying another of her blows. The motion left his sword arm high up in the air, and that was all the opening that Two needed. She leapt forward, grabbing his right wrist with her left hand to prevent him from bringing his sword down, and drove her blade deep into his midsection. The man made a choking, gasping sound and his legs gave out. He dropped to his knees, and Two let him fall, moving with him.

  “Drop the sword,” she told him. “Drop it and let me stop hurting you. Even now, even after everything you shitheads have done, I don’t want to hurt you more than I have to. Drop it and I’ll make it quick.”

  The man with the red hair glared at her for a moment, rage and hatred clearly visible on his face, and then something inside of him seemed to break. He let go of his sword and it fell clattering to the ground behind him. He seemed to be looking past her now, to some place far away.

  “Celia, I did my best,” he wheezed, blood-flecked spittle coating his lips. Two had no idea to whom the man was speaking, but it didn’t matter. She understood the meaning, understood that he was making peace with someone who had gone before him. He was about to die and he knew it; she had no intention of making it any harder on him.

  The man closed his eyes and Two shoved herself to her feet, pulling her blade from his abdomen and burying it in the top of his skull. The man’s body seized for a moment, then went limp, and he fell to the side. Two pulled her blade out and glanced around to assess the situation.

  The fire had reached the end of the hallway now, and the space was rapidly filling with great billows of smoke. Two could barely make out the figures at the end of it. As best she could tell, Jakob had driven Vanessa back almost to the raging flames. It seemed that in just a few more moments, he would either drive her into the fire or kill her. Two concluded that he was not in need of any immediate assistance and that she should check on Sasha first.

  Two was about to turn toward the hallway down which she had seen Sasha disappear when she witnessed a thing so remarkable that for a moment it stopped her cold in her tracks. From beyond the flames, through the very inferno in which she would have sworn no living thing could have survived, a figured clothed entirely in black emerged, leaping into the fray with two blades drawn and engaging immediately with Jakob, keeping Vanessa from choosing between death by fire or by the sword.

  Surprised as much by the speed and ferocity of this new adversary as by her sudden appearance, Jakob dropped back a few steps. Two tried to make her legs move, to go help him, but it seemed as if they were locked in place. There was something about this woman that seemed inhuman, as if Jakob were fighting another vampire. Though she could barely make out their forms, let alone any features, Two was suddenly sure she knew exactly who it was that he was fighting.

  The two exchanged a series of lightning-fast blows, each countering the other’s strokes masterfully, and for a moment Two could do nothing more than watch, fascinated by this display of awe-inspiring speed, dexterity, and technique.

  Vanessa had joined in now, hacking at Jakob, and still he was able to fend the two of them off, moving in a tight circle and keeping them at bay. He was better than them, better even than the new fighter. She could see it in the exchanges of swordplay, and Two knew he was biding his time, waiting for an advantage to present itself. Waiting for one of them to make a mistake.

  Finding her will to move at last, Two raced forward, muttering “Shit, shit, shit” and preparing to enter into a battle she wanted no part of. She could see now that the new attacker had blonde hair, which only added to the obvious. Before Two could reach them, however, the woman made a sudden slapping motion at her own chest, then threw her arm forward. Without hesitation, she went back to fighting, swinging her swords with savage intent.

  It was only when Jakob staggered that Two understood what had happened. The blonde woman, this new and aggressive fighter, had something strapped to her chest – a sort of bandolier filled with darts. She had thrown one at Jakob and it had hit him in the right pectoral muscle. Whatever was inside, it must have been toxic. Jakob took a stumbling step backward, barely avoiding one of the blonde woman’s blows, and this gave Vanessa an advantage. She lunged forward, hitting Jakob’s sword near its base and knocking it from his hands.

  Two cried out his name in fear and despair. Hearing this, Jakob turned away from his opponents, and she saw that blood was already beginning to pour forth from his eyes and mouth.

