The II AM Trilogy Collection

by Christopher Buecheler

  Leonore spoke up. “I must admit, I’m very curious about what happened to the two of you. Tell us about the Emperor of the Sun.”

  Two thought for a moment, trying to piece the action of the previous few hours into a coherent story. Once she felt confident she had it, she began to speak. Theroen made a few additions and corrections but remained mostly silent throughout. He didn’t object when Two informed the others that Vanessa had been killed by the Emperor, and none of them seemed to give it even a passing thought; all three were far too amazed by the revelation that the Emperor had been the first – and last – of some species of vampire previously unknown to anyone but a few select members of the Children. At last, she finished the story.

  “So we climbed up and out through this long pipe, and we ended up on the beach next to the lake, watching the building burn from a distance. Theroen went to get the car, we dropped Thomas off, and here we are.”

  “That girl Carrie deserves some kind of a posthumous medal,” Lewis commented, his tone distant, still trying to digest everything that Two had told them.

  “No shit,” Two said. “Both her and Tori do. If Tori hadn’t stabbed the Emperor, he would have ripped Carrie apart before she could ever arm that grenade. And if she hadn’t thought to jam it down his throat, I mean … who knows if the flames alone would have killed him? But it burned him up from the inside.”

  “Why do you suppose he wasn’t afraid of the bombs?” Sasha asked. “Surely he must have known that the charges had been set, yet he fought you right to the end.”

  “He wanted Tori. Right up to the point where he exploded, I think he still believed that he could … I don’t know, re-brainwash her. Get her back in the fold. Maybe he just got focused on that and forgot about the bombs.”

  “Maybe he was confident he could survive the explosions,” Lewis said. “We don’t know exactly how far the charges were from his part of the structure.”

  “No, I guess we don’t,” Two said. “Maybe he could have … but if he can survive having a fire-grenade go off inside of him and then two more lighting up right below him … I’m not sure there’s anything that can kill him.”

  “I believe he is dead,” Theroen said. “While we were escaping, I made an attempt to see if I could still feel him with my mind, like I could when we first arrived in his chambers. There was nothing at all.”

  “Just thinking out loud,” Lewis said. “I wish we knew more of his history.”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know much,” Two told him. “Just the basics … he started a plague that got out of hand, and the Children were formed to fight it. They wiped out all of his kind, except for him, and the only way he survived was by killing the real Emperor and taking his place.”

  Theroen shook his head. “Thousands of years of history and knowledge, lost. I would call it a shame had I not met the man myself. There was no humanity left in him, if ever there had been any. He would never have come to terms with us, and he only wished to destroy us all.”

  “Well,” Sasha said after a moment of contemplation. “At least we won.”

  There was silence at this for a moment, and then Lewis whooped and clapped his hands. “Holy shit, we won! We’re still fucking here! Can you believe that?”

  Two found herself grinning despite the sadness that still lay deep within her. She took a moment to savor the victory. The Children had been defeated and their Emperor was slain. Their great weapon had, in the end, remembered herself in time to find some kind of redemption before passing on as well. The American council of vampires had been badly wounded, but it was not destroyed. They were still here, as Lewis and said, and no, she could hardly believe it.

  “Has anyone called Naomi?” she asked. Sasha shook her head.

  “We thought … well, I have known her for many years, but you and Theroen are closest to her. We thought you would want to.”

  “She must be freaking out,” Two said. “I’ll call her on the way to the hotel. I wonder if the building explosion made it to the national news yet.”

  “Speaking of hotels,” Sasha said, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but Lewis and I need to be going. Dawn isn’t far off, and the drive to Chicago will take at least half an hour even this early on a Sunday morning.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Two said. “You should go, and so should the rest of us. I’m exhausted. We’re going to grab a room close to the hospital for the day and wait for Thomas to call. We’ll figure out about getting back to New York after that.”