  “Tenor, Ay’Araf!” he cried out to her, and these words Two knew. “Tell her! Two, tell her … please … she must go on. Tell her she must—”

  Before he could finish delivering these instructions, Vanessa leapt forward again and stabbed him in the back. Jakob arched in agony, mouth open in a sort of noiseless scream, and the other woman swung both of her blades at once in a crisscrossing motion. With this stroke, she severed Jakob’s head from his body.

  Two saw it fly up into the air as if in slow motion, eyelids fluttering, blood fanning out in arcs from the neck, and it seemed to her in that moment that she was observing the entire event from someplace very far away. Jakob’s head looped twice in the air, and Two could hear the patter of individual droplets of blood as they landed on the walls and floor. Then it fell with a thud, and rolled once, and lay still. Two screamed his name but even her scream seemed distant, and as it dwindled away she wondered if it had come from her lungs at all.

  The woman was on one knee now, below the smoke, breathing hard. Two was under no illusion that the fight was over. Indeed, in another moment the woman looked up, staring at Two, and for the first time her face was clearly visible. Two felt twin bolts of recognition and despair run through her body as what she had already guessed was confirmed.

  “Oh, no,” she said, and now it seemed she had returned to her own body from the faraway place that she had gone. “Oh, Tori, what have you done?”

  Tori didn’t seem to hear her, and after a moment more she glanced at Vanessa and stood. The soldiers began to advance on Two.

  Well, here it comes, Two thought, backing up as the women advanced on her, weapons held out. Guess I’d rather Tori kill me than some asshole I don’t even know.

  There was no question of fighting with these women; if Jakob had been unable to defeat them, then Two’s efforts would be laughable at best. She could run, and she knew that in a moment more she would do just that, but to what end? Whatever exit Jakob had known about, he had brought that knowledge with him to a place beyond retrieval. Even if Sasha was somewhere further down the hall, Two didn’t think it would be enough; whatever Tori had in those darts, it swung the fight heavily in her favor.

  Two was about to turn and run when Tori stopped in her tracks, the movement so abrupt that Vanessa nearly ran into her. She stepped sideways instead and stopped as well, turning to look at her companion.

  “Captain?” she asked, but Tori wasn’t paying her any attention. She was instead staring at Two, head cocked to one side, eyes narrowed in an expression of confused wariness.

  “I’ve seen you before …” Tori said, a note of surprise in her voice, and Two was so startled by the statement that she laughed.

  “Uh, yeah, you sure have,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Tori … what the fuck? It’s me! It’s Two!”

  Tori was shaking her head slowly now, and she touched a hand to her brow. The expression on her face had moved from confusion to something that looked like panic.

  “No, I … I can’t … why can’t I remember? What’s happening?”

  “Captain, you probably saw her in surveillance photos,” Vanessa suggested, but Tori was still shaking her head, and she took a step backward now, visibly shaken. For one crazy moment, Two thought she would turn and sprint back into the flames from which she had come. Instead, she looked up at Two.

  “Who are you?!” she shouted.

  “Oh, Tori, what did they do to you?” Two asked.

  The fire was encroaching on their space now,
filling the hallway with thick smoke, and Two’s eyes were stinging. Her lungs burned, and not from the exertion of fighting. Something had to happen, soon, or they were all going to die from smoke inhalation. Vanessa seemed to understand this as well.

  “Captain?” she asked, her tone uncertain, and Two doubted she had ever seen Tori behave like this before.

  “For God’s sake, just … just kill her, Vanessa!” Tori snarled, and now it seemed as if she was afraid even to look at Two. She was staring at the ground, eyes wide and distant, as if searching back through her memories and trying to place Two’s face.

  “Yes, ma’am!” Vanessa snapped, and without further hesitation she began again to advance. Two held her weapon up, preparing to fight, when she heard a voice calling her name. She glanced over her shoulder and to her surprise saw not Sasha, but Leonore, the raven-haired Eresh who Two had assumed was long dead.

  “Come on!” Leonore shouted at her, and Two thought this was the best piece of advice she’d heard all day. Before Vanessa could advance on her, Two turned and began to run toward Leonore. She could hear the human giving chase but knew that she was faster, and was listening not for those footsteps but for a pair further away that would mean Tori, too, was in pursuit.

  She had not heard that second pair of footsteps join the first when she reached Leonore, who grabbed her by the arm and hauled her around the corner.

  “Where did you … what the fuck?” Two panted, coughing in the smoke. She wanted to stop, to look around and get her bearings, but Leonore’s grip was like iron on her arm.

  “Secret door,” Leonore said, pulling her along the hallway. “Stop asking stupid questions and run!”

  They passed a body on the ground, lying in a pool of blood, which Two recognized as the dark-haired man that had been fighting with Sasha. One of his legs had been amputated just above the knee, and a blade had been driven into his back where he had fallen and stood there still, pointing toward the ceiling. Two glanced up and saw that the hallway ended in what looked like a flat stone wall. They reached its edge and Leonore flipped open a small panel, concealed in the wall, revealing a numeric keypad. She tapped in a code, and from behind the wall there was a heavy thud and a section of it began to swing inward. Two saw Sasha standing just inside.

  “Well no shit,” Two had time to say, and then Leonore grabbed her by the arm and yanked her through the door, past Sasha and into a long stone hallway. The Ay’Araf woman slammed the door closed and pulled on a large iron lever.

  There was a clanking noise that Two assumed was the door locking, and Leonore made a sound of relief. Two leaned against the wall, coughing. The other two vampires let her catch her breath, and finally she looked up at them. The stone hallway was cramped, perhaps four feet wide and eight feet tall, but the air was clean and tasted sweet after the black smoke Two had been breathing. The only source of light was a small oil lamp that Two thought might have been sitting on its shelf, next to a supply of matches, since before the first World War.

  “Guess this is the other exit Jakob was talking about,” she said, still coughing.

  “Where is he?” Sasha demanded. “What happened? Did he get out through the fire?”

  Free now from the threat to her life, Two felt the sudden weight of Jakob’s loss fall upon her, tears springing to her eyes. She looked away from Sasha for a moment, trying to compose herself, and took a hitching breath.

  “Sasha, he says … he said, Tenor, Ay’Araf.”

  Sasha looked back at her with a complete lack of comprehension for a moment, and then her eyes widened in an expression of shock and horror. She looked down at her one good hand, and then back up at Two, before spinning suddenly and advancing back toward the iron handle of the locking mechanism.

  “No!” Two cried, leaping forward. “No, Sasha! Leonore, help me!”

  She grabbed Sasha’s arm, pulling her hand away from the mechanism, and Sasha spun, shouting something in Russian, grabbing Two by the neck and tossing her up against the wall.

  “Touch me again and I will kill you right here!” she snarled. Two grappled for a moment with the woman’s hand, struggling to breathe, but she could not free herself. Leonore was tugging ineffectually at Sasha’s left shoulder, pleading with the Ay’Araf woman to stop what she was doing.

  “Not … what he wanted,” Two gasped.

  “To hell with what he wanted!” Sasha cried. “I would rather die in that hallway than leave him there. Do you hear me?!”

  “Hear you …” Two managed. Black spots were beginning to flash before her eyes. She forced herself to stop struggling and instead dropped her hands, looking directly at Sasha. “What a sad … fucking … waste.”

  Something in the tone of her voice seemed to get through to Sasha and the Ay’Araf loosened her grip, allowing Two to take in a great, gasping breath of air that tore at her throat. She doubled over, coughing again, still aware that Sasha might at any point make another attempt to unlock the secret door but unsure what she could do about it.

  “How dare you judge me?” Sasha snarled at last, when Two’s coughing had grown less intense.

  “Because I was fucking there!” Two shouted, her voice breaking as she forced the words out through her constricted throat. “I looked him in the eyes as it happened, and he wasn’t thinking about himself. He was thinking about you, and he asked me to tell you, ‘Tenor, Ay’Araf.’ Forward, Sasha. He wants you to go forward. Opening that door is the exact opposite of your patron’s dying wish.”