  “Can we do anything to help, Two?” Lewis asked her, and she gave him a tired smile, shaking her head.

  “Not unless you can raise the dead, and if you could do that, I doubt Tori would be the first person on your list. You guys get out of here before the sun comes up. We’ll survive. The two of us … we seem to be pretty good at surviving.”

  Sasha embraced them and Lewis shook their hands. Leonore settled for giving them a nod. Two was amused to see her getting into the car that Sasha was driving; apparently they had indeed struck up something of a friendship. Lewis, too, got into his car, and in a moment more Two and Theroen were alone, standing in the parking lot and staring out past the beach at the dark body of the lake.

  “I’m so tired,” Two said, and she laughed a little. The statement seemed almost absurd. In the past ten hours she had been beaten and shot in the back with a high-powered rifle, and had engaged in a lengthy battle with possibly the oldest vampire remaining on the planet. That she was only tired, and not dead, seemed like a miracle.

  “I do not believe we will find any five-star hotels in northern Illinois, but I am sure we can find something with a soft bed and heavy curtains,” Theroen said. He took her hand and began leading her toward the car, and Two followed.

  * * *

  When Naomi answered the door, she was wearing a pair of tight, dark blue jeans and a grey silk shirt that hugged the curves of her hips and waist and breasts. A tiny crescent of her belly was visible, and a memory ran through Two of kissing that spot. For a moment she felt a pang of that old attraction, there and gone like a lightning flash. The woman was simply too beautiful to not desire, from time to time. Two put those thoughts away and smiled.

  “Hope you don’t mind an unexpected visit,” she said, and Naomi laughed, closing her eyes for a moment and shaking her head.

  “No, not at all,” she said, opening her eyes again and stepping back. “Two, Theroen, come in! I am so glad to see you both!”

  Two stepped into Naomi’s foyer, Theroen just behind her, and for a moment the three stood in awkward silence. Then Two thought, Ah, what the hell, and threw her arms around Naomi. After a moment the Ashayt woman hugged back, laughing.

  “We did it,” Two said, and she felt Naomi nod.

  “You did it.”

  She had filled Naomi in by phone days before, but there was something about seeing her friend in person again that solidified everything for Two. It made her acutely aware of the fact that she had not been sure she would be coming back from the trip to Illinois. She had not been sure that any of them would. Now, at last, they could move forward. They could honor their dead, as they had been unable to do after the attack on the cathedral, and begin the long process of putting their lives back together.

  Two let Naomi go and stepped out of the way. Theroen also embraced her, albeit for a much shorter time. Then he, too, stepped back and smiled.

  “It is good to see you,” he said, and Naomi nodded.

  “Given what I’ve heard so far of your adventures, it’s nothing short of miraculous that the two of you are standing here,” she said. “Come, I’ll open a bottle of wine and we’ll talk. I suspect there are many hours’ worth of stories to tell.”

  Naomi stepped forward to close the door that led out to the hallway and the elevators, and Two touched her arm.

  “Hang on a sec,” she said.

  Naomi glanced at her, questioning, and Two smiled. “We brought someone else.”

  “
Oh? Two, you should have told me! How awful, I just left them standing in the hallw—”

  Thomas, on crutches, stepped slowly into the doorway, and the sight of him stopped Naomi in the middle of the word, as if someone had locked the breath in her throat. Two felt herself grinning. She had told Thomas to hang back, and the expression on Naomi’s face had been completely worth it. For a long moment Naomi’s emotions – surprise and joy and disbelief – were naked on her face. At last she spoke, her voice incredulous.

  “Thomas?”

  “How you doing, Snowflake?” Thomas asked.

  Naomi’s face had gone pale even for a vampire, and she had to put a hand against the wall to steady herself. At last she regained some of her composure.

  “Are you … you’re hurt! Who hurt you?”

  “He’s dead now,” Thomas said, and he made his way into the apartment, closing the door behind him. “Listen, Naomi, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “I … yes, very well. Go ahead.”

  Thomas glanced at Two and Theroen. “You uh … gonna give us any privacy?”

  Two shook her head. “Nuh-uh. Payment for saving your ass from that cell – I want to hear this.”

  “Two …” Theroen began, but Thomas only shrugged, shaking his head.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Not like it’s some big secret. Listen, Naomi … when the word finally came down that it was time to start the attacks, my orders were to kill you. I was supposed to break into your place down in the Village, while you were asleep, and kill you. I got as far as your bedroom, and there you were, and I almost went ahead with it. I almost put that needle in your throat, but in the end I couldn’t do it.”

  Naomi was staring at him, and Two could see that she was shaking a little. At last she asked him, “Why not?”

  Thomas began to speak once, twice, a third time. He seemed unable to find the words. In a gentle voice, Two spoke. “Tell her what you told your sister.”

  Thomas looked away for a time, staring at the wall, collecting himself. When at last he looked back at Naomi, it seemed that something within him, some part that had still been resisting admitting this truth to her or to himself, had departed. He looked relieved, and he smiled.

  “I told her that I thought of what the world would be like without you, and it wasn’t a place I wanted to live in.”

  Naomi moved to cover her face with her hands, but not quickly enough to hide how deeply she had been affected by Thomas’s words. Her entire body seemed to crumple in upon itself; she bowed her head, bending a little at the waist and giving voice to a single sob.

  “Hey,” Thomas said, and he hobbled forward on his crutches, stopping just before her. With a tentative hand he reached out and touched her hair, cupping the back of her head. “Naomi … don’t.”

  “Don’t,” Naomi echoed through her hands, and Two wished she could not hear such a depth of pain in her friend’s voice. “Thomas, please don’t. You will only leave, like the rest of them. You will find someone else, someone better, and leave me behind, and you will ma—”

  “Cut that shit out,” Thomas growled, and he took both of her hands in his, moving them from her face. Tears were coursing down Naomi’s cheeks, making her eyeliner run, leaving tracks on her skin. Thomas held her hands until at last she looked up at him with her big, grey eyes.

  “Please,” she said, her voice taut and strained. “Please don’t do this to me. I cannot bear it.”

  “I had my chance to hurt you,” Thomas told her. “I didn’t do it then, and I’m not going to do it now.”

  “But I—”

  “I never let myself think about it, all those years when I was watching you. I never let myself pay attention to the way I would wait for you to show up every night. I never let myself consider for a single damn minute how much it sucked when you went away to Europe, or how happy I was that first night when I saw you and Two walk back into my bar. All of the time we spent talking, all those years, I lied to myself and said I was just playing you, making you trust me, staying undercover … but somewhere along the line it stopped being about that.

  “I left because I couldn’t kill you, and I’m here now because I can’t just up and leave you. I can’t do that, but I couldn’t admit the whole truth to myself until right this damn moment. Seeing you again … I know you’ve been alive a long time and I don’t know who’s hurt you, but I’m not those people. I am not any of those people. I’m just me, and if you want me to go away, I’ll go. I’ll do whatever you ask me to do, because I fucking love you … but I needed you to know that first.”

  There was a pause after this so lengthy that it seemed to Two that eons passed before anyone dared move or speak. There was only silence, and waiting, as Naomi contemplated these things that Thomas had said, looking into his eyes as if to divine from them whether or not he spoke the truth.

  Then she was moving forward, rushing forward, putting one hand on his cheek and the other to the back of his head, and she was kissing him. She was crying again, but still kissing. Thomas let go of his crutches entirely and wrapped his arms around her, holding her to him. Naomi returned the embrace, clutching him with savage intensity, as if she feared that should she stop, he would disappear forever. Two could have told her not to worry; Thomas wasn’t going anywhere.

  She wiped her own tears away and grinned up at Theroen, who looked back at her, and smiled a small smile, and nodded.