  Two looked up at Sasha, gritted her teeth, and forced herself to stop coughing.

  “You can pull that handle now, if you want,” she said. “I won’t try to stop you again, and neither will Leonore. It’s your decision. Your choice. But it is not what Jakob would have wanted. Do you understand me? If you walk back out there, you’re going to die. Either the two people on the other side will kill you or the fire will. I guess that’ll fulfill your stupid, bullshit sense of honor, but what fucking good will it do?”

  Sasha looked at her for what seemed a long while, several times starting to speak and then checking herself. At last she glanced over her shoulder at the door, then back at Two, and clenched her jaw. She took three steps down the dark hallway and glanced back over her shoulder.

  “Do not ever speak to me of honor again,” she said, and without further comment she disappeared into the darkness. Two glanced at Leonore, who rolled her eyes but said nothing.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Two said, and Leonore nodded. She picked up the lantern and the two of them began to make their way after Sasha, into the dark.

  * * *

  “So, how did you know about this place?” Two asked. They had descended two or three stories, well below street level, and were now working their way through a series of chambers that Two would never have guessed could exist under the streets of midtown Manhattan. From time to time she heard subway cars passing, shaking the tunnel and rattling the walls.

  Leonore had taken the lead, holding the lantern, and Sasha trailed them both, lost in her own thoughts. Leonore glanced back over her shoulder.

  “Abraham showed it to me,” she said. “He told me that knowing about things like this … it always ends up benefitting you, if you live long enough.”

  “Guess he was right,” Two said.

  “It seems he was. I ran here when the explosions happened.”

  “And then you just stuck around?”

  “I kept the door open a crack. I was … I thought maybe some of the other councilors might arrive, and might have a plan. When I saw Sasha finish off her opponent, I called out to her.”

  “Why’d you come for me? Why not send her?”

  Here Leonore glanced back at Sasha with obvious displeasure. “She made me. She thought you were with Jakob and wouldn’t need any further help, but she didn’t trust that I wouldn’t just lock the rest of you out. The smoke was getting close.”

  “Was she right?” Two asked, smirking a little, and Leono
re looked offended.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I have a sense of honor. I’m just not a fighter. I’m not like the two of you.”

  Two glanced back at Sasha, but if the Ay’Araf woman had been listening to their conversation she gave no indication. She was staring down at the floor, apparently content to let them lead the way.

  “I’m not really a fighter, either,” Two said. “I’ve been playing at it, but I’m not sure I like the game anymore.”

  Leonore made a scoffing sound. “You’ve killed an awful lot of people for someone who’s not a fighter.”

  “I didn’t want to.”

  “But you did it anyway. You didn’t run and hide, like I did. You stayed and fought.”

  “I guess …”

  Leonore stopped walking for a moment and turned to her. “Look … forget it. I’ve been trying to make myself ask you something since we were upstairs, but I’m afraid of the answer.”

  Two raised her eyebrows but said nothing, waiting for the question.

  At last, Leonore pressed on. “Do you … you don’t know what happened to James, do you?”

  “He’s dead,” Sasha said from behind them, her voice empty of any emotion. She, too, had come to a stop. “Jakob and I saw the body.”

  Leonore’s eyes filled with tears at this news, and after a moment she covered her face and voiced several sobs. Two waited, letting her get control of herself, and eventually Leonore looked back up.

  “He didn’t deserve it!” she cried. “Of all the … God damn them! God damn them all!”

  “I’m sorry,” Two said, surprised by this display of emotion. She had assumed that Leonore felt as distant from James as she had acted toward everyone else.

  “Are you? I know what you all think of me,” Leonore said, shaking her head. Tears continued to crawl down her cheeks, but she gave an angry smile. “I’m just the obnoxious Eresh cunt that never shuts up, right? That’s me, and that’s fine, because I truly do not care what you think of me. But I know what you thought about James. You thought he was stupid, and useless, and you probably don’t care that he’s dead, but I do!”