  “We’ll talk later, Naomi,” Two said in a quiet voice, and without further word, she and Theroen took their leave.

  * * *

  “I cannot imagine Thomas will be needing his hotel room tonight,” Theroen said, and Two snorted laughter, glancing up at him.

  “Way to take the controversial stance.”

  They were walking in the direction of Union Square, where they had been staying at the W Hotel. It was a hike from Naomi’s new apartment, but there was no rush. They had fed for the evening before leaving with Thomas for Naomi’s, and now there was nothing to do but enjoy the buzzing activity of Manhattan on a warm summer night. All around them, people were going on about their lives, enjoying drinks on outdoor terraces, eating late meals, talking about films they had seen and concerts they had attended.

  “How is your side?” Theroen asked after another block, and Two looked down at it and shrugged.

  “Feels fine. I think if we were going to find anything wrong with it, it would’ve happened last night, hon.”

  Theroen nodded, smiling a little. They had made love for the first time since the night before the attack, and there had been a savage intensity to their passion. Theroen had first taken her standing up, her legs wrapped around his waist and her back pressed up against the wall, a pair of rose-colored panties still hanging off of one ankle. He had stopped just before his peak, ignoring her entreaties to continue, and carried her to the bed, where he had wrapped his arms around her, put his hands in her hair, and slipped back inside of her.

  They had finished almost simultaneously, thrusting against each other in a way that was near violent, eyes open and locked even as they climaxed, and she had seen in his gaze at that moment something fierce and desperate and vulnerable. Theroen the young man and not the aged vampire, momentarily stripped to his core and laid bare before her. After, as she had lain with her head on his chest and felt him move his fingers restlessly through her hair, he had said, “When that man shot you, I thought I was going to have to watch you die.”

  Two had kissed his chest and said, “I’m still here,” and they had stayed together like that for some time more, not speaking, letting each other’s minds reach out, each to the other.

  She thought these words again, now. Thought them loudly, which was not an act she would have been able to describe had someone asked. It was just something she had come to be able to do instinctively, after much practice. She saw his smile widen and knew that he had heard her.

  “I am very, very glad for that fact,” he said.

  “You
know what? Me too.”

  They walked, holding hands and people watching. Theroen asked her, “Are you prepared for this next council meeting?”

  They had set a date, less than a week away, for the first meeting since their victory in Waukegan. Two shook her head. “Not really. Between going over everything that happened again and working on the funeral plans for everyone, I’m probably going to spend half of it crying.”

  Theroen nodded. “I am not looking forward to it either, but I must admit some desire to be done with it all.”

  Two raised her eyebrows. “You’ll be ‘done with it,’ huh?”

  “Not with the council,” Theroen said, and he gave a sort of disgusted laugh. “I think at this point I am, as they say, in too deep. I never would have thought that I would become so enmeshed in the politics of our people, nor so concerned over the preservation of anything founded by Abraham.”

  “But here we are,” Two said.

  “Indeed. And if I told you tomorrow that I wished to leave it all behind and go somewhere … anywhere … else?”

  Two smiled. “Then I’d go with you because I love you, but you’re not going anywhere, you jerk. I saw you browsing Craigslist this morning.”

  “That was mere curiosity,” Theroen said, a touch of defensiveness in his voice, and Two laughed at him.

  “Yeah? ‘Historic Brownstone in Brooklyn’s Best Neighborhood. Move-in Ready!’ … that ring any bells?”

  “I might have bookmarked a few interesting postings,” Theroen conceded, trying to seem disinterested. After a moment, he smiled broadly and turned to her. “At any rate, a suite at the W is more than sufficient for now, is it not? Or are you in a rush?”

  “I’m not looking to go anywhere, baby,” Two said. “We’ll find something when we’re ready. Remember what you told me? All the time in the world.”

  “Did I say that once upon a time? I believe that I did. Where do you suppose that time will take us from here?”